“I want to play my kind of music, which is no longer the Stones’ music,” was Brian Jones’ official parting statement from The Rolling Stones on June 8th, 1969. He said the split was amicable, but as history revealed the true story, the reality of the departure was anything but.
It’s a sad story. The Stones started as friends with the best intentions. All bonding over their love of American blues music, the band buzzed with a youthful enthusiasm that quickly made them a sensation.
However, As the band became more and more successful, their sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle was their undoing, coming to a head during their 1986 Beggars Banquet sessions.
First, there was the issue of sex. In 1965, Jones and the band met Anita Pallenberg, who struck up a tumultuous and violent relationship. After Keith Richards saw his bandmate physically assault his girlfriend, he intervened. However, tensions built as Pallenberg moved closer to Richards, and the pair struck up a relationship. Causing a rift in the friendships, the cracks were starting to show as Richards said, “That was the final nail in the coffin with me and Brian.”
Drugs, however, were the crux of the issue as the narcotics that helped them enjoy the spoils of their career were starting to hinder it. While it wasn’t that Jones was the only user, the rest of the band could still get the job done.
While their producer, Jimmy Miller, described the rest of the band as “workhorses”, Jones was letting them down. It hit a point where, on the rare occasion Jones’ showed up, the producer would “isolate him, put him in a booth and not record him onto any track that we really needed”, leaving the rest of the band to get on with the album sessions in another room. They’d had enough, as the producer recalled, “The others, particularly Mick and Keith, would often say to me, ‘Just tell him to piss off and get the hell out of here.’”
Unable to balance his hedonism with his focus, Jones couldn’t contribute usefully or reliably enough. When his drug usage meant he was unable to attain a US visa, the band knew it was time to cut off the dead limb.
Little is known about the night of June 8th, 1969. At his Cotchford Farmhouse in East Sussex, Jones was visited by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts as a kind of intervention meeting. Some biographers claim that the band simply fired Jones from the group he had formed. But according to Richards, it genuinely was amicable and that Jones knew he was in no state to go on the road.
“We’d known for a few months that Brian wasn’t keen,” was Mick Jagger’s official line. “He wasn’t enjoying himself and it got to the stage where we had to sit down and talk about it. So we did and decided the best thing was for him to leave.”
In a tragic turn of events, less than a month later, the musician would be found dead. As one of music’s saddest stories of how hedonism can lead to horror, the world will never know what music Jones might have given us next.
