It was in the autumn of 1965 that model and actress Anita Pallenberg had first attracted herself to Jones. They soon merged into one straw blond boy-girl, same hair, same clothes, same penchant for experimentation. "He was besotted with her," says Kathy Etchingham. "I met Anita last October at an art exhibition in Notting Hill and she seems very embittered about it all. I introduced myself to her and said I'd been a friend of Brian's. She just guffawed and said, 'Yes, he had lots of friends.'"
"He fell in love with someone who was just too tough to be broken by him. That's the secret of that relationship," surmises Nick Kent. "It was his misfortune to fall in love with someone as free-spirited as her. That really was his karma in a sense. The way he treated women so badly. He found more than his match in Anita."
Ask Jagger, after all this time, if Pallenberg was a good influence on Brian and the Stones vocalist laughs uproariously. "No," he says. "No, she wasn't." Jones and Pallenberg's intense affair burned itself out in Morocco. After one fight too many Anita ran into the consoling arms of Keith Richards. "Keith and Brian had this very odd relationship, which was very peculiar," says Jagger, distancing himself. "All of it was very strange and I didn't get involved because I was outside it, you know, I was in another place completely, and it wasn't particularly healthy." Jagger had Marianne Faithfull as soul mate, bed mate, and fellow astral traveller during this period. Jones, on the other hand, started to come apart at the seams.
"The drugs were still quite private then," says Gered Mankowitz. "You didn't go round the streets with a joint. I remember one time when we did, thinking it was pretty daring. Andrew pushed it sometimes, asking a policeman for a light for his joint in Newcastle in 1966 when we were doing the Ike & Tina Turner tour. But there were no drugs backstage in those days because there were always police outside the door."
But bad karma was beckoning. Reality fades with every re-telling of a familiar story, and just as we occasionally have to be reminded how different the Stones looked or how raw they sounded in the early '60s, it's also worth re-emphasising how the establishment brought all its weight to bear in its attempts to crush the band in 1967. This was an era when the News Of The World could run an item about London's UFO club under the headline "I Saw Couples Injecting Reefers", and when a leading police chief could tell Jock Young in his classic sociological study The Drug Takers that the hippies were flea-ridden and made his skin crawl. Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher (the "semolina pilchards" of John Lennon's I Am The Walrus), who would arrest Brian, was charged with corruption and blackmail during the seedy '70s.
First came the systematic raids on highly symbolic targets, like the UFO club, and Dandie Fashions, a boutique frequented by both the Stones and Beatles. Then there was the famous News Of The World exposé of February 1967, where Mick Jagger allegedly told a reporter, in suspiciously unhip Fleet Street argot, that he "had sampled LSD" but that he didn't "go much on it now that the cats have taken it up". The News Of The World got one minor detail wrong. They identified the wrong Stone. It was Brian being indiscreet in a dark nightclub, not Jagger. The Stones singer issued a writ. Too late. The machinery was in motion. Acting on a Fleet Street tip-off, the police decided to call in on Keith Richards' Redlands pad. And the rest is history: Wormwood Scrubs, Times editorials about butterflies being broken on wheels, and enduring urban myths about Mars bars.
After Jagger and Richards' convictions and subsequent release on appeal, the Stones singer was whisked off to ITV's World In Action for a tête-à-tête about the generation gap with Times editor William Rees-Mogg, former Home Secretary Lord Stowhill, Jesuit Father Thomas Corbishley, and the Bishop of Woolwich (a summit organised by a 23 year old TV researcher name of John Birt). Meanwhile, as Bill Wyman reports, "it was sad to see Brian scuffling for cash from the Stones office."
Jones, of course, was the real butterfly broken on a wheel. After unsuccessfully pursuing Mick and Keith, the police turned their attention to Brian. Jagger and Richards seemed to add a further armadillo layer to their rebel armour after their bust; Brian visibly diminished after his. Alexis Korner, who saw him during the summer of 1967, was shocked at the decline: "He looked like a debauched version of Louis XIV. That's when I realised that acid -taking can cause casualties." The promotional film for We Love You recorded in July of that year was banned by the BBC, not for its allusions to the trial of Oscar Wilde, but because in the few glimpses of him Brian looks absolutely shit-faced. In fact, he had sneaked out of psychiatric hospital to attend the session.
His debilitated condition didn't stop him adding some inspired spiralling multi-layered Moroccan brass at the tail-end of the track. Neither did it stop him contributing some deft orchestral touches on the Mellotron to 'Their Satanic Majesties Request', most notably on 2000 Light Years From Home. Brian's North African-influenced embellishments of woodwind and percussion are all over that most maligned of Rolling Stones albums. Not bad for a bloke rumoured by this time to be ingesting LSD by the bucket load and drinking brandy from a pint glass: "Even when he was in the most appalling state they could still prop him up and stick a recorder in his mouth and he could make music," notes Gered Mankowitz with amazement.
It might be fanciful to suggest that, like Lenny Bruce, it was an 'overdose of police' and not a swimming pool that ultimately killed Brian Jones, but it's undeniable that the weeping, sick man who appeared in the dock throughout 1967 and 1968, forced to listen to humiliating psychiatric reports about his 'condition', was now a shadow of his former self. At the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Jones wandered about as the high priest of hip, introducing Hendrix on-stage like some alternative toastmaster revelling in his patronage. But such appearances offered only brief respite from the drug-busts, the paranoia, and the legions of liggers.
"I'd go round there when he was in a bad way and cook him breakfast," remembers Shirley Arnold. "He'd phone up and say, 'Get some money from the petty cash', and I'd go round with eggs and bacon. There'd be all these people in the flat, all these hangers-on, passed out. It was a shambles. There'd be someone in the bath passed out. Then I'd cook breakfast and go to find Brian and he'd have passed out again. I'd sometimes think, Something will happen, he'll kill himself if he carries on like this. One morning he was sitting in the kitchen watching me as I was cooking. He thought it was all quite amazing that I could do all this. He was saying, 'One day, Shirley, I'm going to get it all together. I'm going to get married and have it all together.'"
Kathy Etchingham also found herself having to play surrogate mum. "He'd phone up in his little boy voice and go, 'I'm in a terrible mess over here. Can you come over and help me?' I used to go over and clean his place up. The sink would be piled up with dishes. Crud all over the place. He'd be meeting a girl that night and wanted the place clean before the girl came over. But at least he owned up about it. Then one day he phoned up and said he had this girl there and he couldn't get rid of her and could I come over? It was four in the morning and he sent a taxi for me. When I got there he said, 'Sit on my knee', and I had to pretend to this American girl that he was with me. Eventually she got the message and left. Next day he was busted and some dope was found. He absolutely blamed this girl. Swore that it was her but I know it wasn't. She definitely had the hots for him but it was his dope. It was on the table. We were smoking it."