Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

‘Does this musical director have a name?’ she demanded.

‘Tom Scorn,’ said Trixie.

Jenny should have known.

Not very much later at all in Tom Scorn’s on-set recording studio, Jenny said to him, ‘So you’re into film music now?’

‘I always was,’ he said. ‘Eric Kornfeld, Bernard Herrmann, they were always my heroes.’

‘I thought it was Stockhausen and Cardew.’

‘Whatever. The thing is, Jenny, and I’ve said this before, time is no longer a meaningful concept in the age of digital reproduction …’

He ran through the same speech that the child actress had managed to deliver word for word. (Well, at least the kid had the ability to learn lines.) Jenny waited until Scorn came to a part she hadn’t heard before.

‘If you want to hear Guitar Slim jamming with Yehudi Menuhin,’ said Scorn, ‘that’s easily arranged. We can do that. We can pluck those sounds out of the digital ether. Want to hear what Gary Moore or Johnny Marr sound like improvising over a theme from Purcell? Well no, neither do I, but with technology it’s dead easy to achieve. It’s all there for the taking by anyone who has some use for it.’

‘And you have some use for it?’ said Jenny.

‘I most certainly do. With a sampler you can take the greatest voices in the whole world — Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Tom Waits — and you use just one sampled note, transfer it to a keyboard and instil all the musical qualities of those great artists into your music. You know I’m right.’

‘Well,’ said Jenny, ‘only up to a point.’

Scorn was irritated that anyone should disagree with such clearly irrefutable truths.

‘For example,’ Jenny said, ‘I could write a song with the opening line “I woke up this morning”, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean I was an authentic blues artist.’

‘The concept of the song form is very old hat,’ Scorn snarled.

‘You can sample Hendrix’s guitar tone but it’s not as though that makes you Hendrix. It’s not even like having Hendrix in the band.’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Scorn said smugly. ‘It’s much better than having Hendrix in the band. If he were alive today I’d get him into the studio, record five minutes of him jerking around with the guitar and then I’d have no further use for him. I could take that five minutes and do more with it than he did in his whole career.

‘Let’s face it, live musicians are never anything but pains in the arse. They do too many drugs. They want too much money. They’re unreliable, they’re temperamental. You can’t just tell them to play one chord for fifty minutes, because they think it’s uninspired and they want to give of themselves. The sound of Hendrix I love. His genius I love. But having him in the band … don’t be silly. Give me machines every time.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘Did you ever meet Hendrix?’

Jenny said no, but that wasn’t strictly true.

Jimi slumps on a couch, unconscious, guitar in hand. The couch is decked out with throws and cushions, slices of crushed purple velvet, orange brocade and sequined chiffon. He looks so at home there, like a chameleon gone mad, cheesecloth and love beads, lizard-skin boots, a military tunic, tight cotton trousers patterned with multicoloured Op art squares. And even the guitar matches; an old Strat that’s been customized by some fan, some ‘psychedelic artist’ who’s drilled holes in the guitar body, sprayed it with red and black car paint and, while it was running and congealing, stuck rhinestones, rosary beads and silver glitter on to the surface. The process has rendered the guitar more or less unplayable, although Jimi has met a lot of unplayable guitars in his time, and he’s usually managed to wring something out of them, which is to say he’s used them to wring something out of himself.

Not that he’s in any state right this moment to do any playing. He’s sleeping the sleep, not of the just, but of the stoned, the sleep of the heavily sedated, the sleep of the totally fucked up. It would take a scientist, a pharmacist, or at the very least a police coroner to tell you what was the exact cause of Jimi’s condition. Call it a cocktail, call it a random sample. Jimi gets given all kinds of pharmaceutical treats these days, guys and chicks just lay this really cool stuff on him all the time, and if the precise history, the detailed provenance of most of these drugs is a little blurry, well, that’s OK, these people are genuine fans of Jimi. They love him and they love what he does, and they’d have no reason to give him bad shit, no reason to send him on a bad trip, into narcosis and coma. But even if by some mistake they did give him some bad stuff, well, Jimi’s feeling so strong these days, so big and powerful, so on top and above it all, that bad trips and bad chemicals just bounce off him like rain, or ping-pong balls, or bullets off Superman. Butterfly and bee.

Yeah, he often feels like Superman, or sometimes just a little like Clark Kent, and at other times like Adam Strange or Lex Luther or the Riddler. Funny the way they’re all white guys, but the times they are a changin’, and maybe he can even do something about that, a black superhero who ain’t Muhammad Ali. His dreams are certainly full enough of flying and super powers, of defeating nameless but vibrant-coloured dreads. They’re full of big ideas and big insights, heavy shit that you’re never going to be able to sit down and explain in words, but with a Strat and a Big Muff and a Uni-Vibe and a wah wah pedal and a Marshall two-hundred-watt stack, well, just maybe you’re going to be able to get the message across. So long as you get the right rhythm section.

And some of these dreams come when he isn’t even asleep. Like right now he half wakes up and there’s this chick standing in the room and he’s pretty sure he’s never seen her before but she’s here and that’s groovy, and he can’t be absolutely sure that she’s not a hallucination or some kind of sweet angel come down. And yeah, maybe she looks a little like Wonderwoman, and she’s playing a weird-looking guitar, not one of his, picking out a nice blues, and she looks up and says, ‘Now about this stage act of yours, Jimi …’

And he’s halfway into a conversation he doesn’t remember starting.

‘Huh?’ he says.

‘For example, when you mime cunnilingus in the show,’ she says, ‘or when you masturbate your guitar or bang it on the stage, or when you smash it up or set fire to it … what am I supposed to think about that?’

Cogs and cams click in his brain, connect up his speech centres, get the motor running, coming back from out there.

‘Well, you know, maybe it’s not about thought, ’ he tries. ‘It’s about just digging it.’

‘No, Jimi, that’s just not good enough,’ she says bossily. ‘Of course we all understand the phallic significance of the guitar, but what’s the significance of beating your phallus against the stage until it breaks? What’s the symbolic value of trying to set your phallus on fire?’

‘Gee, I never thought about it quite like that.’

‘But I did, Jimi.’

Jimi’s face stiffens and she can see that he’s rummaging through the files in his head, files that have been chemically shuffled and singed.

‘Uh, maybe it’s a guy thing, a black thing,’ he says. ‘I dunno, chicks they don’t understand. Hey, why don’t you come over here, sit by me, mellow out and stop asking me such hard questions?’

‘Women here, women there, always trying to put you in a plastic cage, eh Jimi?’

‘Hey, no, I don’t mean that exactly. That’s just a song, y’know.’

‘Is that right? So you don’t really think you’re a “voodoo chile” or a “hoochie coochie man”?’