How Brian Jones’s Pre-Stones Band the Mastersounds Shaped the Rolling Stones’ First Lineup

Before there was any Rolling Stones, Brian Jones was already running his own band. In early 1962, he placed an ad in Jazz News calling for musicians to form a rhythm and blues group. The resulting outfit, which went by names like the Mastersounds and the Blue Moon Boys, was a rotating cast of local jazz and blues players. That short-lived project didn’t go anywhere, but it gave Jones the blueprint for what he wanted: a hard-driving R&B band built around a sharp rhythm section and a blues harp or sax.

When Jones met Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at the Ealing Club, it wasn’t luck—he was actively scouting. He had already been jamming with guitarist Geoff Bradford and singer Paul Jones (no relation), but found them too polished or too flaky. After hearing Jagger sing with Richards’s backup, Jones decided to bring them into his orbit. The early Stones lineup—Jones, Jagger, Richards, pianist Ian Stewart, and drummer Tony Chapman—was essentially a reworked version of the Mastersounds with younger, hungrier players. Jones’s insistence on a raw, authentic Chicago blues sound, honed during those Mastersounds sessions, directly led him to drop less committed members like Bradford and to recruit a full-time drummer who could swing (Charlie Watts came later, after a detour through Mick Avory). So the initial lineup wasn’t just a loose jam; it was Jones’s calculated attempt to rebuild his earlier group with musicians who shared his fanatical devotion to the blues.