Jumpin' Jack Flash
You Got The Silver/Ruby Tuesday/Paint It, Black
Witness the vagabond blues, as true for the Willy Lomans of the road as for the anonymous bands of young men making music in one town after another. 'No Expectations' is a tender acceptance of that life on the road, where love is a fleeting experience at best, and commitment an impossibility. The sound is elegant and raw, just the quiet strumming of acoustic guitars, while Brian Jones creates a moving passage of bottleneck guitar right out of the Mississippi Delta. "Our love is like our music," Jagger sings regretfully, as if forever en route to some airport, train station or highway. "It's here and then it's gone."
'No Expectations' was recorded at Olympic Studios with the band gathered in a circle, singing and playing into open microphones. The track also marked one of Jones' last flashes of brilliance on a Stones recording. By now, drugs, paranoia and fading health were pulling him away from the muse that had once inspired him to launch the Rollin' Stones. But 'No Expectations' showed that Jones was still capable of deeply moving instrumental flourishes. "That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing," Jagger told Rolling Stone in 1995. "He had just lost interest in everything."
Not everything. Jones would periodically emerge from his cloud to demonstrate a continued interest in creating music, and in exploring new ideas. While the Stones impatiently awaited the release of Beggars Banquet in 1968, Jones travelled to Morocco that July to record the Master Musicians of JouJouka, whose soulful trance rhythms had captured his excited imagination. Jones was introduced to this family of players in the hills south of Tangier by expatriate writer Brion Gysin. Engineer George Chkiantz was soon summoned from Olympic for the recoeding.
"My plane arrived at 9 o'clock in the morning," Chkiantz recalls now. "The Stones office asked me to phone him up - 'Brian says he'll meet you. If he does, give us a ring because nobody will believe that he's going to be anywhere at 9 o'clock in the morning.' But he was. He was there."
Most surprising was Jones' demeanour during this period. "He was the most extraordinarily together person there, in JouJouka, up in the hills. Not when he got back to Tangiers. Different story," says Chkiantz. "In JouJouka he was extraordinary."
Jones was now travelling with his new girlfriend Suki Potier, and quickly slid back into his addictions once he returned from the hills. At one point he collapsed on the balcony of his Tangier hotel room. But Jones never lost his obsession with the JouJouka project. After three days of work, Chkiantz happily stumbled back into his room at the Es Saadi Hotel and collapsed, only to be summoned again by Jones. "I remember being woke up by Brian saying he couldn't get the tape to work," Chkiantz says. "So half in my sleep I sort of stormed out, waggled some connection, pressed a play button and said 'There, see,' and went back to bed. To my great embarrassment I remember having no clothes on at all. I have no idea who was in the room. I remember apologizing to Suki afterwards."
The final result of Jones' last great enthusiasm wouldn't emerge until 1971, when Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan was finally released on Rolling Stone Records. It wasn't exactly music for the pop masses, but Jones' foray into the hills of Morocco would have ramifications as late as 1989. That's when Jagger and Richards returned to the village of JouJouka during work on Steel Wheels to weave some of those hypnotic rhythms into the Rolling Stones' sound via 'Continental Drift'.