Flesh Guitar (14 page)

Bob Arnold reviews a Jenny Slade gig to cherish

The Psychology Club takes
place on
alternate Thursdays in a disused missile silo in Kent. Audiences are small but discerning. Improvisation is the name of the game; improvisation along with subversion, aural mayhem and cheap guitar thrills.

Last Thursday Tom Scorn and Jenny Slade premiered a new untitled piece, a work for computer, voice and guitar. There was talk that the pair had fallen out in the past over artistic differences, but on this occasion the hatchet seemed to be well and truly buried.

Scorn has always been as much into language as music, and on this occasion he vocalized while Jenny played her flesh guitar. In front of Scorn was a small computer programmed to create an endless stream of words and phrases, maybe even whole sentences, but using only the letters ABCDEF and G – the letters that correspond to the notes of western music. Sharps and flats were out. Scorn was to shout out this computer-generated language and Jenny would play their musical equivalents.

Jenny was free to choose where on the neck of the guitar and in which octave to play the notes. She was also free to decide whether notes were to be plucked, hammered on, pulled off, or played as harmonics. She could also determine the length of the notes, the time signature if appropriate, the degree of attack or sustain, the tone of the guitar, the effects used.

Simple words were
obviously easy enough to translate into music notes, words like ‘dad' and ‘bed'. But some of the longer configurations would clearly be trickier, not only remembering and playing the notes, but also trying instantly to give the notes an intonation, a meaning that corresponded to the content of the language. Fortunately Jenny has always liked a challenge.

The audience settled, the lights went down and Tom Scorn tapped his computer. He peered at the tiny screen for a moment and then started. It was simple enough at first, just shouting out a few apparently random words. ‘Egad,' he shouted. ‘Gee! Ace! Fab!'

Jenny played the corresponding notes. Then it got a little tougher.

Perhaps remembering his art school background Scorn was heard to shout, ‘Dada! Dada! Dada! Dada!'

Jenny played right along, and then it was as though Scorn were ordering food.

‘Egg!' he shouted. ‘Egg! Cabbage! Egg!'

‘A misty incomprehension settled over the audience, so Scorn addressed them directly. ‘Deaf?' he enquired of several members of the front row. ‘Deaf? Deaf?' and of the last person, ‘Dead?'

And then he and the computer were off on a continuous, if only intermittently coherent, narrative.

‘A café. A faded facade. Ed, a cad, cadged a fag. Ada, a deb, faced a bad decade. Bea, a babe, gagged. Abe bagged a cab.'

And then Scorn, or at least the computer, loosened up no end, and the language became, not gibberish exactly, and not meaningless either, but Scorn found himself calling a long stream of unconnected words.

‘Abba!' he
shouted. ‘Baa baa. Abed. Abba. Baggage.
Fad
baggage! A gaff? A badge? AC/DC. Gaga! Gaga! Gaga!'

Jenny was clearly doing her best to keep up with Scorn and yet not overtake him. It must have been all too tempting just to let her fingers do the walking and find that she had fallen into cliche, that she was playing some old blues riff.

And then something went terribly wrong with Scorn's computer. The cybernetic needle got stuck and for the next fifteen minutes or so all it came up with was ‘gabba gabba gabba gabba gabba gabba'. The audience became restless. Ever the situationist, Scorn went with the flow and kept shouting the repeated word. Jenny, changing her guitar tone to something raw and fuzzed, had little choice but to follow where he led.

The audience reacted powerfully. Some said it was a superb piece of minimalism. Some said it was like being at a really bad Ramones gig. Others said there was no difference between these two propositions. Who knows how long the piece might have gone on if an audience member, a frail teenager in a gingham dress and flying helmet, fearing for her ears and/ or her sanity, hadn't leapt on stage and unplugged Scorn's computer?

Scorn was outraged and shouted many words that contained letters other than A to G, and stormed from the stage in a queeny fit. Jenny took off her guitar, cocked the tremolo arm, and left it to howl against the speaker, where the feedback note produced was a microtone pitched superbly between G and G#. It was a transcendent moment, one that is unlikely to be repeated in the near future.

Reprinted
from the
Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 6 Issue 2

Nobody ever had to explain
to Jenny Slade the sexual significance and symbolism of the electric guitar. She always knew it was a sexy instrument to touch and to look at, being simultaneously curvy and phallic. But for Jenny it was more than that. It was also a question of language, of vocabulary.

First, there was all that predictable dirty talk about fuzz boxes and truss rods, and ‘spanking the plank' as a euphemism for guitar playing.

Then there were also all those sexy effects: compressors and enhancers, sustainers and flangers. It sounded as though there was a whole world of erotic possibilities among the pitch shifters, swell pedals, digital delays, and something excitingly clandestine in a noise suppressor. There was overdrive and treble boost. There were controls to modify presence, texture, gain, timbre, load impedance. Even a simple change in ‘volume' could sound like a sexy concept if you were in the right mood.

But sex was one thing, love another. Had Jenny Slade ever known true love? (If it's not true then presumably it's not love.) Had she ever known that feeling they celebrate in popular song? She would have said yes, of course, and who was in any position to argue with her?

She understood the
uneasy commerce between ‘real' feelings and the sort people sing about; the description and the prescription. She knew that love songs don't merely describe the things we feel, they also sanction those things which we are capable of feeling. Did anyone ever think all they needed was love until the Beatles told them so? Did they know love was the drug, was blue, or that it came in spurts?

It seemed to her that popular music was best at describing and evoking certain kinds of lust and certain kinds of pain. It did it efficiently, in no time at all. Nobody ever needed a rock opera to say I want you, or I miss you.

Not that this compendium of feeling was necessarily unsophisticated. It asserted, rightly enough, that there are many chapters in the book of love. Yet it seemed to Jenny there were limits. Where was the song that would describe precisely what she had on her mind? It would have to say that she loved sex, was not naturally promiscuous although well aware of its attractions. There'd have to be a verse that said she was open to serious offers but that she feared submitting herself to another person since that other person would make impossible demands on her, would come between her and her guitar playing. And there would have to be a middle eight that compared the horrors of love gone wrong with the horrors of loneliness. Or was she wanting too much, being unnecessarily specific? Was it perhaps only the Everly Brothers she needed? Say ‘Love Hurts' and leave it at that.

She wouldn't have claimed that she had searched unusually long and hard for love, but she had always been alert, she'd always kept an eye open. She was not exactly sure where love and its triggers were to be found: in a body, yes, of course, and in a mind, in an ability to play a musical instrument, and in an attitude, in a certain way of standing on stage, of talking to an audience. Naturally she'd felt the seductiveness of other musicians, their ability to create a beauty that was not quite theirs, that was greater than them. But male musicians were ultimately depressing, too much to prove to themselves and to everyone else. Some of the female ones were a little better. She'd had exciting times with the lead singer of an all-female country and western band, who went so far as to write a song called ‘You Went And Made A Lesbian Outa Me', but that wasn't the real thing either.

Undoubtedly there was such
a thing as rock and roll sex, up tempo, with a back beat, with elements of thrash, in what looked like fancy dress; the familiar items of stage gear, leather jackets, leather trousers, leather bras. Perhaps it was best performed in transitive spaces, dressing rooms, hotel rooms, in the back of limos or vans. Drink and drugs were probably required, music turned up to the point of inaudibility, ideally a tape hot from the mixing desk. And then some paraphernalia, Polaroids, Handicams, silk ropes, plain and fancy sex aids. And maybe it needed more than two players so that it became a group experience, a band experience to be shared with a good number of participants and onlookers. Jenny had been some way down that road but turned back before the end of the cul-de-sac.

And yet alongside this there remained an innocence, or at least a naivety, a youthfulness, a belief that love rejuvenated, that however many miles we have on the clock we're still like teenagers (if not exactly like virgins) when we fall in love (again) with love again, even if we never wanted to.

Or was Jenny's problem
simply that she wasn't a singer? She didn't use words, her own or other people's. She was an instrumentalist and therefore what she expressed was both too abstract and too particular to be reduced to a simple message of love. Her music had ‘meaning' but it wasn't language based. It might convey or recreate or even induce certain feelings in the listener, and those might be erotic, but there was never any narrative element, no story. Could a guitar solo ever convey the same meaning as ‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love', or even as ‘Wooden Heart'?

Wasn't art supposed to be comforting and consoling? Just like love?

He went by the name of Jackie Brando and something clicked for Jenny the moment she saw him. As was often the case with one sort of music fan, he looked more like a rock star than many rock stars. What was it with these male musicians who looked so feminine; the long permed hair, the wearing of silks and velvets, the wearing of make up; what was that all about? And they preened and posed like hookers displaying themselves in a cathouse. Were they trying to get in touch with their feminine side? Jenny didn't think so, but maybe in a groupie it was different, a reversing of power relations.

Jackie Brando wore what looked like a stage outfit, all velvet and shiny, satiny purple with studded leather accessories. His red hair was a pre-Raphaelite dream, and his body was long and willowy. He had a nice smile and nice eyes, and Jenny had been alone and on the road for some time.

Lately she'd found it
easier and less complicated to remain celibate when she was on tour, but sometimes difficulty and complication could be attractive too. She noticed Jackie back stage at a gig in a converted skating rink in Stockholm, and again at the post-gig party, and she was definitely interested.

‘What do you do?' she asked bluntly.

He flashed her a smile and said (and at least he had the good grace to look embarrassed about it), ‘I'm a groupie.'

‘A what?'Jenny asked. The party was loud and she thought she must have misheard, but he repeated it and she realized she hadn't.

‘Groupie guy, that's me. Use me once, then throw me away like an old set of guitar strings.'

At first she assumed he must be gay. There were enough gay or bi, or at least indiscriminate, male rock musicians around to keep him in business. However, that wasn't what he meant at all.

‘I'm a great comfort for the girl bands,' she heard him say. ‘I know what it's like for you girls on the road. You get tired. You get so lonely. I know what you want. I can do massage too. I'm clean, I'm healthy, I've got a good suntan and a flat stomach, what more do you want?'

She looked at him with a mixture of amused contempt and disbelief.

But I'm very discriminating,' he said. ‘I'll only sleep with guitarists. Girl drummers, girl keyboard players, girl saxophonists, they leave me absolutely cold. But a woman with a guitar or bass slung across her body gets me hot as an overloaded amplifier valve.

‘I don't like
to boast, and I wouldn't say I've had them all, but I have references. I have Polaroids. Want to see them?'

Before she could say that wouldn't be necessary he'd whipped out a stack of Polaroids and fanned them out as though they were a pack of cards, and Jenny couldn't help seeing that there were some very famous female faces there, all of them guitar players, many of them undressed, and most of them in advanced stages of sexual arousal.

‘Did you buy these somewhere?'

‘Now you insult me.'

‘Well, I guess you're a good-looking boy but—'

‘Looks have got nothing to do with it,' he insisted. ‘The reason they sleep with me is because I
respect
them. I tell them all I love the way they play guitar, and it's true. I understand what it's like being an axewoman. I know it's not easy. I'm humble and I'm interested. I may even ask them to show me a few clever chops on the guitar. Like I'd ask you how you produced that incredible vibrato on your last number. And women respect me because they know I respect them. I really couldn't sleep with a female guitarist whose playing I didn't respect.

‘I may have been free with my favours, but you know, I've always been true to you in my fashion, Jenny. While ever I was in the hot tub with another I was always thinking about you.'

‘Me?' Jenny snorted.

‘It's absolutely true. I really adore what you do, Jenny. I love the way you play the guitar. If I needed someone to play guitar in order to save my life, you'd be the one I'd pick. But you don't have to feel the same way about me. You don't have to have any feelings at all. I'm happy for you to use me ruthlessly, then boast about it to your friends. It's all right. I won't think any the less of you for it.'