Brian Jones and Big Fat Brenda

One day a fat girl on the fringes of our little rebellious teenage crowd of losers, shoplifters and uncool hipsters announced she was dating Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.

"Oh, yeah, sure you are, and I'm dating Paul McCartney," said Elaine, the coolest one of the crowd, the one who taught me the sleight of hand in Russem's that netted the daisy ring that my boyfriend, Christian Billy, made me throw away in the parking lot of the church. But this was before that, before I met Billy and the Church and folk music.

The girl, was her name Brenda? said, in a very smug way for a fat girl, "Yes, I am too, and i can prove it."

"Prove it," challenged Elaine. And we all echoed, "Prove it, prove it."

How would fat Brenda even get to meet, let lone date Brian Jones, or any of the Rolling Stones, or any boy of interest at all for that matter? I wondered. I knew the Stones had been in Boston the previous week, and I had not been able to see them, because of no money and no ride, and so forth. But others went, including Elaine and fat Brenda, although they did not go together. They were not really friends, and Elaine had her eyes out for boyfriend prospects all the time, especially ones that lived out of town, and did not want someone like Brenda holding her back, someone fat and unhip and needy.

Brenda was on a roll, "Doncha want to know how I met him?" she demanded, petulantly. Sure, sure, but get to the good part, the proving part.

So she told us. She went to the concert with some older girls from another town. Head nodding and eyerolling from Elaine. Older girls taking Brenda anywhere? Unless it was her older, fatter sister Betsy, forced to take Brenda by their enormously fat mother, Bernice. Bernice was so fat, she waddled in the aisles of Karls' market, obliterating the shopping cart, which was inevitably piled high with frozen TV dinners, on top of big tubs of ice cream and gargantuan sides of beef, or so it seemed.

Brenda ignored our disbelief and told how she and the older girls went to the side door after the show to catch the Stones as they left.

"Everybody goes to the side door, stupid," interrupted Elaine. "All the cute girls from Boston go there and flash their panties for the stars; they're all groupies and Brian Jones could have his pick of any of them. Especially the Catholic girls. They put out the most. Everyone knows that."

Well, except for me. I was shocked to hear that anyone our age "put out" even for big British rock stars. But then, the logic of what Elaine was saying struck me. It wasn't the putting out, it was the fact that Brian Jones could have his pick of the cutest, sexiest, fastest girls in the whole Boston area, and would never in a million years choose fat Brenda, whose panties must be the size of one of her mother's two gallon tubs of ice cream.

But Brenda was undeterred by our skepticism and continued her tale of meeting Brian outside the Music Hall where he chose her over all the skinny, loose Catholic girls because he could tell she had "soul." Not for Brian the one night stand, the one hour, stand in the dressing room, before the girl's parents sent her older brothers scouting for her. No, Brenda would be a real girlfriend, someone he could talk to, could count on to wait for him between performance, be a soft landing after the grueling road trips.

Soft landing indeed. Maybe he liked them round and plump, fat. Fat Fat the Water Rat, we used to chant, and never knew it was a song by Dave Van Ronk. Only years later did I Google it. A word, a process not invented or dreamed of outside of unknown to us computer laboratories that even then were springing up along Highway 128.

So Brenda set up a little proof for her doubting Thomasina friends. We all gathered at Elaine's house one evening with Brenda, who had arranged for Brian to call us. Right on time, the phone rang and Elaine jumped for it before her mother could get the extension, "Got it Mom!" she yelled.

Then silence, as she listened, her eyes growing round, head nodding. "Here," she handed the phone to me, "Hello doll," said a distinctly British accent. Too British I thought. Fake.

"Who is this?" I blurted out.

"It's me, Brian," said the voice.

"No, really who is it?"

"I'm Brian, Brian bleeding Jones," getting impatient.

Girls were jostling for their turn, while Brenda looked annoyed. She grabbed the phone out of my hand. "HI Brian," she listened and giggled, and turned to give me a dirty look. "Elaine believes you," she said into the mouthpiece

Elaine was looking less sure by the second. "What do you think?" I whispered to her, as other hands snatched the phone away from Brenda's ear.

"It could be her cousin. He went to England last year."

"I think he sounded fake. I mean, Brian Jones and Brenda!?" I gestured toward her sprawled across Elaine's pink sateen bedspread like a beached whale.

"I dunno."

We never did find out if it was really Brian Jones that fall of 1965. There were no more phone calls but Brenda went on mysterious overnights and told her mother she was staying with Elaine, until in early 1966, coinciding with the end of the Stones' American tour, she said, "Brain's gone back to England. I guess he's gone," and sighed a very large sigh and asked, "Anyone want ice cream?"

In 1969 Brian Jones died, drowned in his swimming pool, one month after being replaced by Mick Taylor in the band. Or was his heart broken by a fat girl named Brenda in Methuen Massachusetts in the fall of 1965, and he just never got over it?

Folk Music and Me -a High School Romance

Folk Music

Everybody in my high school crowd was into folk music. We played guitars, and sang Bob Dylan tunes and Peter Paul and Mary tunes and Joan Baez tunes and my boyfriend Billy was obsessed with Tom Rush, who lived in Cambridge, so was close enough to go see a lot. We both liked Tom Rush, but he was in love with him, like a total crush. I was more in love with Cambridge itself and the Club 47 where we went to see Tom Rush, and later, Joni Mitchell, who was from Canada and a compete unknown, until Tom Rush brought her to the US, after introducing her songs to the Club 47 crowd over the past year. The Club 47 was dimly lit, with a tiny stage and really teeny tiny little tables with candles in old Chianti bottles, so the place always smelled of wax. We drank grenadine, a red drink made of pomegranates, which was the thing to drink while listening to folk music. They didn’t serve alcohol in the Club 47; at least not that I can remember, but then I was a Christian teenager from a dying mill town and what did I know?

My Birthday Surprise

On my birthday one year, Billy said he had a surprise for me; we were going somewhere for a great surprise. So excited, we headed off to the east and I tried to imagine what my surprise would be; this was great. Billy even brought clean clothes home from the shoe factory where he was working for the summer; all the kids worked in the factory during the summer between high school and college, so they’d have some money to start off with; and he changed in my kitchen.

We finally reached the destination, a cool looking club in the home of the Ipswich clam, Ipswich. I was sure we were seeing some famous act, Bob Dylan, or Pete Seeger, or maybe Peter Paul and Mary. One summer night we had gone to Canobie Lake Park, a really seedy amusement park in New Hampshire, and were thrilled to be entertained by Sonny and Cher singing I Got You Babe. My expectations were high.

So when we stood outside the ticket window of the small, out of the way club, and I saw that the headliner for the night was Tom Rush, I completely lost it. And not in a good way.

“Tom Rush is my birthday surprise!?” I hissed not under my breath at all, as we moved up the line toward the ticket window. “This isn’t any kind of surprise; we see Tom Rush all the time.” I whined. I stomped my feet. I was disappointed. Billy was embarrassed that his girlfriend was pitching a fit in front of the fans. I had never heard of “groupies" in those days, but that’s what Billy was, and he thought I was too, but I wasn’t. Tom Rush was all right and Joni Mitchell was even better, but not a birthday surprise. 

I can’t remember if we stayed for the show or not, but we didn’t stay together as a couple past the first trimester of college.

Hosting the Folkies

 

However this story is about something else, another time Billy and I went to a concert, a show, at the Club 47, where we usually saw Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell, or both together, the first time we saw Joni Mitchell, it was both together. This time we knew that Sandy and Jeanie Darlington were coming and we for some reason - what reason? who knows? That’s just something you say when you can’t remember what could have possessed you to do such a reckless thing - for some reason, we wrote to them and said we’d like to take them to dinner before the show. And they replied. They accepted the dinner invitation, so we had to do it; two high school students, going to dinner with big time folk musicians! We took them to some kind of hofbrau type place in Harvard Square, where the food was hearty and cheap, and Germanic if I recall. 

We tried to act cool and look older. And they were totally gracious, pretending they went to dinner with high school age fans all the time, acting like we knew what and who they were talking about, as they discussed their act and the other musicians who'd influenced them, asking us who we liked. They even let us pay for dinner without making the usual adult fuss or giving each other knowing looks over the bill.

Other than those details, which are seared on my brain, I don't remember a thing about the meal; or the concert afterward. This was my first encounter with famous people.

Except of course for Brian Jones. But that must wait for the next chapter.