Flesh Guitar (7 page)

They realize they are listening to the sound, not of music, but of the conditions that make music possible, the sound of electricity, of signal to noise ratios, to the imperfections of circuitry, to interference.

After half an hour or so the whole audience is completely rapt, is in complete awe. Someone says, in unaccented English, loud enough for others to hear, ‘Lord have mercy, Jenny Slade and the Flesh Guitars are forcing us to wholly redefine our conceptions both of music and of performance.'

The show continues for three hours or so in much the same way, gathering majesty and grandeur as it progresses, or rather fails to progress, after which the Flesh Guitars receive a fifteen-minute standing ovation and, despite much pleading, decline to come back for an encore.

The performance, untitled at the time, is now universally known as
Totally Tutto.
It exists in at least three recorded versions. All have merit, but connoisseurs find the Milanese rendering far and away the best.

Reprinted from the
Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 6 Issue 9

Jenny Slade was in Alice Springs, Australia,
a guest of the well-respected and only moderately under-funded Red Centre Improvised Music Festival. She had spent the last week playing in unlikely duos, trios and sometimes larger ensembles, along with Aboriginal percussionists, dancers, flute and didgeridoo players, as well as with various imported international free jazzers, avant-garde rockers and classical musicians who were prepared to let themselves go and take a few risks. It had all been cool but exhausting, and now that it was over she was sitting in the festival bar talking to Billy Nation, an Aboriginal cello player who'd had some success writing music for theatre and television, though he made it plain that his real ambition was to create music much more profound, much more spiritual than that.

‘So let me get this straight,' Jenny said. ‘The Aboriginal myths tell of legendary ancestors who, in Dreamtime, wandered all over the continent singing out the name of everything they came across; not only naming birds and animals and plants the way Adam supposedly did, but also naming hills, rivers, valleys, mountain ranges.'

'That's right,' Billy said draining a tube of lager.
‘And in that way the ancestors sang the world into being.'

‘But I'm not sure I quite understand that,' Jenny said. ‘By definition if they were giving names to things, the things must already have existed.'

‘None of this is easy for the white, western mind to understand,' Billy said. ‘You see, each ancestor is thought to have left a trail of music and words along the route he travelled. So a song becomes a map and a direction finder. If you know the song, you know your way across the whole country.'

Jenny wasn't quite sure he was answering the question she'd asked, but she let him go on.

‘The man who goes walkabout,' Billy Nation continued, ‘is making a sacred journey, reliving his ancestor's journey and singing his song as he goes.'

‘And the subjects of all these songs are holy?' Jenny asked.

‘That's right; every rock, every waterhole, every cliff face, they're all sacred sites, because our ancestors sang about them in Dreamtime.'

‘I guess that pushes up real estate values too.'

Billy frowned at her and she looked apologetic. She knew it was a cheap shot.

‘I've never been much of a singer myself,' Jenny admitted. ‘I have enough trouble staying in tune without having to sing a continent into being.'

Billy smiled indulgently. He was prepared to be charitable, if lordly, towards this white woman and her jokes.

‘You aren't going to be able to understand any of this from the festival bar,' he said. ‘You have to experience the songlines, see them
in situ
. If you had a couple of days, I could take you up country so you could meet
some real local musicians, people for whom music and breathing are one and the same thing. You could play for them and they could play for you.'

Jenny took the offer at its face value and said OK. She could tell that Billy was surprised and not necessarily pleased. He obviously never imagined that she'd take him up on it, and perhaps he hadn't thought through all the implications of travelling into the bush with a strange white woman, but now that she'd accepted, he was too proud to withdraw or modify his offer. The trip was on.

Billy Nation turned up next day at Jenny Slade's hotel in a battered old Land Cruiser, decked out with roo bars, sand ladders, spare petrol cans and tyres. It was thickly powdered with oxidized red sand, as if it were trying to camouflage itself and blend in with the earth.

Billy's cello took up very little space inside the Land Cruiser. Jenny loaded up her own gear, and Billy drove away from the civilization of Alice Springs into the low, blank desert landscape. As they drove along increasingly unmade roads the equipment in the back rattled and bounced around as though creating some long, free-form percussion solo. Jenny feared breakages but Billy was oblivious. She wondered whether he would put a cassette into the stereo, wondered what music he'd think appropriate for the trip, but the player remained unused, Billy preferring to hear the song of the wind and the road.

Jenny Slade stared at the slowly undulating land, at the anonymous dirt road, the endless low scrub and said, ‘It looks like an easy place to get lost in.'

Billy Nation smiled the smile of a
man with inner knowledge and wisdom, and didn't deign to reply.

‘So who are these people we're going to see?' Jenny asked.

‘Good guys. The best.'

‘What do they play?'

Billy seemed to be thinking long and hard about his reply. ‘I guess you'd have to call it country music,' he said. He laughed and Jenny laughed with him. She was beginning to understand. If the country itself was created by song, then how could there be anything other than country music?

They drove on and on into the red vastness, wrecked cars by the roadside, kangaroos and emus bouncing in the middle distance, disused mines and shacks on the horizon. Jenny lost track of the time but when Billy eventually stopped the Land Cruiser after three hours or so, she was glad of the break. They appeared to be absolutely nowhere, a scrubby bit of outback no different from the last hundred miles of terrain they'd passed through, but Billy, she assumed, saw it differently.

He got out of the Land Cruiser and headed for the nearest high place, a mound of red sand that was not really very high at all, but he climbed it, stood on top and scanned the territory, exalting, as if reclaiming it for himself. She let him stand alone there for a long time before she went to join him.

‘It's a big, big place,' she said.

‘Even bigger when you're lost,' Billy added.

She looked at him and smiled to acknowledge his dry wit, but he didn't smile back. He wasn't being witty.

‘Yeah, OK, all right,' he said defensively. ‘I'm lost, OK, I'm lost.'

‘What, do you mean you
don't know the songlines for this area?'

‘That's one way of stating the problem,' he said, sounding peevish and urban now, not at all the attuned man of the desert she'd set out with.

‘Don't you have a map in the truck?' she asked.

‘If I had a map I wouldn't be lost.'

He slunk away, brooding and simmering in silence. Jenny looked around. The lack of landmarks was startling. There was nothing at all to navigate by. She caught up with Billy.

‘Well,' she said positively, ‘not so very long ago we passed a mining camp. We could drive back and ask them for directions.'

‘It was at least fifty miles back,' Billy said bleakly. ‘I don't have enough petrol to get us there.'

‘Oh dear,' said Jenny.

‘I had other things on my mind, all right?' Billy said, defending himself from accusations Jenny had no need to voice.

‘We could light a fire,' Jenny suggested. ‘A distress signal.'

‘No matches,' Billy said, and before she could suggest anything else he added, ‘It gets worse. I don't have any food and I only brought half a pint of water.'

She looked at him as though he were a subhuman idiot.

‘Is it my fault if I was brought up in a suburb of Melbourne?' he whined. ‘I just read about the songlines in a book, like everyone else.'

It was late afternoon. At least the sun was past its hottest point. They stood in silence not daring to look at each
other, having absolutely nothing to say. Jenny thought of the various forms of murderous revenge she could take on him and feared that the land might do the job for her all too soon.

‘There is one possibility,' he said weakly at last. ‘As it happens I always carry a portable generator with me, just in case. It's petrol driven. I could siphon the last of the petrol out of the Land Cruiser and then we'd have a little power.'

‘And then?'

‘And then you could play your guitar.'

‘I'm not in the mood for a jam session.'

‘I'd do it myself but a cello isn't the same.'

‘What are you on about?'

‘You'd play the guitar very, very loud. The noise would carry for miles. Somebody would hear it and come and see what it was all about. They'd have food and water, maybe even petrol. At the very least they could tell us where we were.'

It sounded like an idiotic plan to Jenny but she couldn't think of anything better so she agreed to it. They unloaded the necessary equipment from the Land Cruiser and set it up at the roadside. Billy siphoned the petrol, brought the generator to life and Jenny was ready to play. It was hard to know what was the right repertoire for such a venue and such a gig, but she started to improvise a long, searing, high-pitched solo and she hoped that somebody, somewhere could hear it.

It was getting dark now and as her notes spread out over the emptiness, the enterprise seemed increasingly absurd. She felt they were wasting precious energy that they might need later for survival. The darkness gathered,
night thickened, and the sound of Jenny's guitar became ever more lonesome, ever more forlorn. It seemed an utterly futile activity.

Suddenly, as she was thinking of giving up, out of the darkness a boy appeared. He was a young, shaggy-haired Aboriginal, perhaps twelve years old, in shorts and bare feet. The moment Jenny saw him she stopped playing and they stood looking at each other in wary silence. She was going to speak when the boy turned his back and began to walk away. She called after him but he didn't stop or reply so she struck a loud power chord and he turned and beckoned for her to follow him. She unhooked her guitar and was about to put it down, but he gestured again and indicated that he wanted her to bring the guitar with him. He further indicated that Billy Nation should bring the amplifier. Billy protested for a moment but the boy was having none of it. If they wanted his help he'd have to bring the amp. Above all else Billy did not want to be left alone in the outback, so he picked up the big amp and speaker cabinet and the three of them proceeded through the bush in a curious little procession.

They hadn't travelled far before they came to a large tin shed built on the bank of a dried-out river bed. There was a row of lights along the edge of the roof and the sound of a jukebox coming from within. The boy held open the split wooden door and Jenny went inside, closely followed by Billy Nation in his new role as roadie.

There were perhaps thirty people inside the hut, mostly young and mostly Aboriginal, though not exclusively either. A bar made out of beer crates ran along one side
of the room, and the walls were painted an insistent canary yellow. There was a drum kit set up in one corner, along with a microphone and a beautiful, battered old piano with sconces and fretwork.

The crowd looked at Jenny with curiosity, but with a strange lack of surprise, as though guest guitarists were always dropping in. There was no doubt that she was expected to play, that she was expected to impress, and the matter of where they were or where they might obtain petrol, food and water would have to wait.

Fuming, Billy Nation set down the amp and Jenny plugged in. She continued to play in the same style as she had been in the desert. She was trying to pick up on the spirit of the place, on the stark emptiness, and it seemed to require something both beautiful and desolate. However, after playing for five minutes or so she could see that the audience in the but was losing interest. She carried on, trying that much harder, but they just weren't keen on what she was doing. Jenny stopped playing, hoping for inspiration. She turned towards Billy Nation but his face was blank and inscrutable. He was as much a stranger here as she was. He was going to be no help at all. Then the boy who'd brought them edged towards Jenny, put his mouth close to her ear and said, ‘Generally what goes down best is some pretty basic rock and roll.'

Jenny could take a hint. She immediately changed tack and started to play a variety of rock and roll favourites: ‘Johnny B. Goode', ‘Lucille', ‘Something Else'. ‘Route 66' went down particularly well. A young guy got up and sat in on drums, another sat at the piano and did a pretty good
impression of Little Richard. Jenny played gorgeous chunky rock and roll solos, and at one point was moved to perform a duck walk. The crowd loved her for it. The place was so alive, so enthusiastic she feared it might spontaneously combust. The only damper was Billy Nation who sat nursing a beer, his face showing absolute sulky disapproval.

After an hour or so of fierce rock and roll, the boy came up to her again and pointed out an old man leaning on the bar, a man with a face as ancient as the rocks and the sand. The boy whispered, ‘The old fellah says can you play anything by Jimmy Webb?'

And so they played a short medley of Jim Webb hits, including ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix', before returning to rock and roll. There was the same frenzy and adulation, and then all too suddenly it was over and the bar was emptying and Jenny was sipping a drink, feeling doubly exhausted and triply satisfied. Someone gave her a crate of beer and someone else provided a map and pointed out that they were only a couple of miles from a roadhouse and Shell station.