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The Rolling Stones · S1 E3
Brian Jones
A middle-class kid with a genius ear, a restless soul, and a talent for self-destruction. He founds the band, names it after a Muddy Waters song, and books their first gig
Spring 1962, a small ad appears in Jazz News magazine. A guitarist in Cheltenham is looking for musicians to form an R&B group, and his plan is to bring Chicago blues to London.
The Rolling Stones, It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It). Brian Jones started this band for one reason: he loved the music. Before the fame, the money, the chaos, it was just a kid from Cheltenham who wanted to play blues.
The Boy from Cheltenham
Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones grows up in Cheltenham, a picture-postcard spa town in the Cotswolds. His father is an aeronautical engineer, his mother a piano teacher who gives Brian his first music lessons before he can read. By his mid-teens he has mastered clarinet, saxophone, and guitar, but the instrument that changes everything is a slide made from a glass bottleneck.
Sources
Wyman, Bill. "Stone Alone." Viking, 1990.
Norman, Philip. "The Stones." Elm Tree Books, 1984.
“Brian started the band. He chose the name, he found the gigs, he was the bandleader. No question about it.”
— Keith Richards, in Richards, Keith. "Life." Little, Brown and Company, 2010
TAP TO REVEAL: Where did the name "The Rolling Stones" come from?
The Marquee Jazz Club
165 Oxford Street, London W1. The jazz club where the Rollin' Stones played their first ever gig on July 12, 1962.
Little Red Rooster -- The Rolling Stones
A Willie Dixon blues song that Brian insisted the Stones release as a single in November 1964. It went to number one in the UK: a straight Chicago blues at the top of the British charts. This was Brian's dream made real, the music he loved, played by the band he founded, heard by everyone.
Brian Jones: The File
Who played drums at the very first Rolling Stones gig at the Marquee Club in July 1962?
Brian has the band, the name, and the first gig. But there is a pianist in the room named Ian Stewart who plays better than anyone, and the manager about to walk through the door will cut him from the lineup for the most brutal reason imaginable.
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