"He just wanted to be in a blues band," summarises Jagger, "and didn't really think it was gonna be show business. Perhaps the biggest ambition he thought of was playing the Marquee on Thursdays. That was the end of it."
At the end of the famous, oft-shown concert footage of rioting fans at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966, Mick and Keith are nearly torn limb from limb and are lucky to get off the stage. Jones suddenly lurches into picture, teeth bared and bent double with unhinged laughter as Richards tries to hold onto his guitar. It's the same manic response you see at the end of the Have You Seen Your Mother Baby promo film with the Stones in drag, all managing to keep a straight face except Brian, who dissolves into another unsettling cackle.
"There was a two-year period when the audience were louder than us, all screaming teenyboppers," Keith Richards remembers. "Brian had this terrible joke of playing Popeye The Sailor Man in the middle of anything because it didn't matter, nobody could hear shit anyway. I'd be walking past him on-stage and I'd hear (sings) da-da-da da da da all the time. For Charlie I think that was the most frustrating time. He was a serious musician, a jazz drummer, and all of a sudden he's playing to a load of 13 year old girls wetting themselves and Brian's doing Popeye The Sailor Man and it was, 'Whatever happened to the blues?'"
What Brian was doing instead was schmoozing at Andy Warhol's Factory and bonding with Bob Dylan. "Because of the world he got into, he knew a lot of people long before we did," says Charlie Watts. "Jimi Hendrix was one, and Bob Dylan was a friend of his. A lot of people liked him and admired him. Now whether they liked him because he was a Rolling Stone or whatever I don't know. He became more of a celebrity than a great musician."
"The phone bills were massive," remembers Shirley Arnold. "He'd be on the phone to Dylan for four hours from the office." Dylan would tease Brian about his paranoia, telling him that he was the Mr Jones of Ballad Of A Thin Man. "Look at how much cred McCartney gets now that history, quite rightly, has put it straight that he was the most avant-garde Beatle, hanging out with artists on the London scene," says Jones's biographer Terry Rawlings. "Well, Brian was hanging out with Arthur C. Clarke, checking out the Spear Of Destiny and the Holy Grail and all that business. That's way out there as far as I'm concerned."
"Brian knew Kenneth Anger very well, and lots of people like that," confirms the unflappable Charlie Watts. "I didn't really know them that well, but I've met them. I was never interested in that world and I never came from it. A night out for me was going to the Flamingo. I'd see Georgie Fame more than I'd hang out with that lot. But you've only got to look at the bloody Palladium tape with us on there with him with the hat on. I mean that's how out there he was."
In 1964 the Stones had filled out the obligatory Life Lines section for NME. In time honoured fashion they all lied about their ages. Under Biggest Break In Career, Brian entered "Break with parents". Under Husband And Wife's name he wrote, "Husband Stew and he works in a glass furnace". Under Brothers and Sisters' Names the entry read, "Sister half Moroccan named Hashish".
"He was ahead of the game in many ways," points out Gered Mankowitz. "He was experimenting more and earlier than the others with drugs, with instrumentation in music, and with the way he was living his life. I don't remember anyone else in the band getting visibly out of it, but Brian did. One time on tour he rang me, asking me to go up to his room. He said, 'I've got two tabs of acid, I thought maybe you'd like to share it with me.' I said, Brian, you know I don't do acid. He said, 'Oh right. OK, I tell you what I'll do. I'll take both of them and you write down everything I say.' I said, Er, no I don't think so."
Brian was also the first Rolling Stone to check out the burgeoning West Coast scene. Keith Altham, who interviewed Brian for NME in 1966, remembers him playing experimental free-form tapes that he was working on. "We just sort of laid back and listened to what they were doing in Frisco, whereas Brian was making great tapes, over dubbing," Keith Richards told Rolling Stone in 1971. "He was much more into it than we were. We were digging what we were hearing for what it was, but that other thing in you is saying, Yeah, but where's Chuck Berry?"
As Brian's cultural antennae became more finely tuned than his bandmates', the darker side of his personality started to manifest itself more clearly. "It was always there, you just picked up on it more as time went by," says Mankowitz. "You dismissed a lot of things as vagaries of the moment but as I spent more time with him I started to note a pattern. On one or two occasions in clubs he just snapped when he considered some journalist or fan was pushing him too much. In one place he just put a glass in someone's face. Unhesitatingly. It made you wary of him. There was an instability to him. When he was on form he was an incredibly important, crucial part of the band. When he was off form he let everybody else down. One time I saw Ian Stewart grab Brian in the wings as they came off stage and shake him and say, 'What are you doing? You're playing like a piece of shit.' It infuriated Ian and it frustrated everybody else. Brian wasn't only not bothering. He was making a joke about it." And playing Popeye The Sailor Man where once he would have played Elmore James licks.
Much of the debate about the decline of Jones as a musical force within The Rolling Stones seems to hinge upon his role during the band's classic pop period from '65 to '67: that richly prolific purple patch spanning The Last Time, Satisfaction, Get Off My Cloud, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Paint It Black, Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, 'Aftermath' and 'Between The Buttons', which culminated in the Sunday Night At The London Palladium performance of Let's Spend The Night Together - Brian replete with costume jewellery, frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat - and the band's subsequent refusal to join the other acts on the podium for the show's cheesy showbiz finale. This was the period when what Marianne Faithfull calls their "blend of blues mythology and King's Road noblesse oblige" was at its most synchronised, and Jones the texturalist was at his peak.
"Brian was a sensitive person and tat translated into his playing," says Jagger. His marimba on Under My Thumb, sitar on Mother's Little Helper and Paint It Black, dulcimer on Lady Jane and I Am Waiting are more than mere musical embroidery. Sometimes the contribution is simplicity itself, merely repeating the vocal melody on Lady Jane or running up and down the Eastern scale on Paint It Black, but Jones's multi-instrumental finery is integral; it is the making of all these songs. And for those who care about these things, it is possible that the haircut he sported around the time of Paint It Black is the finest that ever adorned a pop star.
In one of the most telling episodes in Faithfull, her autobiographical collaboration with David Dalton, Marianne describes the moment in the studio when Jones first plays on recorder the beautiful lilting pastoral melody that would eventually become Ruby Tuesday. Richards picks up on it and starts shaping it on the piano. Jones tells his that it's a cross between John Dowland's Air On The Late Lord Essex and a Skip James blues. "Brian wanted everyone to say, 'That's great Brian, wonderful! Good work!'" says Faithfull. "But of course nobody did." When it was released, as the flip side to Let's Spend The Night Together, Ruby Tuesday carried the standard Jagger-Richards songwriting credit. When they performed it on TV, Jones and Richards were sat together at the same piano stool, accentuating their physical and musical closeness. They would never be that close again.