Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  It was Charlie Watts, sitting dejectedly in his corner, who first mumbled the notion that would save the fans’ treat and also not waste the special souvenir number of the Evening Standard already in preparation, the six Granada TV crews already in transit, the stage outfit already chosen by Jagger at the Mr Fish boutique, and the expenditure already incurred from hiring such disparate items as potted palm trees, African tribal dancers and a military armoured personnel-carrier.

  ‘Couldn’t we do it as … sort of a memorial to Brian?’

  Cavalry officers from Knightsbridge Barracks, cantering in pairs round the outer sand track, were not, as usual, Hyde Park’s earliest visitors that summer Saturday morning. As the sun climbed over feathery horse chestnut trees and the dew glittered dry on new-cut grass, a few figures had already begun to stir in the encampment of sleeping-bags, strewn for several hundred yards all around a flimsy, low-lying wooden stage. Cavalry officers trotted on with averted eyes. Ducks, coots and black-faced Canada geese swooped in from their island colony and massed along the Serpentine edge, as if sensing better than usual pickings today.

  By mid-morning, every quarter of Swinging London had registered a noticeable drop in population. The Portobello Road antique fair, the boutiques and hypermarkets along Kensington High Street, the pubs of Chelsea, Fulham and Bayswater, all seemed unaccountably quiet. For the present, only taxi-drivers knew where the Saturday crowd had gone. Taxi-drivers, spinning along Bayswater Road, had seen what appeared, by midday, to be a great rug of semi-clad humanity stretching from Speaker’s Corner to the Serpentine.

  The six Granada TV film crews were also at work early, filming the first awakening of those who had slept in the park overnight to ensure favourable vantage points, and the diverse activities with which they beguiled the hours before the first warm-up band took the stage. Since Hyde Park numbers among its amenities a substantial police station with adjacent dog-kennels, those activities were of the most bucolic, innocent nature. Wild-haired, bare-midriffed figures of both sexes could be seen sitting in deckchairs, blowing soap bubbles, rowing in skiffs on the Serpentine, feeding the ducks or strolling along the paths in an intensifying heat haze. If love had perforce been confined to damp groundsheets in the pre-dawn hours, the peace was unquestionable. It would be estimated by police surveillance helicopters and other, unseen, crowd-monitoring devices that something like quarter of a million people were in Hyde Park, waiting for the Rolling Stones and, meanwhile, doing no damage whatever.

  Random interviews conducted by Granada among the 250,000 showed what a fund of goodwill had been created by the Stones’ gesture ‘… They make you feel you can have a good time and not worry …’ ‘They’re not like the Beatles, spending seven days in bed …’

  Another camera alighted on Tom Keylock, in pebble lenses and cherry-red cardigan, briefing the auxiliary stewards hired to protect the stage and its environs during the Stones’ performance. The stewards were Hell’s Angels, English imitators of California’s motorcycle terrorist-gangs, uniformed in black leather, chin-strapped Nazi helmets, spiked belts and steel-toed boots, their backs metal-studded with ceremonial names such as ‘Rocky X’, ‘Wild Child’ and ‘Wild Little Willie’. Keylock’s instructions – not fully audible – concerned the handling of that sworn Angel foe, the ‘’ippy’.

  The addition of hard rock to already combustible elements, hot sun, melting ice cream, sweltered hot-dog onions, shirt-sleeved policemen and scowling Hell’s Angels, could not discompose the prevailing atmosphere and conventions of an English garden fête. It was a mood perfectly expressed by the day’s compere, Sam Cutler, who spoke to the crowd like some hippy vicar, exhorting everyone to be cool and polite to each other, interspersing performances by King Crimson, Screw, the Battered Ornaments and Alexis Korner’s New Church band, with advice concerning cramp and heat stroke, appeals to respect the trees, and the names of lost children awaiting their parents at the Serpentine boat-house.

  The very Hell’s Angels – as their blank suburban faces and freshly shampooed hair might have indicated – bore as much similarity to their Californian cousins as tapioca does to paraquat. At one point, the stage-front press enclosure became over-full of supernumerary females – among them Suzy Creamcheese and Jagger’s soon-to-be inamorata, Marsha Hunt, fetchingly outfitted in white buckskin. ‘Clear ’em out,’ the chief Angel, ‘Wild Child’, ordered a swastika-capped lieutenant. ‘Do you want me to use force or something?’ the swastika-cap queried nervously.

  Yet another camera crew was in position to film Mick Jagger emerging from 48 Cheyne Walk and then join him in the limousine, with Marianne and Nicholas, as they drove a roundabout way from Chelsea to Mayfair and up a deserted back-double to the east of Hyde Park Corner. Jagger wore an apricot blouse split to the waist, and seemed excited in the way schoolboys are before a sports day or swimming gala. ‘Fantastic day, innit? Yeah … what, Nicholas? Is Charlie going to wave to you, Nicholas?’

  The other Stones had made their separate ways to a first base rendezvous, not at the obvious Park Lane Hilton Hotel but at its much less smart neighbour, the Londonderry. From their tenth-floor suite, they could see the outer perimeter of their audience and hear the vague thunder echoing over the treetops. Among the party was Allen Klein, apparently still persona grata, perched on his hands on a gimcrack table-top wearing – as always on such occasions – an expression of almost child-like wonderment.

  Shortly before 3 p.m. from the direction of Speakers’ Corner, a military armoured personnel-carrier, such as had recently come into use in earnest in Northern Ireland, could be seen, moving through the half-naked crowd and flattened deckchairs as cautiously as if this were the Belfast Falls Road. Inside, sprawled on mattresses, were the five Stones and their two official photographers, Michael Cooper and Spanish Tony Sanchez. On the day they needed it least, the Stones’ pre-performance security had never been better.

  From the armoured personnel-carrier they were decanted into a caravan trailer behind the stage, though still in full view of several hundred fans whom the Hell’s Angels had given up trying to intimidate. From time to time, Charlie Watts’s arm would appear from a window to pass out an apple or orange from the plentiful supplies within. The stage, meanwhile, had been cleared of all inferior equipment and personages, furnished with the Stones’ own giant amplifiers and embellished with a huge blow-up colour photograph of Brian Jones. Tom Keylock and his helpers set down several brown cardboard boxes, from which one telltale white butterfly floated free. Those near the stage-front, versed in such portents, saw its palm-leafy wings suddenly infiltrated by celebrities and their unreprovable children.

  Whatever the 250,000 people in Hyde Park expected of Mick Jagger that afternoon, none could have expected him to take the stage in lipstick, rouge and eye-shadow, and wearing a white, frilly garment which, for all the white vest and bell-bottoms visible beneath, still resembled nothing so much as a little girl’s party dress. Round his neck was a tight, brass-studded leather collar. On the place where his bust ought to have been there hung a stout wooden crucifix, as if his experiments with the occult had left him still not quite easy in his mind.

  Folding his hands in an Eastern sign of namaste, then blowing kisses from his fingertips, he greeted the quarter of a million in that now familiar drawl, lodged indeterminately between Dartford and Memphis.

  ‘We’re gonna have a good time – awright?’

  As the sound of agreement washed back like a slow wave, out to the distant archipelago of Kensington and Knightsbridge, Jagger brought his face close to the microphone, flipping back his chin-length wings of hair.

  ‘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 …’

  From behind his back, like a little girl revealing a surprise present, Jagger took a small calf-bound book. Holding it up in both hands, tossing back his hair once more, he began to read what perhaps half a dozen amon
g his quarter of a million listeners recognized as a stanza from Shelley’s Adonais.

  Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep –

  He hath awakened from the dream of life –

  ’Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep

  With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

  And in mad trance strike with our spirit’s knife.

  Invulnerable nothings! We decay

  Like corpses in a charnel. Fear and grief

  Convulse us and consume us day by day

  And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

  Out over the huge, restive expanse, the whole of Stanza 39 echoed in a voice as empty of artifice as it could remember to be and as close to public sincerity as it knew how. Jagger’s frills billowed gently in the breeze as he turned to a new page, marked by his finger, and Stanza 39 segued into Stanza 52:

  The One remains, the many change and pass.

  Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly.

  Time, like a dome of many-coloured glass

  Stains the white radiance of Eternity

  Until Death tramples it to fragments – Die!

  If thou would be that which thou doest seek.

  As Shelley’s words died away into deep silence, Tom Keylock and his helpers picked up the cardboard boxes and shook them outward, releasing several hundred white butterflies. It was afterwards claimed that most of the butterflies had been killed by confinement without an adequate air-supply. Enough survived to crowd the air above the crowded grass – and, later, to devastate gardens and allotments for several square miles around.

  The tribute to Brian had been grand, even gracious – but it was over. The last white butterfly unclipped the microphone. On the first chord of Honky Tonk Women, Jagger’s frilly wings jack-knifed into their own special kind of flight.

  For Mick Taylor, the next hour passed in a blur of heat and faces and bodies and their manifold odours; of noise both stupendously near and unreally distant, like sea-echoes in the ear of a shell. ‘I’m always asked if I was nervous, coming out to play with the Stones for the first time in front of 250,000 people. The honest answer is, I don’t know. I can’t remember. It was all over too quickly.’

  Granada film crews, shooting from the stage-front pit and from the crowded plantation in the wings, preserved for posterity what is, possibly, the Stones’ worst musical performance ever. They had not played together publicly for more than a year and, what with the trauma over Brian, had managed only one brief limbering-up session in the basement of the Beatles’ Apple house. It was, in short, one of those times when Keith Richard walked onstage looking as if he had just got out of bed, and when half, if not more, of every chord he played seemed still resolutely drugged to the eyeballs.

  Within the clumsy, ramshackle playing, visible only to a few thousand on the grass, and a few dozen more on the branches of surrounding trees, Mick Jagger gave a performance which galvanized even those nearly comatose with sun and grass and patchouli oil. At one astonishing moment, he dropped to his knees and spread his hair forward over a hand-mike supported between his thighs, closing his lips over the bulbous head. There in broad daylight, before 250,000 people, Mick Jagger seemed to be sucking himself off.

  On Monday July 7, as Jagger flew off to Australia and the last of the rubbish was being cleared from Hyde Park, the inquest on Brian Jones took place at East Grinstead coroner’s court. In the front row sat his father, the stiffly correct aeronautical engineer from Cheltenham. A distraught Anna Wohlin was escorted into the building by Frank Thorogood.

  Anna, Thorogood and his female friend Janet Lawson each told their story of the midnight swim at Cotchford Farm and explained their reason for leaving the poolside only minutes before Brian had drowned. Each relived the shock and panic as Thorogood hauled Brian from the warm, blue water, and the attempt to revive him which, despite the participation of Lawson the trained nurse, quickly proved to be hopeless.

  Dr Albert Sachs, consultant pathologist at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, gave the results of the post-mortem which had shown Brian’s liver to be twice normal size and in ‘an advanced state of fatty degeneration’. His heart also was distended far beyond normal proportions. Blood and urine tests had revealed a high alcohol content and ‘an amphetamine substance’, although there was no trace of barbiturates. The cause of death was drowning, ‘associated with alcohol, drugs and severe liver failure’.

  It was less than two years since another famous young Brian, the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, had died on another idyllically warm summer’s night from a similar lethal cocktail of stimulants and booze. As with Epstein, the instant public reaction was to assume Brian Jones had committed suicide. Certainly, there was enough circumstantial evidence for the inquest to glance at this possibility. He had just been fired from the band he had created, after years of increasing impotence and alienation within it. He was normally a strong swimmer who ought to have been able to keep afloat in heated water whatever his intake of drink and pills. But Lewis Jones took the stand to rebut firmly any idea that his son had been a prey to depression in the weeks before his death. Lewis testified that, when they had stayed with him in mid-May, Brian seemed happier than they had seen him in years.

  The only clue seemed to lie in the asthma Brian had had since childhood. Anna Wohlin said he had often needed his inhaler to help him breathe while he was in the pool. But she claimed that during her six weeks at Cotchford Farm she had never seen him suffer a bad attack. Lewis Jones said Brian had been acutely asthmatic as a small boy, but that he ‘seemed to have grown out of it’. Only his housekeeper, Mrs Hallett – who was not called to give evidence – seems to have heard the wheezing fit that came over him on the morning of his last day alive. The verdict of the coroner, Dr Angus Sommerville, was death by misadventure.

  Brian’s funeral took place on July 10 at the parish church only a few steps away from his parents’ home where he had once sung in the choir. The face of Lewis Jones seemed carved in granite as he steered his wife, Louisa, through a nightmare scrimmage of fans, photographers and enormous floral tributes of the type usually associated with dead Mafiosi. Behind Brian’s parents walked his younger sister, Barbara, the officiating clergy Canon Hugh Hopkins, Tom Keylock and Suki Poitier. Then came Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Spanish Tony Sanchez, Les Perrin and Linda Lawrence, that most persistent among Brian’s former girlfriends, carrying one of the two illegitimate sons he had mischievously named Julian.

  In his sermon Canon Hopkins attacked the godlessness and materialism of a world that had put a goldenly talented boy into a wooden box aged only twenty-six. He also asked the congregation to pray for Marianne Faithfull, another Sixties child currently at death’s door on the other side of the world. To sum up Brian there was not much the canon could say, knowing little of the good qualities that lay behind the ruthless ambition and self-destructive devilment. He could only attempt to comfort stone-faced Lewis Jones with an epitaph jointly culled from the New Testament parable of the prodigal son and the telegram which a beleaguered Rolling Stone had sent his parents a year earlier. ‘This, my son, was lost and is found again … Please don’t judge me too harshly …’

  One memory of their prodigal son’s last days would always remain with Lewis and Louisa Jones. It was of a moment during their visit to Cotchford Farm in May, 1969. Brian was rummaging through a kitchen drawer when he came across a photograph that almost seemed to paralyse him. Lewis remembered how he stared at the face in it – at her straw-blonde hair and double-daring smile – and murmured softly to himself, ‘Anita … Anita …’

  Over the next three decades, Brian’s death would create one of rock’s most lasting legends. He was in every way the perfect victim of his milieu, brilliant, wicked, charming and hopeless, the pattern that in future months would also send Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison prematurely into their coffins. Even to modern Stones fans not yet born when he died and unaware of his presence on their earl
y records, Brian’s reproachful drowned ghost still floats above the band every time they take the stage.

  The legend is that Brian did not die by accident or misadventure but was murdered or inadvertently killed by someone connected with the Stones, and that the facts were covered up afterwards to protect the band. Thirty years on, fresh revelations and ‘confessions’ from those involved would still be capable of sparking newspaper headlines and extensive reviews of the mystery all over again. Brian Jones was to become rock’s equivalent of John F. Kennedy.

  Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of his death some events took place that even then Keith Richard admitted, were ‘very weird’. Mary Hallett, Brian’s housekeeper, who lived nearby, remembered a flurry of comings and goings at Cotchford Farm by vehicles that belonged neither to his family nor the police. A number of bonfires were lit in the grounds, though this was nowhere near the season for burning leaves. ‘I didn’t like to go and see what was going on,’ Mrs Hallett remembered. ‘But a man who worked in the garden told me someone was out there burning Brian’s clothes.’

  Brian had been virtually broke, with debts of almost £200,000. His estate was valued at £33,784, a sum largely realized by the sale of Cotchford Farm. The promised pay-off from the Stones of £100,000, which so elated him on the day of his death, would have settled no more than half his debts. Some believe his home may have been plundered of its more desirable contents before they could be included in his estate. According to Shirley Arnold, his parents received suspiciously few of his possessions after his death. ‘I went down to see Mr and Mrs Jones in Cheltenham a few weeks later. Everything they’d been sent from Cotchford was spread out in their garage. They didn’t have all of Brian’s guitars, or his Mellotron.’

  The murder theory would bubble back to the surface every five years or so. Two former Stones insiders whom I interviewed for the first edition of this book told me unequivocally that Brian was murdered, but that they were too frightened to say any more. Both asked me not to quote them directly or give their names. In 1983, a former friend of Brian’s named Nicholas Fitzgerald came forward with new ‘evidence’ which, if true, would significantly have altered the coroner’s view. At the inquest it was said that police and emergency services arrived at Cotchford Farm only fifteen minutes after Brian was found floating in his pool. Fitzgerald, however, suggested that as much as two hours might have elapsed before help came – a period in which Brian was left to expire while unnamed guilty ones made their escape.