Flesh Guitar (21 page)

Then, in the early seventies, he joined a power trio called Dreadnought, who played distinctly ponderous heavy rock, gathered terrible reviews, but nevertheless made
a terrific pile of money touring the States and the Far East. The band was so successful that Churchill was able to indulge a taste for more esoteric playing, and he and Jenny Slade performed and recorded some truly off-the-wall duets.

Twenty years on, Dreadnought records were still selling massively and the band were still having occasional and highly profitable reunion tours, and it was on one of these that the Alzheimer's first got to Jon.

It was during a second encore at the Dallas Civic Arena, playing a famous Dreadnought number called ‘The Journey', a complex, twenty-minute multi-sectioned workout that he knew like the back of his hand, when he suddenly forgot what song he was playing. He also forgot what city he was in, who the two guys on stage with him were, and if anybody had asked he'd have been hard pressed to come up with his own name or even what planet he was on.

Afterwards, when he was back to normal, he wanted to put it down to road fever, to too many late nights, to too many drugs taken many years ago, but he got himself to a doctor who told him it was Alzheimer's, and also assured him there was no coming back, no way out of the tunnel.

Jon Churchill went into distinguished semi-retirement, stopped playing in public, but fortunately was still in demand for session work. He played on a Pete Townshend solo project, was the house drummer for a session at a guitar festival in Seville. He played free jazz with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, worked with Ryan Beano, Steve Albini, Laurie Anderson and, of course, Jenny Slade. He was still highly respected, and he was lucky. For a long time the bad, blank phases never coincided with important
studio dates. But when a furious Daniel Lanois rang up demanding to know why Churchill wasn't at a session in New Orleans, Jon denied all knowledge of the booking, of the music he was supposed to have learned, and before the end of the phone call he'd also forgotten who he was talking to.

A part of him was still intelligent and thoughtful and so he decided to stop right there, to slip away gracefully. There was a small farewell charity gig, in front of an invited audience, at which he played faultlessly along with a lot of the usual suspects. Sting sent his apologies, but Kim Gordon and Ray Cooper made it. It was a good gig and there was a live CD, although the sales were admittedly disappointing.

After that he gave up drumming completely and retired to a converted lifeboat station on the Suffolk coast. He said he would never bother or embarrass anybody with his condition. He would not ask for sympathy nor rub his illness in anyone's face, and he was as good as his word.

It was a big change for his wife Beth. She was a session singer in her own right and had recently started to perform with a jazz a cappella group, but she had no hesitation in giving that up and agreeing to this strange new life. She would be there to protect him from the world. There would be no visitors, no journalists. He would be allowed to slip slowly and permanently from the public imagination.

It was a quiet life. Jon Churchill would spend most of his days sitting on the porch of the house, watching the sea. Often he felt adrift as the tides of dementia swept in and made his mind as smooth and clear as sand, then later, more terrifyingly, he would have moments of clarity and realize how much he'd lost, how much he still
had to lose. He sometimes glanced at the newspapers, though the affairs of the world meant nothing to him, and sometimes he would listen to music, even on occasions his own music, but that too made little impression.

His old drum kit was kept in the basement of the house. Since the charity gig Jon had not shown the slightest inclination to play the drums, had even suggested to Beth that they sell them. But Beth hadn't allowed that and so the drums remained in the cellar, still and silent, along with his collection of percussion instruments from around the world. There was plenty of the more orthodox stuff, the tambourines and maracas, congas, bongos and tom toms, marimbas and castanets. But then there were more ethnic instruments; thumb pianos, talking drums, log drums, tablas, a derbuka. There was electronic gadgetry: pads, kick controllers, acoustic triggers. And then there were lots of items he'd built himself: weird percussive devices made from springs, car parts, beer cans, the insides of typewriters and old computers. Sometimes Beth would go down and look at it all and she couldn't help weeping, but for Jon none of it had any more emotional significance than a new drumskin.

Beth was determined not to treat her husband like an invalid, and not to turn herself into a nursemaid. There was no need. His body remained fit and strong and he was in no danger of injuring himself. He could certainly be left on his own without her needing to worry. So she often drove into town for the day and did some shopping, bought food for the house and one or two things for herself. She might buy some expensive and impractical article of clothing that she would never have any occasion to wear,
and perhaps half a dozen new paperbacks that she would read in the long quiet evenings.

It was on just such a day, an overcast, blustery day in early summer, after she'd been gone for four hours or so, that she returned to find that something quite extraordinary had happened in her absence. A profound change had overcome her husband.

At first, as she pulled into the drive of the house, she could see and hear nothing different, but then she turned off the car engine and she heard drumming. There was no mistaking Jon's style, and the quality of the sound told her it was live, not recorded. She ran round the side of the house and peered in through the french doors. Jon Churchill was indeed playing the drums. He'd moved his kit and all his percussion instruments up from the basement to the living room, and as he played his face looked utterly vacant and his eyes stared out at the sea and sky. His playing was rhythmic but slow, determined yet not thunderous. Beth didn't know whether to weep or to cheer, and in the event she did a little of both.

Jon saw her standing on the other side of the glass and, without missing a beat, motioned for her to come inside. The day was chilly and the sea was loud and as Beth opened the french doors cold air and the steady, shuffling sound of the sea rolled into the room. A look of wonder came into Jon's eyes and he began to play in time with the noise of the sea. Six hours later he was still playing, and he didn't stop until eventually he fell asleep sitting up on his drum stool.

Thus began the worst month of
Beth's life. Night and day, all day, every day, every minute except when he was eating or sleeping (and he did little of either) Jon Churchill continued to play the drums. A part of Beth was pleased, or at least felt she ought to be pleased, for when Jon played it was as though he was his old self again. He had lost none of his touch or dexterity. On one level she could even appreciate his performance, for this wasn't just doodling or practising, he was performing as though for an audience, and although he seemed to be playing a drum solo of indefinite, possibly infinite, length there was a recognizable shape and structure to what he was doing. He was improvising and yet his playing seemed thought out, fully conceived, composed even. He never paused to consider what to do next.

Beth had always loved his drumming, the way his body moved when he played, the supple articulation of his sound. And yet who could possibly live in the same house as a man who played the drums relentlessly for eighteen or twenty hours a day?

Their nearest neighbour lived at least a quarter of a mile away, which was fortunate in one sense. There was nobody to bang on the walls or call the police. On the other hand it meant that Beth was totally alone in her ordeal. The cleaning woman came, listened to Jon playing the drums, seemed appreciative and told Beth she thought this was a terribly good sign. But she only had to live with it for an hour a day and Beth suspected that what she really appreciated was the fact that she didn't have to clean the living room.

Beth, needless to say, did occasionally ask her husband to stop playing; at bedtime for instance, at mealtimes, when she wanted to watch something on
television. Jon didn't say no. He didn't argue or defy her. He simply failed to communicate with her at all, and carried on drumming. Of course she got angry with him. Of course she shouted at him, but it did no good. He acted as though he hadn't heard and, in truth, when his drumming hit a particularly loud patch, she could barely hear herself.

Every moment of Beth's life was now filled with the sound of her husband's drumming. Her every move and thought was accompanied by cymbal crashes, flams, rolls, paradiddles, ruffs, rim shots. Some moments were quieter than others. There were times when he played with brushes, or tapped out extraordinarily complex figures solely on the ride cymbal. Occasionally he'd sit with a tambourine in one hand and a shaker in the other, and spend twenty or thirty minutes exploring their tonal and rhythmic possibilities. But he never completely stopped playing, and Beth knew that these moments of comparative peace would invariably resolve themselves into louder, more aggressive, truly intolerable bursts of percussion.

At first she thought he must eventually wear himself out. She thought he would either run out of ideas or stop because of simple physical exhaustion. It was true that he did sleep sometimes, either on the stool, as on that first night, or on the couch in the corner of the room. But these naps were short, infrequent, taken at peculiar times of the day, and he would wake suddenly, perfectly refreshed and begin playing with renewed vigour and vehemence.

When Beth started to feel positively suicidal she called the one person she hoped might be able to help. But Sting was still busy and she had to fall back on Jenny
Slade. She called her and begged her for help. Jenny turned up at the house the next day with her guitar, a couple of pedals and a small tube amp, and after a long talk with Beth she went into the room where Jon Churchill was still playing and she set up her equipment.

If Jon recognized Jenny from the old days he certainly did nothing to indicate the fact. Indeed her presence in the room seemed to be a matter of complete indifference to him. He showed neither interest nor surprise and when Jenny cranked her guitar into life and began to play along with him, he looked as though he was completely oblivious to the noise she was making. And yet something was happening. After half an hour or so the music began to gel. He was not making any concessions to her guitar playing, but gradually the dynamics of the music changed. Soon she was no longer just playing along with him; they were definitely playing together.

There were some rough edges, moments when they lost each other, but there was no doubt that a terrific interaction was taking place. A strange and complex piece of music was coming into being there in the living room of this Suffolk beach house. After two hours had passed, two hours of the most intense, intricate, draining invention on Jenny's part, she needed a rest. She unhooked her guitar, turned off the amp, but Jon went right on playing.

Beth and Jenny walked along the straight shingle beach together, far enough away from the house so that they could no longer hear the drumming.

‘Oh well,' said Beth, ‘it was a nice try. I thought a face from the old days might bring him back to
normal. Shame it didn't work.'

‘What are you talking about?' Jenny replied. ‘It worked beautifully. Jon and I are going to create a lot of beautiful music before we're finished. Maybe it'll be his last gasp, maybe it won't quite work, but I think we're going to have a great work of art on our hands.'

‘But how can it be art?' Beth demanded. ‘Art demands consciousness, discrimination, a guiding personality. Poor Jon doesn't have any of those things. He's just playing through sheer instinct. I don't think he has a clue what he's doing.'

‘Maybe not,' Jenny agreed. ‘But I do, and it would be criminal to let it just slip away. I'll have a mobile recording van here as soon as humanly possible. I don't want to miss a single beat more than I have to.'

Beth shook her head sadly. This was not what she'd had in mind at all, and yet she couldn't deny that Jenny Slade was probably doing the right thing. Perhaps her husband's music did deserve preserving and recording, but that didn't help her to find it any less intolerable.

Jenny made a couple of phone calls before returning for another two-hour session with Jon that night. Beth sat on the grass in the garden, pulling the heads off dandelions. As well as her husband's drumming she now had to contend with a hundred decibels of distorted guitar noise. She got little sleep that night, but at least she was awake next morning when the mobile studio arrived in her front garden and youths with shaved heads began laying cables all around the house.

Jon Churchill drummed on oblivious to the mikes
and screens that were being set up around him. He was of no use to anyone in helping to create a good drum sound, but neither did he hinder or object to what they were doing. When the engineers were happy with the balance, they miked Jenny into the board and the recordings began. These tapes, which were later to be dubbed
The Dementia Sessions,
are generally agreed to be some of the most intense, most extreme drum and guitar duets ever recorded.

Jenny Slade and Jon Churchill played together with only the most perfunctory breaks and interruptions for the best part of seventy-two hours. Jenny stopped once in a while to retune or to modify her guitar tone, and to replace the occasional broken string, but Jon just kept playing through the gaps.

There was certainly a development as the days progressed. The music of the first day was taut and disciplined in a way that would seem staid compared with the later stuff. The music, without ever losing its focus, became increasingly loose, free form, untrammelled. It became wilder and more Dionysian as it went on, but it never sounded chaotic, never lost its way or its sense of itself. Certain passages were remarkably simple and lyrical, just a simple four-note guitar melody played against a repeated drum pattern. At other times both players displayed a breathtaking, bravura virtuosity.