The Sexual Othering of Brian Jones
Brian Jones is the dark shadow of the Rolling Stones. This is a silly one.
There is something fascinating to me about Brian Jones. A legendary 27 club rockstar alongside Janis and Jimi, but maybe not so well loved? Other Stones haven’t been shy about recalling the downward spiral that saw his role in the band dwindle towards the end of his life, before eventually being kicked out and replaced by Mick Taylor in 1969. He is remembered as a great rockstar, but always with an asterisk about his behavior in the band and substance abuse issues. An artistic cuckold really, kicked out of the band he founded because he couldn’t hold it together. Some are ride-or-die for the Jones era, but many are not. This is all to say that his controversialness is fascinating to me. It adds a bit of an edge to his memory in a way that isn’t there for a Janis or a Jimi.
Something about him in general feels so… un-Rolling Stones. If we’re thinking about Richards and Jagger's Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll image, Jones was its antithesis. This is strange considering he sired children just as prolifically as Jagger, with 6 (known) by his death in 1969 compared with Jagger’s 8 (known) as of today. And so even if he was, deep down, your typical chick-habit-having rocker, he sure didn’t seem it. And that’s why I have been utterly obsessed with this image since I discovered it a couple of months back:
Shot in London by Jack French in 1964, this photo of the group posing with Pattie Boyd shouldn’t really be anything to bat an eye at. The 64 Stones cuddled up with a top model of the time (future muse of George Harrison and Eric Clapton) isn’t anything unusual... but look at Brian. Everyone else is, in the world of the photo, Boyd’s sexual equal. They all look at her with the same expression, they’re all touching her (of course she’s actually closest to Jagger), connected in this big mass from which Brian is distinctly separate. Visually isolated from this orgy of Rock n’ Roll Coolness, he sits and gazes up at her, more with child-like curiosity than lust. This coding of him as child-like, not in control, isolated, as early as 1964 has stuck with me. Did he already feel creative control slipping away as the Jagger-Richards songwriting partnership threatened to take the band’s creative direction beyond the blues direction he envisioned? Could he feel the changing of the tide? The coming of the psychedelic era? These are the questions that plague me.
Anyway! That didn't have much of a point, but check out this sick gif I made:
