Sway by Zachary Lazar Read Free Book Online Page B

keen, a thickening moan.
    Their arms and legs and chests and heads suddenly feel ridiculously stiff and crude. They feel magnanimous for just standing
     there in the torrent of noise and not walking off the stage.
    What has happened is that their record has found its way onto the radio. It is a basic pop song, not much of a song at all,
     distinguished by a simple guitar riff, a hitch in the rhythm, that gives it angles and contours. They had recorded it a little
     more than a week ago, but already it seems like something from the distant past.
    Every gesture they make now is magnified, triggering panic and exaltation. Everywhere, they’re met by the same horde of plucked
     and powdered faces, pallid and swollen and lost. It’s impossible to hear what they’re playing, but they’re not there to be
     heard. They’re there for this swishing around in front of a thousand girls with sprayed hair and defiant, tearful glares.
     They don’t realize they’re even making a gesture until the screams get louder, and then they have to just accept it: they’re
     performing, they’re putting on a show.
    They’re suddenly matched up with American stars — Bo Diddley, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers — people they have idolized.
     It happens so quickly that the band doesn’t have time to parse all the different implications of this mistake. The girls are
     screaming, but it’s for the English boys with their one hit song, their ill-fitting jackets, their scruffy, unwashed hair.
     If they stop to think, they are lost, but if they keep moving there’s a chance it will cohere into a kind of sense. Bo Diddley
     plays with them onstage. The moment Bo Diddley leaves, the screams get much louder. They finish their next song and girls
     start to throw themselves from the balconies: they get their friends to give them a handhold, then dangle for a few bewildered
     seconds, twisting and dazed, then fall shrieking onto the crowd below.
    Already, Mick can see what’s happening. He can see that no matter what he does he’s about to become the focal point of the
     band. He’s in the middle of the stage, taller than the others, and he is the only one not obscured by a large, hollow-bodied
     guitar. Each night, he watches Little Richard leap and collapse and raise himself up, brandishing his microphone stand, everything
     deliberate, calculated for maximum impact. Little Richard can be draining to be around backstage, queenly and round-faced
     now that he’s cut his hair, but he’s always performing, and Mick himself has started to dance in a way that no one else in
     the band would dare to try.
    A sudden rise onto his toes, seizing the microphone. A quick spasm that jerks his head upright and carries out into his back-stretched
     arms. A lazy slouch, hips slung to the side, one hand up, one down, drunken and sliding. A pause before he rights himself,
     turning his head and clapping, a sideways glance at no one, guarding his space.
    It turns out that the point of touring is speed. Time moves faster and faster, the moments bunching up on top of one another,
     so that it’s difficult to experience any of them as real. To stay awake, they take pep pills, the same pep pills that performers
     have been taking for years, but it affects each of them in different ways. Onstage, Brian has started to smile between postures
     of menace. He’s started to act a little bit like a pop star, standing with his feet apart, raising his eyebrows wistfully
     when he plays harmonica. It’s mostly a joke, except when he gets frantic and starts vying with Mick. He winks at the girls
     as they’re carted off on stretchers, grins at them as they pull out their hair. The speed gives him an intense feeling of
     focus for a while, a sense of presence and wit, until the details get exaggerated to such enormous proportion and significance
     that time becomes impossibly dense. His face stares out into the crowd and either acknowledges them or shrugs them off,