Mick, Keith, Charlie, Bill, and the new one, Mick Taylor, come out on stage. Brian’s death is on everyone’s mind. Mick pauses and asks for silence. He quotes Shelley: “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep — He hath awakened from the dream of life.” So, Mick, no doubt unwittingly, adds to the reluctance on all our parts to coldly realize that Brian was now a dead person, a stiff. The one thing we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit, and didn’t. And Brian’s death was treated as an aberration rather than a portent.
But despite the incongruity -who would have expected Shelley? – the tribute is touching, and when Mick finishes a swarm of white butterflies is released. They have been kept in small cardboard boxes that they seem disinclined to leave, so that they have to be shaken out by various handlers, and they then, for the most part, settle on what is nearest: the stage, the amplifiers, the curtains — unhappily not living up to the event that I at least imagined earlier when first told of it – a swarm of perfect butterflies ascending to the heavens.
From ETHAN RUSSELL: AN AMERICAN STORY available here.
