Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

The crowd looked at Jenny with curiosity, but with a strange lack of surprise, as though guest guitarists were always dropping in. There was no doubt that she was expected to play, that she was expected to impress, and the matter of where they were or where they might obtain petrol, food and water would have to wait.

Fuming, Billy Nation set down the amp and Jenny plugged in. She continued to play in the same style as she had been in the desert. She was trying to pick up on the spirit of the place, on the stark emptiness, and it seemed to require something both beautiful and desolate. However, after playing for five minutes or so she could see that the audience in the but was losing interest. She carried on, trying that much harder, but they just weren’t keen on what she was doing. Jenny stopped playing, hoping for inspiration. She turned towards Billy Nation but his face was blank and inscrutable. He was as much a stranger here as she was. He was going to be no help at all. Then the boy who’d brought them edged towards Jenny, put his mouth close to her ear and said, ‘Generally what goes down best is some pretty basic rock and roll.’

Jenny could take a hint. She immediately changed tack and started to play a variety of rock and roll favourites: ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Lucille’, ‘Something Else’. ‘Route 66’ went down particularly well. A young guy got up and sat in on drums, another sat at the piano and did a pretty good impression of Little Richard. Jenny played gorgeous chunky rock and roll solos, and at one point was moved to perform a duck walk. The crowd loved her for it. The place was so alive, so enthusiastic she feared it might spontaneously combust. The only damper was Billy Nation who sat nursing a beer, his face showing absolute sulky disapproval.

After an hour or so of fierce rock and roll, the boy came up to her again and pointed out an old man leaning on the bar, a man with a face as ancient as the rocks and the sand. The boy whispered, ‘The old fellah says can you play anything by Jimmy Webb?’

And so they played a short medley of Jim Webb hits, including ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’, before returning to rock and roll. There was the same frenzy and adulation, and then all too suddenly it was over and the bar was emptying and Jenny was sipping a drink, feeling doubly exhausted and triply satisfied. Someone gave her a crate of beer and someone else provided a map and pointed out that they were only a couple of miles from a roadhouse and Shell station.

Jenny accepted as graciously, as gratefully, as she knew how, all too aware of the sullen, graceless presence of Billy Nation. She no longer felt any need to chastise or berate him, but neither did she feel any responsibility.

She said to him, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about the way certain American popular songs can be used as song-lines. Look at “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”. When she’s rising he’s in Phoenix, then when she’s having her lunch he’s in Albuquerque, and by the time she gets home from work he’s made Oklahoma. You could draw his journey on a map.

‘Or how about “Route 66”? Some of it’s just a list of names: Missouri, St Louis, Oklahoma City and so on. Follow the names and you could never get lost. Isn’t that exactly what a songline is?’

Billy shook his head at her sadly and with all the condescension he could muster. He was trying to imply that she was stupid, that all she had done was confirm that she was too crass ever to understand him or his culture, and perhaps ultimately that was true, but there was some consolation in knowing she had the ability to play to an audience, any audience, and entertain them and make them happy.

Billy Nation walked out into the night and Jenny was about to shout something mildly abusive after him, to tell him to get lost, but she decided that was no longer necessary.

Number one: the nails

Jenny Slade says, ‘You know a lot of women seem to think that in order to get that authentic snarly, slutty, rock chick look, they have to wear their fingernails as long and sharp as talons, and that they should be painted blood red or Goth black, or in some metallic cyber shade. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple.

‘There are two problems here. One, a right-handed guitarist can’t have talons on her left hand at all, because if she does they’ll get in the way of holding down the strings.

‘Secondly, even the strongest non-chip enamel will get trashed by the time you’ve played two hours worth of shred and burn guitar, especially if you do any amount of finger picking. And, despite Courtney Love, most of us still believe that chipped nail varnish is a sin second only to a visible panty line. You could use false nails, I suppose, but in my humble opinion false nails are an abomination against nature.

‘So you see, my advice to young female guitar players is really pretty simple: keep the natural look at your fingertips. Get a good manicure, eat gelatine, keep your nails short and unpainted. Let the authentic snarly, slutty, rock chick persona come from your playing, not just from your cosmetics.’

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 3 Issue 12

Jenny Slade was staying in a tourist hotel in Haiti when she first met Tom Scorn. She was lying out by the pool, eyes closed, gently working on her tan, slowly working off a queen-size hangover, when she became aware of someone casting a shadow over her face. She opened her eyes, looked up and saw a scrawny, thick-lipped young guy standing there, apparently trying to summon the courage to speak. He was tall, had spiked hair and big eyes, and now that she was actually looking at him, his first reaction was to run away, but he steeled himself, swallowed and said, perhaps a little too loudly, as though he had been rehearsing it, ‘Miss Slade, I’d like to say how much I’ve always enjoyed your music.’

Jenny was not entirely unused to receiving such compliments, nor to dealing with them efficiently, and she handled it as gracefully as she could. ‘You’re very kind,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Sometimes this exchange would be enough, but more usually it would be followed by a request for an autograph, which she usually agreed to, or by an attempt to involve her in a muso conversation about guitars and guitarists, which she was skilled at avoiding. But this particular boy did none of the usual things. He wouldn’t go away but neither would he say anything more.

When the situation had become unbearable Jenny said, ‘Is there something else I can do for you?’

‘Well maybe,’ he said. ‘I’m a music student.’

Jenny was unimpressed.

‘Actually I’m studying piano, saxophone and composition, with particular reference to Stockhausen, Cardew, Wally Stott. And yourself.’

‘That’s very nice,’ Jenny said, though she wasn’t really sure it was nice at all.

She saw that he was carrying a tan leather music case and he now held it up in front of him like a breastplate.

‘I have some of my compositions in here,’ he said, sounding simultaneously proud and diffident. ‘Maybe you’d like to take a look at one or two of them.’

Jenny had a firm rule about not accepting things that strangers shoved into her hands. If she was handed a demo tape she knew it would be dreadful and incompetent and unlistenable, but nevertheless the makers of the tape were all too likely to sue her for plagiarism at a later date. If she was handed a note, a piece of ‘creative writing’ perhaps, it would inevitably be somebody’s sick little sex fantasy. If somebody gave her drugs they would always be tainted. So she made it a rule not to accept gifts from strangers and she was on the point of saying a firm no, when the boy began to fiddle with the case and it fell open so that sheets of manuscript paper spilled out and scurried across the pool-side tiles towards the water. Jenny put out a hand and lazily caught one sheet while the boy headed off to catch the more fugitive pages.