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Zachary Lazar's marvelous Sway (Little, Brown) is a fictionalized account of the Satanic web that connected the Rolling Stones, cult director Kenneth Anger and Charles Manson accomplice Bobby Beausoleil, the flip dark side of Stories Done, Mikal Gilmore's collection of ‘60s icon profiles.
Locating the exact moment in time the decade that promised peace and love ended with the Manson murders and the notorious Hell's Angels killing at the Stones' '69 Altamont concert immortalized in the film Gimme Shelter, Lazar meticulously cross-cuts between the various events that led there.
The compelling narrative hurtles from the making of Anger's underground biker classic Scorpio Rising and his friendship with Beausoleil to the ill-fated love triangle between Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, which culminated in Brian's mysterious death by drowning in his swimming pool. While Jones gradually lost his grip as leader of the band, the slyly self-assured Mick Jagger, brought in after Brian formed the band, gradually usurped his role, going beyond sympathy for the devil to believing he was the incarnation of Satan, or at least playing the part for fans on that 1969 tour which culminated in the ill-fated final concert.
Lazar brings the details of the Stones' rise to stardom to life, from their early days in an unheated London apartment, huddling against one another on the bed to keep warm, to their famed psychedelic trip to Morocco, where Jagger and Richards began to distance themselves from the increasingly distracted, perpetually stoned Jones, too hung up on his jealousy over Keith and Anita's love affair to care what was happening to him.
There are also evocative accounts of a mesmerizing Manson playing in a rock band with Beausoleil, Anger's early struggles to break through as an avant-garde filmmaker and Jones' ultimate self-destruction, all set against the Stones' commercial breakthrough, tracing the thin, but often impenetrable, line that separates art and commerce, as well as popular success from failure.
Call Sway a Ragtime for the demise of the classic rock era, as Lazar's nifty novel pinpoints how an entire generation bent on feel-good utopian ideals fell under the "sway" of evil, unable to escape until it was too late.
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Interesting book, especially since I read it nearly back-to-back with Exile On Main Street: A Season In Hell With the Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield. That was a scary one.
"doin' the Rhumba Boogie down the South American way"