Brian Jones: The Making Of The Rolling Stones by Paul Trynka (BOOK REVIEW)

Music has always been a bitches brew of spontaneous seduction and pounding vibrations that often caused the soul of the listener to go mad with fever. It’s all over the blues and Jazz and especially in the realm of rock & roll. The obvious spell that Pan has weaved over his musical children has gone on for generations. And what the Rolling Stones did in the early 1960’s was no different. One could write a whole volume on the folklore alone that surrounds them. How the camaraderie between Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones sparked a darker shade to the Beatles mop top jolliness. Mothers were warned to keep their daughters locked up tight but the ones who could smell the primal fire in the music would not be contained to pink rooms with fluffy pillows. The Stones would win out and the Stones would rule.

But by 1969, the reality was that the band’s founding member Brian Jones was faltering within the group. He had to leave the Rolling Stones to inevitably save his life. But the cruel punchline of the joke was that he died anyway, at the bottom of a swimming pool in Christopher Robin’s sanctuary. This story has been told numerous times by people who knew him and people who didn’t. And now former MOJO Magazine editor Paul Trynka has added his voice to the musical gospels. With over 120 new interviews conducted for his book Brian Jones: The Making Of The Rolling Stones, which hit shelves on October 09, the story of Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones opens up just a little bit more. Spanning over three hundred pages, Trynka has done a few things quite right.

Most importantly, he has kept the focus tightly on Jones. Keeping Jagger, Richards and manager Andrew Loog Oldham basically on the outskirts of the story is the best thing Trynka has done. Some biographers want to say they are writing about the Stones’ founder but he ends up becoming lost amidst too much Glimmer Twins histories and histrionics. Jones becomes a footnote in his own life story. Much like he did in real life, it seems, although not all of it caused by his blues brothers. As Trynka writes in his prologue: “If ever a man was driven by his flaws, it was he.”

Jones’ early years encompass the bulk of the pages. His time in Cheltenham, England, is strongly represented, via new interviews with friends of Jones and his parents and local villagers with first-hand memories of the family. Tales of his distant mother and father who held steadfastly to old time ways would ultimately almost strangle the tow-headed boy. His savior being his staunch belief in the music that would be his venerable guiding light to leave the town of his birth, leave babies he had fathered and schoolmates who never cared a lick for him. His destiny belonged in a city that was beginning to pulsate.

Another thing that Trynka got right was his focus on how Jones died. Instead of whipping Stones fans into a frenzy over NEW EVIDENCE, he calmly lays the individual testimonies out and then tries to validate their truths. It is now a given that Jones didn’t die goofing around underwater before suddenly suffering an asthma attack. For years now, his death at the hands of someone, believed to be a man who was doing odd jobs around the house, has become fact. But was the man who supposedly gave a deathbed confession really the one who killed him? Trynka has made you think a bit on that one.

When one reads a musician’s biography, it often leads you back to the music. For Jones, the music was Elmore James and if you play some of the old Mississippi guitar player’s early recordings you will unmistakably hear Jones and the early Rolling Stones, how Jones integrated those haunting chords into the Keith Richards Chuck Berry infatuation. Berry was innocent compared to some of the old bluesmen who walked to the crossroads and felt the chill of a tap on the shoulder. That is something else that Trynka gets right: Jones’ connection to the music and what he tried to do with what he heard. In a new interview with engineer and producer Eddie Kramer, he reiterated this fact: “Much as I adore Keith, I must preface everything by saying that I always considered Brian the most gifted of the Stones, musically speaking.” It’s too bad not enough people said this to Jones while he was still alive. Or maybe they did and it just wasn’t enough.

The legendary shenanigans are also all in here: how Jones put together the Stones in London, his elbowing out of the loop after Jagger and Richards become roommates and songwriters, his paranoia following a drug bust, his volatile relationship with Anita Pallenberg who would leave him for Richards, his own slide into the dark bowels of drugs, his death in a swimming pool. Although Trynka tries at times to pin Jones down in the devil’s music juju, it is the humanness of the guitar player that struggles to the surface. He was raised by parents with a suffocatingly tight grip; he was rebellious one minute, a genuinely concerned friend the next; he had fears and paranoias like all of us. If he would have never become famous, he still would have been the stubborn yet sensitive British lad, just in a different town. Those deeply imbedded personality traits never really leave you. They just hide every now and then. And those human pockmarks are what eventually connect Jones to the earth we all walk on.

But overall, Trynka’s attempt to shed some light back on Jones and all the right things he did, all the musically innovative things that have made rock music better, are proven right. “Brian’s influence within the Stones,” wrote Trynka in Chapter 7, “would never be stronger than within ‘Paint It Black,’ a song whose melody he wrote, according to Bill [Wyman], a sound that would never have happened without him.”

In all, this is a must-read for Stones fans. If as the years continue to go by and Brian Jones becomes more and more a mere player in the tale he created, this book should bring him back into the position he belongs.