At the second of his court appearances in October 1967, Brian (said by his psychiatrist to be "potentially suicidal") wore a pin-striped charcoal-grey Savile Row suit with flared cuffs, a blue and white polka dot tie, and a white frilly lace shirt. This, in an era when high court judges routinely had to ask what a T-shirt was, let alone how to inject yourself with reefers. Brian was given a custodial sentence for possession of a minuscule amount of hash, again reduced on appeal to a fine.
"He was regularly so stoned in the studio that he would just nod off," says Gered Mankowitz. "The band would send out for food about two o'clock in the morning and I saw Brian just fall head first into his duck à l'orange. It was very sad and it showed a weakness which began to get picked on. When they put him in the soundbooth at Olympic and he had to be propped up with cushions it was really sad and awful but in the control room we were all laughing and joking about it. I don't think we knew how else to deal with it. Nowadays there would be clinics and counsellors but nobody had written the textbook then on how to deal with a rock casualty. There wasn't a manual. There was a lack of concern all round. Nobody rallied round. You ran out of sympathy for him." "Perhaps in these slightly more enlightened days, dealing with personality disorders and drug problems… I mean, everyone knows about it now, " adds Jagger, "but I don't think in those days there was such a lot of understanding about."
"We were in the Maddox Street offices. They'd left Andrew [Loog Oldham] by then and [Allen] Klein was on the scene," says Shirley Arnold. "Jo Bergman had been brought in from California to run the office. Brian was paranoid and didn't take to Jo. He thought she was just catering for Mick, but Mick was the businessman. He was the one that was coming into the office and attending the board meetings. This was '68 and Brian wasn't even attending recording sessions, and when you did see him he looked so tired."
"He wasn't showing up," confirms Charlie Watts. "And you know what happens when people don't show up - you do without them. And then when you do without them, suddenly they're not needed. And then it was a decision. Shall we get somebody else?"
"They wouldn't record anything that he'd written and he wanted to do other things," says Shirley Arnold. "I was never sure what it was but he wasn't keen on the way the music was going. He didn't think the Stones should be moving in that direction." "People say because he wasn't writing songs he compensated by playing every musical instrument going - but he did write songs," claims Terry Rawlings. "Shirley Arnold knew he was writing songs. There's been lyrics found since. I just don't think they got a chance to be heard." David Dalton: "Much later on Andrew Oldham showed me some lyrics Brian had written. It was this very repetitive, very generic blues thing. There was no resonance at all. The guy just couldn't write lyrics."
Whatever the merits, or otherwise, of his lyrics, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Brian has been written out of history in other ways. "There's a great scene in that Doors movie where they get taken into the inner sanctum of Andy Warhol's Factory," recalls Terry Rawlings. "Brian is in there at the time and he's the one who fucks them off! But they leave him out of the movie. He fucked all those bands off. This is the man who burped in Frank Zappa's face. Zappa is trying to be this far-out dude, trying to outgross Brian, and Brian just burps in his face and walks away."
"People who didn't feel threatened by him got on well with him," notes Kathy Etchingham. "Jimi didn't feel threatened by him and Brian adored Jimi, really respected him. Jimi got a copy of 'John Wesley Harding' and wanted to cover I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine, but thought it was too personal to Dylan, so he decided to do All Along The Watchtower instead. Jimi phoned Dave Mason and Brian Jones and asked them if they'd like to come and play on it. They came round when we lived in Upper Berkely Street. Brian could hardly get through the door with his huge sitar. We all piled into this taxi to go over to Olympic Studios - Jimi, me Dave Mason with this big, I think it was his 12 string guitar, and Brian and this enormous sitar, sitting like contortionists in this taxi. That's the kind of thing you don't forget."
A lot of what has been written about Jones's diminishing talents as a musician just doesn't add up. Someone as supposedly washed up as he was wouldn't have been capable of putting together the 'Pipes Of Pan At Joujouka' album, a project entered into with all the anthropological fervour of a Samuel Charters or Alan Lomax. Jones's doctoring of the primitive tapes, made on a simple 4-track, is a proto-dub masterpiece - something the Stones themselves belatedly recognised when they used the Master Musicians Of Joujouka on the 'Steel Wheels' LP in 1989. Neither would a dribbling basket-case with his marbles in his socks have been capable of writing a stunning Cannes-entry film score for Volker Sclondorff's A Degree Of Murder. Jimmy Page plays guitar, Nicky Hopkins piano and Kenny Jones drums. Brian Jones plays every instrument he'd ever picked up and gota tune out of. Around this time he also played alto sax on The Beatles' You Know My Name and, although few discographies credit him, is probably on Baby You're A Rich Man as well.
But for all this innovative extra-curricular activity it was becoming increasingly clear that The Rolling Stones were carrying a passenger. The big screen evidence is up there for all to see in the Jean-Luc Godard film One Plus One, with bleary Brian propped up in his corner as Sympathy For The Devil evolves without him. In the video for Jumping Jack Flash he looks like a waxwork effigy of himself. During the sessions for You Can't Always Get What You Want, a legendary and brutally telling interchange, duly witnessed by Jack Nitzsche, occurred between Jagger and Jones. "What can I play?" says Jones. "I don't know. What can you play?" replies Jagger. On The Rolling Stones' Rock And Roll Circus, Jones had faded to silence, his broken wrist necessitating Keith Richards to double up on lead and rhythm guitar on just about everything. And let's not even speculate on what the assembled Lennon/Clapton/Richards supergroup version of Yer Blues, with its "I feel so suicidal / Just like Dylan's Mr Jones", will have done for Brian's paranoia. On 'Beggars Banquet' his playing - what little there is - is sober and respectful. Apart from some nice sitar touches on Street Fighting Man he is becoming spectral within his own band.
"We carried Brian for quite a long time," says Jagger. "We put up with his tirades, and his not turning up for over a year. So it wasn't like suddenly we just said, Fuck you. You didn't turn up for the show, you're out. We'd been quite patient with him. And he'd just gotten worse and worse. He just didn't want to be in it. He didn't want to be part of it. He didn't want to come out of this rather sad state." Nick Kent: "The guy was in a car driving himself at 150mph at a brick wall, wasn't he? Drugs really did for that guy. They really sliced him up. There were a lot of people who wanted to help him but there were a lot of people who were too cool. Jagger and Charlie were very concerned. They could have fed stories to the press that he was unstable and just got rid of him but they didn't. They were considerate."
Ultimately a decision had to be made. When it emerged in early 1969 that the Stones couldn't tour the States because of Jones's drug convictions the inevitable loomed. "I think he knew, in a way," says Jagger of the final split. "He was quite philosophical about it." Was it a hard thing to do? "Really hard. But it was either that or just going on with someone that was just not functioning. I mean, he was in a really bad state. We couldn't have survived with Brian. He was too ill to play. It was sorrowful."
"I'm sure it nearly killed him when we sacked him 'cos he'd fought so hard to put it all together at the beginning," states Charlie Watts. "It was a huge void in his life, especially being young. If he'd have made 60 million dollars, if he'd had that cushion… He had a little bit, but not what people think. But he was very young, you know, so there was a big space of nothing."
Jones had filled that big space of nothing some months earlier by purchasing AA Milne's old house at Cotchford Farm in Sussex. He inherited Keith Richards' chauffeur, Tom Keylock, and a motley crew of cowboy builders and their freeloading mates. It was here in an atmosphere of subterfuge and bathos that the final acts of Brian Jones's life were played out. "There was Tom Keylock at the top and it all went out in tiers," says Terry Rawlings. "There was a network of drivers, builders, labourers. The same guys who were working on Redlands. All working class, all in their thirties, all taking as many liberties as they could, borrowing his Rolls Royce. Seeing him swan around with dolly birds in this beautiful house, there's bound to be resentment."