Why Brian Jones Was Fired from the Rolling Stones — and What Happened Next

The official story was that Brian Jones’s drug busts and erratic behavior made him unreliable. But by mid-1969, the Rolling Stones had already stopped treating him as a bandmate. He’d missed sessions for Let It Bleed, and his playing was often wiped and replaced — most famously on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” where Al Kooper played the French horn, not Jones. On June 8, 1969, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts drove to Jones’s country house at Cotchford Farm and told him he was out. Jones agreed to a severance of £100,000 plus a £20,000 annual payment, and the band announced his departure on June 9.

Less than a month later, on July 3, 1969, Jones was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm. The coroner’s verdict was “death by misadventure,” with his lungs and liver enlarged from drugs and alcohol. He was 27. The Stones played their famous free concert in Hyde Park two days later — originally planned as a welcome for Jones — and dedicated it to him with a release of white butterflies. The timing has always been suspicious to fans, but no evidence ever pointed to foul play. Jones’s downward spiral had been long and public; the firing just sealed the last chapter.