“Hello, my name is….and I’m a Stones-a-holic.” Since age 11, in the month of June 1965 when I was sentenced to 2 weeks’ purgatory at summer camp, I’ve been an unabashed and unashamed Stones groupie and fan. It was while living in an army-style dormitory with, say, 20 other kids my age that I became hooked on Andrew Loog Oldham’s response to the ubiquitous influence of the Beatles: the Rolling Stones. Our teenaged camp counselor, separated by just a few years but with dictatorial powers over his gangly, coming-of-age recruits, bunked at the entrance to our sleeping quarters, in the first of two long rows of beds. On his nightstand was a for-the-time standard, portable battery-operated radio with a boom-like extendable antenna that angled in whichever direction gave the best reception, and for 14 solid days of heavy rotation, it drilled into my receptive pre-teen consciousness the strains of the Stones’ first big hit in the US: [I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction.
Like the acetates put out by American blues and jazz legends that post-war music buffs Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Charlie Watts devoured as kids off obscure imported labels such as Okeh, Chess and Dial, I internalized the demonic rhythms and obscene fuzztones of “Satisfaction” through repeated listenings until it became as much a part of my DNA as my hair and eye color. I was influenced and affected by the Beatles ~ as was every one of my Boomer generation ~ but I was hopelessly in thrall to the Rolling Stones.
A bottomless reservoir for biographers and gossip columnists, Stones historiography has yielded up yet another book about the cherubic (right), though eventually bloated & pasty-faced (see below), poetically doomed founder of the group: Brian Jones.
By expiring as he did sometime overnight on July 2-3, 1969, he also put his fabled last residence Cotchford Farm on the must-see bucket list of every Stones devotee (doubtless ~ were he still alive ~ to the eternal chagrin of its original owner, Winnie the Pooh’s creator A.A. Milne).
It seems that attending the mysterious demise of any musician of the rock era (be it Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Felix Pappalardi or Elliott Smith) there has always been a shady figure ~ somewhat akin to an angel of death ~ left to give a never-quite-convincing-enough explanation to the police of what really happened, so that the official verdict leaves enough latitude that no one can be criminally charged with complicity in the sudden passing of a legend who had so much more to contribute, leaving millions of fans forever tormenting themselves with “what if’s” and “what might have been’s”.
The agent whom author Geoffrey Giuliano suspects was actively involved in Jones’s drowning death in his own swimming pool ~ shortly after Jones’s dismissal by the Stones ~ was…. not fair, won’t reveal it here but, again, someone who should have been looking out for Jones in his dishevelled state, but who conveniently was not, when it counted most.
I closed the book feeling that Giuliano had done one of the most thorough jobs of questioning, scrutinizing (and in the process eliminating) some of the more credulous theories about how Jones died, to arrive at a very plausible scenario of what occurred in the murky depths of the backyard pool at Cotchford Farm that fateful evening.
