(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 12 November 2025 18:00, UK
‘No Stones without Jones’ – that became the protesting slogan as The Rolling Stones tried to pick up and start again after firing Brian Jones, growing even louder when they simply kept on going after his death.
It all comes back to a debate of who really started the Stones. The official line is that it was Brian Jones. He was the one who put an ad in the papers looking for members, and he was the one who named the group. However, any biography of the band starts earlier than that, beginning instead with the friendship between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and their shared inspirations.
Most begin with Jagger and Richards’ shared love for blues, rather than with Jones’ mission to find more men for his group, suggesting that, really, the Stones had begun long before. Then, given that the band was quickly shaped into the two friends’ image with their songwriting and Jagger’s leadership, does the issue of founding really come into it?
It draws a dividing line between fans. Some argue that without Jones, the band as we know it today would never exist. However, others dare to suggest that had Jones survived, he would have only held them back, so they likely would exist in the same form today anyway.
It’s a delicate line of questioning given the tragedy of Jones’ death and the involvement of addiction. But the band themselves were never really all that delicate. Even in 2002, decades on from Jones’ death, Richards wasn’t shy about delivering some critique about their old bandmates’ skill.
“Brian was not a natural songwriter,” he said to Rolling Stone, adding, “His mind was too confused.”
In the artist’s final years, that definitely would have been the truth. Part of the reason why Jones had to be fired was that he’d become so lost to drugs and booze that he couldn’t even be trusted to play his instruments right. The skills and talent he’d honed were lost under the weight of his addictions, and so they had to call in a replacement in order to get anything done. If he couldn’t even play his guitar, there was no hope that any song he wrote would come out clear.
But for Richards, it was more than that. He simply didn’t think Jones was cut out to be a songwriter. “He could talk his head off, but he couldn’t write well. He was an interpreter more than a writer,” he said, claiming that he simply didn’t have the knack for it.
It’s half talent and half dedication, and to Richards, it was himself and Jagger who had both. “I stumbled into songwriting; so did Mick. You know the story: Andrew Oldham locked us in the kitchen and forced us to do it,” he said, adding, “You either find you’ve got it or not.” To him, Brian Jones did not.
However, what Jones did have a knack for was riffs and melodies. For so many of their early hits, the foundation of the song first came from an idea the guitarist had, like the riff of ‘Paint It Black’. So while Richards might have a point that Jones didn’t have the words, he did have songwriting skills in a different lane, and that can’t be discredited.
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