Flesh Guitar

DEATH AND THE PERCUSSIONIST

Death walks with the guitar player. It is there leaning over her shoulder as she changes strings. It is there lurking behind the PA stacks, or surfing in over the heads of the audience. Death leaves its thick perfume in stinking dressing rooms, in musty, unopened flight cases. Sometimes it is indistinct, unfocused, as unformed and shapeless as a forty-five-minute blues jam, but other times it shapes up, gets its act together, does the business.

Jenny Slade used to say she wished she could have been there on 26 November 1973 when John Rostill of the Shadows was found in his own studio apparently electrocuted by his guitar. The coroner returned an open verdict, but Jenny didn’t like things to be that open. She wanted to close the case, to know the full story. Rostill was not the only one. Keith Relf, of the Yardbirds, he too was found dead at home clutching a live guitar, and he didn’t even consider himself a guitarist.

But death likes to get away from home, to go on the road, to get on the bus and tour. It has a sense of the big occasion, an unfailing grasp of showbiz. Death enjoys playing to the gallery. All sorts of players, from Gary Thain of Uriah Heep to Bill Wyman and Keith Richards, have received monster electric shocks on stage, but they all survived. However, death really put on a show on 3 May 1972 with Les Harvey, guitar player in Stone the Crows. He was electrocuted live on stage in front of an audience of 1200 at the Top Rank, Swansea. You can’t follow that.

These deaths which are so appropriate, so fitting, so electric, can make the more usual musicians’ deaths seem positively tame and beside the point. Drink, drugs, choking on vomit, plane crashes, Aids, even blowing your own head off, somehow they lack the mythic structure of a death that comes to you direct through the very medium that makes the music possible.

And at least it’s quick. If nothing else, an early death must surely save you from a long, slow, lingering one. It may not simply be a question of rusting or fading but rather of lasting long enough to fall prey to the old horrors, the old men’s illnesses. But few have suffered so badly or so early as Jon Churchill who was diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s disease when he was barely forty-five years old.

Jon had started out as an exceptionally youthful jazz and big band drummer, but he was young enough and smart enough to reinvent himself as a rock and roller by the time of the Beatles and sixties beat groups. He was much in demand as a session man and though he was too cool ever to name names, he never denied the rumours that he was the drummer on twenty or more Merseybeat hit singles. This despite his having been born and raised in Great Yarmouth.

Then, in the early seventies, he joined a power trio called Dreadnought, who played distinctly ponderous heavy rock, gathered terrible reviews, but nevertheless made a terrific pile of money touring the States and the Far East. The band was so successful that Churchill was able to indulge a taste for more esoteric playing, and he and Jenny Slade performed and recorded some truly off-the-wall duets.

Twenty years on, Dreadnought records were still selling massively and the band were still having occasional and highly profitable reunion tours, and it was on one of these that the Alzheimer’s first got to Jon.

It was during a second encore at the Dallas Civic Arena, playing a famous Dreadnought number called ‘The Journey’, a complex, twenty-minute multi-sectioned workout that he knew like the back of his hand, when he suddenly forgot what song he was playing. He also forgot what city he was in, who the two guys on stage with him were, and if anybody had asked he’d have been hard pressed to come up with his own name or even what planet he was on.

Afterwards, when he was back to normal, he wanted to put it down to road fever, to too many late nights, to too many drugs taken many years ago, but he got himself to a doctor who told him it was Alzheimer’s, and also assured him there was no coming back, no way out of the tunnel.

Jon Churchill went into distinguished semi-retirement, stopped playing in public, but fortunately was still in demand for session work. He played on a Pete Townshend solo project, was the house drummer for a session at a guitar festival in Seville. He played free jazz with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, worked with Ryan Beano, Steve Albini, Laurie Anderson and, of course, Jenny Slade. He was still highly respected, and he was lucky. For a long time the bad, blank phases never coincided with important studio dates. But when a furious Daniel Lanois rang up demanding to know why Churchill wasn’t at a session in New Orleans, Jon denied all knowledge of the booking, of the music he was supposed to have learned, and before the end of the phone call he’d also forgotten who he was talking to.

A part of him was still intelligent and thoughtful and so he decided to stop right there, to slip away gracefully. There was a small farewell charity gig, in front of an invited audience, at which he played faultlessly along with a lot of the usual suspects. Sting sent his apologies, but Kim Gordon and Ray Cooper made it. It was a good gig and there was a live CD, although the sales were admittedly disappointing.

After that he gave up drumming completely and retired to a converted lifeboat station on the Suffolk coast. He said he would never bother or embarrass anybody with his condition. He would not ask for sympathy nor rub his illness in anyone’s face, and he was as good as his word.

It was a big change for his wife Beth. She was a session singer in her own right and had recently started to perform with a jazz a cappella group, but she had no hesitation in giving that up and agreeing to this strange new life. She would be there to protect him from the world. There would be no visitors, no journalists. He would be allowed to slip slowly and permanently from the public imagination.

It was a quiet life. Jon Churchill would spend most of his days sitting on the porch of the house, watching the sea. Often he felt adrift as the tides of dementia swept in and made his mind as smooth and clear as sand, then later, more terrifyingly, he would have moments of clarity and realize how much he’d lost, how much he still had to lose. He sometimes glanced at the newspapers, though the affairs of the world meant nothing to him, and sometimes he would listen to music, even on occasions his own music, but that too made little impression.

His old drum kit was kept in the basement of the house. Since the charity gig Jon had not shown the slightest inclination to play the drums, had even suggested to Beth that they sell them. But Beth hadn’t allowed that and so the drums remained in the cellar, still and silent, along with his collection of percussion instruments from around the world. There was plenty of the more orthodox stuff, the tambourines and maracas, congas, bongos and tom toms, marimbas and castanets. But then there were more ethnic instruments; thumb pianos, talking drums, log drums, tablas, a derbuka. There was electronic gadgetry: pads, kick controllers, acoustic triggers. And then there were lots of items he’d built himself: weird percussive devices made from springs, car parts, beer cans, the insides of typewriters and old computers. Sometimes Beth would go down and look at it all and she couldn’t help weeping, but for Jon none of it had any more emotional significance than a new drumskin.

Beth was determined not to treat her husband like an invalid, and not to turn herself into a nursemaid. There was no need. His body remained fit and strong and he was in no danger of injuring himself. He could certainly be left on his own without her needing to worry. So she often drove into town for the day and did some shopping, bought food for the house and one or two things for herself. She might buy some expensive and impractical article of clothing that she would never have any occasion to wear, and perhaps half a dozen new paperbacks that she would read in the long quiet evenings.

It was on just such a day, an overcast, blustery day in early summer, after she’d been gone for four hours or so, that she returned to find that something quite extraordinary had happened in her absence. A profound change had overcome her husband.

At first, as she pulled into the drive of the house, she could see and hear nothing different, but then she turned off the car engine and she heard drumming. There was no mistaking Jon’s style, and the quality of the sound told her it was live, not recorded. She ran round the side of the house and peered in through the french doors. Jon Churchill was indeed playing the drums. He’d moved his kit and all his percussion instruments up from the basement to the living room, and as he played his face looked utterly vacant and his eyes stared out at the sea and sky. His playing was rhythmic but slow, determined yet not thunderous. Beth didn’t know whether to weep or to cheer, and in the event she did a little of both.

Jon saw her standing on the other side of the glass and, without missing a beat, motioned for her to come inside. The day was chilly and the sea was loud and as Beth opened the french doors cold air and the steady, shuffling sound of the sea rolled into the room. A look of wonder came into Jon’s eyes and he began to play in time with the noise of the sea. Six hours later he was still playing, and he didn’t stop until eventually he fell asleep sitting up on his drum stool.

Thus began the worst month of Beth’s life. Night and day, all day, every day, every minute except when he was eating or sleeping (and he did little of either) Jon Churchill continued to play the drums. A part of Beth was pleased, or at least felt she ought to be pleased, for when Jon played it was as though he was his old self again. He had lost none of his touch or dexterity. On one level she could even appreciate his performance, for this wasn’t just doodling or practising, he was performing as though for an audience, and although he seemed to be playing a drum solo of indefinite, possibly infinite, length there was a recognizable shape and structure to what he was doing. He was improvising and yet his playing seemed thought out, fully conceived, composed even. He never paused to consider what to do next.

Beth had always loved his drumming, the way his body moved when he played, the supple articulation of his sound. And yet who could possibly live in the same house as a man who played the drums relentlessly for eighteen or twenty hours a day?

Their nearest neighbour lived at least a quarter of a mile away, which was fortunate in one sense. There was nobody to bang on the walls or call the police. On the other hand it meant that Beth was totally alone in her ordeal. The cleaning woman came, listened to Jon playing the drums, seemed appreciative and told Beth she thought this was a terribly good sign. But she only had to live with it for an hour a day and Beth suspected that what she really appreciated was the fact that she didn’t have to clean the living room.

Beth, needless to say, did occasionally ask her husband to stop playing; at bedtime for instance, at mealtimes, when she wanted to watch something on television. Jon didn’t say no. He didn’t argue or defy her. He simply failed to communicate with her at all, and carried on drumming. Of course she got angry with him. Of course she shouted at him, but it did no good. He acted as though he hadn’t heard and, in truth, when his drumming hit a particularly loud patch, she could barely hear herself.

Every moment of Beth’s life was now filled with the sound of her husband’s drumming. Her every move and thought was accompanied by cymbal crashes, flams, rolls, paradiddles, ruffs, rim shots. Some moments were quieter than others. There were times when he played with brushes, or tapped out extraordinarily complex figures solely on the ride cymbal. Occasionally he’d sit with a tambourine in one hand and a shaker in the other, and spend twenty or thirty minutes exploring their tonal and rhythmic possibilities. But he never completely stopped playing, and Beth knew that these moments of comparative peace would invariably resolve themselves into louder, more aggressive, truly intolerable bursts of percussion.

At first she thought he must eventually wear himself out. She thought he would either run out of ideas or stop because of simple physical exhaustion. It was true that he did sleep sometimes, either on the stool, as on that first night, or on the couch in the corner of the room. But these naps were short, infrequent, taken at peculiar times of the day, and he would wake suddenly, perfectly refreshed and begin playing with renewed vigour and vehemence.

When Beth started to feel positively suicidal she called the one person she hoped might be able to help. But Sting was still busy and she had to fall back on Jenny Slade. She called her and begged her for help. Jenny turned up at the house the next day with her guitar, a couple of pedals and a small tube amp, and after a long talk with Beth she went into the room where Jon Churchill was still playing and she set up her equipment.

If Jon recognized Jenny from the old days he certainly did nothing to indicate the fact. Indeed her presence in the room seemed to be a matter of complete indifference to him. He showed neither interest nor surprise and when Jenny cranked her guitar into life and began to play along with him, he looked as though he was completely oblivious to the noise she was making. And yet something was happening. After half an hour or so the music began to gel. He was not making any concessions to her guitar playing, but gradually the dynamics of the music changed. Soon she was no longer just playing along with him; they were definitely playing together.

There were some rough edges, moments when they lost each other, but there was no doubt that a terrific interaction was taking place. A strange and complex piece of music was coming into being there in the living room of this Suffolk beach house. After two hours had passed, two hours of the most intense, intricate, draining invention on Jenny’s part, she needed a rest. She unhooked her guitar, turned off the amp, but Jon went right on playing.

Beth and Jenny walked along the straight shingle beach together, far enough away from the house so that they could no longer hear the drumming.

‘Oh well,’ said Beth, ‘it was a nice try. I thought a face from the old days might bring him back to normal. Shame it didn’t work.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Jenny replied. ‘It worked beautifully. Jon and I are going to create a lot of beautiful music before we’re finished. Maybe it’ll be his last gasp, maybe it won’t quite work, but I think we’re going to have a great work of art on our hands.’

‘But how can it be art?’ Beth demanded. ‘Art demands consciousness, discrimination, a guiding personality. Poor Jon doesn’t have any of those things. He’s just playing through sheer instinct. I don’t think he has a clue what he’s doing.’

‘Maybe not,’ Jenny agreed. ‘But I do, and it would be criminal to let it just slip away. I’ll have a mobile recording van here as soon as humanly possible. I don’t want to miss a single beat more than I have to.’

Beth shook her head sadly. This was not what she’d had in mind at all, and yet she couldn’t deny that Jenny Slade was probably doing the right thing. Perhaps her husband’s music did deserve preserving and recording, but that didn’t help her to find it any less intolerable.

Jenny made a couple of phone calls before returning for another two-hour session with Jon that night. Beth sat on the grass in the garden, pulling the heads off dandelions. As well as her husband’s drumming she now had to contend with a hundred decibels of distorted guitar noise. She got little sleep that night, but at least she was awake next morning when the mobile studio arrived in her front garden and youths with shaved heads began laying cables all around the house.

Jon Churchill drummed on oblivious to the mikes and screens that were being set up around him. He was of no use to anyone in helping to create a good drum sound, but neither did he hinder or object to what they were doing. When the engineers were happy with the balance, they miked Jenny into the board and the recordings began. These tapes, which were later to be dubbed The Dementia Sessions, are generally agreed to be some of the most intense, most extreme drum and guitar duets ever recorded.

Jenny Slade and Jon Churchill played together with only the most perfunctory breaks and interruptions for the best part of seventy-two hours. Jenny stopped once in a while to retune or to modify her guitar tone, and to replace the occasional broken string, but Jon just kept playing through the gaps.

There was certainly a development as the days progressed. The music of the first day was taut and disciplined in a way that would seem staid compared with the later stuff. The music, without ever losing its focus, became increasingly loose, free form, untrammelled. It became wilder and more Dionysian as it went on, but it never sounded chaotic, never lost its way or its sense of itself. Certain passages were remarkably simple and lyrical, just a simple four-note guitar melody played against a repeated drum pattern. At other times both players displayed a breathtaking, bravura virtuosity.

Later Bob Arnold would write, ‘Few people have been lucky enough to hear the entire session from beginning to end, but those who have are stunned by the work’s essential unity and coherence. Rhythms and chord progressions that are quickly passed over in the early hours of the session are reworked and given full expression some twenty or thirty hours later. The three-CD set that was extracted from the tapes represents a distillation but also an enormous reduction. The complete work derives its strength and majesty from its sheer size and scale, and in a perfect world it would always be listened to as a whole.’

Given the way the recording was set up, it inevitably started in medias res, at the moment when the engineers happened to be ready, and the ending was similarly abrupt and arbitrary. After three days of continuous playing, Jenny was more than ready to call it quits. It was only Jon Churchill’s relentless energy, her fear of letting him down, and her sense that she was part of something so very important that had kept her going for so long.

When Jon Churchill suddenly stopped, threw down his sticks and walked out through the french doors, she felt nothing but relief. She followed him, hoping that he might at last have something to say to her, some comment to make on what they’d been creating. In the event she was disappointed. He ran off down the beach and she was far too weary to chase after him. Dan, one of the engineers, offered her a beer and a bacon sandwich and that more than absorbed her attention. The crew turned off the recording gear and took a desperately needed break.

It was then that Jenny Slade spoke briefly to Beth. It had been a tough few days for everyone, but Beth looked particularly shattered and demented by it all.

‘This is not what I wanted,’ Beth said, and she wandered off, amazed that silence had finally fallen on her house, and walked into the living room as though to savour the peace and quiet there, but she didn’t stay long.

Jenny didn’t know whether the session was over or not. If Jon Churchill had come back from the beach and taken up his place behind the drums she would certainly have joined him. But he was away a long time and on his return he entered the house through a side door, thus avoiding everyone, and he went into the living room, to the makeshift studio and picked up Jenny’s guitar, slung it round his neck and turned on the power to the amp.

The electric shock must have come immediately, since nobody heard him play any notes or chords. Instead he received a bolt of electric current that threw him across the room and dumped him on top of his drum kit.

The noise from the amp, followed by the sudden crash, the noise of colliding drums and guitar was truly terrible, and it was immediately obvious that something bad had happened, and even though Beth raced into the room, turned off the power and began immediate first aid, somehow everyone knew it was a futile exercise. Jon Churchill was killed by electricity in his own living room having played the most extraordinary music of his life.

There are those who say it was a merciful death, a quick, clean release from the lingering horrors of Alzheimer’s, and there are those who say he engineered the death himself. Perhaps he had deliberately got his hands wet on the beach. Perhaps he had interfered with the power supply, certainly some of the cables were frayed and worn, and Dan the engineer swore they hadn’t been like that when he’d first connected them. Jenny examined her guitar and amp and was all too aware that Jon’s death might very easily have been hers. The fatal shock had been there waiting for whoever picked up the guitar.

Beth was inconsolable, hysterical, half out of her mind with grief and exhaustion. She would scream at Jenny, blaming her for the death, saying it was all her fault, and then she would crumple with misery and say it was all her own fault. Everyone assured her that she mustn’t blame herself, but it did little good.

After the ambulance and the doctor and the police had gone there was nothing left for Jenny and the crew to do but pack up and go home. Dan the engineer was unusually quiet and broody. The death seemed to have affected him profoundly despite his never have met Jon Churchill until the beginning of the session. Jenny tried to console him but he didn’t want to be consoled.

‘I have no right to call myself an engineer,’ he berated himself. ‘The first rule of recording is to always keep the tape running. And I didn’t. That noise, the sound from the guitar when it electrocuted him, that drum crash, if only I could have got that on tape, I’d have made a fucking fortune.’

Jenny slapped him hard across the face with a bundle of twisted guitar leads and made her own way home.