Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

‘Yeah? I was wondering about that. You don’t think maybe it’s too ethnic?’

‘No. It’s fantastic. It could have been thought up by a committee of marketing men. It’s perfect for what you’re going to do. You’re going to zap things. Second, pretend you’re smart.’

‘I am smart.’

‘I know you think you’re smart, and maybe you are pretty smart for this town. Given the greater shores of smartness, however, you’re no rocket scientist.’

‘Oh, OK.’ Frank sounds confused as though he doesn’t know what to do with this bit of advice.

‘So stay away from rocket scientists, and away from artists and intellectuals, and away from serious social commentators. Try to spend your life dealing with musicians and rock journalists. By their standards you’re a genius.’

He’s still not sure whether he’s being flattered or insulted.

‘And if some idiot college boy comes along and wants to write his Ph.D. about you, pour scorn on the very idea, but don’t actually stop him.’

‘Doesn’t sound so hard.’

‘In other words,’ Jenny says, ‘be cynical.’

‘That I can do.’

‘Yes, but make sure you’re cynical about everything. Not just about parents and police and politicians — everyone’s cynical about them. You should be cynical about hippies and rock musicians and the drug culture too.’

‘What’s a hippie? What’s drug culture?’

‘It’ll become obvious, believe me.’

‘Oh, OK.’

‘What I mean is, be cynical about record companies, but be cynical about record buyers too, even the ones who buy your records. And above all pretend that your music isn’t commercial.’

‘Yeah? You sure? I mean I’d like to make a lot of money. I’d like the house and the studio up in the Hollywood hills, the cars, the pool, the girls.’

‘It’s OK, Frank, there are a whole lot of people out there who like music they think is uncommercial. They’re your audience. Tell them that by acquiring your records they’re being radical and subversive and individualistic and they’ll buy your stuff in bulk. Millions of uncommercial units. You can make a fortune by being uncommercial.’

Frank shakes his head. This all sort of makes sense but it’ll take some time to sink in.

‘But once in a while you may have to stop being totally negative. That’s where the guitar playing comes in.’

‘Guitar playing?’ Frank says.‘But I’m a drummer.’

‘You are now, but that’s going to have to change.’

‘My dad has an old guitar in his closet. I fool around with it sometimes. I guess I could try to play it more seriously if there was going to be some future in it.’

‘The future is the electric guitar, Frank.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do. And that’s about it for advice, really.’

‘Yeah? It all sounds pretty easy.’

‘It may not be as easy as it sounds, but you’ll get by. Oh and one more thing, whatever happens, pretend that nobody ever gave you any advice. Pretend you made it all up on your own, pretend that you’re entirely your own creation.’

Frank looks rueful. He lights another cigarette, tries to inhale as though he knows what he’s doing and says, ‘You’ve been pretty good to me, told me some great stuff. You’re smart and attractive, and we seem to get on, so why don’t you, you know, complete my education and ball me?’

Jenny looks at him dismissively; suddenly she’s light years ahead of him, so genuinely cool, so authentically adult and superior.

‘That’s another thing you should bear in mind in your music, Frank. Couldn’t you try to be a little bit nicer to women?’

Frank raises a thick black eyebrow and says, ‘I’m as nice to women as they are to me.’

‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t press you on this one, since I realize that being vaguely unpleasant about women and sex will probably be a vital part of your career. Sensitive songwriter really isn’t going to be your style.’

This much he had worked out for himself but the guitar playing, that’s news. He can already see the advantages of being a guitarist rather than a drummer; more chance to show off to the girls, more opportunities to make truly grotesque noise. He sits there for a moment looking out through the windscreen, watching the landscape bend and ripple in the heat.

‘Are you for real?’ he asks. ‘Or are you just a figment of my twisted imagination?’

‘You think the two things are mutually exclusive?’

‘Well, I don’t …’

He’s confused as all hell. Is it the heat? Is it something in the cigarettes?

‘I’ve been doing far too much talking,’ Jenny says. ‘After all, you’re the guitar genius. I was wondering, is there a piece of advice you’d give to the aspiring guitarist?’

Frank laughs. Until this second he wasn’t a guitar genius, not even an aspiring guitarist. Who is he to give advice? Then he thinks, why not? He’s regularly confronted by ignorant assholes giving advice on stuff they know nothing about.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘I guess my advice to the aspiring guitar player would be shut up and play your guitar.’

‘I like that,’ says Jenny. ‘I wish I’d said that.’

Bob leans over the bar and says to Kate, ‘Rickenbacker, Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Guild, Steinberger, Kay, Alembic, Harmony, Ibanez, Klein, Kramer, Danelectro, B. C. Rich, Mosrite, Hagstrom, Epiphone, Hamer, Washburn, Vox, Silvertone, Shergold, Watkins, Burns, Patrick Eggle, Paul Reed Smith … Are you getting these?’

‘I might not remember them all by tomorrow,’ Kate admits.

‘Well, at least try, because you see these aren’t just makers’ names, although they are makers’ names, of course, but they’re also a roll of honour. And when you add to these the names of the different models, the Strats and the Teles, the Thunderbirds and the Flying Vs, the Jaguars and the Mustangs, the Pacers, the Bisons, the Presidents, the Meteors, the Sting Rays, the Vikings, the Custom Masqueraders, the Apaches, the Explorers, the Jagstangs, well … that’s pure twentieth-century poetry.’

‘Does it make any difference what guitar you play?’ Kate asks.

Bob laughs darkly. ‘That’s like asking does it matter which cock you suck.’

Oh dear, she thinks, the drink’s getting to him. Neverthe less she tries to think through the analogy and even though it seems a needlessly opaque one, with much to be said on both sides, she decides he means yes.

Bob says, ‘There’s a story, almost certainly apocryphal, of a naive young man who decided he wanted to play the electric guitar. So he went into a guitar shop and bought one. He took it home, strummed it, fiddled with all the knobs but couldn’t get any sound out of it. Where was the sturm and drang he was looking for? Where was the volume? Where was the skronk? Nowhere, because he didn’t realize that you need an amplifier and some speakers before you can get any proper sound out of an electric guitar.

‘Instead, in his ignorance, he made the simple observation that his guitar wasn’t plugged in yet, that in fact the shop had sold him the guitar without any plug at all. It was now the evening, and too late to go back to the shop and demand the missing plug, so he decided to rig something up for himself. He took a length of electric flex, attached a domestic plug to one end and a jack plug to the other, shoved the jack into the guitar, the plug into the live wall socket and stood helplessly by as his guitar rapidly self-destructed in a shower of sparks and flames.

‘That guitar was truly electric, and the chances are it made a pretty unique sound as it died. But that isn’t what we normally mean by electric guitar.’