Bummer

By JAY COCKS

BLOWN AWAY: THE ROLLING STONES AND THE DEATH OF THE SIXTIES

by A.E. Hotchner

Simon & Schuster

349 pages; $21.95

, "Drowned and wasted" is the way the singer and writer Marianne Faithfull thought about the death of Brian Jones. He was the seminal Rolling Stone, the guiding spirit of the band as well as its original unifying force, but he was done in: by drugs; by intramural rivalry; by his own musical eccentricity, a sense of rhythm-and-blues purity that kept him from going easily along with the kind of flat-out, bleacher-battering rock that bandmates Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were starting to write.

Jones, try as he might, couldn't write a tune. So he was cut out of the publishing revenues and the limelight. Jagger and Richards were too formidable for the slight, blond, increasingly tuned-out guitarist. Jones lost his grip on the group, and on his own life, and he died on the bottom of the swimming pool at his English estate, a property once owned by A.A. Milne, an author who believed in happier endings.

All this is a matter of record -- indeed, of rock mythology -- and needs some freshening up for contemporary consumption. A.E. Hotchner, whose previous forays into biography have included volumes about Ernest Hemingway, Doris Day and Sophia Loren, is clearly no rock fan. He dismisses Jagger as "a ruler with no queen, no jester, no kingdom, just an egocentric bitch king with a neon scepter sitting on a hollow throne." But Hotchner does display a certain amount of commercial calculation, no doubt having sized up the sales receipts of rock butcher Albert Goldman's biographies of Elvis and John Lennon, and he comes up with his own cash-register kicker: Brian Jones was murdered.

The evidence for this conclusion seems a little . . . well, marginal; a lawyer might call it pure hearsay. The motive is class resentment (a couple of lads working on the estate held Jones in utter contempt), but even Perry Mason might turn into a loser trying to sell a judge that one. Even if the research were more solid, Hotchner thinks so little of the Stones and manifests such indifference to rock that his book creates an atmosphere that would put anyone, not just a fan, on the defensive. Hotchner quotes at length from Jagger and Richards, but they did not cooperate with Blown Away, and their dialogues have been culled from a variety of sources. That kind of cut-and- paste job makes for a shaky brief, and a contemptible book.