Brian Jones Caricature

Brian Jones Caricature, illustrated here in 1966 with his Vox Mark III guitar, age 24.

Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones was an English musician and composer, best known as the founder and original leader of the Rolling Stones.

Initially a slide guitarist, Jones was a talented multi-instrumentalist, seemingly at home on any musical instrument. For many Rolling Stones tracks prior to 1969, for any instrument except the standard rock instrumentation of drums, guitars, piano, or bass, Jones would be the one playing it.

After he founded the Rolling Stones as a British blues outfit in 1962, and gave the band its name (from The Best of Muddy Waters album, track five, side one was ‘Rollin’ Stone Blues”), Jones’ fellow band members Richards and Mick Jagger began to take over the band’s musical direction, especially after they became a successful songwriting team.
Over the next few years, Jones developed acute alcohol and drug problems, and his performance in the studio became increasingly unreliable, leading to a diminished role within the band he had founded.

Jones’ last substantial sessions with the Stones occurred in spring and summer of 1968, when the Stones produced “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and the Beggars Banquet album.

In June 1969, the Rolling Stones dismissed Jones; guitarist Mick Taylor took his place in the group.

Less than a month after his firing, around midnight on the night of July 3, 1969, Jones was discovered motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm.
He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. The coroner’s report stated “death by misadventure”, and noted his liver and heart were heavily enlarged by past drug and alcohol abuse.

He was 27 years old.

Jones’ death at 27 was the first of the 1960s rock movement, and was followed within two years by the drug-related deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin at the same age (Morrison in fact died two years to the day after Jones).

The coincidence of their deaths at that age has been referred to in popular culture as the “27 Club”.