The 10 wildest instrumental contributions Brian Jones made to The Rolling Stones
There needed to be a way for The Rolling Stones to stand out. Although they were at the forefront of the English blues-rock boom of the early 1960s, the amount of competition the band faced made it necessary to move on quickly. Manager Andrew Loog Oldham recognised that the band wouldn’t last long simply covering old blues material, so he encouraged singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards to begin collaborating on writing their own songs (allegedly by force, but that aspect of the story is probably apocryphal).
That left original band leader Brian Jones on the outside looking in. Jones had organised the original incarnation of The Rolling Stones, appearing as a frequent presence around jazz and blues clubs in London. After befriending the members, Jones was the band’s original manager and booking agent, taking an additional fee that rankled the other band members. More importantly, Jones picked the majority of the band’s material, played slide guitar and harmonica, and led the direction of the group until Jagger and Richards became the primary creative voices.
Initially, Jones didn’t exactly know how to adjust to the Jagger/Richards partnership. Other than an occasional idea (Jones allegedly wrote the melody for ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and went uncredited), Jones wasn’t gifted as a composer or a lyricist. Instead, he found his niche as a gifted multi-instrumentalist.
Throughout the latter half of his tenure in the Stones, Jones would rarely pick up the guitar. In its place, Jones would play sitars, marimbas, recorders, and even kazoos. The switch in instruments complemented the band’s psychedelic reinvention as albums like Between the Buttons and Her Satanic Majesties Request required a new scope of sounds. Jones was eager to stay on top of the band’s new music, but as drugs began to take over his life, the musician’s interest in contributing to the Stones began to dwindle considerably.
By the end of the 1960s, Jones was barely appearing in the studio. But for a golden period between 1965 and 1968, Jones successfully reinvented himself as a startling multi-instrumentalist. To best illustrate the wild range of Jones’ musical contributions to The Rolling Stones, here are ten of his wildest instrumental parts that found their way onto the Stones’ records.
Brian Jones’ 10 best contributions to The Rolling Stones:
Marimba – ‘Under My Thumb’
As The Rolling Stones entered into a new phase of their career, their abandonment of the blues and the major awakening of the Jagger/Richards partnership required a change in sound. Initially, Jagger and Richards were writing pop songs. In order to give them an edge and make them unique, the duo needed some interesting arrangements to fill out these tracks.
That’s where Jones excelled. For one of his first non-traditional contributions to the Stones’ catalogue, Jones picked up a pair of mallets and beat out a melody on the percussion instrument called the Marimba. A large wooden percussion instrument that had the same notes as a piano, Jones didn’t have to make a major leap in order to find the right notes that helped ‘Under My Thumb’ stand out among the hit parade.
Sitar – ‘Paint It Black’
It was hard to argue that Jones’ proclivity for exotic instruments was anything short of revolutionary in the mid-1960s. While the idea of raga-rock had been pioneered by George Harrison on The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ in 1965, Harrison hadn’t quite mastered the instrument by the time he recorded that part.
Just five months later, The Rolling Stones released ‘Paint It Black’, a much darker and more traditional use of the sitar in rock music. Jones had been studying with Harihar Rao, a student of Ravi Shankar, and had become proficient on the instrument. As it stood, most rock fans first heard proper sitar playing on ‘Paint It Black’ thanks to Brian Jones.
Recorder – ‘Ruby Tuesday’
Jones’ ability to contribute to the Stones’ originals was limited. Jones wasn’t a very competent melody writer, and his ability to write lyrics was nearly non-existent. While his aptitude toward music allowed him to play a variety of different instruments, Jones’ technique was often limited to fiddling around with an instrument until he found something in tune.
That being said, Jones occasionally produced truly thoughtful music with his instruments. While fooling around with the recorder, a fairly basic woodwind instrument, he crafted a melody that eventually became ‘Ruby Tueday’. The extent of his contribution has been up for debate, but it didn’t matter in the long run: no matter how much of the song he wrote, Jones went uncredited.
Mellotron – ‘She’s a Rainbow’
As the psychedelic age began to dawn, synthesisers weren’t quite ready to join the party. The Moog synth wouldn’t be widely available until 1967, so early alternatives were sought out by bands looking to diversify their sound. The Mellotron was an early keyboard with different settings that could emulate different instruments. Jones took to the instrument and played it throughout his later years with the Stones.
The central pull of ‘She’s a Rainbow’ is Nicky Hopkins’ incomparable piano runs, but just below the surface, a brass band plays the song’s prominent fanfare. That’s not actually a group of session musicians: it’s Jones on the mellotron, contributing some of his finest work to Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Kazoo – ‘Cool, Calm, and Collected’
At a certain point, it seemed as though Brian Jones was looking for something, anything, to add to the Stones’ songs. When his mastery of the guitar, sitar, and keyboard had run its course, Jones began feeling around the outer edges of traditional western instruments in order to fill in the gaps. Sometimes, he went straight for instruments that kids played.
It’s hard to hear Jones’ kazoo playing on the Between the Buttons cut ‘Cool, Calm, and Collected’ as being anything other than ridiculous. This is the line that Jones always toed in the Stones: he was the man that could play anything, but did he always have to? For a silly music hall track like ‘Cool, Calm, and Collected’, it at least works in the context of the song.
Saxophone – ‘Dandelion’
Jones wasn’t content with just mastering string instruments. During the Stones’ bluesiest days, Jones and not Jagger was the group’s primary harmonica player. His aptitude for reed instruments had already been highlighted on ‘Ruby Tuesday’, but Jones was ready to move up from the recorder.
The saxophone has been one of rock music’s most beloved instruments since the 1950s. But the way that Jones used it was miles away from the rollicking tones of King Curtis. On ‘Dandelion’, Jones tootles out a delicate and slightly discordant melody on either the soprano saxophone or the oboe. It’s fairly basic, but Jones was irreplaceable for contributions like these that no other band member could handle.
Harpsichord – ‘Ride On, Baby’
The Stones didn’t always know where they wanted to go in the mid-1960s. As one of the biggest groups in the world, it seemed obvious that the band wanted to go in a more pop direction. However, their genre experiments and nefarious reputation often put them at odds with the mainstream, even as pop culture was shifting toward the counterculture.
Jones’ solution was to look into the past, namely, by pulling out an ancient classical keyboard instrument called the Harpsichord for the Stones’ 1965 baroque pop track ‘Ride On, Baby’. Jones became one of the first to associate the harpsichord with the psychedelic movement, inspiring everyone from burgeoning hippie Elton John to Stones collaborator Nicky Hopkins to try out the instrument’s singular sound.
Appalachian Dulcimer – ‘Lady Jane’
There was a time when Jones’ ear for exotic sounds worked in harmony with the rest of his band. As the Stones moved beyond the limited sounds of the blues, everything from baroque pop to acid-drenched psychedelia would pop up in their music. Jones was as proactive about seeking out futuristic sounds as anyone in the group, and when the band went baroque, he was often the one leading the charge.
A song like ‘Lady Jane’ could have been just fine with an acoustic guitar arrangement. Perhaps Jones could have dipped back into his experiments with the harpsichord to get some delicate additional tones. But instead, he took a page out of Joni Mitchell’s book a few years early by picking up the Appalachian dulcimer, a folk instrument that gave ‘Lady Jane’ a distinct pastoral feel.
Koto – ‘Take It Or Leave It’
As Jones’ fascination with exotic sounds hit its peak, his creative contributions to The Rolling Stones began to plateau. Rarely ever picking up his guitar, Jones was often thrown in an isolation booth to record instruments from all over the world. Those recorded takes would rarely make the final mix, and the musician was rarely present during the mixing stage to put up any kind of protest.
The Japanese koto instrument was one of many exotic instruments that Jones had stumbled upon during the late 1960s. Its earliest appearance can be heard on the UK version of Aftermath, where Jones plays it on ‘Take It Or Leave It’. The koto part is almost inaudible, foreshadowing how Jones’ “contributions” would be treated by the rest of the band in the coming years.
Jaw harp – ‘Sing This All Together (See What Happens)’
Eventually, The Rolling Stones became too obsessed with psychedelia. While legions of fans came to appreciate the varied sounds and wild experiments on Their Satanic Majesties Request, the album still stinks of trend-chasing and half-baked nonsense. Nowhere is that lack of direction more clear than on ‘Sing This All Together (See What Happens)’.
An interminable nine-minute slog that is an extended and experimental rehash of a much better song that appears earlier on the album, ‘Sing This All Together (See What Happens)’, is completely nebulous without being at all entertaining. Jones’ jew’s hard can be heard buzzing and boinging around, but at that point, it was clear that no one in the band (least of all Jones himself) knew what he was adding to the mix.
