Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  If anything, she tries too hard. Her breath is stale and she keeps thrusting her chest out at him. He moves her clumsily back toward the couch. When he sees her eyes roll back blankly in the vagueness of succumbing, he realizes how determined she is, how little this has to do with him.

  The music is simple on the surface. On the surface, it’s a matter of three chords that even a boy like Keith, sequestered in his bedroom in his parents’ house, can learn to play along with on his guitar, until he begins to listen more carefully and hear what’s actually there. After that it becomes a matter of how many layers he’s able to discern, how much he’s willing to commit to in terms of patience and repetition. For a boy like Keith, the willingness is all but infinite. He’s a shy dreamer, prone to isolated fantasies, preyed upon at school by older boys who call him a faggot and a girl. They throw rocks at him from the building sites of unfinished council terraces. They inspire in him confusing, shaming acts of cruelty, tormenting animals mostly. The music he listens to when he’s alone is like the angry essence of the boys who taunt him, the aggressive force in them that he can’t help but covet. Its sound is otherworldly, impossible to connect to his drab suburb of identical brick flats, muddy roads, dustbins.

  The three chords are usually only alluded to, he finds, approached from various, jarring angles in massings of two or three odd notes that are sometimes not even in the same key. He struggles with half tones and quarter tones, dozens of tiny, hard-to-discern variations in rhythm and pitch that he has to match somehow on his thick-stringed, high-fretted guitar. To hear any of this requires an ear acute enough to pick out several tones at once and isolate each of them, even as they change, and this in turn requires a nearly autistic willingness to move the phonograph needle back, groove by groove, in order to assess again the same two-second snatch of song. It is a tedium exceeded only by the painful, fumbling labor of trying to finger these notes on a fretted board, going only by ear, by trial and error, one awkward voicing to the next. The music raises blisters on his fingers, causes him to pound the guitar in frustrated fits or to stare at it from his bed. It defies him to internalize even a portion of its alien power, to play it just once with his body and not his mind.

  A hundred and fifty people in Ealing. Almost two hundred in Richmond. They’ve begun to draw followers who come every week in leather and black sweaters to dance on the tables with such violence that a reporter from the Record Mirror feels threatened and denounces the band as “thugs.” A kind of culture has started to evolve. Everyone under thirty has decided that they’re an exception — a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star. There are no more wars to fight, no more ration coupons, nothing to do but study graphic design or live in Paris for a month busking in the Métro. They have no experience of fear, or violence, or patriotism, or duty. What they have instead is an obsession with style, a collage of half-understood influences from other times and places. It is a language of pure connotation, of suggestion and innuendo, and once it gets started it has to move faster and faster, it can never stop working.

  It’s something Keith has begun to feel a little suspicious of, when he’s not belittling it in his mind, the way the unspoken secret between Mick and Brian — their mutual awareness that Mick has slept with Tricia — has had the odd effect of bringing them closer. Keith sits with his guitar now, idly playing little bits of music, while Brian tries once again to teach Mick a riff on the harmonica. They are weirdly eager and solicitous with each other, rising to careful heights of consideration. For Keith, who’s never even kissed a girl, whose only contacts with girls are sarcastic and self-defeating, it brings a confusing kind of envy.

  It’s a Little Walter riff they’re trying to learn, impossible to duplicate without a microphone, but when Brian plays it he manages to catch some of its menace and depth. He takes Mick’s hands and cups them around the harmonica, places his fingers on Mick’s and holds them in place. Then he brings his own hands to his mouth and mimics the waving motion that produces vibrato, raising his eyebrows at Mick, who takes the cue by just barely shaking his head. He stares seriously into Brian’s eyes and tries once more to reproduce the sound. He sits up straight and raises his shoulders, the instrument cradled in one hand and completely covered by the other, which flutters beneath his thumbs in the deliberate way of someone making birdcalls. He closes his eyes and blows harder, and Brian nods his head at the ground, unimpressed but patient, almost resigned in the way he’s passing on his skills.

  Even in March it is still cold in the flat. Through the window, the crusted snow glows a faint blue between the rails of the iron fence. At three in the morning, Keith has passed out at the far edge of the bed where the three of them are curled up for warmth. Brian and Mick are snuggled against each other, both drunk, both moving back and forth between deep, stuporous sleep and lulled, half-waking dreams.

  It is so dark that when Brian opens his eyes, Mick’s face is a blue vagueness that seems asleep but also not like a human face at all. It seems large and made of highly pumiced stone, a monument that emanates a kind of numinous comfort that has nothing to do with Mick’s actual self. He seems to be faintly smiling. Then his face seems blank and tranquil, the remembered smile a faint nimbus that fades in and out.

  Brian twists a little and Mick groans. For a moment, the look on his face is pained, but then he moves his head down against Brian’s shoulder, and they enter a space that is almost indistinguishable from sleep. They are pressed up against each other, front to front, and each of them has a hand buried deep in the warmth between the other’s legs.

  Then Mick’s hand slackens and stills. His mouth is open and his eyes stare at Brian without recognition.

  They’re still holding each other in their hands. There is a moment before the shame has time to register, and Brian closes his eyes, opting to continue, but Mick takes his hand away and turns on his side, rolling over toward Keith on the other side of the bed. It occurs to Brian then that he has been deceived, that Mick has been awake this whole time, and now he is awake himself, unable to move.

  They get their next big break a few nights later, a Saturday night gig at the Marquee Club, the most important club in London. The sound is bad and they play a sloppy, fast-paced set, but there is a young publicity man in the audience who wants to speak to them anyway, a twenty-year-old former design student named Andrew Loog Oldham. He sees that this band with its aloof antistyle, drawing the crowd closer to the stage to fight for a space in which to dance, is in some way a rough successor to Elvis Presley. He’s encouraged to think this way because a band from Liverpool of all places has just sold a million copies of its own song.

  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 o
f 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.