Chapter One
The Rollin' Stones
Yes, I will be famous. No, I won't make thirty.
—Brian Jones
I Will Be Famous
It would later seem ironic to many that Brian Jones, Wild Man of the Sixties,
came from Cheltenham, the old Regency-era spa town in the Cotswolds whose
springs had dried up long ago. Cheltenham was known for its bourgeois conformity
and legions of the retired. It was a hotbed of rest. Cheltenham Ladies College
was the most proper girls' school in Britain. But there was another side to
Cheltenham that owed a lot to the American air bases nearby. The town had five
movie theaters, ballrooms where bands played, coffee bars for hanging out. A
clever boy like Brian could easily get an idea of the world waiting beyond the
provincial beauty of the West Country.
Lewis Brian Hopkins-Jones was born on a winter Saturday night in 1942, during
the dark days of the war. Father worked in the aircraft industry, mother played
and taught the piano. Pure Welsh stock on both sides—a race of singers,
musicians, poets despised by the English for being the descendants of the true
Britons they displaced ... read full excerpt from Old Gods, Almost Dead ebook
