STEPHEN DAVIS: “Cotchford Farm, as it was called, was better known around the world as the House at Pooh Corner, because it had been the home of A.A. Milne, who had written his tales of Winnie the Pooh in the house. There was a statue of Christopher Robin in the garden, which the Milne Society had the right to visit annually. It was an almost ridiculously perfect home for a reclusive, semi-retired rock star. Christopher Gibbs set about fixing the place up, and everyone close to him talked about how much Brian, who loved to swim, would enjoy the outdoor pool when summer came around again.”
TERRY RAWLINGS: “Brian cared little for the rest of the ancient farm’s extraordinary history. The fact that William the Conqueror had stayed there bore little significance for him. It was the idea of living in the house at Pooh Corner that thrilled him. He liked nothing better that to excitedly drag guests around the grounds to show off the pool and the life-sized statue of Christopher Robin, leaving until last the sundial which he would point to and then read aloud its inscription: ‘This warm and sunny spot belongs to Pooh and here he wonders what to do.’ ‘It’s perfect,’ Brian would say. ‘It’s exactly what I’m doing.’”
ETHAN RUSSELL: “Up close on that afternoon in his home, apart from his golden hairdo, Brian looked surprisingly old. He had bags under his eyes, and his face was swollen. Brian talked rapidly, though in a quiet voice. There was a charm to it; an uncensored stream of stoned consciousness like you might have expected from Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty… We headed out across his lawn toward the swimming pool, Jones striding in the lead. He began to move through a series of poses that he made up as he went along. He strutted and preened. He grimaced and grinned… Then he ducked inside a shed for a moment and reemerged holding a gun. Jones pointed it at the Christopher Robin statue and pulled the trigger… I was confused about how this quiet fellow, who had a few minutes ago been speaking in hushed and reverent tones about the history of his house and the wonder of Winnie-the-Pooh, came to be writhing in the dirt in his garden attacking everything around him with a gun.”
LEWIS JONES: "I was down there with him, in a sort of junk room there at Cotchford, not long before he died. He came across a photograph of Anita and just stood for a moment looking at it. He said, 'Anita,' almost as if he were talking to himself, as if he'd forgotten I was there. Then he put the photograph down and we went on talking, doing what we'd been doing. The loss of Anita upset him terribly. Nothing was the same for Brian after that. Then the drug charges, all that trouble. His mother and I didn't know how to help him."
ANITA PALLENBERG: "Brian's fall wasn't my fault or because of drugs. It was Mick and Keith."
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It was just dusk when I threw the coins. The reading I got was: Death by water. I turned to Mick and said, ‘It’s very odd, isn’t it?’ And he said, ‘My God. Do it again.’ I did it again, and I got the same thing. We just looked at each other.”
ANNA WOHLIN: “I was chatting on the phone 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. He looked so alive when we got him out, unconscious, but not dead. 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.”
ROB CHAPMAN: “In 1962 he had a head full of the blues and a heart full of hope. By 1967 he had a wardrobe full of Chelsea velvet and Marrakesh silk. But by the summer of 1969 the blues was merely a distant, faded bottleneck note, the dandy clothes were clumped in unwashed, hashburned heaps, and Brian Jones floated face down in a swimming pool.”
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.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “And it was hard to shed a tear at his demise, quite honestly. It was like, ‘Wow, he’s gone, thank God.’ Cold-blooded as that sounds, he was a passenger for us. We had to cover his ass. We all revere his memory, and nobody deserves to go that young. But if anybody asked for it, he did. But you don’t leave the Stones singing, you just get carried out. Brian was already effectively dead when he died; he was already out of the band.”
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.”
RONNI MONEY: “I believe in ultimate evil now. I do, I’ve seen it, and I believe in it. And I don’t think it’s got anything to do with horned people, it’s to do with people who can actually loathe you to death.”
SUKI POITIER: “I went to Cotchford the day after, and the interior of the house had been ransacked. That lovely William Morris tapestry, all covered with fairies and elves, was gone from the wall. I would have liked to have had it as a memento of Brian.”
PATTI SMITH: “I began to dream of Brian Jones. They were so real, and every one was the same. The first one, I was riding in this old Victorian carriage with Mick and Keith and they were talking to each other in this funny language. They kept talking about ritual, it reminded me of voodoo, Haiti or something. And Anita Pallenberg was sitting there real nervous, clutching her hands. I kept saying, 'Where's Brian? Where'd Brian go?' They'd say, 'Never mind.' Then I thought I saw him pass by in this big picture hat, like a Victorian duchess or something. It was one of these art dreams, like some Renoir movie with all these pastel colors. And then the rain started coming down, like Noah's rain. I got this weird feeling and I got out of the carriage and it was all Victorian, all English. And I looked and there was water rising about four feet and he was floating in this old Catherine the Great black Victorian dress and this big picture hat. So I told my sister about it and I forgot it. Then the next night the same thing happened. Now I don't even remember the dreams. I remember the second one was more Kenneth Anger, more homosexual, with switchblades. At the end, I came into the bathroom and his head was in the toilet. It was always water, you know? Then this big pot of boiling water spilled on me. In reality, I was in a lotta pain, had second degree burns or something, all over me, so they gave me belladonna and morphine. I went to sleep and I had this dream that I was crawling in the grass. And there was a whirlpool, rocks and river and ocean and whirlpool, and we were slipping, it was me and Brian. He said, 'Throw up.' He's saying, 'Spit it out. Spit it out.' he grabbed my hair and he says, 'Spit it out.' And I remember this white hem, like a Moroccan djellaba, grabbing it and spitting up. I woke up. I was throwing up, and it was like I woulda. . . You know, how they say Jimi Hendrix died? Well, that dream really blew my mind. I said to my sister, 'Let's go back to Paris.' Maybe we could call up -- but I didn't know any rock people then, I didn't even know Bobby Neuwirth. That was the whole tragedy, that I was just totally nobody, I had no connections. I had no money, I couldn't fly to London. And I felt like I had this information that Brian Jones was gonna die. So we went back to Paris and the next day, I couldn't even find it in English, it just said, 'Brian Jones Mort.'"
MICK JAGGER: “Brian drowned in his pool. The other stuff is people trying to make money.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Had he wanted to deal one final, devastating blow to the two people he loved and hated the most, Jones could not have done anything more effective than dying when he did, two weeks after he was fired and two days before the Stones were to play to the biggest audience of their careers. Keith would spend the next ten years, as he put it, becoming Brian and trying to kill himself with heroin. In her attempt to assuage the pain and guilt incurred by Brian’s death, Anita would follow Keith down the path of self-destruction with even more harrowing results.”
MICK TAYLOR: “Before the concert, the feeling in the hotel room was intense, this sense of pressure on all of us and this feeling of loss.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “In the Stones’ office memo schedule the Hyde Park Concert was listed as the Battle of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.”
HELEN SPITTAL: “I went to see Brian at Cotchford shortly before he died. He only once went a little sad. He told me about Anita being pregnant and begged me not to tell anyone. The pain in his eyes was so obvious and then he just went quiet. He really did love her. But he said he didn’t hate Keith and that they couldn’t help falling in love. But he was hurting beneath it all.”
STANLEY BOOTH: "Anita thought that Marlon, the son she had with Keith after Brian died, would be Brian reborn. He wasn't, but she did not stop thinking about Brian. 'I'll see him again. We promised to meet again. It was life or death,' Anita said. 'One of us had to go.'"
ZACHARY LAZAR: “It was July 5. In the center of London, in Hyde Park, five hundred thousand people were waiting for the band to arrive in his honor. The past year had already been full of vivid catastrophes: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Soviet invasion of Prague, half a million troops in Vietnam, the Cuyahoga River going up in flames. Now Brian had died, and half a million people were spread out from a large black stage with towers of black scaffolding to make a dense rectangle of tiny flesh-colored blips, mostly faces and hair. They wore the somber, utilitarian clothes of that year: jeans, work boots, leather sandals, sunglasses. They were a peaceful crowd, but there was a familiar playfulness that was missing. It was a warm day and some of the men had taken off their shirts, but there were very few flowers or beads or Indian-style pajamas. They were thoughtful, unsmiling, squinting in the sunlight, shading themselves with sheets of newspaper. There was no visible grass in the park, only people and trees, cut through at the center by the silver water of the Serpentine.”
IAN STEWART: “That performance in Hyde Park was one of the worst, if not the worst concert we ever gave. First of all, Mick came on stage alone and announced that he would read a poem by Shelley, which he said would tell how the Stones felt about Brian’s unexpected packing off. An endless poem. Now I admire Mick for a lot of things but one thing he ain’t is a reader of epic poems.”
SHIRLEY ARNOLD: "Mick read a poem by Shelley and then released the butterflies, and one landed on me. It was so pretty, and I was sitting with Shirley Watts, and when the boys came on, she said, 'I miss his face.' The butterfly that landed on my arm had a broken wing, so she said, 'Oh, it's got a broken wing,' and she started to cry. I said, 'Come on, we'll go.' We only listened to two numbers and went back and sat in the caravan."
DICK HATTRELL: “I thought this opportunistic memorial was rather tacky. I would say that only a fraction of the two hundred fifty thousand who crowded the park were aware before they came that this was meant to be a tribute to Brian. Mick came on stage wearing the goddamndest costume I ever saw. First of all, he was wearing heavy makeup – lipstick, eye shadow, rouge, mascara – like a tart. And his costume was a white, lacy affair that was cut like a dress, with pants and a vest underneath, and he wore a necklace that was a brass-studded leather choker. Hanging from his neck was an outsize wood crucifix. His hair was parted in the middle and hung to his shoulders. With his long hair and dolly dress, it was hard to tell, if you were in that crowd, whether it was Mick on stage or some chick from a boutique on King’s Road.”
NICO: “People said I had not written my song for Brian [‘Janitor of Lunacy’] and that is why I didn’t perform. I had, although it was not what it would become. I didn’t perform because I was late arriving at the stage, because it is difficult for one woman to carry a harmonium across a crowded park with nobody offering to help. So I missed my turn. It was an irony in any case. Mick had thrown Brian out of the band a few weeks before this. He opened a box of butterflies for Brian which he thought was poetic. Well it was because I saw a lot of dead butterflies stuck in the box afterwards, and the next day Marianne Faithfull tried to commit suicide.”
SHIRLEY ARNOLD: "It was a strange day in the park, it was a great day if Brian had been there, if he had been watching, I'm sure he was. All you could see was thousands and thousands of people - quiet, calm, not moving. A couple got up and danced. But I think if Brian hadn't died, there would have been a riot, because the music was fantastic. But they'd lost a Stone, and they just wanted to listen to the music. They were there to pay their respects."
IAN STEWART: “I guess by then Mick realized that he had to pump some like into the proceedings, so the band jumped into ‘Honky Tonk Women’ but the problem was that this was the first time we had given a performance in over a year, we hadn’t rehearsed, so we were ragged and rusty, and besides, Keith had shown up in terrible condition, off some kind of dope binge, looking like a derelict, and since as Keith played so went the band, the musical results that day were pretty ragged. Mick’s performance got increasingly frantic as he tried to overcompensate for the band’s sluggishness, with the result that he really went overboard. He stripped off his dolly tunic and was leaping around in his vest and pants when he suddenly went to his knees, stuck his mike on his crotch and put his mouth over it, leaving nothing to the imagination as to what he was mimicking. A rather tacky way to commemorate Brian’s death.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “No one really knew what was going on. It was a hassle, quite honestly. It was fantastic from the point of view of a mass gathering. You’ll never see Hyde Park like that – just people and trees. But Brian had died and we were breaking in Mick Taylor. We hadn’t played live for quite a while and the organization, the logistical end of it, was flimsy. And we played pretty bad until near the end, ‘cause we hadn’t played for years. And nobody minded because they just wanted to hear us play again. It was nice they were glad to see us because we were glad to see them. Coming after Brian’s death, it was like the thing we had to do. We had that big picture of him on stage and it came out looking like a ghost in some pictures.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Hyde Park. I can’t stop dreaming about it. It had to be the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen. They were the stars of the show: like some massive religious gathering on the shores of the Ganges.”
ZACHARY LAZAR: “From a tower of scaffolding to the left of the stage, Anger was filming it all on his Kodak Cine Special camera, a gaunt man in black pants, hair wafting in the breeze. He thought that at least a few of the fans would get up and dance to the music on the P.A., even climb up for a quick frolic on the empty black stage, but none of them did. There was the hush and awe of hierarchy. It occurred to him that his time with the band would be in jeopardy now, that they would have less and less time for people like him. After today, their circle would just get narrower and narrower. They would be as remote as pharaohs or Hollywood stars. He saw that the Hells Angels were more than just a defensive force, they were also the embodiment of some punitive urge the crowd had, an urge to atone.”
ETHAN RUSSELL: “Underneath the stage in Hyde Park, Tom Keylock, once Brian Jones’ chauffeur and now Keith Richards’s, instructed a group of British Hells Angels about security. I looked at them. They were kids. Some looked twelve years old, maybe fourteen, and it occurred to me that they might well go home to their parents. Some were just generic bikers. Some were wearing wigs for the look. Others sported Nazi paraphernalia. I was from California, so it was easy for me to tell that these were no Hells Angels. Not one of them was the real deal. But I think that the Stones really didn’t know and maybe thought that if they weren’t exactly like their American counterparts, they were similar enough. Or, more likely, the Stones didn’t think about it at all. Their casual impression that these kids were somehow like real Hells Angels would have disastrous consequences months later.”
KENNETH ANGER: “I remember Anita and Marianne seated up in
the scaffolding, watching… like two predatory birds.”
MARC SPITZ: “Faithfull can be seen beaming in footage from Hyde Park, but it’s misleading. Convinced that she’d seen a premonition of Jones’ demise, she was unraveling mentally as fast, if not faster than even he did. After seven months of pregnancy, they lost their unborn daughter. ‘The miscarriage did both of us in,’ she has said. Her own musical career had stalled in the years following the Redlands bust. Frustrated by the prospect of spending eternity as Miss X, the woman with the Mars bar, she was, by ’69, easing her pain over the miscarriage and frustration with her standing with smack. It worked faster and more completely than the pills and liquor she’d initially turned to. Still recognizable as the angelic ingénue of ‘As Tears Go By,’ she had, spiritually, become a harder, darker creature entirely, one who’d come to resent her role in the already indelible Stones myth.”
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Seated
on the stage with the rest of the Stones’ wives and official girlfriends,
Marianne Faithfull was too high to care.
More than anyone else in the Stones’ inner circle, she seemed most
traumatized by Brian’s death. Faithfull
was also upset that none of the Stones seemed to care. At one point, she heard Mick sniffling in the
bathroom and assumed that the reality of his friend’s death had finally caught
up with him. Instead he was simply
fighting off a transient case of hay fever.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “At the concert in Hyde Park July 5 – which Mick dedicated to Brian – I was in very rough shape. I was dope sick coming off smack, anorexic, pale, sickly and covered with spots. Looking like death. I should never have gone in the first place. I was obviously a woman in the middle of a big pickle. And there was Marsha Hunt bursting out of her white buckskins. She was stunning. After the concert I went home with Nicholas and Mick went off with Marsha. If I’d been Mick in that situation, I might have done exactly the same thing.”
MARC SPITZ: “American-born Marsha Hunt, then twenty-three, was the face of British fashion in ’69, all big brown eyes and a full afro. She was an actress and aspiring pop singer in addition to her career as a model, and had been romantically involved with a pre-glitter Marc Bolan. She was also, relative to Faithfull at the time, sane.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “The concert was quite a frightening
event. You can see that in our
eyes. I was incredibly pregnant at the
time and was standing on the rails at the side of the stage. The people were getting closer, and then
suddenly, I saw all the Hell’s Angels and said, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to
end up really bad.’ Then they told me
that they were the security people, but they were pretty rough and during the
concert were climbing on me to get a better view… I had to climb a tree to
escape the crowds and hide.”
ZACHARY LAZAR: “Anita stood up with the crowd. Her eyes closed and her smile loosened into something dreamy and approving as Marianne pulled her back gradually into her arms, all four of their hands on her pregnant belly. Anita wore black kohl on her eyes and a purple gypsy dress and a crown of Moroccan coins around her straw-colored hair. Apart from her belly, she hardly looked pregnant at all. As Anger filmed her, he was struck once again by how much she looked like Brian.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita went through hell from survivor’s guilt and guilt plain and simple. She developed grisly compulsions. One of them was that terrible business of cutting out pictures of Brian and sticking them up on the wall and then in the morning tearing them all down.”
ASTRID LUNDSTROM: “It felt like we were in a bubble, like all of us were separate from the rest of the world; like something had happened to us that hadn’t happened to anyone else. Everyone felt shell-shocked, and now they had to go out and do this huge concert. It was quite an effort, I think, to do that. Maybe it’s just how it affected me, but it felt like – closeness is not quite what I mean – it had a certain strangeness because of Brian’s death. It was a lot of darkness, really, coupled with this ‘the show must go on’ kind of thing.”
IAN STEWART: “I can honestly tell you that I had a foreboding of disaster for the Stones the day Brian died. If you want to unravel the mystery of what happened to the sixties, start with Brian. I always felt there was something sinister about the way he died.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “And up on Jajouka’s mountain, the tribal musicians put a photo of Brian on the wall of their clubhouse and continued to sing their Brahim Jones song. The glossy old photo of Brian seemed to jiggle in its frame every time they sang it.”