Flesh Guitar (16 page)

Oh dear, she thinks, the drink's getting to him. Neverthe less she tries to think through the analogy and even though it seems a needlessly opaque one, with much to be said on both sides, she decides he means yes.

Bob says, ‘There's a story, almost certainly apocryphal, of a naive young man who decided he wanted to play the electric guitar. So he went into a guitar shop and bought one. He took it home, strummed it, fiddled with all the knobs but couldn't get any sound out of it. Where was the
sturm and drang
he was looking for? Where was the volume? Where was the skronk? Nowhere, because he didn't realize that you need an amplifier and some speakers before you can get any proper sound out of an electric guitar.

‘Instead, in his ignorance, he made the simple observation that his guitar wasn't plugged in yet, that in fact the shop had sold him the guitar without any plug at all. It was now the evening, and too late to go back to the shop and demand the missing plug, so he decided to rig something up for himself. He took a length of electric flex, attached a domestic plug to one end and a jack plug to the other, shoved the jack into the guitar, the plug into the live wall socket and stood helplessly by as his guitar rapidly self-destructed in a shower of sparks and flames.

‘That guitar was truly electric, and the chances are it made a pretty unique sound as it died. But that isn't what we normally mean by electric guitar.'

‘Hey, I'm not stupid, you know,' Kate protests. ‘I've taken on board all the stuff about pickups and magnetic fields.'

He's impressed. ‘All right. I didn't mean to insult you. I said before that life is like a guitar solo. But it's also like an electric guitar itself. That's because it's expensive, not necessarily all that pretty, surprisingly fragile and all too likely to go out of tune. It's also far too easy to fetishize and get over-attached to, and then some bastard is only too likely to take it away from you. You know what I mean?'

‘I think so.'

‘Some
people give their guitars names. They call them “Lucille” and silliness like that.'

‘Always women's names?'

‘Not always, no.'

‘I'm glad. That was quite some guitar Jenny Slade was playing tonight. Even I could tell that.'

‘Yes, it's special. I can tell you the date and place where she first used it if you like.'

‘No thanks.'

He's a little disappointed not to be able to further demonstrate his expertise but he lets it go.

‘Like most guitarists,' he says,‘Jenny tried a lot of different guitars before she found the one that suited her.'

‘Does Jenny Slade have a name for her guitar?'

Bob looks at her mysteriously. It's a banal question, yet it's more telling than she realizes.

‘If it had a name,' he says, ‘it would be called “Greg”. “Greg Wintergreen”.'

‘What kind of name is that?'

He reaches into one of his bags and comes up with another copy of the
Journal of Sladean Studies.

‘This will explain everything.'

‘More post-modernism?'

‘Post-modern and almost certainly apocryphal.'

‘I can hardly wait.'

Greg Wintergreen woke
from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into an electric guitar. He was lying on his back, which was of a lacquered hardness, and when he lifted his headstock a little he became aware of his belly with scratch plate and tremolo arm. His strings, of a pitifully light gauge, vibrated ineffectually.

What's going on? he thought.

This was no dream. His room, a normal human room except perhaps a little too small to allow him to play electric guitar at the volume he would have liked, lay peacefully between the four familiar walls. Above the table, which was littered with guitar tutors, CDs and guitar magazines, hung the picture he had recently cut out of a magazine and stuck to the wall. It showed Bonnie Raitt cradling her trademark blue Stratocaster.

Greg's attention shifted to the window. Raindrops hit the glass in a loose four-four beat, and he felt as though he finally knew what the blues were all about. Why don't I go back to sleep and maybe I'll dream about turning into Stevie Ray Vaughan instead, he thought, but somehow he knew this was going to be impossible.

He heard the voices of
his mother, father and sister outside the door of his room, all urging him to get up.

‘Greg, you'll be late for work. Again,' his mother shouted. He tried to reply and gave a start when he heard the sound of his own voice; unmistakably his, but blended with it was the sound of a humbucking pickup. Fortunately he was plugged in to a small practice amp. ‘I'll be right down,' he said musically.

The strangeness of his voice went unnoticed. Perhaps his family thought he was having an early-morning guitar practice. Such things were not unknown.

In truth he did want to get up, get dressed, go downstairs, and he thought that when he'd done those things he might be able to consider his plight more rationally. But having no arms or legs he could see that these simple tasks were likely to prove impossible. He stayed where he was, silent and immobile, and glad that he'd locked his bedroom door before going to sleep the previous night.

He lay there a long time and heard various comings and goings in the house, and then his sister came to the door and informed him in a whisper, ‘The shop manager's here.' Greg worked in a music shop and his manager had agreed to stop by and give him a lift into work this morning since it was stocktaking day and they needed an early start.

‘Greg, it's Frank here,' the manager shouted cheerily through the door. ‘Is this a wind-up or what? I know the tills have been short lately, but I never thought you was the culprit. And then there was that bit of bother over the echo unit you took in a part-exchange deal; all right, so it was nicked, but I still thought you was an honest lad. However, now I find you're taking the piss and you're making me have second thoughts.'

Greg tried to speak and this time it appeared they could no longer understand him. All they could hear was the sound of a guitar.

‘This is no time
to be practising your scales!' Greg's father yelled, and he yanked the door handle as hard as he could and succeeded in breaking the flimsy lock.

Father, mother, sister and music-shop manager entered the bedroom.

‘All right, I'll get up, I'll come to work, if someone can only give me a hand,' Greg said plaintively.

But again nobody understood him. They gathered round and stared down at the electric guitar lying there on the duvet, and they were terrified and speechless. True, a guitar lying on a bed was not in itself terrifying, but as they looked at its frets, its machine heads, at the grain of the body, at the general patina of the thing, there could be no doubt that this musical instrument before them was their own Greg Wintergreen.

The shop manager fled the house, saying he mustn't be late for stocktaking, and Greg's father too said he had an important meeting that he couldn't afford to miss. Even Greg's mother and sister slipped from the room, closing the door hurriedly and firmly behind them. Greg fell into a feverish sleep.

Not until dusk did he wake again. The room had been tidied and was warm, and someone had left a tray of food for him. It was a thoughtful gesture but a futile one. Even if he'd been hungry, which he was not, by what possible means could he have consumed the food?

More helpfully, he was aware that someone had tuned his strings but he had been unplugged from the practice amp. He hummed to himself thinly and very quietly in a lochrian mode, but not for too long. He didn't want to disturb his family any further. All evening he could hear their voices downstairs and he didn't doubt that they were talking about him, but they went to bed without coming in to bid him goodnight.

Next morning his sister returned to the bedroom, took away the untouched tray and came back with guitar polish and a cloth and began to buff the surface of Greg's body. His father and mother refused to come near, although he did overhear a conversation in which his father referred to his son as a layabout and said that things were going to be considerably harder for the family without Greg's wage coming in. They seemed already resigned to the fact that Greg's transformation was permanent. It took Greg much longer to accept that.

As the days passed, his sister continued to administer to him but there was a growing reluctance about it and he soon realized that she found the sight of him unbearable, as though she were looking at a corpse or a mummy. Not long after that she arrived carrying a guitar case and placed Greg inside it to spare herself the torment of having to look at him.

His mother and father came at last to see their transformed son. It was traumatic for both of them, and perhaps specially so for his father, who in a fit of grief-stricken rage picked Greg up and yanked at his strings until he'd broken three of them. One of the strings snapped at him, whipped the back of his hand and left him with a long, red cut. It took Greg's sister a lot of effort to dissuade their father from chopping Greg up there and then for firewood.

What point was there in
tuning a guitar with only three strings? What point in polishing it? What point in even opening the case? Greg's sister began to neglect him. She did not come to clean his room and it soon began to gather dust, and for a time it became a depository for old boxes and pieces of furniture not wanted in the rest of the house.

But then Greg's
mother decided that since Greg was no longer making much use of his room she might as well rent it out. The lodger she found was a bearded, duffle-coat-wearing saxophonist, leader of a jazz trio. Like many jazz players he was rather dismissive of the electric guitar and certainly didn't want one cluttering up his room. So Greg was moved into the living room, where for a brief time he lived behind the television set, propped up against the hostess trolley, but when Greg's father developed the theory that the guitar's presence was affecting television reception, Greg was moved again, taken out of the body of the house and condemned to a damp corner of the utility room.

Greg was now apparently well out of the way, and yet he was still a grim reminder to the family of their own dysfunctional state.

‘It has to go,' Greg's sister said, with resolve. ‘It's the only way. We must try to stop thinking of it as Greg. The Greg we know is gone forever. I'll take it to some second-hand music shops and try to sell it.'

She began at the store where Greg himself had worked, but Frank, the manager, took one look at the guitar and said he didn't want that thing in his shop. And so it went at other music shops. Although the buyers couldn't quite put their finger on what was wrong with the guitar, or why they wouldn't take it off her hands, they all made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the instrument.

In despair Greg's sister explained her plight to the family's lodger. Was there perhaps someone in his circle of musicians who could find a use for an old but little-used electric guitar? He was not optimistic but came back later and said there was a band called the Flesh Guitars who could probably make use of Greg, although of course he had not mentioned to them the guitar's anthropomorphic nature. A deal was agreed.

It was at a time in
musical history when Jenny Slade and the Flesh Guitars were in their most nihilistic, confrontational phase. It was a period when they were getting through guitars at a frightening rate, smearing them with pig's intestines, attacking them with strimmers, electric sanders, caulking irons, beating them against walls, floors, ceiling, and finally smashing them to pieces against the speaker cabinets of the PA. The semi-naked bass player might then rub her crotch with fragments of the guitar neck in a mood of Dionysian abandon.

It was not what any self-respecting family would have wanted for their son. Fortunately Jenny Slade knew a good instrument when she saw one. She played a couple of chords on it and saw at once that it was too good to abuse and destroy. She wanted that guitar, and wild horses wouldn't have taken it from her. Naturally, Jenny would have been a great guitarist whatever guitar she used, but there was something about the Greg Wintergreen guitar that was perfectly suited to her technique. It became her main instrument, and she never looked back.

Reprinted from the
Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 8 Issue 3

Perhaps after the fiasco of
their ‘tour' and the Psychology Club gig Jenny Slade should have stayed well clear of Tom Scorn, and no doubt she would have if he hadn't kept coming up with such weird and exciting music. She had watched with fascination as he changed from a young, naive upstart into a major player in the world of experimental music. He met up with Jenny again while waiting for a plane to fly to the Greenland Thrash Elevator Festival, where they were both making guest appearances.

Dispensing with pleasantries he slid a tape into a DAT player and asked Jenny to listen. She had never heard anything quite like the noises that came out. There was lots of space and silence, great pools of inky stillness in which there was little or no music, but then there would be an explosion of percussion or a streak of dissonant piano chords followed by more silence. Next there would be a thud of bass guitar noise, again brief stabs and attacks of sound, music wrestled out of the very craw of the instrument, followed perhaps by the thin rasp of a high hat, then silence again.

‘Check out that extended technique,' Scorn blurted, ‘that non-canonical praxis.'

He was right. Jenny
could hear that conventional technique had been discarded. Notions of good playing had been sent packing, and yet there was something compelling in the music. For all that the music rejected the easy pleasures, it drew you in and was surprisingly easy to listen to.

‘It's something special,'Jenny said. ‘Who is it?'