A STONE UNTURNED

Sean Egan looks past the scandalous, mysterious and tragic story of Brian Jones to examine the musical legacy of the Stone who never fulfilled his potential

During his short life, Brian Jones, the founder member of The Rolling Stones, displayed a breathtaking ability to master any musical instrument – string, wind or percussion – literally in an afternoon.

Yet for all his symbiotic musicality, Jones bafflingly never displayed the knack for composition that seemed to come so effortlessly to his less musically gifted Stones colleagues Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. His musical legacy, therefore, is slender. However, aside from the well-known Rolling Stones songs that benefited from either his guitar and harmonica work or his decoration with more exotic instruments, and his equally wellknown contributions to recordings of peers The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Beatles, that legacy does exist, though it has rarely been written about.

Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones was born on 28 February 1942 and raised in the quiet spa town of Cheltenham. His upbringing would seem to have been a complicated affair. Brian’s aeronautical engineer father and piano teacher mother are said to have provided a comfortable but austere childhood. And yet Linda Leitch, née Lawrence, who was Jones’ partner from 1962 to 1964 and with whom he fathered Julian, one of his children, describes Jones, whom she met at a Stones gig at the Ricky-Tick in Windsor in 1962, as, …

by Sean Egan
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