Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Marianne Faithfull

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СКАЧАТЬ listening to George’s new songs. When he wasn’t playing his own stuff, he would be playing Ravi Shankar on those beautiful green discs we all used to have. I do think he very much brought all that into our world.

      Mick loved George’s songs – those wonderful songs on Revolver – but George never felt that anybody appreciated his songs, really, or thought they were as good as John and Paul’s. George was racked with doubt about his work, but it’s now obvious what a great songwriter he was. ‘Beware of Darkness’ is as good as anything anybody ever wrote.

      In a way, Brian Jones was George’s counterpart in the Stones. But there was a big difference in their personalities. The thing about George – and we all feel it strongly now that he’s gone off and left us – is that he plunged into things. Whatever he got into, whether it was the sitar and Ravi Shankar or the Maharishi, he walked right in and never looked back, and that takes a lot of confidence. Brian, on the other hand, was all flash. He loved to astonish – and then on to the next thing. Sometimes I’d get the eerie feeling that – like the positive and negative in a photograph – George was the positive version of Brian. They were quite similar in many ways; both could play a lot of different instruments and were hugely talented. But of course one huge difference was that Brian was unable to write songs. His perpetual upsetness and unhappiness and paranoia and low self-esteem all worked against him. It was tragic because he wanted to be a songwriter more than anything. I’ve watched the painful process, Brian mumbling out a few words to a twelve-bar blues riff and then throwing his guitar down in frustration.

      I think in Brian’s state writing a song probably wasn’t possible. He could only do it through another medium, through Keith. I guess the closest he came to it was ‘Ruby Tuesday’, where his melancholy recorder wistfully carries that sense of irretrievable loss. ‘Ruby Tuesday’ was a collaboration between Keith and Brian. It’s one of the few cases where Mick had nothing to do with a Stones song, neither the lyrics nor the melody – but he and Keith got the writing credit. Without Brian, there wouldn’t be a ‘Ruby Tuesday’.

      It’s funny how each drummer was so perfect for the band they were in. Mick admired Ringo’s drumming – it was so simple, so spare, so incredibly on the money – but it wouldn’t have fitted into the Stones at all. You couldn’t have taken Ringo and put him in the Stones; you couldn’t have Charlie Watts drumming for the Beatles. As for Keith Moon, his drumming would have got too much in the way of the guitars and the vocals in either the Stones or the Beatles, but could there have been a more perfect drummer and maniac for The Who than Keith Moon?

      I’ve heard this funny theory that Mick wanted to be a Beatle and that John wanted to be a Rolling Stone, but I think it misses the point by a mile. Mick loved the Beatles, of course, and obviously there was a bit of natural competition going on there, but I don’t think that was unhealthy at all – they sparked off each other.

      You know, people have said, with a little truth to it, that the Beatles were thugs pretending to be gentlemen, whereas the Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs, and this is where it all gets so interesting when we talk about the music, because you’ve got those contradictory aspects bleeding through. They’re very subtle, but they’re there, and that’s what makes the music so compelling, the rent in the temple cloth.

      The thing about the Stones is that they were very intense about everything: about writing, recording, and performing. The Beatles had a similar intensity in the studio, but they were never able to transmit that on to the stage. They were so unlucky with what they went through in the early days; not being able to hear themselves play. It was a complete fuck-up that we have to lay, I’m afraid, at Brian Epstein’s door.

      One of the things a manager must do is make sure that theb technical aspects are taken care of when the musicians go on stage. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp did it for The Who, Clapton’s crew looked after Eric. The basic responsibility of people who take care of any band, including mine, is to make sure that the sound is right so that the musicians can enjoy the experience. That’s vitally important, and Brian Epstein just didn’t get that together. He never made that leap from playing small venues in the north of England to playing Shea Stadium. It’s tragic to see the Beatles on stage with their tiny amps, unable to hear a thing. And naturally, after that last tour, they came back from all that and said, ‘That’s it! We’re never going out again!’ And then Brian Epstein got really depressed because he realised he was almost out of a job.

      The Beatles completely evolved from the pop business. The Stones began as a Brit Chicago R & B group and then lurched into a more raunchy rig than the Beatles ever managed. When the Beatles stopped touring in 1966 they were still the lovable Fab Four – they were rock’n’roll muppets. The Stones were menacing and sexy. A lot of that had to do with the kind of music they played, with Andrew Oldham, their manager, pushing their bad-boy image and Mick and Keith’s natural bolshiness. But much of it, too, had to do with Mick’s savvy on the business side. They never had a manager in the sense of a daddy figure like Brian Epstein telling them what to do – Andrew was younger than they were and more reckless. They weren’t dependent on Allen Klein or Andrew – they were their own gang. Also, you have to take into account that the Beatles were the pioneers and nobody had invented proper speakers yet. It was so early on that nothing had been sorted out yet.

      Mick might, very occasionally, put the Beatles down for their provincialism, which, if you’re from London and they’re from Liverpool, is a very natural reaction. But he’d never put their music down. Well, of ‘Yellow Submarine’ or those whimsical Beatle songs he might say, ‘Now that is a bit silly.’ I never thought so; I loved it, still do. Also something like ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, but these are obviously not the sort of things the Stones would be into.

      Anyway, when you listen to the Beatles carefully, and the John Lennon stuff in particular, they aren’t all sweetness and light. There’s an edge to their music; there’s a real soggy, dark, dirty bit in it that bleeds through. Their sweetness is very superficial. You hear the undercurrent in Paul’s bass playing, you hear it in John’s harmonies, you hear it in the call-and-response stuff. Maybe not the first couple of records, but when you get to Revolver and Rubber Soul, things begin to darken. And there’s something very weird about Sgt Pepper, too. It’s not at all what it appears to be. I’ve found subsequently that listening to Sgt Pepper can be a bit of an unsettling experience. Pet Sounds still comes across as very beatific, so innocent and yearning, whereas Sgt Pepper really doesn’t.

      Brian Epstein didn’t seem to get it that one of his jobs was to make sure that his precious boys were happy onstage and could hear each other and that they weren’t torn to pieces all the time by crazed fans. The most basic of needs, you know, just to make sure they weren’t being hounded day and night by cameras and reporters, with absolutely no time to themselves. These awful things kept happening and he wasn’t able to deal with them. That’s one of the reasons why Derek Taylor, their publicist, was so handy, because he was such a gentleman, and a hipster plus he had that ability to make people snap to attention. Invaluable, since Brian Jones would go missing in the middle of tours, recording sessions, negotiations, and nobody could find him. Epstein was a handy front for the Beatles in the beginning, because he seemed to be a gentleman – in appearance he was upper middle class. At first he was able to keep that together and where he did fall short he wasn’t that different from many of the early managers. It was new territory and they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

      Brian Epstein was so talented and had so many gifts and yet in many ways it was as if he really wasn’t paying attention. He fucked up. Beautifully. He was eaten up by what he called his ‘problem’. This was all long before it was cool to be gay. He was wrestling with real demons there, boy, as much if not more than our Andrew. But the difference was that Andrew seemed to enjoy his demons, let’s put it that way. Andrew embraced them, whereas poor Brian just beat himself into a bloody pulp СКАЧАТЬ