From a tower of scaffolding to the left of the stage, Anger was filming it all on his Kodak Cine Special camera, a gaunt man in black pants, hair wafting in the breeze. He thought that at least a few of the fans would get up and dance to the music on the P.A., even climb up for a quick frolic on the empty black stage, but none of them did. There was the hush and awe of hierarchy. It occurred to him that his time with the band would be in jeopardy now, that they would have less and less time for people like him. After today, their circle would just get narrower and narrower. They would be as remote as pharaohs or Hollywood stars. He saw that the Hells Angels were more than just a defensive force, they were also the embodiment of some punitive urge the crowd had, an urge to atone.
Brian Jones, 27, was found dead in his swimming pool Thursday, apparently the result of drug and alcohol intoxication. A spokesman for the band says that they have decided to carry through with their plans to host the free concert this afternoon in Hyde Park as a tribute to his memory. Jones was the band’s founding member. Last month, after a series of drugs arrests, he announced that he was leaving the group over musical differences.
He had tried not to push too hard, staying in the background, not a participant but an onlooker. An invisible nimbus seemed to surround them sometimes, a kind of electrical field that made them hyperrealistic, unapproachable. They were stars — lights that were out of reach — and he had tried to understand this. But it had been six years since he’d made a new film. He could feel it like a pressure in his lungs, the images impacted, jostled together, superimposed. The smallest effort on their parts would make all the difference.
The crowd before him was religiously large, a kind of death cult in the new Aquarian style. It had little chance of being much else in these years of violence, riots, assassinations, Vietnam. A rock star drowned in his swimming pool. A gunman appeared in a crowd to murder a president, a senator, Martin Luther King, and in the process somehow became infused with the romance of the person he’d killed. It was the logic of thanatomania, not a sequence of cause and effect but an underlying current, a unifying style. With each death, the mystery of death took on more and more glamour, the romance making the human world feel less and less bound to the earth.
He remembered a dream Anita had told him about just a few months ago, at Keith’s country house. In the dream, she was in the desert in California, walking on the sand beneath a cloudless blue sky, when suddenly she’d lost her sense of hearing. There was no sound. She knew then — though there was no mushroom cloud, none of the obvious signs — that the world had ended. At that same instant, hundreds of dragonflies appeared in the air, all of them flying in the same direction. Their bodies seemed to be made of glass, a glistening blue, as if she could see the sky through their transparent shells.
“It went on for a long time,” she said. “It was like if I kept walking, everyone might still be where they were supposed to be and we’d all just go back to the way we were before. Only I knew it wasn’t true. I knew everything had changed. There was just this endless little moment where I didn’t have to face what had really happened yet.”
Anger had looked down at his hands, thinking even then that in some way the dream was about Brian. The three of them were sitting on some Moroccan carpets spread out on the grass, and when he looked back up, the different planes of Anita’s and Keith’s faces were flashing orange or black in the lantern light like fun-house ghouls.
“A dream of heaven,” he’d said, meaning timelessness, uncertainty, unknowing. But Anita had looked down at her hand on her knee, not liking the word.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever thought about before. It was strange. I don’t know where something like that comes from.”
Keith brought his dangled hand to the collar of her leather coat. She looked up at Anger, her face angular and lean, a face out of Dürer. Then Keith leaned forward slightly, offering him the end of a joint.
“People always think the world is coming to an end,” Keith said. “But it never does. They wish it would end sometimes because they can’t control it. But you never control it. All you can do is react.”
They were crammed into an armored car, a dark container with bench seats that inched its way up the narrow park road through the crowd. Their journey from the Londonderry Hotel to the stage in Hyde Park was less than a quarter of a mile, but it would take them almost forty-five minutes. Their new guitarist, also named Mick — Little Mick — was staring down at the floor as the van shunted from side to side, jostling his body. He was nineteen years old, a wiry-haired boy in a kind of swashbuckler’s shirt with puffy sleeves and a set of crossed laces at the collar. He had been in the band for less than three weeks and had never played with them anywhere but in Keith’s basement.
The G up high, then C, down to E b, C, A b, double bar for the suspended fourth, watch the third finger. Shuffle on C, suspended on the F, down to C, B b, G, chorus.
Across from him, Keith sat with his head slumped over on his shoulder, his eyes half-closed. He hadn’t been to bed in two days — no rehearsals, just a long binge that still hadn’t stopped. He remembered Anita passing him the joint after they’d taken in the news about Brian, then the long drive to London, dropping her at the flat in Chelsea, then two days later — this morning — walking across this same park a little after five o’clock. He wasn’t going to stop. He didn’t know if he was strong enough to survive the kind of life he was going to try to survive, but it was who he was. Every day he was more certain of that. Anita was eight and a half months pregnant with their child. She was out there somewhere in the crowd now with Marianne, the two of them sitting in the sun, getting high. A part of him was distracted, angry, as if Brian were still alive. The band had not played in front of a live audience in three years, and now Brian had just died, making it even harder.
Mick was sitting with his hands in his lap and looking straight ahead at nothing. He had a summer cold. His throat was so sore that he could hardly speak, much less sing, but he was purposeful in the way of someone who knew he couldn’t fail. He was going to walk onstage in front of half a million people, and to do this was like walking onstage naked. It was an act of surrender that had to look and feel like an act of conquest. His sign was Leo, the sign of Strength in the tarot deck. Its glyph looked like an omega, the sign of infinity, or of the apocalypse, depending on whom you asked. The band’s support staff had a code name for today’s events. They were calling it the Battle of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
Memories of the riots outside the Democratic convention in Chicago, the riots in Paris, the riots in Berkeley. The crowd was getting high and doing crossword puzzles, and a few of them were playing guitars, and they didn’t know what to feel about the sight of the armored van moving up the path through the crowd. Its way was cleared by six motorcyclists in spiked helmets and leather jackets, an imperial guard armed with beer cans and knives. The words “peace” and “love” had been used so many times by now that they meant almost anything, including their opposites. It was what gave the words their charge. It was why some of the men in the crowd were wearing olive drab fatigue jackets, like GIs in Vietnam.