Richard Crouse

A month after the release of “Hackney Diamonds,” the latest record from The Rolling Stones, comes a documentary about the largely forgotten musician who started the band. “The Stones and Brian Jones,” a new film from Nick Broomfield and now playing in theatres, examines the man who posted the want ad in “Jazz News” that got the Stones rolling in 1962.

“He was the heart and soul of the Rolling Stones,” says Broomfield in the film. “Yet, most people today haven’t even heard of him.”

At age 14, Broomfield, director of music docs like “Kurt & Courtney,” “Biggie & Tupac” and “Whitney: Can I Be Me,” had a brief, chance encounter with Brian Jones on a train. Jones was then a superstar, the guitarist of the Rolling Stones, the dangerous alternative to the clean cut Beatles.

Six years later, the director attended the famous Rolling Stones concert in London’s Hyde Park, a tribute to Jones who had been found dead less than a month after he was fired by the band he began. “If anyone was going to die; Brian was going to die,” Jagger said. “He just lived his life very fast. He was kind of like a butterfly.”

A light that burned brightly, Jones was an innovative multi-instrumentalist with a love of the blues, who embodied London’s Swingin’ Sixties, but harboured a troubled soul. With a mix of new they-were-there interviews from folks like former Stones bassist Bill Wyman, Animals’ singer Eric Burdon, model/singer Zouzou and singer Marianne Faithfull, plus archival footage and interviews from Mick jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts, among others, Broomfield builds a portrait of Jones as the bad boys band’s most rebellious member.

Raised by straightlaced parents, an aeronautical engineer father and church organist mother, Jones displayed antagonism toward authority early on, rebelling against his family and getting suspended from school. Obsessed with blues artists like Elmore James and Robert Johnson, he got his first acoustic guitar at aged seventeen and began performing at blues and jazz clubs. He was s womanizer—”He just uses people,” says teenager Valerie Corbett, mother of his first baby.—a wild child, uninvited to art college after being labelled an “irresponsible drifter.”

The story of the beginning of the Stones is more familiar. Jones put the band together, gave them the name, cribbed from “Rollin’ Stone Blues,” track five, side one of “The Best of Muddy Waters,” taught Jagger to play harmonica and roomed with his bandmates in a grungy apartment on Edith Grove in Chelsea as they developed the intertwined guitar sound that would characterize their music.

With fame, came musical exploration—Jones played everything from slide-guitar and harmonica to recorder and Appalachian dulcimer—but also a change in the band’s dynamics. As Jagger and Richards moved the band’s sound further away from the blues Jones loved to a more mainstream rock ‘n’ roll vibe, Jones found himself indulging in two-thirds of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll stereotype. “Drugs destroyed his discipline,” says filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, “and you can’t be an artist without discipline.”

As for the sex, Broomfield details Jones’s chaotic relationship with actress, artist, and model Anita Pallenberg, who left Jones for Richards. He also dives deep into the decision to remove Jones from the band and his passing, called “first drug/alcohol casualty of our generation.”

Much of the biographical information is familiar, but Broomfield props up this section with first-hand accounts, particularly from Wyman, whose enthusiasm for the music, and Jones’s contributions to it, is infectious.

A note of pathos comes near the end when Bloomfield reveals a personal note from Jones’s father expressing regret for not being more supportive. The formality of the writing hides a deep well of emotion and acceptance, which, for the musician, came too late to ease his troubled mind.

The old stories are bolstered by the addition of new, fresh interviews but it is the focus on Jones as a brilliant musician and not simply another rock ‘n’ roll casualty, that elevates The Stones and Brian Jones.” The story has its sordid moments, but Broomfield emphasizes the very heart of Jones’s being, the music.