THE WASTED LIFE OF BRIAN JONES
A review of the new movie STONED
Review by Kevin C. Madigan
It’s no secret that Brian Jones was a troubled soul. An antagonist of the first degree, the jazz and blues fanatic who founded The Rolling Stones in 1962 was also a brilliant multi-instrumentalist who pushed the band to take risks with their music. Although neither a vocalist nor a songwriter, Jones was a progressive thinker who liked to experiment with different sounds and who persuaded the other Stones to expand their outlook beyond the relatively limited confines of the popular music of that era.
For all his prowess, however, Jones was, by all accounts, impossible. In Andrew Loog Oldham’s excellent book STONED, Jones is described by band associate Tony King as “a cunt, very difficult for anybody to get on with. A fallen angel, with a golden halo surrounding an angelic face, but the soul of a devil.”
Older and more experienced musically than both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Jones nevertheless felt threatened and intimidated when his two partners began writing songs and receiving more attention. Distracted by women and increasingly debilitated by drugs, Jones let his position in the group slip away, eventually getting fired by his colleagues for not pulling his weight. Weeks later he was found dead in his swimming pool.
A new film, also called STONED, examines Jones’ life in both brutal and sympathetic ways, with an eye towards balancing the facts with the myths that have persisted since his death at the age of 27. Inevitably, perhaps, the focus of the movie gravitates towards the more prurient elements of his short life, spending precious little time on his musical aptitude, and reconstructing the downfall of this sad figure in painful detail.
His firing from the band by his own bandmates, his abhorrence of being alone, his tortured relationships with women, getting a girl pregnant when he was only 14, his brittle, cruel father and hapless mother, his relentless substance abuse; all these scenarios are played out by actor Leo Gregory, who effectively captures the nuances and character flaws of his subject.
Key to Jones’ deterioration was his relationship with two people: the first was German actress and model Anita Pallenberg (Monet Mazur), who became involved with him but switched her affections to Richards during a trip the three took to Marakesh. It’s a part of Rolling Stones lore that Pallenberg’s defection and subsequent protracted entanglement with Richards caused Jones to become unhinged and proved to be the beginning of the end for him. Though the Stones all courted danger to some degree, the film suggests that Jones actually instigated a liaison between Richards and Pallenberg as a dare, evidently without envisioning how dire the consequences would become.
The second damaging relationship and, according to the movie, the probable cause of Jones’ untimely demise, was a builder named Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine) hired by the Stones’ management to do work on Jones’ house in Sussex. An unsettling and complicated master-servant bond ensued, though it was not always clear who was which.
The wasted talent and the loss of this once fine musician is best demonstrated by a scene in a recording studio with the other Stones. All of them, except Jones, are busy putting together a track for a new song. Jones sits in a chair, slumped forward, eyes closed, smashed out of his mind. The others calmly finish their work, turn off the lights, and leave the room. Jones remains there, in the dark, oblivious.
Stoned is in theaters now, and the DVD is being released in the U.S. on July 4th, 2006. 
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Brian Jones Fan Club
