Old Gods Almost Dead (40 page)

At 10
A.M.,
the Stones appeared as scheduled at the BBC studios to tape “Honky Tonk Women,” since the single would be out the following week while Mick was in Australia. That night, he and Marianne went to Prince Rupert's White Ball. Mick wore the skirted white suit that he would later dance in at Hyde Park. Marianne, deeply affected by Brian's death, wore black, much to the annoyance of the Lowensteins. The rock bands Peter Swales hired for the party did their thing, and Rupert Lowenstein was pleased as punch when the next day's papers reported that his party had kept the neighbors awake until three.

The Stones met at their Maddox Street office later that day amid doubts whether to do the concert, but decided to carry on in memory of Brian. “He would have wanted it to go on,” Mick told a reporter, straight-faced.

                

“Brian's death
will always be suspicious,” Keith Richards said years later, reflecting the disquiet about the case that lingered for decades. Everyone knew that Brian was the strongest swimmer they'd ever seen, and it was absurd that he could drown in a backyard pool unless he'd had a lot of help.

After he died, rumors that Brian had been accidentally killed circulated immediately. Police reopened their investigation six weeks after the coroner issued his preliminary report of “death by misadventure” due to a combination of drugs and alcohol. Some who worked on the case reportedly wanted to charge Frank Thorogood with manslaughter, but it never happened.

Keith Richards: “We were completely shocked. I got straight into it and wanted to know who was there, and couldn't find out. The only cat I could ask [Tom Keylock] was the one I think got rid of everybody and did the whole disappearing trick so when the cops arrived, it was an accident. Maybe it was. Maybe the cat just wanted to get everyone out of the way so it wasn't all names involved. Maybe he did the right thing. I don't even know who was there that night, and trying to find out is impossible. It's the same feeling [as] who killed Kennedy. You can't get to the bottom of it.

“Maybe [Brian] was trying to pull one of his deep-diving stunts and was too loaded and hit his chest and that was it. But I've seen Brian swim in terrible conditions. He was a goddamn good swimmer and it's hard to believe he died in a swimming pool.”

As the years went by, the Stones came to agree that Brian died accidentally. Keith said that he, Keith, had more reason to kill Brian than anyone. Mick dismissed all the conspiracies, as did Charlie Watts: “I think he took an overdose. He took a load of downers, which is what he used to like, and drank, and I think he went for a swim in a very hot bath . . . Quite honestly, I don't think he was worth murdering, because he was worth more alive than dead.”

Mick: “Brian drowned in his pool. The other stuff is people trying to make money.”

Yet Brian Jones's death remains a mystery to many people unconvinced that any of the legends of his fall are accurate. He gave the Stones what Nick Kent has called “the full force of authentically damned youth,” and so it seems apposite that the details of his death are unclear.

Nevertheless, some believe that Frank Thorogood, dying of cancer in 1993, confessed to killing Brian Jones. “I done Brian,” he allegedly gasped to a friend, and expired shortly thereafter.

Shelley in Hyde Park

Saturday, July 5, 1969.
The bands opening for the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park started playing for the huge crowd of about 300,000 at one o'clock on a hot, sunny afternoon. King Crimson, Family, and Alexis Korner's New Church played short sets. The stage, the largest ever built for an outdoor show in England, was ringed by cameras and protected by about fifty local “Hell's Angels,” actually a bunch of yobs in studded leather costumes. Sam Cutler had heard from Rock Scully how the Oakland chapter of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang had provided hip security for the Grateful Dead's famous free shows in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and so these ersatz London bikers were hired to do the same in Hyde Park.

Mick Jagger had laryngitis but was itching to get onstage. Keith was stoned. Mick Taylor was scared shitless. Ronnie Wood bumped into Keith and Charlie on his way to the show and wished them luck. The Stones gathered in the nearby Londonderry House Hotel on Park Lane, where Bill Wyman saw Jagger in tears, deeply affected by Brian's death. The Stones were driven to the backstage enclosure in an old army ambulance. They rehearsed for fifteen minutes, trying to tune the guitars to a harmonica. Then they gave one of their worst performances ever.

Before the Stones went on, Mick asked Sam Cutler to quiet the crowd. Costumed in his white party dress and a studded dog collar, standing in front of a backdrop showing a drunken Brian from the
Beggar's Banquet
photo sessions, Mick then addressed the crowd: “Now listen, cool it for a minute. I really would like to say something about Brian, about how we feel about him just going, when we didn't expect it.” He took out an edition of Percy Shelley and read two stanzas from the heroic threnody “Adonais”:

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—

He hath awaken'd from the dream of life—

'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife  .  .  .

Keith hit the opening chords of Johnnie Winter's “I'm Yours, She's Mine” as the Stones began their first show in England in two years and Tom Keylock released two thousand white moths in memory of Brian. But most of the creatures had suffocated in their boxes, one of which had been crushed by a drunken “Angel” who'd fallen on it, and the gesture fell flat as dead moths littered the stage.

The Stones did their best under the circumstances: “Jack Flash”; “I'm Free”; “Mercy Mercy”; “No Expectations,” with Mick Taylor playing Brian's slide part expertly. “Here's one about a groupie” before “Stray Cat Blues.” The air was so humid the guitars kept going out of tune, and the Stones struggled to keep up with their perspiring drummer. “Tempo!” Mick shouted at the band. “Get your tempo together.” In the crowded VIP area in front of the stage were Marianne and her son, Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman, Eric Clapton, Donovan, Allen Klein, Robert Fraser, Michael Cooper shooting away, Marsha Hunt in tight white buckskin. The Stones managed the public debuts of “Loving Cup,” “Love in Vain,” and “Honky Tonk Women” in a protracted format that differed from the recorded version and sounded ragged. “We got lots more to do,” Mick told the crowd after the Stones had badly mangled “Loving Cup,” “and we're gonna get better as we go along!”

They didn't. They bungled “Midnight Rambler” too, then stumbled through “Satisfaction,” “Street Fighting Man,” and ten minutes of “Sympathy for the Devil” with a troupe of South African dancers until Mick got bored and signaled that the Zulus be thrown off the stage.

After an hour, having disgraced themselves, the Stones were done. A confetti drop covered Charlie and his tom-toms in colored paper. But the event was judged a great success in the press because the giant, docile crowd had even picked up their litter as they left. The positive, peaceful buzz from the show helped reestablish the Stones as the leading band in England. Afterward a car took a dope-sick Marianne and Nicholas back to Cheyne Walk, while Mick squired his girlfriend Marsha Hunt to see Chuck Berry and the Who at Royal Albert Hall.

The next day, Mick and Marianne flew to Australia to begin work on
Ned Kelly.
During the long flight to Sydney, Marianne had a chance to think things over. When they arrived at their hotel, she took 150 Tuinal pills and said good night. Mick couldn't wake her the next day and thought she was dead. They pumped her out, but she was in a coma for six days, during which, she told Mick, a ghostly Brian urged her to join him on the other side.

Tony Richardson gave her part in the film to a local actress, and production went forward during July.

                

Brian was buried
in Cheltenham on July 10, the day after a coroner's inquest concluded he'd drowned accidentally. Charlie and Bill attended with Shirley and Astrid. Suki Potier came, as did Ian Stewart. Linda Lawrence came from America with her five-year-old son, Julian. Mick and Marianne sent a wreath. Due to his local notoriety, Brian's parents had to beg for the service to be held in the Anglican church in whose choir he'd sung. As a possible suicide (to say nothing of his reported six bastard children), permission was denied for Brian to rest in the churchyard.

Bill Wyman was astonished to see the crowds lining the streets to witness the funeral cortege. There were hundreds of women, many in tears, throwing roses at the hearse. Canon Hugh Hopkins, who'd known Brian as a boy, gave a diffident eulogy that many found offensive in its faint praise for Cheltenham's pop outlaw. The scriptural reading was the Prodigal Son.

On the way out of the church, Brian's bronze coffin (flown in from New York) was saluted by the police. This gave Charlie Watts his only laugh of the day.

During the funeral, the workmen who'd been grafting off Brian held a party at Cotchford Farm, even using Brian's bed for their fun. A truck was backed up to the house and filled with furniture, artwork, and instruments, including an organ and Brian's Mellotron. These were never seen again. Local people who'd befriended Brian were troubled to see his clothes, papers, and other effects burned in a series of bonfires over the next few days. Suki Potier arrived the following week to find the house looted and almost empty. Luckless, she herself died in a car wreck within a few years.

                

Most people
were fatalistic in the wake of Brian's death, especially those who knew him. Anita was angry that no one had been around to take care of him. The office staff took it hard. So did Keith. Others were almost relieved.

George Chkiantz: “I had my doubts whether he could ever get anything together. I'm sorry to say that it might have been fortunate that Brian died before he found out how few friends he really had. I felt sorry for him, felt that when the Stones' money ran out, it wasn't going to be so good for him.”

“No one wanted to imagine Brian growing old,” Peter Swales adds. “He was one of those types of characters you never wanted to see shuffling down the Kings Road later in life.”

When asked for a comment on Brian's death, Peter Townshend said, “Oh, it was a normal day for Brian. Like he died every day, you know?” George Harrison was quoted: “I don't think he had enough love or understanding.”

It was the first major death of anyone in the rock movement, foreshadowing many tragedies. In Los Angeles, Jim Morrison wrote a long poem, “Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased”:

You've left your Nothing

To compete with Silence

I hope you went out Smiling

Like a child

Into the cool remnant

Of a dream.

                

There was
an accident on the
Ned Kelly
set as Tony Richardson shot his movie in the pale light of the Australian winter. An old revolver exploded in Mick's hand as he was rehearsing for a gunfight scene, and while recuperating the doctors told him to exercise his injured wrist. One day he was alone in the outback with his valet, Alan Dunn, playing electric guitar through a small amp, when the chords to “Brown Sugar” materialized in the air. The lyric came next, “brown sugar” being a play on potent Asian heroin and the charms of black girls like Marsha Hunt. The song was the only positive thing to emerge from Mick's Australian ordeal. His girlfriend had tried to kill herself, and he wouldn't make another movie for twenty years. He described the disastrous
Ned Kelly
as “that load of shit” when it came out the following year.

                

That summer,
around the time of Hyde Park, Keith got his ear pierced by some Living Theater people one night. He hung from his lobe a heavy bone earring he'd gotten in Peru. It became his trademark over the next few years, along with his no-limits gaze and the endearing gap where his front teeth had rotted out of his head.

The Bleeding Man

The Rolling Stones'
hot new single “Honky Tonk Women” ruled the airwaves in the summer of 1969, a raunchy jam with a stripper beat that made hearts beat harder and sold its way to no. 1 everywhere. A truncated mix of “You Can't Always Get What You Want” appeared on the single's flip side. Al Kooper had volunteered to arrange horns for the track and received the master tape for this song in the mail one day from Mick. Kooper arranged and recorded a full horn section for the song, but only his French horn introduction was finally used. Kooper was credited on the single's label with organ and piano as well, an unprecedented gesture by the Stones attesting to Kooper's exalted stature as a studio wizard.

Anita and Keith's son was born on August 10, 1969, and named Marlon Richards, after Marlon Brando. Bill Wyman divorced his wife, and the press delighted in publishing his real age, thirty-two, considered ancient for a pop star. In mid-August, the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. (Mick Jagger had turned down an invitation for the Stones to perform.) Billed as “Three Days of Peace and Love,” Woodstock mingled a half million muddy, tripping rock fans with the star performers of the day (the Band, the Who, Hendrix, et al.) without much trouble. This spawned the communitarian notion of “Woodstock Nation,” an idealized global village of rock music—loving youth supposedly self-sufficient enough to feed, police, and care for itself without the help of the “straight” world. It was a hippie myth that lasted until the Stones toured America four months later.