Flesh Guitar (6 page)

‘You probably heard about Tubby demanding to appear on stage with us, and in one way
I thought he had a point, because obviously he was vital to the act; it was just that he looked like such a prat on stage. I mean he was completely unmusical. He couldn't dance, couldn't even play a tambourine. He made us look stupid.

‘But he was a pussycat compared to my lead guitarist. I know you've got to have plenty of ego in this business and I know that being cheered ecstatically by thousands of people every night must do strange things to your head, but he was ridiculous. He really thought he was the best guitarist who'd ever lived. He really did think he was God and Eric Clapton all rolled into one. He never twigged that it had anything to do with the drug. The worst part of it was that if I happened to be on Bliss at the time I'd think he was right. When the drug wore off, I tried telling him that audiences would have reacted the same way if he'd been a well-trained monkey up there, but he just didn't get it.

‘And the rest of the band weren't much better. They got to the stage where they'd only play if the audience was drugged up. They were scared of playing to a straight audience, to anyone who might have their critical faculties intact. They forced me to cancel gigs when Tubby hadn't managed to mix up enough Bliss to get the whole audience loaded.'

Jed shook his head at the terrible memory.

‘Still,' said Jenny, ‘it can't have been all bad, playing to such adoring audiences.'

‘Yeah, on balance I was happy enough but the record company weren't.'

‘No?'

‘No, because none of the buggers who
came to the gigs ever bought any recordings. Maybe they knew it was only a live experience, or maybe one or two had actually bought our records, listened to them and realized they were no good without the drug. I suggested we give away free samples of Bliss with every album, but the record company didn't like that at all.

‘So an A&R man took Tubby aside and said to him, couldn't he redesign this drug of his a little so that the effect lasted, either permanently or at least until the punters had bought the CD, taken it home and played it a few times. And couldn't he maybe change the drug so that instead of reacting to raucous guitar noise, the audiences would react instead to strings or middle-of-the-road vocal harmonies. Tubby said he'd see what he could do, but then, of course, the penny dropped. The record company bosses realized they could do without me and the rest of the band. All they needed was Tubby and his drugs. If they could get the right drug to the audience they could put out any old crap and people would still love it and buy it.

‘So Tubby Moran, the quisling, got a ten-year “production” deal, and I understand he's going to be working with some very exciting Vegas lounge acts. My lead guitarist decided to go solo and now he plays every night to completely indifferent audiences and wonders where he went wrong. And I'm left with a rhythm section that has lost its nerve. That's how it's going for me. How's it going for you, Jenny?'

Jenny smiled sadly. It seemed she had no worries at all compared to Jed, but the things he'd said had started her thinking. The whole saga of Jed and Tubby and this drug called Bliss had scarcely lasted six months and yet it
seemed to her that the drug, or at least something very much like it, had perhaps been around much, much longer than that. If the drug, or a precursor of the drug, had been around for a long time, then who was to say that she, along with millions of others, hadn't already been unknowingly exposed to it.

Its existence explained so much – those albums that only had one listenable track on them, those albums you listened to once and never again, those albums you used to love and nearly wore out with playing that were now completely intolerable, those guitar solos that had once seemed so exciting and vital that now sounded so feeble and pallid.

It explained other things too. Jenny had never been able to understand how anybody could listen to Pat Metheny or John Scofield albums, but mind-altering drugs would certainly have been one way of doing it.

Then another thought struck her. That night in Phoenix when she saw Neil Young, that Free Kitten gig at the Garage in London, watching K. K. Null in Tokyo, they'd all seemed like wonderful, magnificent occasions, but how could she tell that her response had been genuine and not caused by exposure to doses of Bliss? It was a devastating idea.

The next night Jenny Slade and Jed Rhodes did a duo set at a working man's club in Dagenham. It was not one of the great gigs. The audience was restless and halfway through the set a handful of drunks cut up nasty and started heckling and booing. Jed and Jenny smiled and lapped it up. Booing had never sounded so good.

‘Hey Kurt, where are you going
with that gun in your hand?' Jenny Slade asks brightly.

Kurt spins round. Kurt, a dishwater-blond in a lumberjack shirt, mascara'd eyes blinking at the vision. He'd thought he was alone in the room, alone with a head full of storming emotions, a suitcase full of pharmaceuticals and a few choice weapons.

‘I ain't going nowhere,' he says.

‘Well, that's a blessing,' says Jenny. ‘And how the hell are you?'

Stopping to pose, to let his words carry their full cargo, Kurt says, ‘I've hurt myself and I want to die.'

Jenny chuckles politely. ‘That's my Kurt, ever the master of irony.'

We are in the apartment above the garage of Kurt and Courtney's Madrona home, up in the eaves in a long thin room, triangular in section, one wall mostly glass. The place is a mess. Jenny wonders why he doesn't employ a house cleaner, spread some of that money around, create a little trickle down.

The books and the CDs and the video tapes have all been carelessly cast aside. Who would have thought
Kurt was such a big reader? Bukowski and Burroughs and Beckett and Burgess. Burgess? Anthony Burgess? Yep – he's one of Kurt's main men. The dog-ears and the split spines testify to Kurt's attention. But then everything has a well-used look around here: wine stains on the rugs, a cigarette stubbed out on the scratch plate of a vintage Fender Jag. Only the weapons and drugs get treated with any respect.

Kurt's guns include a Taurus revolver, a Baretta semiautomatic, a Colt rifle, a Remington twenty-gauge shotgun. His drugs of choice are heroin and Valium; a narcotic cuddle, oblivion with fluffy edges.

‘All this loading up on guns and drugs,' Jenny says. ‘Tell me about it, Kurt. Do you think it's clever? Do you think it's funny?'

‘Well, it makes
me
laugh.'

He turns his back on her and shambles his way over to a desk by the window. There's a writing pad and a few pens set out. The page is filled by a red scrawl, an earlier draft. Kurt picks up a pen, holds it poised in his left hand, then gradually changes his grip till he's holding it not like a pen but a dagger. He slowly stabs the page a few times, making a row of deliberate, calculated gouges. Then he just sits there, blank as a sheet of listing paper, Mr Catatonia.

Jenny lets a few minutes pass before she says, ‘Hey Kurt, here I am, entertain me.'

Kurt doesn't smile so she says, ‘What are you trying to write anyway? Another chart-topping hit? Another teenage angst-ridden smasheroo?'

‘A suicide note if you must know.'

‘Cool,' she says, and then, having mulled the matter
over, adds, ‘It's funny the way we need rock stars to die on us every now and then, isn't it? Like it wakes us up a little. It purifies the tribe, something like that.

‘Of course it probably wouldn't happen if you were English. The English really don't have that martyr tradition, not for rock stars anyway. They have a tendency, not necessarily a very attractive one, to keep on living, unless of course they're John Lennon and they meet someone like Mark Whatsisname.'

‘Yeah, well I'm not English, OK?'

‘Fine.'

‘And I'm going to do it just as soon as I finish this damn letter.'

‘We could be here all night,' Jenny says, but not loud enough for him to hear. ‘I don't suppose anything I say will make any difference.'

‘Dead right.'

‘And I suppose there's no point in asking you to think about Courtney and the kid.'

‘They'll live through this,' Kurt snarls.

‘Probably,' Jenny agrees. ‘But you couldn't exactly call it responsible parenting, could you now? It can't be exactly what the therapist ordered.'

Kurt turns back to the page, sorry to have wasted time talking. Jenny decides to be helpful. He stares at the paper till his eyes cross and go out of focus.

‘When in doubt you could always use a quotation,' Jenny offers.

‘Maybe,' says Kurt, ‘but I wouldn't want to quote from some old fart.'

‘It's a strange thing about people who like popular
music,' Jenny says. ‘When they're twenty-one they think the best music in the world is made by twenty-one-year olds. When they're forty they think it's made by forty-year olds – sometimes these are the same people they loved when they were twenty-one, but not always.

‘Of course, for people who like classical music it's different. They think the only good music is made by dead people.'

Kurt looks at her with narcotic confusion in his eyes. This stuff is hard for him to follow.

‘What I'm saying,' Jenny simplifies, ‘is that this is what pop music is
for,
surely, to provide a series of shorthand expressions that convey and describe various generalized, uncomplicated feelings.'

Kurt blinks at her in quiet surprise. Well yeah, what she says sounds true if a little fancy. Maybe she's right. Maybe somebody's already said all those things he wants to say.

‘How about “It's All Over Now Baby Blue”?' he says hopefully.

‘I don't think so,' Jenny replies. ‘Dylan's too easy. And before you say it, “I Can't Get No Satisfaction” is too easy as well. How about, “Come On, Do The Jerk”?'

‘No,' Kurt says. ‘I was never much of a dancer.'

‘Then how about “Waiting For The Man”? But no, I can see that wouldn't work, the man's already been and gone. How about “Boom Boom”?'

‘Hey, are you taking me for a fool?'

‘Not me, Kurt. Any thoughts on what you want to have done with your ashes?'

‘Nah, I won't be around to worry about
it, will I?'

‘So it would be all right for Buddhist students to turn some of them into figurines, and for Courtney to carry the rest of them around inside a teddy bear.'

‘Oh sure, like that's really going to happen,' he says, and Jenny doesn't disabuse him.

Suddenly he shouts. ‘I know. I've got it. What I need is something from Neil Young. I mean, he's the godfather of grunge, right?'

‘I like it,' Jenny agrees. ‘Go for it, Kurt. What's it going to be?'

Kurt picks up the guitar, strums a few easy, unamplified Neil Young chords, then says, ‘Yeah, I got it. I got it.'

‘Great,' Jenny says enthusiastically, and she watches as Kurt takes up the pen again and writes across the page those immortal words ‘I've been a miner for a heart of gold – and I'm gettin' old,' and signs it with a flourish.

‘Oh come on, Kurt,' Jenny says irritatedly. ‘I know your brains are scrambled but you can do better than that.'

Kurt shivers. The room is suddenly cold and the desk looks as big as a pool table. He doesn't think he can do better than that at all.

She feels sorry for him, and takes his hand and guides it as it writes down a far better Neil Young line, the one about rust and fade. Kurt looks at the words on the page and feels pleased with himself. Jenny seems pleased with him too. She looks out of the window. She can see water, trees, hedges, a well-kept lawn. It's OK here. A young couple and their baby could lead a very comfortable, privileged
life in this place if they had a mind to.

‘Hey, I think I've got a better line,' she says.

But it's too late. Behind her the shotgun goes off and Kurt turns himself into a sort of hero, a member of the stupid club.

Jenny shrugs, looks at her watch. It's still early. She wishes he'd hung around and at least offered some advice to the aspiring guitarist. She wishes he'd at least waited until she'd told him to use a better Neil Young line. ‘Got mashed potato. Ain't got no T-bone.' That's what she'd have recommended. But maybe Kurt wouldn't have liked that so much. He never looked much like a T-bone kind of guy.

Bob Arnold reviews a Jenny Slade gig
and decides she's the Po-Mo queen of the guitar.

The Club Tutto, Milan: a converted small arms factory on a hot September night in the early nineties. Jenny Slade and the latest incarnation of the Flesh Guitars bounce on to the stage, an all-girl, drummerless line-up; girls who look part punkette, part pagan. They wave encouragingly at the audience, then each picks up a guitar from the stands on the edge of the stage. They strap them on. There's the noise of jack plugs being slid into sockets, of volume and tone controls being whirled, the static of pickup selector switches being moved, the sighing of a wah wah pedal being pumped.

The audience, a thousand or so hot-blooded souls, is all anticipation, and the apparently slow start only adds to its eagerness, its readiness and willingness to be entertained. Still, the band continue to fiddle with their instruments and equipment. Amp settings are adjusted, effects boxes are switched on and off. Sometimes there's hiss, sometimes buzz, sometimes a suggestion of muted feedback, of a sort of ambient reverb; but there is nothing remotely resembling music. No guitar is strummed, no chord is played, certainly nobody attempts anything resembling a guitar solo. The audience experience and show a little restlessness, but still the girls of the Flesh Guitars continue flicking
dials and knobs, making endless minute adjustments. And then suddenly the audience
gets it.