By 1968, the Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones was wasted, hurt, angry and looking for a retreat. He found it two hours southeast of London at an estate called Cotchford Farm. An English house in the countryside surrounded by arbours and woodland. It was built in the 1400s, knocked down and built again. Jones was taken by its provenance. For years, the house belonged to AA Milne, creator of Winnie-the-Pooh.
He intended Cotchford Farm— it cost about £30,000 — as a weekend retreat but ended up spending most of his time there. He began renovating before he moved in, bringing the house up to rock star spec. This was important, as it meant that from the autumn of 1968 until his death, Jones was almost never free of builders, foremen, JCB operators and the like, most of whom resented the small, weak, needy, weird and unaccountably wealthy celebrity.
On June 8, 1969, Mick, Keith and Charlie Watts drove to Cotchford Farm to fire Brian. He rarely turned up at sessions, and drug prosecutions made it impossible for him to tour. “They’d reached that point where they realised Brian was just a hopeless catatonic,” Sam Cutler told me. Keith studied his fingernails as Mick explained the hard truths to the founder of their band.
Charlie sat quietly. He’d been brought along for mood, the sober ranch hand to keep the others from getting out of control. Brian stared through bloodshot eyes. He reminded Mick and Keith that it was he — Brian — who had started the group and come up with the name. Mick nodded, Yes, yes, we’re aware of your contributions. By way of a divorce settlement, Brian would be paid a lump sum of about £100,000, plus £20,000 a year as long as the Stones existed. According to Keith, Brian took it quietly, as if he’d been expecting it, as if, like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he’d been in the wilderness waiting for them to terminate his command. “I’m sure it nearly killed him,” Charlie said. “He’d fought so hard to put it all together in the beginning.”
You shouldn’t be surprised. The Stones had been shedding people from the start. Use ’em up, toss ’em aside, move on. It’s a machine that runs on bodies. Brian Jones was simply the grandest goat yet sacrificed to insatiable Pan — who has thick lips, and loose limbs, and slouches. There’s something monstrous about Mick Jagger. Forget Keith; Keith is a trance-ridden melody. Forget Charlie; Charlie is a mercenary, having chosen success over jazz. Forget Bill Wyman; Bill is the back line. When you talk about the brain of the Stones, you’re talking about Mick, who’s always operated with a cruel edge that bleeds into the music.
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You see it in the remorseless way the Stones have continued decade after decade after decade. Everyone I have asked to explain this longevity has given the same answer: Mick Jagger. His will, determination and intelligence. Of course, Jones really forced the others to dump him. His behaviour left little choice. But there was something cold in the way it was done. What is the quality that allows Mick to operate with such lack of sentiment? Is it ambition, or something more?
“The Stones had been shedding people from the start. Use ’em up, toss ’em aside, move on. It’s a machine that runs on bodies
Once upon a time, Mick Jagger’s drive and the effect it had on people were associated with evil, which is why songs such as Paint It Black and Sympathy for the Devil went over so seamlessly. They confirmed what we already knew: Mick is Lucifer. But that’s wrong. Mick is not Lucifer. He’s showbiz, a pop version of the classic Hollywood diva, for whom the show must always go on, for whom obscurity is even more terrifying than death. It’s a special kind of charisma that generates tremendous light but little heat. People crave that light but get no sustenance from it. It destroys them. Life with Mick is life astride a black hole. Two years ages you immeasurably. Yet none of it touches him. Because no one else matters. He’s the ego that became the world. He stands before the millions, but the millions don’t exist. At the centre of the universe, Mick Jagger dances alone.
BACK in 1969, Brian reached into his pocket, pulled out a large joint. He wanted to get high. The joint at the end of the dream, the seal of rock’n’roll death. After they smoked that last peace pipe, Mick said it was time to go. Keith followed, then Charlie. There were ceremonial hugs, the sort exchanged by mob bosses on New York’s Mulberry Street two hours before the hit. Brian stood in the door watching them leave, then went into his house, put his head in his hands, and cried.
The band released a statement a few hours later. Jones issued a statement of his own, saying he hadn’t been fired but had quit because “I no longer see eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting”. He spent the ensuing days wandering Cotchford Farm, taking drugs, drinking and planning his funeral. He said he wanted to be buried beside the Christopher Robin statue in a casket lined with blue silk.
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On July 3, 1969, most of the Stones were at Olympic Studios in Barnes, recording Stevie Wonder’s I Don’t Know Why, when the call came. “[Mick], Keith and Charlie sat around, dazed and disbelieving,” Bill Wyman wrote. “Charlie called me at the Londonderry House hotel [on Park Lane] at 3am, half an hour after we had gone to bed. Astrid [Lundstrom, his partner] and I were stunned, in tears.”
“It was dreadful, that next morning in the office,” Shirley Arnold, who worked for the Stones in London, told Mojo. “Charlie was crying. Mick couldn’t speak. I hadn’t been to sleep. I got a minicab to work at seven o’clock. Driving through the West End and seeing the newspaper signs: ‘Brian Jones drowns.’ ”
In the days that followed, the Stones continued their regular schedule of recording and performing, as if they did not care. Which was probably not the case. I don’t think it’s a lack of sentiment you see in their actions, but shock. How can a person just vanish from the world? It’s insane. For most of the Stones, this was their first experience of mortality.
According to Jagger’s girlfriend, the singer and actress Marianne Faithfull, each member of the circle was affected in his or her own way. Jones’s ex-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was ridden with survivor’s guilt. She would cut pictures of Brian out of magazines, hang them on her walls, then throw them out in the morning. And Keith? He reacted to the death by turning into Brian, a drug-saturated rocker patrolling the border between life and death.
© Tough Jews, Inc 2016
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Extracted from The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, by Rich Cohen