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The death of Rolling Stone Brian Jones is one of the more regrettable rock 'n' roll tragedies, perhaps because, unlike an obvious drug overdose or vehicular accident, it seemed utterly avoidable. He was found, at 27, drowned in his swimming pool, with only a relatively small amount of sedatives and alcohol in his system, under murky circumstances. Seemingly, Jones—who had just been fired from/quit the band after a long period of alienation—was more a victim of neglect (his own as well as that of others) than anything else. The career concerns of the other Stones, the mortification of Jones' very middle class parents and the British justice system's disdain for the Stones all conspired to keep a serious investigation from taking place. His death was labeled a cause of "misadventure" (a very British way of saying "weird accident") and left at that.
Though generally thought of as a footnote to the Stones' mythologized career, Brian Jones was in every sense not only an essential catalyst to the group's first success, but arguably the entire British R&B scene. It was very much his doing that created the group in their primary form, his impetus that stressed the band's purity towards Chicago blues (very exotic for the time), and his upper-middle class diplomacy skills that raised the group to the top of the heap. Oh, that and girl-grabbing good looks. You're not going to argue that the Stones were the best musicians (Jones excepted) in the scene at that time, are you? Or that Jagger was the best vocalist? Please, don't.
But Jones, as they say now, had "issues": a fragile ego (he insisted on being in the front of almost all press and LP cover photos); a weakness for drink, drugs, and dames (more a womanizer than Mick and Keith combined); and what would have to be called an acute case of bipolar disorder. In '60s jargon, he could be a real drag. There was always a certain amount of understandable tension between Jones (who felt it was "his" group, long after that should've mattered) and Jagger, who as the vocalist, like it or not, would obviously emerge as the band's main "mouthpiece."
Compounding this was pressure for the band to have a Lennon/McCartney type of creative focus, something Jagger and Richards were willing to buy into (with some success), but Jones was not. His known co-compositions, including "Play With Fire," "Empty Heart," "Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man," "Stoned," and others, went under the rubric "Nanker, Phelge," a democratic pseudonym in which all band members shared credit (if he wrote other songs, he refused to show them to the group). He also got little appreciation for being the band's omnidextrous musical secret weapon.
Around the time of (the underrated) Between The Buttons, Jones started checking out creatively—whether from fatigue, frustration, anxiety or intoxication is hard to say. He also found himself tempted by side-projects—the little-heard soundtrack to Anita Pallenberg's '67 film A Degree Of Murder—while his experimentation on Their Satanic Majesties' Request was vastly maligned. Suffering from physical/mental breakdowns, leading to frequent hospital stays, he had the bad luck of being targeted by the corrupt British vice squads eager to bust pop stars for drugs (Jagger and Richards won on appeal, as did Jones the first time).
Considered in all, it's somewhat surprising that it's taken this long for a film to emerge. Stoned purports to tell the true story of Jones' decay and death, honestly and unsensationalized. Directed and produced by Stephen Woolley, it's less successful than his similar productions Scandal (about Mandy Rice-Davies) and Backbeat, (the Beatles in Hamburg) partially because of subject matter—Jones was not an easy person to know—and partially because of script. Based on three different books, Stoned focuses on the last few months of his life, and on Jones' negative qualities. It shows him nodding out in the studio, but doesn't show him performing (uncredited) on several Beatles sessions. It shows him hitting girlfriend Anita Pallenberg (Monet Mazur), but doesn't show him in the hospital just days before. And it obsesses on his brief mercurial "friendship" with builder Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine), who was hired to do remodeling on Cotchford Farm, the Tudor estate of Winnie The Pooh author A.A. Milne which Jones bought in 1968.
SPOILER ALERT: Thorogood allegedly confessed on his death bed to killing Jones—accidentally—but even that doesn't excuse turning the story into an almost Mansonesque witch hunt. Road manager Tom Keylock (David Morrisey), generally remembered as a dubious character, is also implicated for the mysterious disappearance of all of Jones' personal effects after his death. Moreover, though visually well cast (as is Leo Gregory as Jones), the actors playing Mick and Keith are given almost nothing to say. In a way, this has the effect of showing how much they were intimidated by Jones, but that's hardly the totality of their relationship. Considering the quality of the Scandal and Backbeat soundtracks, music here is also distinctly disappointing. And both editing and filming make a story about a very social person somehow claustrophobic.
Copious gratuitous nudity, however, helps the film go by faster.
At the time of his death, Jones was in talks to put together a supergroup which easily could have changed the face of rock at the time. It's all the more regrettable that it never came to be. Unlike other live-fast-die-young archetypes, everything about Jones' life implied that he was only getting started.
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