“You’re going to kill yourself”: How Brian Jones’ defiance forged The Rolling Stones’ sound
It’s alleged that when Brian Jones was asked what he’d do after being fired from The Rolling Stones, he replied, “I’m going to have a cup of tea, like any good Englishman”. If that quote is true, then it is just about the only time he adhered to any notion of conformity, particularly of a Saxon sentiment. Defiance and rebellion were part of his DNA, and it’s those very characteristic that christened the group Bob Dylan venerated as the “the first and the last” great rock ‘n’ roll band.
They might now be crowned one of the biggest cultural sensations in history, but their beginnings certainly didn’t hint that this lofty fate would await them. As Keith Richards would recall, they “just wanted to be the best blues band in London” when they first started out. However, even that was a more radical goal than it might now seem.
Flash back to July 11th, 1962: Mick Jagger shuffles around backstage at the Marquee Club. He’s been too nervous to eat properly for days. There’s hardly enough substance within in him to hold up his cadaverous frame. He could swallow a dinner plate and it would drop straight out the other end like a coin in a faulty vending machine, briefly held up by the butterflies fluttering in his stomach. This is not just because it’s The Rolling Stones’ first gig but because they happened to be debuting at the notoriously snobbish Marquee Club, attempting to propagate a sound they’ve been heavily warned against.
Those running the venue made matters worse when they headed backstage to check on the young kids mulling about there skittishly, beset by pre-show jitters. They looked like hip vagabonds. The trad jazz purists in the lounge, all of them dressed as though Jack Kerouac had scored a modelling contract with Marks & Spencer, would immediately be put off by this scruffy, vaguely psychedelic assortment, and now the Stones were being informed of this. It was nothing new to them.
“Everybody said, ‘Don’t do it, because you’ll destroy your career’,” Bill Wyman recalls of the anti-blues feedback that they constantly received from those apparently ‘in the know’. However, Jones was propelled by a vision, and he was determined to bring this to dream to fruition. “He created the band,” bassist Wyman affirms, “it was his idea to play blues when blues was unheard of in England.”
That feedback seemed fair enough when they found themselves on the Marquee Club stage for the first time. When they began to play, boos quickly rang out from the trad jazz segment of the crowd. Thankfully, for the sake of the future of rock ‘n’ roll, there were some mods amongst them who were rather more appreciative of the visceral vagabonds playing something new. They hushed the naysayers with all the subtlety of a policeman’s knock and aggressively danced out their appreciation.
This created a violent divide within the room. The band played on, lapping it up. Clashes, skirmishes and smashed glasses bought them just enough time to get swinging, and when the room settled down, their sound was steadily gathering. The first song on this offending front was fittingly written by a couple of teenagers back in 1952, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller – the same kids who had been moved to mould the future of rock when they raced home and wrote ‘Hound Dog’ after witnessing Big Mama Thornton blow their minds with a blues show for the ages – so, with the same youthful vigour as the pair who had spawned it, the band raced through ‘Kansas City’ as a statement opener.
When they finally gathered enough esteem after a slew of similarly divisive shows, they found themselves in the unlikely position of being able to put a single out. “No one has ever done a blues record for a single in England,” Wyman once again recalls them being told. “It’s the worst thing. Like they said to Ray Charles, ‘Don’t do a country album because it will destroy you, and it was the greatest thing he ever did’. Well, when we did ‘Little Red Rooster’, they said, ‘You’re going to kill yourself’. It came out on the Friday, and on the Monday it was number one.”
In Wyman’s view, it was Jones’ signature slide sound that put them on that mantle. It was new and different in an era when nobody knew that newness and difference was what people wanted. “He was brilliant. He was a brilliant musician. He shocked everyone with the quality of his playing,” the former Stones man adds. Jones was the Svengali behind it all, steadfastly shaping his vision of blues purity, revivified for a new, radical era.
While the other members certainly bought into this, particularly after success became apparently viable, it was Jones who forged the sound. “I don’t care what you say about Mick and Keith,” Wyman explains in Brian Jones and The Stones, “if it hadn’t been for Brian, they probably would have had a different band.” Alas, they didn’t. They were part of Jones’ crazed crew—one where the defiant objective to honour their blues heroes can be heard as potently in the mix as any instrument.
So, while Jones might have been fired in the summer of 1969 and was dead just a month after, he’s still persistently there in the sound of not just The Rolling Stones, but just about any genre inspired by rock ‘n’ roll.
