Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

In the world of rock and roll it is often said that no publicity is bad publicity, yet there was no doubt that after the events at the prison Jenny Slade found it much harder to get gigs, and when she got them the audiences were smaller, their responses depressingly muted. Her confidence began to falter. She wondered if it had all been sound and fury. Perhaps her whole career had been merely a hiccup in popular taste. She’d fooled some of the people for some of the time, but that time had now passed.

She began to play safe, to anaesthetize and protect herself: drink and drugs helped a little, as did long hours locked away indoors. She cried a lot, and not only when she was alone. She wept all the way through a recording session where she was supposed to be providing racy, upbeat rock guitar for a soft drink commercial. She cancelled some of her gigs; at others she simply failed to show up. When she did show up she was often in no condition to play. If she did manage to play she’d almost certainly perform badly and alienate the audience.

She began to wish the piano had been her instrument. A piano player who was past it and past caring could always get a gig, even if it was only tinkling the ivories in some cocktail lounge, like Walter Hormone. But a state of the art experimentalist who had stopped experimenting, who had stopped caring about her art, was no use to anyone.

She turned up at a few jam sessions, made a fool of herself by playing insanely loud, fast, tuneless solos during soulful renditions of ‘The Thrill Is Gone’. If she was tolerated at all it was as a kind of joke, an eccentric comedy act, but those who had known her at her best found it a sad, sick joke.

Every time she picked up the guitar she died a little. She wouldn’t have minded going like Jon Churchill, would have been perfectly happy to die on stage, to add the literal death to the metaphoric. But that didn’t happen.

She felt cursed. And maybe it went all the way back. Perhaps it wasn’t Ahab who had lured the Magic Big Band to its doom all those years ago, but her. She was the affliction, the bird of ill omen.

And she began to think that maybe Tom Scorn had been right when he said the days of the musician were over. Maybe it would be machines from now on, machines capable of tireless precision. Maybe the electric guitar was a remnant of a closed period of history, like the hurdy-gurdy or the serpent.

When things were looking their very worse she got a letter from someone who claimed to be her number one fan, saying that she must carry on playing, get back to being her old self. There was a fanzine enclosed. It reported in dreary detail all the facts of her recent musically and spiritually bad gigs. She didn’t need reminding and threw the magazine away. She looked at the signature on the letter, ‘Bob Arnold, your number one fan’. She’d never heard of him. She tore the letter into obsessively small, neat pieces and burned them.

She became a recluse. She grew her nails long. Her career seemed to be over and she had no complaints, no regrets. Silence beckoned and she welcomed it, but she wasn’t content to slide into easy retirement. She needed to go out with a bang, not the ordinary sort of bang, not the farewell tour, not the ‘Best of album. She wanted to play just one last time, to hit it and quit, and she knew the very place to do it, a place at the end of the world, where the rules didn’t apply, a place where she wasn’t known, where the audience was hostile and the PA useless: the Havoc Bar and Grill.

‘Look, it’s really very late and I’ve quite enjoyed talking to you,’ Kate says to Bob Arnold, ‘but I’ve got to close up the bar now. Stop by again. Tomorrow’s another day, you know.’

‘That’s undeniably true,’ says Bob.

‘And who knows, maybe it’ll be a day when you can catch Jenny Slade’s act again.’

This time he really does bang his head against the bar. He lets it drop like a bag of potatoes and although it lands with a sickening crack, Bob is sufficiently drunk not to feel the pain.

‘There won’t be any gig tomorrow,’ he says desperately. ‘Nor the day after that. Haven’t I made myself clear? Jenny Slade played her last ever gig here, a few hours ago, and I didn’t see it. You saw it. A crowd of drunken hoi polloi, they saw it. But I, the number one Jenny Slade fan in the whole world, I didn’t.’

‘Her last gig, wow. I can see why missing it would depress you.’

‘Depress!’ he says it as though the word cannot express a millionth part of the anguish and misery he is still feeling. This isn’t just a heartache. It isn’t just a mild case of the summertime blues.

‘But why would she choose this dump for her farewell gig?’ Kate asks.

‘Precisely because it was a dump,’ Bob explains. ‘Because it wasn’t on the map. She didn’t want her fans there, didn’t want a loyal following, not even an open-minded audience. She wanted to prove to herself one last time that she could conquer an audience, no matter how indifferent, no matter how bone-headed. Then, once she’d proved to herself that she still had what it takes, she wouldn’t ever need or try to prove it again.’

‘So is that why she gave the guitar away, because she had no more use for it?’

‘She gave the guitar away?’

The news only hits him slowly, like a tower block being demolished, collapsing in stages into a rising cloud of debris.

‘Sure,’ said Kate.

‘She gave away her guitar,’ he repeats. ‘Are you sure? The flesh guitar? The one that looks like it’s alive?’

‘That’s the one.’

This time he screams with anguish.

‘Do you know what that guitar is worth?’ he says. ‘You could name your price. You could just think of a number and triple it. And if only I’d been here she could have given it to ME!’

Kate isn’t terribly sympathetic.

‘You can’t be sure of that,’ she says. ‘Besides, I thought it was quite ugly actually.’

‘Ugly,’ Bob says despairingly, knowing that it is his destiny to remain misunderstood.

‘She gave it to a good-looking boy,’ Kate says. ‘Besides, you don’t even play guitar.’

‘That’s not the point,’ Bob says.

‘Anyway, I’m sure that real guitar playing comes from the soul not the instrument.’

‘You know,’ says Bob, ‘you’re learning fast.’

Kate nods. ‘It’s too bad,’ she says. ‘I thought Jenny Slade was really inspiring, a real role model.’

The BIG thought occurs to them both simultaneously, unfolding like a gaudy flower, but Kate is the first to speak. ‘You don’t think I’m too old to start learning the guitar, do you?’

‘You don’t look so old to me,’ Bob says.

‘I could take lessons,’ she enthuses. ‘I could practise really intensively, learn my scales, my riffs, my runs, get my chops together.’

‘For sure,’ says Bob.

‘And you could fill me in on the theory.’

‘I definitely could,’ says Bob.

‘I’ll need to surround myself with some sympathetic musicians,’ Kate says, ‘and I’ll have to get some stage outfits and publicity photographs and an agent and a record company, and maybe a personal trainer. And a guitar, naturally. And some amplification. And a repertoire. But, of course, what I really need are fans.’

‘Don’t worry,’ says Bob. ‘You’ve already got one of those.’

The sleeping drunk wakes again, lifts an invisible glass and yells, ‘Here’s to Jenny Slade!’

Bob and Kate do not join in with this toast.

‘Where is she now?’ the drunk asks. ‘Where’s she gone, to what godforsaken region? What’s she thinking? Is she alone? Is she feeling suicidal? Is she all played out? Is the rest silence?’