On June 9, 1969, Brian Jones made the following announcement about leaving the Rolling Stones: “I no longer see eye-to-eye with the others over the discs we are cutting. … I want to play my kind of music, which is no longer the Stones music. The music Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] have been writing has progressed at a tangent, as far as my own taste is concerned.”
Many fans were shocked by the news, but few people in the music business were, including his former bandmates Jagger, Richards, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts.
In actuality, they had let him go the day before, but they had not told anyone.
Tragically, it was the beginning of a downhill trend that would get worse: Jones, another member of the “27 Club,” would pass away in three weeks.
As Wyman wrote in his 1990 autobiography Stone Alone, Jones had served as the group’s first frontman.
In 1962, he had gathered deserving individuals from various London blues and jazz scenes. “He formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs,” Wyman said.
Jagger and Richards, who didn’t like that Jones paid himself £5 more than the others to reflect his management skills and senior status, seemed to harbor some anger toward Jones from the beginning.