Which Rolling Stone did Keith Richards think couldn’t handle fame?
Fame has always been a bit of a tricky beast in the music industry. There are plenty of people who spend their entire lives trying to make it in the business, but even when they have everything that they supposedly wanted, they have to admit to themselves that it’s far from the greatest thing that they could have asked for. In many ways, fame can go from a dream to a nightmare fairly quickly, and Keith Richards knew that better than anyone when The Rolling Stones hit it big.
Before the band even found their feet on their own, they already had major competition from some other rapscallions out of Liverpool. Since The Beatles had debuted a bit before The Stones started, Mick Jagger and Richards were already being looked at as the inverse version of Lennon and McCartney, almost like the bad kids in school that no mother wanted their sons or daughters to hang out with.
Which isn’t exactly the full story when breaking everything down. The Fab Four were the ones who came from the rougher neighborhoods and would have easily been considered bad boys compared to The Stones, but when it came to their misbehaviour on the road, it’s not like Richards couldn’t indulge in the kind of fantasies that the press were setting up for him when he got offstage. That meant more booze and drugs when he could find him, and Brian Jones was practically his partner in crime.
Then again, Jones was often far more distant compared to the rest of his bandmates. He was always central in their early days at booking them gigs, but the more their star continued to rise, the more he realised that he had less and less to do behind the scenes. This was his band in many respects, but it seemed like it had immediately been taken over by what Jagger and Richards were writing.
That’s before getting into his bad-boy image on the road. From day one, Jones got a reputation as the true bad seed of the band, but despite all of the trouble he could get into behind the scenes, he was always the one that was willing to throw anything into the mix to see what worked, learning multiple instruments and playing anything he could to get the sound in his head that he wanted.
“Brian was the least capable of coping with teenybopper stardom and it made him so depressed that eventually he became a liability, and especially because of the pressure we, as a band, were under.”
Keith Richards
Once the band started to become larger than life in the late 1960s, Richards remembered feeling his bandmate start to crack up, saying, “Brian was the least capable of coping with teenybopper stardom and it made him so depressed that eventually he became a liability, and especially because of the pressure we, as a band, were under. Also Mick and I, after Andrew [Loog Oldham] had got us into writing – which we’d never dreamt of doing – after the first couple got to Number One it increased Brian’s antagonism towards us.”
And the saddest part is that Jones never fully got over his struggles with fame. He had seen his musical baby be transformed into something completely different and there was nothing he could do to stop it, and once he was found dead in his pool after being fired, it felt like no one had the chance to see what he was fully capable of when working on a record by himself.
But looking at Jones’s career, he will forever be known as one of the integral members who brought the band together in the first place. The Stones had become this musical machine whenever they took to the road, and even though some of their parts had to be replaced over time, they were never going to forget the one person who acted as their engine for years on end.
