“Interrupted by a phone call”: The 1968 Motown song The Rolling Stones were recording when Brian Jones died
“You’re going to kill yourself,” a label boss wailed at Brian Jones. The Rolling Stones were on the brink of releasing their first single, and he was insistent that it should be a blues song. Needless to say, the label disagreed.
In the end, Jones remained headstrong enough to get his own way. They released a version of ‘Little Red Rooster’, and as Bill Wyman recalled, “It came out on the Friday, and on the Monday it was number one.”
His legacy now lies betwixt those two poles: he was dangerously daring to the point that the label’s forewarning of Jones’ self-imposed doom now feels like an eerie prognostication, yet, even the most judicious polemic would find it hard to avoid the uncomfortable truth that his daring spirit was also what drove the Stones to a position where even Bob Dylan would posit, “They were the first and the last and no one’s ever done it better.”
If the Fab Four were all about peace, love, and smiling faces, then it was Jones who positioned his band as the polar opposite of that. He was the anarchic leader of the pack. But like the 1960s itself, he stepped one toke over the line.
After relationships became more frayed than a velour sofa in a cat cafe and a fateful blowjob in the back of Keith Richards’ car, Jones was fired from his own band. “I want to play my kind of music, which is no longer the Stones’ music,” his official parting statement read on June 8th, 1969.
It was partly true. There were musical differences amid the melee of converging chaos that led to his departure. But his bandmates claim he was no longer functioning as a musician to play any kind of music whatsoever.
Yet, even they didn’t expect that in less than a month, he’d be dead.
It’s alleged that when Jones was asked what he’d do after being fired from the Stones, he replied, “I’m going to have a cup of tea, like any good Englishman”. Seemingly, he did a lot more than that. By all accounts, he was aware that his sacking was an inevitability. In fact, departing The Rolling Stones didn’t seem to bother him that much. But the sudden reality of a directionless malaise intensified his drug use in the idle weeks that followed.
Then, on July 3rd, at the age of 27, he was found unresponsive in the swimming pool of his home at Cotchford Farm in East Sussex. His passing was officially ruled “death by misadventure” with alcohol and drugs cited as contributing factors.
The Rolling Stones would soon tragically be informed. It is as fitting as it is eerie that they were in a studio performing the black music that Jones loved so dearly when they learned of his death. “There exists one minute and 30 seconds of us recording ‘I Don’t Know Why’, a Stevie Wonder song [from 1968], interrupted by the phone call telling us of Brian’s death,” Keith Richards later wrote in his memoir.
The band were in Olympic Studios on the night of July 3rd, trying to find their feet after the emotional toil of Jones’ departure. They had been caught up in a whirlwind for well over a year, and they feared that their music had taken a backseat. Whether or not the Motown jam of ‘I Don’t Know Why’ was merely a run-through to help them get in the groove remains unclear, but the fabled tape in question is now the morbid subject of much discussion among Stones collectors.
While this tragic, curtailed ‘69 rendition has never been made public, they would eventually officially release a version of the song in 1975 on Metamorphosis. Stubbornly inaccessible, the interrupted disc now lingers between daring myth and sobering reality, much like Brian Jones himself.
