Brian Jones

That's cool I was taken aback about the marimba I love the sound of it. It starts a real groove to me. I like the original " I'm Free." I never bought the deluxe edition of Ya-Yas for crappy sound issues. The original Ya-Yas is my go to.

 

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/rolling-stones-arrest-history/

 

From Brian Jones Fanclub:

Back in the UK and on September 26th, the jury at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court retired to reach a verdict on the accusation that Brian was in possession of cannabis at the time of his earlier arrest. Having listened to the evidence and mitigation, and despite the judge directing the jury to find Brian not guilty, they did in fact return a guilty verdict "No, no, no. It can't be true", Brian gasped as girls sobbed in the public gallery; but the judge, showing signs of belief in the vendetta waged by the police, bestowed leniency with a mere £50 fine, plus costs. However, the guilty verdict did eventually cost Brian dearly – making it almost impossible to get the visa he needed to tour and perform in the US.

He was unfortunately for The Stones, convicted guilty in 1968 and by June 1969 he was refused to get his visa.
Jagger and Richards could get their visas, although it would also hunt them for years.

 

don't you mean the the first British blues-rock band playing covers?

and certainly the preeminent one from 1963 on, especially if we're talking blues-rock rather than more purist bands like Alexis Korner and John Mayall.

"The Last Time" isn't "Stones-y"? Or "I Wanna Be Your Man"? this is extreme revisionism...

 

wow -- high standards... how much faster could they really have taken off? You're talking about, what, a 1-year period before the founding of the Stones that they should have been able to get signed during? (I think it's actually just a few months.)

 

not really ... that's the genesis of "slowly rocking on"...

 

"established fact" -- synonym for "subjective labeling," ok.

and what does Lennon have to do with anything? We're talking about the Stones.

 

I think most people are forgetting that during the time when Jones had a huge influence on the Stones they were playing cover songs. The first few albums were made entirely of covers. And by the time The Stones started writing albums comprised of mostly or all original material he was already in the process of checking out. Jagger and Richards were writing nearly all of the original material even before Jones was fired. That being said, he was a huge force in the beginning as far as developing the swagger and direction of the Stones, but I think his departure was the reason the Stones reached new heights. In my opinion their strongest "albums" all came after he was fired. Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street (maybe the greatest album of all time) and Some Girls. Even Beggar's Banquet, to which he apparently contributed little more than a slide guitar riff. The guy was great, and I love his guitar and some of his backing vocals on the early albums. But it seems pretty clear that toward the end he was more of a destructive force than a creative one.

 

When I was a kid, that early 80s promo video for "Time Is On My Side" from the "Still Life" live album (which I had on vinyl) was played quite often on MTV and was always fascinating to me when they showed those old 60s clips of the band from the projector displayed on the back of the stage. I always noticed this young man in the band that didn't have dark hair like all the other members had and I didn't recognize him. I always wondered who that mysterious fellow was. I later looked at some books on the Rolling Stones at the library and discovered who I was missing from the various photos within. It was Brian Jones!!!

I started getting interested in him and started reading stuff on the band and was especially captivated by his persona. I discovered the "Satanic Majesties" album cover and was hooked. He just looked so sly on that album cover. I knew he was bad. This is what kicked off my interest in the 60s Stones music and made me realize the hidden gem this band had that I did not take notice of over a decade after his death. And I would later find out that he was quite the creative genius and most versatile musician in the band at that time.

RIP Brian

 

The premise of this thread is quite clearly wrong. You can use lots of word to describe Brian but unsung isn't one of them. There is plenty of recognition for his work. Which is not to say that the Stones were finished without him. SullyJosh, I agree 100%.

Now the fact that he hasn't been mentioned yet would make Ian Stewart the true unsung hero of the Stones. Ian was there before Mick and Keef and to quote Keef "Ian Stewart. I'm still working for him. The Rolling Stones is his band.". You gonna argue with Keef? And BTW how many of the Rolling Stones played with Led Zeppelin? Just Ian. The unsung hero of the Rolling Stones.

 

"Signed" isn't the issue - I don't think they were even playing many gigs. IIRC, Mick started singing with Korner's band and that led to the Stones' formation and eventual emergence. But anyway, I'm not making some set-in-stone pronouncement that they wouldn't have gone anywhere without Brian, I'm just pointing out that after Brian, things seemed to take off very quickly. But I'm not getting a calendar out to track dates, it's just a casual observation.

 

Perhaps he is not so much "unsung" as "controversial." It's not always easy to tell where Brian's influence begins and ends.

Ian was one of a kind and should be more recognized, but Mick has said that Charlie is the leader of the Rolling Stones! And if Charlie bails and the the band breaks up, that may well prove him right!

 

Brian still picked Ian. Brian placed a ad in Jazz News and Ian Stewart was the first to respond to the ad in May 1962. Keith and Mick joined the Rollin' Stones (as they were known then) in June 1962. And as we all know Brian named the band after a Muddy Waters song. The Rolling Stones
are Brian Jones creation period!

 

God, not this again. What I said in one of the other threads about him:
Brian might have contributed a little writing to a few songs and his instrumentation was an added bonus but Mick and Keith wrote all those fabulous songs and that is what made them great.

 

Certainly the Stones would have another name, perhaps "The Blue Boys", who knows. Out of curiosity even Brian Jones's death is a mystery.

 

It' s hard for me to even know what stuff he does on any given track, maybe that's revisionist thinking...interesting story, when I went to tangiers, morroco in 1989, getting baked out of my skull, the dude I bought the fist-sized piece of hash from said he sold a whole bunch of it to Brian jones and Keef, but they got busted, and then the "Rolling Stones mafia" flew over and worked it all out...priceless memories getting stoned and playing soccer on the beach with a bunch of kids, the rest of the story is an utter horror-trip, don't ever go to morroco by yourself and get completely stoned and kidnapped!!!!

 

"Ladies & Gentlemen, The Rolling Machines!"

 

Yeah, I think Bill plays the organ, Keith plays bass and Brian and Keith play the various guitars.

 

A lot of extreme positions being staked out in this thread, as ever. I think that Brian was clearly a crucial figure in their early development, but because he was neither a songwriter or a vocalist, he gradually got marginalized. He certainly provided a crucial "x factor" with his knack for picking up diverse, exotic instruments that helped to set the new Jagger/Richards compositions apart, but his personal demons were ultimately his undoing. Let's be candid here: None of the Stones were angels--OK, maybe Charlie!--but I think it's a mistake to set Brian up as some kind of unjustly wronged martyr. He was unable to control his appetites for drugs and women and he abused both. Judging from the later film clips, he was a shell of his former charismatic self by the end.

That said, he probably deserved a few writing credits here and there and it's hard to fathom how anyone would hate his marimba part in "Under My Thumb", which totally makes the song, IMO. His mellotron work on Satanic Majesties was amazing as well.

 

The circumstances were different for Mick and Keith. Keith was busted for allowing his place to be used for cannabis smoking, but no actual cannabis was discovered IIRC. Mick was busted for a couple of amphetamines that Marianne Faithfull purchased legally in Italy, and both their busts were tainted by the obvious collusion between the News Of The World and the police. Brian, on the other hand, was busted for actual possession, although the hashish was very likely planted. I don't remember all the details but the fact is, Brian's busts and the Redlands bust were much different things and Brian got the much worse end of the stick as far as punishment. I've never read an account of the story that disputed that Brian would have been unable to tour due to visa problems.

 

I think where people fall on this question of whether or not Jones was "unsung" -- he clearly wasn't in his time -- or the "real" architect of the Stones sound has a lot to do with a) whether you're thinking about the Stones as a performing band or thinking about the Stones' records; and b) whether you're more of a fan of the '60s singles band and fast garage rock and psychedelia generally, or more of a fan of the later, slugdey, distorted, teeter-tottering around the beat kind of loose and slower Stones sound of the '70s.

When it comes to the records, I'm a man who likes the former but loves the later. When I think of something that sounds "Stonesy" to me I think of, yeah, "Gimmie Shelter" and "Brown Sugar" but also "Sway" and "Tumbling Dice" and even later songs with some of that vibe like "Beast of Burden." And I think of those Keef open G riffs, like "Start Me Up." But there's no doubt that the early records, even covers like "Time Is On My Side" and "It's All Over Now," have a characteristic sound too, I have to acknowledge that, and to the extent that the earliest records were defined by fast, razor sharp driving rhythm guitar; little instruments like maracas or color instruments; I think Brian's particular input is audible.

To the point about the Stones as a band, not just record makers -- when I watch the '64 TAMI show sequence, the guy who obviously is least contributing anything distinctive or even meaningful to the band's characteristic sound is the guy strumming barre chords the whole time. By contrast, Keith is already becoming a kind of new style rock guitarist. He's already playing really loud with not just a Fender piggyback amp but also an extension cab. His tone, its volume-driven sustain, and his herky jerky rhythmic phrasing is already distinctive and different from what anyone else on the bill that day -- including Chuck Berry -- was doing, as is the role his lead lines play in the arrangements. Charlie's drumming is completely distinctive (and loud), as it always was, and gives the band an immediately identifiable sound, as does Mick's sneering vocal timbre. At this point Jagger and Richards hadn't even become the creative engine of the band as writers yet, and already it seems to me that Brian is not in any way driving the band's distinctive sound. It that would only become more and more true as Jagger and Richards started writing all those great songs.

 

Brian gets very little camera time in the TAMI show clip. I haven't re-watched the clip you've posted (and can't, being at work), but IIRC there are some moments when it looks like Brian is being quite active and engaging the audience but the camera isn't focused on him so it's not clear. Humorously, there appears to be a moment during the solo in "Time Is On My Side" where Brian is mugging and posing as if HE is playing the guitar solo instead of Keith! At least that's what it looks like, but it's a shot of Brian's back.

Every account I've ever read about Brian's live form was that he was very active, very charismatic and very in-your-face, and none of the film clips I've ever seen have captured that. I don't know why that is, but there is a disparity between what we can see now and what quite a few people say they saw then.

 

Well, I'm talking about the musical context of what he's doing, not the performing content. But even the performing content -- his mugging and shrugging -- ain't nearly what Mick and Keith are doing, who are really hamming it up obviously thinking this was a big shot for them to really break big in the U.S. (though it wouldn't really happen until the following year). And Brian gets a fair amount of screen time in the TAMI show clip. Probably more than Keith does, certainly a lot more close up time than anyone but Mick. Wyman's largely invisible.

 

I think that if we were to see a clip that focused on all three of them equally, we'd get a better picture of the balance between them. And also, I think that perhaps the guitar weaving between Keith and Brian was perhaps too good, in that unless one of them takes a solo, it can be awfully hard to discern who's playing what and how well they are doing it. But I think that in fact the sort of situation where one tries to play Keith against Brian and argue that one was a better guitar player than the other is exactly what neither of them was going for. The idea, as Keith put it, was "two guitar players and one sound." This is what they achieved, so it seems that pitting one of them against the other is perhaps missing the point.

 

Well, in that performance, there's no guitar weaving on display. It's a straight rhythm-lead performance. All Brian plays through the whole set is barre chords almost always with just straight strumming except for "Time Is On My Side" where he's plays the kind of chord arpeggio lead and Keith does the strumming.

If you watch the performance again I think it's pretty clear that Keith has become a different sort of player -- not that he's playing particularly well from a technical point of view, just that it's a different kind of electric guitar/rock thing with the two cabs and the loud sound and the prominent parts. That's the thing that most strikes me when I watch the whole movie (besides being hit again by the awesomeness of Jame Brown at the height of his powers and how good Leon Russell sounds behind Marvin Gaye) -- how Keith has come from the future like Marty McFly with tomorrow's approach to rock guitar already, or at least a hint of it, and everyone else on the bill is just kind of playing the established early '60s musical roles. (And how great Dennis Wilson sounds driving the Beach Boys even though his time keeping is pretty bad and he seems to be continually accelerating throught the performance).