Flesh Guitar

DICK

Call me Jenny Slade. Some years ago, having little or no money, and nothing particular to interest me at home, I thought I would tour about a little and see the rock and roll parts of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the blues. Whenever I find myself playing exclusively minor chords, when I find myself listening to Leonard Cohen albums, when it requires a strong act of will to prevent me from braining promoters, record reviewers and teeny boppers with the blunt end of my guitar, then I account it high time to get on the road as soon as I can.

I found myself signed up as rhythm guitarist with an outfit called Captain Ahab and His Magic Big Band, an intermittently outrageous combo with its roots in the blues. The eponymous Captain, originally just plain Johnny Ahab, sang, played harmonica and sometimes shouted a sort of cracked, surreal poetry. I knew the tour would be a learning experience, and would look good on my CV, even if the good Captain himself had a reputation for being difficult to work and live with. I thought I could handle him, but I didn’t know the half of it.

It was going to be a long, arduous world tour calling in at the Azores, Rio de la Plata, Sumatra, Java; all the hot spots. And the band was hot too. On bass there was the very heavy and very tattooed Sam Queequeg. He looked fearsome, but he was a great man to have on your side; certainly if somebody tried to invade the stage. Playing keyboards and acting as musical director was Randy Starbuck, the Captain’s right-hand man from way back. Billy Stubb was the drummer, and he was supplemented by Rikki Tashtego, a percussionist and the Native American of the group.

Each of them was a musical giant in his own right and they had all led their own bands at one time or another, but it was clear that on this particular tour they would be subservient to the genius and obsessive vision of the Captain.

It was some time before I met the man himself. I was auditioned and recruited by Randy Starbuck alone. The Captain would only show up when we were fully drilled and rehearsed. We had to be tight, disciplined and controlled so that we could become his creatures, and give him the freedom to pursue his own strange, lofty goals. What these goals were we only slowly discovered.

We were put through our paces in an old, disused whaling station in Nantucket, and although the Captain was rumoured to be in town we weren’t allowed to see him. His absence had a strange effect on the band. We all felt apprehensive and uneasy. We already suspected that the rehearsals would scarcely prepare us for the task ahead. We played as well as we could and yet we knew it would all be totally different the moment the tour started.

It was not until we’d been playing together for two weeks or more that the Captain finally put in an appearance. Starbuck had led us through a beefy, somewhat shambolic instrumental version of Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’, which had ended in a loose but undeniably exciting burst of improvised sound and fury. We looked up and there was the Captain, standing at the back of the hall.

He was quite a spectacle. There seemed no sign of common bodily illness. His whole high, broad form seemed made of solid bronze and shaped in an unalterable mould like Cellini’s cast of Perseus or like an Oscar statuette. He was wintry, bare, rugged, like a thunder-cloven oak.

He had a formidable scar. It started high up in his long grey hair, continued white and livid down one side of his tanned, chiselled face and neck, and disappeared inside the collar of his black silk shirt. Whether he was born with the scar, or whether it was the result of over-enthusiastic audience participation on some earlier tour, I couldn’t say, but by mutual consent it was never mentioned by anyone.

So charismatic was the Captain that at first I hardly noticed the curious false leg on which he stood. How he had lost his real leg I had no idea at the time, but I could see it had been replaced by a false one fashioned from the rosewood neck of a pre-CBS Fender Telecaster. It gave him a strange, insecure posture, not entirely unlike Gene Vincent. You couldn’t look away. When he shambled on to the stage, any stage, and hooked that leg around the microphone stand and began to sing, people took notice. Snappier critics than I have written that he ‘had crucifixion in his face and all the regal, overbearing dignity of some mighty woe’, and I couldn’t put it better myself.

We went through ‘Sailing’ again. The Captain sang a couple of verses with us. His sudden appearance had thrown us into musical confusion. We played extremely badly for him, and yet when he got to the end of the song, as the band crashed hopelessly out of time, and into a chaos of discord and disharmony, an expression came upon his face that in other men might have resulted in a smile. We knew then that this was going to be a tour to remember.

We began in earnest. The tour was long and hard. The hotels were cheap and cheerless, the travel arrangements chaotic. We ate too little and drank too much. Drugs were popped at every conceivable occasion. Such sex as was encountered was brief and animalistic. It was just another tour in those respects. But, if I say so myself, the music was pretty good, and we were glad about that. We all wanted to do a good job for the Captain. Yet at the same time I think we were also aware that we might never quite be able to live up to the standards he was setting.

And as we toured we heard stories and rumours about the Captain, and though many of them were absurd or downright contradictory, they gradually gelled and made sense. We realized soon enough the nature of his mission. Quite simply he was in search of the Great White Noise. He had heard it once, had indeed created it with an early incarnation of the Big Band. It all stemmed from a date in a gaucho bar in Patagonia. It had started like an ordinary gig, but as the evening progressed the music had become increasingly free-form, increasingly wild. The band was blowing up a storm, something supernatural and terrifying. They played on for hours, rode the whirlwind till they feared for their very souls. A point came when they were no longer playing music, rather they were involved in something perilous and incorporate and life-threatening. It was indeed a great white noise that drew them to the edge of madness and mayhem.

They played till they couldn’t play any more, until they were spent and all the music had been wrung out of them. When they eventually left the stage they were wrecked, but they all thought it was worth it for the sake of having produced that wild, wild noise.

However, it turned out to be a one-off, an end rather than a beginning, a fluke perhaps. They were never able to recapture that sound, that moment, and so the Captain broke up the band, decided to try again from scratch. From then on he had toured the world, his monomania heavy upon him, always trying out new bands, new equipment, seeking out new audiences and venues. He’d hear of a hot new bass player from Estonia, of a happening club in Mauritania, and he would be there trying to recreate that sound; but to date he had failed miserably. Consequently his manner was both frantic and morbid, and it seemed to us that he put into his quest all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.

And we also heard stories of how he came to lose his leg. It was said that on that famous occasion he was so transported by the music, so utterly delirious, that he climbed to the top of a stack of speakers and fell off, shattering his leg. Despite all the administrations of a good Patagonian surgeon, the leg was lost, and in the madness of his convalescence he decreed that he would become a living instrument, the means by which that great white noise was recaptured, hence the neck of the Telecaster. It sounded like far-fetched stuff, yet nobody who met the Captain had any trouble believing it.

We toured on. There were good gigs and bad gigs. Gigs when we didn’t play as well as we wanted to, gigs where we played supremely well. But the only gigs that interested the Captain were those where a kind of madness came over us, when we played beyond ourselves, when we successfully pushed and tore the envelope. Some audiences seemed to understand what we were about and urged us on, others simply found us crazed and incomprehensible.

The Captain was enough of an old pro that he could never be accused of shortchanging an audience, but he didn’t see himself simply as an entertainer. He was going all the way and if the audience couldn’t go with him that was just too bad. There were nights when we thought we were getting close, when the music was pure abstraction, something radical and deranged, but the Captain insisted we go further. Within the band there were those who suspected it might all end in tears, that the Captain might lead us into some sort of rock and roll hell from which there was no return, but nobody ever suggested we hold back or try to pace ourselves. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was exhaustion, but we were all prepared to follow him to the end of the line.

And so we came at last to Tierra del Fuego, the final stretch of the tour, back to those regions where the Captain had first encountered his white noise and lost a part of himself. It had been a very long tour. We were infinitely weary. All the humour and joy seemed to have been forced out of us and yet we played on. The Captain had driven us to the ends of our tether, till we were in a state of such spiritual malaise that we were nothing more than his pawns, his playthings. Dumbly we moved through the sound check, ever conscious of the old man’s despot eye, aware that he was willing us to bring the tour to a dramatic, shattering conclusion.

The gig started in front of a big enthusiastic audience, and the Captain led us into a version of ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’, a version such as you’ve never heard. It was as though he were playing for his very life, for all our lives. If the Captain was aware of his surroundings, of the club we were in, of the way the audience responded, he failed to show it. His gaze was fixed upon dim and distant horizons and he sang and played like a man possessed.

The band playing on, rolling and swaying. Sometimes the music shuddered and splintered, as though threatening to fall apart, and yet somehow we continued. The Captain played his harmonica for all he was worth. ‘There he blows,’ Sam Queequeg shouted over and over again, really getting off on the awesome beauty of the noise. The Captain drove us on. We played faster and faster, skimming over melodies, re-forming them so that they flowed and rippled, were turned to surf and waves, until at last a moment came when we no longer knew what we were playing. Tonight was going to be the night. We had gone beyond technique, beyond conscious intention. We were maniacs. It was all wind rush and spume, and it was truly magnificent. We were lost, utterly lost, at the mercy of forces much greater than ourselves. But there it was. We knew we had finally succeeded in creating the great white noise that the Captain had been pushing us so hard to locate.

‘At last,’ he said between atonal blasts on his mouth harp. ‘At last.’

He stood rooted in front of the microphone as if he were no longer with us, his mind transported to some dim, blue, vacant place. The audience went crazy. They pressed against the stage like a flood tide, and the Captain leaned towards them, reached out, tilted perilously in their direction, trusting them, wanting to become one with them, to float upon the sea of people.

He launched himself. It was a terrible mistake. Stage diving was entirely unknown in that part of the world. The welcoming supporting raised hands he had been expecting were not there for him. Instead a gap opened up in the crowd and the bare floor of the hall became visible. The Captain plunged downwards, hit the deck with a horrifying crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom. Then the crowd closed in around him and he disappeared like one trodden underfoot by herds of stampeding polo ponies. Nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from far ravines. There was a terrible beauty in knowing that these sounds were unlikely ever to be repeated.

The band stopped playing, but the audience scarcely noticed. They were mad now, as mad as we members of the band had been, as mad as the Captain. We had created in them a frenzy that we could not possibly control. What’s more, we were now leaderless and redundant. We decided to make a dash for it. We ran from the stage and in the process lost almost everything we had, our instruments, our amplifiers, our PA system. The audience wrecked the hall, the dressing rooms, our tour bus. Security guards muscled in, started cracking heads and waving baseball bats around. The gig was over, and so was the tour, and so was a whole phase of my life. Perhaps it was because I was a woman that I alone survived unharmed to tell the tale.

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 5 Issue 8