Flesh Guitar (18 page)

‘Or maybe she'll be stretched out atop a stack of amplifiers and speaker cabinets, with tousled hair, a “come and get it” expression in her eyes that the manufacturer hopes the punter will confuse with lust and transfer from the girl to the hardware.

‘Here's to all those
naked girls on the original
Electric Ladyland
cover, to the barely pubescent teeny holding the silver aeroplane on the Blind Faith album. Here's to all the babes on all the Ohio Players albums. Here's to the girl pleasuring herself with a Tokai copy of a Stratocaster in guitar magazine ads, the legend “Tokai is Coming” printed behind her back.

‘I've seen 'em all, bare bodies coiled with guitar strings and guitar leads, naked women posing in front of banks of speakers, plectrums displayed in deep cleavages. I've seen pickups strategically placed on nipples to retain some crass notion of decency, if not dignity. I've seen taut, sweaty bodies creating an objective correlative for the virtues of pedals and stomp boxes. Here's to 'em.'

With a certain reluctance, though with a considerable urge to placate, Kate and Bob drink. Bob knows that Kate is being made uncomfortable by the drunk, and he can see her point all too clearly, though on a different night, in a different bar, he knows he might be proposing similar toasts himself.

The drunk says, ‘Here's to the girls who got their tits out for the lads, who got their tits out so the audience would have something to entertain them while the lead guitarists went into long, laboured solos. Here's to Stacia of Hawkwind, and Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics, and sometimes Grace Slick, and sometimes even Siouxsie Sioux, and certainly P. J. Harvey and definitely Patti Smith.

‘Exploited? Oh come now, surely that's just the name of a band. Here's to ‘em.'

This time Kate doesn't pick up her drink, won't humour the drunk at all, and Bob decides his place is right with her.

‘No, we can't drink to that, I'm afraid,' he says.

For a second the drunk
looks dangerously agitated. Who are these people that think they're too good to drink with him? Maybe he should take one of them outside, probably the guy, though not necessarily, and see what he's made of. Then the booze and tiredness roll in again and he simply can't be bothered.

‘OK,' he says, ‘so
you
propose a toast.'

After due consideration Bob Arnold says, ‘Here's to the
ironic
nude guitar girls. Here's to the Slits all wet mud and atavism. Here's to post-feminist nudity, to the vocalist in Tribe 8 who sings topless wearing a strap-on. Here's to Courtney Love letting it all flop out, having her doll parts mauled by sticky fingers from the moshing pit.

‘And here's, especially, to poor, poor Laurel Fishman, who is remembered, if at all, for having been vaginally penetrated by Steve Vai with his guitar head. The episode is recorded in a particularly nasty song by Frank Zappa. Here's to you, Laurel. Here's to all you girls. You're the genuine article no doubt, the real thing, the live wire. Mind how you go. Forgive us for being young and callow, for being in love with the guitar. It was so much easier than being in love with real women.'

‘OK, I'll drink to that,' says the drunk, and all three of them raise their whiskies.

The drunk's glass is now empty and he seems glad of it. Bob's attempt at a toast was just one more baffling element in this long and befuddled night.

‘Here's to Jenny Slade,' the drunk says thickly, and he waves his empty glass in the air before returning to his table to resume his alcoholic slumbers.

‘Thanks for the
solidarity there, Bob,' Kate says.

‘It's not a problem,' says Bob.

‘I've got nothing against nude guitar girls, you understand,' she says confessionally, ‘just against unpredictable drunks.'

‘Oh well, in that case,' and Bob produces another issue of the
Journal of Sladean Studies
from one of his bags.

Bob Arnold recalls an especially challenging Jenny Slade gig

Lately Jenny Slade has
been denying that she ever made a habit of appearing nude on stage; but anyone who ever saw the Flesh Guitars play the composition ‘Shimmers' (described as ‘a performance piece for more intimate spaces') would surely beg to differ.

The Flesh Guitars were operating as a drummerless six-piece at the time, two men, four women, all of them guitarists. The players were prodigiously gifted unknowns who regarded Jenny Slade with a certain awe, and would willingly have followed her into the darkest regions of guitar hell.

The stage was set with a dozen guitars, a few on floor stands, others suspended on racks at waist level; some were bass guitars, some twelve strings; some were hooked up to multiple effects units. Illumination was kept enticingly low, a swathe of purple light bleeding into shades of coral. The six band members took to the stage, some of them a little tentatively, some with a defiant confidence.

It would take the audience little or no time to realize that all six band members were naked; Jenny Slade included. Her later claims that she wore a flesh-coloured body-stocking simply won't wash. Even the most blasé crowds would be captivated by six nude guitarists. Was it just a cheap gimmick? No. Genuine Jenny Slade fans knew better than that, but even they could have had little idea of what was to come.

As the audience peered more
closely at the musicians, as their eyes got used to the dim light, they would see amid the dappling of line and shadow that there was something unusual, something
extra
about the nudity. It could take a long time to work out precisely what was going on, but sooner or later one would realize that each guitarist's body was spiked in dozens of places by acupuncture needles, all of which had been left
in situ,
their points lodged in the guitarists' flesh.

They moved towards their instruments and positioned themselves before them. They stood an inch or two away. Then, as their bodies moved, acupuncture needles would sway and make metallic contact with the guitar strings. Sometimes several needles would touch different strings or different parts of the strings simultaneously. There would be glistening ripples, glissandos and arpeggios. The sounds produced might be clean and resonant one moment, the next they might be just random scrapes.

The sonic possibilities for six people of different builds and body types performing movements that ranged from the barely perceptible to the downright violent, touching the strings glancingly or furiously as the case might be, with each guitar displaying its own distinctive, musical signature, were all but limitless. Performances could go on for two hours or more, until the performers were physically or creatively exhausted. The piece was so demanding that it remained in the Flesh Guitars' repertoire for less than six months.

Only one, rather
inadequate bootleg recording exists of ‘Shimmers'. It is not much prized by collectors, whereas a pirate video of a performance at a private party in a converted corned beef factory in Rio de Janeiro has been known to change hands for staggeringly high prices. Jenny Slade, despite her denials, has never looked better.

Reprinted from the
Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 7 Issue 4

‘Guess who
invented the plectrum?'

The question was fired at Jenny Slade by a famous Hollywood movie producer, Howie Howardson by name, a member of the new Hollywood, the very new Hollywood. He appeared to her as a series of slurred fashion statements: cowboy boots, a soul patch, an orange crew-cut, a turquoise ring as big as a gull's egg, a waistcoat made of giant fish scales, sunglasses in the shape of ultra-wide cinema screens.

‘No idea,' Jenny replied.

‘Go on, guess,' Howardson said with boyish enthusiasm.

‘Will Scarlet,' she offered fatuously.

‘No, not even warm,' Howardson replied. ‘It was Sappho. Goddamn Sappho invented the plectrum. How about that?'

‘I didn't know that,' Jenny admitted.

‘But you've heard of Sappho. Am I right?'

‘Yes.'

‘So I don't have to tell you she was this major Greek, lyre-playing lipstick lezzie. She plucked the strings, she pulled the babes. There's a vase painting or some damn thing that proves she was the first-ever plectrum user.'

‘That's incredible,' Jenny
said, trying to show a willingness to be impressed.

‘I'm just telling you this information so you'll have some idea of the depth of research that's gone into this project.'

Ah yes, the project. Jenny knew she must have been flown here for a reason, even if that reason had yet to be revealed. The office was in a converted fall-out shelter, a long, low-ceilinged tunnel with white concrete walls. Here Howardson displayed his love of art and electricity; the walls were hung with early Paolozzis, Gwen Johns, late Rosenquists, a couple of Frank Stellas, some important Braques. And these canvases were interspersed with and lit by neon shop signs, illuminated petrol pumps, barber's poles, lamps in the shapes of fish, dragons, Swiss chalets, chandeliers hung low with bunches of mutated grapes and ping-pong balls. It hurt the eyes to look at it all. Perhaps that was why Howardson wore such impenetrable shades.

‘Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself,' he said. ‘First thing I ought to say is that we love your work. We're passionate about it. I especially loved your music video, the one where you've got the big supermarket set and it looks as though it's being filmed by a security camera. It has a fabulous retro look. And there's no posing, none of that lousy over-acting you get in so many videos.'

Jenny quietly said, ‘Thank you,' and tactfully didn't point out to him that it was no ‘set' at all but a real supermarket and that the retro security camera look was achieved by using an actual modern security camera, and the lack of posing was because you don't need to pose very much when you're doing your shopping. Still, what did it matter so long as he liked it, so long as he
said
he liked it?

‘You remember when you were
at school?' Howardson asked, getting down to business now. ‘I guess it's the same in England, how they'd get you to write the life story of a penny and you'd have to track it from being pressed, going in and out of the bank, through all the pockets and purses of the people who owned it, through slot machines and one-armed bandits till it finally fell into a drain. Or maybe you remember those portmanteau movies like
The Yellow Rolls-Royce
where the film tells the story of everyone who had the car. Well, we want to do the same with a plectrum.'

Jenny struggled to keep her composure in the face of this absurdity. She attempted to remain alert and interested-looking but she feared she might be failing.

‘First scene shows Sappho playing her axe,' said Howard-son, ‘which is actually some sort of harp, but that could be changed. So she has a few adventures but eventually she dies, and the plectrum goes missing for a thousand years or so, and then suddenly Henry the Eighth is using it at Hampton Court to play “Greensleeves” on a lute. Centuries later it turns up in Chicago being used by Muddy Waters, then before long it finds its way to Vegas where it's used by Elvis. He hands it to someone in the audience who gives it to Johnny Thunders who's so stoned he drops it and only years later is it rediscovered by Joe Satriani, or maybe Sheryl Crow, or whoever's hottest when we finally cast this thing.

‘So you see, the possibilities are literally endless. Great moments in plectrum history, past, present and future. There'll be a script real soon. Yeah, and we're also really keen to have a sci-fi element set in the future. Maybe some twenty-first-century teenager finds the plectrum, but the electric guitar has died out by then and he doesn't know what it is, so he goes to the local museum, steals an old Gibson, and the rest you can guess. So what do you say, Jenny, are you interested?'

‘Yes,' she said with
all the feigned enthusiasm she could muster. She knew this was no time for reservations; she could have those later. ‘You mean you want me to compose the music for the film?'

Howardson moved uneasily in his chair, twirled his rings around his fingers a couple of times. At last he said, ‘Well, that's a possibility, Jenny, although I have to admit it wasn't a possibility we'd actually thought of. We had someone else kind of pencilled in for that job. More what we had in mind was for you to be the film's plectrum consultant.'

Jenny gawped.

He continued, ‘You see, a lot of big-name actors and actresses are crying out to be in this movie, and most of them have scarcely even
seen
a plectrum before. They sure as hell won't know how to hold one. That's where you come in; to make their plectrum use look authentic. Don't worry, we're gonna get somebody else to deal with the fretting hand.'

Jenny leaned back, stared fixedly at a lamp in the shape of a bison and said nothing. She was aware that for the first time she actually had Howardson's attention.

‘I could pick up that bison lamp,' she said, ‘and I could run it along my guitar neck, pull it across the strings and, hey presto, suddenly it would be a plectrum.'

‘I see,' Howardson said, utterly uncomprehending but still upbeat.

‘A plectrum is what
a plectrum does,' Jenny went on. ‘Thurston Moore shoves a drum stick into his strings and turns the drum stick into a plectrum. Tom Verlaine saws at his strings with a metal file. Reeves Gabrels coaxes noise out of his guitar using a vibrator.

‘Whether it's a piece of plastic, a length of steel pipe, or an electric angle-grinder they're all conceptually and functionally performing the role of the plectrum. When some poodle-head guitarist rubs his guitar with his crotch, he's saying that even the mighty phallus can be reduced to the status of a plectrum. Sappho might have had a lot to say about that.'