27: Brian Jones (8 page)

Having temporarily moved into Redlands during this period, Brian had bought his own house in the country, Cotchford Farm, near Hartfield in Sussex. It was the former home of A.A. Milne, the writer of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, and it boasted a full-size swimming-pool in the garden. On 26 September Brian's drug case was heard in court, with both Mick and Keith attending to give him moral support. Although Brian was found guilty, he escaped with a fine and a severe warning. Mick was learning how to play the guitar, with lessons from Eric Clapton. Did he imagine there might soon be a position to fill in the Rolling Stones?

On 4 December, a launch party for the release of
Beggars Banquet
was held at Kensington's Gore Hotel. A seven-course Elizabethan banquet was served. After the meal, Mick picked up a foam custard pie and thrust it into Brian's face. Masochistically, Brian seemed to delight in this, as though it proved he was still part of the group.

Especially in the United States,
Beggars Banquet
was very well received critically, almost with a breath of relief that the Stones had weathered their various storms and were back on form. The return to their blues and rock roots served them well, as did Jimmy Miller's crisp and juicy production. ‘We were just coming out of
Satanic Majesties
. Mick was making movies, everything was on the point of dispersal. I had nicked Brian's old lady. It was a mess. And Jimmy pulled
Beggars Banquet
out of all that,' Keith told
Crawdaddy!
magazine in 1975.

In fact, several of the ten songs on the album were relatively nondescript and time shows the record to be patchy. However, it contained a number of bona fide classics, notably its opener, the infamous but fantastic ‘Sympathy for the Devil', ‘Street Fighting Man', inspired by Mick's participation in the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam War riot, and the extraordinary ‘Stray Cat Blues', almost an ode to paedophilia with its line ‘
I don't care if you're 15-years-old
'. Brian provided graceful slide guitar on the beautiful slow blues ‘No Expectations'. This was to be his last significant contribution to the group, like a reprise of his slide sound on Slim Harpo's ‘I'm a King Bee' on the group's first album.

However, the breadth of the album, coupled with Jimmy Miller's experience in producing such specifically ‘album' acts as Traffic and Spooky Tooth, marked
Beggars Banquet
as the Stones' first ‘rock' LP. They had successfully made the transition into the next stage of their career.

It was not an evolution in which Brian Jones would participate, however. On 30 May 1969 Mick Taylor, a guitarist with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, was invited to come to Olympic. The next day he recorded ‘Honky Tonk Women' with the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Miller adding the sound of the cowbell that gave the record its utterly distinctive sound. Brian had not been told about the recording session.

Early in the morning of Saturday 7 June Keith crashed his Mercedes eight miles from Redlands. Although the car was written off on the tree he hit, Keith was unhurt, but Anita broke a collarbone. The day after the crash, Keith and Mick, along with Charlie, drove down to the country. Already, at Mick's request, Alexis Korner had been down to Cotchford Farm to let Brian know how worried the group were about him. Now the three Stones themselves had gone down to see Brian at his new house. They discussed their differences over the direction of the group's music:, and Brian agreed he couldn't carry on in the Stones. ‘What we were trying to say was a very difficult thing,' Keith admitted to the American writer Stanley Boothe. ‘After all, Brian was the guy that kicked Stu out of the band. In a way it's like the script starts to take shape after this. And the guy that kicked Stu out of the band is the first one to crack.'
[27]

Brian was stepping out of the fray, it was announced, so the group could tour the USA. With two drug busts, Brian wouldn't have a chance of getting a US work visa. In this argument Mick was conveniently overlooking a pending drug case hanging over himself. Through Les Perrin, their publicist, Mick made a formal statement: ‘The only solution to our problem was for Brian to leave us. He wants to play music which is more his own rather than always playing ours. We have decided that it is best for him to be free to follow his own inclinations. We have parted on the best of terms. We will continue to be friends and we're certainly going to meet socially in future. There's no question of us breaking up a friendship. Friendships like ours just don't break up like that.'

*

Like many children of the age, Marianne Faithfull was big on throwing the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle. Concerned about Brian while she was with Mick one night, she threw three coins the requisite six times and came up with the hexagram whose explanation was: Death by Water. Both she and Mick felt extremely concerned by this prediction. At Mick's urging, Marianne threw the oracle once again. And came up with precisely the same reading. Mick's cynical facade fell away. Deeply concerned, he phoned Brian, who – touched by this attention – immediately suggested that Mick and Marianne come down to have dinner with him at Redlands, where he was briefly staying while building work was completed on his new home.

At Redlands they found Brian with Suki Poitier. Mick, however, suddenly changed from being the caring human being. When the meal that Brian and Suki had cooked was served up, he turned up his nose at it, confiding in Marianne that he couldn't eat ‘this shit'. He demanded to go out to a restaurant, ‘mortally offending Brian'. Brian, however, was in no state to go out, and Mick and Marianne left him and Suki at Redlands while they went out to eat.

Returning, they found Brian in a furious rage at their behaviour. This anger culminated in a physical fight between him and Mick which climaxed when Brian fell in the moat that ran around Redlands. Aghast, Mick leapt in after him, intent on saving Brian's life … to discover that the water was only three feet deep.

At least the stoned absurdity of the situation brought solace to Marianne: ‘I thought death by water must be a symbolic message. What a relief!'

Two weeks later, on 3 July 1969, Brian died by drowning.

*

At his new home of Cotchford Farm Brian Jones had insisted that no one could have any drugs with them. This was a new phase of his life and he wanted nothing about the place that might bring the police down on him again. He substituted his fondness for all manner of narcotics, however, with copious amounts of wine.

On the evening of Wednesday 2 July 1969, Brian was at Cotchford Farm with a new Swedish girlfriend, Anna Wohlin. Frank Thorogood, a builder who had been working on the house, was also present, along with his girlfriend Jenny Lawson. Towards midnight Brian and Thorogood, both of whom were quite drunk, decided to take a swim in the outdoor pool. Thorogood, who had had to help Brian onto the diving board, soon gave up swimming, pulled himself out of the pool, and returned to the house.

Just after midnight, he returned to the pool. Brian was lying on the bottom of the deep end, face down. After he had been pulled out, Anna Wohlin, a trained nurse, tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Meanwhile, Jenny Lawson called a doctor. By the time he arrived, 27-year-old Brian Jones was dead. A watery end for the Piscean, who for years had been slowly evaporating through the fire of the Leonine Mick Jagger and the Sagittarian Keith Richards.

For years rumours circulated that Brian had been murdered. Except that, as Keith put it to
Rolling Stone
two years later, who would have wanted to kill him? Wasn't it more a case, as he suggested, that no one was really looking after Brian? ‘Everyone knew what Brian was like, especially at a party. Maybe he did just go in for a swim and have an asthma attack. I never saw Brian have an attack although I know he was asthmatic. He was a good swimmer. He was a better swimmer than anybody else around me. He could dive off rocks straight into the sea. He was really easing back from the whole drugs thing. He wasn't hitting them like he had been, he wasn't hitting anything like he had. Maybe the combination of things, it's one of those things I just can't find out. We were completely shocked. He was a goddamn good swimmer and it's just very hard to believe he could have died in a swimming pool.'

The news flabbergasted the Rolling Stones. They had a free concert scheduled in London's Hyde Park the following Saturday, 5 July. On the evening of 3 July they were booked to appear on
Top of the Pops
, to perform ‘Honky Tonk Women'. In a dazed state they appeared on the television programme and afterwards went to their offices in Maddox Street. Te
arfully, Charlie suggested they should perform the Hyde Park show as a tribute to Brian.

*

Unusually, Mick had stage fright before the Hyde Park show and was suffering from psychosomatic laryngitis. ‘He told friends he was terrified of taking the stage for this concert,' said Bill.

With Brian no longer there to steal his sartorial thunder, however, Mick was certainly the centre of attention, a picture of androgyny. Above his white bell-bottoms, he was wearing what appeared to be a white frilly dress, especially designed for the occasion. Around his neck was a studded black leather choker. His face was made up with rouge, lipstick and eye-shadow. His jet-black hair was longer even than Marianne's. Was he a man? Was he a woman? Was he a transvestite? Would you let your son marry a Rolling Stone? Dangling down onto Mick's chest at a level with his hair was a wooden crucifix, a visible talisman of protection for this bi-sexual shaman, but a symbol that seemed at odds with Mick's first words. They were extraordinarily, incongruously banal and clearly covered a cascade of awkwardness and confusion: ‘We're gonna have a good time. All right?'

After a moment he addressed the matter of the moment: ‘Now listen … cool it for a minute. I really would like to say something about Brian. About how we feel about him just goin' when we didn't expect it.'

He announced that he was going to read something by Shelley. Mick's slurred enunciation made many of the audience at first believe it to be a poem by ‘Che', the revolutionary leader. Then he proceeded to read first stanza 39 and then stanza 52 from Shelley's
Adonaïs
:

And then:

Before the group could plunge into the opening riff of ‘Honky Tonk Women', several cardboard boxes were emptied into the air: hundreds of white butterflies rose above the stage. Yet it became apparent that, rather fittingly, this tribute to the memory of Brian Jones was somewhat flawed. The long, hot hours imprisoned in the cardboard boxes had led to the deaths of most of the butterflies, and only a small percentage escaped their prisons. For the entirety of their set, Mick and the Stones felt the corpses of desiccated butterflies scrunching beneath their feet as they moved about the stage. Thus did they enact their tribute to Brian, founder of the Rolling Stones.