anybody here knows about this one? Recommendable? Looks good!
Sympathy for an angel: Brian Jones from The Stones Sympathy for the Devil: The Birth of the Rolling Stones and the Death of Brian Jones
by Paul Trynka. Bantam Press, hdbk, 368 pages, €24.99
19-year-old actress Anita Pallenberg with Brian Jones, guitarist and founder member of the Rolling Stones at Heathrow Airport.
George Byrne on a book which says the angelic looking Brian Jones never got the credit he deserved in The Rolling Stones
Any teenager now looking back at early photos of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones could be forgiven for wondering how on earth these people were ever considered a threat to society, the former seeming like a jolly bunch of lads and the latter looking like trainee accountants. Yet that wave of British acts were at the cusp of the Generation Gap, born with Luftwaffe bombs falling on their native cities and hitting their late teens just as their parents wondered why they'd ever bothered fighting Hitler in the first place if this was how the young lot were going to turn out.
And if ever a story told the tale of a seismic schism in society then it's that of Brian Jones.
Born in 1942 in Cheltenham, Lewis Brian Jones was an angelic-looking but asthmatic child. Growing up in a household with a domineering, repressed father and submissive mother, Jones took up clarinet at an early age and soon proved to be a natural musician, moving to guitar and developing an interest in jazz, rock'n'roll and, particularly, the blues.
His mastery of electric slide guitar made him a musician to watch and a move to London was inevitable, not least because he had two legal firms in Cheltenham on his case trying to get him out of town, young Brian having got at least four girls pregnant by the time he was 19. Veteran British r'n'b bandleader Alexis Korner was sceptical of Brian's claim that the blues could become a mainstream, popular music but by the time The Rolling Stones played their first gig at the Marquee in July 1962, Jones was convinced that his musical destiny was in his hands.
Make no mistake, it's quite clear that for the first three years of their existence, the Stones were Brian's band. He was the musical director, showed Keith Richards how to achieve his unique tuning (Richards later claimed otherwise), chose much of the material and passed his harmonica tips on to Mick Jagger. And after all this he was eventually shafted.
Author Paul Trynka is a former editor of Mojo magazine and one thing which you certainly couldn't accuse him of is glorifying the subjects here. It's quite clear that The Rolling Stones were an appalling bunch of people to be around, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman excepted. When Jones was inviting Jagger and Richards to join the band, Korner advised 'take one, don't take them both', rightly reckoning that the two Dartford schoolchums would eventually gang up on the leader.
Things really got nasty when young chancer Andrew Loog Oldham took over the band's management, riding roughshod over a previous arrangement they'd had, sidelining original member Ian 'Stu' Stewart and intent on alienating Jones in favour of the Jagger/Richards axis.
One of Brian's early girlfriends, Pat Andrews, describes a 'sexually predatory atmosphere' surrounding the band, with members continually trying to shift each other's girlfriends in a bizarre litany of sexual one-upmanship. In later years this would see Keith steal Anita Pallenberg from Brian, after Jagger had slept with her on the set of Performance, while by way of revenge Keith shared a night of passion (and, more than likely, drugs) with Mick's partner Marianne Faithfull. God, you would not want to have been anywhere next nor near these people.
And yet, while all this carry-on was happening, the band were still making great music, aided in no small part by Jones' expertise as a multi-instrumentalist and arranger. His contributions to 'Under My Thumb', 'Lady Jane', 'Paint it Black' and 'Ruby Tuesday' effectively made those songs yet all the credit - and the royalties - went to Jagger and Richards.
Yet while Brian could be a venal monster with a vicious streak and 'a horrible attitude to women', according to London scenester Barry Miles, he did truly love the music he'd grown up with. Just look at the smile on his face as he introduces blues legend Howlin' Wolf on US TV show Shindig in 1965. This was a black blues musician being granted access to mainstream American television audiences courtesy of a pasty-faced chap from Cheltenham at a time when America was tearing itself apart with racial tensions. That's some achievement.
Brian's decline, when it came, was swift and not particularly pretty. In Jean-Luc Godard's One plus One from 1968 he's practically unrecognisable as the band try to work up a version of 'Sympathy for the Devil' and clearly a liability in the studio. Indeed, he'd be gone from the band in six months.
Being kicked out of your own band would be hard enough to take for most people, far less someone who was emotionally fragile, paranoid that the police were out to get him and taking far too many drugs.
It all came to an end on the night of July 2, 1969 when he drowned in his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm, East Sussex. There have been several shadowy conspiracy theories that Jones was murdered but Trynka dismisses these as nonsense and I reckon he's right to do so, given that there's no evidence whatsoever to back any of them up.
Bran Jones was a fabulous musician if deeply flawed human being and there's a great, cautionary tale to be found in these pages. Interestingly enough, when the Rolling Stones played Hyde Park this year there wasn't a single mention of or nod to the man who founded the band over 50 years ago. Reading Sympathy for the Devil, that won't come as any great surprise.
Available with free P&P on
www.kennys.ie or by calling 091 709350