Flesh Guitar (20 page)

‘Some other men
are very fancy, full of technique and finesse, as though they've read all the books and practised all the moves, but when it comes to the real thing there's no passion there, just a lot of twiddling and showing off to no purpose. What do you think, Jimi?'

He smiles again, a little embarrassed by what he knows he's about to tell her.

‘Well,' he says, ‘personally, I like to jam and, basically, I'll jam with just about anyone, and once I start jammin' it just goes on and on, hour after hour, sometimes all night long. It gets very free form, very wild, very experimental. I like to get into whole new areas that I've never explored before. I like to try things that I never knew I was capable of. Sometimes it mightn't work out exactly right, but that's cool. I haven't had too many complaints except maybe from the neighbours who start beating on the walls telling me to “keep it down in there”, whereas I just want to keep it up.'

He laughs a roguish, boyish laugh and Jenny's inclined to go with it, to be gentle on him, but that's really not what she's there for.

‘On the other hand, Jimi, I've never seen too many women in your backing bands.'

‘Huh?'

‘You know, women keyboard players, women drummers, women bass players. Women who are good for something other than undressing and putting on your album cover.'

‘Like I say, I'll play guitar with anyone.'

‘Anyone so long as they've got a dick. You're not telling me you couldn't find a woman who played bass better than Billy Cox, better than Noel Redding.'

‘Shit, I don't know.
Guys are good for playing in bands with. Chicks are good for other things.'

‘You know, Jimi, one day soon this kind of talk will sound very sexist.'

‘What's that mean?'

‘It's a seventies word, Jimi, a seventies concept, but not one that you're going to have to worry too much about.'

‘Well, thank God for that.'

‘The seventies is going to be a very strange decade for Jimi Hendrix.'

She can see him bristle. Strange is normal where Jimi comes from. He wants the future to be less strange, more structured, more you know, composed.

‘Hey,' he says, ‘the seventies is going to be a
great
decade for me. I got big plans. I'm going to make some serious music, some serious collaborations, maybe work with Miles Davis, Gil Evans, maybe play with Jeff Beck and John McLaughlin (John's a real spiritual cat), and Eric, of course. Going to make lots of albums, lots of money, put it all together, make a lot of number one hits.'

‘The number one hit, yes, you'll have that,' Jenny says cheerfully. ‘Thirteen weeks on the chart. The rest of it, I'm afraid not.'

‘What you talking about? Who are you to be afraid for me? Who are you anyway? You talk too much to be a groupie. You a fucking journalist or something? You trying to bring me down? You some kind of devil woman?'

‘As popularized
in song?' she says. ‘You and Robert Johnson, two of a kind. No, I'm no devil woman. I'm just someone who can see a bit further into the future than you can.'

‘You a clairvoyant?'

‘No.'

‘Or are you just part of a bad trip? You know, I heard there are drugs can give you crazy powers, like telepathy, like the ability to see the future.'

‘Drugs are going to kill you, Jimi.'

‘Nah, not me. The others. I'm strong. I can take anything.'

‘It's OK,' says Jenny. ‘A lot of people won't mind you being dead at all. They'll love you for being dead. The seventies, the eighties, the nineties, they're all going to be good decades for James Marshall Hendrix. There'll be lots of respect, adulation, big record sales. There just won't be any more music. Not new music anyway, not by you.'

Jimi looks troubled. He's talked to people who've taken acid and seen visions of their own death. 'Course they ain't necessarily accurate, but it's still scary.

‘But a lot of people are going to like that too,' Jenny continues. ‘There's nothing like a completed oeuvre to bring out the scholars. But it won't only be scholars. Every guy who ever picks up a guitar is going to try to play the riff from “Purple Haze”, and the fact is an awful lot of them are going to get it note-for-note perfect. There are going to be people who spend their whole lives just trying to rip off your sound.'

‘You're really starting to bring me down, you know that?' Jimi says.

‘I can see how that might happen, Jimi, yes.'

He shudders. He feels a
twinge as though someone has snapped a cold guitar string across his back. He doesn't know who this woman is, whether she's flesh or the product of his own mind, but he knows that in some vital sense she's for real. She has a gift, the gift of prophecy, just like in the songs, the legends. This feels like a chillingly authentic blues moment, but also modern, all tuned in with drugs and outer space, stars spangling in the black velvet sky, dead stars, multiple moons. Shit, he's starting to drift away. He hauls himself back.

‘You're here to tell me I'm about to die,' he says, just to get this whole thing absolutely clear.

‘Yes,' she says.

‘And there's nothing I can do about it, right? No penance. No restitution, no second chance.'

‘That's it.'

‘Boy, that's heavy,' he says.

He thinks, then starts to giggle.

‘Hey, maybe you can answer some questions for me.' And suddenly he's wide-eyed and eager for information. ‘Is there sex after death? Are there guitars in heaven? Is music like the thing that makes sense of the universe?'

She hasn't the heart to tell him she hasn't the faintest idea, so she tries to be mysterious and says, ‘You'll have the answers soon enough.'

Jimi is not deterred. He says, ‘Up there you can probably play like for eternity, right? Guitar solos can go on from now until the end of time. I'll get to jam with Charlie Christian and Robert Johnson and all those great guys. Yeah, and new arrivals all the time. I'll eventually get to jam with guys from the future. Play riffs that haven't even been invented yet. Wow. Hey, I'm really getting into this.'

And he starts to laugh
and laugh, gets the real giggles, the stoned version that makes no sense but keeps going till it hurts, the cosmic joke, the ultimate laugh track.

‘Hey,' he says between bursts of laughter, ‘you know there's not much you can tell me about death. I've played the Wolverhampton Gaumont. I've been on tour with the Walker Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck. Hey, I think there's a song in that, if I could just get this guitar in tune, if I could just get a piece of paper. If I could just wake up.'

Suddenly the room looks dark and he feels all alone. Wasn't there something she was supposed to ask him? His advice for the aspiring guitarist. He has no answer. He knows it has to do with blackness and anger and sex and violence and Vietnam and the ghetto and, yeah, well maybe it's as well she didn't ask. He can tell there are going to be no more songs, no more jams, no guitar solos. Bile wells up in his throat, vomit comes heaving up from his stomach, fills his mouth, his nose, his very being. When he wakes up next morning he finds himself dead.

So the film got made. They kept
changing the title. It went from
Pluck!
to
Twang!
to
Valley of the Plank-Spankers,
compromising with the rather dour title
Plec.
They did a lot of test screenings, messed around with the ending, unable to decide whether the climax should be the heat death of the universe or a song-and-dance number, finally choosing the latter.

Responses were surprisingly good. ‘Cool to the max,' was the most frequent comment from white middle-class youth in the cineplexes. A review on the Internet said it was a ‘string-driven masterpiece'. The London
Daily Telegraph
called it a ‘spirited, youth-orientated extravaganza'. None of these sources said anything at all about the way the actors held their plectrums.

But these were amateur opinions; for a more specialized and authoritative opinion one would naturally have to turn to the
Journal of Sladean Studies.

Review of
Plec
by Bob Arnold

The opening scene says it all. We're in a plectrum factory, a sweatshop, somewhere in the Third World, somewhere cheap, clean and super-efficient. White-coated workers stand by as gigantic, soulless machines stamp out plectrums
by the million. The camera moves along the production line and we see the little plastic suckers being sorted, separated, boxed, despatched. This is a far more significant sequence than the film-makers know. It sets exactly the right tone for a movie that is mechanical, soulless and far too neatly packaged.

Wiser critics than I have raised doubts about the wisdom of selecting the plectrum as a suitable subject for a high-budget three-hour mass-entertainment movie. If the idea sounds tired and jejune, then in Howie Howardson the producers have found a director who was perfectly in tune with the material.

Following the factory sequence we're immediately plunged into Greek antiquity, Lesbos year zero to be precise. Classical scholars may find much to intrigue them here, but for the rest of us it's the nude swimming and dancing sequences that are more likely to grab the attention. Those ancient babes sure knew how to do a lot with a little.

The casting of Sappho was always going to be tricky, and Helen Mirren battles gamely with the role without being utterly convincing. Similarly Eddie Murphy does his best with Henry VIII, but his best just isn't good enough. Some of the cast wrestle bravely with their roles, but they all find themselves pinned to the canvas by a lame, witless, anachronistic script. Other members of the cast don't even seem to be trying. Robert De Niro's depiction of Johnny ‘Guitar' Watson suggests that he knows nothing about guitar playing, the blues, or indeed human life on earth.

Strange as it seems, however, especially to me, the one performance that's oddly affecting is that of Trixie Picasso as the young Joan Jett. The scene when her vicious music teacher (edgily played by Dennis Hopper) makes her turn
out her pockets and then mocks the presence of the plectrum sent several tears running down my usually poker face. It's a moment that's almost worth the price of admission on its own, but not quite.

As for Jenny Slade's involvement, well, the actors' plectrum technique is fine, certainly better than their acting technique. If anything Megan Floss looks more at home with a plectrum than Patti Smith ever did. On the other hand, Michael Cutlass's macho posturings with a jumbo acoustic suggest that his real instrument is probably the claw hammer.

But you don't have to be Jenny Slade's number one fan to feel that her talents are utterly wasted on this farrago. Why oh why didn't they ask her to write the music, or even have her appear in the film?

Such music as there is comes courtesy of Tom Scorn. His soundtrack is a mess of bass and drum loops, samples, treated vocals and dodgy retro synths. To add insult to injury, acute listeners will be able to spot a sample from Jenny Slade herself (way back in the mix, uncredited, and no doubt unpaid for), which is used in the Link Wray, speaker-piercing sequence. I hope she sues Scorn and the film's producers for everything they've got, although having made this piss poor movie one suspects and indeed hopes that they've got very little.

Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 9 Issue 2

Death walks with the guitar player. It is there
leaning over her shoulder as she changes strings. It is there lurking behind the PA stacks, or surfing in over the heads of the audience. Death leaves its thick perfume in stinking dressing rooms, in musty, unopened flight cases. Sometimes it is indistinct, unfocused, as unformed and shapeless as a forty-five-minute blues jam, but other times it shapes up, gets its act together, does the business.

Jenny Slade used to say she wished she could have been there on 26 November 1973 when John Rostill of the Shadows was found in his own studio apparently electrocuted by his guitar. The coroner returned an open verdict, but Jenny didn't like things to be that open. She wanted to close the case, to know the full story. Rostill was not the only one. Keith Relf, of the Yardbirds, he too was found dead at home clutching a live guitar, and he didn't even consider himself a guitarist.

But death likes to get away from home, to go on the road, to get on the bus and tour. It has a sense of the big occasion, an unfailing grasp of showbiz. Death enjoys playing to the gallery. All sorts of players, from Gary Thain of Uriah Heep to Bill Wyman and Keith Richards,
have received monster electric shocks on stage, but they all survived. However, death really put on a show on 3 May 1972 with Les Harvey, guitar player in Stone the Crows. He was electrocuted live on stage in front of an audience of 1200 at the Top Rank, Swansea. You can't follow that.

These deaths which are so appropriate, so fitting, so electric, can make the more usual musicians' deaths seem positively tame and beside the point. Drink, drugs, choking on vomit, plane crashes, Aids, even blowing your own head off, somehow they lack the mythic structure of a death that comes to you direct through the very medium that makes the music possible.

And at least it's quick. If nothing else, an early death must surely save you from a long, slow, lingering one. It may not simply be a question of rusting or fading but rather of lasting long enough to fall prey to the old horrors, the old men's illnesses. But few have suffered so badly or so early as Jon Churchill who was diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer's disease when he was barely forty-five years old.

Jon had started out as an exceptionally youthful jazz and big band drummer, but he was young enough and smart enough to reinvent himself as a rock and roller by the time of the Beatles and sixties beat groups. He was much in demand as a session man and though he was too cool ever to name names, he never denied the rumours that he was the drummer on twenty or more Merseybeat hit singles. This despite his having been born and raised in Great Yarmouth.