Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  Chris Barber brought blues to English coffee clubs before Brian brought blues to the world. His appearance at Cheltenham was the first step in Brian forming the Stones. ‘I was glad we were useful to Brian,’ he says. ‘But given what happened, maybe we weren’t useful at all.’

  *

  The hurried aftermath of Brian’s death had a dark momentum to it, just as the run-up had, as if there was an inevitability about it all. When Hartfield beat officer Albert V. Evans arrived at the scene shortly after midnight, he had a ‘policeman’s instinct’ that he wasn’t being given the full story but had no evidence to support his feelings. The investigation of Brian’s death was assigned to a senior officer, Detective Chief Inspector R. Marshall, assisted by Detective Sergeant P. Hunter, who concluded fairly early that the case seemed to be a ‘normal drowning’.

  The autopsy, by Dr Albert Sachs, a consultant pathologist at Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, was extraordinarily brief. There were some elementary errors, too: Brian was described as being 5ft 11in tall when he was in fact around 5ft 8in. Sachs ruled out an asthmatic attack, although this was not necessarily implausible according to other pathologists. Still, there was no evidence of manipulation, and the top line of the verdict, ‘Death By Misadventure’, was simplistic but has never been proved wrong. In delivering the verdict, coroner Dr Angus Sommerville could not resist adding his own moral censure: ‘He would not listen. So he drowned under the influence of alcohol and drugs.’

  In the years that followed there was a concerted attempt by Brian’s minder, Tom Keylock, to shift blame on to Frank Thorogood, in the main with his unverified account of a last-words confession by the builder. More recently reports have emerged that an investigation by Allen Klein pinpointed Keylock as the guilty man. Yet once again these accounts (detailed in the coda) have never been verified. In 2003, a story in the Toronto Sun reported how club owner and Stones aficionado Jerry Stone had bought two gold records, one for Paint It, Black and one for Little Red Rooster, which commemorated Brian’s proudest moments. He described in the story how these were Brian’s copies, mentioning as their provenance that he had bought them from ‘former Stones chauffeur Tom Keylock’. Thus we have convincing evidence of Keylock’s theft of Brian’s property – although thieves are not necessarily murderers.

  The focus on Brian’s death seems over the decades to have transformed a visionary into a victim. ‘I don’t think of him like that,’ says Bobbie Korner. ‘I don’t know why people have all these theories. It’s a reflective thing. They don’t want to let go.’ Today, Bobbie still remembers the sadness of seeing the charismatic young boy she and her husband had given a home so reduced. ‘One knew it wasn’t good, so it didn’t come as any shock. Only a great sadness.’

  At least some of those who speak for Brian seem to have bizarre agendas of their own. The murder scenario was kicked off by Nicholas Fitzgerald, whose book contains the obligatory hallmarks: implausibly detailed reconstructed dialogue, vague reports of assaults and threats, and reliance on the deceased for corroboration. Fitzgerald claimed to have been a close friend and lover of Brian, yet he sold his story to the News of the World, the one publication that had done the most to destroy him.

  Brian’s funeral took place on 10 July in Cheltenham, the city of secrets and lies. Some townsfolk considered that the vicar, Hugh Evan Hopkins, was too forgiving in presiding over the rite, at the request of Lewis and Louisa Jones. Suki Potier walked alongside Barbara and her parents. Keith and Anita stayed away, while Mick was contractually obliged to remain in Australia to film Ned Kelly, so Charlie and Bill were the only Stones in attendance. Nico and Pete Townshend wrote songs for him, but perhaps the most incisive tribute came from George Harrison, the man who first recommended his band to Decca:

  When I met him I liked him quite a lot. He was a good fellow, you know. I got to know him very well and I felt very close to him; you know how it is with some people, you feel for them, feel near to them. He was born on February 28, 1942, and I was born on February 25, 1943, and he was with Mick and Keith and I was with John and Paul in the groups, so there was a sort of understanding between the two of us. The positions were similar, and I often seemed to meet him in his times of trouble. There was nothing the matter with him that a little extra love wouldn’t have cured. I don’t think he had enough love or understanding. He was very nice and sincere and sensitive, and we must remember that’s what he was.

  It’s unlikely that Lewis and Louisa, who had now suffered the terrible fate of losing two of their children, ever quite came to terms with their son’s death – or his life. When Alexis Korner, Brian’s greatest mentor, wrote a note to them after Brian’s death, Lewis wrote back, saying that the Korners’ attendance at the funeral would be ‘inappropriate’.

  *

  The Stones made great music without Brian, with Sticky Fingers (1971) an unqualified masterpiece, and Exile on Main Street (1972) a magnificent, sprawling epic. But they were working on a kind of residual mojo, and a massive quality drop-off soon followed. When the band assembled in 2012 to celebrate their half century, they barely mentioned Brian’s name. But then, in most performances Mick and Keith avoided eye contact, while the spectacle of Bill Wyman, asked back in order to be stuck on the side of the stage and studiously ignored, was a reminder that inter-band feuds add a dark energy for the first few years, and then they become deadly dull. ‘It is tedious,’ says Andrew Oldham. ‘It’s Mick with instrumental accompaniment.’

  Yet if in 2014 the Stones seem banal, everyday, that’s because they did change the world in their image: a world where in London in 1962, black culture was an oxymoron; a world where in 1965, when Brian Jones presented Howlin’ Wolf to the American public, the venerable bluesman believed he would never cross to mainstream TV in his lifetime. Brian’s pioneering status as a musician has become steadily less obvious thanks to the very success of his mission. The blues and world music that he championed and dragged into the mainstream have become so ubiquitous that we all suffer a hindsight bias – we find it impossible to imagine what the world was like without this music. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, this is proof of Brian’s accomplishment.

  Set alongside his powerful musical legacy is a less welcome distinction. After his death came the untimely ends of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, who together make up the 27 Club – stars who crashed, burned and then died at that fateful age. Being the inaugural member of such a club seems a gloomy achievement – though Brian would have been the first to point out that this distinction should really be credited to Robert Johnson, the visionary bluesman who also died aged twenty-seven. Johnson had lived a life on the edge of established society, where you could get thrown in jail for being a musician and no one much cared if you died. It’s worth repeating, of course, that Brian was as much a victim of the establishment as Johnson: it was sustained harassment by an officer since proven to have planted evidence that isolated him and engineered, as Stash puts it, ‘the breaking of Brian’. An establishment which carried out a minimum of seven raids on a vulnerable rock star surely bears a bigger, more demonstrable share of the guilt than any of the shady characters around Brian’s beloved Cotchford Farm.

  Beyond the establishment’s contemptuous treatment of Brian Jones, the dysfunction and repression around his family add to the air of tragedy and loss. One can only imagine the feelings of Lewis and Louisa Jones when they buried their second child. However, imagine was all most people could do, for Lewis avoided the advances of people such as Alexis and Bobbie Korner, and other acquaintances. Fans and friends noticed Lewis and Louisa chose not to use the word ‘love’ on Brian’s tombstone, which was marked merely ‘in affectionate memory’. Brian’s parents also showed little interest in his children: letters from Pat Andrews and others went unanswered, and their contact with Julian Leitch, Brian’s son by Linda Lawrence, was fitful. Unsurprisingly, Julian has found the burden of
being Brian’s son heavy to bear, despite being brought up with obvious love and sensitivity by his adopted father, Donovan Leitch. Yet the passing of time has brought some healing.

  For several of Brian’s girlfriends who bore his children, the misogyny of society in the sixties was a bigger source of pain than their relationship with the Stones founder. Dawn Molloy was ‘one of thousands of women who were forced to give a baby up for adoption’. Finally, thanks to new regulations, she was contacted by her and Brian’s son; it was a joyful moment, which brought some closure, as her son John learned about his dad. Simon, Brian’s son by Valerie Corbett, went through a similar emotional journey, and has become friends with Graham Ride, Brian’s old flatmate. Mark, Pat Andrews’ son, is still close to his mother, but is generally resistant to talking about his absentee father; Belinda, Brian’s daughter, has over the years spent more time finding out about her father and herself seems reconciled with her past.

  Most poignantly, Joolz Leitch, Brian’s first grandson, born in 1997, has, like many kids his age, become fascinated with the music of the sixties, which still permeates our cultural landscape. Tall (unlike his grandad), with close-cropped hair and a laid-back charm, he’s emerged from the wreckage of the Jones family with a deep, enduring pride in his grandfather’s legacy and a mature acceptance that what will be, will be, for he remembers Brian Jones not as a man who had his life cut short but rather as a man who had completed his mission. ‘It’s odd, it’s weird – but it couldn’t have happened any other way.’

  In the closing stages of writing this book, I spent an evening with Joolz in Donovan and Linda Leitch’s peaceful, sprawling Georgian rectory in County Cork, chatting for a while before we picked up guitars and played them late into the evening. Joolz is already a fluid guitarist, hinting at some of his grandfather’s musical insights. It was a moving, warm experience, one of family pride, with only one strand of disappointment: while Brian’s legacy, the way he opened up black music to a huge young audience across the world, has deepened with time, the memory of his impact has arguably diminished thanks to the sustained sniping of his brother Stones, and an unending obsession not with his life but with his death. ‘I do think all the focus on his death has taken the music away from him,’ says Joolz. ‘The death doesn’t matter; it’s what he did in his life, while he had time, that matters. He definitely did change the world.’

  Just as vexing is the recent history of the Stones, whose Hyde Park show contained no reference to Brian. Incredibly, over the course of several interviews to mark the anniversary of the band’s formation, Mick Jagger managed to explain how the Stones got together and his discovery of the blues without any significant mention of Brian Jones. In contrast, Keith Richards, whose Life did so much to minimize Brian’s role (as it did Bill Wyman’s), mentioned Brian’s loss as his biggest regret around the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s Marquee debut.

  Those who knew the band in the early days have become puzzled by the lottery of life, the way Mick seems to have succeeded in a Stalinesque revision of history, airbrushing Brian out of the story. ‘Brian Jones was the main man in the Stones, Jagger got everything from him,’ says Ginger Baker, who helped out the pair on some of their first shows back in 1962. ‘Brian was much more of a musician than Jagger will ever be – although Jagger’s a great economist. Yet sometimes Brian seems to have been forgotten, which is very sad.’

  Just as sad is the way the value of Brian’s estate seems to have dwindled. His mum and dad, and after their death his sister Barbara, inherited some money, but the Stones’ early catalogue generates fewer royalties than their later work because the band was compelled to hand over their pre-1971 catalogue to Allen Klein in order to retain control of their later material. In the meantime, several songs credited to Nanker Phelge – the name Brian came up with for early band compositions – have now been reassigned by BMI to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

  Still, Brian wouldn’t have carped, believes his grandson Joolz. Brian’s mission was to champion his beloved R&B, and he succeeded. Nothing can erase that. ‘He changed the face of rock’n’roll. There was nothing more to do. Nothing more needed in this world.’

  The commercial behemoth that is the Stones today should not overshadow the force of nature that was the Stones in 1963. The Beatles launched a revolution, the Stones electrified it; they interposed a blue note in the Beatles’ white notes, added the dark danger of Pan to the Beatles’ Apollonian optimism. It’s understandable why the survivors resent Brian Jones beyond the grave: he formed the band, he named the band, he taught Keith Richards Open G tuning, and he taught Mick Jagger how to bring a girl to orgasm. Like his inspiration, Pan, Brian Jones may be demonized but his music plays on. Not in his old band, but in the sounds, the magnificent panic, which he unleashed on the world. For the battle between Pan and Apollo, ecstasy and elegance, the magnificently flawed and the imposingly perfect, goes on for ever. We bow our heads to Apollo, but we should all have sympathy for the devil.

  Coda

  Unreliable Evidence: The Death of Brian Jones

  IN THE YEARS since the death of Brian Jones late in the evening on Wednesday, 2 July 1969, the focus has changed from the impact of his life to the drama of his death. The circumstances of his leaving this earth are undoubtedly disturbing, messy and contradictory. Yet in my view this focus on conspiracy theories, along with some revisionism by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Andrew Oldham and others, has diminished the importance of one of the most visionary musicians of the twentieth century.

  Without doubt the official coroner’s verdict on Brian’s death was perfunctory and lazy. The initial view of the police was that this was a simple drowning and most of the anomalies in witness accounts were not investigated. The police had, in the main, exhibited contempt for Brian Jones during his life and there’s good evidence that they continued to do so after his death. Furthermore, the motives of many people around Brian in his final days were dubious, and their accounts are suspect. However, from my interviews with objective witnesses of Brian’s last weeks, including musicians who played with him and old friends like Bobbie Korner, I’ve come to share their belief that Brian’s death was most likely a tragic accident. I’ve also come to believe that many of the existing theories that his death was in fact murder rely on unreliable witnesses, most of whose accounts are markedly more contradictory than the official witness statements.

  Police version: Brian drowned

  As flawed and cursory as the original verdict is, compared to the complexity of most conspiracy theories, this remains the most likely scenario, partly because it is supported by most disinterested witnesses and people who knew Brian. Brian had blacked out in the past, under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs, for instance with George Chkiantz at the Minzah hotel, and according to Suki Potier, this was a frequent occurrence.

  There are, of course, crucial discrepancies in the witnesses’ descriptions of Brian’s death, all of which were shared with police in the early hours of 3 July. Anna Wohlin stated that she heard Lawson shout, ‘Something has happened to Brian’ and she rushed out to the pool at the same time as Thorogood; Thorogood stated he had left Brian in the pool to get a towel when Wohlin shouted, ‘He is lying on the bottom’; meanwhile, Lawson states that she was in the house, returned to the pool and found Brian motionless. There are also discrepancies about what each party did that day, whether they watched TV and in particular about the timeline.

  There are several other disturbing elements in the official chain of events, principally the rush to convene a coroner’s court and the reliance on medical information communicated via telephone rather than in writing. In addition, there are anomalous elements in the autopsy which have never been explained: there is the mention of ‘punctuate haemorrhages’ in Brian’s brain, for instance – a term familiar from shaken baby syndrome.

  However, anyone involved in criminal trials will know that witness statements usually
differ, and witnesses often recall the timeline of simple events in a different order. If there had been collusion between witnesses, concealing a murder, it’s likely there would have been fewer discrepancies. Likewise, if the authorities had colluded in covering up a murder they would in all likelihood have made more of an effort.

  For all these reasons I believe that Brian’s death was most likely a sad accident.

  Nicholas Fitzgerald’s account

  Nicholas Fitzgerald’s book, Brian Jones: The Inside Story of the Original Rolling Stone, combined with an earlier News of the World story on 27 February 1983, contained the first allegations that Brian was murdered. Fitzgerald, a cousin of Tara Browne, claimed that he, like Browne, was a close friend of Brian’s. He related how he and a nineteen-year-old friend and gofer, Richard Cadbury – who had died by the time the story appeared – had visited Brian at Cotchford on the day of his death. Brian had shared with Fitzgerald his stories of an imminent supergroup with John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, and warned him, ‘Don’t say anything . . . it could be dangerous!’ Fitzgerald and Cadbury had visited a pub, then returned to Cotchford at 11.15, leaving their car some distance from the house; when they walked into the grounds they saw three men near the pool, one of them pushing someone under the water, while two bystanders – a man and a woman – looked on. Suddenly, a ‘burly man’ (probably Keylock) leapt out of the bushes and snarled, ‘Get out of here, Fitzgerald, or you’ll be next.’

  Fitzgerald refused to make a formal statement to the police, and a detailed investigation by Detective Chief Superintendent J.F. Reece in August 1983 concluded Fitzgerald was a ‘Walter Mitty type person’, and that the allegations had been made primarily to help promote his book. Reece’s interviews with Fitzgerald were hostile; he informed him several times that he might well be committing offences by withholding information, and become an accessory after the fact. Yet Fitzgerald’s evidence was bizarre, full of unverifiable claims that he, too, had escaped murder attempts, that Cadbury might have been involved with the murderers, and that Cadbury, too, had died ‘in mysterious circumstances’.