Cotchford Farm was once the home of A. A. Milne; Pooh Bear lived in its Hefalump Wood. It seemed right that Brian should have the place, where he died so soon, less than a year after he bought it. Many things had hurt him by then, and Mr Jones could not stop going over them, trying to find where things went wrong, where to place the blame. ‘I was down there with him, in a sort of junk room there at Cotchford, not long before he died. He came across a photograph of Anita and just stood for a moment looking at it. He said, “Anita,” almost as if he were talking to himself, as if he’d forgotten I was there. Then he put the photograph down and we went on talking, doing what we’d been doing. The loss of Anita upset him terribly. Nothing was the same for Brian after that. Then the drug charges, all that trouble. I didn’t know how to help him. We were close when he was young, but later we had . . . differences of opinion.’
So much promise . . . a choirboy . . . first-chair clarinet . . . now old friends were saying, Well, it’s about time you retired, isn’t it? He stared at the cold fire, clenching his teeth, then went on talking.
‘Brian rejected all discipline. He was suspended from school twice. Once when he was in the sixth form he and some of the other lads used their mortarboards as boomerangs, sailing them up in the air. Brian’s came apart, and he refused to wear it. They suspended him. ‘A most salutary experience’ for Brian, a week’s suspension, according to that twit of a headmaster. Brian spent the whole week down at the Cheltenham Lido, swimming, and came back a hero to all the other boys. I hardly knew how to deal with him. The head-master would complain about him, and I’d become very serious and sit Brian down for a talk. ‘Why is the headmaster always writing us with complaints? Why do you disobey them?’ And Brian would say, ‘Look, Dad, they’re only teachers. They’ve never done anything. You want me to do the things you did, but I can’t be like you. I have to live my own life.’ He was terribly logical about it all. I could hardly get anywhere trying to argue with him.
‘Brian simply loathed school, the exams, the discipline, all that. He made his O levels and A levels in spite of himself. At eighteen he left school. He wouldn’t consider going to university. He had a dread of going to university and couldn’t face years of study before he could be self-supporting. He hated the idea of being twenty-five or twenty-six before he could start earning his own living. For a while he was keen on dentistry, but after he left school, he decided to go to work in London for an ophthalmic firm. There was an ophthalmic college affiliated with the firm, and Brian studied there for a while, at the same time he was working. The firm had a branch in Newport, but Brian wanted to go to London. He wanted the London nightlife, the jazz clubs, all that. He loved jazz, Stan Kenton, that sort of thing.
‘I took him to London for an interview with the ophthalmic firm. He put on quite a good show, and we left, and I said, ‘Well, what train shall we take home, the five o’clock?’ And he said, ‘No, Dad, I want to go to some jazz clubs before we go home, would you like to come along?’ I told him, ‘No, no, I don’t want to go.’ Brian said, ‘I’ll come home on a later train.’ He’d been to London more often than I’d known, hitchhiking, going to these clubs. I came on home and Brian stayed in London. He came home about six a.m. He bought me a hamburger that night in London. I don’t know why I should remember that. I suppose it was the first time he ever bought me a meal.
‘Brian was obsessed with music. He used to play these, what are they, Modern Jazz Quartet records—’
‘The reverberations used to drive me crazy,’ Mrs Jones said.
‘These records were playing morning, noon, and night,’ Mr Jones said. ‘I saw it as a positive evil in his life, undermining a quite good career. Maybe music was his eventual downfall, but at the time I saw it as an evil because he was so obsessed. Music had driven out all thoughts of a conventional career. His involvement with music and London life, the life of the nightclubs, all that, ruined his career at the ophthalmic firm and school. He threw school and his job over and came back home. He had odd jobs, played with a band, worked in a music shop in Cheltenham, selling sheet music, records. He was becoming totally absorbed in a musical atmosphere. I knew Brian had musical ability, but I was very chary that he could achieve success. To me the most important thing was his security. I was unsatisfied to see him just drifting, and I saw no security or success likely to come from jazz. But to him – a religion it was, he was a fanatic. He went back to London for good when he was about twenty.’
At about the same time, two other young men were coming to London, where they would meet Brian, and none of them would ever be the same.
‘Brian’s fall wasn’t my fault or because of drugs,’ Anita said. ‘It was Mick and Keith.’
THREE
Why is the jass music, and therefore, the jass band? Jass was a manifestation of a low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in civilisation’s wash. Indeed one might go farther and say that jass music is the indecent story syncopated and counter-pointed. Like the improper anecdote, also, in its youth, it was listened to blushingly behind closed doors and drawn curtains, but, like all vice, it grew bolder until it dared decent surroundings, and there was tolerated because of this oddity . . . on certain natures sound loud and meaningless has an exciting, almost an intoxicating effect, like crude colours and strong perfumes, the sight of flesh or the sadic pleasure in blood. To such as these the jass music is a delight . . .
New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1918
I woke up under a Wizard of Oz bedspread, magenta and turquoise, with Dorothy and the Scarecrow and all the rest of them in a balloon. There were a pair of single beds in the room, where rich little Du Ponts used to sleep. David Sandison spent the night in the other bed, but he was already up. I showered and dressed looking out over Los Angeles, invisible under a dense elephant-colored cloud. Then I strolled the length of the house to the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. It was odd to wake up in a big characterless house on a sunny morning when you couldn’t see the rest of the world around you for the noxious vapors and to open the fridge and find bottles of raw milk and whole-grain bread. California. It was ten o’clock, and I was sitting at the circular breakfast bar eating an orange and whole-wheat bread with blackberry preserves, recording things in my midget legal notebook.
Jo Bergman told me as I passed the office, where she and Sandison were working on the publicity kits for this morning’s press conference, that Ronnie Schneider had gone back to New York for a few days. I figured that should make him easier to avoid.
Jo, David, and I left early for the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where the press conference would take place, in one of the limousines that were on duty around the clock at all three of the Stones’ L.A. abodes – our place with the Watts family on Oriole Drive, the Laurel Canyon house where Keith and the two Micks were staying, and the Beverly Wilshire, where Bill Wyman and Astrid would be until Jo could ‘get them a house together.’ This did not imply any question of her getting them separate houses; it simply meant until Jo got them, rented for them, a house. ‘Together’ was Californian, or Hip, as obscenity used to be Army. There were certain words and phrases used by people who liked to think themselves hip, au courant, and the hip people in London or Los Angeles or Katmandu, the farthest spot in the world from Coral Gables, Florida, all used them, but you heard them used most, and regular English used least, in California. Out here whole neighborhoods had been talking for weeks, since they learned the Stones were coming, without resorting to even the most basic English: ‘Far-out dudes, man.’ ‘Heavy.’ ‘What a trip.’ All of which might mean nothing or might be code for some mysterious poetic message, like Catullus speaking from the grave about Mick’s sullen grace, Keith’s cold killer beauty.
Jo, born in Oakland, California, reared in the United States and England, had spent most of her adult life working for celebrities, and spoke a mixture of Hip and an even more esoteric language, Celebrity Code: ‘Did I tell Mick the telegram—? She’ll kill me— A baby, that’s really far out!’ she would say, all in a kind of intense breathless Lady Macbeth rush of pleasure and excitement, even genuine wholehearted concern, speaking this tongue in which words,