Sway (5 page)

Backstage, he speaks to Brian, who is obviously the leader. He offers to get them into a recording studio. He says he has
an older partner with connections at Decca Records. He says that they need a different singer, though, because Mick has no
voice.

Brian raises an eyebrow. He’s never thought of this before — it’s a guitar band, and Mick can’t even play an instrument. He
has no voice, that’s obvious, but it’s never occurred to him that Mick would ever be more than a secondary figure anyway.
What he feels now, at this first glimpse of success, is a kind of generosity born of his own power, made keener by a perverse
reluctance to make any concessions at all to this person who wants to be their manager.

He tells him that he’ll make the demo, but that Mick has to stay. Then he tells Mick what has just happened. He tells him
that this is it, that they are on to something, that he had better call it quits with the London School of Economics.

That summer — 1963 — they make a first tour of the hinterlands. They follow the old vaudeville circuit through Epping and
Slough, Bradford and Spalding, dim ballrooms with spotlit curtains where the last of the big bands still go through their
paces. It’s a failure, one failure after another. They come onstage and half the seats are empty and there is too much space
to move around in, all that old-fashioned stage to somehow inhabit and use. In London, the crowds had gotten so dense that
people fainted from lack of air. The band sometimes had to strip down to their bare chests it was so hot. Now they come on
in their street clothes, the way they did in London, and nobody responds. They play seven songs to quiet indifference, then
they do the same thing an hour later for a different audience, then they drive somewhere where the tea shop is closed and
the petrol station won’t sell them fuel.

It’s hard to remember what they thought they were doing, playing blues to tiny crowds in the Midlands. The ballrooms are damp
and cold and they can’t make out the faces in the room, the strange austerity of the spectators. On the wide, empty stages,
they move around in some effort even to make themselves seen. They play to forty people in Watford. In Morecambe there are
twenty-two. They arrive in provincial high streets, where a few girls wait outside in kerchiefs and plastic pumps, and always
there are the stares of the local constables, skeptical faces in a changeless gray drizzle.

The only thing that seems to work is aggression. The sound gets angrier and angrier. In the van afterward, they sometimes
turn this aggression on one another.

Keith writes a letter home to his mother:

I thought I’d see the countryside but all I see is the inside of this van. Two weeks now and not a minute to myself. The other
night Bill, who’s playing bass, gets into it with the police. They spot him pissing on a wall. There’s a restaurant won’t
let us in to use the toilets, so we have to piss outside. Then the cops take each one of us individually behind the building
and make us walk a straight line, count backwards from a hundred, pat us down with their hands. Three of them and one of you
and it’s dark, some town you never heard of, they’re shining a light on you, none of it makes any sense. Last night Bill pissed
himself because we wouldn’t stop the van, just kept jabbing him in the kidneys, telling him it’s a long way back to London
and would he like a warm cup of tea?

On the road, Brian sometimes gets his own car. He sometimes even gets his own room at some shabby country hotel while the
others sleep in the van. He’s supposed to get to the shows early, settle accounts with the management. That’s the arrangement
he’s come to with Andrew Loog Oldham, who has sent them on this futile round of engagements. But something about his privileges,
his isolation, along with the shaming drudgery of the tour, has given him a sense of experiencing things from a distance,
as if he’s not quite present for what’s really happening. He places his phone calls back to London and counts out the nightly
receipts and writes in his book what they’ve spent each day on petrol and food, but there’s often a feeling that somehow it’s
coming to an end, that the band is on the verge of failing, no matter what he does.

He’s started to think about the Beatles, to envy their growing fame. There’s the temptation to clean things up, to wear matching
suits, and then the realization that it wouldn’t work for them anyway.

One night in Sheffield he arrives almost an hour late for the first show, so drunk he can hardly get inside the backstage
door with his briefcase and guitar. He greets the others with a tone of fuzzy dismissal, a complicit blear-eyed shrug, as
if the whole thing is just some minor hassle that they should be hip enough to not even notice, much less mention. But then
he sees the way Mick is sitting on his dressing room stool, smoking, not looking at him, and it causes him to drop his things
to the ground, newly animated, suddenly raising his arms and opening his eyes wide in some strange parody of spookiness.

“What’s wrong?” he says. He walks over and puts his face right in Mick’s, leering at him in a way that Mick has never seen
before. It causes him to stare back for a moment in challenge but then to recoil inside himself, realizing that Brian isn’t
seeing him.

“What are you so afraid of?” Brian says. “What is it? Are you afraid that I might lose control? That I might bite you, or
touch you somewhere dirty? Is that what the long face is about?”

Mick closes his eyes, struggling to compose himself in the small space between himself and Brian. He nods his head then, his
eyes heavy-lidded, and lets out a disdainful sniff.

“You’re right,” he says. “We’re all afraid of you, Brian.”

Keith is strapping on his guitar, impatient. “What the fuck are you on about?” he says. “Get your gear on.”

“He looked so displeased just now,” Brian says. “Like this was the whole point, this little gig in fuck knows where. Sheffield.
You think you can handle it, Mick?”

He turns back toward Keith, smiling at him in a weirdly complicit way. “Everything he’s ever done, I thought of it a thousand
times before. Now he has the nerve to just sit there like that. Like anyone can even see him.”

“Right,” says Keith. “Get yourself together, yeah? You ought to have a look at yourself in the mirror.”

He looks not drunk but fluish. His eyes are gluey and his face is blanched, pink only at the edges of his cheeks. He paces
around the dressing room for a few more moments, incredulous and lost. Then he takes his briefcase and his guitar and walks
back out the door.

It’s a small crowd, only a few dozen people, but by the third song they’ve all moved close to the stage, standing in the first
rows and waiting as if the spectacle before them might collapse. It’s the first time the band has played without Brian, the
first time Keith has had to fill up all that space with only one guitar. He moves back and forth toward his microphone stand,
raising himself into place for his vocals. For some of his chords, he crouches down by the drum riser, his head lowered almost
to his knees. Others he attacks with a sudden upswing of the wrist, a windmilling motion that makes the chords seem like small,
controlled detonations. He knows without looking at the crowd that they’re watching him as much as they’re watching Mick.
What he’s playing is not quite the blues, and it comes out as if the band is playing it through him, a kind of revenge for
Brian’s desertion.

That night Brian has a dream. He’s walking through a courtyard full of rubble — it’s in London, during the war. The courtyard
ends in a patch of stubby weed trees, then opens up on a whole city block in ruins: burnt-out cars, sidewalks folded in on
themselves, trunks and boxes lying on the ground covered in white dust. What keeps him moving is the sense that he’s being
pursued. His pursuer is not quite a person, but like the distorted essence of someone he knows: a middle-aged man with a wrinkled
suit who can’t stop smiling. Above them, the sky tilts and veers, invaded at its edges by the branches of trees. The man is
stepping through a hallway now, swinging a closed umbrella at his side, grinning. There is a sense of panic before an immense,
unending futility. Now they’re in a gray room and the lights surge to an intense white, the walls and ceiling emit a high
hum. It sends Brian to the floor, on his back, grasping his knees, paralyzed by the bright exuberance of the man’s gaze. He
wakes up with a feeling of intense shame, a sense that whatever happens now will be tainted by the violation of this dream.

Life pivots all at once and suddenly they are stars. One night they come onstage to a hall so full, so crammed with bodies,
that they seem on the verge of falling onto the stage. They’re almost all girls — girls with bouffant hairdos and scarves,
girls in black jumpers who elbow their way to the front. For a moment, they struggle to find the dials on their guitars; it’s
as if they’ve outgrown their bodies and become some quality of the air. The sound the girls make is the strangest they’ve
ever heard, not the high screech of adulation but an eerily sexual keen, a thickening moan.

Their arms and legs and chests and heads suddenly feel ridiculously stiff and crude. They feel magnanimous for just standing
there in the torrent of noise and not walking off the stage.

What has happened is that their record has found its way onto the radio. It is a basic pop song, not much of a song at all,
distinguished by a simple guitar riff, a hitch in the rhythm, that gives it angles and contours. They had recorded it a little
more than a week ago, but already it seems like something from the distant past.

Every gesture they make now is magnified, triggering panic and exaltation. Everywhere, they’re met by the same horde of plucked
and powdered faces, pallid and swollen and lost. It’s impossible to hear what they’re playing, but they’re not there to be
heard. They’re there for this swishing around in front of a thousand girls with sprayed hair and defiant, tearful glares.
They don’t realize they’re even making a gesture until the screams get louder, and then they have to just accept it: they’re
performing, they’re putting on a show.

They’re suddenly matched up with American stars — Bo Diddley, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers — people they have idolized.
It happens so quickly that the band doesn’t have time to parse all the different implications of this mistake. The girls are
screaming, but it’s for the English boys with their one hit song, their ill-fitting jackets, their scruffy, unwashed hair.
If they stop to think, they are lost, but if they keep moving there’s a chance it will cohere into a kind of sense. Bo Diddley
plays with them onstage. The moment Bo Diddley leaves, the screams get much louder. They finish their next song and girls
start to throw themselves from the balconies: they get their friends to give them a handhold, then dangle for a few bewildered
seconds, twisting and dazed, then fall shrieking onto the crowd below.

Already, Mick can see what’s happening. He can see that no matter what he does he’s about to become the focal point of the
band. He’s in the middle of the stage, taller than the others, and he is the only one not obscured by a large, hollow-bodied
guitar. Each night, he watches Little Richard leap and collapse and raise himself up, brandishing his microphone stand, everything
deliberate, calculated for maximum impact. Little Richard can be draining to be around backstage, queenly and round-faced
now that he’s cut his hair, but he’s always performing, and Mick himself has started to dance in a way that no one else in
the band would dare to try.

A sudden rise onto his toes, seizing the microphone. A quick spasm that jerks his head upright and carries out into his back-stretched
arms. A lazy slouch, hips slung to the side, one hand up, one down, drunken and sliding. A pause before he rights himself,
turning his head and clapping, a sideways glance at no one, guarding his space.

It turns out that the point of touring is speed. Time moves faster and faster, the moments bunching up on top of one another,
so that it’s difficult to experience any of them as real. To stay awake, they take pep pills, the same pep pills that performers
have been taking for years, but it affects each of them in different ways. Onstage, Brian has started to smile between postures
of menace. He’s started to act a little bit like a pop star, standing with his feet apart, raising his eyebrows wistfully
when he plays harmonica. It’s mostly a joke, except when he gets frantic and starts vying with Mick. He winks at the girls
as they’re carted off on stretchers, grins at them as they pull out their hair. The speed gives him an intense feeling of
focus for a while, a sense of presence and wit, until the details get exaggerated to such enormous proportion and significance
that time becomes impossibly dense. His face stares out into the crowd and either acknowledges them or shrugs them off, it’s
never quite clear. It’s a face he’s had all his life, one that has molded his personality, and now it’s a face that carries
him as the personality begins to fade.

Backstage, the girls hover around him — the assertive, the shy, the fat and devoutly hopeful. He speaks to them in a faint,
spacey lisp, mixing good manners with a sudden spice of profanity. They let him do whatever he wants, but they’re not seeing
him, they’re seeing what they’d imagined they’d see, some projection of their awe. They can seem like predators, especially
the shy ones, and he begins to take Pleasure in the ways he makes them leave: feigning a helpless, melancholy fugue that requires
immediate solitude. Retreating into the toilet to emerge a few minutes later as an older, businesslike stranger. Pouring himself
a drink, then tossing their clothes out the door in a pile and telling them to get out before he calls the front desk.

When he misses another show in Newcastle, their manager, Andrew, has a talk with Mick and Keith. They don’t realize that Andrew
has taken a sharp, animal dislike to Brian, almost from the moment of their first meeting. It’s the fact that he’s vulnerable
and arrogant at the same time, the fact that he gets so many girls. In the dressing room, Andrew tells Mick and Keith that
according to his records Brian has been paying himself an extra five pounds for every show.