The measure of every great rock and roll outfit comes down to chemistry. Even though many may try to become the masters of their respective instruments, it all depends on whether musicians will hit it off when they step into the room to play music, having that inherent sixth sense that makes their music move like nothing else in the world. Although Keith Richards and Mick Jagger may have had a telepathic way of communicating in The Rolling Stones, the guitarist thought that one of their bandmates wasn’t that great of a musician.
While The Stones may have been built off the strength of Jagger and Richards’ songwriting skills, that was far from where they began. Before the pair had even joined the group, Brian Jones had helped form the band in the early 1960s, wanting to emulate the sounds that he was hearing out of the American blues scene.
Even when Jagger and Richards came on board, most of the band’s material included various blues standards and road-tested rock and roll favourites from Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. Though the band did get a handful of donated songs from The Beatles, ‘The Glimmer Twins’ knew that they needed to start writing original material if they would be remembered.
As they spent time honing their crafts, Jones was willing to fill out the sound with any instrument he could get his hands on. While primarily known for his guitar prowess, Jones made any instrument beautiful, from playing the sitar on the group’s macabre hit ‘Paint It Black’ to eventually working with baroque instruments throughout the recording of Between the Buttons.
Although Richards was happy to keep the band afloat on rhythm guitar, he recalled that Jones was far from the best musician the band had worked with. Despite being capable behind any instrument, Richards thought Jones had a good handle on his instrument but no way of adequately gelling with the band.
Speaking shortly after Jones’ death, Richards said that most of the guitarist’s pitfalls lay in his inability to gel with the band towards the end, saying, “Because he’s dead, I can say, ‘Oh, Brian was a fantastic musician’, but it wasn’t true. Brian wasn’t a great musician. He did have a certain feel for certain things, but then everybody in the band has that for certain things too. And there was a nice bit of chemistry there for a while which unfortunately didn’t stay”.
Regardless of his musical pedigree, Richards thought that Jones was far too paranoid to blossom into the best musician he could be, continuing, “He wrote bits and pieces, but he never presented them to us. No doubt he spent hours, weeks, working on things – but his paranoia was so great that he could never bring himself to present it to us”.
Then again, it’s easy to see why Jones would have been lenient about giving his songs to Jagger and Richards. Since he had founded the band, Jones had seen his musical brainchild be stripped away from him, becoming commandeered by Jagger and Richards and leading to the guitarist feeling like a sideman in his group.
Jones would never get the chance to flesh out those ideas, either, eventually passing away a few months after being fired from The Stones after being found at the bottom of his pool. While Jones may have been able to play nearly anything he got his hands on, his inability to articulate his ideas led to him becoming one of the first significant casualties of The British Invasion.
