Flesh Guitar (9 page)

21) The Tarmac Solo

The player uses a two-hundred-yard-long lead to connect the
guitar to the amplifier. She then picks up the guitar, leaves the stage, leaves the auditorium, and goes out into the nearest road, which should be only intermittently busy with traffic. The player sets the guitar down in the centre of the road and returns to the hall. The solo is ‘played' when the first vehicle runs over the guitar, an incident which is not seen and is heard only as electrical noise conveyed along the lead. The player may be in or out of the hall when this happens.

(If the player only owns one guitar it is recommended that this piece be played as the last solo of the evening.)

There were another nineteen or so ‘compositions' in a similar vein. When she had read them all Jenny Slade put down the pages, smiled and said, ‘I'll gig.' She tracked down Tom Scorn and agreed to play a series of solo concerts in which she would showcase these creations of his. She thought of it as a way of giving a helping hand to a young, up and coming musician.

Somewhat to her surprise he said he had already taken the first steps towards booking such a tour and had used her name to obtain an Arts Council grant. The guy was obviously quite a hustler. He was also decidedly well organized and well connected. He booked her into a variety of cabaret clubs, avant-garde jazz venues and small concert halls. He insisted on travelling with her and attending every date on the tour, saying he might need to rewrite or modify the compositions as they went along. She thought this was a mite over-conscientious and it certainly upped the travelling expenses, but she didn't complain.

Neither did she complain when
she saw that the posters for the early concerts read, ‘Jenny Slade plays the music of Tom Scorn'. As the senior partner she thought that her name ought to be bigger than his, rather than equal size, although at least hers came first. But as the tour progressed (and it was not a very long tour) the poster was redesigned so that it read, ‘Tom Scorn guitar solos, played by Jenny Slade'. This was, she supposed, factually accurate but she still believed that she was the draw, rather than this young, unknown composer. When the tour hit Amsterdam, Scorn decided that ‘guitar solos' was not a sufficiently beguiling title so he came up with another, and now the posters read, ‘Thomas Scorn's First Guitar Symphony', and then in much smaller print, ‘Soloist, Jenny Slade'.

At this point Jenny did complain, loudly and at length, but Scorn seemed so young and enthusiastic, so naive, that it was hard to be very angry with him. And besides, she did enjoy playing the music; it was challenging and different, and audiences liked it. You could forgive a lot as long as things were going well on stage.

But things came to a complete head in a club in Wiesbaden when, two minutes before Jenny was due to go on stage, Scorn announced that he intended to conduct her performance. He'd bought a baton and a tailcoat specially for the occasion. It was too late to have a full blown argument about it and, short of kicking him off stage, Jenny didn't know what she could do. She played her way through the solos, ignoring him as much as she could, refusing to make eye contact, and trying her best to make it clear to the audience that she was not being in any way conducted.

As the final chords of the last solo trickled away,
Tom Scorn stood directly in front of her and bowed grandly to the audience. It was as if she did not exist for him any more, as if he alone had created the music out of nothing. He lapped up the applause and didn't even offer a gesture of acknowledgement towards Jenny.

When she could stand it no longer she kicked him hard in the backside, so hard that he
had
to acknowledge her presence. He spun round, and she spun round too and she was holding her guitar at head height so that it swung like a tennis racket or indeed a frying pan, and Tom Scorn's face made hard, sickening contact with the guitar, just a little way above the bridge, so that the strings started to vibrate and set up a long, aching discord.

‘That was a composition of my own,' Jenny said. “The Dickhead Composer Solo.”'

When his face had stopped pulsating Tom Scorn said coolly, ever needing to take credit, ‘No, Jenny, that was a
duet.
'

‘All right,' says
Kate, ‘you've given me the historical background, but I think there's a paradox in all this, don't you? Wouldn't you say that we're discussing the intellectual background to what is an anti-intellectual form?'

‘I don't think rock music is anti-intellectual,' Bob says passionately. ‘And as a matter of fact neither does Jenny Slade. Neither she nor I have ever really believed in the guitar player as noble savage. We believe in instinct, of course, but it's surprising how much better a player's instincts can get when he's got a brain that's in working order. It seems to me that those years Jenny Slade spent at the Sorbonne, at Oxford, at Harvard, they all went into making her the shithot guitarist she is today.'

Kate says, ‘You make Jenny Slade sound like a blue stocking.'

‘A blue stocking maybe,' Bob admits, ‘but blue stockings worn with high heels and a suspender belt.'

Kate is amused. The kid has a way with words. He also has a way with Scotch. His glass is already empty again and she fills it up. He looked like such a shy, sober lad when he came in.

‘OK, so you've explained the significance
of the electric guitar,' she says. ‘Now explain the significance of Jenny Slade.'

Bob takes a deep breath. He's been waiting for this and he's more than ready.

‘Right,' he says. ‘So the electric guitar has been around for, say, sixty years. The modern idea of pop music, by which I suppose I mean rock and roll, has been around for maybe a couple of decades less. In that time various women performers have been strident, brilliant, self-destructive, tragic, outrageous, unreasonable, suicidal. They've been all the things that men have been, good and bad, and yet the idea of a great female guitarist, the guitar heroine, remains an untried concept.

‘Now you may say look at Jennifer Batten or Lita Ford, in which case I'd say
get real.
They're just drag acts, bad male impersonators. Or you may say that the electric guitar just isn't a girl thing. You'll say that the
acoustic
guitar is a girl thing (look at Joni Mitchell or Suzanne Vega), you'll say the
bass
guitar is sometimes a girl thing (look at Suzi Quatro, “lewd in leather”, look at Tina Weymouth, “tempting with a trust fund”). But skronking female lead guitar, you'll say, it's a rare bird. And all I can say is it's also a damn shame.

‘That's where Jenny Slade comes in. She comes down the front of the stage, turns the volume to twelve, puts her foot up on the monitor, gives it some welly, and just
does it.
And she does it right, for real, like nobody else, certainly not like some man.

‘I don't know why it should be so unusual for a woman to do that, but it is. The very idea of Jenny Slade, guitar heroine, seems utterly strange, utterly subversive. Sometimes
it seems inconceivable, like science fiction or something, but there's Jenny Slade confirming that it's all possible and true.'

‘Hold on,' says Kate, ‘that wasn't exactly what happened here tonight. She didn't exactly turn up to twelve, put her foot up and give it some welly at all. It was far spookier than that.'

‘Precisely,' Bob says with delight and triumph. ‘That's why she's special. She's so infinitely surprising, so infinitely various. Whatever expectations you have she confounds them, yet she still delivers. She doesn't just give you what you want, she gives you what you never even knew existed or even thought was possible. But once she's delivered it, you realize it was what you wanted all along.'

Kate nods. What he says makes surprising sense. What he's described is precisely the experience she had earlier that night. He's not only explaining Jenny Slade, he's also explaining Kate's own feelings. He may look like a joke but he knows his stuff.

‘Have you ever met her?' she asks.

‘Of course. I am her number one fan, after all.'

He digs in his briefcase and produces an autograph album. He opens it, and there on the first page it says, ‘To Bob Arnold, my number one fan. Love, Jenny Slade'.

‘Well, I guess that proves it,' Kate says, unimpressed.

‘No, that doesn't prove it,' he snarls defensively.

‘What proves it is that I have here
two hundred
Jenny Slade autographs,' and he flips the pages of the book so that she can see Jenny Slade's autograph on every page.

Kate, naturally, still doesn't think that proves anything except that Bob is obsessive and weird, so he tries another
technique.

‘I'll convince you,' he says. ‘I have all her recordings, OK? How's that for starters? And I do mean all of them, in all formats and all sort of pressings, all the remixes and all the bonus tracks, all the picture discs and fold-out sleeves, the rare imported box sets, promotional items, Japanese twelve inchers, radio edits. I have acetates and bootlegs and unreleased demos.'

‘OK,' Kate says, a little impressed, prepared to allow that this is some reasonable definition of fandom.

‘But that's only the tip of the iceberg,' Bob laughs. ‘There's all the merchandise too. I buy the goods: the T-shirts, the baseball caps, the posters, the concert programmes I snip cuttings out of magazines and stick them in scrapbooks; dozens of scrapbooks. I hang out at record fairs and swap meets, looking for those unknown, unlisted rarities. I communicate with other fans, by post, by fax, by Internet, arguing with them to prove that my fandom is predominant.

‘I've been to hundreds of Jenny Slade gigs, of course. I've travelled tens of thousands of miles to see her. I've got thirty or so plectrums and a dozen or more broken strings that I've picked up off the stage after gigs. I have her used towels and sweat bands, and even a grubby T-shirt she threw into the audience at a concert in Bruges. I had to fight dirty to get that.

‘Maybe all that makes me a bit of an anorak, but at least it's an anorak with a picture of Jenny Slade appliqued on the back.'

‘OK, you're her number one fan,' Kate concedes.

‘And,' Bob adds passionately, ‘as if that wasn't enough I came to this hell-hole trying to see her play,
didn't I?'

Kate considers this and is doubly, triply, impressed. She has to admit that coming all this way to the Havoc Bar and Grill, to a place where they'd normally eat people like him alive, for a performance that was neither advertised nor expected does show a formidable degree of commitment, of manic fandom.

‘But if you really want to see how great my fandom is,' Bob says determinedly, ‘all you have to do is read this.'

He puts a copy of a magazine on the bar. It's a fanzine, not badly produced, well printed, neatly designed, and bearing the title
JOSS.

‘Joss?' Kate asks.

Journal of Sladean Studies.
Jenny Slade. Get it?

‘I get it all right.'

‘I wanted something with an academic ring to it. I'm the publisher, picture researcher, distributor, proof reader, fact checker and chief scribe. There's something in here you ought to read.'

He opens the magazine, folds it at the appropriate page and turns it round for her to see. She looks at it quizzically. This night is getting more and more bizarre. She's been asked to do some weird things by previous customers of the Havoc Bar and Grill, but reading articles in academic journals is the most bizarre yet. Nevertheless she looks at the piece, which is short; she looks at the time, which is still not all that late, and she decides she has nothing much to lose. She begins to read.

(A true fan's account)

The universe (which others call
the ‘Record Library') is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal listening booths. (The term ‘Record Library' may seem both archaic and anachronistic, given that vinyl has long since been abandoned and superseded by the compact disc. However the word ‘record' remains the most appropriate, since the Library undoubtedly still contains recordings, and since it is also an agency of record.)

The layout of the booths is invariable. There is salmon-pink carpet, a leather couch and state-of-the-art listening equipment. The walls are soundproofed and in two of them, as well as in the floor and ceiling, there is a hatchway that leads into a sort of airlock which interconnects with other hexagonal listening booths, like a honeycomb. Within the booths are toilet facilities, and listeners can sleep comfortably enough on the sofas.

In each listening booth four walls have floor to ceiling storage units consisting of ten shelves. Each shelf then contains sixty single CDs and each CD lasts approximately seventy minutes. There is a letter or number on the spine of each CD case, but there is no packaging, no cover art, no liner notes and no track listings. These letters and numbers bear no apparent relation to the content of each disc, which consists solely and entirely of guitar solos.

Like all men of the Record Library, I have
travelled in my youth. I wandered in search of inspiration, in search of a brand new, totally original guitar sound which would say and do it all. I visited listening booths at the far extremities of the system, pushed and exhausted myself. It was a long, hard struggle but worth it, since in the process I discovered the music of Jenny Slade.

Theories have always circulated about the nature, the extent and the ‘meaning' of the Record Library. It has been much admired, much praised. People have dedicated far more of their lives to exploring its treasures than I have. The most fanatical have asserted that it is proof of the existence of God since (they argue) such a neat, vast and methodical library could only be created by a supreme being, and one who, incidentally, likes to rock. Man, the imperfect listener, the music enthusiast, the obsessive fan, is compelled to feel awe in the face of such a magnificent creation. He must also be content to realize that he will never fully know or comprehend it.