Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  The necessity of planning the year ahead – and, in particular, the American tour that was becoming ever more crucial – raised yet again a problem Jagger, no less than the other Stones, had long shrunk from facing. By May 1969, the decision could no longer be postponed. Some way would have to be found of dumping Brian Jones.

  It was not, even now, a decision taken lightly. All Brian’s hopelessness over the past three years could not cancel out the bonds of their early friendship – the realization that, without Brian, none of them might be where they were today. Even last year, confident of what seemed a bottomless income, the Stones could afford to keep on carrying Brian. This year, in an atmosphere of worsening financial anxiety, they couldn’t afford not to jettison him.

  With two drug busts on his record, Brian hadn’t a hope of getting the work permit necessary for a major American tour. The fact that he had appealed successfully against this second conviction – on January 13 – was not likely to soften the hearts of US Immigration officials.

  Brian was living out of London now, in surroundings as far removed as they possibly could have been from any of his metropolitan harems. In November 1968, he had paid £38,000 for Cotchford Farm near Harefield, Essex, former home of A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. Since Milne’s death in 1956, the property had been maintained as a semi-public national monument, its grounds dotted with shrines to the immortal ‘bear of very little brain’, his owner Christopher Robin and their friends Piglet, Eeyore and Rabbit. Brian’s journey through the Sixties, from Cheltenham to Windsor, Chelsea and Morocco could hardly have ended in a more unlikely final resting place: the House at Pooh Corner.

  Jagger had special reason to feel a resurgence of sympathy for Brian. Since Brian’s departure from Chelsea, the local police had been obliged to find an alternative Stone to harass and pursue. Recently, as Jagger was riding along the King’s Road with his new young chauffeur, Alan Dunn, a patrol car had flagged down his Rolls, and two officers had demanded to search both Jagger and the car. Jagger had refused, ordering Dunn to lock the car and then telephone for his solicitor to come straight there.

  On May 28 – the day his film role as Ned Kelly was announced – Jagger opened the door at Cheyne Walk to behold the very CID man who had last busted Brian, accompanied by half a dozen other officers. ‘I didn’t get the chance to say anything,’ Jagger commented later. ‘One of them stuck his foot in the door and the rest came barging in. They put me in the dining room while they searched the place.’ Within a few minutes, the squad had unearthed a small wooden box containing approximately one quarter-ounce of cannabis.

  Jagger and Marianne were taken to Chelsea police station and charged under the usual act. Next day, they appeared together at Great Marlborough Street Court, to plead not guilty to possessing cannabis. The magistrate adjourned the case until June 23, remanding each on £50 bail.

  Finding himself in Brian Jones’s place as the Chelsea drug squad’s favourite target was a salutary lesson to Jagger that Brian’s catastrophes had not all been self-induced. Though Brian must be sacked if the Stones were to survive, Jagger now agreed it must be on terms as tactful and generous as possible. The offer, worked out in consultation with Allen Klein, was that Brian be asked to leave primarily to allow the Stones to go on tour in America. As far as the press and the fans were concerned, it would be only a temporary absence, to allow him to work on solo projects like his Jajouka album. As well as his royalty share from past Stones albums, a settlement of £100,000 would acknowledge the Stones’ debt to his musicianship and personality.

  Tact and consideration were evident in the method chosen by Jagger to prepare Brian for the approaching shock. He and Keith separately got in touch with Alexis Korner, the Stones’ – especially Brian’s – old blues mentor. ‘Mick and Keith told me Brian was sick and they were worried about him,’ Korner remembered. ‘Because he wouldn’t talk to them, or didn’t trust them, they asked me if I’d go down to his place and see him.’ Remembering the boy who had parachute-rolled through the kitchen window at Moscow Road – his neat Italian suit, and ‘beautiful mixture of good manners and rudeness’ – Korner agreed to try to do what he could.

  TWELVE

  ‘HE HATH AWAKENED FROM THE DREAM OF LIFE’

  Mary Hallett knew Cotchford Farm better than did either of its two famous owners, the author and the pop star. She was born there, in the great, secure age when Sussex was a remote county, and the sixteenth-century house served merely as adjunct to hard-working land, shared by two farm labourers and their large Edwardian families. Mary was one of eight children who helped their father with the haymaking and milking, and rescued lambs from winter snowdrifts before the crows could peck out their eyes.

  When A. A. Milne owned Cotchford in the Twenties, Mary Hallett lived still only a few minutes’ walk away. She remembered the author’s shiny motor car, and the celebrity enjoyed by Milne’s small son, on whom Christopher Robin had been modelled. ‘He was a dear little chap – but he was a mischief, too. He used to like my brother, who worked at the stables, to shut him up inside the horses’ feed-bins.’

  Forty years later, after her birthplace had changed from labourer’s cottage to rich man’s country mansion, with trim lawns, topiary bushes – even a swimming pool – Mary Hallett got to know Cotchford Farm all over again. Its present owner, an American named Taylor, needed help in the house because his wife had fallen ill. It was arranged that Mary should go in every day for the Taylors to clean and keep house.

  The news that the Taylors were moving from Cotchford, in November, 1968, and that it had been bought by a Rolling Stone, who intended to live there permanently, caused Mrs Hallett understandable dismay. Though not specially prejudiced against the Rolling Stones – being of a generation unable to tell one pop group from another – she had read and heard enough about such people to know she probably would not get on with them. At the new owner’s request, however, she agreed to continue coming in on a trial basis. So, with many misgivings, she made the acquaintance of Brian Jones.

  It was an experience which caused her to revise her idea of pop musicians as drunken louts. ‘You couldn’t have wished for a nicer, more polite boy. In all the months I worked for him, he was kindness itself to me. And always so well mannered. With Brian, it was never “I want …” or “Do this …” It was always “Please, Mrs Hallett, would you mind …”

  ‘Nobody could have been more generous. After I’d started working for him, he discovered I wasn’t on the telephone. Straightaway, he had a phone installed for me – and the bill was always paid. Whenever it rang, I’d always half expect to hear Brian’s voice. “Oh, Mrs Hallett …” he’d say, so woebegone. “I can’t get this fire started. Do you think you could come over?”

  ‘It was a pleasure to work for him – he was so appreciative of every little thing. We had a long talk together one day while I was cleaning and he was sitting at the kitchen table. I’d seen him reading this big, old-fashioned family Bible, like the one we used to have when I was a girl. I discovered he knew his Bible very well – better than I did. I always had the feeling he was a very lonely boy. After I’d been out shopping, I often used to come home and find Brian sitting and waiting for me on my front door step.’

  * * *

  It was at Cotchford Farm that Brian Jones, one evening late in May, finally ceased to be a Rolling Stone. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard drove down together from London to do the job they had postponed for more than a year, accompanied – as a further instrument of clemency – by Charlie Watts. Even Charlie, kind-hearted as he was, realized there was no other way.

  The moment was not as traumatic as everyone had expected. Mick and Keith pretended not to be firing Brian for ever; he, in turn, pretended he was glad to go. They agreed the press should be told he was leaving voluntarily, because of musical differences with the others. Brian undertook to say nothing of the matter until Mick and Keith could find someone to replace him. The four broke up on friendly terms. Then
Brian went into his kitchen, laid his head on the scrubbed wooden table, and wept.

  Despite his promise of secrecy, he could not resist telephoning the Stones office next day and confiding in his great ally, Jo Bergman. ‘He said, “You will go on doing things for me, won’t you, even when I’m not in the Stones?” I said, “Oh, of course, Brian, for goodness’ sake …”’ Peter Jones, the music journalist, met him in London that same week, wearing a look that was half-shamefaced, half-triumphant, as if he had done something very silly but couldn’t help feeling pleased.

  Alexis Korner, on visits to Cotchford, found Brian excited by the challenge of starting again in what was, after all, the prevailing fashion among top musicians. Eric Clapton had disbanded the hugely successful Cream, to link up with Stevie Winwood, from Traffic, in the experimental heavy metal group Blind Faith. Graham Nash had left the Hollies, uniting with Steven Stills of Buffalo Springfield and Dave Crosby of the Byrds, to form Crosby, Stills and Nash. With Brian’s reputation and his circle of virtuoso friends like Lennon, Townshend and Hendrix – so Korner reasoned – he would not be without a band for long.

  He was talking already about starting a pure blues outfit, on the model of Korner’s Blues Incorporated but with the cutting-edge of new American groups like the Allmann Brothers and Creedence Clearwater Revival. It was the time of Creedence’s first great ‘swamp-rock’ hit, Proud Mary. John Fogarty’s voice, rasping against the lazy paddle-wheel beat, echoed repeatedly through Cotchford Farm as Brian poured out his plans to Alexis Korner. ‘He was excited in a vague way,’ Korner remembered later. ‘He’d start to talk, then he’d stop and put on another Creedence record, slurring the needle across it. Then he’d have a different idea. He and I would form a new band together and take it on the road. At that point, I had to say, “Now, hold on, Brian …”’

  On his first trip down to Cotchford to pave the way for Mick and Keith, Korner had been shocked by the change in Brian’s appearance – by his haggard face, his developing paunch, in particular his complexion, bloated white and glistening, ‘like old, cold fat’.

  He had greatly improved since then, helped by the country air, the constant, restful quiet and, not a little, by Cotchford Farm’s powerful association with a tranquil, secure world of childhood. Knowing the Winnie-the-Pooh stories almost by heart as he did, it gave him special delight to show Alexis the statue of Christopher Robin in the garden, the sundial – under which Milne’s original manuscripts are reputedly buried – and the bridge over the little stream where Pooh and Christopher Robin invented their Poohsticks game. He felt proud to be the guardian of such a shrine, as if the money he paid for the house had brought him an extra gift of responsibility and trust.

  He had managed to stay off drugs, he told Alexis – was, indeed, so terrified of being busted again that he would not allow so much as a joint to be rolled under his roof. He was drinking less, too, forsaking whisky and brandy for beer and white wine. But for his asthma – the recurrent problem that caused him to keep a small inhaler always with him in summer time – he could be believed when he said he hadn’t felt so good in years.

  He was insistent that Alexis should spend regular weekends at Cotchford with his wife, Bobbie, and their daughter, Sappho. The Korners both remembered Brian’s excitement, one weekend, at having persuaded his parents to come from Cheltenham soon and stay a whole week. ‘He wanted to show them he lived in a real house,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘That seemed important – proving to his father that his music had brought him to a quite conventional end.’

  Happily excited as he was, there still remained fears and anxieties that Brian would confide to Alexis as they sat in the ingle-nooked living room or – as summer drew on – outside, next to the swimming pool.

  Chief among his anxieties was a gnawing suspicion that Mick and Keith’s clemency might be no more than some elaborate game; that, having persuaded him to leave the Stones, they might now be plotting to renege on the terms of the agreement. The promised £100,000 had not yet been paid. Brian needed money, both to support his superstar lifestyle and to maintain so large and extensive a property.

  To renovate the farmhouse he had employed a builder named Frank Thorogood, a schoolfriend of Tom Keylock whom Keylock had first brought in to do extensive work for Keith Richard at Redlands. On top of the £32,000 Brian had paid for Cotchford Farm, he was committed to £10,000-worth of improvements by Thorogood and a four-man gang hired in Chichester. The work ranged from restoring antique beams in the kitchen and making a new stone floor upstairs, to draining and levelling a large field behind the house.

  Unofficially, Frank Thorogood’s job was to keep an eye on Brian during Tom Keylock’s frequent absences on service for the other Stones. Keylock gave him the power to draw money from the Stones’ London office to pay incidental expenses. He even moved in to Cotchford Farm, living through the week in a flatlet above the garage and returning to his wife and family at weekends.

  Brian’s soft-heartedness and need of friends made not only Thorogood, but also the most temporary workmen free of his home, his food and wine. Mary Hallett, his housekeeper, remembered that Thorogood spent much of the time sitting around the house with Brian, sunning himself in the garden or swimming in the pool.

  Sometimes even Brian would complain to Alexis about Frank Thorogood. Then his mood would change again: he would put on Proud Mary, and talk further about blues bands yet unformed. The Korners would leave him in his Winnie-the-Pooh garden, stretched out along the diving board of his bright blue swimming-pool, staring up into a sky almost as blue as it used to be in Morocco.

  Mick Taylor was eight years old when he saw his first guitar. His parents – themselves young enough to be rock ’n’ roll fans – had taken him to a Bill Haley concert at the Golders Green Hippodrome. Between the baby-faced small boy and the glinting, amber silhouette on Haley’s chest there passed a charge which was to give the boy’s life thereafter a wonderful simplicity. All he thought of was getting a guitar, learning to play it, then playing it better and better. By the age of twelve, he was sought after by every amateur group in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, the drab aero-engineering suburb where his father worked as a fitter for de Havilland Ltd.

  Shy and quiet as he usually was, the guitar gave Mick Taylor nerve enough for anything. At fourteen, he went to see a concert by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, featuring Eric Clapton, in nearby Welwyn Garden City. He talked his way backstage, only to find that Eric Clapton hadn’t turned up that night. The fourteen-year-old schoolboy persuaded John Mayall to let him play lead guitar in Eric Clapton’s place.

  He was still only seventeen when John Mayall asked him to become the Bluesbreakers’ lead guitarist as a replacement for yet another graduate from that seminary of British rock. Peter Green, who had succeeded Clapton, was now leaving, with bass-player John McVie, to form Fleetwood Mac. One day, Mick Taylor was at school in Hatfield. The next, he was on the road as star instrumentalist in Britain’s best, as well as busiest, pure blues band.

  He remained with John Mayall for four years, playing almost every night, refining his technique and also strengthening his nerves under the autocratic leader who would train up such brilliant pupils only for so long as they threatened no direct rivalry to himself. ‘John was a great eccentric,’ Taylor says. ‘He’d lived in a tree once – somewhere near Manchester. He collected erotica and wore all his harmonicas on a belt round his waist. And every conversation you had with him, he’d record on a tiny little tape.’

  In May 1969, when John Mayall announced yet another reshuffle of the Bluesbreakers, Mick Taylor realized he had become too good for Mayall’s peace of mind, and had better find employment elsewhere. Then, one night, John Mayall rang him up in Paddington and asked if he fancied becoming lead guitarist in the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger had asked Mayall, along with many other people, to nominate a successor to Brian Jones. Mayall had recommended his ex-pupil as the best young virtuoso in contemporary rock. It was arranged that Taylor should meet t
he Stones at Olympic Studios, during sessions for the album that would become Let It Bleed.

  He went along, very nervous, thinking the Stones needed someone only for temporary session work. ‘I’d never met any of them before. The only one I’d ever seen was Mick Jagger, sprinting down the King’s Road one day with a pack of photographers after him.

  ‘I met their producer, Jimmy Miller, first. Then the Stones themselves started drifting in. Keith, I remember, arrived about three hours late. It was all very easy and friendly. The track they were working on was Live with Me. I gave them a riff – it seemed to work in well. I still thought I was being auditioned to play just on the one album. It wasn’t until the end of the session that I realized they were asking me to join them.’

  The deal offered by Jagger was not instant full membership. Mick Taylor would join the Stones initially as an employee, for a salary of £150 per week. Only if things proved satisfactory would he receive a share of their concert fees and record royalties.

  On June 9, Les Perrin’s office was finally allowed to give the prearranged story to the press that Brian Jones had ‘resigned’ from the Rolling Stones because of disagreements over musical policy. His replacement would be a twenty-year-old unknown whom first newspaper pictures revealed to be so angelically boyish, with his round, clear face and thick, wavy hair, there was even some speculation that the Stones might be turning into middle-aged pederasts. It was further noted of this apparently willing sacrifice to decadence incarnate that he neither drank nor smoked, and was into macrobiotic food.

  To reporters who reached him on the telephone at Cotchford, Brian dutifully gave the same story of a regretful decision to quit the Stones ‘because I no longer see eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting … I have a desire to play my own brand of music … We have agreed that an amicable termination of our relationship is the only answer.’