Flesh Guitar

WILLING FLESH

Bob leans over the bar and says to Kate, ‘Rickenbacker, Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Guild, Steinberger, Kay, Alembic, Harmony, Ibanez, Klein, Kramer, Danelectro, B. C. Rich, Mosrite, Hagstrom, Epiphone, Hamer, Washburn, Vox, Silvertone, Shergold, Watkins, Burns, Patrick Eggle, Paul Reed Smith … Are you getting these?’

‘I might not remember them all by tomorrow,’ Kate admits.

‘Well, at least try, because you see these aren’t just makers’ names, although they are makers’ names, of course, but they’re also a roll of honour. And when you add to these the names of the different models, the Strats and the Teles, the Thunderbirds and the Flying Vs, the Jaguars and the Mustangs, the Pacers, the Bisons, the Presidents, the Meteors, the Sting Rays, the Vikings, the Custom Masqueraders, the Apaches, the Explorers, the Jagstangs, well … that’s pure twentieth-century poetry.’

‘Does it make any difference what guitar you play?’ Kate asks.

Bob laughs darkly. ‘That’s like asking does it matter which cock you suck.’

Oh dear, she thinks, the drink’s getting to him. Neverthe less she tries to think through the analogy and even though it seems a needlessly opaque one, with much to be said on both sides, she decides he means yes.

Bob says, ‘There’s a story, almost certainly apocryphal, of a naive young man who decided he wanted to play the electric guitar. So he went into a guitar shop and bought one. He took it home, strummed it, fiddled with all the knobs but couldn’t get any sound out of it. Where was the sturm and drang he was looking for? Where was the volume? Where was the skronk? Nowhere, because he didn’t realize that you need an amplifier and some speakers before you can get any proper sound out of an electric guitar.

‘Instead, in his ignorance, he made the simple observation that his guitar wasn’t plugged in yet, that in fact the shop had sold him the guitar without any plug at all. It was now the evening, and too late to go back to the shop and demand the missing plug, so he decided to rig something up for himself. He took a length of electric flex, attached a domestic plug to one end and a jack plug to the other, shoved the jack into the guitar, the plug into the live wall socket and stood helplessly by as his guitar rapidly self-destructed in a shower of sparks and flames.

‘That guitar was truly electric, and the chances are it made a pretty unique sound as it died. But that isn’t what we normally mean by electric guitar.’

‘Hey, I’m not stupid, you know,’ Kate protests. ‘I’ve taken on board all the stuff about pickups and magnetic fields.’

He’s impressed. ‘All right. I didn’t mean to insult you. I said before that life is like a guitar solo. But it’s also like an electric guitar itself. That’s because it’s expensive, not necessarily all that pretty, surprisingly fragile and all too likely to go out of tune. It’s also far too easy to fetishize and get over-attached to, and then some bastard is only too likely to take it away from you. You know what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

‘Some people give their guitars names. They call them “Lucille” and silliness like that.’

‘Always women’s names?’

‘Not always, no.’

‘I’m glad. That was quite some guitar Jenny Slade was playing tonight. Even I could tell that.’

‘Yes, it’s special. I can tell you the date and place where she first used it if you like.’

‘No thanks.’

He’s a little disappointed not to be able to further demonstrate his expertise but he lets it go.

‘Like most guitarists,’ he says,‘Jenny tried a lot of different guitars before she found the one that suited her.’

‘Does Jenny Slade have a name for her guitar?’

Bob looks at her mysteriously. It’s a banal question, yet it’s more telling than she realizes.

‘If it had a name,’ he says, ‘it would be called “Greg”. “Greg Wintergreen”.’

‘What kind of name is that?’

He reaches into one of his bags and comes up with another copy of the Journal of Sladean Studies.

‘This will explain everything.’

‘More post-modernism?’

‘Post-modern and almost certainly apocryphal.’

‘I can hardly wait.’