PAUL SIMON: “Did you see that chick walking around backstage who looks like Brian Jones?
JOHN PHILLIPS: “Yeah, you mean the one with the lipstick and mascara and the frock that looks like a Moroccan caftan?”
PAUL SIMON: “Caftan, schmatte, what do I know? I’m from the City. I don’t know from caftans. You saw her too?”
JOHN PHILLIPS: “Oh yeah. That WAS Brian.”
ETHAN RUSSELL: “Brian, more than any of his contemporaries, seemed to have invented the rock and roll lifestyle. It was as if he had chosen to become the Crown Prince of Stonedness. This role required that Jones remain constantly high. Few would have disputed his position, even in California in the 1960s, where people were now setting daily records of higher and higher, just trying to catch up. It was Brian’s face, after all, squinting back at you from the cover of ‘High Tides and Green Grass.’ It was his face peering out of the mist on the cover of ‘Between the Buttons,’ announcing with his wicked leer that he was so high it was a miracle the camera could capture him at all. It was Brian who decided, in June 1967, to attend the Monterey Pop Festival. He arrived as the self-selected ambassador from the English Court of Rock to excitement and deference. Pictures of him at the festival show him wearing a long cape, its edges lined with fug, and festooned with a collection of pendants and Moroccan jewelry draped around his neck, his long, blond Prince Valiant hair framing his pale face. There, too, Jones had that Cheshire Cat look on his face, smiling as if he were about to fade away.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Brian Jones got dressed up and made sensational visitations to the Sunset Strip, where he was mobbed on the sidewalks and in the shops and clubs, a luminous exemplar of English pop and Swinging London’s saucy glamour. Intelligent, well-spoken, and affable when he wanted to be liked, the notoriously difficult Jones was on his best behavior and was obviously dazzled by Hollywood and its azure swimming pools, fin-tailed Cadillacs, and mansions up in the hills about the Strip. Brian moved around LA like a young god by night, in a pill-and-booze haze that could turn weird when he got really loaded.”
DAVID DALTON: “Brian wandered about like an iridescent ghost on the threshold of the drugs that sustained him.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Sometimes, late at night, flying on star quality Purple Haze LSD, Brian Jones would cruise the clubs by himself, blowing his harmonica with whatever band would let him sit in. Carousing with girls he picked up, Brian cut a glamorous, out-of-control swath across Hollywood… When a drunk started hassling him about his hair, Brian suddenly smashed his wineglass on the bar and slashed the drunk’s cheek to the bone.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Dressed variously in exquisite Chinese silk robes and a lustrous gold coat, dripping with Berber jewelry and a crystal swastika, blasted out of his mind on STP ( a newly formulated psychedelic speedball that lasted about three days), Brian floated around the festival’s backstage area with luminescent blond Nico on his arm, the two looking exactly alike.”
SHEILA KLEIN OLDHAM: “We were staying in this house in Monterey with the Mamas and the Papas, and Nico and Brian Jones came to stay. The maid had thrown all the grass out in the rubbish along with the scrambled eggs. I remember Nico picking tiny bits of grass out of the scrambled eggs. It was freezing. I thought it was going to be normal California and warm. Jimi Hendrix was there; he looked pretty freaked out as well. While we were staying with Lou Adler in Bel-Air, we hadn’t taken any acid and when we did we were given some really bad stuff. Only did it once. David Crosby said, ‘Oh, there’s this wonderful stuff that’s really organic and it’s a really gentle ride.’ I shared half with John Phillips and Andrew shared half with Michelle. And they immediately started throwing up and it was getting stronger and stronger and then we get this call saying, ‘Oops, we made a mistake; it’s one of a batch that Owsley made, fifty of which is STP.’ Some people had actually died from it.”
DAVE THOMPSON: “The cameras that caught the onstage action for the ‘Monterey Pop’ movie would also snatch a glimpse of Nico and Brian as they passed in stately procession through the crowd. It is only a glimpse, and the cameraman appears to have recognized the Stone alone. But it is a meaningful moment as well, a split second of beauty within the madness that was both artists’ lives.”
NICO: “Brian was like my little brother, and I had to stop him sometimes from destroying everything, including himself. At least that was one thing I could do that Anita Pallenberg couldn’t.”
NICO: “I tried to discuss poetry and music with Brian but he was really too stoned to talk about anything, and often so was I. He was too lazy to be a genuine artist, but he was gifted and could have made some original music. I kept saying that, but he called me a nag.”
NICO: “It was as though Brian had bought Biba up and put it in a valise. He would try everything on every day. He would annoy me with asking questions whether this went with these boots, this scarf matched this waistcoat, every little thing against everything else. I made fun of him but he said I was quite the same and why should a girl spend more time than a man? I said that I spent some time with simple things trying to get them correct, but he spent all his time with everything and in the end it still looked like he had thrown it on. This would provoke him, which I liked to do, frankly. I think he was trying to compensate with his clothes for his bad appearance. His body did not like a lot of drugs, and he had spots on his face.”
DENNIS HOPPER: “The vibe was beautiful. The music was fantastic. To me, that was the purest, most beautiful moment of the whole sixties trip. It seemed like everything had come to that moment. And if that could have continued, it really would have been Camelot."
MATT GREENWALD: “Monterey was the wedding, Woodstock the divorce… and Altamont the funeral.”
