Prince Stash De Rola Shares Stories Of Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, Syd Barrett & Talks About New Film ‘Rolling Stone: Life & Death Of Brian Jones’

Brian Jones was many things. He was the founder and early leader of the Rolling Stones. He was a master musical craftsman, one who could pick up an instrument new to his hands and be playing it within hours. He was a pin-up boy for the youth of Britain whose hormones were raging to a new sound, a mixture of rock and blues. And following his death on July 3, 1969, at age twenty-seven, he grew into a legend. But Jones could also be a terror, mocking friends and foes, a wicked sense of humor that cut to the soul of those whose constitution was weaker than his own. He was loved and he was despised. But he was always memorable.

The death of Brian Jones has been shrouded in mystery since the night of his passing at his home, Cotchford Farm, in Sussex, England. Many articles and books have been written about it over the last fifty years, trying to make stick one theory or the other, of why this musician died when he did. And now director Danny Garcia has added his two-cents to the brew with Rolling Stone: Life & Death Of Brian Jones. A two hour documentary that had a limited run in select theatres earlier this year, it is now available on DVD, which also contains bonus behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes and a special extended chat with journalist Scott Jones who goes into more detail about the police files that have been sealed to the public. 

What Garcia, who also made the film Looking For Johnny about the late Johnny Thunders, is doing is once again trying to get you to think about that night in 1969. The first half of the film builds a picture of who Brian Jones really was, tracing his youthful years back in Cheltenham to his early days in London. Although no actual Rolling Stones talk in the film, except for a few voice-overs from the late Ian “Stu” Stewart culled from older interviews, the rest of the participants include friend Prince Stash, photographers Gered Mankowitz and Terry O’Neill, tour manager Sam Cutler, former girlfriend ZouZou, the Pretty Things singer Phil May, who recently passed away in May, music writers and several others somehow connected to Jones and the Stones. It makes for an interesting watch as it keeps the spotlight firmly on Jones – not Jagger, not Richards – as it attempts to get under Jones’ many layers as a person and as an artist, his decline as both, and his death as murder. It is up to the viewer, and Stones fan, to believe him or not.

Prince Stanislaus Klossowski De Rola, Baron De Watteville, was with Jones the night of his first police bust in May of 1967. They had become friends after meeting in Paris when Stash was playing in Vince Taylor’s band and they were on the same bill as the Stones. Stash, a member of the aristocracy, the son of painter Balthus, was known as quite the stylish dandy in the sixties. An actor, musician, partier, friend of everyone from Syd Barrett to Muddy Waters, Stash is committed to keeping his friend’s memory and contributions to rock & roll alive. Both in the documentary and in our interview, Stash speaks honestly about Jones while keeping his good and bad qualities in perspective of the times and Jones’ own personal constitution. He treasured their friendship and it seems to sadden him that he had not checked in on Jones once Jones moved to the country near the end of 1968.

I spoke with Prince Stash recently about the new documentary, his friendship with Jones and his own very interesting life.

I was looking at your Facebook page and you have a picture of Kristin Diable on there. She is a wonderful singer from down this way in New Orleans.

Oh yes. Her mother was a very good friend of mine and she sort of wrote to me when I was in Italy and she turned out to be my friend’s daughter. So I invited her to the castle and she came with her girlfriend and they stayed a couple of days. She is extremely talented and we discussed production and things like that, songs. She sent me lovely records and things but I haven’t seen her since, unfortunately, but she’s wonderfully talented.

In my opinion, there are two major talents that are unheralded in this country – there’s lots more but one is Kristin and the other one is Chris Pierce. They’re not household names as they ought to be but Chris Pierce, you know, he grew up with Ben Harper, their parents were friends, and he’s a major, major talent. And Ben agrees with me on that. Check him out. He is one of the most extraordinary performers and singers we’ve ever seen. We met him when Mac [Ian McLagan] from the Faces, who is now long gone, was performing in California and I was with members of a band called The International Swingers, a sort of supergroup, and we all sort of gaped at Chris. I met him and he gave me his first album, which was marvelous. So those are the people that are brilliant, wonderful young people.

Oh and Julian, Brian’s son, has a son called Joolz Jones who is a wonderful player. You should do something about him. Donovan took him under his wing and produced this marvelous tribute to Brian Jones. They did all these videos and all that and he is an amazing player. He is a very charming young man as well and extremely talented and he picked that up from his grandfather. Julian, himself, does all sorts of things. I see quite a bit of Donovan and Linda Lawrence, Donovan’s wife. He is an old, old friend of mine and she was Brian’s girlfriend in the early sixties and had Julian.

What are your earliest memories of loving music?

Oh my God, the discovery of Elvis was the revelation to me. I just loved Elvis Presley and through Elvis I listened to a lot of black music. I grew up in Europe so it was sort of an adventure. You had to discover things. And Chuck Berry was a huge revelation when I was a bit older. You know, I had a tutor in Devonshire, a private tutor, and I used to ride my horse in the snow to go to see some young girls. They came from a rich family and they had the only television around and I used to go to their houses in England every Saturday to watch a show called Six Five Special, which was a rock & roll show.

When did you get into playing music yourself?

The thing is, I was discovered by Luchino Visconti and was an actor still in my teens and I went with [director Federico] Fellini to the thirteenth Cannes Film Festival when La Dolce Vita won. And I was in Paris and I was the assistant of a famous director called Marc Allegret, who I was also his actor in a film called La Demon De Minuit. Then I went to America for the first time in the fall of 1962. When I returned at the end of 1963, I had a very close friend who was the rock & roll singer Vince Taylor. Now Vince Taylor, you might not be familiar with his name but he is the man who wrote “Brand New Cadillac” that The Clash covered on London Calling and Vince Taylor is also famous for being the inspiration for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. He was very sexy, black leather rocker, who was an amazing phenomenon and he took continental Europe by storm. He was an American-raised Englishman. I mean, he was more Californian than English and when he went back to England as a young performer, he was on early rock & roll shows and was indeed somebody that the Stones followed as well when they were just barely starting out. So this leads us into how I came back from America looking for something interesting to do in film or theatre and I was in Paris and Vince said, “You’ve always loved the music, why don’t you join my band.” So that’s how I joined the band. 

When did you meet Brian Jones?

Well, I started out in 1964 and then we toured Europe and we went to Spain and in Spain we got the word we were to play sort of against the Rolling Stones. Not what is commonly termed opening up for the Stones. That’s not what we did. It was a series of shows we were to play with them the Easter weekend of 1965 and there were at least ten acts on the bill playing one or two songs. There was even a magician. It was a very diverse type show. But we would come on and play our entire set, which was extremely well-received by the hordes of young female fans who’d followed the Stones from Britain. This was in Paris. Then there would be an intermission and then the Stones came on. It was sort of a battle of the bands, if you will. 

We were very successful in sort of seducing their girl fans and they stood stone-faced in the wings watching what we were doing. They weren’t in their dressing room. When we came off the stage, covered in sweat and very, very successfully went down extremely well, Mick said to Vince Taylor, “Have you been on?” very tartly and Vince walked right past him and said, “No, we’ve been rehearsing.” 

In contrast, Brian Jones and I looked at each other in the eyes and he came forward and shook my hand and we were friends for life and that’s how we began and I said, “I’m taking you out.” Strangely enough, I was with Anita Pallenberg that night, one of my many girlfriends, a casual girlfriend and especially very good friend, and we were together that whole night with a whole bunch of people and we went to all the famous clubs and then ended up at the future filmmaker Donald Cammell and his girlfriend Deborah Dixon’s apartment. Then at the end of the night, Brian, who was with another girlfriend, Zouzou, went back to the Stones hotel at Boulevard des Capucines and there were these young English girls, sleeping on the pavement on newspapers in the hopes of catching Brian coming home. So these girls staggered up as we staggered in turn out of the car in a frightful state. These girls unleashed a barrage of instamatics and I always tell people, I wish any of those pictures would surface, we’ve never seen any of those fan pictures, which would have been fun to see from that very first night.

And so it went, you know. We were on a different arc of this. They were on tour and we were several days together and we parted extremely good friends. Then they went on to whatever they were doing and we went to do a lot of things and then went to America ourselves and I went to record in Scandinavia for the fall of 1965 and by then the Stones had done “Satisfaction” and were going from strength to strength. When at the time we did the Olympia in Paris, “Satisfaction” hadn’t been issued yet. So it was a huge turning point in their career.

Why do you think you clicked so well with Brian?

I don’t know. We were both sort of the best-looking guys in our bands. We both were resolutely arrogant and defying convention and determined not to survive to reach twenty-five. I’m going to be seventy-eight. We bragged we wouldn’t reach twenty-five (laughs). We were totally reckless and womanizers, etc, you know; just dangerous people and we just loved each other.

Do you think that everything you just told me about you and Brian, and probably the Rolling Stones in general, that’s what frightened the older generation so much?

Yeah, no doubt. It’s hard to believe, especially in the twenty-first century. But we just had long hair and I had a gold earring in my left ear and that sort of provoked absolute outrage. People wanted to lynch you. People in 1965 were saying things like, you heard people at Customs in Switzerland, for instance, an officer in Customs department saying in an absolute fit of extraordinary rage, just unwarranted rage, “If my son looked like that, I’d kill him with my own hands.” It was that kind of thing. You stepped out onto the street and the street would go freeze-frame on you. Now, everybody can have hair of any length or any color or any type of piercing. Unthinkable in the mid-sixties. It would provoke, especially in America, it provoked extreme outrage everywhere. In America, it even provoked physical assault. It was an anti-establishment stance. The man resented it because it attracted the girls to some extent. The young girls thought it was very sexy and all that but it troubled them. We had a lot of success with the girls and they didn’t like that at all.

Do you think that was the main reason they started going after you with the arrests?

The arrests were a deliberate campaign by the establishment. It’s been established clearly by people who were in the know that it was a deliberate campaign to decapitate the Rolling Stones, who were considered a menace to society. This extraordinary arrest, which was really on completely trumped up charges, deliberately timed to coincide with Mick and Keith’s trial, which was front page news that day, and they leaked it to the press that we would be arrested as well. You see, if they could get Brian Jones out of the way, that was three of the Rolling Stones out and the band would disappear. This was the goal that they were pursuing. It actually backfired but in the process it cost Brian his life.

There are pictures of you and Brian leaving court and you’re actually laughing

Oh, we were laughing the first day. The whole thing was so farcical from the way this whole bust happened. They only found what they’d planted there, it turned out, and the rest was we were still charged with possession of cocaine and methedrine. But the methedrine was useless, couldn’t have been used by the most desperate junkie; even the cocaine was non-existent. Holding a small vile to the light you saw a few crystals. The police even said, “Well, we’re not going to charge you with it. Must be one-thousandth of a grain.” It was ridiculous and still we were charged with it initially before they dropped it. I mean, for it’s shock value in the paper, “Cocaine Found!” their headline screamed.

The whole thing was abominable and we laughed the first day we appeared in court because it was a one minute thing and they read and they remanded that they needed analysis and so on and so forth. By the time we came out, there must have been over a hundred girls and an old woman dancing around making all kinds of funny faces. That’s why we laughed. The whole thing had been so farcical.

We laughed less on the second court appearance, I can tell you. They had the police lie about what had gone on and construct a script of incredible fabrication and so on, which was very worrying. And that’s how Brian began to slowly deteriorate. He was very oversensitive and he was so paranoid about everything and some idiots that we knew introduced him to mandrax, which is a horrid drug, especially if you drank with it. So he got himself into a frightful state and it was awful to witness. And that sort of led to a gradual alienation. He became unreliable, erratic Brian, sadly. But that was over the course of quite a while. In those months followed, we didn’t go up to trial until the 30th of October, and in the intervening months, he had a precipitous decline that was absolutely heartbreaking.

Then by October, they dropped the charges against me when I came in and I thought, well, we’ve won the case. And Brian had been so brainwashed by his useless legal team, who were in fact all these establishment type people who considered us guilty in any case. Our lifestyle sort of designated us to be sort of sacrificial lambs to their slaughter. My own attorney said to me, and I’m quoting only to give you a sense of how awful the Stones were considered to be, my attorney said, “You Sir,” – this is a class thing cause I’m a aristocrat – “You Sir, are a gentleman. What on earth are you doing with those chaps!” And he spit the word chaps as something ghastly, despicable, cockroaches. That’s the way they looked upon them. It was deplorable to them that me, because of my titles and all that, should be in their company.

But they persuaded Brian to plead guilty, to throw contrition and all that kind of thing. And poor Brian, because he refused to listen to me, and in maintaining his guilty plea, he sealed his fate, really. He’d never be able to get a working visa again. He didn’t realize, or he didn’t think it through, that it would be the end of his career on the international scene. 

You see, I saw this coming to some extent when Brian and I couldn’t come back to the apartment at Courtfield Road, where I had been staying. We went to the Hilton Hotel where Allen Klein was in residence. In fact, when we arrived that day of the bust, there had been a television crew filming us, and in fact you’ll see the film in the documentary, of my walking to the police car and being taken away to the Chelsea Police Station. It was so highly publicized that at least thirty reporters had called up beforehand. We totally didn’t believe it, we thought it was too gross a plot to be really happening. When the police did come, it took us by complete surprise because it seemed so fanciful and so bizarre. There was a completely farcical element to the whole thing. There were dozens of photographers outside the police station, to the point that the police themselves suggested that we have the Rolls brought and the chauffer come forward to the front court and while the press milled around it, we slipped out the back and jumped into a black cab and went to the Hilton Hotel. When we got to Allen Klein’s penthouse suite at the top of the London Hilton, we saw as we entered the suite there were quite a few people there. We saw ourselves on the overhead TV on the 6:00 news.

So Allen had already taken over management? Andrew Loog Oldham wasn’t a factor in it anymore?

No, no, Andrew was no longer involved. Allen Klein was very helpful on that occasion. In fact, the Hilton when we had to have rooms there, Allen Klein had to make a frightful scene saying that he spent, you know, all this money on a yearly basis and that he would never set foot in a Hilton Hotel again unless they gave us rooms and they caved in and they did give us rooms. So Brian and I shared the room at the Hilton and Paul McCartney rang and I thought he was calling for Brian. I said to him, “Brian’s out.” And he said, “I’m not calling Brian, I’m calling you and I wanted to know how you are.” And he said, “Listen, pack your stuff, my chauffer is on the way to pick you up and you’re coming to stay at my house. And if they want to bust you again, they’ll have to arrest me as well.” So The Beatles rallied around me and I had that support group, amazingly in every way, financially and otherwise, because I was cut off from being able to report to my job. I was supposed to be in this film and so on and so forth. It was a complete disaster, this arrest. They took my passport, I couldn’t go anywhere and my plans were completely disrupted. So this wonderful generosity of Paul McCartney saved a lot of trouble. 

But then Brian, you see, he would come to see me at Paul’s house and he was undermined in every way. You see, Paul McCartney would drill into me, “You’ve got to resist, look at these people, look at those ridiculous charges, the whole thing is fight, fight, fight.” Brian would on the contrary say, “They’re too strong for us,” and have this attitude, this defeatist attitude was deplorable.

What do you think was Brian’s greatest gift as a musician?

He had an absolute genius and the ability to figure out any given instrument in no time at all. Not only that, he could pick up any of these random instruments without knowing how to play but figure out how to effectively play them and do something extraordinary with them. For instance, he hadn’t played the sitar very long but he mastered it enough to be extremely effective in the manner of a master could have done, to be that effective on a pop song like “Paint It Black.” His use of instrumentation was extraordinary and he was an absolute genius in the studio.

Do you have a favorite memory of watching him in the studio creating something?

Yes, I watched him do the record of “Ruby Tuesday” and I was very impressed. I went up to him and he said, “I’m doing it again,” and I said, “What?” He said, “Yes, it was a quarter of a tone off.” That was Brian. He was a great perfectionist and that’s the reason that perfectionism took it’s toll. People wondered why he didn’t write songs. Well, he couldn’t write songs because he was too much of a perfectionist. He didn’t have the knack for them and he didn’t stick with it. You have to hone your skills and maybe it comes after a while but he was too insecure to even propose things to the others. It’s like when somebody is doing well and you’re not and you stay in the same field, you get a bit discouraged and that was what happened to Brian in that sense. He was discouraged and he didn’t pursue it. He was content to rest on his well-earned laurels, to do what he did best, which was to whip things not only into shape but to make the ordinary extraordinary. He was extremely intelligent.

You also knew Syd Barrett. Do you think him and Brian were of similar souls?

No, completely different people, different talents. You see, Syd wrote. The difference between Brian and Syd was that Brian couldn’t have been on his own, a solo artist, because he didn’t sing and he didn’t write like that; whereas Syd was the lead guitarist and the singer in Pink Floyd. Those were his songs on the first album nearly, the early hits. He was the undeniable leader of Pink Floyd in the sense that he was its principal force. It’s a miracle that they survived his demise as a musician; not as a man, a human being, because he lived on. I was there when he flipped out. In fact, we were on acid together and there was this very strange thing that happened where he lost himself in this and it’s a long story. But it was a very strange night and he never was the same again.

Can you tell us how you became involved with the new documentary?

They called me up and said, “Would you do an interview?” and I said yes. There was time before he actually got the wherewithals and so on, because that production had the merit of somehow managing to pull it off when they had virtually, very little money, really. That’s why they couldn’t license all these things and so on. The first cut initially, I found the first cut quite objectionable, to tell you the truth, and much to Danny Garcia’s credit, he took note of my concerns and he asked me to put everything that I saw as being wrong in writing and he dealt with it. And he improved it considerably within reason because he couldn’t do everything. He couldn’t get the original music.

Are you happy with the film now?

I’m happier. I mean, there is a lot of opinions, you know, given by people who just didn’t know the subject and some of these opinions were outrageous initially and some of the more outrageous and erroneous statements have been excised. So in that sense, I’m happy. Obviously I can’t be totally happy with something that emphasizes this sordid affair of the death of Brian Jones as opposed to the extraordinary, creative force of the man. They couldn’t show all the clips of and demonstrate visually how brilliant Brian was, musically speaking, and the years that preceded. Brian was, being such an extraordinary artist, he also had ups and downs. There were moments when he was discouraged and he wasn’t the same physical composition as the others and he tended to have a harder time with it and also get psychologically discouraged in areas of great stress. There is a tendency to always paint him as some sort of pathetic victim, which he definitely was not.

What do you know of Brian and the blues?

There is a slight confusion. Brian wasn’t just a blues guy like those dreadful English players, those real purist type of people. They were dreadful, just no good at all, a lot of them, with the possible exception of John Mayall. I mean, people like Alexis Korner were unlistenable to; Long John Baldry, please, I mean, all these white boys couldn’t play to save their lives in actual fact. They were just a ghastly imitation. Whereas the Rolling Stones emphasized R&B and Brian even wrote about it, “What we do is rhythm and blues.” He tried to emphasize the differences in what they did and the great thing about Brian and the Rolling Stones is that they really often were able to even improve on the originals; or at least, you know, do something truly extraordinary with it. Their version of “Little Red Rooster,” which was the first quote-unquote blues record to ever be at number one in England, was because of their treatment of it. It wasn’t copying moves of other African-American performers. They did it their way in a brilliant way. They earned the respect of people. 

I was friends with Muddy Waters, whom I met at Keith’s house, at Redlands, and Muddy Waters was full of praise for the Rolling Stones. And a lot of people were. Otis Redding, in fact, covered “Satisfaction.” They gave back. Brian and the Stones forced a white television show to have Howlin’ Wolf on it, otherwise they wouldn’t go on. So they managed to get recognition for these people who were very sorely neglected in their own country. Even the white boys in America didn’t know that this was original music from their own land. They were very respectful but their treatment on all these early albums, before they started to be able to do their own material, which of course was a stroke of genius on Andrew Oldham’s part to force them first to do it, which they didn’t think they could, to write songs, and then they got better at it and then they found they had a knack for it. They came out with some amazing original songs. And Brian was like the architect of all that, of organizing all this material and, as I repeat, making something that would have been good into absolute excellence. That was his role and believe me, it was not overlooked and not neglected.

Back in the day you were considered to be a very fashionable young man. Was it fun going to all these shops and looking for all these different clothes to wear?

It was tremendous fun. The idea was that you didn’t want to go to the same, where the tourists, the people who thought of swinging London and used the Time magazine map to navigate things, we despised all these people and we’d rather be caught dead rather than in the rubbish that Carnaby Street produced. Rave Magazine did a piece on me at the time and I said, I don’t want to wear anything that somebody else can get a hold of. That’s why we looked for more and more unique type of things – girls clothes that could be fashioned into tunics and that sort of thing – trying to do extraordinary things. We got into oriental garb, wearing more and more eccentric stuff. I used to wear Syrian wedding dresses and things like that (laughs).

Do you still have any of those clothes?

All these moth-eaten rags, torn up things you couldn’t even have given it to charity, Christie’s and things like that sort of lapped it all up and you got absolutely enormous amounts of money for all this out-worn junk (laughs).  I got rid of all that stuff, or most of it. Over the years I found old suitcases in storage, at my father’s house and in attics and they were full of all this rubbish and I sold a lot of it, including the kangaroo coat that Brian wears on Between The Buttons. No, hold on a second, the kangaroo coat, unfortunately, my mother gave it to the Salvation Army in my absence. I was horrified. 

I understand that you used to go to Slash’s mother’s shop

Oh yeah, Ola. It was so funny because my first wife and I went to a show in Los Angeles where we found ourselves behind Slash. So I said, “Oh, you’re Ola’s boy,” and he sort of looked at me and said, “Yeah, you know her?” And I said, “Yeah, I am Stash” and then he became this little boy again and said, “You remember me?” He was this little boy running around. So as a result of us meeting at this David Bowie concert, Nine Inch Nails and so on, Ola called me in Malibu and we had a long conversation.

What do you remember about her shop? 

They had a lot of interesting things. It was one of the many shops we went to. It was on the King’s Road. We called it scoring chicks’ clothes.

I understand you have a connection to Lord Byron. Is that correct?

My father used to sort of cherish a kind of very tenuous connection to Lord Byron via Byron’s mother’s family. We ended up just at the end of the war, I think it was 1946, we ended up living at Villa Diodati and it was the house which Byron had rented in 1816 and where they had that famous competition of horror stories with Shelley and Byron and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. That was conceived at Villa Diodati and Villa Diodati when we lived there still had fabrics on the wall that had been selected during Byron’s occupancy, so that had seen the poet himself. 

Since your father was a famous painter, did you grow up going to a lot of museums and enjoying that or did your appreciation of art come later?

Well, we were surrounded by fine art growing up in all these marvelous houses and so on and obviously these visual foundations were there. But there was also at one of the great mansions we lived in there was a lot of music, even Classical music. But I was very early on attracted to Jazz and blues and so on and I would have played keyboards at a very early age but they wanted to force you into a formal training and even in the 1940’s when you were a little child they were so mean, they would hit you on the fingers or have you writing the notes. It was totally wrong approach. It put me off for many, many years. 

I will tell you one thing, the one person I credit for my being able to play today is Ike Turner. I used to complain to Ike and Ike said, “You’ve got to make it your own,” he said. “Drop all that stuff and just make it your own.” And Ike made me play and I got my own sound and everything, playing guitar. And then keyboards came as a result of Ike visiting my Malibu house where there’s a 19th century piano that could never be tuned and so old and broken and everything. Ike said, “I can fix it but in the meantime I can play it too.” And he started playing this piano absolutely sensational, because that’s how they grew up, playing on any instrument, a found instrument on the street or in the dump or somewhere. Ike could play anything and was such a superb musician and a very much-maligned human being, because when he came out of jail they gave him this money and said but you can’t say anything about this film and that was an ironclad contract and that’s the What’s Love Got To Do With It film and of course it depicted Ike in an atrocious light. And Ike, whom I was very close to, said, “I’m not saying I was any kind of saint, far from it, but this exaggeration and this monster they depict me as is completely untrue.”

How do you occupy your time nowadays?

In many different ways. Occasionally I pull out something that is very in high demand, which is my finishing a book, a sort of reflections book on all these many, many years spent on this Earth. Then I play a lot of music. I’ve been recording, I’ve been doing an album in Italy because in the castle there is a room dedicated with an instrument that can play in 4/15 tuning and I improvise in the Baroque mode sort of theory and I played it very successfully. I played a brief bit of it at the Brian Jones concert last summer, which drew a lot of bands to play, that Donovan was headlining in England. Have you heard of Kenney Jones’ polo grounds? Kenney Jones [former Who drummer] has these polo grounds and he has a concert every year and in this case it was dedicated to the memory of Brian and they called it the Golden Stone Concert. I was fortunate enough to be on with Donovan and Donovan introduced me and I played a little bit between, which was very unexpected to get a good reception for playing that kind of music, you know, at a rock concert.

What is something Brian said to you that still sticks with you today?

He said so many things. I can’t quote you a single thing. I’m not like somebody who had one conversation with him. We spent a lot of time together, we lived in the same place for an extended period, etc, so we had many very deep conversations. We worked together using words and avant garde music, we did a proto rap sort of thing. So there were many, many wonderful things. He was always so adventurous and then of course he blamed himself for the Anita Pallenberg fiasco in Morocco, he found himself at fault. If he hadn’t reacted as he did. Now, people try to paint that he was completely betrayed and if he had been completely betrayed as they think, he would never have spoken to any of them again, you know. It was just a very incestuous situation. 

But there are people who have read certain things and they’ve pieced together a narrative which they are like people who has gotten a hold of a bone. They grab it and they stick to it and they insist and if you try and tell them something, they will insult you in the most unbelievable manner. Some of these people weren’t even born when Brian Jones died. There’s especially some very, very aggressive ladies who try to maintain that Brian was murdered because he owned the name and therefore he had to be done away with because Mick and Keith and blah blah blah; that they went on having stolen everything from him and the narrative is so completely wrong and so insulting to his memory and to everything he would have liked. You know, he was very proud of his band despite the fact that he had to leave and everything and that they went on and continued and they still tour. It’s wonderful, because Brian’s name lives on and on. Oddly enough, it’s because they endure that he endures. So many wonderful musicians are forgotten by today’s youth. They died and people don’t even know who they are. People like Chris Wood from Traffic. Ask people on the street and they won’t know who that was. But Brian has this sort of James Dean mystique going for him. Thank heavens the Stones are still rolling on because he will never be forgotten as a result of that.

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5 Responses

  1. I found the article about Brian Jones to be interesting; especially Stash De Rola’s accounts of Brian. From this article I learned more about how Brian worked hard at his craft. It is fascinating to read about his input with the band, and his high level of creativity.

    What I disagree with in this article is that Brian’s death is not considered to be questionable by Stash De Rola. If anything else, there are more questions than answers when we think about how Brian died; death by misadventure is convenient for this situation. At least leave it to the reader to figure out that Brian did not die of natural causes. What we do know is that in the end, Brian was surrounded by some unsavoury individuals. I think that we can piece together some of the unfortunate events that led up to his death and summarize that something went totally awry with Brian on July 3rd, 1969.

    Otherwise, this article was very thought provoking.

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