“Complicated”: The Rolling Stones song too hard for Brian Jones to play
By the time The Rolling Stones reached the end of the 1960s, no type of music seemed outside of their reach. They had trademarked their brand of blues rock from the minute that they started, but whether it was the country sounds of ‘Wild Flowers’ or the soft ballads like ‘Ruby Tuesday’, it wouldn’t have been all that surprising if they tried to pull off an operetta and made it work back in the day. While a lot of that creative ingenuity came down to Brian Jones, there was one tune that even managed to defeat him.
Looking back on the early period of The Stones, there’s a good chance they would be nowhere without Jones. Outside of naming the group and gigging around with the name before coming across Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, his knowledge of various instruments is frankly alarming, looking at his list of credits on albums.
Whereas most people knew him for being the blonde-haired kid with a bowl cut pumping out the riffs next to Keef, Jones’s ability to play virtually anything with strings and various woodwind instruments gave the group an edge that no one else could boast. Sure, The Beatles could get session musicians to fill out the sound, but none of them would play the harmonica on one tune, switch over to sitar for the next one, and then somehow find time to throw in some flutes towards the end of a session.
And that’s why comparing the Fab Four and The Stones was such a fair fight back in the day. Even though The Stones did a pretty good job of riding their friends’ coattails half the time, experiments like Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request come from giving Joines carte blanche to do anything he wanted to on some of the tracks.
But right as they were starting to follow the Fabs’ lead on Aftermath, they did manage to get to an instrumental freakout before their rivals on ‘Going Home’. While blues musicians had been no strangers to elongated jams, having a mainstream pop band put together a tune that lasted over ten minutes was unheard of at the time, especially with only one real verse to tie everything together.
Although Jones was more than capable of putting any kind of instrument that he could into the mix, Richards admitted that nothing sat right with the guitarist when it came time to lay down a guitar part for the tune, saying, “Brian didn’t play (guitar) on this ’cause it was too fuckin’ complicated.”
At the same time, hearing Richards play the lead isn’t on the same level as Eric Clapton. A lot of the playing is still fairly blues-based runs, but whereas Jones could be incredibly clinical in his style, what Richards delivers is a lot more off-the-cuff, almost like he’s coming up with licks on the spot to make the track better.
While it’s a shame we don’t know what Jones could have contributed to this song, some tunes only become classics if they have the right feel behind them, and Jones wasn’t the right person for that particular track. As great a player as he can be, it all comes down to how someone’s creative heart beats.
