To Dare Even More Boldly: Knowing the Nature of Your World; The Rolling Stones Regroup
In 1967, no sane person would have bet the Rolling Stones would outlast the Beatles. While, at least on the surface, the Beatles seemed to epitomise hippy togetherness, the Stones were characterised by endless fist-fights, girlfriend swapping, drug arrests, and chaos. The Beatles were part of a stable creative bipolar system of Lennon-McCartney dominance, while the Stones were a volatile multipolar system, uneasily ruled by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones, all of whom at various points seems to openly loathe one another.
Yet at Glastonbury in far-away 2013, the creaky, aged—but still very good—Stones headlined the most important music festival in Europe, 43 years after the seemingly indestructible Beatles had acrimoniously split up. Why did the Stones’ apparently unstable system last forever, and why did the Beatles’ placid facade crumble so easily? What is going on here, and what can geopolitical risk analysts learn from it?
Ironically, the key to the Stones’ long-term success was the demise of the group’s founder, the talented, troubled Brian Jones. With his passing from the creative scene, the Stones were to be led by the surprisingly stable Jagger-Richards bipolar duopoly, one that would survive arrests, addictions, and just plain dislike, for the rest of time.
The Fall of Brian Jones
Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones, the founder and original leader of the Rolling Stones, was born February 28, 1942, in Cheltenham, England. His middle-class parents were always interested in music: His mother taught piano, while his father led the local church choir. From early on in his life, Brian was a jazz enthusiast, being given his first acoustic guitar at the age of 17.
Already promising, Jones did well at Cheltenham Grammar School for Boys, but hated the school’s rules and regimentation. Further marring his childhood, Jones was sickly, having severe attacks of asthma that would recur throughout his life.
Late in the summer of 1959, at 17, Jones’s life was thrown into turmoil when his girlfriend became pregnant. He was forced to abandon school and his promising future and leave home in disgrace. His chaotic personal life was to continue over the next few years as he had five children in all, by five different mothers.
Wandering, Jones drifted with the wind, traveling in Scandinavia, surviving by busking as he went, before returning to London, where be became a fixture at the local blues and jazz clubs. Always ambitious, Brian placed an ad in Jazz News on May 2, 1962, inviting local musicians to audition to be part of his new rhythm and blues band; it was the birth of the Rolling Stones.
Along with Jagger and Richards, Jones set about nurturing the fledgling band. He made up its name on the spot—taking it from an old Muddy Waters tune—in order to secure desperately needed gigs. For a year, between September 1962 and September 1963, Jones, Jagger, and Richards all shared an incredibly dingy flat, 102 Edith Grove, Chelsea. Here Jones and Richards, then comfortably sharing lead guitar duties, spent most days endlessly playing guitar together and listening to blues records.
Uniquely, and as a definitive sign of their initial real but fleeting personal harmony, Jones’s and Richards’s guitars were interchangeably playing lead and rhythm guitar, without the usual clear boundaries between the two, more like traditional jazz musicians. By January 1963, bassist Bill Wyman had joined the band, along with world-class drummer Charlie Watts.
At this point in time, Jones was the undisputed leader of the Stones, which functioned as a unipolar system centred on him. As Bill Wyman later put it, ‘He (Jones) formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs…he was very influential, very important.’
But Brian was always his own worst enemy. While acting as the band’s business manager, he secretly saw to it that he received five pounds more than the others. When this became known, it created deep resentment within the band, especially with Jagger and Richards.
As Keith later disclosed in his wonderfully revealing memoir Life: ‘The first demonstration of Brian’s aspirations was the discovery on our first tour that he was getting five pounds more a week than the rest of us because…he was our ‘leader.’ The whole deal with the band was we split everything like pirates. You put the booty on the table and split it, pieces of eight. ‘Jesus Christ, who do you think you are? I’m writing songs round here, and you’re getting five pounds extra a week? Get outta here.’ It started with little things like that, which exacerbated the friction between us.’
Not helping matters, when the first lengthy tours were arranged in 1963, Jones chose to travel separately from the rest of the band, staying in different hotels and continuing to demand extra pay. While all agreed that Brian could be charming, friendly, and thoughtful, he was just as likely to be cruel and unbearably difficult. As Wyman observed, ‘He (Brian) pushed every friendship to the limit and way beyond.’
As ever, Brian lacked staying power, tiring of playing the guitar. Instead, he evolved into a multi-instrumentalist, playing everything from guitar, marimba, Appalachian dulcimer, and organ, to the sitar, recorder, autoharp, and saxophone on the Stones’ mid-1960s records, Aftermath (1966), Between the Buttons (1967), and Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967). However, by now the creative power shift in the band was apparent to all, with Jones increasingly being seen by the others as an erratic, annoying distraction.
Many factors led to Jones’s fall from grace as the Stones gradually morphed from a unipolar power system dominated by Jones to the unstable, multipolar power triumvirate of Jones-Jagger-Richards, to the enduring bipolar world of Mick and Keith.
First, the hiring of Andrew Loog Oldham as their permanent manager abruptly ended Jones’s unique position as leader. Oldham, seeing that Jagger had the potential to be the best front man in rock, made Mick’s flamboyance and swagger the focus of the band’s live performances, further enhancing his role in the Stones.
Second, and perhaps most crucially, following the overwhelming success of their friendly rivals Lennon-McCartney, Oldham clearly perceived the financial advantages to the group writing their own songs rather than merely performing the blues covers that Jones adored. As the song-writing duo of Jagger-Richards came to rival Lennon-McCartney, Brian—who was incapable of sustained song-writing—became increasingly overshadowed by his two bandmates. As Mick and Keith creatively grew, Jones stagnated.
By the time Aftermath was released in the spring of 1966, all the songs on the album were Jagger-Richards originals. Their song-writing dominance was to eventually form the core of the enduring creative bipolar duopoly that was to characterise the band for the many years to come following Brian’s eclipse. While with the rise of George Harrison the Beatles’ bipolar power structure was in relative decline, with the advent of the Jagger-Richards song-writing partnership, the Stones’ formerly unipolar power structure had obviously ceased to exist, as the group’s creative realities were so at variance with this.
Instead, the Stones temporarily transitioned into an uneasy multipolar division of power. Keith unerringly sensed the shift: ‘What probably stuck in Brian’s craw was when Mick and I started writing the songs. He lost his status and then lost interest.’
If Jones couldn’t write, he increasingly couldn’t play either, owing to his growing problems with drugs. Keith puts it bluntly: ‘And he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment. When you’re schlepping 350 days a year on the road and you’ve got to drag a dead weight, it becomes pretty vicious.’ Time and time again, Richards was forced to cover for a debilitated Jones at concerts. He bitterly remembers: ‘And I never go a thank-you from him, ever, for covering his arse. That’s when I had it in for Brian.’
Brian’s creative demise coincided with a general moment of systemic crisis for the Stones as a whole. December 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request was conceived under very trying circumstances, as Jagger, Richards, and Jones were all dealing with legal issues relating to various drug arrests. Late 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet saw Jones increasingly absent and only able to haphazardly contribute to the band.
During this period, Andrew Oldham, the Stones’ manager, walked out on the band, feeling the end was near. Keith’s recollection of the period is equally apocalyptic: ‘We’d run out of gas. I don’t think I realised it at the time, but that was a period where we could have foundered—a natural end to a hit-making band.’ The unstable multipolar system the Stones had evolved into was simply not working. The band had either to adapt or die.
The final straw that broke the camel’s back concerned Richards going off with Jones’s girlfriend of two years, the sexy, dangerous actress Anita Pallenberg. Mired in an increasingly abusive relationship, matters came to a head in March 1967 when Jagger, Richards, Jones and their entourage retreated to Morocco for a much-needed holiday. Following one particularly violent domestic incident with Jones, Pallenberg left the country with Richards, leaving Brian stranded at their Moroccan hotel. Richards later recounts: ‘It’s said I stole her. But my take on it is that I rescued her.’ Richards and Pallenberg were to reman a couple together for 12 years. Jones’s humiliation was complete.
Following this, Jones and Richards’s relationship was irretrievably shattered. As Keith puts it: ‘All of my plans for rebuilding my relationship with Brian were obviously going straight down the drain. In the condition he was in, there was no point in building anything with Brian.’
The Stones wanted to tour the United States in 1969, but Jones was in no fit condition to join them and was further constrained from doing so as a second drug arrest made getting an American work visa highly unlikely. Given the doldrums the band was then in, the Stones could little afford to cancel the tour if the band was to survive.
But the supposedly radical and rebellious Stones were at heart Burkean conservatives—desperately searching for stability—as they unsentimentally morphed once again into a different creative structure, this time an enduring bipolar duopoly that actually suited the real creative realities within the group. As Richards puts it: ‘You can’t work with a broken band. If there’s something wrong with the engine, an attempt has to be made to fix it.’ Bill Wyman has been equally incisive about Jones’s fall from grace, saying that he ‘just kind of wasted it and blew it all away.’
On June 8, 1969 Jagger, Richards, and Watts traveled down to Jones’s new house, Cotchford Farm, the former residence of author A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. Their purpose was anything but childlike. Jones admitted to the three that he was in no fit state to go on the road again. Unceremoniously, they told Jones he was out of the band. It was left to him to decide how to break the news to the public. Then his former bandmates left as abruptly as they had arrived, going on to a record of longevity that is unmatched by any other major band in the annals of rock music.
But for Jones there were to be no more tomorrows. Less than a month later, on July 3, 1969, Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool under mysterious circumstances. While there were certainly signs of foul play and one deathbed confession by a local builder years later that he had killed Jones, the autopsy of the time noted that his liver and heart were greatly enlarged, owing to massive drug and alcohol abuse. Keith’s philosophical view of what happened is perhaps best: Brian, he says, ‘was at the point of his life when there wasn’t any.’ Of his former bandmates, only Watts and Wyman attended Brian’s funeral.
While Jones’s demise and ultimate death were undoubtedly tragic, inadvertently these events gave the band he founded a second lease on life. For with Jones’s passing from the scene, the Stones completed their lengthy metamorphosis from a unipolar creative structure dominated by Brian, through the uneasy Jones-Jagger-Richards triumvirate, to the far more stable bipolar creative construct that has characterised the band for decades. As Keith forthrightly puts it, of his famously volatile relationship with Mick, ‘It was like two alphas fighting. Still is, quite honestly.’
But the bipolar partnership at the heart of the Rolling Stones was to endure, surviving Mick’s fling with Pallenberg (and Keith’s with Mick’s long-time girlfriend Marianne Faithfull), Keith’s recovery from drug addiction and further arrests, and these two gifted musicians growing personally part through the decades.
The stable systemic nature of the relationship, something every first-class political risk analyst must grasp, is the obvious explanation for the longevity of this highly unlikely partnership. With the necessary removal of Brian Jones, the band was able to adopt a power relationship that still mirrors its basic creative forces. The Stones, after all the chaos, managed to adopt a stable system allowing for their remarkable—and seemingly endless—run.