Later on, maybe, in the dressing room, or in an interview, they might apologize, to other men, for the screaming girls: “It was a bit mad out there!” “Blimey—St. Trinian’s were mental tonight!”
But they know, and you know, that tonight, your screaming was the most important thing to them. It was the energy that they fed on. It was the vortex they levitated in. They could not have been amazing without you. You have blessed them with your magic. You made them holy, and endless, and hot—and, in return, they played in a febrile way they could never attain in front of an audience of motionless men, murmuring, “Nice middle eight. Good reference.”
Bands need to be screamed at. In their hearts, they know that. They know there is a power they will never attain until they have stood in the white-light noise of a theater of devotion, and seen girls down the front collapse in ecstatic tears.
And this is true even when it’s the biggest scream in the world. Even when the mythology is that the screaming was what killed your band. When the Beatles played Shea Stadium, they turned up to a vast cauldron of howling, wild, melting girls, and might as well have mimed for all anyone could hear. That was when they decided to stop touring—that was what drove them to the studio, to write Sgt. Pepper. They were so tired of being screamed at—of being chased down streets—that they turned into another band: all decked out in Day-Glo army uniforms. They joined the army to escape all the girls.
But when I watch the Beatles at Shea Stadium—after I have sighed over the beautiful podginess of John, his belly straining at the buttons on his jacket, which begs to be taken off; once I stop swooning over the impossible cow-lashed eyes of Paul, and his pale, milky skin—I watch the girls. I watch the audience—those thousands of girls, dressed like their mothers; dressed like Far Side ladies, in glasses and pencil skirts, and rigid hair. I watch those girls, in those rigid decades, before contraception; before feminism; before women were seen as people—fucking freaking out. At first, because they are looking at the Beatles—who would not freak out looking at a Beatle? So podgy! So milky!—but soon, freaking out because they are the girls. Fifty-seven thousand girls—will they ever have seen so many of their own? Have there ever been so many girls in one room, united? United in the very thing girls are not supposed to do: losing their minds—in forgetting everything, and everyone; the unprecedented power of being able to scream, cry, wail; overwhelming the security, untouchable by their own parents.
They are a power grid of energy—they are splitting their own atoms with love and exploding, over and over.
They cannot hear the Beatles—the band plays through the Tannoy, as distant and tinny as an ice-cream van, five streets away—so these girls are making their own music. They scream. All they can hear is their vast chorus of their own, ecstatic wilding. They all scream at different pitches, notes, and tone—sliding up and down the scales like the orchestra in “Day in the Life” will, a few months later, when the Beatles record it. The girls are singing their wild, high, feral-love seagull songs to the Beatles, and the Beatles embed it in their songs, and give it right back to them. It was a communal composition.
How, we ask ourselves, over and over, do we understand the miracle of the Beatles? How could one band—four men—have done all they did, at such velocity, with such density, and with a complexity so hot and elastic it feels like the simplest, most obvious thing in the world . . . until you try to do it yourself. Until you stand, in a silent room, and feel for one minute how impossible it would be to pull “Strawberry Fields”—that dark, fizzing, heartfelt oil wheel—out of the self-same, empty English sky John Lennon found it in?
When we talk of genius—of seizing a moment—these are man-words used when people are too scared to say “magic,” and “witchcraft.” We are too scared to talk about what we cannot see. We fear we might find God at the end of that sentence—some galactic passion that chooses its vessels, and gifts to them the universe’s most totemic joys.
But here’s the magic that the Beatles had—the unprecedented energy surge that blew out all the cultural circuits in the world. They had girls. They had the love of teenage girls. An audience who were neglected, belittled, hungry—they spoke to those girls, and unleashed the kind of power that can change the world.
And why did girls love them so much? Because the Beatles loved girls. The Beatles were saturated in girl culture—they loved black American girl groups; they had dandy outfits and uncomfortable pointy shoes, like girls. They went out of their way to write about girls in their songs—“She Loves You” is the Beatles siding with a girl in love . . . acting as her sexy envoys. They grew their hair long—like girls: an act of alliance in a time when femininity was implicitly inferior. All the teasing they got, all the outrage they caused, but they wanted their hair to look like girls’ hair.
At a time when the difference between genders was never more rigidly enforced, they rebelled into soft, clannish, sly, joyful femininity. Never combative, like boy gangs usually are; instead, their weapons were the weapons of girls: humor, sexiness, slyness, flirty wit.
So much is written about how all boys want to be, then kill, their fathers: Freud has gifted us decades of Luke vs. Darth. But the joy of the Beatles, as a gang, is that rather than becoming men by killing their fathers, they became men by turning into their dead mothers. John and Paul—both motherless at an early age—married single mothers; wrote songs about dead mothers and their living mother-wives; left the maelstrom of the Beatles to live the lives of wives: buying farms, making bread, raising children. They rioted into their femininity. They switched the polarity. They lived the unseen half of life.
How can you be as extraordinary as the Beatles? How can you change so much, in such a short period of time, with seemingly nothing—no capital, no contacts, no education—on your side? By tapping into the untouched cultural capital of humanity: girls. To be on the side of girls. To look girls in the eye, and declare yourself on our team. To copy girls. To acknowledge girls. To learn from girls. To accept what we give you—screaming, loving, singing, dancing—and let it set you free.
The great pity of my lifetime is that, still, no one notices this is what happens. Girls are invisible. The power source goes unacknowledged.
But not to other girls. I see you, girls. I see you, in history.
And all anyone has to do—to have our impossible energy, and love, given willingly, forever—is say, “I see you, too.”
Love, Duchess
31
The next few days are like starting a new life, as a new person. All the traveling I’ve ever done before has been either work—twenty-four hours in a European city: plane/hotel/hour interview with the band/gig/hotel/plane home; or with my family—arguments in caravans, and tents, in Wales.
I have never been away with someone who is just joyous, uncomplicated, fascinating fun: who, over breakfast, will say, “Right. It’s about time we went and met van Gogh’s Starry Night, isn’t it?” and take me to MoMA; or stand at the top of the Empire State Building whilst I sing the appropriate songs from On the Town; or push me into a cinema where they serve you margaritas in your chair, then lean over to hiss, with barely repressed Welsh fury, to the man who kept rustling his crisps: “Or perhaps, my love, it would be quieter to just eat a tuba?”
But the main thing is—we talk. We talk whole books, every day. What we say over breakfast alone is two chapters—John telling me about how he’s rated his roadies, over the years: “Lesbians at Number Two—they’re faster than anarchists, but slower than men.”
Me telling my favorite story about writing: Henry James being asked to write a two-thousand-word book review, and submitting thirty thousand words. When the editor pointed out it might be a trifle too long, James cut one sentence and sent it back with a furious note, reading, “Here—take back the mangled remains.”
This makes John laugh until he wheezes, and his eyes crease into just three lines—like when people laugh in the Mr. Men books. This is his best laugh. It is my favorit
e thing to make happen. I feel like I am collecting everything we say, and every honking laugh that bursts forth, in a series of leather-bound volumes, on a shelf, in my head, marked, “Continuing Fun,” and that this is the library I shall browse through, remembering, when I’m ill, and dying. These are memories you can live in.
In Philadelphia, on the third night—in a hotel that, winningly, has a massive fiberglass Liberty Bell in the lobby—John plays me the songs from his new album. Lying on the bed, guitar balanced on his belly, fat fingers bouncing on and off the strings, like rain on a tin roof.
“After I read your letter,” he says—still playing, as he speaks—“I went into the studio, which I had been dreading; as I’d believed I had run out of songs.”
He shakes his head as he fumbles a chord—corrects it, smiles, and continues.
“And I found out that—I was wrong. That, actually, I had plenty of songs. It’s just . . . I had thought they were the wrong kind of songs. So I’d ignored them.”
He pauses speaking for a minute, to play a particularly complex flurry of chords. Task completed, he continues.
“I had been ashamed of all the new songs that were coming to me—because they were all so bloody bright, and shiny. Hahaha! They’re so commercial, Dutch. They couldn’t be more pop. I could hear the bloody Radio One jingle coming in at the end of them. And I hated it. Hated it. I could just imagine all the terrible balls your Tony Rich at the D&ME would say about them.”
The name “Tony Rich” sounds so out of place, and long ago, here. And redundant. It is as if John had just mentioned the medieval practice of setting fire to bags full of cats.
“But then, I read your letter”—and, here, he smiles his best smile: the one that feels like sunshine on my arms, and face, and the streets around—“and I realized what a rotten bastard I was. I was! I was! Why do I care more about the opinion of half a dozen miserable, old journalists, than the opinion of thousands of brilliant, bright girls? What was I doing? What was I running away from? Whoever, in this world, turns down love?”
His fingers slide down the guitar neck, as his strumming hand turns into a blur. “This is the chorus!” he shouts, over six bars that cartwheel with joy, through meadow-rich melody. He beams as he plays it. “Isn’t it fucking brilliant? That’s down to you, babe. This one’s on you.”
Normally, at this point—in this kind of conversation—we would then hug. I would go over to him, and say, “It’s my pleasure, you terrible murderer! Please write a song about me now,” and we would do our brother-sister kissing, on the cheek, or in the hair; the brother-sister kissing that has sustained me for the last two years.
But instead, I stay where I am sitting—on my chair, by the window, smoking. And John stays on the bed—looking at me warily.
I feel safe here. I cannot move any nearer to him.
For since we have come to America, things have changed. There is mutual understanding that we should not be . . . too close. That if one of us steps forward, the other should step back. When we accidentally touch each other—in a lift; squished up together in a cab—we both hold our breath, for a second, until we move, safely, apart; and then we breathe again.
We have stayed up all night in dozens of hotels, over the years—lying on the bed, talking until dawn.
But here, we do not lie on the bed—we avoid it as if it were unstable, or electrified.
We have run away together, to America. We know what should happen next. I catch John often looking at me for a beat too long, a degree too hot. I am aware of him watching me as I brush my hair; as I drink my wine; as I walk into the room, with the new button-up green suede boots I bought in Greenwich Village.
“Those are the kind of boots that could make a man dizzy,” he said, appreciatively, as I smiled at him—and then sat on the chair farthest from him, at the table.
I know the way John thinks about me has changed. I see him waiting. He is waiting and watching for the slightest sign from me—a look, a word—and he would then take that one step toward me, and that will be it. All this static electricity will find its path to the ground, and the kissing will begin, and never stop.
But I can’t go near him. It feels like a bad idea, right now. And I don’t know why. I presume it’s because of Jerry.
John, of course, knows something bad has happened, but not the full story—for the first two days in America, I was too ashamed to tell him. I do not like telling sad, awful stories about myself. I do not know how to end them. How do you finish a story that cannot swing up into a triumphal joke, or conclusion?
When I finally tell him tonight, I end it suddenly—“So he filmed it, and now he shows it to people at parties. And that’s the story of my sex-tape shame.”
I look down, and notice I have torn the room service menu into three hundred tiny pieces—my lap is filled with confetti that says “urger” and “yonnaise.”
The story makes John so angry, and distraught—“How could he do that?”—that I think he might actually wail, as if injured.
“When his karma comes, I hope it’s painful, and testicular,” he concludes, at the end of a white-fury rant. “I wouldn’t even bother burying him, after I’d killed him. I’d just throw him up a tree, and let the birds fuck him up. Oh my love, what can I do? I’ll do anything.”
“I don’t know,” I say, still looking down at my lapful of paper. “I don’t know what can be done. I think about it all the time. At first I was in denial, and then I was angry, and now . . . now I’m in this odd place, between emotions. I feel like I’m . . . waiting for something. You know how, in The Railway Children, Bobbie wakes up one day, and knows something’s going to happen? Everything feels really dreamlike, and disconnected—and then, at the railway station, her father appears?”
“‘Daddy, my daddy!’” John exclaims. “God. If you ever wanted to bawl like a baby.”
“I feel like that,” I say. “That I’m waiting for something. That I’m waiting for something to happen.”
John nods, but stays on the bed. I stay on the chair. Waiting.
Wednesday is Washington, DC, where John has a whole day of press to do.
“I’m sorry babe,” he says, over breakfast. He was right—about American breakfast. They are amazing. I’d never had a hash brown before.
“It’s like some chips had an orgy,” I say, wonderingly, as the waiter puts it in front of me. “Don’t worry about abandoning me. I have a plan.”
“Bar? Strip clubs? Bongo flicks? Crack den? America is bounteous with its diversions for the troubled,” John says, finishing his eggs, and lighting up a fag.
“Oh no,” I say, cheerfully. “The Smithsonian Institution. I’ve always wanted to go.”
“Your nerd pilgrimage continues,” John says, tenderly, putting down a hefty $10 tip.
He kisses me on the hand, and goes out to his cab. “Four p.m., back here. We will be handy dandies on the brandies.”
The truth is, whenever I am abroad, and alone, I always go to museums, and art galleries. Museums and art galleries are by way of a worldwide network of places a teenage girl can go, when she has time on her hands, and no friends to speak of, and be both safe, and uplifted. Where she can think. Where she is shown things that will, undoubtedly, be useful to her. And museums always, always have great cafés. It is one of the things I admire about the liberal, middle-class elite: if they make a place of culture, it will be unthinkable to them that such a place would not also have a shit-hot selection of soups, cakes, and sandwiches. It’s very clear that their take-home message is, “What history has taught us, is that lunch is very important.”
As I walk the ten blocks from our hotel—on a day where the wind is brisk enough to make all the Stars and Stripes, hung from flagpoles, unfold graciously, and the sky is as blue as the blue upon them—I am heading toward where Krissi and I always go, when we hit up a museum: Geology, Gems, & Minerals.
In the beginning, it was, of course, because we wanted to look at diamonds. Diamon
ds, and emeralds; sapphires, amethysts, and rubies. Why would a poor child not want to see the most glittering and expensive things on Earth—trapped in a glass case; inches away from changing our lives, if we smashed it, and ran? We would walk around, deciding which one we would have, if the museum decided to gift us one single thing from their cabinets.
We felt it very important to know which jewels we would take, if we were ever asked. We wanted to be ready, should Daddy Warbucks walk in, and feel generous. We didn’t want to be caught on the hop, and go home with . . . garnets. Garnets are just shit. Muddy rubies, for sad Aquarians.
But to get to the precious jewels, you have to walk through the “lesser minerals” first—the browner ones; the duller ones—it’s like eating your Yorkshire puddings, before you get to the roast in a roast dinner. Over the years and the hours we have spent there, we have come, eventually, to love these best. They are the best, once you stop, and look at them. Once you stop valuing sparkle—and start coveting mysteries, instead.
It takes a minute for my eyes, and brain, to adjust to the room—museum quiet, and dark, with the cabinets lit up, like stars on a stage—but once I do, the old magic starts. Rocks shaped like stars; like Buddhas; like temples; like daggers. Rocks as fine as hair; or which glow in the dark. Rocks that look like bubbles, or hearts, or molten spacecraft.
I wander over to the maps, on the wall, which detail where all the finds have come from. And I note, with slow wonder, how every single amazing thing in this room—everything that is precious, or glittering; everything that glows; everything that is notable—comes from somewhere awful. Terrible. Terrifying. Somewhere where tectonic plates have ground up against each other; or things have exploded. Places of chaos, or intolerable pressure. Volcanoes and landslides. Earthquakes, and floods. Asteroids, slamming into the Earth. Without exception, the way wondrous things are made is through trauma.