Cover Story: Jagger Remembers

Well, he had a huge contribution in the early days. He was very obsessed with it, which you always need.

Obsessed with the band?

Yeah, getting it going and its personality and how it should be. He was obsessed. Too obsessed for me. There's a certain enthusiasm, and after that it becomes obsession. I go back to my thing about collecting: It's nice to collect stamps, but if it becomes obsessive, and you start stealing for your stamps, it becomes too much. He was obsessed about the image of the band, and he was very exclusionary. He saw the Stones as a blues band based on Muddy Waters, Elmore James and that tradition.

I don't think he really liked playing Chuck Berry songs. He was very purist. He was real middle class; he came from one of the most middle-class towns in England, Cheltenham, which was one of the most genteel towns in the most genteel area of England. So his whole outlook and upbringing was even worse in the gentility fashion than mine.

What started causing tensions in the group among Keith, you and him?

[Brian] was a very jealous person and didn't read the right books about leadership [laughs]. And you can't be jealous and be a leader. He was obsessed with the idea of being the leader of the band. You have to realize that everyone in a band is all more or less together, and everyone has their own niche, and some people lead in some ways, and some people lead in others. He never could understand that; he never got it, and he was kind of young. So he alienated people. And as I say, he was very narrow-minded in his view of music, and, really, Keith and I had been very catholic.

But did you take away the leadership of the band from him?

He had never had the leadership of the band to take away; if you're the singer in the band, you always get more attention than anyone else. Brian got very jealous when I got attention. And then the main jealousy was because Keith and I started writing songs, and he wasn't involved in that. To be honest, Brian had no talent for writing songs. None. I've never known a guy with less talent for songwriting.

What did he have talent for?

He was a guitar player, and he also diverted his talent on other instruments. His original instrument was the clarinet. So he played harmonica because he was familiar with wind instruments.

Did he give the band a sound?

Yes. He played the slide guitar at a time when no one really played it. He played in the style of Elmore James, and he had this very lyrical touch. He evolved into more of an experimental musician, but he lost touch with the guitar, and always as a musician you must have one thing you do well. He dabbled too much.

Does he deserve the kind of mythological status that he has among hard-core Stones fanatics?

Well, he was an integral part of the band, and he -- for whatever it means -- was a big part of it.

Can you describe your falling apart?

It happened gradually. He went from [being] an obsessive about the band to being rather an outsider. He'd turn up late to recording sessions, and he'd miss the odd gig every now and then. He let his health deteriorate because he drank too much and took drugs when they were new, hung out too much, stayed up too late, partied too much and didn't concentrate on what he was doing. Let his talent slide.

Did you fire him, finally?

Yeah.

How was that?

Not pleasant. It's never pleasant, firing people. But it had to be done because we felt we needed someone, and he wasn't there. He wouldn't come to the studio. He wouldn't do anything. We felt we couldn't go on. In fact, we came to a point where we couldn't play live. We couldn't hold our heads up and play because Brian was a total liability. He wasn't playing well, wasn't playing at all, couldn't hold the guitar. It was pathetic. Of course, now I suppose we would have had him admitted to rehab clinics and so on, but those things, unfortunately, in those days were not the path. He tried lots of doctors, but they just gave him more pills.

Do you feel guilty somehow about it all?

No, I don't really. I do feel that I behaved in a very childish way, but we were very young, and in some ways we picked on him. But, unfortunately, he made himself a target for it; he was very, very jealous, very difficult, very manipulative, and if you do that in this kind of a group of people, you get back as good as you give, to be honest. I wasn't understanding enough about his drug addition. No one seemed to know much about drug addiction. Things like LSD were all new. No one knew the harm. People thought cocaine was good for you.

I'm going to quote you something Charlie told me: "Brian Jones had a death wish at a young age. Brian's talent wasn't up to it. He wasn't up to leading a band. He was not a pleasant person to be around. And he was never there to help people to write a song. That's when Mick lost his patience. We carried Brian Jones."

That's straight to the point, isn't it? Whether he had a death wish or not, I don't know. He was a very sad, pitiable figure at the end. He was a talented musician, but he let it go and proved to be a rather sad precursor to a lot of other people. Why this should be, I don't know. I find it rather morbid, but it does keep happening, with people like Kurt Cobain. Why? Does this happen in accounting, too? Is this something that happens in every profession -- it's just that we don't read about the accountants? I think the answer is, yes, it does happen in every profession -- it's just played out in public with people like Brian and Kurt Cobain.

How do you think Brian died? There's been a lot of speculation.

Drowned in a pool. That other stuff is people trying to make money.

THE NEXT STONE AGE

After Brian died, you recorded what has to be considered another classic Stones album, "Sticky Fingers." Was it strange making an album without Brian?

Oh yeah. A whole new world, an era away from Beggars Banquet. We had Mick Taylor in the band, and we had a new record company. We'd been at Decca, and we'd been rather successful, but we didn't get paid very much, and it was like being with strangers.

The cover of that album is a pair of jeans with a real zipper.

This was Andy Warhol's idea.

There's underwear on the back. Is that you?

No. It's one of Andy's . . . proteges is the polite word we used to use, I think.

All right. That's the news in this interview. Why does "Brown Sugar" work like mad?

That's a bit of a mystery, isn't it? I wrote that song in Australia in the middle of a field. They were really odd circumstances. I was doing this movie, Ned Kelly, and my hand had got really damaged in this action sequence. So stupid. I was trying to rehabilitate my hand and had this new kind of electric guitar, and I was playing in the middle of the outback and wrote this tune.

But why it works? I mean, it's a good groove and all that. I mean, the groove is slightly similar to Freddy Cannon, this rather obscure '50s rock performer -- "Tallahassee Lassie" or something. Do you remember this? 'She's down in F-L-A." Anyway, the groove of that - boom-boom-boom-boom-boom -- is "going to a go-go" or whatever, but that's the groove.

And you wrote it all?

Yeah.

This is one of your biggest hits, a great classic, radio single, except the subject matter is slavery, interracial sex, eating pussy . . .

[Laughs] And drugs. That's a double-entendre, just thrown in.

Brown sugar being heroin?

Brown sugar being heroin and --

And pussy?

That makes it . . . the whole mess thrown in. God knows what I'm on about on that song. It's such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go.

Were you surprised that it was such a success with all that stuff in it?

I didn't think about it at the time. I never would write that song now.

Why?

I would probably censor myself. I'd think, "Oh God, I can't. I've got to stop. I can't just write raw like that."

"Wild Horses." Is that a Keith song?

Yeah, it was his melody. And he wrote the phrase "wild horses," but I wrote the rest of [the lyrics].

It's one of the prettiest.

I like the song. It's an example of a pop song. Taking this cliche "wild horses," which is awful, really, but making it work without sounding like a cliche when you're doing it.

What about "Moonlight Mile"? That's a song without Keith -- that's you and Mick Taylor.

Yeah, we recorded it in my house in the country, Stargroves. And we recorded a lot of stuff [there]: "Bitch," stuff from Exile on Main Street.

At the same time? And then just divided the songs between records?

Yeah. It's a good house to record in. And that's also where the Who made an album. Led Zeppelin recorded one. But anyway, I remember Mick Taylor playing that song. Real dreamy kind of semi-Middle Eastern piece. Yeah, that's a real pretty song -- and a nice string arrangement.

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