Sway by Zachary Lazar Read Free Book Online

The band sometimes had to strip down to their bare chests it was so hot. Now they come on
     in their street clothes, the way they did in London, and nobody responds. They play seven songs to quiet indifference, then
     they do the same thing an hour later for a different audience, then they drive somewhere where the tea shop is closed and
     the petrol station won’t sell them fuel.
    It’s hard to remember what they thought they were doing, playing blues to tiny crowds in the Midlands. The ballrooms are damp
     and cold and they can’t make out the faces in the room, the strange austerity of the spectators. On the wide, empty stages,
     they move around in some effort even to make themselves seen. They play to forty people in Watford. In Morecambe there are
     twenty-two. They arrive in provincial high streets, where a few girls wait outside in kerchiefs and plastic pumps, and always
     there are the stares of the local constables, skeptical faces in a changeless gray drizzle.
    The only thing that seems to work is aggression. The sound gets angrier and angrier. In the van afterward, they sometimes
     turn this aggression on one another.
    Keith writes a letter home to his mother:
    I thought I’d see the countryside but all I see is the inside of this van. Two weeks now and not a minute to myself. The other
     night Bill, who’s playing bass, gets into it with the police. They spot him pissing on a wall. There’s a restaurant won’t
     let us in to use the toilets, so we have to piss outside. Then the cops take each one of us individually behind the building
     and make us walk a straight line, count backwards from a hundred, pat us down with their hands. Three of them and one of you
     and it’s dark, some town you never heard of, they’re shining a light on you, none of it makes any sense. Last night Bill pissed
     himself because we wouldn’t stop the van, just kept jabbing him in the kidneys, telling him it’s a long way back to London
     and would he like a warm cup of tea?
    On the road, Brian sometimes gets his own car. He sometimes even gets his own room at some shabby country hotel while the
     others sleep in the van. He’s supposed to get to the shows early, settle accounts with the management. That’s the arrangement
     he’s come to with Andrew Loog Oldham, who has sent them on this futile round of engagements. But something about his privileges,
     his isolation, along with the shaming drudgery of the tour, has given him a sense of experiencing things from a distance,
     as if he’s not quite present for what’s really happening. He places his phone calls back to London and counts out the nightly
     receipts and writes in his book what they’ve spent each day on petrol and food, but there’s often a feeling that somehow it’s
     coming to an end, that the band is on the verge of failing, no matter what he does.
    He’s started to think about the Beatles, to envy their growing fame. There’s the temptation to clean things up, to wear matching
     suits, and then the realization that it wouldn’t work for them anyway.
    One night in Sheffield he arrives almost an hour late for the first show, so drunk he can hardly get inside the backstage
     door with his briefcase and guitar. He greets the others with a tone of fuzzy dismissal, a complicit blear-eyed shrug, as
     if the whole thing is just some minor hassle that they should be hip enough to not even notice, much less mention. But then
     he sees the way Mick is sitting on his dressing room stool, smoking, not looking at him, and it causes him to drop his things
     to the ground, newly animated, suddenly raising his arms and opening his eyes wide in some strange parody of spookiness.
    “What’s wrong?” he says. He walks over and puts his face right in Mick’s, leering at him in a way that Mick has never seen
     before. It causes him to stare back for a moment in challenge but then to recoil inside himself, realizing that Brian isn’t
     seeing him.
    “What are you so