Sway (6 page)
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.
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.
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.
At dinner, there would be a pot roast surrounded by potatoes, which sat directly before the father. Nearer the children were
bowls of beets and beet greens, white bread and butter. His mother would talk about the neighborhood women, the book club,
the chatter at the bridge game. The father would interject terse commands:
Kenneth, fork. Napkins.
Sometimes he would strike the table. Sometimes the meal would be interrupted for a round of spankings.
It was a ritual that started in dread and then accrued a kind of hysterical momentum. Each warning would lead to more noise,
more pinching under the table, more desperate squealing and giggling. Kenneth would howl and grin, his legs twitching beneath
the table, leering eyes fixed on his father. It was always as if the father would single out only one of them. The game was
to plead helplessness, giddy innocence, as if innocence had a meaning or a value once the game began.
He would send them all to their rooms, where he would make them wait until he finished his meal. Kenneth would sit on the
edge of his bed and bury his face between his knees, breathing. In this self-imposed darkness the fear would become an unwelcome
kind of yearning, guilty and hopeless. His hands would grip the backs of his legs through the fabric of his jeans. He would
imagine himself in a rough cave lit by a fire, a vision from the movies. On the cave’s back wall, a man struggled in chains,
a few narrow cuts across his chest. Then he would see himself and his brother wrestling in the driveway, their hands joined
in struggle, Kenneth’s head buried in his brother’s armpit. It would end with Kenneth grinding a rock into his brother’s knuckles.
His father smelled like alcohol and cloves, the scent of aftershave. There was something almost shy about the way he entered
the room, adjusting his glasses and clearing his throat, then telling Kenneth to take down his pants. Kenneth could not look
at him. He felt detached from himself as he unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them down around his ankles, covering himself
with his hands. Without speaking, his father removed his belt, then he bent Kenneth over his knee and beat him methodically
with a small length of the doubled-over leather, breathing through his nose. He did it without emotion or even interest. Perhaps
worse than the pain itself was the sullen intimacy of his lap, his rigid grip on Kenneth’s back, the idea that Kenneth couldn’t
see his father’s face.
Kenneth thought of the dinner table: the plates a dull white that showed their scratches in the bright light, the tablecloth
olive green and mustard yellow. He saw the jelly glasses that he and his siblings used, the faceted garnet-colored goblets
for his parents. It was a kind of ceremony: that was why his mother pinned up her hair and put on a clean dress, but also
why his father was allowed to unbutton and roll up his sleeves.
The blows came in a slow, precise rhythm that made Kenneth buck and kick. He became smaller and less aware of himself, reduced
finally to the smallest pinpoint of whoever he was. When it was over, he lay curled up in the corner of his bed, wheezing
and lost. His jeans were still down around his ankles, his warm skin exposed to the air.
“Relax,” his father said. “Let’s try to calm down now. Let’s try to settle down and get some sleep.”
When he left, Kenneth opened his eyes to the room he lived in. There were his careful drawings of Japanese scholars, of geishas
with piled hair held in place by lacquered sticks. There were the cutouts of Flash Gordon and Aquaman, the illustrations from
The Wizard of Oz.
He turned to look at the marks on his buttocks, nursing them with his fingers. In the bronze light of his bedroom lamp, the
pictures on his wall had been transformed. They were witnesses to this secret bond he shared with his father.
It was his grandmother’s friend Meg who got him a small part in a movie adaptation of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. At first, he and some other kids in different costumes ran up and down a cellophane-wrapped staircase, reaching up for girls
in cellophane dresses who were lifted away on guy wires. Next, they frolicked aimlessly in a forest of artificial trees. There
was an odd stop-start quality to it all, a vacant pause between brief snatches of play. They ran with their hands at right
angles to their hips, crouched or fell to the ground in laughter, teased one another in smiling pairs. The play began to feel
important. They became immersed in it, aware of themselves as children. It was as if they each had unique talents that it
was now their duty to exaggerate. Kenneth found himself running around the trees, faster and faster, waving his hands like
wings above his head until he was shouting. By then, he was dizzy from the fumes, the acrid smell of shellac, the bright reflections
of the lights.
Afterward, in the costume room, they chose him for a special role: the Changeling Prince. He didn’t know what this role involved
or even what the story was about. He stood in a shiny plastic suit with three strands of pearls over his chest, a thicker
strand around his neck, and two rhinestone earrings that dangled to his chin line. On his head was a turban that culminated
in a spray of white ostrich feathers.
He would watch it a half-dozen times in the theater with his grandmother and Meg. Here was the important moment: the woman
who played Titania lifting him onto her knee, her body softened by a fill light so that there was no distinction between the
beaded fringes of her sleeves and the silver spray of hair that descended like a shawl to her waist. She and Kenneth were
in close-up, his dark hair and small features nearly as Asiatic as his rounded turban. The plastic trees and flowers radiated
a light that had nothing to do with any actual season or time of day. Onscreen, his body and the woman’s body were hardly
bodies at all, more like figments. Gone was any vestige of the actual soundstage: no smell of shellac or hairspray, no visible
trace of his own anxious joy.
It affected him like the first manic vision of a would-be saint: his first Hollywood role. Afterward, there would be much
struggling and compromise, an endless effort to return to that original moment.
When he was ten, he began begging his father for the leftover ends of film from the home movies they made on their vacations.
He examined the black Bolex camera, the riddles of apertures and shutter speeds, the light meter, the different filters for
indoors and outdoors. He shot little fragments that evoked unexpected emotions: a few seconds of his sister brushing her hair
with her fingers, or stepping out of a car in a long dress. He worked out scenarios in his mind, fairy tales involving kings
and sorcerers and princesses, power struggles that ended not with a plot twist but an image: a candle burning on his parents’
dresser, a potted hyacinth on the kitchen table, a patch of sky between cypress trees. He found by accident that if he spliced
together snippets from the family’s home movies — group poses at Yosemite or Big Sur — the images took on a different meaning,
a lonely, distant quality, as if his family were strangers or dead. The images seemed more real than the moments they recorded.
They made everything suggestive and strange, as if highlighted or outlined.
He filmed the family Christmas tree, bestrewn with silver tinsel and colored glass balls. A few weeks later, he filmed its
undressing, the ornaments packed away in boxes. Then he filmed the bare, broken tree on the grill inside the fireplace, the
flames slowly reaching up to its limbs until it had withered to a charred skeleton. It was only after watching it in his room
on the bare wall that he realized what the film was about. It was about the holiday’s actual meaning, the story of Christ
told in some strange new language that only he seemed to be aware of.
It was a lot of knowledge to carry around by himself. Sometimes he spent time with his sister, Jean, playing Chutes and Ladders
in her bedroom, listening to Frank Sinatra records, watching her try on makeup. He kept going to the movies with his grandmother
and Meg. He fell in love with actresses who were elegant and strong, brought down in the end by loneliness or jealousy or
age, but always wittier and dressed with more flair than their rivals. He daydreamed that he was a girl himself, leaving home
for an uncertain career, embarking on a life of struggle and tribulation.
What it amounted to at first was a certain preoccupation he had with photographs of men, particularly well-dressed, capable
men who seemed at ease in their own skin. The sight of their faces would strike him in the center of his chest with a feeling
of both menace and safety, as if they could see inside him but were somehow protective of what they found there. Executives
who carried briefcases, combat pilots standing before their airplanes, their eyes screened by sunglasses — for a long time,
he wasn’t aware of what drew him to these men, only that they made him alert and still. He found them in movie magazines,
in fashion ads, in recruitment propaganda for the armed services. They hailed cabs in raincoats, or twisted at the waist to
meet his gaze. When he finally understood how important they were to him, how much they cost him in guilt, it was like discovering
a new birthmark in the crook of his leg, a stain that had to be studied carefully in order to be assimilated. It was like
the feeling of spying or eavesdropping, a practice that became harder to resist once you had started doing it, no matter how
appalled you were, until the loathing itself became a part of the fascination.
In dreams, a hive of bees would push itself slowly through the skin of his mother’s face. The family would appear as monkeys,
crashing over the dinner table with inflamed genitals, their hands full of food. In the blue glow of a city covered in ice,
a young girl with a dog’s slender body would drag a cart full of glowing coals through empty streets. The dreams were full
of irrational feelings — a sudden urge to eat rotten fruit, a calm fascination with snipping off the ends of his own fingers
— fears that modulated into a cocooned sense of safety. His father would appear as a fat man with a few strands of oily hair
and an old-fashioned pin-striped suit. When Kenneth began unbuttoning his father’s vest, he nestled Kenneth’s face against
his chest, and Kenneth felt two long rows of nipples beneath his undershirt.
One night, he came downstairs to find his father still awake, reading the newspaper in his armchair. He looked at Kenneth
for a moment in openmouthed uncertainty, as if on the verge of sleep. His glasses were slightly crooked on the bridge of his
nose, his hair a disheveled spray of dark fronds.
“I want you to look at something,” his father said. Then he rested his paper on the ottoman before him and stood up slowly
in his slippers and robe. “I want you to see if there’s anything over here that you can salvage.”
He was indicating a neat pile of his own clothes, which he had stacked on the side table by the door. They were old trousers
and work shirts, a pile of laundered garments that had been reserved for work in the garage.
