In the re-telling of the Brian Jones story his birthplace is constantly caricatured as a Regency rest home for retired majors and assorted nobility. Charlie Watts still subscribes to this view: "He was a pretentious little sod. He was from Cheltenham. Does that sum it up? An English boy from Cheltenham." "He started off by being a clarinet player in a trad band," affirms Mick Jagger. "In a provincial West Country town. Very provincial." That's not how Pat Andrews remembers it. "There were plenty of dancehalls. Five cinemas including the Gaumont where the Stones played. During the war there'd been two airforce bases nearby. My older brothers used to get lots of American magazines and records from them. There was always a big jazz following in Cheltenham. In the '40s it was all bebop: Thelonious Monk and people like that would come and play. At the town hall it was all Kenny Ball and Johnny Dankworth. Then they opened up a place called the Barbecue, and it was always full of beatniks from the Art College."
Brian was already proficient on saxophone, clarinet, guitar and piano when Pat met him. He had played trad jazz with people twice his age in local bars, in the quaintly monikered Cheltone Six, and had now progressed to an R&B combo called The Ramrods. "He was very modest at that time," says Pat. "He said he played a couple of musical instruments, tinkered around - he made it sound more like a hobby - but he didn't push it. He didn't start playing properly 'til he met Alexis."
When Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated came to town Jones immediately bonded with its talismanic leader. Seeking out the right people was a hallmark of his intuitive enthusiasm right from the start. It was Brian who would later pester Giorgio Gomelsky to let his new outfit play at the famed Station Hotel, Richmond. "We all went back to the coffee bar after the gig and Brian plonked himself down in front of Alexis," remembers Pat Andrews. "This kind of thing must have happened to Alexis hundreds of times, but Brian started telling him how much he loved the blues and what he played. He went home and got his guitar and went back and played for Alexis. Alexis was so taken by him that he gave him his address in London and said come up and stay."
Paul Jones, a fellow blues obsessive, was at that time playing parties around Oxford with the splendidly named Thunder Odin's Big Secret. "I'd just bought a 78 from the late '50s by Thunder & Lightning called Santa Fe Blues. Lightning was Lightnin' Hopkins," he laughs. "I met Brian at an Alexis Korner gig in the Ealing Jazz Club in 1962. We jammed together at a few parties in Oxford. I asked Brian if he would come and play guitar in my band but he said, 'I don't really want to be in a band unless I'm the leader.' Brian wasn't so good at that stage that I couldn't afford to be without him so I got another guitarist. A few months later Brian said he was moving to London and forming a band and would I like to be in it? I said no. I told him, I don't think we will ever be able to make enough money from playing this kind of music to make a living from it, and in my case I've just got a job with a dance band. I'm just going to do blues as a hobby! Brian was more enthusiastic about the immediate future than I was - and a bit more perceptive, too."
After a few reconnaissance visits to the capital Brian moved up permanently early in 1962. Pat, with six-month-old Mark in tow, followed him soon afterwards. Dingy flats and dead-end jobs came and went as Brian pursued his mission. Alexis Korner was busy building a Trojan horse for R&B within the trad jazz enclave; just about anybody who would ever be anybody on that scene would sit in his band, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Charlie Watts was drummer with Blues Incorporated at the time. "Alexis introduced me to Brian and we went off back to his flat," he remembers. "Bloody 'orrible thing, with one of the girls he was living with and was pregnant by him. He used to have short hair like Gerry Mulligan, blond, pushed forward, and he used to wear thick-fur crew-necked sweaters. He played bottleneck guitar and loved soprano saxophone - his big heroes were Sidney Bechet and Elmore James. He used to play harp quite well, too, which not many people did then." Brian, with Alexis Korner's blessing, eventually convinced Charlie Watts to join his fledgling outfit. "Brian saw in Charlie what he had in abundance and demanded from any musician: commitment and idealism," Bill Wyman later noted.
It was Brian who placed a Musicians Wanted ad in Jazz News. It was Brian who auditioned future members, named the band after a Muddy Waters song, and assertively defended his callow crew when the purists gathered round to sneer. Not that Brian wasn't a fundamentalist himself. His R&B was Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, John Lee Hooker. He had to be convinced, by Keith Richards, that Chuck Berry wasn't just pop. In fact, potential Stones guitarist Geoff Bradford walked out over this very issue.
"I first saw Brian at the Ealing Club playing with Paul Jones as interval guest with Alexis Korner," says early Stones member and Pretty Things founder Dick Taylor. "I was there with Mick and Keith and we were most impressed. He was playing an acoustic with a pick-up on it and his slide playing was extraordinary. It didn't take long to get talking with him and it wasn't long before he in turn heard Jagger sing and poached him for his band. Mick took Keith along which prompted Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight to walk and myself get drafted in."
When the Stones toured with Bo Diddley the following year, such was Brian's reverence that the band dropped their Bo Diddley covers. Like The Beatles, the Stones occasionally had to pretend they played trad just to get a gig. Indeed, at their first big showcase, the Third Richmond Jazz Festival in August 1963, they played bottom of the bill to the likes of Terry Lightfoot and Acker Bilk. But within a year the Stones' brand of raw R&B had blown trad out of the water, and much else besides. "A schoolfriend's father was the promoter of gigs at the Sophia Gardens in Cardiff," remembers Nick Kent of his Damascene conversion as a 12-year-old in February 1964. "He got me backstage to meet them. Johnny Leyton was topping the bill. Jet Harris was on there. Their day was done. They weren't going to last another year. It was the changing of the guard culturally; the Stones just took that place. We had front-row seats and girls in the third row were threatening us with their stilettos. Backstage Brian was clearly the leader. The others were sulking around but Brian was smiling and talking to all the girls."
The Rolling Stones' self-appointed leader had the musical acumen to back up his promotional skills. He 'worked out' blues harp, 'worked out' slide, 'worked out' the Bo Diddley beat, and later the dulcimer and sitar like they were mere maths equations. Ginger Baker told Laura Jackson in her book Golden Stone how, during an early rehearsal with the fledgling Stones, he and Jack Bruce had played complicated patterns which completely succeeded in throwing Jagger. Jones had to go over to the singer and shout 1-2-3-4 to show him where the beat was. Pat Andrews also witnessed this early musical maturity first hand: "They were rehearsing in the Bricklayers Arms. Mick Avory or Carlo Little was on drums, I can't remember who. Dick Taylor was there and Brian Knight, too. They were doing this song and Mick was playing the harmonica. Brian was never the kind of person who would turn round and say, 'You're rubbish.' He just pulled his harmonica out of his pocket and said, 'Mick, I think you should play it this way.' I'll never forget the look on Mick's face. It was like, 'Oh, shit. What else can this guy do?'"
"Brian at that time had a certain amount of moodiness about him but also a brilliant sense of humour and enthusiasm," says Dick Taylor. "He was very encouraging about my bass playing which was nice as I only started to play the bass in order to work with the band and was quite unsure of my own ability on it. Both Keith and myself had a lot of respect for his musical abilities, which were quite a bit ahead of our own. We, and Mick, tried to steer things a bit more into the Chuck and Bo areas than maybe Brian wanted."
"He was very diligent," remembers Paul Jones. "Once he got into something he wanted to do he went for it. I used to play harp in first position all the time. I wasn't any good at bending notes. I could only really do the Jimmy Reed top end stuff. It was Brian who showed me quite early on how to do cross harp and other positions."