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.
Keith punches a hole through the dressing room wall. He can’t speak; he has to leave and stand in the alleyway, staring at the dampness that steams and drips off the black stone building. His anger and disgust are compounded by the apprehension that this stupid rivalry among them is somehow at the heart of their sound. It’s a sound that even Bo Diddley has told him would make them famous if they persevered. But he knows that the sound starts with him, that the drums follow the lead of his guitar so that the backbeat always comes just a millisecond late, lazy and blunt and stamped with his imprint.
“Forget it,” he says to Mick a few minutes later. “Now’s not the time to fuck around.”
“Not now,” says Andrew. “But when we get back to London, we’re going to sit him down, have a little palaver.”
“I think we should do it now,” says Mick. “How much longer are we going to carry him?”
“He has style,” says Andrew. “Do you know how to speak like he does? I don’t think so. Brian speaks like Hollywood.”
“It’s two guitars,” says Keith. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“We need his bloody face,” says Andrew. “His image.”
“Image?” says Mick.
They arrive in America and are treated like a comedy act, a scrofulous, second-rate version of the Beatles. A deejay drives them around Detroit in a convertible Ford while a loudspeaker plays their songs to empty streets. Their songs are too much like American songs, too raw and unmelodic, and they seem on the verge of failing once again, faking their way through an America they’d always imagined as their rightful home. They pose like teen idols with a circus elephant in California.
But it turns out they’ve only gotten started. The tour will go on for much longer than they’d expected — in fits and starts, it will go on for another three years — and they will have no time to assess what has happened or how they’ve changed. They play a week of sold-out dates in London, and everything reverts to violence. The fans charge the stage, smash the instruments, pull off the band’s clothes. Every show erupts in a riot. When they make their way into Europe, the tour becomes like a military exercise: attack dogs, tear gas, truncheons, armored vans. They see through their limousine windows a row of cars with flames rising from the hoods, coalescing into startling blossoms of thick, dark smoke. In Paris, the fans are joined by student mobs who smash windows and throw cobblestones at the mounted police.
In West Berlin, Brian gets sick and spends two days in bed. He misses the entire city, doesn’t see the Reichstag or the rubble of Potsdamer Platz or the newly erected Wall. He dreams of stray dogs running through the rubble of a blacked-out London, taking cover beneath the piles of beams and crumbled stones. He wakes with a smothered sense of distance that makes it difficult for him to move. It comes as an ironic surprise, how ill-equipped he is for this life he’s always wanted. He has an odd relapse of his childhood asthma, a sudden fluttering in his heart that leaves him light-headed. He misses all four shows, and Keith has to fill up all that space with only one guitar.