Flesh Guitar

CAGED SKRONK

Tom Scorn drove himself to the San Germano Correctional Facility; a high-tech, high-security prison, thick, high Victorian walls, built in the middle of swamp and wasteland, where he was booked to do a solo gig, part of a rehabilitation scheme. He pulled up at the electronic gate and showed the necessary documents to a guard in a black uniform spattered with red fringes and braid, and was waved through to a central courtyard. Two more uniformed men took his equipment out of the van for him and he was conducted through a sort of portcullis into a metal chamber where he found yet another guard. This one was apparently higher ranking, the uniform more ornate.

‘Ready for the strip search?’ the guard asked nonchalantly.

‘Actually, no,’ Scorn replied.

‘It’s just a formality,’ said the guard. ‘We know what musicians are like.’

‘You really think I’m going to come in here carrying drugs?’

‘Drugs is the least of it,’ the guard said, still cheery.

Scorn saw no point fighting. If you wanted to play to a gaol full of dangerous criminals then you had to make some compromises. Having nothing to hide, he started to undo the buttons of his shirt.

‘Hey, I’ll do that,’ the guard shouted, and he made Scorn remain motionless as the clothes were peeled from him.

The guard was brisk, without being rough, thorough without being invasive. He found plenty of opportunity to lay his hands on Scorn’s body and the red fringing of his uniform brushed repeatedly against Scorn’s bare flesh.

‘What sort of music do you play exactly?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ said Scorn thoughtfully, ‘it’s certainly not easy music. It’s challenging, thought-provoking. It makes the listener reassess his own position with regard to the world, as does all art, of course.’

‘A bit like that Jenny Slade, then.’

‘Not entirely unlike her, I suppose,’ Scorn said drily.

‘We tried to get her to come here but the governor thought it was asking for trouble bringing a woman to play in a men’s prison.’

Scorn grunted.

‘Well, good luck,’ the guard said. ‘You might need it.’ He peered inquisitively into Scorn’s holes and crevices and said, ‘OK, you’re clean.’

‘I know,’ Scorn replied.

He put his clothes on. The guard dusted him down, slapped him on the buttock and accompanied him through an electronic door into a featureless corridor beyond.

‘You’ll be playing in the Beckett Theatre,’ the guard said.

Scorn had already been told this, although he didn’t know and couldn’t quite imagine what kind of theatre they were likely to have in a high-security prison. Maybe the talk of fierce discipline was exaggerated. Maybe in reality it was all concert parties and amateur dramatics.

‘There have been some spectacular acts performed in the Beckett Theatre,’ the guard remarked. ‘The place has quite a history. It dates back to the time when the San Germano was a hospital and madhouse.’

‘Hospital?’ Scorn repeated, light suddenly dawning. ‘It’s not an operating theatre is it?’

The guard laughed at the very idea. ‘Of course it’s not,’ he said brightly. ‘It’s a former dissection theatre.’

Before Scorn could express surprise they had arrived. Two wooden swing doors were set in the steel-lined corridor and the guard pushed him through into the theatre. It was reminiscent of a bear pit. The space was circular, not large, with steeply rising banks of seats on all sides. The ‘stage’ where the dissections would once have taken place was in the centre, the performances here would always be ‘in the round’. The dissection table had gone but there was a distinctly medical air to what had been left behind: white tiles, a sluice and overhead illumination as fierce as searchlights. There was not going to be much of an atmosphere, Scorn thought, and the acoustics were bound to be horrible.

‘Nervous?’ the guard asked.

‘A little,’ Scorn confessed. ‘I think a few nerves help improve a performance.’

‘Yeah, well I’d have nerves too if I was going to stand up on my own in front of a roomful of druggies, murderers and bum bandits.’

The two guards who’d taken Scorn’s equipment now arrived and set down the four electronic keyboards and amplifiers that he was using for his set. There was also a small, square card table, whose function at this stage was obscure. Scorn set up the gear himself, while the guards watched him with bored curiosity. Ostensibly they were here to help, to provide what he needed, but when he asked for a cup of coffee or a bottle of mineral water all three assured him these were unrealistic and unrealizable requests. Scorn got the impression that the guards were there as his captors rather than his protectors.

Soon sounds came from the corridor outside and the captive audience began to arrive. They shuffled into the theatre and took their places in the wooden seats. They seemed reluctant, repressed, as though they had been dragged there unwillingly, as though attendance at this concert was just another aspect of their continuing punishment. Certainly, Scorn noted with some relief, there appeared to be enough guards in attendance to ensure the prisoners behaved themselves.

He was used to facing an audience, but this time half of them were behind him, and he could feel their hostile stares boring into his back. He was also accustomed to waiting for an audience to settle down and quieten before he started playing but this audience was already absolutely silent and still.

The piece he had decided to play was called ‘Absent Kings’, one of his more recent, and in his opinion, less demanding compositions. The performance began as he produced a pack of playing cards, removed the four kings and tossed them into the audience. This caused the most muted of ripples. He then dealt out the rest of the pack face-down on the card table. He paused theatrically, then turned over the first card, looked at it briefly and ran to one of the keyboards where he played a single note of D.

The composition fell broadly into the category of ‘systems music’ and someone familiar with the genre might instantly have realized what Scorn was up to. Each card on the table represented a note of the chromatic scale of A, so that an ace was A, 2 was A sharp, 3 was B, 4 was C, and so on: twelve cards per suit corresponding to the twelve musical notes. Each of the four suits in turn corresponded to each of the four keyboards on stage, so that if Scorn turned up a heart he’d have to play on keyboard number one, a spade meant keyboard number two, a diamond was number three and so on, each keyboard having a different, though equally cheap and cheerful, tone. Thus if he dealt the cards three of diamonds, queen of hearts, eight of clubs, he would have to play B on the third keyboard, then G sharp on the first keyboard, followed by E on the fourth keyboard. The keyboards were deliberately set just out of reach of each other so he had to dash from one to another leaving silences between each note. The music was thrillingly spare and thin.

The sight and sound of Scorn dashing around the stage playing apparently random notes might have appealed to a fan of the more ironic avant-garde. It might even have caused gentle amusement to those with a sense of the ridiculous. However the prison population at the San Germano Correction Facility contained neither of those types. After thirty or forty seconds of ‘Absent Kings’ the audience in the Beckett Theatre erupted in passionate, violent booing.

The prisoners were on their feet shouting, heckling, cat-calling. The prison guards tried to remain unmoved and unimpressed by the reaction, but that was a difficult act to pull off. They suddenly looked terribly outnumbered and ineffectual.

Scorn, who had never been one to seek easy audience approval, thought there was something rather wonderful about the directness and vehemence of the response, and he was still feeling that way when the prisoners rushed the stage, knocking prison guards unconscious as they came. They seized Scorn and dragged him out of the theatre. As he lay on the floor in the corridor outside he could hear the sound of his keyboards being smashed to pieces, but he tended to think this too was a valid aesthetic response, and he was still having these charitable thoughts as he was kicked into unconsciousness.

A scrum formed around him and he was manhandled into the toilet block, while other prisoners engaged in a pitched battle with the guards. There was an amount of wounding and maiming on both sides, and honours remained even in terms of combat, but having Tom Scorn as a hostage gave the prisoners a definite edge. Before long a state of siege obtained throughout the prison and the circus could begin in earnest.

Outside the walls armed police arrived in numbers, along with a crack negotiating team, some SAS men, fleets of helicopters and armoured cars, ambulances, fire engines. And of course the media came too, teams of reporters and film and television crews, along with a throng of amateur gawpers who’d braved the swamp and wasteland to be there.

Communication was established with the prisoners and after some hours of intense, complex see-sawing negotiations, the prisoners finally made their demands clear.

Jenny Slade was watching the whole thing on TV, thinking that it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy than Tom Scorn. She hadn’t touched her guitar since the death of Jon Churchill. Music seemed an all too melancholy activity. That was when she got a phone call from a senior member of the negotiating team, one Major Warren. His voice was clipped, unemotional, narrow in range. She somehow assumed he had a trim toothbrush moustache.

‘They’re desperate men,’ he said of the prisoners. ‘If we put a foot wrong they wouldn’t think twice about killing Tom Scorn.’

‘Well, I’ve thought about it at least once, myself.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘The man’s a fool,’ Jenny said drily. ‘What did he want to play that experimental stuff for? When I get invited to play in a prison I always do some country and western songs. “Coward of the County” generally goes down pretty well.’

‘It’s funny you should say that,’ the major said, ‘because that’s more or less what we’ve got in mind.’

‘Huh?’

‘Actually it wasn’t what I personally had in mind at all. I rather favoured the use of nerve gas, but that’s just me. The situation is this; the prisoners will release Tom Scorn on one condition only — that you play a concert for them.’

Jenny Slade found this completely mad. There were surely easier ways of getting a change in the entertainment. Why would they risk so much? But mad or not, when the request was put to her so directly how could she refuse? She supposed that on balance she didn’t want to be responsible for Tom Scorn’s death, so she would do what was required, but it still seemed to be an arrangement full of problems.

‘If I go in there to play a gig, what’s to say they won’t kidnap me as well? They could end up with two hostages instead of one.’

‘We’ve discussed that of course, Ms Slade,’ the major said suavely. ‘The prisoners themselves have suggested that you play outside the prison, on a patch of waste ground in front of the main gate. Now, there’s a slight problem here since the prison is rather well soundproofed but we’ve talked to an expert, a technical boffin, and he swears he’s got some special highly penetrative amplification equipment that means they’ll be able to hear clear as a bell in there. The boffin’s name is Tubby Moran.’

The man who invented Bliss?’ Jenny said.

‘Well, I’m not sure I’d go that far.’

Jenny gave her consent, and while pantechnicons moved masses of unfamiliar sound equipment to the site, Jenny practised a few Hank Williams and Patsy Cline favourites. She suspected this was going to be a very weird gig.

Jenny was driven to the prison, accompanied by motorcycle outriders. The hastily built stage outside the prison was small, but the surrounding structure of amplifiers and speakers was overwhelming. It looked like the ruined gateway to some futuristic city. Parts of it were recognizable as standard stage rig, but whole chunks were quite unlike anything she’d ever seen before. There were clusters of ominous, curling tubes, and vast metal plates and crude square horns and cones mounted on scaffolding towers. Much of it looked like debris from a scrapyard and Jenny hoped that was all it was, junk sculpture, but there was something forbidding and brutal about it, that suggested more than just decoration. And there, at the centre, dressed in camouflage gear, directing operations, climbing over the structure and snarling instructions through a surprisingly crude-looking megaphone, was Tubby Moran.

‘Hi kid,’ he said, when he saw Jenny.

‘So this is what you’re into now, is it?’ Jenny asked. ‘No more drugs, no more Bliss, no more production deal?’

‘I’m still into all those things,’ he said, ‘but this is the future.’

He waved grandly at the equipment.

‘Music isn’t just about leisure and pleasure,’ he said. ‘It’s more elemental than that. Plug into the right frequencies and it’s the very stuff of the universe.’

Ignoring this high-falutin’ tone, Jenny asked, ‘What is all this gear? It looks like a war zone.’

‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about that,’ Moran replied. ‘You just play. Leave the hardware to me. You just be the software.’

Once again Jenny felt she had no choice. She took her guitar, plugged in and strummed. The sound was nice, surprisingly clean and conventional considering the outland-ishness of the set up. It sounded like an old classic tube amp. The bass was particularly thick and rich.

This was not the kind of show where there would be a support act, not even a master of ceremonies. All around the stage there were soundmen, police, reporters, plenty of people watching, even some soldiers, but when she began to play a version of ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon’ she knew she was doing it mostly for an invisible and incarcerated audience.

She had been playing no more than a minute and a half when she saw that one or two of the policemen were looking very unsteady on their feet, then one of them gripped his stomach and started to retch. Before long she could see that everyone within hearing distance of the stage seemed to be having breathing difficulties, falling to their knees, collapsing in pain.

Tubby Moran was on stage beside her, looking horribly pleased with himself.

‘Ah, the potency of cheap music,’ he said.

‘What’s going on?’ Jenny demanded.

‘Infrasound,’ he said. ‘Sound waves below twenty hertz, very low frequency, below what the human ear can hear. But the fact you can’t hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Mild exposure causes giddiness and nausea. At high density it cracks walls.’

Jenny stared at him in horror and she suddenly began to understand. ‘Of course, you can’t just walk up to a prison wall with an infrasound generator,’ Moran continued. ‘So the challenge was to find a way of combining the infrasound with the notes of an electric guitar. We also had to devise a way of shielding the stage from the infrasound so that the guitar player didn’t suffer the same effects and could carry on playing. I think I can say that today we’ve solved those problems.’

Jenny stopped playing, wanting to put an end to the sound, but Moran signalled to one of his back-stage crew who threw some switches. A squall of feedback grew and swelled from Jenny’s guitar, regardless of anything she did to it. She had heard louder guitar noise, had indeed played it herself, but never with such results. Suddenly it was as though the towering stone walls of the prison had been turned to cardboard. A rip appeared from top to bottom, at first just a few inches wide, but stretching all the time until it was wide enough to let a man pass through it, at which point various prisoners did just that.

They straggled out in single file holding a tattered, bruised Tom Scorn in front of them as a shield. They started piling into the trucks that had delivered the sound equipment, ready to make a getaway, and the police and military just sat back, too sick to do anything about it.

The guitar howl played on, the gap continued to widen and prisoners continued to pour out. What happened next was inevitable; at least Jenny could see it coming all too clearly. She couldn’t bear to look, yet she couldn’t turn away as the gap finally got so wide that the whole wall of the prison quaked and then collapsed.

In the panic that followed, Jenny was able to silence her guitar. That was when the forces of law and order moved in. There were smoke bombs and semi-automatic fire, water cannons, crack teams of SAS boys scampering up and down the crumbling masonry of the prison, grenade explosions, clouds of tear gas. When the fog of war had thinned, it was apparent that the vans full of prisoners had gone, along with Tubby Moran and his crew. It was apparent too that quite a few men had died in the collapse of the prison, both guards and inmates, and Tom Scorn was found trussed, his throat cut with a guitar string, his every orifice having been used for acts both conventional and experimental.

Months later the official inquiry asserted that mistakes had been made at the San Germano Correctional Facility. The regime at the prison, it was declared, had been too harsh in certain areas, too soft in others. There were lessons to be learned. The practice of allowing live entertainment in prison was immediately halted, and easy-listening programmes were piped into every cell in every gaol in the country, to soothe and sedate the captive population. The question of how and why Tubby Moran had been able to use infrasound to enact the gaolbreak was regarded as too sensitive and secret to be publicly discussed. However, an appendix to the report argued that there was a case for licensing the electric guitar, like a gun or a Rottweiler, and that unlicensed or dangerous users should be heavily fined.

The report exonerated Tom Scorn, easy enough since he was now something of a martyr, but was rather less forgiving of Jenny Slade. While she was clearly not the prime mover in the gaolbreak she was certainly in some sense the cause. And although she appeared not to have committed any indictable offence, in the absence of the actual culprit, she was a very convenient scapegoat and a certain amount of the mud thrown at her was bound to stick.

For her part, Jenny felt thoroughly, desperately guilty. Yes, she knew Tubby Moran was the real villain but that didn’t make her feel any better. Men had died when the walls came tumbling down, and even among survivors the after-effects of infrasound were grisly and long lasting. It wasn’t an event you could just shrug off.

Jenny was much written and talked about. Other stories about her started to make the papers. Most of them were pretty old and careworn, stories about the ruination of the Hormone Twins, about the deaths of Captain Ahab and Jon Churchill. There were even fabricated stories about the Daughters of Jenny Slade, who supposedly cut off a hand in honour of their heroine. In more perverse reports the hand had been transformed into a breast.

At first Jenny read the stories as though they referred to someone else, someone foul and vicious, someone she wouldn’t choose to be in the same room with, much less choose to be. She knew it was rumours and lies and stories they’d made up, but before long, perversely, she couldn’t help believing there must be some truth in them. Late in the day she began to believe her own press. A fathomless and unshakeable melancholy enfolded her like a poncho.

In the world of rock and roll it is often said that no publicity is bad publicity, yet there was no doubt that after the events at the prison Jenny Slade found it much harder to get gigs, and when she got them the audiences were smaller, their responses depressingly muted. Her confidence began to falter. She wondered if it had all been sound and fury. Perhaps her whole career had been merely a hiccup in popular taste. She’d fooled some of the people for some of the time, but that time had now passed.

She began to play safe, to anaesthetize and protect herself: drink and drugs helped a little, as did long hours locked away indoors. She cried a lot, and not only when she was alone. She wept all the way through a recording session where she was supposed to be providing racy, upbeat rock guitar for a soft drink commercial. She cancelled some of her gigs; at others she simply failed to show up. When she did show up she was often in no condition to play. If she did manage to play she’d almost certainly perform badly and alienate the audience.

She began to wish the piano had been her instrument. A piano player who was past it and past caring could always get a gig, even if it was only tinkling the ivories in some cocktail lounge, like Walter Hormone. But a state of the art experimentalist who had stopped experimenting, who had stopped caring about her art, was no use to anyone.

She turned up at a few jam sessions, made a fool of herself by playing insanely loud, fast, tuneless solos during soulful renditions of ‘The Thrill Is Gone’. If she was tolerated at all it was as a kind of joke, an eccentric comedy act, but those who had known her at her best found it a sad, sick joke.

Every time she picked up the guitar she died a little. She wouldn’t have minded going like Jon Churchill, would have been perfectly happy to die on stage, to add the literal death to the metaphoric. But that didn’t happen.

She felt cursed. And maybe it went all the way back. Perhaps it wasn’t Ahab who had lured the Magic Big Band to its doom all those years ago, but her. She was the affliction, the bird of ill omen.

And she began to think that maybe Tom Scorn had been right when he said the days of the musician were over. Maybe it would be machines from now on, machines capable of tireless precision. Maybe the electric guitar was a remnant of a closed period of history, like the hurdy-gurdy or the serpent.

When things were looking their very worse she got a letter from someone who claimed to be her number one fan, saying that she must carry on playing, get back to being her old self. There was a fanzine enclosed. It reported in dreary detail all the facts of her recent musically and spiritually bad gigs. She didn’t need reminding and threw the magazine away. She looked at the signature on the letter, ‘Bob Arnold, your number one fan’. She’d never heard of him. She tore the letter into obsessively small, neat pieces and burned them.

She became a recluse. She grew her nails long. Her career seemed to be over and she had no complaints, no regrets. Silence beckoned and she welcomed it, but she wasn’t content to slide into easy retirement. She needed to go out with a bang, not the ordinary sort of bang, not the farewell tour, not the ‘Best of album. She wanted to play just one last time, to hit it and quit, and she knew the very place to do it, a place at the end of the world, where the rules didn’t apply, a place where she wasn’t known, where the audience was hostile and the PA useless: the Havoc Bar and Grill.