A portrait of the life and death of Brian Jones, the founder of The Rolling Stones, rejects traditional stereotypes of an addicted and womanizing rock star for the often startling confidences of those who knew him best. National ad/promo. As founder of the Rolling Stones, Jones was a charismatic performer and perhaps the group's best musician. Although the author's assertion in the preface that "Arguably Brian Jones was the most exciting man of one of the most exciting decades of living memory" overstates Jones's impact on the 1960s, he was certainly an influential innovator in popular music. When his relationship with other members of the band deteriorated and he was unable to tour abroad because of convictions for drug use, Jones quit the band in 1969. His death by drowning in his swimming pool later that year has never been adequately explained. This book offers a more thorough investigation of Jones's life and the events surrounding his death than Mandy Aftel's Death of a Rolling Stone: The Brian Jones Story ( LJ 9/1/82). Recommended for larger public libraries. - Tim LaBorie, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Gossipy account of the rise and fall of Brian Jones, founder of the Rolling Stones. Jackson (a British freelance writer) tells us that though Jones was a loner as a child, his natural proclivity for music expressed itself early on and, by age 12, he was ``already a brilliant guitarist.'' Jones took up the saxophone to emulate his hero, jazz great Charlie Parker, and became enamored of blues and R&B. By age 14, he'd fathered his first child--an ominous sign of troubles ahead. Settling in swinging London in his late teens, Jones soon became a central part of the exploding blues scene and, from among hangers-on, began to assemble the band that would become the Stones. The group's rapid rise to the top--followed by increased tension as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards tried to edge the unreliable Jones out of the band--is chronicled here, along with Jones's fatal attraction to beautiful but self-centered model Anita Pallenberg (who would eventually dump him, when his weakened position in the band became apparent, for the more powerful Richards). Jones's brutal ouster from the band, as well as the mysteries surrounding his death by drowning in his own swimming pool, are recounted in all their gory detail. But Jackson inflates Jones's importance to the Stones through incessant hero worship (he was ``undoubtedly the most talented member of the band,'' she assures us more than once). Moreover, although Jones's contributions to the band's recordings are discussed briefly, Jackson's repetition of age-old mistakes (such as referring to the Robert Johnson/Elmore James classic ``Dust My Broom'' as ``Dust My Blues'') makes her musical analysis the weakest part of the book, while her fanzine-style writing (``His tantalizing body language whipped girlish screams into howling hysteria'') makes for some rough going. An engrossing story, lamely told. (Thirty-four b&w photographs) (For a look at another Stone, see Davin Seay's Mick Jagger, reviewed below.) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.