Flesh Guitar

QUARTER TO THREE …

‘All right,’ says Kate, ‘you’ve given me the historical background, but I think there’s a paradox in all this, don’t you? Wouldn’t you say that we’re discussing the intellectual background to what is an anti-intellectual form?’

‘I don’t think rock music is anti-intellectual,’ Bob says passionately. ‘And as a matter of fact neither does Jenny Slade. Neither she nor I have ever really believed in the guitar player as noble savage. We believe in instinct, of course, but it’s surprising how much better a player’s instincts can get when he’s got a brain that’s in working order. It seems to me that those years Jenny Slade spent at the Sorbonne, at Oxford, at Harvard, they all went into making her the shithot guitarist she is today.’

Kate says, ‘You make Jenny Slade sound like a blue stocking.’

‘A blue stocking maybe,’ Bob admits, ‘but blue stockings worn with high heels and a suspender belt.’

Kate is amused. The kid has a way with words. He also has a way with Scotch. His glass is already empty again and she fills it up. He looked like such a shy, sober lad when he came in.

‘OK, so you’ve explained the significance of the electric guitar,’ she says. ‘Now explain the significance of Jenny Slade.’

Bob takes a deep breath. He’s been waiting for this and he’s more than ready.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘So the electric guitar has been around for, say, sixty years. The modern idea of pop music, by which I suppose I mean rock and roll, has been around for maybe a couple of decades less. In that time various women performers have been strident, brilliant, self-destructive, tragic, outrageous, unreasonable, suicidal. They’ve been all the things that men have been, good and bad, and yet the idea of a great female guitarist, the guitar heroine, remains an untried concept.

‘Now you may say look at Jennifer Batten or Lita Ford, in which case I’d say get real. They’re just drag acts, bad male impersonators. Or you may say that the electric guitar just isn’t a girl thing. You’ll say that the acoustic guitar is a girl thing (look at Joni Mitchell or Suzanne Vega), you’ll say the bass guitar is sometimes a girl thing (look at Suzi Quatro, “lewd in leather”, look at Tina Weymouth, “tempting with a trust fund”). But skronking female lead guitar, you’ll say, it’s a rare bird. And all I can say is it’s also a damn shame.

‘That’s where Jenny Slade comes in. She comes down the front of the stage, turns the volume to twelve, puts her foot up on the monitor, gives it some welly, and just does it. And she does it right, for real, like nobody else, certainly not like some man.

‘I don’t know why it should be so unusual for a woman to do that, but it is. The very idea of Jenny Slade, guitar heroine, seems utterly strange, utterly subversive. Sometimes it seems inconceivable, like science fiction or something, but there’s Jenny Slade confirming that it’s all possible and true.’

‘Hold on,’ says Kate, ‘that wasn’t exactly what happened here tonight. She didn’t exactly turn up to twelve, put her foot up and give it some welly at all. It was far spookier than that.’

‘Precisely,’ Bob says with delight and triumph. ‘That’s why she’s special. She’s so infinitely surprising, so infinitely various. Whatever expectations you have she confounds them, yet she still delivers. She doesn’t just give you what you want, she gives you what you never even knew existed or even thought was possible. But once she’s delivered it, you realize it was what you wanted all along.’

Kate nods. What he says makes surprising sense. What he’s described is precisely the experience she had earlier that night. He’s not only explaining Jenny Slade, he’s also explaining Kate’s own feelings. He may look like a joke but he knows his stuff.

‘Have you ever met her?’ she asks.

‘Of course. I am her number one fan, after all.’

He digs in his briefcase and produces an autograph album. He opens it, and there on the first page it says, ‘To Bob Arnold, my number one fan. Love, Jenny Slade’.

‘Well, I guess that proves it,’ Kate says, unimpressed.

‘No, that doesn’t prove it,’ he snarls defensively.

‘What proves it is that I have here two hundred Jenny Slade autographs,’ and he flips the pages of the book so that she can see Jenny Slade’s autograph on every page.

Kate, naturally, still doesn’t think that proves anything except that Bob is obsessive and weird, so he tries another technique.

‘I’ll convince you,’ he says. ‘I have all her recordings, OK? How’s that for starters? And I do mean all of them, in all formats and all sort of pressings, all the remixes and all the bonus tracks, all the picture discs and fold-out sleeves, the rare imported box sets, promotional items, Japanese twelve inchers, radio edits. I have acetates and bootlegs and unreleased demos.’

‘OK,’ Kate says, a little impressed, prepared to allow that this is some reasonable definition of fandom.

‘But that’s only the tip of the iceberg,’ Bob laughs. ‘There’s all the merchandise too. I buy the goods: the T-shirts, the baseball caps, the posters, the concert programmes I snip cuttings out of magazines and stick them in scrapbooks; dozens of scrapbooks. I hang out at record fairs and swap meets, looking for those unknown, unlisted rarities. I communicate with other fans, by post, by fax, by Internet, arguing with them to prove that my fandom is predominant.

‘I’ve been to hundreds of Jenny Slade gigs, of course. I’ve travelled tens of thousands of miles to see her. I’ve got thirty or so plectrums and a dozen or more broken strings that I’ve picked up off the stage after gigs. I have her used towels and sweat bands, and even a grubby T-shirt she threw into the audience at a concert in Bruges. I had to fight dirty to get that.

‘Maybe all that makes me a bit of an anorak, but at least it’s an anorak with a picture of Jenny Slade appliqued on the back.’

‘OK, you’re her number one fan,’ Kate concedes.

‘And,’ Bob adds passionately, ‘as if that wasn’t enough I came to this hell-hole trying to see her play, didn’t I?’

Kate considers this and is doubly, triply, impressed. She has to admit that coming all this way to the Havoc Bar and Grill, to a place where they’d normally eat people like him alive, for a performance that was neither advertised nor expected does show a formidable degree of commitment, of manic fandom.

‘But if you really want to see how great my fandom is,’ Bob says determinedly, ‘all you have to do is read this.’

He puts a copy of a magazine on the bar. It’s a fanzine, not badly produced, well printed, neatly designed, and bearing the title JOSS.

‘Joss?’ Kate asks.

Journal of Sladean Studies. Jenny Slade. Get it?

‘I get it all right.’

‘I wanted something with an academic ring to it. I’m the publisher, picture researcher, distributor, proof reader, fact checker and chief scribe. There’s something in here you ought to read.’

He opens the magazine, folds it at the appropriate page and turns it round for her to see. She looks at it quizzically. This night is getting more and more bizarre. She’s been asked to do some weird things by previous customers of the Havoc Bar and Grill, but reading articles in academic journals is the most bizarre yet. Nevertheless she looks at the piece, which is short; she looks at the time, which is still not all that late, and she decides she has nothing much to lose. She begins to read.