“We almost asked”: The legend The Rolling Stones wanted to replace Brian Jones with
Any band dynamic is never that easy to manage. It’s one thing for Simon and Garfunkel to try and work out their differences as a duo, but when that number grows to four to six people, it’s hard to make executive decisions and ensure that everyone is completely satisfied. Although Brian Jones initially had the idea for The Rolling Stones years before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards got involved, there was a good chance that Jimmy Page could have been behind the fretboard in one early incarnation of the group.
When you break it down, Jones never looked to take The Stones in the direction they ultimately went. He was always a child of the blues, and while the first albums they worked on had many of those tunes, it was only a matter of time before ‘The Glimmer Twins’ started stretching themselves when writing tunes like ‘Satisfaction’ and appealing to a global audience who were more intent on dancing the night away.
Looking back, the way that The Stones let go of Jones is all the more tragic. Since he was often pushed to the side, his eventual dismissal felt like an artist losing the drive to create and finally bottoming out by the late 1960s. But if he couldn’t play strictly blues, he would use whatever instrument he could to get his point across.
Outside of guitar, some of the best instrumental detours on Stones records are down to Jones using just the right piece for any song. Although the thought of a band as dangerous as them taking on baroque pop on Between the Buttons sounded dreadful, Jones is the glue that keeps everything together most of the time.
But Page was already that kind of animal before he had started working in The Yardbirds. His talents were primarily relegated to the guitar, but given how many sessions and genres of music he had played, it wasn’t out of the question for The Stones to think of him as a potential replacement when Jones first started going off the rails in the mid-1960s.
As Bill Wyman recalled, he didn’t think it was a bad idea for them to let Jones years before and snatch up Page before Zeppelin happened, saying, “In ’65, we almost asked (Brian) to leave before Zeppelin was formed, when we were going to ask Jimmy Page. We thought of asking him to leave five or six times.”
However, looking at where Page did after Zeppelin, it doesn’t sound like it would have been the best move. Outside of the few one-off supergroups and his work collaborating with other artists, Page was always the one who had the final say in what he was doing, and since he was the de facto leader of Led Zeppelin, there was no way that he was just going to kick back and play whatever Jagger or Richards wanted him to play on any certain song.
And when you start looking at all of Jones’s greatest moments on Stones records, the world would have been missing something if they didn’t have him in the group to play the sitar on ‘Paint It Black’ or the various lead lines on their early material. The Stones did go from strength to strength once Mick Taylor joined the group, but they might not have known what they had on their hands with Jones.
