Zachary Lazar - Sway

The music is simple on the surface. On the surface, it’s a matter of three chords that even a boy like Keith, sequestered in his bedroom in his parents’ house, can learn to play along with on his guitar, until he begins to listen more carefully and hear what’s actually there. After that it becomes a matter of how many layers he’s able to discern, how much he’s willing to commit to in terms of patience and repetition. For a boy like Keith, the willingness is all but infinite. He’s a shy dreamer, prone to isolated fantasies, preyed upon at school by older boys who call him a faggot and a girl. They throw rocks at him from the building sites of unfinished council terraces. They inspire in him confusing, shaming acts of cruelty, tormenting animals mostly. The music he listens to when he’s alone is like the angry essence of the boys who taunt him, the aggressive force in them that he can’t help but covet. Its sound is otherworldly, impossible to connect to his drab suburb of identical brick flats, muddy roads, dustbins.

The three chords are usually only alluded to, he finds, approached from various, jarring angles in massings of two or three odd notes that are sometimes not even in the same key. He struggles with half tones and quarter tones, dozens of tiny, hard-to-discern variations in rhythm and pitch that he has to match somehow on his thick-stringed, high-fretted guitar. To hear any of this requires an ear acute enough to pick out several tones at once and isolate each of them, even as they change, and this in turn requires a nearly autistic willingness to move the phonograph needle back, groove by groove, in order to assess again the same two-second snatch of song. It is a tedium exceeded only by the painful, fumbling labor of trying to finger these notes on a fretted board, going only by ear, by trial and error, one awkward voicing to the next. The music raises blisters on his fingers, causes him to pound the guitar in frustrated fits or to stare at it from his bed. It defies him to internalize even a portion of its alien power, to play it just once with his body and not his mind.

A hundred and fifty people in Ealing. Almost two hundred in Richmond. They’ve begun to draw followers who come every week in leather and black sweaters to dance on the tables with such violence that a reporter from the Record Mirror feels threatened and denounces the band as “thugs.” A kind of culture has started to evolve. Everyone under thirty has decided that they’re an exception — a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star. There are no more wars to fight, no more ration coupons, nothing to do but study graphic design or live in Paris for a month busking in the Métro. They have no experience of fear, or violence, or patriotism, or duty. What they have instead is an obsession with style, a collage of half-understood influences from other times and places. It is a language of pure connotation, of suggestion and innuendo, and once it gets started it has to move faster and faster, it can never stop working.

It’s something Keith has begun to feel a little suspicious of, when he’s not belittling it in his mind, the way the unspoken secret between Mick and Brian — their mutual awareness that Mick has slept with Tricia — has had the odd effect of bringing them closer. Keith sits with his guitar now, idly playing little bits of music, while Brian tries once again to teach Mick a riff on the harmonica. They are weirdly eager and solicitous with each other, rising to careful heights of consideration. For Keith, who’s never even kissed a girl, whose only contacts with girls are sarcastic and self-defeating, it brings a confusing kind of envy.

It’s a Little Walter riff they’re trying to learn, impossible to duplicate without a microphone, but when Brian plays it he manages to catch some of its menace and depth. He takes Mick’s hands and cups them around the harmonica, places his fingers on Mick’s and holds them in place. Then he brings his own hands to his mouth and mimics the waving motion that produces vibrato, raising his eyebrows at Mick, who takes the cue by just barely shaking his head. He stares seriously into Brian’s eyes and tries once more to reproduce the sound. He sits up straight and raises his shoulders, the instrument cradled in one hand and completely covered by the other, which flutters beneath his thumbs in the deliberate way of someone making birdcalls. He closes his eyes and blows harder, and Brian nods his head at the ground, unimpressed but patient, almost resigned in the way he’s passing on his skills.

Even in March it is still cold in the flat. Through the window, the crusted snow glows a faint blue between the rails of the iron fence. At three in the morning, Keith has passed out at the far edge of the bed where the three of them are curled up for warmth. Brian and Mick are snuggled against each other, both drunk, both moving back and forth between deep, stuporous sleep and lulled, half-waking dreams.

It is so dark that when Brian opens his eyes, Mick’s face is a blue vagueness that seems asleep but also not like a human face at all. It seems large and made of highly pumiced stone, a monument that emanates a kind of numinous comfort that has nothing to do with Mick’s actual self. He seems to be faintly smiling. Then his face seems blank and tranquil, the remembered smile a faint nimbus that fades in and out.

Brian twists a little and Mick groans. For a moment, the look on his face is pained, but then he moves his head down against Brian’s shoulder, and they enter a space that is almost indistinguishable from sleep. They are pressed up against each other, front to front, and each of them has a hand buried deep in the warmth between the other’s legs.

Then Mick’s hand slackens and stills. His mouth is open and his eyes stare at Brian without recognition.

They’re still holding each other in their hands. There is a moment before the shame has time to register, and Brian closes his eyes, opting to continue, but Mick takes his hand away and turns on his side, rolling over toward Keith on the other side of the bed. It occurs to Brian then that he has been deceived, that Mick has been awake this whole time, and now he is awake himself, unable to move.

They get their next big break a few nights later, a Saturday night gig at the Marquee Club, the most important club in London. The sound is bad and they play a sloppy, fast-paced set, but there is a young publicity man in the audience who wants to speak to them anyway, a twenty-year-old former design student named Andrew Loog Oldham. He sees that this band with its aloof antistyle, drawing the crowd closer to the stage to fight for a space in which to dance, is in some way a rough successor to Elvis Presley. He’s encouraged to think this way because a band from Liverpool of all places has just sold a million copies of its own song.

Backstage, he speaks to Brian, who is obviously the leader. He offers to get them into a recording studio. He says he has an older partner with connections at Decca Records. He says that they need a different singer, though, because Mick has no voice.

Brian raises an eyebrow. He’s never thought of this before — it’s a guitar band, and Mick can’t even play an instrument. He has no voice, that’s obvious, but it’s never occurred to him that Mick would ever be more than a secondary figure anyway. What he feels now, at this first glimpse of success, is a kind of generosity born of his own power, made keener by a perverse reluctance to make any concessions at all to this person who wants to be their manager.

He tells him that he’ll make the demo, but that Mick has to stay. Then he tells Mick what has just happened. He tells him that this is it, that they are on to something, that he had better call it quits with the London School of Economics.