Tom Keylock announced over the P.A.: “Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band.”
A subdued kind of cheering started. They whistled and shouted encouragement and then they stood up to take in the view and then the applause thickened into a diffuse cloud of noise.
Anita stood up with them. Her eyes closed and her smile loosened into something dreamy and approving as Marianne pulled her back gradually into her arms, all four of their hands on her pregnant belly. Anita wore black kohl on her eyes and a purple gypsy dress and a crown of Moroccan coins around her straw-colored hair. Apart from her belly, she hardly looked pregnant at all. As Anger filmed her, he was struck once again by how much she looked like Brian.
They were the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band. Even a year ago, no one would have made such a claim, but now it seemed obvious. They had a backlog of more than two hundred songs. Country songs, blues songs, rock-and-roll songs. Mick and Keith didn’t know where they came from, only that the flow had been unstoppable in the last year or so. During that time, Keith had taught himself to play the guitar in several different tunings, the notes all in different places on the fretboard, moving from one accident to the next, everything working. They’d written riot songs, war songs, murder songs, drug songs, and these had turned out to be exactly the songs people wanted to hear. It was toilet music, dirt music, the music of 1969.
From his place on the scaffolding, Anger considered stopping the film. Mick had come onstage alone, and he looked all wrong — he looked lost. His long hair fell into his eyes like a sheepdog’s and he wore a gauzy white gown and black lipstick. He had a large, solemn-looking book in his hand, possibly the Bible, and there was something priestly about him as he tried to quiet down the crowd.
“Now listen,” he said. “Cool it for a moment.”
Behind him, there was a large cardboard cutout of Brian, standing in the sunlight like a figure on the wall of a temple. He wore a fur coat and half a dozen brightly colored scarves, making the Hindu greeting of two palms pressed together before his chest.
Mick read something archaic and strange. He read it in a prim, unconvincing voice that made it sound as if he didn’t know or even care what the words meant.
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! — Rome’s azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
To the crowd, it maybe sounded like Shakespeare. Anger recognized it as Shelley’s Adonais. But what did Mick mean when he ordered them all to die? Did he mean that Brian had found some “white radiance of Eternity,” or did he mean nothing at all? Mick was the Prince of Darkness or the Angel of Light. It was difficult to say why he was so hard to stop looking at.
Keith sniffed from his canister, once for each nostril, then let the silver straw dangle down from the chain he wore around his neck. He picked up his guitar and slung it over his back as the crew flung open the doors of two large boxes at the front of the stage. They were full of butterflies — moths — and they flickered for a few moments in a daze above the crowd, half-suffocated, then wafted down like white confetti on the massed heads and the black-painted stage.
The Hells Angels leaned back against the iron barricades, legs crossed, passing each other beers. The band tuned its guitars. The cardboard cutout of Brian smiled unchangingly at the crowd, a billboard advertisement for a children’s play about a magic prince.
It started with a flat, basic drumbeat, so slow that the song felt as though it was about to collapse before it even started. Mick was trying to move in time, a half jog, half chicken walk, wading through thick sludge. He’d taken off his white gown and was wearing tight cotton pants and a sleeveless mauve T-shirt. Keith didn’t look at him. His guitar part was one chord, so useless that he didn’t even face the crowd but stared down at his strings, as if waiting for something better to happen. Mick stared at him: it was too slow. He was almost ready to give up and start over. He clapped his hands and waved his head from one side to the other, a rueful smile on his face, but then Keith finally got to the first riff, a major-key country riff slowed down to one-quarter speed. He mangled a few double-stops in the middle, but now it started to make sense. The point of the song was its big gaping holes, the ragged dead spaces between the sounds. It was always about to break down, a half step behind. The drums leveled out at the same slack pace. Keith leaned back, head nodding, then stepped forward on one long leg, a black-haired ghost in bullfighter’s pants, a crescent moon dangling from his ear.
It was the band’s new sound. Mick put his hands in his hair and pouted and stood on his tiptoes. For a moment, he looked like a street drunk yelling denunciations at strangers. His first words were incomprehensible, but it didn’t matter. They were all looking at him now. He scowled and pointed his finger, then mouthed a kiss: a dictator for half a second, then a dancer out of Swan Lake.
It was a series of vibrations amplified through electric circuits, a current of sound the crowd could feel on the skin beneath their hair, in the cavities of their chests, in their rectums and their groins. It registered in their bodies, in the pulse of the blood, but also in their minds, the part that was always changing, as senseless and illogical as a dream. The band was making sounds, the sounds were coming from the stage, but they were no longer themselves, the people in the crowd were no longer themselves, no one was even thinking about it anymore. They might be a nobody from Romford with the wrong kind of accent, or a mechanic’s son with ruined teeth, or they might think all the time about what people had and what they were missing out on, but nobody was thinking about any of that while they were in its grasp. It was basic, energy and sound, life intensified for a few moments, its chaos made plain, the self slipping outside the body, joined in sound to other bodies. It was a feeling everyone had always craved, had always been warned about, a connection to something like the deeper self that used to be called the soul.
When Anger got home, it was almost two in the morning. His lover Will was asleep beneath an afghan on the broken couch, surrounded by eight-by-ten color prints he was supposed to have arranged for Anger into little booklets to promote the yet-to-be-made Lucifer film. Anger set his things down carefully in the glow of the TV, trying not to wake Will, but it wasn’t long before he stirred.
“You missed something good,” he said.
He looked to his side, slightly dazed by the pale, clustered lights from the TV. The rest of the room was shadowy, the walls dimpled, water-stained, dirty windows reflecting back the TV light, like glass plates for some abstract etching.
“It’s not my thing,” Will said, shifting beneath the blanket.
“Yeah, well, there were half a million people there.”
“The guitar player was the one I liked. The one who died. He was the only one I responded to.”
Anger looked at the stack of mail on the table, but there were no personal letters, no checks. He sat down in a chair and rubbed his eyes, head bowed.
“Are they giving you anything back?” Will said.
“They’re doing my film. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I mean the real film. The one you had in mind before. Not the film of you following them around documenting every time they wipe their ass.”