Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones by Paul Trynka

Author:Paul Trynka [Trynka, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

8

Butterflies and Wheels

BACK IN THE 1920s and 1930s, Brian Jones knew, making music was a life-or-death proposition: a blues singer who hit the road with a guitar in the Southern states took his life into his hands. This was part of the music’s force, an intrinsic part of the legend of blues singers like Robert Johnson, who’d died of strychnine poisoning, aged 27, crouched on his hands and knees, coughing like a dog. Brian, the first Stone to delve deep into the blues, was more aware than most of the forces that threatened the music’s first pioneers. Fatefully, he had little clue that he was about to face a similar assault from forces who found his lifestyle an affront to their values.

Posterity would ascribe the undoing of Brian Jones to a woman; yet the hammer blow, it turns out, came from a very different source. In a cruel twist, the corrupt, cynical attack of the establishment which was the making of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards proved to be the breaking of Brian Jones – the real butterfly broken on the wheel.

*

The year 1967 began beautifully. Back in September 1966, Anita Pallenberg had started work on her first big movie, Mord und Totschlag, directed by the twenty-eight-year-old wunderkind Volker Schlöndorff, his follow-up to The Tin Drum. The film was based on a true story, of a woman who’d killed her friend more or less accidentally; rather than go to the police she hires two men to dispose of the body. ‘The picture was about the total absence of old values,’ says Schlöndorff; ‘an unresolved crime story, no redemption, no morals.’ Anita played the main role, and Brian had joined her for the filming. The media firestorm around the couple was so intense that Schlöndorff lent them his little flat in Munich as a hideout. (Brian and Anita became embroiled in a mini-scandal soon after their stay in Munich, when Brian dressed up in an SS uniform for a playful but ill-advised shoot for Stern, all of which helped secure their status as the definitive bad-boy-and-girl couple.)

The shooting was well in progress when Brian asked if he could do the soundtrack. Schlöndorff’s reaction was, ‘I’d love to – but I can’t pay you.’ Brian’s response was, ‘Well, I’ll do it for free.’ Largely as a result, Schlöndorff spent quite a lot of time with Brian at the end of 1966 and the beginning of 1967 and considered him ‘amazing. He was a Shelley-style character, a dandy. He could be spoiled and nasty, but at the same time he was creativity incarnate, and had great intuition.’ Schlöndorff was struck particularly by Brian’s sensitivity; he seemed to sense mood, and instinctively understand what was necessary for a film. ‘He also had quite an education, and quite a horizon, so I really thought, this is the best music I could ever get for a movie.’

Once the main movie edit was completed, in January 1967, Brian joined Schlöndorff for a spotting session, working out the main themes and timings.

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