“I grabbed Brian Jones’s ankle once,” says Patti Smith to her interviewer Thurston Moore, late one night in a Massachusetts hotel room. “It was in 1964 or 1965 . . . Brian was sitting on the floor playing a sitar.” The Rolling Stones were blasting through a set in a school auditorium and the girls behind the teenage Patti were growing restless. “They pushed me right on the stage and then I felt myself going under and I was gonna be trampled and, just out of total desperation, I reached up and grabbed the first thing I saw – and it was Brian Jones’s ankle . . . He looked at me. And I looked at him. And he smiled. He just smiled at me. My Brian Jones story.”
You can just about imagine grabbing the ankle of most rock stars – even one as heavily mythologised as Brian Jones. Dylan may kick you but, forced to choose between sharp jabs from his pointy shoes and being trampled on by high-school girls, you would grab his ankle. You would grab Prince’s ankle. But David Bowie’s – who could catch it? He seemed perpetually in flight.
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