Time for the second part of this long af interview.

What was Brian like onstage?
He'd worked out these movements. In those days, little chicks would all have their favorites. Yeah, when you think the Rolling Stones magazine, the Beatles magazine came out once a month. Big sort of fan thing. It was a very old thing that one had the feeling had to change. All those teenyboppers.

Brian had some kind of genius for finding people, didn't he?
He did. He got us together . . . Charlie, Mick and me.

He brought Nico to the Velvet Underground.
He was into Dylan too, very early on. He was the only one of us who hung out with Dylan for a bit. A lot of people know Brian that I don't know, that I didn't know knew him who come up and say, "Yeah, I knew Brian."

He was great. It was only when you had to work with him that he got very hung up. Anita could tell you a lot about Brian, obviously, because she was Brian's chick for a long time. Brian did have that thing for pulling people together, for meeting people, didn't he?

Anita: Mixing. Mix it. Mix it, Charlie. Fix it, Charlie.

Keith: We're just trying to figure out why Brian couldn't be with Mick and me at the same time. "Why can't Mick come in?" "No, no," he'd say . . . he was a big whisperer too, Brian. Little giggles . . . you don't meet people like that. Since everybody got stoned, people just say what they want to say.

Brain got very fragile. As he went along, he got more and more fragile and delicate. His personality and physically. I think all that touring did a lot to break him. We worked our asses off from '63 to '66, right through those three years, non-stop. I believe we had two weeks off. That's nothing, I mean I tell that to B.B. King and he'll say, "I been doing it for years." But for cats like Brian . . . He was tough but one thing and another he slowly became more fragile. When I first met Brian he was like a little Welsh bull. He was broad, and he seemed to be very tough.

For a start, people were always laying stuff on him because he was a Stone. And he'd try it. He'd take anything. Any other sort of trip too, head trips. He never had time to work it out 'cause we were on the road all the time, always on the plane the next day. Eventually, it caught up.

Right until the last, Brian was trying to get it together. Just before he died, he was rehearsing with more people. Because it happened so quickly, people think . . .

Anita: They think he was really down. But he was really up.

Keith: And they also think that he was one of the Stones when he died. But in actual fact, he'd left. We went down to see him and he said, "I can't do it again. I can't start again and go on the road again like that again." And we said, "We understand. We'll come and see you in a couple weeks and see how you feel. Meantime, how do you want to say. Do you want to say that you've left?" And he said, "Yeah, let's do it. Let's say I've left and if I want to I can come back." "Because we've got to know. We've got to get someone to take your place because we're starting to think about getting it together for another tour. We've got itchy feet and we've got Mick Taylor lined up." We didn't really, we didn't have Mick waiting in the wings to bring on. But we wanted to know if we should get someone else or if Brian wanted to get back into it again. "I don't think I can," he said, "I don't think I can go to America and do those one-nighters anymore. I just can't." Two weeks later, they found him in the pool, man.

In those two weeks, he'd had musicians down there every day. He was rehearsing. I'd talk to him every day and he'd say, "It's coming along fine. Gonna get a really funky little band together and work and make a record."

Do you think his death was an accident?
Well, I don't want to say. Some very weird things happened that night, that's all I can say.

It could have as well been an accident. There were people there that suddenly disappeared . . . the whole thing with Brian is . . .

Anita: They opened the inquiry again six months after his death.

Keith: But nothing happened. None of us were trying to hush it up. We wanted to know what was going on. We were at a session that night and we weren't expecting Brian to come along. He'd officially left the band. We were doing the first gig with Mick Taylor that night. No, I wouldn't say that was true. Maybe Mick had been with us for a week or so but it was very close to when Mick had joined. And someone called us up at midnight and said, "Brian's dead."

Well, what the fuck's going on? We had these chauffeurs working for us and we tried to find out . . . some of them had a weird hold over Brian. There were a lot of chicks there and there was a whole thing going on, they were having a party. I don't know, man, I just don't know what happened to Brian that night.

Do you think he was murdered?
There was no one there that'd want to murder him. Somebody didn't take care of him. And they should have done because he had somebody there who was supposed to take care of him. Everyone knew what Brian was like, especially at a party. Maybe he did just go in for a swim and have an asthma attack. I'd never seen Brian have an attack. I know that he was asthmatic. I know that he was hung up with his spray but I've never seen him have an attack. He was a good swimmer. He was a better swimmer than anybody else around me. He could dive off those rocks straight into the sea.

He was really easing back from the whole drug thing. He wasn't hitting 'em like he had been, he wasn't hitting anything like he had. Maybe the combination of things. It's one of those things I just can't find out. You know, who do you ask?

Such a beautiful cat, man. He was one of those people who are so beautiful in one way, and such an asshole in another. "Brian, how could you do that to me, man?" It was like that.

How did you feel about his death?
We were completely shocked. I got straight into it and wanted to know who was there and couldn't find out. The only cat I could ask was the one I think who got rid of everybody and did the whole disappearing trick so when the cops arrived, it was just an accident. Maybe it was. Maybe the cat just wanted to get everyone out of the way so it wasn't all names involved, et cetera. Maybe he did the right thing, but I don't know. I don't even know who was there that night and trying to find out is impossible.

Maybe he tried to pull one of his deep diving stunts and was too loaded and hit his chest and that was it. But I've seen Brian swim in terrible conditions, in the sea with breakers up to here. I've been underwater with Brian in Fiji. He was all right then. He was a goddamn good swimmer and it's very hard to believe he could have died in a swimming pool.

But goddammit, to find out is impossible. And especially with him not being officially one of the Stones then, none of our people were in direct contact so it was trying to find out who was around Brian at that moment, who he had there. It's the same feeling with who killed Kennedy. You can't get to the bottom of it.

Anita: He was surrounded by the wrong kind of people.

Keith: Like Jimi Hendrix. He just couldn't suss the assholes from the good people. He wouldn't kick out somebody that was a shit. He'd let them sit there and maybe they'd be thinking how to sell off his possessions. He'd give 'em booze and he'd feed 'em and they'd be thinking, "Oh, that's worth 250 quid and I can roll that up and take it away." I don't know.

Anita: Brian was a leader. With the Stones, he was the first one that had a car. He was the first into flash clothes. And smoke. And acid. It was back when it seemed anything was possible. Everybody was turning on to acid, young and beautiful and then a friend of Brian's died and it affected him very much. It made it seem as if the whole thing was a lie.

Did he stop taking acid then?
Anita: No. He got further into it. And STP. DMT, which I think is the worst, no? Too chemical. The first time Brian and I took acid we thought it was like smoking a joint. We went to bed. Suddenly we looked around and all these Hieronymus Bosch things were flashing around. That was in 1965. Musically he would have got it together. I'm sure of it. He and Keith couldn't play together any more. I don't know what causes those things but they couldn't.

Was there a gap between Brian and the rest of the Stones because he had taken acid and they hadn't?
Anita: Yes, as far as I know, Mick took his first trip the day he got busted, in '67. Keith had started to suss, he saw us flying around all over the place. He started to live with us. Every time Brian was taking trips, he was working, making tapes. Fantastic.

He didn't dig the music the Stones were making and he really got a block in his head that he couldn't play with them. Now, he would dig it. He never really stopped playing. It was just so different from what they were playing, he couldn't play in sessions. I'm positive he could have gotten it together. Positive. He was just a musician. Pure, so pure a musician.

Keith: I remember once in Philadelphia some kids had picked up on an interview Brian had done with somebody, he'd used one of those intellectual words like "esoteric." And so, right in the front, these kids had big signs that said, "Brian, you're so esoteric." It had that aura. It was down to Sixteen magazine. Everything you did in America then, it could all be in Sixteen magazine.  

Thanks for reading. ♡

The next part is going to be the last part of this interview and after that I hopefully have time again to work on some more fun things again. These posts make it easier for me to update and well a lot of this interview actually gets quoted. So it probably is a good idea to see it for the most part in context, rather than bits and pieces.