Beatles vs. Stones Read Online Free PDF Page A

become consumed with improvisational jazz (especially as practiced by Charlie Parker).“He started to rebel against everything—mainly me,” said Lewis. When Brian was confronted about his disorderly behavior at school, which led to at least two suspensions, his father lamented that Brian was “terribly logical about it all.” “You want me to do the things you did,” Brian explained. “But I can’t be like you. I have to live my own life”—a life that in short order wouldmean leaving his studies behind, drifting about, flirting with poverty, and evading adult responsibilities.
    In 1959, when Jones was seventeen, he was expelled from Cheltenham Grammar School after his fourteen-year-old girlfriend became pregnant and declined to have the abortion that Brian had assiduously lobbied for. This was the first of at least several (some have claimed five ) “illegitimate” children. The following year, a one-night stand led to another woman’s pregnancy. Then in 1961, after making his way through several low-wage vocations (shop assistant, deliverer of coal, bus conductor, apprentice at the local housing office), Brian made a young woman named Pat Andrews pregnant. She likewise carried the baby, apparently with the understanding that, given the mores of the time, as well as Brian’s personal reassurances, he would soon marry her.
    He did not. Instead, he beat his way to London to work in an optician’s office, forcing Ms. Andrews to track him down, baby and belongings in tow, and demand that he take them in. It would be difficult to describe the shame this must have brought upon Brian’s family. After the optician job, Jones worked at a department store from which he was fired for theft. Later he would leave the employ of a record store, and then a newsstand, after committing the same offense at both places.“Brian was totally dishonest,” remembered Ian Stewart, the Stones’ regular keyboardist.
    When the opportunity arose, he could also be a world-class bully. Keith Richards recalled how Brian used to torment their insecure, sycophantic roommate Dick Hattrell:
Within two weeks Brian took him for every penny, and he conned Dick into buying him this whole new Harmony electric guitar, having his amp fixed and getting him a whole new set of harmonicas. Dick would do anything Brian said. It was freezing and the worst winter. Brian would say, “Give me your overcoat,” and he gave Brian his army overcoat. “Give Keith the sweater,” so I put the sweater on. “Now you walk twenty yards behind us,” and we’d walk off to the local Wimpy Bar. “Stay there. You can’t come in. Give us £2.” Dick would stand outside this hamburger joint, freezing. Brian would invite Dick to lunch and the three of us would go to what we considered a really good restaurant, and have a hot meal, which nobody could afford, of course! Then we’d just walk out and leave Dick with the bill.
    One winter evening, Brian even locked Hattrell out of the house, forcing him to pound on the front door for hours, begging to be let back in, “by which time he’d turned blue.” Worst of all, according to bandmate Bill Wyman,“One night Brian punched [Pat Andrews] in the face and she ran home with a black eye, crying. A few hours later, Brian, the true romantic, arrived outside her home, throwing pebbles up at her window and shouting his apologies. They were quickly reunited.”
    Philip Norman, the Stones’ best biographer, observed that when“Brian fixed anyone with his big baby eyes and spoke in his soft, lisping, well-brought-up voice, it was impossible to imagine the chaos accumulating behind him.” Someone else called him a“Botticelli angel with a cruel streak.” His genteel background and, at times, shy and quiet persona masked an incredible capacity for harming others. In its own way, Jones’s softness must have been just as disarming as Lennon’s impish humor and quick wit. Though rarely as outwardly aggressive as Lennon, he