by Paul Trynka
‘That’s easy to remember,’ said Hardy. ‘Like the Rolling Stone?’
‘I am the Rolling Stone,’ Brian replied.
Then the conversation took a different tack. Hardy was a bit of a music buff, and on his travels he’d bumped into other legendary guitarists such as Big Jim Sullivan and Hank Marvin. Soon they were chatting about Brian’s plans. ‘I want to get back to my roots,’ Brian told Hardy. This wasn’t a total surprise to Hardy, who’d heard the rumours of a falling-out, but he was surprised at how relaxed and open Brian sounded, coherent and full of energy. ‘I can’t wait to record a new album,’ he told Hardy. The painter told him he was looking forward to hearing it, then the pair wished each other well. Of course, Hardy never got to hear this album, and the two large paintings seemed to vanish as completely as Brian’s dreams. Over the decades since Brian’s death Hardy has made investigations with specialist dealers and auction houses in an attempt to discover if either of the two canvases has passed through their hands. It seems they have both disappeared, without a trace.
Brian knew he needed to make the break, the leap he’d first contemplated back in 1965. Of course, he’d realized the significance of Ry Cooder being asked down for sessions – not that Cooder would have joined the band: he was too obviously, as Keith puts it, ‘his own guy’. Of course, intimate as he was with the old blues scene, Brian knew very well that Mick had been chatting with John Mayall, who was forming a more acoustic line-up and therefore had a lead guitarist to spare – Mick Taylor, who rehearsed with the band from the middle of May 1969. Rather than confront the Stones, Brian probably took it out on Suki, who finally bailed around April. More isolated than ever, he was reduced to calling old friends like Zouzou. ‘It was really sad. He said, “They think I don’t know they are rehearsing.” They never told him he wasn’t a part of the Stones any more – but they’d taken on another musician! Mick had told him to fuck off – Mick didn’t care at all about him.’ Occasionally they’d talk about other subjects, and for an hour or so Brian would be lucid, talking quietly. Yet when it came to his old band ‘he was talking crazy, telling stories that made no sense. It was then I thought, This is not Brian any more, this is somebody who’s been destroyed.’
It was inevitable that rather than leave, as he should have done, Brian would wait for the blow to be delivered – by Mick, for he seemed to be the one he resented and feared, much more than Keith. The immediate imperative was money. Although there was always a possibility that with therapy, attention and an end to police harassment Brian would recover his powers, he would nevertheless have problems being admitted into the US, which would imperil future tours. Mick and Keith had just finished mixing Honky Tonk Women, with Mick Taylor on guitar, when they travelled down to see Brian late on the evening of Sunday, 8 June. Fearful there would be a fight, they took Charlie Watts along with them.
Keith Richards described the evening to Rolling Stone in 1971, telling Robert Greenfield that ‘He left [the band]. We went down to see him and he said, “I can’t do it again.” And we said, “We understand.”’ According to Keith, the trio told Brian they ‘didn’t have Mick Taylor waiting in the wings to bring on’ (Taylor had auditioned for the band three weeks earlier, on 14 May). But one element of Keith’s version is true: Brian agreed readily to leave the band, almost relieved at the resolution. A press release was hurriedly assembled, with Brian stating, ‘I no longer see eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting . . . we shall still remain friends. I love those fellows.’
Brian kept in fairly regular touch with the band over the next few weeks – Keith would later describe how Brian called every day, telling him how well the music was going. Brian had acquired a new girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, whom he’d met via Swedish photographer friend Jan Oloffson back in January during a party at the Revolution club. Anna moved in to Cotchford at the beginning of May, joining a small community including driver Tom Keylock, housekeeper Mary Hallett, gardener Mick Martin and a temporary guest, Frank Thorogood. Although in subsequent years many would speculate why Brian would hire this shadowy character, Thorogood had in fact been employed by the Rolling Stones office for around three years to repair and maintain the band’s various properties, including Redlands. He had started work at Cotchford the previous November, and was currently sleeping over in a flat above the garage, returning home to Wood Green most Wednesday nights and weekends.
This small crew would soon be the subject of hundreds of newspaper articles, and many books over the coming years, starting in 1983 with Nicholas Fitzgerald’s ‘inside story’. The JFK-style industry of conspiracy theories continues to this day. Intriguing and contradictory as they are, they have perpetuated the image of Brian Jones as a corpse, which is a scandal, for it has overshadowed and obscured the legacy of Brian Jones as a musician.
What’s beyond debate is that once out of the Stones, Brian was perilously low on friends. This wasn’t, as some imply, unique to him, for as a huge number of people agreed, compared to the Beatles in particular the Stones had always been surrounded by hangers-on – gangster types and drug dealers – rather than friends. While there was a modest rebound in Brian’s mental state, compounding his problems was the fact that he was reliant on Allen Klein for funds. Klein had always been tardy when it came to releasing money to the Stones, and Brian’s position had worsened as he was sidelined. There have been many reports that Mick offered Brian a continuing salary, generally quoted as a one-off payment of £100,000 plus an annual wage of £20,000, but there seems to be no evidence that Brian ever received the money.
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Brian did have one friend: the man who’d told him back in 1962 that blues was only niche music but who was happy to be proved wrong – and who believed, as his wife Bobbie points out, ‘that Brian had been treated horribly by the Stones. Brian was a very special, curious young man.’
Alexis Korner had kept busy over the years, partly owing to his avuncular nature, beautiful radio voice and unrivalled connections. Although his record sales were modest, he remained busy as a radio and TV presenter, and a new avenue for live shows looked to be opening up in Europe where audiences appreciated his current, eclectic take on blues. Korner had assembled a reworked group, the New Church, just a few months before, with a younger line-up including his own daughter, Sappho, and bassist Nick South, a friend of Korner’s son Nico. Korner and his wife drove over to see Brian around four or five times in June 1969; Korner also took his band over to play with Brian, and kept in constant touch with him on the phone.
Nick South had joined the veteran bandleader the previous year, and was just eighteen. He was thrilled to be in a bona fide rock star’s house, all dark wood corridors which contrasted with the bright Moroccan blues on the paintwork. He arrived with Korner, and spent four or five days at the house. Korner had filled him in on the initial plan: to involve Brian in a short string of shows they had scheduled in Europe, something low-key to get Brian back on the horse.
The Korner family themselves stayed longer. Despite Brian’s troubles, Korner’s twelve-year-old son Damian found the lost Stone a delight to be around: ‘such a lovely man. He was kind, considerate and thoughtful. If you don’t have children, you have to be a nice person to comfort them. Staying at the house was a problem for me, because it was haunted. But he had the capacity to make a young child who was feeling frightened feel OK.’
South, too, found Brian a pleasant host, but as a clear-eyed eighteen-year-old fixated on music he couldn’t help noticing a few details: crates of wine by the front door, Brian’s beer gut, and his bleary, distracted manner. Korner was ‘a brilliant diplomat’, South remembers, encouraging Brian, making him feel comfortable. Although he was also too much of a diplomat to say so at the time, Korner believed Brian’s ejection from the Stones was a shabby affair, says his wife and confidante Bobbie. ‘We really did think that, and that’s why we went to see him.’
Korner’s diplomacy continued
posthumously, too: he’d later comment that he’d quietly dropped the idea of Brian playing with the New Church in Europe because Brian would overshadow them. The truth was that the rehearsals with Brian were a mess, and there seemed no chance of getting it together for July, when the New Church were scheduled to hit the road. Sadder still, Brian had abandoned the instrument that was his companion as he looked for gigs around Cheltenham at the age of fifteen; the instrument on which he’d first unlocked the secrets of the blues; the instrument he’d brought with him to London – his compass. Despite repeated urgings, Brian simply wouldn’t play guitar. ‘That was the strange thing. I was, “Put the guitar on, Brian.” But he didn’t play guitar – he left that to Alexis,’ says South. ‘And he would come in and play for a bit and wander off. He was playing soprano sax at one point, but it wasn’t like a normal rehearsal where you’d sit down and play a song. It was more out there.’
Anna Wohlin described in her book The Murder of Brian Jones how his ‘inspiration flowed unstemmed during the months I spent with him’. Another writer mentions how Brian was ‘blind with enthusiasm for his [music] which had crystallised at last’. Sadly, there is no evidence to support such accounts. ‘Brian didn’t look too well,’ says South. ‘It would seem that he didn’t have a support structure, from what I noticed. It looked like he had a habit of a few bottles of wine a day, and was looking a bit bleary. I don’t want to be horrible . . . but I wouldn’t say he was alert, not really. I think he was surviving. Trying to cope.’ Korner and his band tried various songs in an attempt to get Brian to play along, ‘but he’d be trying other instruments, then he’d go off and disappear, or say he had to make a phone call. There was no direction or energy coming from him.’ Brian looked physically diminished. ‘He was on those asthma inhalers all the time,’ says Bobbie Korner. ‘He wasn’t in a good state.’
South’s sadness at Brian’s condition and his lack of ability to focus on his music was shared by the other musicians who went to see him. Korner asked his friend John Mayall to come down, saying that Brian was thinking about forming a new band and needed some encouragement. The pair sat down together, keeping it low-key. Mayall had only brought a harmonica with him, so this time Brian attempted to play guitar. ‘It wasn’t hanging,’ says Mayall. ‘His hands and his brain simply weren’t matching up. It was a shame.’ Mayall, like South, remembers that Brian was ‘very wobbly. Not really in the condition to be putting something together.’
Brian’s poor coordination and inability to focus weren’t necessarily permanent obstacles to his forming his own band; upon a return to full health he could well have done so, as some people believed. But Nick South, John Mayall and Bobbie Korner’s memories contradict practically every account of the run-up to Brian’s death, most of which culminate in a murder, which makes for a nice simple story, with cartoon villains. The reality is more complex, for Brian Jones was exploited by many people in his life and continued to be exploited in his death, even by those who profess to care for him.
The rehearsals weren’t totally joyless: Brian was good company, occasionally joking around with the Korners, playing Proud Mary loud on a tape deck while banging a tambourine and shouting, ‘We want Brian Jones!’ over the chorus. But Bobbie thought he seemed very isolated: ‘I didn’t see any builders around, and there was no sign of any girlfriend at all in the time we were there.’ She wondered how he could have founded a band like the Rolling Stones, whose career she had followed through the years, and be left so alone and vulnerable. Others agreed. Sam Cutler thought the Stones office bore some responsibility for his welfare and was horrified that this job was left to Tom Keylock. ‘Keylock had been sacked by Keith – I was in the office when it happened. Keith had bought some furniture, and Keylock put his own furniture on the bill. He was a low-life.’
Brian rehearsed with Korner and Mayall throughout much of June; and according to Anna Wohlin, the couple were blissfully happy, Brian buying his new girlfriend three cocker spaniel puppies to add to their existing menagerie: Luther, an Afghan hound, and Emily, another cocker. Anna remembered one niggling irritant throughout that month, namely the building work being performed by Frank Thorogood, who was generally described as an old friend of Tom Keylock, despite the lack of any evidence. Anna’s account, though hugely flawed, perhaps remains the best one there is, and she recalls ongoing disputes with Thorogood leading up to 2 July owing to problems with the shoddiness of his work. A few other people, notably Nicholas Fitzgerald, would later write that Brian had called him to complain that he was being watched, of strange lights in the trees. Such allegations would form the basis of yet another book describing the murder of Brian Jones. But then Fitzgerald also wrote that Brian was planning a band ‘with Jimi Hendrix. In the same outfit [with John Lennon]’, suggesting that dark forces wanted to prevent this supergroup from overshadowing the Stones. Those who actually worked with Hendrix in June 1969, like Eddie Kramer, describe such stories as ‘silly nonsense’.
Alexis Korner was the one outsider who spoke frequently with Brian. Again, some books suggest that Korner, too, thought there were dark forces at work. His wife Bobbie rejects this: ‘There were a lot of phone calls – Brian did feel underrated, got at, but I wouldn’t interpret that as anybody out to kill him. If there were plots, it was that he felt excluded.’
Wednesday, 2 July was a muggy, oppressive day, bad weather for someone who suffered from asthma. Frank Thorogood had been staying in the garage flat since the beginning of the week, and the previous night had been joined by a friend, Janet Lawson. Each evening, Thorogood joined Brian and Anna for dinner; they drank wine every night, usually the then obligatory Blue Nun, and then Brian would drink brandy and Thorogood would have vodka. Most evenings running up to the Wednesday night, two or three of them would go for a swim after their meal. The previous night, Anna had cried off, telling Brian the pool was too cold, so for the Wednesday evening he raised the thermostat to ninety degrees.
That day, Anna later stated, she and Brian got up around eleven and watched the tennis from Wimbledon on TV for most of the afternoon (Bill Wyman, in contrast, would later write that Brian had been in London in the morning and travelled back to Cotchford in a limo hired by the Stones office). They had a salad for lunch, another snack later, and watched TV that evening – probably Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In – sending Frank into the village to fetch more drinks. Around 10.15 Brian decided to go for a swim. Again Anna wasn’t keen, so Brian walked over to the flat to invite Janet and Frank to join him, loaded up a tray with drinks, then went back to change into his multicoloured swimming trunks.
Anna (who had been persuaded), Frank and Brian spent some time in the pool, the trio recounted later, although Janet stayed away as ‘I considered that Frank and Brian were in no fit condition to swim. I felt sufficiently strongly about this that I mentioned it to both the men.’ Later Janet went to the music room ‘and played a guitar’ while Anna continued swimming before eventually returning to the house and getting changed. Frank stayed in the pool with Brian for a while, then returned to the house himself, for a cigarette or to get a towel. A few minutes later, Janet looked out at the pool and ‘saw Brian. He was face down in the deep end. He was motionless and I sensed the worst straight away.’ Janet called to Anna and Frank, and eventually the trio managed to get Brian out of the water. Janet attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then left that task to Anna while she performed cardiac massage, for around fifteen minutes.
Brian died before midnight, yet his death is still widely reported as having occurred on 3 July. The reports surrounding the end of his life would be just as contradictory. The police investigation was cursory, and the industry that grew up around his death exploitative, with a remarkable reliance on deathbed confessions. In the years that followed, several witnesses, notably Anna Wohlin and Janet Lawson, reappeared to accuse Frank Thorogood of pushing Brian under the water, although neither had actually witnessed the deed. Tom Keylock, ludicrously
, claimed that Thorogood had made a deathbed confession to him. Everybody blamed somebody else – except for Brian’s real friends, who mostly blamed themselves. As Pete Townshend puts it, ‘I’ve become angry about a business in which people, especially the press, sneer if someone tries to save their skin by going into rehab after raising hell. Brian should have been sectioned into a mental hospital, not allowed to flounder around in a heated swimming pool taking downers. If I’m honest, I suppose, I was one of the friends who should have called the ambulance.’
Keith Altham was at Olympic, where Brian’s old band were working on Let It Bleed, when the Stones heard the news. There was shock, tears, and curiously contrasting reactions. Most of the tears came from Marianne, who was overwhelmed with grief. The strangest but most telling reaction was Mick’s. ‘[He] got quite angry about it,’ says Altham, ‘almost as if Brian had committed hara-kiri on purpose, cos the Stones were planning their Hyde Park concert later that week.’ Some of Mick’s anger was doubtless directed at the tragedy of the death, the waste of it all. Yet the chilling fact remains that the man who has often accused Brian Jones – the founder of the Rolling Stones, who gave Mick a job that would last for half a century – of being a self-centred, jealous type was upset because Brian’s death threatened to overshadow his big media event.
Many people suggest, quite rightly, that Brian deserved better from the authorities who investigated his death. It’s undeniable that he deserved much better from those authorities who harassed him until he was a broken man, particularly as that group included Detective Norman Pilcher, who colluded with the media, planted evidence and was finally convicted of perjury in November 1973. Most undeniable of all is that Brian deserved better from his friends.