How Mick Jagger and Keith Richards Pushed Brian Jones Out of the Stones in 1969

By early 1969, Brian Jones was barely functioning. The founding guitarist had been sinking deeper into drug and alcohol abuse for years, missing sessions and showing up to rehearsals unable to play. The band had already replaced him in the studio on several tracks, most notably on Beggar’s Banquet, where Keith Richards handled almost all the guitar parts. Jones’s contributions had become a liability, and the rest of the Stones—especially Jagger and Richards—had run out of patience.

The final break came in June 1969. Jagger and Richards drove out to Jones’s country house, Hartfield, to deliver the news face-to-face. Accounts differ on exactly what was said, but the message was clear: the band could no longer carry him. Jones was given a financial settlement of £100,000 (roughly £2 million today) and a promise that the band would buy him out of future royalties. He was out, and Mick Taylor was already waiting in the wings.

The decision was cold but pragmatic. Jagger and Richards had spent years building a career that Jones’s instability was now actively threatening. They stopped viewing him as a co-founder and started seeing him as a problem that had to be removed. Jones’s death three weeks later, drowned in his own swimming pool at age 27, turned the firing into one of rock’s most tragic ironies—he’d lost the band he created just before he lost his life.