Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  They sacked Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones the evening of June 9, one of those early summer English nights when it doesn’t get dark until late. Mick, Keith, and Charlie Watts drove down to Sussex to talk to Brian at Cotchford Farm.

  Keith Richards: “Mick and I had to go down and virtually tell Brian, ’Hey, old cock, you’re fired.’ Because there was no serious way we could go on the road with Brian. The fact that he was expecting it made it easier. He wasn’t surprised. I don’t think he even took it all in. He was already up in the stratosphere. He was like: ’Yeah, man, okay.’ ”

  Mick softened the blow as best he could. He told Brian they would put out any statement he liked. He could say he was leaving the band or just not touring this time, whatever he wanted. They offered him 100,000 pounds in ready cash and 20,000 pounds a year as long as the Stones lasted. Yeah, man, okay.

  Keith: “We said, what do you want to say? Do you want to say that you’ve left? And he said, ’Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s say I’ve left and if I want to, I can come back.’ [We said,] ’Because we’ve got to know, and we’ve got Mick Taylor lined up.’ He said, ’I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can go to America and do those one-nighters anymore.’ ”

  When the meeting was over, the Stones drove back to London to finish mixing “Honky Tonk Women.” Brian sat by himself for a while, watching the Christopher Robin garden paint itself black, crying softly to himself.

  The next day, Les Perrin issued a statement 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.”

  The other Rolling Stones would express a certain amount of regret and guilt over the years about what happened to Brian. Mick Jagger: “We carried Brian for quite a long time. We put up with his tirades and his not turning up for over a year. So it wasn’t like suddenly we just said fuck you. We’d been quite patient with him, and he’d just gotten worse and worse. He didn’t want to come out of this rather sad state. We had to baby him, and it was rather sad.

  “What we didn’t like was that we wanted to play again onstage, and Brian wasn’t in any condition to play. He was far too fucked up in his mind to play.”

  Charlie Watts: “I felt sorry for him, for what we did to him then. We took his one thing away, which was being in a band. I’m sure it nearly killed him when we sacked him. That’s my opinion.”

  * * *

  Awakened from the Dream of Life

  Late June 1969. The Rolling Stones were working on “Midnight Rambler” at Olympic, the lyrics inspired in part by the published confessions of the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, who killed six women in the sixties. They all met at a strip club in Frith Street, Soho (Keith and Mick arrived in Mick’s spiffy yellow Morgan), where Ethan Russell photographed the sleeve of “Honky Tonk Women.” They rehearsed for the July 5 Hyde Park concert in the Beatles’ basement studio at Apple in Savile Row; Charlie and Keith played for hours, jamming on Jimmy Reed numbers, trying to get something going. The next day, they held a press conference in Hyde Park to introduce Mick Taylor as their new guitar player. “He doesn’t play like Brian,” Mick was quoted. “He’s a blues player. He gets on well with Keith and wants to play rock and roll, and that’s OK with us.” They taped their first TV appearance with Taylor, doing “Honky Tonk Women” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” for David Frost’s American program.

  Mick and Marianne were learning their lines for their roles in Tony Richardson’s new film, Ned Kelly, based on the Australian outlaw and folk hero. Mick had been cast as Ned (with Marianne as his loyal sister), provoking a brief outcry from Australian newspapers, which thought Mick too epicene for the role of badass, cop-killing Ned.

  While Marianne was drowning herself every night in Hamlet, Mick had been seeing a lot of a black American actress, Marsha Hunt, who’d been in the London production of the rock musical Hair. He was trying to get money out of Allen Klein for repairs at Stargroves, his country place, which was serving as a commune for some of his friends. And he was helping his new banker, Rupert Lowenstein, plan a big party, a White Ball, at the banker’s Holland Park home. Peter Swales hired a new band called Yes to play, and it was a big deal because Princess Margaret, movie stars, and politicians were expected.

  Keith needed money to close the deal on 3 Cheyne Walk, but Klein’s office in New York didn’t respond to his frantic calls and telexes. So Keith sent Tom Keylock to New York. Tom vaulted the receptionist’s desk, stormed into Klein’s office, sat down, and told Klein he wasn’t leaving until he had Keith’s money. Rupert Lowenstein was waiting in the wings to assume control of the Stones’ finances. Their Decca contract would expire in 1970, and the Stones anticipated a bidding war for their services.

  Things had been quiet at Cotchford Farm in June, and Brian seemed better than he had in years. Charlie and Shirley Watts visited him a few times that month, since they lived nearby, and found him upbeat and better. Alexis Korner came and jammed in Brian’s fully equipped music room. Brian was heavy into Creedence Clearwater Revival’s swampy hit “Proud Mary” and liked to blast “The Ballad of John and Yoko” with his favorite line, “They’re gonna crucify me.” Stu asked if he was coming up for the free concert, and Brian laughed and said no, because he’d be the only person who’d have to pay.

  He was living with Anna Wohlin, a pretty, raven-haired Swedish dancer. She was twenty-two, in love with him, and was trying to help him get back on his feet. They were enjoying the long days of the English summer, taking walks with Brian’s dogs, Emily and Luther, picking flowers. Also living on the property, in a flat above the garage, was a builder named Frank Thorogood and his girlfriend, Janet Lawson, a nurse.

  Brian had problems with Thorogood and his building crew. Thorogood, forty-four, had been hired by Tom Keylock, having done some work at Redlands. His crew was a raucous bunch of lads and riffraff, openly contemptuous of the stoned rock stars for whom they worked. Thorogood had been working at Cotchford Farm, but Brian felt overcharged and taken advantage of, and had given Thorogood the sack. He allowed him to continue living on the property, possibly because Brian owed him money.

  Over the years, there have been many attempts to make sense of what happened on July 2, 1969, the night Brian Jones died. In the official version, the people in the house that night claimed that an unsteady Brian was swimming by himself after an evening of drinking, possibly suffered an asthma attack while in the water, and was found drowned at the bottom of his pool. No one believed this except the East Sussex coroner.

  Another version, related by an unnamed source years later to an investigating journalist, claimed that Brian was accidentally drowned during a drunken party while “playing” with some of the straw dogs who were working for him. Everyone scattered after a dead Brian was pulled out of the pool, and, threatened and intimidated by Frank Thorogood, no one ever said anything to the police.

  Anna Wohlin published her own account thirty years later. According to her, only four people were there that night: Brian, Anna, Thorogood, and Janet Lawson. Brian had fired Thorogood a few days earlier, but hated falling out with people, and invited Frank and Janet to spend the evening with them by the floodlit heated pool.

  It was a hot summer night. According to Wohlin, Brian tried to talk to Thorogood, to make up with him. But Thorogood was truculent and kept bringing up the money he said Brian owed him. Brian was conciliatory, teasing, needling Thorogood, drinking his favorite wine, Blue Nun. He suggested they all have a swim. Janet Lawson wasn’t in the mood and went into the house to get a drink. Brian, Frank, and Anna jumped into the pool.

  The teasing continued in the pool, Wohlin says, and Thorogood got upset. He grabbed Brian and dunked his head underwater. Brian came up sputtering, coughing up water, supposedly still laughing at Thorogood and taunting him. From the house came Janet’s voice, telling
Anna there was a phone call for her, and Wohlin left Brian and Frank alone in the pool for about fifteen minutes.

  “I was chatting on the phone,” she related, “when I heard Janet cry from below the bedroom window. ’Anna! Anna! Something’s happened to Brian!’ I found Frank in the kitchen. His hands were shaking so badly he had difficulty lighting his cigarette . . . When I got outside there was no sign of Brian. Then I saw him, lying on the bottom of the pool.” Thorogood and Janet got Brian out of the pool and onto his back in the grass. “He looked so alive when we got him out,” Wohlin said. “Unconscious, but not dead.” She thought she felt Brian grip her hand. Bill Wyman said she told him that she felt Brian’s pulse. Janet tried artificial respiration, but it didn’t work, and she told Anna that Brian was dead and ran to call for help.

  “I refused to believe Janet when she told me he was gone. I kept giving him resuscitation until the ambulance people pulled me away. I was devastated—Brian had been murdered, by Frank Thorogood.”

  According to Wohlin, Thorogood threatened her life if she told the police what she had seen. She was taken to London, hidden from the press by Les Perrin, kept away from the funeral. Within a week, she was put on a plane for Sweden and told not to come back to England if she knew what was good for her. She stayed silent until her account was published in England in 1999.

  Frank Thorogood called Tom Keylock’s home to tell him what had happened, and Keylock arrived—possibly before the police were called. After Brian was pronounced dead shortly after midnight on July 3, the police took conflicting statements from Thorogood, Janet Lawson, and Anna Wohlin. Les Perrin found Brian’s asthma inhaler by the side of the pool at three in the morning and gave it to the police. After they left, Brian’s house was looted of some valuables—money, tapes, guitars, clothes, and a William Morris tapestry.

  Ian Stewart picked up the phone at Olympic Studio at two in the morning of Thursday, July 3. It was Tom Keylock’s wife, saying Brian was dead. The Stones had been recording a Stevie Wonder song, “I Don’t Know Why.” They all looked at each other and went into what passed for shock among the Rolling Stones. They lit a couple of joints and sat on the floor. Charlie Watts wept for a while, then called Bill Wyman at his hotel to tell him Brian was gone.

  BRIAN JONES OF THE ’STONES’ FOUND DEAD was the headline on that morning’s Daily Mirror. The London press reported the events as given them by the police, based on the three people they’d interviewed.

  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 d
id 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.