Mick Jagger (51 page)

Harefield was only about an hour’s drive across Sussex from Redlands, and rather than take the coward’s way out and employ a third party—as the Beatles had when ditching their original drummer, Pete Best—Mick and Keith did the firing in person, taking along Charlie Watts in case a mediator should be needed. But the meeting passed off with none of Brian’s usual histrionics or hysteria. It was agreed that the press would be told he was leaving by amicable mutual consent, and he would receive a once-for-all payment of £100,000 (well over £1 million by modern values) in addition to the royalties still accruing to him from Stones recordings. When it was all over, Brian shook hands and wished them good-bye with old-fashioned courtesy: only when their Rolls had turned out of the front drive and disappeared did he run back into the house, lay his head on his kitchen table, and weep.

The following day, a press release from Les Perrin’s office announced that Brian had left the Stones because of “musical differences,” describing it (in words that would prove somewhat unfortunate) as an “amicable termination.” A statement from Brian himself explained he had taken the decision because “I no longer saw eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting.” One from Mick added a persuasive note of personal warmth: “We have decided that it is best for him to be free to follow his own inclinations. We have parted on the best of terms. We continue to be friends and we’re certainly going to meet socially in future.”

For London, the summer of 1969 brought a return of the sunshine that seemed to have saturated it throughout the decade. And on June 7, the predominantly sunny mood of its young was demonstrated as never before by a free rock concert in one of its cherished royal parks.

The chosen space was Hyde Park, the 350 verdant acres bounded by Knightsbridge, Bayswater, and Mayfair, whose loudest sound as a rule was the splash of oars on the Serpentine lake or the soapbox orators at Speakers’ Corner. The license had been obtained by a new promotions company named Blackhill Enterprises; its star attraction was Blind Faith, the supergroup lately formed by Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker from Cream, Steve Winwood from Traffic, and Rick Grech from Family. A stage was constructed on the wide plateau in the park’s northeast corner next to Marble Arch, and the spectators sat on the grass or in deck chairs, just yards from grinding traffic. The event attracted an audience of 150,000, by a long way the largest crowd ever formed in London since the end of the Second World War. Despite the competition for good vantage points and the extreme heat—in an era long before people carried their own bottled water—not a single case of violence or drunkenness was reported.

Blind Faith had only recently come together, and their set—including a cover version of the Stones’ “Under My Thumb”—scarcely lived up to their hype. But the atmosphere of good humor and togetherness was like no festival’s since Monterey. In the VIP area, the show’s organizer-compere, Sam Cutler, bumped into Mick, wandering around with Marianne and Nicholas, clearly as enraptured as everyone else. That evening, Cutler went to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall and again encountered Mick, by this time free of Marianne and Nicholas and with Marsha Hunt at his side. He was in high spirits, having realized the perfect way to restart the Stones’ live performing career and introduce their new lead guitarist. They, too, would give a free concert in Hyde Park.

As always when Mick made up his mind, events moved rapidly from then on. Blackhill Enterprises were brought in to organize the staging, with Sam Cutler as compere once again. Despite the prevailing atmosphere of hippie altruism, Cutler had to explain to Mick that putting on a free concert was just as expensive as putting on a commercial one. Mick’s neat solution was to sell the television rights to the Granada network, which would effectively underwrite the event in return for exclusive access to the Stones and himself, both on-and offstage.

There was also input from Rock Scully, manager to San Francisco’s legendary Grateful Dead and a friend of Cutler’s, who happened to be passing through London. Scully talked enthusiastically of free festivals in California whose promoters used Hell’s Angels bikers to protect the electricity supply by parking their machines next to the generators, so giving the performers an effective but—Scully stressed—unaggressive security screen. Cutler remembers Mick saying he’d like to do a free show in California also, on the same lines.

So the date of the Stones’ first live appearance in more than two years was set for July 5. Their alfresco rebirth in fact would take place only a few streets west of the Soho pubs and clubs where Brian Jones had first slapped them into life. That was the last thing on anyone’s mind until, with only two days to go, Brian was found dead in his swimming pool.

HIS DEATH WOULD turn into the pop world’s most famous whodunit. Although an excellent swimmer, he had drowned in a few feet of water, within earshot of his girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, and several houseguests who could easily have come to his aid. Sudden, lonely, inexplicable deaths have been the fate of many other major rock figures; those of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were, indeed, soon to follow in quick succession. But Brian’s peculiar blend of brilliance and self-destructiveness—and the fact that the most decadent rock star of his time expired in a garden dedicated to Winnie-the-Pooh—has generated an unparalleled degree of fascination, speculation, and Kennedyesque conspiracy theory.

The inquest found his drowning to have been “misadventure,” due to the level of drugs and alcohol in his system and his appalling physical shape for a man of only twenty-seven. But among investigative journalists and broadcasters, a suspicion still lingers that he was murdered and a cover-up inside the Stones’ camp prevented his killer or killers from being brought to justice. The motive most commonly suggested (albeit without a shred of hard evidence) is that, despite having left the band in seeming amicability, he still posed some threat or knew some dark secret about them which he was threatening to make public.

In the countless articles and documentaries about the case that have appeared since 1969, the Stones have never been accused of direct involvement in either the alleged murder or conspiracy. They receive a large share of blame nonetheless for the seeming callousness with which they had fired him from the band he founded, so sending him off a metaphorical deep end well before he plunged from the real one. Mick is always portrayed as the most selfishly indifferent to his plight, stealing his leadership without a qualm, then, once he was gone, not sparing him a backward glance. As we have already seen and will now again in spades, all this could not be further from the truth.

Brian’s final undoing seems not to have been drink or drugs but his pathetic need for friends, all the greater now that he was no longer a Rolling Stone. To carry out renovations at Cotchford Farm, he had hired a local builder named Frank Thorogood, a crony of the Stones’ driver, Tom Keylock, who had previously done some work for Keith at Redlands. The misnamed Thorogood took shameless advantage of the situation, dawdling over his construction work while sponging off Brian and living rent-free with a woman friend in a flat above the garage.

Twenty-six years after the event, Thorogood, by that time terminally ill with cancer, made a supposed deathbed confession to Keylock that he’d drowned Brian by accident during some drunken horseplay while they were temporarily alone together in the pool. But there remain puzzling aspects to the case, for instance precisely how many people were at Cotchford Farm at the time, and what happened to the large amount of Brian’s possessions and private papers that disappeared immediately afterward. The Sussex police’s investigation—using some of the same officers who busted Mick and Keith in 1967—was later revealed to have been seriously flawed, and there have been repeated calls for an official reexamination of the evidence, the most recent in 2010.

When Brian died, at around midnight on July 2, the reconfigured Stones happened to be all together at Olympic Studios, working around the clock to finish off Let It Bleed. The news reached them between 2 and 3 A.M., in telephone calls from their assistant Shirley Arnold and their press officer, Les Perrin. The Olympic session was aborted, and the band went home, reconvening later at their Maddox Street office in a state of collective shock. Charlie Watts was weeping, while Mick—as Shirley remembers—wandered distractedly up and down, repeatedly kicking a dog’s water bowl on the floor.

The immediate assumption was that the Hyde Park concert in two days’ time would be canceled. But after a chance remark by Charlie, another idea emerged. That afternoon, Mick gave an interview to the London Evening Standard and said the concert would go ahead, but now as a tribute to Brian. Afterward, he continued with the busy day as scheduled, premiering “Honky Tonk Women” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops show, then going on to a “white ball” at the country home of Prince Rupert Loewenstein, at which the guests included the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret.

His comments to the media about Brian were gracious and heartfelt (in contrast with Paul McCartney’s and George Harrison’s flip responses to John Lennon’s death, eleven years later): “I just say my prayers for him. I hope he becomes blessed, I hope he is finding peace … Brian will be at the concert. I mean, he’ll be there. I don’t believe in Western bereavement. You know, I can’t suddenly drape a long black veil and walk the hills … I want to make it so that Brian’s send-off from the world is filled with as much happiness as possible.” The Oscar Wilde line, however, came from the Who’s Pete Townshend: “It’s a normal day for Brian. Like, he died every day, you know.”

Given the length of the Stones’ layoff, and the changes in rock tastes and presentation in the meantime, there was no knowing how many people would turn out to see them in Hyde Park. Brian’s many loyal fans might well refuse to accept Mick Taylor in his place and, despite the tribute theme, could boycott the event in their thousands. Even Mick felt nervous about how he would go over, and didn’t anticipate a crowd anywhere near Blind Faith’s 150,000 the previous month.

He spent the forty-eight hours leading up to Saturday, July 5, compiling a fourteen-song playlist with Keith and rehearsing the band in what would be the first-ever stage versions of most. For convenience, they used the Beatles’ basement recording studio at 3 Savile Row, with John and Yoko running their world peace campaign on the floor above. Three floors higher was Allen Klein, preoccupied with Beatle problems to the exclusion of all else and still unaware that the Stones were no longer in his pocket.

The weather continued to be glorious, but London’s unusually high pollen count gave Mick a bout of hay fever, something he had not suffered since his schooldays, which developed into full-blown laryngitis. On the following Monday, he was due to fly to Australia to begin filming Ned Kelly, having just heard that his still-unresolved drug case would not prevent him from traveling. The filmmakers were starting to fear rock-star unreliability and hinting at legal action if he did not arrive on the set on time, fit and ready for work. Even so, there was no question of the show being called off.

What he wore onstage clearly was of critical importance. By 1969, rock stars performed in hippie clothes as colorless and shapeless as their fans’, but this gig, more than any before, demanded some sartorial splash on his part. He first asked the couturier Ossie Clark to make him a snakeskin suit, but realized it would be too purgatorially hot. Then at the Mister Fish boutique he found a white cotton suit whose ruffle-fronted, puffy-sleeved, flounce-skirted jacket looked feminine even beyond the gender-blurring modes of the day. It had been made for the American cabaret star Sammy Davis Jr., but Mick borrowed it for the Hyde Park show, trying it out first on Princess Margaret and the other posh guests at Prince Rupert’s white ball (where only Marianne had defied the dress code by wearing top-to-toe black). The Fish outfit was light and summery and also fitted the new, solemn mood, white in many cultures signifying bereavement.

By early Saturday morning, it had become clear that Blind Faith’s concert had been the merest sideshow and that around 250,000 people were gathering in Hyde Park to welcome back the Stones. Blackhill Enterprises had provided a workmanlike stage well over six feet high, with a canopy and a thirty-foot scaffolding tower to house some of the extra speakers needed for so vast an open-air auditorium. Obedient to Mick’s wish for a natural look in keeping with the surroundings, potted palm trees decorated the stage, with a color blowup of the Beggars Banquet album gatefold group picture as a backcloth. On Mick’s orders, too, there was no backstage VIP enclosure. The Stones would wait in a suite at the Londonderry Hotel, at the Apsley House end of Park Lane, and when their moment came, would be delivered to the stage by armored truck.

The other innovation—copied from Californian festivals as detailed by the Grateful Dead’s Rock Scully—was to recruit fifty Hell’s Angels as stage-front security. The purpose was to show that, despite recent flower-power detours, the Stones remained as edgy as ever; outlaws of rock, guarded by black-leather-clad, dangerous motorbike outlaws of the road. These British Angels, however bore only a superficial resemblance to their genuinely ferocious and much-feared American counterparts—in fact, were not an official chapter of the international Angels brotherhood. Though adorned with the regulation tattoos, metal studs, Nazi helmets, and swastikas, they were a weedy-looking bunch whose only payment for acting as stewards was to be a free cup of tea each.

Otherwise, the question of security hardly arose. Hyde Park had its own substantial police station, including mounted and dog-handling sections, which stayed on full alert but would be exercised hardly at all. In the whole day, there were just twelve arrests for minor offenses, a handful of knives were confiscated, and four hundred people had to be treated for heat exhaustion.

The Stones were preceded by a string of not-too-threatening support acts: King Crimson, Family, Screw, the Battered Ornaments, the Third Ear Band, and, for old times’ sake, Alexis Korner’s latest blues band, New Church. In the absence of a VIP enclosure, special guests sat on either side of the stage or in the scaffolding tower. Among them were Paul McCartney with his new wife, Linda, and Eric Clapton with his new girlfriend, Alice Ormsby-Gore (Mick’s penchant for the upper classes had proved catching). Marianne and Nicholas drove with Mick to the Stones’ base camp at the Londonderry, then were ushered to front seats on the right side of the stage. Marianne’s hair was still cropped short for her role as Ophelia; in her own words, she “looked like death … dope sick, coming off smack, anorexic, pale, sickly and covered in spots.” On the tower she could see a figure with an enormous Afro, dressed in a skimpy suit of white buckskin. Mick had been unable to resist having Marsha Hunt there, too.