The Swashbuckling Woman Who Helped Invent The Rolling Stones
“Why do you want to talk about Brian?” Alexis Bloom, the co-director, with Svetlana Zill, of the new documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, asks when I raise the specter of Brian Jones, the ill-fated founder of The Rolling Stones and Pallenberg’s lover during the 60s heyday of the band. “They were young, they were on drugs, he was dazzling, he was a good musician. But he beat her. He beat everyone else. It’s like, she was going to stay around?”
For decades, the “cool kids” amongst Stones fans have fought for what they’ve felt was founder, l’enfant terrible and drug casualty Jones’ rightful place of pride in the history of the band’s rise, while others have wrung their hands over whether it was keyboardist, roadie and founding member Ian Stewart or Brian Epstein protégé and early manager Andrew Loog Oldham who was more deserving of the “6th Stone” moniker.
But maybe they’ve had it wrong all along.