27

by Howard Sounes

  Amy broke up with her boyfriend before the album came out, and indeed Frank is a kiss-off to Chris. At first she was angry and upset about the split, smashing things, tossing nail varnish around her bedroom, then boxing up Chris’s belongings for him to collect, as in ‘Take the Box’. By the time she came to promote the album in 2003 she seemed to be over the relationship, though she mocked her ex in interviews, ridiculing him in Blues & Soul magazine as a ‘pussy man’. ‘He was seven years older than me and a right woman.’ What was most revealing about such comments was that Amy, whose father had left home when she was a child, craved a strong man in her life. Her choices would not always be good ones.

  The break-up with Chris aside, the prevailing tone of Frank is confident and sassy. In private Amy was not quite the person she presented as. She was prone to bouts of depression, even self-hatred. ‘I worry about her a lot,’ Juliette Ashby told the Observer in 2007, recalling nights when her former flatmate banged her head against her bedroom wall. Amy had also started to drink and smoke cannabis to excess, which didn’t help her moods. But she was not yet addled. She was still a healthy young woman, with a voluptuous figure, clear skin and bright eyes. Many people who worked with Amy at the start of her career recall how well she looked in 2003, and shake their heads at how she changed. As Gordon Williams says, ‘You look up and you see a girl you don’t even know anymore. How did that happen?’

  * Bill Wyman was married, and lived with his wife. Charlie Watts also lived elsewhere.

  * John Densmore writes in his memoir that Morrison told him he was classified Z, but there was no such classification. Selective Service records reveal the true classification.

  Four

  SUCCESS

  … the first wild wind of success and the delicious mist it brings with it [is] a short and precious time – for when the mist rises in a few weeks, or a few months, one finds that the very best is over.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  1

  The six principal members of the 27 Club took varying periods of time to find the formulae for popular success. When they did so, as they all did in their early twenties, success was sudden and, after a brief period of elation, proved overwhelming.

  The rise of the Rolling Stones was typically meteoric. In March 1963, with one record out, the Stones could still be seen playing small clubs in England. Within weeks the band were filling theatres, and within a year they were playing arenas in the United States. Such rapid success affected all five band members, but it seemed to turn Brian Jones’s head the most. ‘Brian was a man of excess,’ Keith Richards has said. ‘He got into excess really quickly. The fame affected all of us – and it still does, no doubt – but it seemed that there was an extreme personality change, which happened really quickly with Brian … At the beginning he had considered himself the senior member of the band. I think he was a very jealous guy, which affected everything in his life, to the point of self-destruction.’

  Initially the public also saw Brian as the leader of the Stones, as did the press and people the band worked with. It was partly the way he deported himself. ‘Brian looked like a pop star … with his extraordinary hair and his white trousers and his rather skinny body,’ says Gered Mankowitz, who photographed the Stones for several early album covers. ‘He just looked the business, whereas Mick and Keith still looked a little bit studenty. Brian [was also] vain. He fussed about his hair all the time. He was the only one who actually carried a bit of makeup.’ Brian’s contribution to the sound of the group was also vital at this early stage. Bill Wyman writes that he and Keith Richards agreed that Brian’s bottleneck guitar helped make their second single, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, a hit.

  Brian took full advantage of his good fortune. He moved to an expensive address in London’s Belgravia, bought outlandish clothes and a fancy car, and became a face on the club scene alongside the Beatles and the other pop luminaries of the day. ‘He thought he’d made it when he just got to London and had that big audience. He was quite happy,’ says his girlfriend Linda Lawrence. Most of the 27s enjoyed a similar golden period before they became weighed down with the burdens of fame. For Brian, as with others, this shining period was brief. ‘Money and power and fame took over,’ sighs Linda.

  That summer Linda gave birth to Brian’s fourth illegitimate child, a son. Although Brian took no more care of this boy than he had his previous children, Linda defends Brian within the context of the hippie era, going so far as to liken him to mythological Pan. ‘It’s only society that judges the way we [behave],’ she says. ‘But if you put it in mythology, and into a higher level of thinking, [Brian] was a very special being that came in and fertilised many women … He was Pan.’ Brian and Linda named their son Julian. Perhaps Brian had forgotten that he already had a son of that name, by Pat Andrews. In any event he all but ignored Julian II (as we might think of him), as he ignored Julian I (whom Pat chose to call by his middle name, Mark). Pat and Linda would have to go to law to compel Brian to help support them and the two Julians.

  Meanwhile Brian went on his merry way, dating other women, including the French actress and model Danièle Ciarlet, better known as Zouzou. Brian met Zouzou in Paris when the Stones were on tour and invited her to stay with him in London. He neglected to mention that he was living with Linda Lawrence. The actress found out about Brian’s domestic arrangements when she arrived on his doorstep. ‘Linda was there [and] they had a baby. Oh, my God! If he had told me he had a girlfriend, and all of this, I wouldn’t have come.’ Still, Zouzou became part of Brian’s complicated private life. Like his other lovers, she found him to be sensitive and deeply insecure. One of his many hang-ups was that he was short (barely able to peep over the steering wheel of his Humber Super Snipe, according to Keith Richards who says that Brian sat on a cushion to drive). So that Zouzou didn’t tower over Brian she wore flat shoes and walked with a slump when they were out together. There were other neuroses: ‘He had depression sometimes at night, because he thought he was ugly, and he wanted to have the bags [under his eyes] done. I had to put makeup [on him] every time we went out. I cut his hair – one millimetre by one millimetre.’ She laughs affectionately. ‘I knew it was crazy.’

  During a tour of the United States in 1964 Brian complained of feeling unwell, checked into hospital and missed four concerts. By necessity Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took on more and more responsibility. A key element in their ultimate take-over of the band was that they also started to write songs. Previously the Stones had recorded covers of songs by other artists, including Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. Seeing how much money Lennon and McCartney earned as songwriters, as well as performers, Andrew Loog Oldham urged the Stones to write original material. While he had good ideas, Brian didn’t have the inclination or talent to write songs. But Mick and Keith were willing to try their hand. Their first real success was with ‘As Tears Go By’, which became a hit for Marianne Faithfull, a protégé of Loog Oldham who became Mick’s girlfriend. Then they wrote ‘The Last Time’, which the Stones took to number one in the spring of 1965.

  Brian began to feel ‘redundant and underappreciated’, says Loog Oldham, who urged Mick and Keith to write more hits. Brian mocked their lyrics as ‘moon and June’ piffle, further estranging himself from his colleagues. Indeed, Brian increasingly seemed like the odd man out in the band. Some of his contemporaries sympathised. ‘I found [Brian] to be the most musical of all of them,’ says Zoot Money, leader of the Big Roll Band. ‘In a way, I thought it was the wrong band for him to be in.’ Now that he was perceived as being weak, and uncongenial, Brian was mercilessly teased and mocked by Mick and Keith. They made fun of his stature, his pomposity and pretensions. He irritated Keith in particular for not thanking him when Keith covered for him. ‘Mick and I had gotten incredibly nasty to Brian when he became a joke, when he effectively gave up his position in the band,’ Keith Richards writes in his autobiography. Isolated and ridiculed, losing status and confidence, Brian becam
e paranoid. At the same time he was drinking, he was using amphetamines, and he became one of the first British rock stars to use LSD heavily, none of which helped his mental health.

  As we have seen, Linda Lawrence maintains that Brian had an underlying personality disorder in that he was bipolar. Unhappy at work, and under the influence of drugs, he became increasingly volatile and was often violent, throwing a fit at a press conference in the United States when a journalist asked him a question he didn’t like. ‘He was threatening to use a glass on the guy and had to be restrained,’ says Gered Mankowitz. ‘Suddenly one was aware of this extremely violent side to him.’ Brian also turned his violence on himself.

  Freud wrote that the suicidal person initially wants to kill others. When thwarted, they turn their rage inward. Many of the 27s exhibited such anger (Kurt Cobain developing a murderous rage against one unfortunate journalist) before ultimately destroying themselves. As his personality crumbled, Brian threatened suicide, telling friends that he wanted to cut his wrists, drown himself in the Thames, or throw himself from a hotel window. It has been claimed in one history of the band, by Stephen Davis, that Brian actually cut his wrist in 1964 to punish Mick and Keith for ignoring him. But it was a superficial cut, a suicidal gesture rather than a serious attempt to end it all, and indeed Brian’s suicidal talk at this point seems to have been intended to gain attention. If he was serious, he could have done away with himself easily enough.

  The stoic philosopher Seneca argued that death can always be achieved, by a variety of means, if one is determined. ‘In whatever direction you may turn your eye, there lies the means to end your woes,’ he wrote. ‘See you that precipice? Down that is the way to liberty. See you that sea, that river, that well? There sits liberty – at the bottom. See you that tree, stunted, blighted and barren? Yet from its branches hangs liberty … Do you ask what is the highway to liberty? Any vein in your body!’ When his problems became insurmountable, Seneca was true to his philosophy and dispatched himself by opening his veins. He found that this was not as easy as he had supposed, but die he did. Somebody like Brian, who is forever threatening suicide – an alarming cry that soon becomes tiresome – may never have the courage to do it. Alternatively, he may be giving utterance to where he may end up and, as noted in the Prologue, suicide can be achieved by negative as well as positive action. By abusing his body with drugs Brian’s life had already started to take on the shape of what Al Alvarez described in his insightful book on suicide as the ‘gradual, chronic suicide of drug addiction’.

  Brian’s behaviour continued to deteriorate. He walked out on the Stones for three days during a tour of North America in the spring of 1965, and when the band got to Florida in May, he beat up a girlfriend in his motel room. ‘[Apparently] Brian was frequently impotent as a result of drugs,’ says Gered Mankowitz, who travelled with the Stones at the time. ‘When I say frequently impotent what I mean is he was too stoned to get it up. I think that became a big problem, and whether he took that out on women, I don’t know.’ Marianne Faithfull adds corroboration. In her memoir, Faithfull, she describes a fumble with Brian at his London flat when they were high. Brian got as far as groping her after which his interest ‘fizzled out’. She writes: ‘He was a wonderfully feeble guy, quite incapable of sex.’ That Brian had fathered so many children demonstrates that this was not always the case.

  Still, Brian retained an attraction. On tour in Germany he met a model named Anita Pallenberg and cried on her shoulder about how mean the Stones were being to him. Pallenberg promptly moved into his London apartment, which put paid to Linda Lawrence. ‘I was very upset about it,’ says Linda, who had considered Anita a friend. This time Brian was in love. Anita was a cultured, statuesque beauty of aristocratic heritage, whose blonde good looks complemented his own. He was proud of having a partner whom his friends admired and were nervous of, for Anita exuded danger. Even Mick Jagger seemed frightened of her. This was also a love affair marked by violence. As we have seen, Brian had a history of hitting women. Anita apparently hit back. Their rough-house lovemaking became notorious, as Stones employee Ron Schneider recalls: ‘When he was with Anita, there would be many a time that the hotel would call me and say, “Mr Schneider, could you help us, please? The room that Mr Jones is in, the door’s been locked overnight, and all day, and all we hear is screaming and fighting …”’

  By now Brian had effectively lost the leadership of the Stones to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who had come into their own as songwriters with compositions including ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, number one in May 1965. At the end of the year the band went into the RCA studios in Hollywood to record the Aftermath album, every track of which was by Jagger-Richards. Brian’s contribution can still be heard – playing sitar on ‘Paint it, Black’ for example – but he was marginalised. Andrew Loog Oldham says that Brian was absent for days on end during the sessions, and when he did show up he was so stoned that he just about managed to plug in his guitar before collapsing on the floor. The instrument hummed uselessly in his hands until Loog Oldham withdrew the lead.

  2

  Jimi Hendrix arrived in England on 24 September 1966, stopping off at the West London home of Zoot Money to borrow a guitar on his way into town from the airport. Jimi jammed that night at the Scotch of St James, one of London’s trendy new nightclubs, then went back to his hotel with a woman he met at the club, Kathy Etchingham, who became his steady English girlfriend. It was a busy first day.

  Over the following weeks Jimi played in front of the élite of British pop at several London clubs, impressing everybody who heard and saw him, and making important new friends, including Brian Jones. With their shared love of the blues, the two guitarists became close over the following months, as Jimi’s career burgeoned and Brian’s wilted. They were headed in opposite directions, yet both would be dead within four years.

  Although he took longer to get his break than the Stones, and indeed the other principal 27s, Hendrix’s career took off like a rocket once he came to England. He went from obscurity to being one of the biggest acts in popular music – the first black rock star – in a few months, creating all the amazing music he is known for between his arrival in London in September 1966 and his death in September 1970. Between those dates Hendrix ‘zoomed off in a spaceship round the world’, as Zoot Money says. The metaphor is apt. Hendrix was a science-fiction fan who incorporated space imagery in his work at the time of the race to the moon.

  The Jimi Hendrix Experience was assembled quickly in London with the recruitment of two British sidemen: chirpy former child actor John ‘Mitch’ Mitchell on drums, and the lugubrious Noel Redding on bass. The trio’s first release was an elemental electric blues, ‘Hey Joe’, just before Christmas 1966. Gered Mankowitz took the publicity photos at his studio next to the Scotch of St James. He recalls how happy Jimi was on the brink of success, despite his intense stare in the photographs. ‘He wasn’t a hit yet. But he was clearly at a fantastic moment in his life and he was really relishing it, so he was happy and everything was clicking. It was all falling into place. And he was excited, and it seemed like an extremely positive, good energy, and a really great moment to have been with him.’ Sadly, the happiness did not last. ‘His decline was terribly rapid, when you think about it. I mean, [four] years after my session he was dead!’

  Around this time Mankowitz also photographed the Rolling Stones for their Between the Buttons album, taking the cover picture on Primrose Hill, where Amy Winehouse would spend carefree summer days in the 21st century. The Stones shoot took place in the winter of 1966 at a time when Brian was increasingly unhappy. Wrapped up in a fur coat like a querulous old woman, he sulked throughout, which was typical of his disobliging behaviour nowadays. ‘He had a big brown fur coat and it was very, very cold and he wrapped himself up in this coat and sort of hid in the collar and turned his back to the camera and started reading the newspaper,’ recalls Mankowitz. ‘I said to Andrew [Loog Oldham] that I was worried th
at Brian was fucking up the session.’

  It was not long after this that the authorities began to create significant problems for the Stones, with the police conducting a dramatic drugs raid on the country home of Keith Richards in February 1967, resulting in charges against Keith, Mick Jagger and their friend Robert Fraser. In the aftermath of this bust, while awaiting trial, Keith decided to go on a road trip to Morocco with Brian and Anita.

  They travelled in Keith’s Bentley, chauffeured by Stones employee Tom Keylock. On the drive south through France, Brian complained of feeling unwell and checked into hospital near Toulouse. Keith and Anita continued without him to Spain. ‘In the back of the Bentley, somewhere between Barcelona and Valencia, Anita and I looked at each other [and] the next thing I know she’s giving me a blow job,’ Richards writes in his autobiography, Life. Keith and Anita slept together that night, then continued to Tangier where the affair intensified. Richards found himself falling in love with Anita, but he worried about the effect this would have on Brian and the band. Anita also seemed concerned. She flew back to France to pick Brian up, taking him to London for medical tests, before they both flew on to Morocco to rendezvous with Keith, Mick Jagger and other friends in Marrakesh.