But it doesn’t really matter what Keith plays anymore, it doesn’t matter if he plays at all. The crowd is screaming. The stage is overrun before the first song is over, and the band races for the limousines through the fire door. The next single goes to number three.
All Brian can think to do is push himself harder. He splashes water on his face, steels himself with liquor and barbiturates, liquor and speed.
When the tour makes its next brief stop in England, Andrew locks Mick and Keith in his back bedroom and tells them they can’t come out until they’ve composed an original song. He doesn’t mention any of this to Brian. He explains that this is the next step, the way they will be like the Beatles. It’s where the real money is anyway, not in some five extra pounds on a package tour of England.
The short film Invocation of My Demon Brother had its premiere at the end of 1969. The images rush by like a strobe light, rapidly intercut, sometimes superimposed: Mick Jagger’s face, Keith Richards’s face, the face of Bobby Beausoleil, a rock musician whom nobody would have heard of at the time. In the film, there is a violent merging, a trance, all of their images blurred into one. The filmmaker, an older man named Kenneth Anger, is shown conducting an occult ceremony while helicopters land in Vietnam; Hells Angels menace fans at a Rolling Stones concert; a nightmare begins to unfold. Within months of the film’s release, Bobby Beausoleil would appear for the first time in newspapers in the company of Charles Manson — he had committed the first of the Manson murders. That same week, a fan would be killed by Hells Angels at a Stones concert at Altamont Speedway. The sixties would come to an end.
An invocation draws forces in. It can lead to an evocation, which spits the forces back out.
— from Dream Plays: A History of Underground Film
The dream starts with Bobby Beausoleil, the would-be star. He’s walking by himself at night, his clothes soaked through to the skin, cuts on his hands. People hurry by with bowed heads beneath umbrellas, water pools on the sidewalks, lights burn dimly in the liquor stores and bars. Bobby thinks about how he used to know people like that, but now they don’t see him, the hunch-shouldered kid with his hands in his pockets, the runaway fingering his change.
The entrance to the theater is a tiny vestibule of darkness that seeps into his lungs, a musk of cigarettes and mold. He finds the gap in the heavy blackout curtains and pushes them open with both hands. Before him, the screen is enormous, maybe six stories high, far enough away that a fog of blue light seems to waft in the air before it. He goes up to the balcony, where a few people whose faces he recognizes are passing around a skull-shaped pipe. Ron, Carol, Sharon. They stare at him but don’t say hello.
He sits down by himself, his face hidden in the darkness, his hands cold and stinging where they’re cut. Hanging from the ceiling is a silver eagle gripping a swastika in its talons. The theater is more like a warehouse or a hangar, he sees now, with catwalks on the ceiling, lights hung from girders, condensation trickling from the gridwork. He recognizes it without knowing from where, a forgotten part of some recurring dream.
The lights go out. There is total darkness. Then a pale half-moon of light slowly rises over a man on a stage before the screen, accompanied by a sound like the purr of distant helicopters. At the man’s feet, there is a blue nimbus of fog. He raises his arms, extends them fully so that his heavy sleeves form the shape of a cross. In his left hand he holds a wand. Above him, on the screen, a shirtless boy sits and stares. He seems barely awake, his hair and sideburns dyed a lifeless white, his pupils moving sightlessly in the slits of his eyes.
The man’s face suddenly appears onscreen, six stories high, staring right at Bobby. He wears mascara and green eye shadow. He seems to have deliberately made himself ugly, a zodiac glyph traced in ash on his forehead. He starts to dance in a slow shimmy, his arms extended, the wand still in his hand, his chest heaving in and out, eyes defiantly fixed straight ahead. Every time the body on the stage moves, the body onscreen moves in the same way.
The music gets louder, more insistent. It’s a cacophony of noise — a tank’s engine, a helicopter’s blades, a satellite’s bleep, a missile’s thrust. The man takes off his hat, throws it into the seats. He puts his hands on his hips and rotates them back and forth, angrily staring straight ahead. He cups one hand behind his ear and one down by his waist, vamping, jutting his pelvis, then switches hands in rhythm. The credits roll.
A film by Anger.
Invocation of My Demon Brother.
THE EMPRESS, 1928–1947
HIS MOTHER CARRIED KENNETH past the olive trees, the backyard sprig of bougainvillea. The colors blurred and seared. His last name was Anglemyer. Later he would change it to Anger. Even in those years of the Depression, his mother spoiled him, buying him drawing paper, movie magazines, comic books, cutout paper dolls.
While his father saved, they lived in his grandmother’s house in Santa Monica. Hollywood wasn’t far. His mother and his grandmother talked about movie stars, Hollywood stories Kenneth could only partly understand. Once, his grandmother took a sugar cube, soaked it in bitters, placed it at the bottom of a glass, then filled the glass with champagne. “It’s called a champagne cocktail,” she said, letting Kenneth taste. It was only a few months later that she left. In one of the first painful mysteries of his life, she moved in with a thin, dark-haired woman named Meg, who worked in the production department of MGM Pictures.
It became his father’s house after that. His older siblings — terse, industrious — were already in his father’s sway. He was a silent man who worked as a mechanical engineer. When he wasn’t at the office, he made things on a lathe in the garage: tables, chairs, wooden stools. Amid the carpenter’s benches and the table saw, the utility lamps with their dangling cords, the three children would sometimes watch him work, and he would explain each step of what he was doing, tapering the spindles for a chair back or molding the hinges of a drawer. Sometimes he would allow them to hammer in dowels or turn the drill axle, peering with a surgeon’s gravity over their shoulders at the instrument they held in their hands. “Watch it from the side,” he would say. “The angle. You’re about to come in at an angle.”
Kenneth daydreamed. His grandmother and her companion, Meg, showed a special interest in him that they could only feign toward his older siblings. They took him to the movies, the theater adorned with African designs, its walls broken up by enormous pillars carved with conga drums and crossed spears. There they watched epics from the Bible: bare-chested men, their muscles accentuated with grime and sweat, struggling with hard, implacable women who wore coiled bracelets in the shape of serpents. In science-fiction movies, men in skintight suits wandered Mars, stalked to the edge of madness by sentient beings who took form as blurs of light. There was a film set in Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, in which peasants ate candy skeletons and danced ecstatically under glowing torches. Skeletons in shrouds moved in carts beneath flames, while the living exulted in their own bodies, or suffered agonies of religious grief, or strutted clownishly in the abject shamelessness of their poverty.
Even as a child, he suspected that there was another world being concealed from him by a mother and father who had conspired to lead lives of convention and disguise. The movies gave him clues about lives they had chosen to disown, or perhaps lived out at night when he was not there to see them.