Rolling Stones and Charles Manson, fictionalized
By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, March 16, 2008
It's a little too facile, the pat analysis that the '60s ended with Altamont and the Manson Family's murder spree. One minute college kids are sticking daisies in National Guardsmen's rifles, then clouds the color of spilt blood rumble in and the Summer of Love turns into a Bosch painting. It suggests a kind of madness pandemic, when in fact everybody goes crazy the same way they die: alone.
I still believe that, but Zachary Lazar's novel "Sway" makes a convincing case that dark forces can be summoned with the right incantation, and that Altamont and the Manson Family and My Lai and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy brothers were the result of the world cheerfully deciding to go rabid-dog loony for a while. Shot through with the reek of doom and as audacious an imagining of the JFK assassination as Don DeLillo's "Libra," this is the story of a bizarre convergence of real lives overlapping: the Rolling Stones, avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger and Bobby Beausoleil, a drifter and wannabe musician who appeared, with Mick Jagger, in Anger's film "Invocation of My Demon Brother." By the time the film premiered, Beausoleil one of the stray hippies Charles Manson took in had been charged in the murder of another Family associate, Gary Hinman, in July 1969. The cops pulled him over driving Hinman's car. He's been in prison ever since.
Anger who's prone to saying things like, "My last film was very black. Motorcycles. People falling in love with death, that sort of thing" is the anchor here. We see him growing up in Santa Monica, making movies as a young boy, getting aroused by photos of male bodybuilders (and getting busted in a public bathroom after having sex with an undercover cop oh, the indignity) and developing a lifelong interest in the occult. Beausoleil, meanwhile, accompanies Manson on what amounts to a dry run for the carnage to come. And we get to know the Stones in 1962, when it's just Brian Jones then the bandleader and Jagger and Keith Richards, practicing in a crummy flat in Chelsea during "the coldest winter there in a hundred years," warmed only by unconsummated homosexual tension. Soon enough, the band is touring, their crowds getting bigger and more violent and the internecine conflicts are brewing. Richards punches a hole in a dressing room door out of frustration: "He knows that the sound starts with him," Lazar writes, "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." Jones' estrangement from the band grows, he's unable to tour the States because of drug convictions, then he's conveniently dead at the bottom of his swimming pool at 27 a famously hazardous age for rock stars.
Among other things, Lazar writes beautifully about music, which is much harder than riffing in open G. As a longtime Stones fan, I found the sections on the band most interesting by default. He has us in the studio as "Sympathy for the Devil" takes shape, has Jones' replacement Mick Taylor thinking about chord changes, drops in on Keith listening to a Chuck Berry record focusing on pianist Johnnie Johnson's "splashy laughing trills" and offers this canny analysis of the band and the malignant, serpentine times that formed it:
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.
Lazar's title, of course, is copped from the Stones song commonly referred to as "the one on 'Sticky Fingers' after 'Brown Sugar,' " in which Jagger sings, "It's just that demon life has got me in its sway." And in a presumably fictional newspaper story printed in the novel, a lawyer refers to a member of the Family "being in Mr. Manson's sway."
Lazar's agenda is exploring the notion of what happens when people surrender themselves to something else, whether it's fame, dope, black magic or charismatic nutbags like Manson. It's about the compulsion to find the edge by plunging over it.
As William Blake put it in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," in a passage Lazar quotes: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."
Dangerous times, times so huge and incomprehensibly weird that even Lucifer found himself, as Jagger sang over the howls and the congas, "in need of some restraint."
While no cautionary tale, "Sway" features scenes that are so depraved, characters so nihilistic and amoral, that it makes that infamous Stones documentary with the unprintable title look as wholesome as that Hannah Montana movie. You can't always get what you want, and when you do, that can be a very bad thing.
15th March 2008 11:31 PM
moy
the book's cover
16th March 2008 12:47 AM
mojoman
manson was a beatles fan........
16th March 2008 02:23 AM
Ten Thousand Motels
quote:mojoman wrote:
manson was a beatles fan........
I wonder if he wore one of these on his lapel.
16th March 2008 07:00 PM
VoodooChileInWOnderl
quote:mojoman wrote:
manson was a beatles fan........
No... I have investigated a lot about Charles Manson and the Family... the good news for you is that it was NOT the white album the one which inspired him but "Beggars Banquet" in its original white cover
16th March 2008 09:07 PM
mojoman
quote:VoodooChileInWOnderl wrote:
No... I have investigated a lot about Charles Manson and the Family... the good news for you is that it was NOT the white album the one which inspired him but "Beggars Banquet" in its original white cover
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