 With their new album now completed, the Byrds flew to England for an appearance at a charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall on July 7, 1968. Following the concert, just prior to a tour of South Africa, Parsons quit the Byrds on the grounds that he did not want to perform in a racially segregated country (apartheid did not end in South Africa until 1994). Hillman doubted the sincerity of Parsons'gesture, believing that the singer had in fact left the band in order to remain in England with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, whom he had recently befriended. Parsons stayed at Richards' house in West Sussex immediately after leaving the Byrds, and the pair developed a close friendship over the next few years. After leaving the Byrds, Parsons would go on to produce an influential but commercially unsuccessful body of work, both as a solo artist and with the band the Flying Burrito Brothers (which also featured Chris Hillman). He died on September 19, 1973, at the age of 26, following an accidental overdose of morphine and alcohol in his room at the Joshua Tree Inn.
