Flesh Guitar (19 page)

Howardson grinned wickedly. ‘I love a plectrum coach who talks dirty,' he said.

Some time later …

‘I'm worried about my hands, Jenny.'

The speaker was Megan Floss, the actress who would be playing the part of Patti Smith in the movie. Megan was thirty-three years old. She used to have a reputation for being a real hard body, but in her last couple of movies she'd looked fat and puffy. She'd had jowls for Chrissake! So she'd been working hard, getting toned up and thinned down, getting tanned and tucked. Everybody told her she'd never looked better, but they
would
say that, wouldn't they? She wanted to believe it. She knew her butt looked good, she knew her tits looked good, and so they should; they were straight out of the catalogue. She knew her face would look OK, she'd trust this lighting cameraman with more than her life. Everyone told her everything was going to be fine, but that still left her with a truckload of insecurities and they had to come out somewhere.

‘There's no need
to worry,' Jenny said. ‘That's why I'm here.'

‘But I'm worried about the things you can't fix, things like poor skin tone, wrinkles, damaged cuticles.'

Yep, Megan was focusing all her stress, all her anxiety on this one area, her plectrum hand.

‘It'll be fine, really,' Jenny said.

She showed Megan how to hold a plectrum and after five or six hours the actress seemed to be getting the hang of it. She sent for an assistant, who entered holding a mirror for her to observe her hand in. She looked. She shrieked; a high-pitched, attention-seeking, filmic shriek.

‘Oh my God, I'm going to have to wear gloves!'

‘Well, I'm not the director,' Jenny said, ‘but I can't see anybody playing guitar in gloves.'

‘Then what's the alternative?'

‘We could always use a hand model.'

‘A hand model!' Megan bawled. ‘What do you think I am? I'm a serious actress. I have integrity. I have a reputation to think of. I'd rather die than use a stand-in. Right, now we understand each other, let's get down to some serious plectrum practice.'

Later that same week …

‘Now about this plectrum thing …'

‘Yes?' said Jenny.

She was talking to Michael
Cutlass, a movie star of the old school; craggy, iron-chested, toupeed. He was being cast against type in the role of Jimmy Page.

‘I'm going to need a lot of help from you on this one,' Cutlass said.

‘That's what I'm here for,' Jenny replied.

‘Because I want to get it right. And more than that, I want the plectrum technique to be part of the characterization. I want the audience to be able to look at the way I hold the plectrum and say, there goes a real man, a strong man, tough but not insensitive, a man's man but also a woman's man, the kind of guy who can ride a horse, use a gun, fly a Lear jet, make love to a couple of women, all with consummate ease. I want the way I hold that plectrum to say that I'm a poet, a fighter, a man of integrity, a man who's known pain, who'd be a good father, a good son, the kind of guy who'd lend you his last fifty bucks, the kind of guy who could wrestle naked with his buddies and yet there'd be no hint of queerness. You know what I'm saying?'

‘I'll see what I can do, Mr Cutlass.'

‘In fact,' he continued, ‘I've been thinking maybe there's something effete about using a plectrum at all. I think maybe I'm more the kind of guy who wouldn't fiddle around with some cheesy little bit of plastic, but more the sort of guy who'd use his bare hands, feel the wood and steel on fingers, wrench melodies with his own skin and bone. You got me?'

‘Oh yes, I've got you all right,' Jenny said.

And later still.

‘This is boring.'

‘Not only for you,' Jenny said.

Jenny was now
giving tuition to eleven-year-old Trixie Picasso, who was appearing in a fantasy sequence about the childhood of Joan Jett. The kid was a monster: cute-looking, big-eyed, a sweet smile, huge bubbles of blonde hair and the disposition of a cornered rat. She also, incidentally, bore not the slightest resemblance to Joan Jett, whether old or young.

‘Guitars are boring,' she said. ‘They're old hat. I mean, who needs 'em. Gimme a sampler and a sequencer and a drum machine and you're history, lady.'

‘You think so, huh?'

‘I know so.'

‘And why do you think that?' Jenny said sweetly, humouring the brat.

‘Well, the main thing is that time is no longer a meaningful concept in the age of digital reproduction. The entire history of music has been digitally transferred to cyberspace where it exists in an eternal present. It's all there. Every note that's ever been recorded is available, every chord progression, every drum beat, every accidental disharmony …'

‘Where are you getting this from?'

‘I thought it through for myself.'

‘Like hell,' Jenny said.

‘Oh, all right then,' Trixie trilled, all dimples and tilted head. ‘If you must know, I got it from the musical director.'

Jenny couldn't suppress that smouldering streak of jealousy. She should have had that job. There was nobody on God's multicoloured earth who could do it better.

‘Does this musical director have a name?' she demanded.

‘Tom Scorn,' said Trixie.

Jenny should have known.

Not very much later at
all in Tom Scorn's on-set recording studio, Jenny said to him, ‘So you're into film music now?'

‘I always was,' he said. ‘Eric Kornfeld, Bernard Herrmann, they were always my heroes.'

‘I thought it was Stockhausen and Cardew.'

‘Whatever. The thing is, Jenny, and I've said this before, time is no longer a meaningful concept in the age of digital reproduction …'

He ran through the same speech that the child actress had managed to deliver word for word. (Well, at least the kid had the ability to learn lines.) Jenny waited until Scorn came to a part she hadn't heard before.

‘If you want to hear Guitar Slim jamming with Yehudi Menuhin,' said Scorn, ‘that's easily arranged. We can do that. We can pluck those sounds out of the digital ether. Want to hear what Gary Moore or Johnny Marr sound like improvising over a theme from Purcell? Well no, neither do I, but with technology it's dead easy to achieve. It's all there for the taking by anyone who has some use for it.'

‘And you have some use for it?' said Jenny.

‘I most certainly do. With a sampler you can take the greatest voices in the whole world – Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Tom Waits – and you use just one sampled note, transfer it to a keyboard and instil all the musical qualities of those great artists into your music. You know I'm right.'

‘Well,' said Jenny, ‘only up to a point.'

Scorn was irritated that anyone should disagree with such clearly irrefutable truths.

‘For example,' Jenny
said, ‘I could write a song with the opening line “I woke up this morning”, but that wouldn't necessarily mean I was an authentic blues artist.'

‘The concept of the song form is very old hat,' Scorn snarled.

‘You can sample Hendrix's guitar tone but it's not as though that makes you Hendrix. It's not even like having Hendrix in the band.'

‘Of course it isn't,' Scorn said smugly. ‘It's much
better
than having Hendrix in the band. If he were alive today I'd get him into the studio, record five minutes of him jerking around with the guitar and then I'd have no further use for him. I could take that five minutes and do more with it than he did in his whole career.

‘Let's face it, live musicians are never anything but pains in the arse. They do too many drugs. They want too much money. They're unreliable, they're temperamental. You can't just tell them to play one chord for fifty minutes, because they think it's uninspired and they want to give of themselves. The sound of Hendrix I love. His genius I love. But having him in the band … don't be silly. Give me machines every time.' Then, as an afterthought, ‘Did you ever meet Hendrix?'

Jenny said no, but that wasn't strictly true.

Jimi slumps on a couch, unconscious,
guitar in hand. The couch is decked out with throws and cushions, slices of crushed purple velvet, orange brocade and sequined chiffon. He looks so at home there, like a chameleon gone mad, cheesecloth and love beads, lizard-skin boots, a military tunic, tight cotton trousers patterned with multicoloured Op art squares. And even the guitar matches; an old Strat that's been customized by some fan, some ‘psychedelic artist' who's drilled holes in the guitar body, sprayed it with red and black car paint and, while it was running and congealing, stuck rhinestones, rosary beads and silver glitter on to the surface. The process has rendered the guitar more or less unplayable, although Jimi has met a lot of unplayable guitars in his time, and he's usually managed to wring something out of them, which is to say he's used them to wring something out of himself.

Not that he's in any state right this moment to do any playing. He's sleeping the sleep, not of the just, but of the stoned, the sleep of the heavily sedated, the sleep of the totally fucked up. It would take a scientist, a pharmacist, or at the very least a police coroner to tell you what was the exact cause of Jimi's condition. Call it a cocktail, call it a random sample. Jimi gets given all kinds of pharmaceutical treats these days, guys and chicks just lay this really cool stuff on him all the time, and if the precise history, the detailed provenance of most of these drugs is a little blurry, well, that's OK, these people are genuine fans of Jimi. They love him and they love what he does, and they'd have no reason to give him bad shit, no reason to send him on a bad trip, into narcosis and coma. But even if by some mistake they
did
give him some bad stuff, well, Jimi's feeling so strong these days, so big and powerful, so on top and above it all, that bad trips and bad chemicals just bounce off him like rain, or ping-pong balls, or bullets off Superman. Butterfly and bee.

Yeah, he often feels like
Superman, or sometimes just a little like Clark Kent, and at other times like Adam Strange or Lex Luther or the Riddler. Funny the way they're all white guys, but the times they are a changin', and maybe he can even do something about that, a black superhero who ain't Muhammad Ali. His dreams are certainly full enough of flying and super powers, of defeating nameless but vibrant-coloured dreads. They're full of big ideas and big insights, heavy shit that you're never going to be able to sit down and explain in words, but with a Strat and a Big Muff and a Uni-Vibe and a wah wah pedal and a Marshall two-hundred-watt stack, well, just maybe you're going to be able to get the message across. So long as you get the right rhythm section.

And some of these dreams come when he isn't even asleep. Like right now he half wakes up and there's this chick standing in the room and he's pretty sure he's never seen her before but she's here and that's groovy, and he can't be absolutely sure that she's not a hallucination or some kind of sweet angel come down. And yeah, maybe she looks a little like Wonderwoman, and she's playing a weird-looking guitar, not one of his, picking out a nice blues, and she looks up and says, ‘Now about this stage act of yours, Jimi …'

And he's halfway into
a conversation he doesn't remember starting.

‘Huh?' he says.

‘For example, when you mime cunnilingus in the show,' she says, ‘or when you masturbate your guitar or bang it on the stage, or when you smash it up or set fire to it … what am I supposed to think about that?'

Cogs and cams click in his brain, connect up his speech centres, get the motor running, coming back from out there.

‘Well, you know, maybe it's not about
thought,
' he tries. ‘It's about just digging it.'

‘No, Jimi, that's just not good enough,' she says bossily. ‘Of course we all understand the phallic significance of the guitar, but what's the significance of beating your phallus against the stage until it breaks? What's the symbolic value of trying to set your phallus on fire?'

‘Gee, I never thought about it quite like that.'

‘But I did, Jimi.'

Jimi's face stiffens and she can see that he's rummaging through the files in his head, files that have been chemically shuffled and singed.

‘Uh, maybe it's a guy thing, a black thing,' he says. ‘I dunno, chicks they don't understand. Hey, why don't you come over here, sit by me, mellow out and stop asking me such hard questions?'

‘Women here, women
there, always trying to put you in a plastic cage, eh Jimi?'

‘Hey, no, I don't mean that exactly. That's just a song, y'know.'

‘Is that right? So you don't really think you're a “voodoo chile” or a “hoochie coochie man”?'

‘Well, maybe just a little.'

‘And are you really saying you're not a “lover man”, Jimi?'

He smiles that shy, polite smile, eyes and head turned coyly down. He won't deny it. ‘Lady's man, cocksman, axe-man, whatever,' he says.

‘I thought so,' she says.

‘Yeah, sure,' Jimi says. ‘It's like a divining rod, maybe a fishing rod. It helps make you feel connected. It helps you make a catch.'

She doesn't bother to ask whether he's talking about his guitar or his penis. It doesn't really matter which.

‘It plugs you into these, kinda, energies,' Jimi says. ‘And you know out there in swingin' London there's a whole lot of sockets just begging you to plug into them.'

‘You always had a way with metaphor, Jimi.'

‘Thank you,' he says, hoping he's not being mocked.

‘You know,' Jenny says thoughtfully, ‘I think that a man generally makes love the same way he plays a guitar solo. For example, some men are very hot and flashy but it's all over in ten seconds. Some make a big noise and it gets the job done but it's crude, simple stuff. Some men are always asking, when's it going to be my turn to take a solo, my turn to perform, as though they're really keen and really good, but when the chance comes and the spotlight's on them they tend to shrivel and lose interest.