Brian Jones's Slide on 'No Expectations': The Last Great Performance Before the Fall

By 1968, Brian Jones was barely functioning—drugs, paranoia, and a court date for cannabis possession had reduced his role in the band. But he showed up for the Beggars Banquet sessions with a steel guitar, not his usual multi-instrumental arsenal, and laid down the slide part for “No Expectations” in what most biographers consider his final genuinely great contribution. The track sounds like slow-motion grief because it was: Jones was already being pushed out, and the lonesome, weeping slide mirrors a man watching his own band move on without him.

He’d taught himself slide on acoustic as a teenager, but here he played a National steel guitar—his fingers too swollen from prescription pills to manage standard fretting. The take is so raw that producer Jimmy Miller kept it as the first thing recorded after Keith Richards’s acoustic rhythm. Jones’s fills are deliberately simple, almost hesitant, as if each note costs him something. He doesn’t try to dazzle; he just hangs the melody like a wet coat over a chair.

By then, Jones’s original role as the band’s stylistic magnet—bringing in blues purism, sitar, dulcimer, marimbas—had evaporated. He’d stopped contributing ideas for Beggars Banquet beyond this one guitar part and some harmonica on “Dear Doctor.” The recording crew remembers him lying on the control room floor between takes, barely able to stand. Keith Richards later said that when he heard that slide track back, he knew Jones was “playing his own funeral.” It was the last time he’d play on a Rolling Stones record before being found dead in his swimming pool three months later.