Which is why the footage in the recently released Charlie
Is My Darling is such a revelation. In
addition to the most electrifying live footage yet seen from the Jones era
(shot in Ireland in 1965), Brian also gets valuable camera time as a talking
head, and it’s a refreshing shock to encounter him as a living, breathing human
being rather than a spectral presence called up from someone’s unreliable
memory. Choosing his words carefully, he is revealed as the ambitious,
soft-spoken, keenly intelligent person that many say he was.
He is also terribly self-aware, observing at one point,
“Let’s face it, life as a Rolling Stone is very unpredictable.”
He says that with a slight gleam in his eye, as if he
already knows or suspects how that future will play out. For that brief moment
it’s possible to feel not only his humanity, but also to catch a glimpse of the
mercurial, charismatic quality that made him such a fascinating figure.
To be sure, within many circles (including that of the band
he founded) he was not well liked. A notorious drug fiend, womanizer, and
all-around self-centered man-child, his must have been an incredibly difficult
personality to deal with. It also provided the worldly, sensual, and sinister
impulse that lurks within the Rolling Stones’ best music.
There is a subset of Rolling Stones fans that insists that
Brian Jones WAS The Rolling Stones. He set the stage, putting the band
together, dictating the musical direction and providing the most appealingly
exotic ugly/beautiful (in Brian’s case mostly beautiful) physical appearance in
a band with many contenders. These fans swear that the Stones really ended with
his dismissal from the group.
The trouble with that theory, of course, is that not only
did Mick and Keith have more than enough talent and charisma to match Brian,
but (duh) they wrote the songs that turned the band into a cultural
institution, and eventually into a world-dominating, money-generating,
unstoppable corporate machine.
Still, consider the subject matter, and the alluringly dark
and comic atmosphere of the Stones best songs. Particularly those of the 65-6
period, with the sardonic social observations and sexually-charged put-downs –
“Play With Fire”, “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown”, “Stupid Girl”. Or the
gleefully grim attitude of “Get Off My Cloud” or “Paint It Black.” If this
music was somehow mixed together and reprocessed as a movie or a book or a
play, the lead character would be Brian Jones.
Such was the potency of his character - that of the ultimate
flash sixties libertine, ceaselessly flirting with any available edge, immersed
in erotica, the occult, and the pleasures and pains provided by any number of
controlled substances – that it haunted the Stones’ music for years, even after
his death 44 years ago.
In fact, it might be possible to trace the decline in
quality of The Rolling Stones music to the gradually diminishing presence of
Brian Jones (or his ghost) through the years. On the post-69 peaks Sticky
Fingers and Exile On Main Street that presence is obvious. Drug-fuelled, casually
carnal, from the dissolute haze of “Sister Morphine” to the grungy
harmonica-driven version of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breakin’ Down”, it’s
everywhere on these records, sometimes hidden in the shadows, sometimes in plain sight. It can even be found in the decadent fog of Goat’s Head Soup and the charged-up glitz of It’s Only Rock
‘N Roll.
Only with the later ‘70’s records, the New York-obsessed
punk-inspired Some Girls or the funky,
exploratory mishmash Emotional Rescue, is his presence more or less absent, though the sheer momentum of the
band’s creative drive kept the music interesting during this time. By the eighties
it seems to be gone completely, and so is the power, the ability to compel, of
the music. “Continental Drift” from 1989’s tepid Steel Wheels, an attempt at Eastern exotica that utilizes the
same group of Moroccan musicians Jones recorded in 1967, is less an invocation
of Jones exploratory spirit than an impotent attempt at connecting with it.
Or maybe this theory is bullshit, too. Drawing at straws in
an effort to understand why this music is so fascinating. More mythmaking to
expunge into an endless sea of the stuff.
But mythmaking is part of what both rock and roll and The
Rolling Stones are all about. Luckily, we have a pretty hard reality that we
can rely on in the form of the Stones’ recorded work. And if you love rock and
roll, it’s hard to argue with that.
