BY LATE 1969, the Stones rediscovered and reasserted their in-studio recording chops with the widely acclaimed and very well-received Beggars Banquet album. But what the Rock and Roll Circus undeniably proved was that the group’s live-performance skills were very, very rusty. For reasons of money, pride, and self-respect, 1969 was the year that something had to be done about it, but there were many obstacles in the way. First and foremost among them was the continuing disinterest, disintegration, and, eventually, the death of Brian Jones. Jones’s personal struggles were a factor during the recording of Beggars Banquet, and it became clear that it was going to be an even bigger factor during the Let It Bleed sessions. Mick expressed his frustration and dissatisfaction to Roy Carr:
MICK JAGGER: We weren’t playing, that was the thing, but we were recording a lot of good material on our own . . . the four of us Keith, Bill, Charlie, and myself. Brian played on some of Beggars Banquet . . . not all of it. Let’s say he was helpful. I don’t know exactly how many tracks he played on but that was his last album. We did Let It Bleed without him. But Brian wasn’t around towards the end. What we didn’t like was that we wanted to play again on stage and Brian wasn’t in any condition to play. He couldn’t play. He was far too fucked-up in his mind to play.
In June 1968, Mick, Keith, and Charlie informed Brian Jones that the band was going to move on without him.
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: It is sad and I think he felt life had gone the wrong way for him because originally it had been his band and they took it over. But he was drinking and drugging and it wasn’t doing him any good. I think what happened partly, he couldn’t play well anymore. He’d been to north Africa a few months before to record an album with a Joujouka tribe. He’d broken his wrist. So he couldn’t play; he couldn’t finger the way he was used to doing . . . And that depressed him and then he drank and that depressed him. His emotional constitution wasn’t strong anyway.
Charlie’s overview on “The Life of Brian” is even more personal:
CHARLIE WATTS: For a long time he was the most popular person in the band, fan letters and all that, for what it’s worth. It was Brian, Brian, Brian. Then it became Brian and Mick. Then it became Mick and Brian. Then it became Mick, and Keith and Brian. And Brian slowly faded off and his ability to play on many, many instruments, which was his best thing, to be able to pick up any instrument that was lying around in a studio and perform on it, not as an expert but to use it in a recording, like a harp. All those early albums was Brian using marimbas and sitar and anything. He would just pick it up and play it and it made a track different, did something to another song. He just got worse . . . I think the whole band as a whole got better performing on their instruments and Brian didn’t get better, he stayed where he was. And eventually he wasn’t where he should have been and it did create a lot of conflicts.
They were conflicts that had to be addressed. The great American guitar virtuoso Ry Cooder was brought in to work on the Let It Bleed sessions, and later described Brian as a phased-out, sad character who spent most of his time in the corner of the studio sleeping or crying! Others insist that the Stones had given Brian every benefit of the doubt for a very long time, but that their patience had worn thin. They ALL wanted to get back out on the road, yet realized that Brian’s deteriorating mental and physical condition would certainly make that impossible just as it had in 1968. And even if he were able to rally, he might not get the proper paperwork to reenter the United States because of his drug arrests. It all came to a head on June 9, 1969, when Mick, Keith, and Charlie paid an anticlimactic visit to Brian’s home to work out the details of his departure from the Rolling Stones. A press release went out the next day with this quote from Brian: “I no longer see eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting. The Stones’ music is not to my taste any more . . . I have a desire to play my own brand of music rather than that of others. We had a friendly meeting . . . I love those fellows.”
British blues icon John Mayall offered us this sad memory:
JOHN MAYALL: The week before [Brian’s death], Alexis Korner and I both had been to Brian’s house and talked to him about putting a band together of his own that never came to pass unfortunately . . . He was definitely a casualty. By the time we met with him near the end of his life, the damage had already been done. The coordination between his right hand and his left hand was definitely off. His rhythm was all over the place. It was one of the side effects of the drugs, all very sad. The drugs and all that were going around really took their toll. It’s a tragedy that was all too familiar at that time with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison. It was that time where the drugs really took over.
Eddie Kramer recalls Jones dropping by the studio when he was working with Jimi Hendrix on Are You Experienced.
EDDIE KRAMER: He adored Jimi. Brian used to come over to Jimi’s sessions. You could hear him on the tape. I have a multitrack of when we’re cutting “All Along the Watchtower.” You can actually hear him as he stumbles into the control room and he stumbles out to the studio. He’s trying to play the piano and Jimi says, “No, no, no.” Jimi would wink at me. “See if you can get him out of here.” Because he was out of his mind . . . He would come into the control room and collapse in a heap . . .
We’ve heard all our lives that a rolling stone gathers no moss, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that a solution to the “Jones problem” was already in the works well before the June 9 confrontation. The mental decision to ease Brian out of the group was probably made in May. Eric Clapton was always a possible candidate, but at the time he was completely wrapped up in his newly formed “supergroup” Blind Faith with Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech.
Young Ron Wood was another possibility after he was let go by the Jeff Beck Group, but he wasn’t available for long, opting to join the Small Faces soon after. Ron had a passing acquaintance with the Stones and recalled a visit with them in 1968:
RON WOOD: I went to Olympic Studios in London when they were doing Beggars Banquet and I saw little odds and ends going down and I was very impressed then. And I met Brian then. Nicky Hopkins introduced me to Brian and I used to think he was a very nice character, very outlandish; he was wearing all these brilliant colored clothes and floppy hats, feather boas, and I used to think, “Christ this guy gets away with murder.” He was a great character.
Would Wood have joined the Rolling Stones? We’ll never know. Here’s why:
RON WOOD: I must put in another bit here . . . Before the Small Faces started with Rod and myself in the lineup, Ronnie Lane very nicely said no to the Stones before they got Mick Taylor, because apparently they’d asked me then but I knew nothing about it. Ronnie Lane said, “No, Ronnie won’t do it. He’s gonna stay with us.”
That was thanks to Ian Stewart, occasional member of the Stones, and he’s like the old sixth Stone going back many years. He said, “Why don’t you get this guy Ronnie Wood. Let’s give him a try.” So he rang up Laney [who] said no on my behalf. I don’t blame him. I had a fantastic time with the Faces. And chronologically everything took its own form and shape.
Okay. No Clapton and no Ron Wood. Where would the Stones find their replacement for Brian Jones? John Mayall told us:
JOHN MAYALL: Mick Jagger called me up. He reckoned if there was a guitar player around, I’d know who to recommend. I recommended Mick Taylor. This was before the tragic death of Brian Jones. Mick was talking to the other Mick and they got something primed for the future . . . Mick actually sat in with us one night when Eric [Clapton] didn’t show up. That was the first time I got the opportunity to hear him and it was pretty special that he had a handle on all the tunes we were playing at that time. He was obviously someone who was on the horizon, so to speak, and fortunately I was able to get a hold of him after Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood left. He joined the band and of course he’s still playing. He’s part of the Bluesbreakers history. He always seems to crop up over the years. It’s always a pleasure to play with him. Mick’s one of the all-time greats.
ALAN CLAYSON: He had a very supportive family. His uncle took him to see Bill Haley and the Comets in 1958. They bought him his first guitar, then an electric guitar. At this time, you have to understand that a boy saying he wanted to be a rock and roller was the equivalent of a girl saying she wanted to be a stripper.
Mick Jagger made the initial offer (one hundred fifty pounds per week). Mick Taylor accepted. And Keith Richards made the necessary adjustment from Brian to the new Mick.
KEITH RICHARDS: I’d been working with Brian for a long time. At the same time, Brian had gone off the guitar for a long period of time. He wasn’t interested in it. In sessions throughout most of the ’60s, I just overdubbed the guitar. Brian was more interested in playing other instruments that were around, like the marimbas on “Under My Thumb” or harp on something else. He was one of those guys who could just pick up an instrument and by the time we’d worked out the song, he’d have worked out how to play this instrument enough to make the record.
So I had to adjust in a way even in the latter part of Brian being in the band to doing virtually all the guitar work on record. With Mick Taylor, this was somebody who was a definite lead-guitar player. It was very easy right from the beginning. Number one because he’s such a master guitar player with what he does. It’s very easy for me to stick to my role of writing songs and playing chord. As long as I accepted my role of laying down the rhythm, then Mick and I would work very well together.
Taylor’s first task as a Stone was to overdub the guitar part on the hot new single “Honky Tonk Women.” Then there was the matter of how the new member would be presented to the world. The answer to that one actually came on June 8 when Mick Jagger attended a free Pink Floyd concert in Hyde Park where he met another soon-to-be very important person in the Stones’ universe. His name was Sam Cutler and he was the production supervisor, stage manager, and MC of the event, and he suggested to Mick backstage that the Stones do a Hyde Park free concert as well. Mick was taken with the idea of launching the new single and the new guitarist in such a low-risk, high-profile manner. The date chosen was Saturday, July 5, 1969. The rest of June was spent recording, rehearsing, and preparing for the big day. But no one was quite prepared for the news headline that was flashed around the world on July 3: BRIAN JONES OF THE STONES FOUND DEAD.
Many books have been written exclusively about this tragedy. This isn’t one of them. We will offer a few first person accounts to illustrate the scope of the mystery, and then move on. Sam Cutler’s reflection is a concise recap of the events:
SAM CUTLER: On July 2, three days before the Hyde Park concert, Brian Jones died in mysterious circumstances, apparently having drowned in his swimming pool. The police made a complete shambles of the investigation and the coroner eventually ruled that Brian had died through “death by misadventure” . . . Many older people in England were not at all sympathetic to Brian and basically thought that as a drug-taking rock star, he had got what he deserved . . .
All that I know is that the day after Brian’s death a certain person took a truck to Cotchford Farm and removed everything of value; none of Brian’s belongings have been seen since that day. Valuable guitars, clothing, furniture—the lot was simply stolen. While this was going on, every scrap of paper that made reference to financial matters was burned on a bonfire in the garden. This happened in a place where someone had died in suspicious circumstances less than twenty-four hours earlier. The police didn’t even bother to secure the crime scene.
The person who removed the articles was a close friend of Frank Thorogood, the builder whom many suspect of murdering Brian because he was there at the scene. Thorogood is supposed to have made a deathbed confession to Brian’s murder, but this was in front of only one witness, and those who know both the witness and the history of his relationship to the Stones remain unconvinced. What is beyond dispute is that several people who were present when Brian died were subsequently threatened and forced to leave the country so that they had no input into the enquiries made by the police or the coroner . . .
The coroner was unable to establish who was present on the night Brian died . . . The whole case for his cause of death seemed to rest on an asthma inhaler conveniently found beside the pool; the coroner found that “on the balance of probabilities” Brian had died from an asthma attack while swimming. No one who knew Brian, or knew the people who were around him at the time of his death, believed the verdict for a minute. I am firmly convinced that he was murdered.
Here’s what Keith says in Life:
KEITH RICHARDS: I’m always wary of deathbed confessions . . . Whether he did or not, I don’t know. Brian had bad asthma and he was taking quaaludes and Tuinals, which are not the best things to dive under water on . . . He had a high tolerance for drugs, I’ll give him that. But weigh that against the coroner’s report, which showed that he was suffering from pleurisy, an enlarged heart, and a diseased liver. Still, I can imagine the scenario of Brian being so obnoxious to Thorogood and the building crew . . . that they were just pissing around with him . . . At the very most, I’d put it down to manslaughter.
Interviewed in tandem in 1977, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman offered this heartfelt assessment when asked if they were shocked at the news of Brian’s demise:
CHARLIE WATTS: It was to me. I was more shocked for him to die than anybody since.
BILL WYMAN: The thing is—looking back on it—I think he was a very weak, I mean, ill person. He had been very ill before that.
CHARLIE WATTS: He couldn’t handle that fame. He used to have a lot of things like asthma and all kinds of allergy things. He was a nervous type of sensitive person. An article in the newspaper would really freak him out if it was bad; whereas everybody else would tear it out and throw it away and laugh, when they used to say we smelled and never took baths and had fleas and filthy clothes. It was really stupid. But he really took it to heart and he used to write letters back.
BILL WYMAN: He took himself and his image very seriously, which I never saw at the time.
CHARLIE WATTS: He found it very difficult to change from the ’63 thing that was happening, to suddenly he was world known. He couldn’t really handle it. Maybe we did it to him.
On another occasion, Charlie clarified what he meant by these chilling words:
CHARLIE WATTS: We took away the one thing that he had—the band.
EDDIE KRAMER: The drug problems only exacerbated the health problems he had. He had a mischievous side to him—a genius musician. He would try any goddamned instrument you could think of just to get a different sound. He added these tone colors that no one else thought of.
Of course, Brian’s death put the Hyde Park concert in jeopardy. Bill Wyman gave me his up close and personal view:
BILL WYMAN: We came very close to canceling the whole thing. Brian had left the band about a month before, and he’d come around to tell us that he was getting a band together with Alexis Korner. He was really excited about his new project, and he was kind of hanging out with us a bit. Then we got the news while we were recording in London and, of course, we all thought we should cancel the Hyde Park thing. Then we realized that Brian would have probably wanted us to go on—it had been announced for weeks in the papers, and they were estimating there’d be half a million people there. So we went ahead, basically to keep our minds off what happened, I suppose. We had a photo of Brian on the stage and . . . it was exactly like he was there. There was a special atmosphere, and Mick said that poem and they released ten thousand butterflies. It was the most peaceful concert—there was no trouble, no problems. And afterwards gangs and gangs of kids went around and cleaned up, and we promised everyone who came back with a sack of litter a free album. And by the next morning, apart from a few broken branches, you wouldn’t have known anything about it, it was so well done.
SAM CUTLER: There were five hundred thousand people. No one was injured. No one got sick. I think two people had to go to the Red Cross to have tea and a biscuit.
Documentary filmmaker Leslie Woodhead was brought on board to shoot the concert.
LESLIE WOODHEAD: My next encounter with the Stones was in 1969, when Mick Jagger got in touch to ask if Granada wanted to film their upcoming free concert in Hyde Park. At that time I was part of a group of documentary makers making films on everything from the capture of Che Guevara to the London production of Hair—and Jagger’s notorious drug bust. With a fellow producer, I met the Stones in their London office with manager Allen Klein, and we agreed to shoot the concert with six film cameras—a logistical challenge back then. On the day, surrounded by half a million fans, I was shooting the concert on stage alongside Marianne Faithfull with one crew, while a colleague shot backstage with the Stones, and four other teams were located at various locations round the stage. We filmed as Mick read a Shelley poem for Brian Jones, a closing act of ’60s innocence, just before Woodstock—and Altamont.
The poem that Bill and Leslie referenced was “Adonais” by Percy Bysshe Shelley and the excerpt included the following lines:
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.
Our eyewitness at the event would go on to have a long career as the music critic for the Boston Globe—Steve Morse.
STEVE MORSE: It was a magical show. Mick’s elegy, where he released thousands of butterflies in the air, was a magical cathartic moment, with the Stones set up in front of mock palm trees to give it kind of a tropical air, and they were right down by the lagoon in Hyde Park. And then they just started ripping. It was Mick Taylor’s first show with the Stones.
There was instant rapport between Mick Taylor and Keith on guitar. Some of the British reviewers from the time didn’t think that highly of the show. They didn’t think that Taylor and Keith played that well together. They thought that “Honky Tonk Women” had kind of a herky-jerky rhythm that didn’t cut it, but I don’t know what concert they were seeing. I’ve seen two hundred fifty concerts a year for the past thirty years and from my vantage point of thirty feet away, it was just overpowering. And with the added emotion of being a tribute to Brian Jones—who knows what happened in that swimming pool—but the Stones came out of it just kicking on all cylinders. It was just a phenomenal concert experience.
You gotta give Keith and Mick Taylor credit, when they got together it was just a blues duel, that down and dirty, real blues sound. In the trenches. The synergy is what made it. Mick Taylor arrived at the right place at the right time. And to think that they played the Hyde Park concert within the same week as when Brian Jones died is almost inconceivable, really. That they were able to get it together and perform that well, with that level of emotion cutting through that Hyde Park field. I’d never seen anything like it, and I’ve never seen anything like it since.
And the Stones had an unusual security force for the event.
SAM CUTLER: Tom Keylock, the Stones “security man” and apparently a former member of the parachute regiment, briefed a bunch of motorcycle riders with hand-embroidered “Hells Angels” signs on their backs on how to deal with “screamers,” girls who might try to get to Mick on stage.
STEVE MORSE: The day was further highlighted by security from the Hells Angels. The Angels in Britain did an exemplary job. Jagger was complimenting them throughout the day and it was a peaceful day, beautiful sunny day.
LESLIE WOODHEAD: I vividly recall the Angels doing sterling work in Hyde Park. The film I made [The Stones in the Park] has lots of cheery Angels sporting cheery swastikas. The benign London Angels undoubtedly did seduce the Stones into believing that the San Francisco brothers would be similar pussy cats. Big mistake.
SAM CUTLER: Most of the bikers were no more Hells Angels than any other young rock ’n’ roller in England. They were a joke. In fact there was no officially sanctioned Hells Angel chapter in England in 1969, just a bunch of risible wannabes who were barely old enough to shave.
The Rolling Stones (and some butterflies) at Hyde Park, July 5, 1969
How about the performance itself?
STEVE MORSE: They did fifteen songs, “No Expectations,” “Stray Cat Blues,” “Midnight Rambler,” “Satisfaction,” “Street Fighting Man,” and they finished with “Sympathy for the Devil.” I was just completely blown away by “Sympathy for the Devil.” Before the show they had put in the paper asking fans to bring tin cans to use as percussion. Today, that would never be allowed at a concert, no way. It would be considered a real safety violation. It was like Britain’s Woodstock that summer. And to hear them all with the tin cans, banging them on percussion during “Sympathy for the Devil,” the sound was just deafening, the stereophonic percussion running all around Hyde Park. At the end, they got into a boat and started going back over the lagoon, to get away that way. And Jagger had said to the crowd that they were going to see Chuck Berry that night, and suggested that the crowd go too. Chuck was at Royal Albert Hall that night with the Who. I didn’t get to that one. I was just thankful I made it to Hyde Park. It was a show and a summer I will never forget.
Before we move on to the next story, I would just like to weigh in personally with a final thought about Brian Jones. This is a book about the fifty-year odyssey of the Rolling Stones. But the truth is that there were at least four distinct and separate eras in those fifty years: the original Stones from 1962 to 1969; the Mick Taylor Stones from 1969 to 1975; the Ron Wood Stones from 1975 to 1992; and the Bill Wyman–less Stones from 1992 to the present. But for those first seven years, when the band burst onto the scene, there is no question about it: No Jones, No Stones.
And that’s how we like to remember him.
