Flesh Guitar

A HARD DAY IN THE LIFE

‘Guess who invented the plectrum?’

The question was fired at Jenny Slade by a famous Hollywood movie producer, Howie Howardson by name, a member of the new Hollywood, the very new Hollywood. He appeared to her as a series of slurred fashion statements: cowboy boots, a soul patch, an orange crew-cut, a turquoise ring as big as a gull’s egg, a waistcoat made of giant fish scales, sunglasses in the shape of ultra-wide cinema screens.

‘No idea,’ Jenny replied.

‘Go on, guess,’ Howardson said with boyish enthusiasm.

‘Will Scarlet,’ she offered fatuously.

‘No, not even warm,’ Howardson replied. ‘It was Sappho. Goddamn Sappho invented the plectrum. How about that?’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Jenny admitted.

‘But you’ve heard of Sappho. Am I right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I don’t have to tell you she was this major Greek, lyre-playing lipstick lezzie. She plucked the strings, she pulled the babes. There’s a vase painting or some damn thing that proves she was the first-ever plectrum user.’

‘That’s incredible,’ Jenny said, trying to show a willingness to be impressed.

‘I’m just telling you this information so you’ll have some idea of the depth of research that’s gone into this project.’

Ah yes, the project. Jenny knew she must have been flown here for a reason, even if that reason had yet to be revealed. The office was in a converted fall-out shelter, a long, low-ceilinged tunnel with white concrete walls. Here Howardson displayed his love of art and electricity; the walls were hung with early Paolozzis, Gwen Johns, late Rosenquists, a couple of Frank Stellas, some important Braques. And these canvases were interspersed with and lit by neon shop signs, illuminated petrol pumps, barber’s poles, lamps in the shapes of fish, dragons, Swiss chalets, chandeliers hung low with bunches of mutated grapes and ping-pong balls. It hurt the eyes to look at it all. Perhaps that was why Howardson wore such impenetrable shades.

‘Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself,’ he said. ‘First thing I ought to say is that we love your work. We’re passionate about it. I especially loved your music video, the one where you’ve got the big supermarket set and it looks as though it’s being filmed by a security camera. It has a fabulous retro look. And there’s no posing, none of that lousy over-acting you get in so many videos.’

Jenny quietly said, ‘Thank you,’ and tactfully didn’t point out to him that it was no ‘set’ at all but a real supermarket and that the retro security camera look was achieved by using an actual modern security camera, and the lack of posing was because you don’t need to pose very much when you’re doing your shopping. Still, what did it matter so long as he liked it, so long as he said he liked it?

‘You remember when you were at school?’ Howardson asked, getting down to business now. ‘I guess it’s the same in England, how they’d get you to write the life story of a penny and you’d have to track it from being pressed, going in and out of the bank, through all the pockets and purses of the people who owned it, through slot machines and one-armed bandits till it finally fell into a drain. Or maybe you remember those portmanteau movies like The Yellow Rolls-Royce where the film tells the story of everyone who had the car. Well, we want to do the same with a plectrum.’

Jenny struggled to keep her composure in the face of this absurdity. She attempted to remain alert and interested-looking but she feared she might be failing.

‘First scene shows Sappho playing her axe,’ said Howard-son, ‘which is actually some sort of harp, but that could be changed. So she has a few adventures but eventually she dies, and the plectrum goes missing for a thousand years or so, and then suddenly Henry the Eighth is using it at Hampton Court to play “Greensleeves” on a lute. Centuries later it turns up in Chicago being used by Muddy Waters, then before long it finds its way to Vegas where it’s used by Elvis. He hands it to someone in the audience who gives it to Johnny Thunders who’s so stoned he drops it and only years later is it rediscovered by Joe Satriani, or maybe Sheryl Crow, or whoever’s hottest when we finally cast this thing.

‘So you see, the possibilities are literally endless. Great moments in plectrum history, past, present and future. There’ll be a script real soon. Yeah, and we’re also really keen to have a sci-fi element set in the future. Maybe some twenty-first-century teenager finds the plectrum, but the electric guitar has died out by then and he doesn’t know what it is, so he goes to the local museum, steals an old Gibson, and the rest you can guess. So what do you say, Jenny, are you interested?’

‘Yes,’ she said with all the feigned enthusiasm she could muster. She knew this was no time for reservations; she could have those later. ‘You mean you want me to compose the music for the film?’

Howardson moved uneasily in his chair, twirled his rings around his fingers a couple of times. At last he said, ‘Well, that’s a possibility, Jenny, although I have to admit it wasn’t a possibility we’d actually thought of. We had someone else kind of pencilled in for that job. More what we had in mind was for you to be the film’s plectrum consultant.’

Jenny gawped.

He continued, ‘You see, a lot of big-name actors and actresses are crying out to be in this movie, and most of them have scarcely even seen a plectrum before. They sure as hell won’t know how to hold one. That’s where you come in; to make their plectrum use look authentic. Don’t worry, we’re gonna get somebody else to deal with the fretting hand.’

Jenny leaned back, stared fixedly at a lamp in the shape of a bison and said nothing. She was aware that for the first time she actually had Howardson’s attention.

‘I could pick up that bison lamp,’ she said, ‘and I could run it along my guitar neck, pull it across the strings and, hey presto, suddenly it would be a plectrum.’

‘I see,’ Howardson said, utterly uncomprehending but still upbeat.

‘A plectrum is what a plectrum does,’ Jenny went on. ‘Thurston Moore shoves a drum stick into his strings and turns the drum stick into a plectrum. Tom Verlaine saws at his strings with a metal file. Reeves Gabrels coaxes noise out of his guitar using a vibrator.

‘Whether it’s a piece of plastic, a length of steel pipe, or an electric angle-grinder they’re all conceptually and functionally performing the role of the plectrum. When some poodle-head guitarist rubs his guitar with his crotch, he’s saying that even the mighty phallus can be reduced to the status of a plectrum. Sappho might have had a lot to say about that.’

Howardson grinned wickedly. ‘I love a plectrum coach who talks dirty,’ he said.

Some time later …

‘I’m worried about my hands, Jenny.’

The speaker was Megan Floss, the actress who would be playing the part of Patti Smith in the movie. Megan was thirty-three years old. She used to have a reputation for being a real hard body, but in her last couple of movies she’d looked fat and puffy. She’d had jowls for Chrissake! So she’d been working hard, getting toned up and thinned down, getting tanned and tucked. Everybody told her she’d never looked better, but they would say that, wouldn’t they? She wanted to believe it. She knew her butt looked good, she knew her tits looked good, and so they should; they were straight out of the catalogue. She knew her face would look OK, she’d trust this lighting cameraman with more than her life. Everyone told her everything was going to be fine, but that still left her with a truckload of insecurities and they had to come out somewhere.

‘There’s no need to worry,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘But I’m worried about the things you can’t fix, things like poor skin tone, wrinkles, damaged cuticles.’

Yep, Megan was focusing all her stress, all her anxiety on this one area, her plectrum hand.

‘It’ll be fine, really,’ Jenny said.

She showed Megan how to hold a plectrum and after five or six hours the actress seemed to be getting the hang of it. She sent for an assistant, who entered holding a mirror for her to observe her hand in. She looked. She shrieked; a high-pitched, attention-seeking, filmic shriek.

‘Oh my God, I’m going to have to wear gloves!’

‘Well, I’m not the director,’ Jenny said, ‘but I can’t see anybody playing guitar in gloves.’

‘Then what’s the alternative?’

‘We could always use a hand model.’

‘A hand model!’ Megan bawled. ‘What do you think I am? I’m a serious actress. I have integrity. I have a reputation to think of. I’d rather die than use a stand-in. Right, now we understand each other, let’s get down to some serious plectrum practice.’

Later that same week …

‘Now about this plectrum thing …’

‘Yes?’ said Jenny.

She was talking to Michael Cutlass, a movie star of the old school; craggy, iron-chested, toupeed. He was being cast against type in the role of Jimmy Page.

‘I’m going to need a lot of help from you on this one,’ Cutlass said.

‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Jenny replied.

‘Because I want to get it right. And more than that, I want the plectrum technique to be part of the characterization. I want the audience to be able to look at the way I hold the plectrum and say, there goes a real man, a strong man, tough but not insensitive, a man’s man but also a woman’s man, the kind of guy who can ride a horse, use a gun, fly a Lear jet, make love to a couple of women, all with consummate ease. I want the way I hold that plectrum to say that I’m a poet, a fighter, a man of integrity, a man who’s known pain, who’d be a good father, a good son, the kind of guy who’d lend you his last fifty bucks, the kind of guy who could wrestle naked with his buddies and yet there’d be no hint of queerness. You know what I’m saying?’

‘I’ll see what I can do, Mr Cutlass.’

‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘I’ve been thinking maybe there’s something effete about using a plectrum at all. I think maybe I’m more the kind of guy who wouldn’t fiddle around with some cheesy little bit of plastic, but more the sort of guy who’d use his bare hands, feel the wood and steel on fingers, wrench melodies with his own skin and bone. You got me?’

‘Oh yes, I’ve got you all right,’ Jenny said.

And later still.

‘This is boring.’

‘Not only for you,’ Jenny said.

Jenny was now giving tuition to eleven-year-old Trixie Picasso, who was appearing in a fantasy sequence about the childhood of Joan Jett. The kid was a monster: cute-looking, big-eyed, a sweet smile, huge bubbles of blonde hair and the disposition of a cornered rat. She also, incidentally, bore not the slightest resemblance to Joan Jett, whether old or young.

‘Guitars are boring,’ she said. ‘They’re old hat. I mean, who needs ’em. Gimme a sampler and a sequencer and a drum machine and you’re history, lady.’

‘You think so, huh?’

‘I know so.’

‘And why do you think that?’ Jenny said sweetly, humouring the brat.

‘Well, the main thing is that time is no longer a meaningful concept in the age of digital reproduction. The entire history of music has been digitally transferred to cyberspace where it exists in an eternal present. It’s all there. Every note that’s ever been recorded is available, every chord progression, every drum beat, every accidental disharmony …’

‘Where are you getting this from?’

‘I thought it through for myself.’

‘Like hell,’ Jenny said.

‘Oh, all right then,’ Trixie trilled, all dimples and tilted head. ‘If you must know, I got it from the musical director.’

Jenny couldn’t suppress that smouldering streak of jealousy. She should have had that job. There was nobody on God’s multicoloured earth who could do it better.

‘Does this musical director have a name?’ she demanded.

‘Tom Scorn,’ said Trixie.

Jenny should have known.

Not very much later at all in Tom Scorn’s on-set recording studio, Jenny said to him, ‘So you’re into film music now?’

‘I always was,’ he said. ‘Eric Kornfeld, Bernard Herrmann, they were always my heroes.’

‘I thought it was Stockhausen and Cardew.’

‘Whatever. The thing is, Jenny, and I’ve said this before, time is no longer a meaningful concept in the age of digital reproduction …’

He ran through the same speech that the child actress had managed to deliver word for word. (Well, at least the kid had the ability to learn lines.) Jenny waited until Scorn came to a part she hadn’t heard before.

‘If you want to hear Guitar Slim jamming with Yehudi Menuhin,’ said Scorn, ‘that’s easily arranged. We can do that. We can pluck those sounds out of the digital ether. Want to hear what Gary Moore or Johnny Marr sound like improvising over a theme from Purcell? Well no, neither do I, but with technology it’s dead easy to achieve. It’s all there for the taking by anyone who has some use for it.’

‘And you have some use for it?’ said Jenny.

‘I most certainly do. With a sampler you can take the greatest voices in the whole world — Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Tom Waits — and you use just one sampled note, transfer it to a keyboard and instil all the musical qualities of those great artists into your music. You know I’m right.’

‘Well,’ said Jenny, ‘only up to a point.’

Scorn was irritated that anyone should disagree with such clearly irrefutable truths.

‘For example,’ Jenny said, ‘I could write a song with the opening line “I woke up this morning”, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean I was an authentic blues artist.’

‘The concept of the song form is very old hat,’ Scorn snarled.

‘You can sample Hendrix’s guitar tone but it’s not as though that makes you Hendrix. It’s not even like having Hendrix in the band.’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Scorn said smugly. ‘It’s much better than having Hendrix in the band. If he were alive today I’d get him into the studio, record five minutes of him jerking around with the guitar and then I’d have no further use for him. I could take that five minutes and do more with it than he did in his whole career.

‘Let’s face it, live musicians are never anything but pains in the arse. They do too many drugs. They want too much money. They’re unreliable, they’re temperamental. You can’t just tell them to play one chord for fifty minutes, because they think it’s uninspired and they want to give of themselves. The sound of Hendrix I love. His genius I love. But having him in the band … don’t be silly. Give me machines every time.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘Did you ever meet Hendrix?’

Jenny said no, but that wasn’t strictly true.