Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

And so we came at last to Tierra del Fuego, the final stretch of the tour, back to those regions where the Captain had first encountered his white noise and lost a part of himself. It had been a very long tour. We were infinitely weary. All the humour and joy seemed to have been forced out of us and yet we played on. The Captain had driven us to the ends of our tether, till we were in a state of such spiritual malaise that we were nothing more than his pawns, his playthings. Dumbly we moved through the sound check, ever conscious of the old man’s despot eye, aware that he was willing us to bring the tour to a dramatic, shattering conclusion.

The gig started in front of a big enthusiastic audience, and the Captain led us into a version of ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’, a version such as you’ve never heard. It was as though he were playing for his very life, for all our lives. If the Captain was aware of his surroundings, of the club we were in, of the way the audience responded, he failed to show it. His gaze was fixed upon dim and distant horizons and he sang and played like a man possessed.

The band playing on, rolling and swaying. Sometimes the music shuddered and splintered, as though threatening to fall apart, and yet somehow we continued. The Captain played his harmonica for all he was worth. ‘There he blows,’ Sam Queequeg shouted over and over again, really getting off on the awesome beauty of the noise. The Captain drove us on. We played faster and faster, skimming over melodies, re-forming them so that they flowed and rippled, were turned to surf and waves, until at last a moment came when we no longer knew what we were playing. Tonight was going to be the night. We had gone beyond technique, beyond conscious intention. We were maniacs. It was all wind rush and spume, and it was truly magnificent. We were lost, utterly lost, at the mercy of forces much greater than ourselves. But there it was. We knew we had finally succeeded in creating the great white noise that the Captain had been pushing us so hard to locate.

‘At last,’ he said between atonal blasts on his mouth harp. ‘At last.’

He stood rooted in front of the microphone as if he were no longer with us, his mind transported to some dim, blue, vacant place. The audience went crazy. They pressed against the stage like a flood tide, and the Captain leaned towards them, reached out, tilted perilously in their direction, trusting them, wanting to become one with them, to float upon the sea of people.

He launched himself. It was a terrible mistake. Stage diving was entirely unknown in that part of the world. The welcoming supporting raised hands he had been expecting were not there for him. Instead a gap opened up in the crowd and the bare floor of the hall became visible. The Captain plunged downwards, hit the deck with a horrifying crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom. Then the crowd closed in around him and he disappeared like one trodden underfoot by herds of stampeding polo ponies. Nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from far ravines. There was a terrible beauty in knowing that these sounds were unlikely ever to be repeated.

The band stopped playing, but the audience scarcely noticed. They were mad now, as mad as we members of the band had been, as mad as the Captain. We had created in them a frenzy that we could not possibly control. What’s more, we were now leaderless and redundant. We decided to make a dash for it. We ran from the stage and in the process lost almost everything we had, our instruments, our amplifiers, our PA system. The audience wrecked the hall, the dressing rooms, our tour bus. Security guards muscled in, started cracking heads and waving baseball bats around. The gig was over, and so was the tour, and so was a whole phase of my life. Perhaps it was because I was a woman that I alone survived unharmed to tell the tale.

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 5 Issue 8

‘Frankly,’ says Kate, the barmaid at the Havoc Bar and Grill, ‘I’ve never really understood what the big deal is about the electric guitar.’

Bob Arnold looks as though she has stabbed him in the heart.

‘Well, thanks for being frank,’ he says bleakly.

She has provided him with his second drink, poured something for herself, and the two of them are sitting in a pale cone of light at the corner of the bar, while around them other drinkers settle into snoring, lumpen stupors, and the manager contemplates going home and leaving Kate to lock up.

‘Well,’ says Bob wearily, but with patience, as though he’s explained all this stuff a million times before but still thinks it worthwhile to explain it again, ‘the thing is: the electric guitar is a conduit. It connects with pain and passion, with inspiration and aspiration, with sound waves and electrical charge, with technology and history, with industry and the heart.’

‘Oh,’ says Kate, strikingly aware that she may be out of her depth here, or more specifically that she has fallen into conversation with a serious guitar bore. He wouldn’t be the first to have bent her ear. However, Bob’s take on things seems a little more interesting than those she’s suffered through before.

He says, ‘The electric guitar is a strange combination of electronics and mechanics. The simple movement of the fingers is translated by electricity into sound.

‘An electric guitar has pickups. The pickup consists of a magnet or magnetic pole pieces surrounded by a wire coil. When a steel string vibrates within the magnetic field it induces a current in the coil. That electric signal is sent out of the guitar along a lead to an amp and speakers. Jenny Slade and I always like to think it has something in common with chaos theory, but I won’t trouble you with that now.’

‘Thanks,’ says Kate.

He continues. ‘The unamplified acoustic guitar has always been a rather quiet, impotent sort of thing. It was OK for folk singers or country blues singers, or even to accompany flamenco dancers, but put it up against a full jazz band or the Benny Goodman Orchestra and it becomes pretty well inaudible. So it needed to be louder.

‘There’s a lot of infighting about who invented the electric guitar; Lloyd Loar at Gibson was in with a claim, the guys at Dobro too, but the fact is, nothing much predates the Frying Pan.’

‘Excuse me?’ says Kate.

‘It was a nineteen thirty-one prototype; a long thin guitar neck with a solid circular body, hence the Frying Pan. Arnold Rickenbacker, George Beauchamp, an assistant called Paul Barth, a guitar-maker called Harry Watson, they all had a hand in creating it. It’s said that Beauchamp began by taking the pickup from a Brunswick phonograph and attaching it to a piece of two-by-four with a single string. The pickup translated the vibration of the string and amplified it. Adding five more strings and giving the guitar a more conventional shape was just icing on the cake. The basic principle had been established.

‘By nineteen thirty-two Rickenbacker was manufacturing the Electro Spanish guitar, a perfectly modern looking piece of gear with f holes and fancy volume and tone controls, but the pickup is exactly like on the Frying Pan.’

Bob is aware that some of this may be a little technical for his listener, but she did ask for it, and he would never dream of talking down to a person just because she worked behind a bar. And besides it’s so much easier to talk about history and technology than it is to talk about what’s really breaking his heart.

‘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.