Flesh Guitar (2 page)

And as the crowd watches, increasingly spellbound, the guitar seems to develop a life of its own. It seems to be breathing, to be pulsing with its own heartbeat. And then the finale. Just when you can't imagine how Jenny Slade can possibly embellish or prolong the music, and when you can't see how she's ever going to bring it to a conclusion, the guitar starts to bleed. Thick warm blood starts to ooze from the scar tissue of the pickups, trickles down the guitar's body, makes dark, scattered blots on the stage.

It's a hard act to follow. The audience is silent, but gives Jenny what she wants and needs; unqualified, undivided attention. And she takes certain energies away from them. But that's OK, it's not as if they were using those energies for anything much. As forms of vampirism go, this one is relatively benevolent. She brings the music to an end, a long diminuendo, a series of descending melancholy minor chords.

Jenny would always claim that guitar playing has something in common with chaos theory. A simple movement of her plectrum, a pluck of a string, a movement no greater or more dramatic than that of a butterfly's wing, would create a signal which could sound as loud, as complex, as elaborate as the sounds that might accompany the end of the world.

The music starts to evaporate. Smoke and decay and a new silence hang in the air. The customers in the bar are not quite sure what they've heard or seen, but
they're suddenly in need, acutely aware that they're dying for a drink. They huddle around the bar, and the barmaid has a hard time coping with their urgent demands for more booze.

Nobody applauds Jenny Slade. It wasn't that kind of performance, but she's well contented with the audience response. She sits down at a corner table and the manager sends over a beer. The crowd are in awe of her, deferential and too shy to approach her. Jenny slips her guitar into its case and snaps its lid shut with a bold, decisive gesture. Done it. It's finished.

Nearby is a young kid, not more than seventeen years old, all Celtic tattoos, multiple piercings, blond hair and dirty denim, a tough cherub. He's alone at a table full of empty beer bottles lined up like ten pins, but he appears sober. When Jenny looks towards him he turns his gaze aside, but he can't ignore her when she says, ‘You're a guitar player, aren't you?'

‘That's right,' he admits. ‘How could you tell?'

‘The way you watched me play. The way you twitched your fingers.'

He grins shyly. ‘Yeah, I should stop playing air guitar, shouldn't I?'

‘I've got something I want to give you,' Jenny says.

He blushes, aware of the sexual innuendo, but he can't respond, and his embarrassment turns to dumb amazement as Jenny Slade hands him her guitar.

‘It's all yours,' she says, and she drains her beer and heads for the exit.

‘Hey, hey,' the boy says, and he gets up and pursues her out on to the street. All eyes from the bar turn
and look out through the grey mottled windows to watch the dumbshow that now takes place; his mimed reluctance to accept the gift, Jenny Slade's absolute refusal to take no for an answer. They watch as finally Jenny walks away and the boy doesn't follow her. The guitar is his, though he has no idea what future comes with it. He is too stunned to return to the bar, and he too wanders off into the night, guitar in hand, but in the opposite direction from Jenny.

‘What was that all about?' Kate the barmaid asks. ‘Of all the juke joints in all the world, why here? What did she want?'

None of the drinkers offers an answer; they've already got enough to think about. That was quite some cabaret turn they just witnessed. They finish their beers and slowly start to drift away. The manager talks of closing early, and Kate begins cleaning up the bar and stacking some of the chairs.

At which point the door of the bar is thrown open again. This time it's a plump, uncool lad in a tangle of thick, ill-fitting clothes, laden down with several carrier bags, a briefcase, a rucksack. Greasy hair is tucked in behind his ears and his face shows the trouble he's having breathing. He's panting like a greyhound and the sweat pours down the sides of his nose, letting his horn-rims slip so that he peers over the top of them. He's exactly the kind of nerd the bar's clientele would normally have a lot of fun taking apart. He speaks only with great effort.

‘Am I too late?' he asks of the almost empty room.

Nobody responds and he hustles up to the bar. The manager ignores him completely and the barmaid carries
on with her stacking, but eventually she calls across the room to ask what he wants.

‘Did I miss Jenny Slade?' he asks, but something in his voice shows that he already knows the answer.

‘Was that her name?' Kate replies. ‘Yeah, you missed a good show.'

‘A good show,' he repeats bleakly.

‘Actually,' she says, ‘it was more than a good show. It was a great show, totally cool. I was completely blown away.'

He slams his fist down on the bar and for a moment it looks as though he's going to do the same thing with his head. There are tears in his eyes, tears of pain and absolute despair.

‘Can I get you a drink?' Kate asks sympathetically.

‘Yes, whisky, lots of it.'

She eyes him uncertainly. He's young, doesn't look as though he's much of a drinker, but he definitely needs something to sustain and console him.

‘Water with that?' she enquires.

He doesn't reply so she dilutes the whisky with a good splash of water. She doesn't know why she should care. She sees young men drink themselves into oblivion every night of the week, but there does seem to be something uniquely vulnerable about this guy.

‘Come far?' she asks.

‘From the ends of the earth.'

‘Yeah, you really missed something special,' Kate says.

‘I know,' he yells. ‘KNOW THAT!'

The manager glances over, wondering if the guy's a troublemaker in need of bouncing, but he seems
harmless enough and Kate is a much tougher cookie than she looks. The new arrival takes off his spectacles and lets the sweat and tears run freely down his wide, rounded cheeks.

‘Please tell me about it,' he sobs.

‘What?'

‘Describe Jenny Slade's performance to me. Please.'

The barmaid tries but it isn't easy. She can't put her enthusiasm into words, can't begin to express the excitement of it. Besides, he wants masses of detail, more than she can provide. She wasn't all that aware, for instance, of how Jenny Slade was dressed or how she stood or what the piece of music was, or what gauge of string she was using. Kate just knows that she loved it. Her account is lively but it does nothing to enliven the new customer. The more she enthuses, the more miserable he becomes.

‘What's your name anyway?' she asks.

‘Bob,' he says. ‘Bob Arnold, and I'm Jenny Slade's number one fan.'

‘Is that right?'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘Well, you have very good taste. So how come I never heard of her before?'

‘Because she's a cult,' Bob says shortly.

‘Tell me more.'

‘How long have you got?'

Kate thinks of the cheap, cold, low-ceilinged room that she calls home, a place she doesn't want to return to. Then she contemplates a bar full of drink, the offer of company and the chance to hear more about Jenny Slade,
though admittedly from a guy who looks like a nerd, and she replies encouragingly, ‘I've got as long as it takes.'

We can try to imagine Jenny Slade's childhood;
unhappy and solitary is always best for an artist. Did she come from conventional if progressive parents who encouraged their daughter in everything she did? Or was her mother a drunk, her father violent when not absent? And did some uncle encourage her to play music, did he pooh-pooh the notion that there was anything wrong with a thirteen-year-old girl strapping on an electric guitar? Did he go with her to buy her first good instrument, tune it for her, teach her some chords, pay for a few lessons?

What was her guitar teacher like? An ageing, chain-smoking rocker maybe, with a Ritchie Blackmore fixation, who after six months said, ‘Go, I can teach you no more'?

Did he like to talk about it afterwards?

‘Oh, I couldn't really pretend that I taught Jenny Slade how to play the guitar,' he might say, all appropriately modest. ‘With someone like Jenny that's not what happens. You just show them how to start playing, how to start
learning
to play, and then you stand back and watch as they take off on that big, wide learning curve.

‘You know, there's a certain kind of student whose hands just seem to curl naturally around
the neck of the guitar and land on the fingerboard in just the right places. Jenny was like that.'

And does he shake his head a little sadly, savouring a sweet sorrow, as he says, ‘But one thing I've learned in my long teaching career is that it's not about fingers. Fingers are finite whereas the human spirit is infinite. So it makes sense to play guitar with your spirit rather than your digits.

‘And one more thing I'll say; start a girl or boy playing the guitar and they've got a metaphor
of
life and for life.'

And did she read Bert Weedon's
Play in a Day,
and did she abandon it because she wasn't sure she really wanted to know how to play ‘Bobby Shafto'?

Did she play rhythm guitar for her older brother and his friends, creating a backing for their long, inept solos? Did the arrangement come to an end, not because Jenny was bored with her role (in fact regarding it as some sort of Zen discipline) but because the boys realized she had outgrown them?

Did she walk into guitar shops, those complex arenas of male intimidation, and refuse to be intimidated? Did she overhear the salesman say, ‘Y'know as a guy gets older his dick seems to recede more and more–maybe it's something to do with the size of his gut; anyways, when you hit middle age you're generally in need of a little symbolic phallic extension. Some guys buy a Corvette, me, I recommend this lil' beaut.

‘It's called the Splatocaster. Pretty as a penis, ten times as big. Show your woman the spec on this monster and she'll be squealing like a teeny bopper.
She'll be crying out for an encore and you'll be able to give it to her.'

Did he only say all that stuff to embarrass her? Did she have to overcome sexist abuse? Did people tell her she needed balls to play the guitar? Did they say she played pretty good
for a chick?
Did she think Angus Young was a sad little fuck when he said that his ideal guitar would be a ‘cannon that shot sperm at the audience'? Or did she think he was a supreme ironist?

Did she have heroines? Did she dote on Ari Up and Ivy Rorschach and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, or was it less gender specific than that? Was it Bowie and Ronson, the rock performer as androgyne? We can assume a tortured adolescence. She was nobody's idea of a dream date. She stayed in her room, read poetry, practised her guitar, listened to Django Reinhardt and Eddie Van Halen and Gaye Advert.

We can take for granted the false starts, the rip-offs, the broken promises, the bands that broke up after one gig, the managers who could make her a star. The rest we have to imagine, although there is the following rather improbable text that appeared in the fanzine
JOSS (The Journal of Sladean Studies)
, a piece purporting to be about Jenny Slade's early experiences on the road. It is generally assumed that Jenny Slade did not in fact write the words, that the piece is fictionalized ‘autobiography', written by a third party. Yet Jenny never objected to the publication and subsequent anthologizing of the piece so we assume she must have thought that in some sense it contains the truth about her early days on the road.

Call me Jenny Slade. Some years ago,
having little or no money, and nothing particular to interest me at home, I thought I would tour about a little and see the rock and roll parts of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the blues. Whenever I find myself playing exclusively minor chords, when I find myself listening to Leonard Cohen albums, when it requires a strong act of will to prevent me from braining promoters, record reviewers and teeny boppers with the blunt end of my guitar, then I account it high time to get on the road as soon as I can.

I found myself signed up as rhythm guitarist with an outfit called Captain Ahab and His Magic Big Band, an intermittently outrageous combo with its roots in the blues. The eponymous Captain, originally just plain Johnny Ahab, sang, played harmonica and sometimes shouted a sort of cracked, surreal poetry. I knew the tour would be a learning experience, and would look good on my CV, even if the good Captain himself had a reputation for being difficult to work and live with. I thought I could handle him, but I didn't know the half of it.

It was going to be a long, arduous world tour calling in at the Azores, Rio de la Plata, Sumatra, Java; all the hot spots. And the band was hot too. On bass there was the very heavy and very tattooed Sam Queequeg. He looked fearsome,
but he was a great man to have on your side; certainly if somebody tried to invade the stage. Playing keyboards and acting as musical director was Randy Starbuck, the Captain's right-hand man from way back. Billy Stubb was the drummer, and he was supplemented by Rikki Tashtego, a percussionist and the Native American of the group.

Each of them was a musical giant in his own right and they had all led their own bands at one time or another, but it was clear that on this particular tour they would be subservient to the genius and obsessive vision of the Captain.

It was some time before I met the man himself. I was auditioned and recruited by Randy Starbuck alone. The Captain would only show up when we were fully drilled and rehearsed. We had to be tight, disciplined and controlled so that we could become his creatures, and give him the freedom to pursue his own strange, lofty goals. What these goals were we only slowly discovered.