This Day in Rock History (Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones in a Mysterious “Death by Misadventure”)

July 3, 1969—A midnight swim in the pool on his Sussex, England, estate might have seemed a good idea, but it ended the life of Brian Jones, whose exit from the world proved to be even more messy and controversial than his departure from the rock ‘n’ roll band he founded, The Rolling Stones.

People of impassioned political beliefs entertain all manner of conspiracy theories, most with little relation to reality. In the world of entertainment, however, the death of the 27-year-old guitarist has led to far more justified questioning of the official verdict of what happened on his last fateful night.

The case has figured in any number of TV documentaries and nonfiction accounts. It even inspired one of the plot developments in Peter Robinson’s marvelous murder mystery from a couple of years ago, A Piece of My Heart (which I reviewed here).

What has fascinated me is the official cause of death, made by coroner Angus Sommerville four days after Jones’ demise. “Death by misadventure” sounds like the title of a novel, a description of what happens to little boys when they take childhood fantasy too seriously.

Actually, the phrase is a British legal term for death by accident. In some ways, it seemed more probable than any other coming from a national legal judicial establishment that had been at pains to crack Jones, his former bandmates and their women for open and flagrant drug use.

That never-ceasing substance abuse, the coroner decided—capped on the night of Jones' death with the consumption of several liquor bottles and pills—led the singer to ignore a warning from a nurse friend that hot night that he was in no condition for a dip—and to drown before anyone could reach him.

Many observers had difficulty in accepting this verdict. The most outlandish of the conspiracy theories holds that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, each of whom had supplanted Jones as the prime forces in the band, wanted him done away with once and for all, only three weeks after they had requested his removal from the popular group because of his general unreliability in the studio.

Two of the more popular alternative theories of his death are: a) he got into some horseplay with the construction crew on his estate, Cotchford Farm, which had once belonged to his idol, Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, then died accidentally when the rowdiness got out of hand; and b) he was murdered by the head of this crew, Frank Thorogood, for falling behind on his payments.

Particularly over the last decade, the latter two theories have gained ground, because of the following press reports:

* Thorogood allegedly confessed to his role in the death shortly before his own demise in 1993—though the man to whom he confessed, a Rolling Stones chaffeur, contradicted this account.

* Just before her own death from cancer last year, the nurse friend on the property that night, Janet Lawson, recanted her testimony in an interview with a Daily Mail reporter, revealing two things she had not mentioned at the inquest: that there had already been tension between Jones and Thorogood, and that the look on the builder’s face when he returned from the pool led her to fear instantly that something terrible had happened.

* Jones’ girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, gave her view in a memoir called The Murder of Brian Jones, again tagging Thorogood as the culprit—though she admitted that she was in the kitchen at the time and did not witness the event itself.

* An account by Ernest Hemingway biographer A.E. Hotchner, citing anonymous sources, offered this scenario: Two members of the work crew, resenting Jones for his wealth and women, decided to have a little fun at his expense in the pool, first preventing him from getting out, then holding him under water until he accidentally drowned. (Suffering from asthma, Jones would have had an already weakened bronchial condition.)

Two days after the death, his stunned former bandmates gave a free concert dedicated in Jones’ honor at Britain’s Hyde Park.

Not all of the Stones showed up at his funeral, though: Jagger and girlfriend Marianne Faithfull were scheduled to shoot a film in location and are believed to have been threatened with legal action if they missed any days. Richards and his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, had no public explanation, though their feelings about Jones were likely to have been ambivalent, given that Pallenberg had left Jones for Richards.

Reading the accounts of Jones’ passing, I was struck by the comments of the minister offering the eulogy, Canon Hugh Evan Hopkins: “He had little patience with authority, convention and tradition. In this he was typical of many of his generation who have come to see in the Stones an expression of their whole attitude to life. Much that this ancient church has stood for in 900 years seems totally irrelevant to them.”

It’s inconceivable to me that such a thing would be said today. Not only has the Anglican Church become more liberal, but the Stones themselves are no longer a threat to “authority, convention and tradition.” (Jagger, in fact, was even knighted six years ago.)

Moreover, there would probably be greater speculation about the elements in Jones’ own psychological background that led perhaps the most musically skillful member of the group, a man who could master virtually any instrument he picked up, to embark on a path of self-destruction.

In the end, the death of Brian Jones seems like a real-life counterpart to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1965 film Blow-Up, with the blond, hedonistic, swinging (five children born out of wedlock, none that he supported) Jones at the heart of an inexplicable mystery. The dark energies symbolized by his demise would echo later in the year, in the band’s fateful concert at Altamont Speedway in December.