Flesh Guitar (4 page)

‘Anyway,' Bob says, ‘being the first is nice, but it isn't everything. Some things are simply inevitable. If Beauchamp hadn't come up with the Frying Pan somebody else would have.

‘Leo Fender was the first to mass-produce electric guitars. He made 'em cheap and he made 'em good. And if he hadn't started producing them, then Gibson certainly wouldn't have set up in competition, in which case Les Paul would never have been called in and the whole history of the electric guitar would have been different.

‘But note that I only say
different.
If Fender hadn't been the Henry Ford of guitars, somebody else would have been. If Les Paul hadn't invented that fat, eloquent humbucking sound, somebody else would. These
things were simply bound to happen.

‘And after those few basic but crucial inventions, after those patents and practices, it didn't really matter. After that, the deluge. After that there came tens of thousands of designers and inventors, craftsman and manufacturers, customizers and luthiers, all trying to “reinvent” the electric guitar. But basically they were all too late. The job had been done and the party was over. The rest was just tidying and sweeping up.'

‘You certainly know your history,' Kate says.

‘Those who don't know history are doomed to do bad cover versions,' he quips. ‘Now, there's a reasonable argument that says the best electric guitars are the biggest failures. You see, the pioneers of the electric guitar wanted a device that could reproduce the sound of an acoustic guitar as accurately and with as pure a tone as possible, so that it sounded exactly like an acoustic guitar only louder. But electric guitars never quite do that. They add muck and growl and distortion. And the strange thing is, people discovered they preferred it that way.'

Kate's face shows confusion. She says, ‘Why would people prefer muck and growl and distortion to accuracy and purity?'

‘People are funny like that, Kate.'

Kate shakes her head sadly.

‘And that's why they like effects too.'

‘Effects? As in special effects?'

‘In a way, yes. If people liked a fuzzy signal, why not make a little machine that could create fuzz to order? And chorus. And phase. And tremolo. And echo.
And chorus. And so on and so on.'

‘The more the merrier,' Kate adds glibly.

‘Frankly, merriness is not one of the things I've ever really looked for in music,' says Bob. ‘But yes, when it comes to guitar noise, less is generally not better. Jenny Slade may be many things but she's never been much of a minimalist.'

Kate considers this proposition and finds some truth in it.

‘The other element in all this is the amp,' says Bob. ‘The guitar and the pickup and the effects units create and modify the signal, and then the amplifier messes it all up some more in its own special way, and cranks it out at skull-crushing volume.'

‘And people like that even more?' Kate asks.

‘Yes, Kate, some people really like that a lot, believe me.'

‘Yes, I'll buy that,' says Kate. ‘Jenny Slade's performance wouldn't have been the same if it had been quiet.'

‘Look, Kate, here's the true juice,' Bob announces. ‘You can quote me on this. Life is like a guitar solo. It's loud, shapeless and it goes on too long. Sometimes it's tuneless, sometimes it's cliched, either way it's damned difficult to get it right, and even if you've done your best and you're pleased with what you've achieved, you can be sure a lot of people are going to hate it and dump all over you and tell you you're a loser.'

‘Aren't
you
the philosopher?' Kate says, not unkindly. ‘Do I really need to know all this background just to be able to appreciate Jenny Slade's music?'

‘Yes, Kate, you do. Because once you know and understand the background you'll see that the whole of history,
of invention, of technical and artistic development, has existed for one reason and one reason only; to bring Jenny Slade to us.'

‘Whew,' says Kate, ‘that's heavy.' And she reaches for a drink.

‘Heavy is the word,' Bob agrees, and he holds out his empty glass so that Kate can refill it.

Bob Arnold chews the fat with Jenny Slade

Jenny Slade was looking especially
good when I caught up with her in LA's favourite watering hole, the Giant Anaconda Room. Her look was fearlessly eclectic: the bondage pants, the boob tube, the bolero jacket, the leopardskin pork pie hat, all creating a striking, provocatively sexual image that few could carry off. And yet why did I feel that these fine feathers were hiding a deep hurt? She might have looked like a major babe, but it seemed to me that she was blubbing inside.

I started with a lively and provocative question. ‘What happened to all your money, Jenny?'

‘Did I ever have any?' she replied wearily. ‘Well, maybe I did. I don't know where it went. I guess I spent it all on cheap boys and expensive guitars. Or perhaps it was the other way round; cheap guitars and expensive boys. I forget. Either way, I was never in it for the money, which I agree is perhaps just as well.'

‘And how long have you been playing the guitar?'

‘For about the same amount of time that the guitar's been playing me,' she quipped gaily, and I got the sense that here was one lady who wasn't going to betray her age.

‘I think of you as a true radical,' I said, getting bolder now. ‘Always out of step but never out of touch.'

‘Are you trying to say that I do not grow old as those
who are left grow old?' she intoned.

‘I think I'm trying to say that you have a different relationship to the space/time continuum than the rest of us poor mortals.'

‘Hmm,' said Jenny, more seriously. ‘I will say this: as I get older the appetite for drink and drugs and untrustworthy boys recedes, but the urge to pick up an electric guitar and make a godawful noise just won't go away.'

‘And would you say the guitar is a hard instrument to play?' I quizzed provocatively.

She looked at me glancingly, and I knew there was going to be iron
and
irony in her reply.

‘Of course it is,' she said. ‘If it was easy people like you would be doing it.'

I knew she meant it kindly and we laughed together like old buddies.

‘And who are your influences?' I asked.

It was a corny old question but I knew Jenny would come up with a lively and original reply.

She thought for only a moment before replying, ‘Willa Cather, Margaret of Anjou, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pamela Des Barres, those sort of people,' and with that she grinned girlishly.

‘Do you feel in touch with the modern world?' I challenged.

‘I feel in touch with Charlie Christian and Eddie Durham,' she said. ‘With Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and Hank Marvin and Duane Eddy, with Beck and Page and Clapton. With Guitar Slim and Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. With Henry Kaiser and Bernard Butler and Noel Gallagher and Vernon Reid and Winged Eel Fingerling. Sexy fellers, every last one of them. And I feel in touch with women
too – though in a different way.

‘But mostly I feel in touch with all those lonely boys of the future, still sitting in their rooms trying to play guitar, solemnly believing that if only they could coax some music out of the damn machine they're holding then somehow everything would be better, everything would fall into place; their sex lives, their shyness, their bad skin. And you know what, fellers, you're absolutely right, it would.'

There was a poignant pause while she let that remark settle in.

‘You know,' she added briskly, ‘it's a long time ago that I decided to be my own woman, my own musician. I decided I was going to tear up the rule book, and then I realized there
was
no rule book.'

I smiled appreciatively but at last I thought it was time to end this verbal jousting. I looked her straight in the eyes and I said, ‘Who do you play for, Ms Slade? Yourself or others?'

Arching one carefully plucked eyebrow, she said, ‘I play for the nice guys, the filing clerks and computer nerds, the deceived and exploited, for the dysfunctional and the confused and the just plain wrong, for those who are unsure about their identities, their body politics, their genders.

‘I play for the decontamination squads, for the firework scientists, the mutants and sleepers. I play for the homely girls terrified by their first sight of menstrual blood, and for the sad boys suffering the attentions of their mothers' special friends. I play for the number crunchers and the atom splitters, for the deformed and the brain dead, for the emotionally drained, for the synaesthesiacs (they make terrific listeners). I play for germ warfare enthusiasts, for the genetic goofballs, the Apple mystics, the road whores,
the insurrection grrrls, the nylon broads, the fishnet lads. I often play for the tone deaf.

‘I play for those with extra senses and extra heads, for the bad mothers and the cheerful patricides, for the wreckers and the recyclers, the scanners and cyberniks, the video jerks, the steeplejacks of middle space, the boys in the bunker, the hyper-drive cadets, the ovary barons, the born-again crucifiers, the twang bar princesses, the wah wah dudes, the radon lovers, feedback addicts, fuzz theorists.

‘I play for the cryogenic fetishists, the orgone punks, the cosmetic surgeons with the shaky hands, the thrash throngs, the synth siblings, the napalm fanciers, the nuclear Klansmen, needlegun gangs, anarchs of the old school, neurone handymen, death metal alchemists.

‘I play for the people next door. I play for people like us. I play for people like you, Bob'

It was a tender and touching moment, but of course she was only telling me what I already knew.

Reprinted from the
Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 4 Issue 3

Jenny Slade could no longer remember
which magazine had first referred to Jed Rhodes as a ‘drug-crazed bass player'. The epithet had stuck, but she'd always found it absurd. There was no denying that Jed had a lifelong appetite for, maybe even a lifelong love affair with drugs, but it seemed to her there was nothing even remotely crazed about him. He played bass, he took drugs and he remained an utterly sane, rational, ordinary individual. There were times when he became rather quiet and introspective, other times when he might see and talk to things or people or monsters that weren't actually there, but these were small, forgivable eccentricities. The basic, down-to-earth personality always remained. His sense of rhythm never faltered and he never played a bum note.

Jenny sometimes thought Jed didn't deserve to look so good, so healthy, shouldn't be such a walking advertisement for the joys, or at least the essential harmlessness, of drug abuse, but it was an aesthetic judgement not a moral one.

‘Drug abuse!' Jed would sneer. ‘That's such a pathetic term. What can you do with drugs except abuse them? That's what drugs are
for
.' He'd spent a lifetime just saying
yes and he'd done fine, but Jenny knew he was lucky. It wasn't always like that. Few people in the world had the constitution, the inner or outer strength that Jed had, and she certainly did not include herself in that number.

So when she ran into Jed Rhodes in the car-park of a club that was being held in a converted pasta factory just outside the M25 and he offered her an untried and untested chemical, her first reaction was not necessarily to knock it back without hesitation. She also saw that Jed was not alone. He was with a curious young man: a wire-thin, jumpy, wasted-looking, top-of-the-class-in-science type.

‘This is Tubby Moran,' Jed said. ‘We call him Tubby because he's not. That's drug humour for you. Tubby designs designer drugs, like this one.'

Jed held up a phial about the size of a chemistry lab test tube containing a baby-pink liquid. Tubby Moran looked at the tube and swelled with pride.

‘What drug is it?' Jenny asked.

‘We call it “Bliss”,' Jed replied.

‘That's such a dodgy name for a drug,' Jenny said, and she noticed that Tubby looked hurt.

‘What's in a name,' Jed insisted. ‘It's good. I've taken gallons of the stuff.'

He waved the phial again. The contents certainly looked cute and harmless enough.

‘What does it do to you?' she asked.

‘Better if I don't tell you,' Jed said. ‘That way it's a surprise'.

‘Oh, come on!' she protested.

‘I promise you it's not harmful, it's not going to make you believe you can fly or want to have sex with
the first eighteen truck drivers you meet.'

‘I promise too,' Tubby added reassuringly.

Jed put the phial to his lips and drained a good half of the pink liquid. ‘Last chance,' he said, and made as though he was going to swig the rest.

‘Oh, all right, damn it,' Jenny said. ‘But you're sure I'll like it?'

The two men nodded enthusiastically and Jenny drank half of the remaining dose. Keeping up with Jed's intake was not a game she intended to play. She handed the phial back to him, expecting him to pass it on to Tubby, but he finished the rest himself and the designer-drug boy didn't complain.

‘You feel OK?' Jed asked.

‘I feel fine, no different.'

‘Good. Wait till we get into the club.'

Two bouncers, broad as air-raid shelters, waved them into the club. They looked dubiously at the tragically unhip Tubby Moran, but being with Jed Rhodes was passport enough. They made for the bar.

‘Is it OK to drink on top of this stuff?' Jenny asked.

Tubby assured her that it was. As they stood in the crush trying to get served, Jenny became aware of the music. It was something she'd never heard before, a techno beat, a black woman warbling in a high register, not the sort of stuff she normally listened to or liked, yet tonight in the context of the club it sounded really good. And before long she couldn't be bothered to fight her way to the bar; she just wanted to get on the dance floor and immerse herself in the music. Jed followed her and they danced together briefly, but she didn't really notice him. She was dancing
with and for herself.