Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

She throws open the door and walks into an end-of-the-world watering hole called the Havoc Bar and Grill, a converted research laboratory somewhere on the outer fringes of the metropolis. She is carrying a guitar. Its case looks ordinary enough. It is scuffed and well-travelled, her name — JENNY SLADE — is stencilled on the side, and it has a few old stickers for amp and effects manufacturers, but there is nothing about the case that gives any hint of what’s inside.

The bar’s decor is early post-nuclear holocaust; exposed pipes and ducting, mutilated concrete, buckled metal furniture. The customers might have been specially designed to match. The crowd is male, drunk, aggressive, misogynistic, and adolescent in mind, if not in age. They all lack a certain something: good looks, teeth, fingers, brain cells. Undifferentiated hostility hangs over them like a cloud of swamp gas. Behind the bar a waif-like barmaid does her best to keep the rabble in check, at least while they’re ordering their drinks. The badge on her white T-shirt says she’s called Kate.

One of the drinkers looks at Jenny Slade and says, ‘Hey, the stripper’s arrived,’ but even he knows it’s not a good joke. She doesn’t look at all like a stripper. She doesn’t look much like a guitar player either. Oh sure, she has the beat-up leather jacket and the motorcycle boots. And she has the cheekbones and the mess of wild hair, but she isn’t posing as some kind of guitar heroine. She isn’t playing at being tough. She looks strong but not hard-bitten. She looks self-possessed and able to take care of herself, but that hasn’t destroyed’ an essential sensitivity and vulnerability, even a fragility. Jenny looks over her feral audience and smiles. She’s played far more difficult rooms than this one.

She can’t remember a time when she didn’t play the guitar. She was the kind of kid who sat alone in Dad’s garage, yanking weird noise out of a plywood cheese-grater guitar. That might have been considered a strange thing for a good-looking teenage girl to be doing, but she had always been far beyond that kind of suburban nonsense.

Even back then she liked to think of herself as a relentless experimentalist. She employed what she only learned later was called ‘extended technique’. She could play conventionally enough when the gig required it, but at other times she attacked the guitar with hammers, box spanners, nail guns, adzes, spokeshaves. She would dangle house keys, six-inch nails, rusty razor blades, spark plugs, nipple clamps, from the strings. She loved feedback, distortion, sheer noise. She liked to abuse both guitar and equipment. She knew this wasn’t going to get her into the charts but it made her happy, and if it didn’t always make her audiences happy that was OK, since for a long time she seldom had an audience.

She orders a beer from the barmaid and props the guitar case against the bar. The manager of the Havoc, a bald, bearded ex-biker, comes over and asks, ‘What kind of axe you got in there?’

‘It’s custom made.’

‘Yeah? Can you play it?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ she says.

‘Tell you what,’ he says, with what he takes to be a devilish glint in his eyes, ‘the beer’s on the house if you can get up on the stage and keep my customers entertained for a couple of numbers.’

‘Oh, I can do that, ’ she says, and her face says that she can do a lot more besides.

The barman tells her she can plug into an old Brand X ten-watt amplifier, miked into the house PA. He admits it isn’t an ideal arrangement, but it’s fine by her. She knows that in the end it isn’t a matter of equipment.

By now the crowd is taking quite an interest. They’re too hip in their malevolence actively to taunt her, but they leave their seats and the pool table, and they crowd in around the bar’s tiny stage, their body language challenging her to impress them.

She stands on the stage, looking suddenly much smaller and younger. She still hasn’t taken the guitar out of its case, but now she snaps open the clasps. There’s a noise like a sigh, and a wisp of what looks like steam, or maybe even hot breath, billows from the case.

She reaches inside and takes out this thing. Well yes, you’d have to admit it was a guitar, but none of these drinkers, these lovers of good ol’ rock and roll, has ever seen one like this before. The neck is made out of some kind of unnaturally lustrous metal, so shiny it almost has a glow to it. It is long and thick, and convincingly phallic. The strings run along its length, ultra light, ultra malleable, and end at the machine heads in a lethal-looking tangle of spikes and cogs and chains.

But this is the orthodox bit of the guitar. It’s the body that defies belief. It is shaped like an amoeba, which is to say that it’s curvy but essentially shapeless; and it appears at first glance to be made out of some sort of tan-coloured plastic. But the more you look, the less it appears to be plastic at all. In fact it looks more like a piece of soft, private flesh, and in places there are growths of hair bursting out in thick, black, irregular tufts. There are blemishes that on a piece of wood might look like knots, but here they look disturbingly like nipples, and the pickups look like three parallel bands of livid scar tissue.

‘Hey, what do you call that sucker?’ someone yells.

‘I call it a guitar,’ Jenny Slade answers quietly.

She straps it on, this instrument that looks part deadly weapon and part creature from some alien lagoon. She plugs a lead into a deep orifice in the thing’s surface, and the bar manager takes the other end of the lead and runs it into the amp.

Without tuning up she grabs the neck at the seventh fret, holds down a fairly straightforward-looking chord, and picks out a lazy arpeggio with her plectrum hand. Well, the guitar isn’t in standard tuning, that’s for sure. The chord contains all kinds of weird harmonies, unisons, octaves, diminished sevenths, augmented fourths, suspended ninths. In fact it sounds like the richest, most complicated chord anyone has ever heard. And that guitar has absolutely incredible sustain. She’s barely touched the strings and yet the whole room is filled with that dense, ringing, fluid sound. It’s not so very loud, yet it demands absolute attention. It isn’t a sound you could dance to exactly but it sure keeps you on your feet.

And as the music hangs in the air the guitar tone is not a wholly pleasant sound. It has elements of feedback in it, elements of white noise, of grunge and skronk. And yet it remains listenable and utterly compelling. Nobody’s walking out of this performance.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when somebody comes on stage and makes horrible noise with, say, a saxophone, the audience tends to dismiss the performance as ‘just a load of fucking about’. Whereas when somebody comes on stage and makes horrible noise with an electric guitar, the audience is far more likely to say, ‘Holy moly! Ruined cities of sonic mayhem! Give me more!’ One day Jenny thinks she may come to understand the reason for this, but for now she’s happy just to take advantage of the fact.

She might have stayed a bedroom guitarist all her life if it hadn’t been for a dream she had. It was the last of a series. Often these dreams were full of frustration; she would be on stage playing an electric guitar in front of an audience and something would always be wrong. Sometimes she couldn’t get the guitar in tune, sometimes it was too quiet to be heard, sometimes the lead from the guitar to the amplifier was too short to be usable.