Brian Jones Movies

Best known as the co-founder and original leader of the Rolling Stones, guitarist Brian Jones enjoyed a brief, enigmatic career in film music. Born in Cheltenham in 1942, Jones was raised with exposure to a wide variety of music, including classical, but gravitated toward American blues, and it was as a guitarist, harmonica player, and singer that he first began performing. This ultimately led to his co-founding the Rolling Stones with singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards -- by 1964, they had taken the leadership of the band away from him, growing out of their emergence as a formidable songwriting team and Jagger's charismatic presence as lead vocalist, and the group's move away from the hardcore blues that was Jones' first love. During the mid-1960s, in tandem with the group's increasing experimentation with more complex forms of pop music and various controlled substances, Jones's musical range blossomed as well -- in addition to the guitar and the harmonica, he now added such exotic instruments as the marimbas, sitar, dulcimer, harpsichord, mellotron, and flute to the group's palette.

Despite his playing skills and his fascination with myriad instruments and sounds, Jones never became a proper songwriter, at least in any pop/rock context. Indeed, the only extant example of Jones's work as a composer was his soundtrack for the 1966 film Mord Und Totschlag, directed by Volker Schlondorff at the outset of the latter's commercial career. The movie starred Jones's then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and as he was one of the most celebrated pop-music icons of his day, his willingness to provide a score seemed an appealing prospect to all concerned -- Paul McCartney of the Beatles had embarked on a similar undertaking with the comedy The Family Way that same year, and if that score hadn't exactly set crowds humming its tunes, the musician's involvement had greatly boosted the movie's exposure and audience.

The resulting music for Mord Und Totschlag mixed Jones's longtime fixation on American roots music with elements of psychedelia and experimental sounds. Among the musicians playing on that soundtrack, in addition to Jones himself (on everything from guitar to Jew's harp to electronic keyboards) were Jimmy Page, Nicky Hopkins, and Kenney Jones. There never was a soundtrack album release, and the music, like the movie -- which was issued in dubbed form in England and America as A Degree of Murder, and was available in television syndication packages from Universal into the 1980s -- has remained a true obscurity in the orbit of the Rolling Stones. Jones's personal and professional life spiraled down in the three years following the film's release, owing to various chemical dependencies and indulgences and their attendant emotional consequences, and he never did another soundtrack. In June of 1969 he was asked to leave the Rolling Stones, and a month later he was found dead in his swimming pool, an apparent death-by-misadventure at the age of 27. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi