Why Between the Buttons, Not Aftermath, Might Be Brian Jones’s Best Showcase

Ask any Stones fan which album captures Brian Jones’s musical range best, and you’ll get a split. Aftermath (1966) is usually the default answer — it’s the first all-original LP and features his sitar on “Paint It Black” and marimba on “Under My Thumb.” But a quieter faction insists Between the Buttons (1967) is the real showcase. The argument isn’t about hit singles; it’s about how many hats Jones wore across one record.

On Between the Buttons, Jones plays a dizzying array of instruments: dulcimer on “Lady Jane,” recorder on “Ruby Tuesday,” marimba on “Cool, Calm & Collected,” saxophone on “Connection,” and even some vibraphone. It’s not just the variety — it’s that each part feels built around his playing, not layered on top of a guitar riff. Aftermath has showy moments, but many of Jones’s contributions there are one-dimensional (e.g., sitar on one track, marimba on another). Between the Buttons gives him four or five distinct textures across the album, making it feel like his most collaborative moment before things fell apart.

The catch: Between the Buttons was also the album where Jones’s drug use and alienation from the band were accelerating. So it’s bittersweet — the album that shows his peak as a multi-instrumentalist is also the one where he started