Flesh Guitar

MEANWHILE BACK AT THE BAR

‘Frankly,’ says Kate, the barmaid at the Havoc Bar and Grill, ‘I’ve never really understood what the big deal is about the electric guitar.’

Bob Arnold looks as though she has stabbed him in the heart.

‘Well, thanks for being frank,’ he says bleakly.

She has provided him with his second drink, poured something for herself, and the two of them are sitting in a pale cone of light at the corner of the bar, while around them other drinkers settle into snoring, lumpen stupors, and the manager contemplates going home and leaving Kate to lock up.

‘Well,’ says Bob wearily, but with patience, as though he’s explained all this stuff a million times before but still thinks it worthwhile to explain it again, ‘the thing is: the electric guitar is a conduit. It connects with pain and passion, with inspiration and aspiration, with sound waves and electrical charge, with technology and history, with industry and the heart.’

‘Oh,’ says Kate, strikingly aware that she may be out of her depth here, or more specifically that she has fallen into conversation with a serious guitar bore. He wouldn’t be the first to have bent her ear. However, Bob’s take on things seems a little more interesting than those she’s suffered through before.

He says, ‘The electric guitar is a strange combination of electronics and mechanics. The simple movement of the fingers is translated by electricity into sound.

‘An electric guitar has pickups. The pickup consists of a magnet or magnetic pole pieces surrounded by a wire coil. When a steel string vibrates within the magnetic field it induces a current in the coil. That electric signal is sent out of the guitar along a lead to an amp and speakers. Jenny Slade and I always like to think it has something in common with chaos theory, but I won’t trouble you with that now.’

‘Thanks,’ says Kate.

He continues. ‘The unamplified acoustic guitar has always been a rather quiet, impotent sort of thing. It was OK for folk singers or country blues singers, or even to accompany flamenco dancers, but put it up against a full jazz band or the Benny Goodman Orchestra and it becomes pretty well inaudible. So it needed to be louder.

‘There’s a lot of infighting about who invented the electric guitar; Lloyd Loar at Gibson was in with a claim, the guys at Dobro too, but the fact is, nothing much predates the Frying Pan.’

‘Excuse me?’ says Kate.

‘It was a nineteen thirty-one prototype; a long thin guitar neck with a solid circular body, hence the Frying Pan. Arnold Rickenbacker, George Beauchamp, an assistant called Paul Barth, a guitar-maker called Harry Watson, they all had a hand in creating it. It’s said that Beauchamp began by taking the pickup from a Brunswick phonograph and attaching it to a piece of two-by-four with a single string. The pickup translated the vibration of the string and amplified it. Adding five more strings and giving the guitar a more conventional shape was just icing on the cake. The basic principle had been established.

‘By nineteen thirty-two Rickenbacker was manufacturing the Electro Spanish guitar, a perfectly modern looking piece of gear with f holes and fancy volume and tone controls, but the pickup is exactly like on the Frying Pan.’

Bob is aware that some of this may be a little technical for his listener, but she did ask for it, and he would never dream of talking down to a person just because she worked behind a bar. And besides it’s so much easier to talk about history and technology than it is to talk about what’s really breaking his heart.

‘Anyway,’ Bob says, ‘being the first is nice, but it isn’t everything. Some things are simply inevitable. If Beauchamp hadn’t come up with the Frying Pan somebody else would have.

‘Leo Fender was the first to mass-produce electric guitars. He made ’em cheap and he made ’em good. And if he hadn’t started producing them, then Gibson certainly wouldn’t have set up in competition, in which case Les Paul would never have been called in and the whole history of the electric guitar would have been different.

‘But note that I only say different. If Fender hadn’t been the Henry Ford of guitars, somebody else would have been. If Les Paul hadn’t invented that fat, eloquent humbucking sound, somebody else would. These things were simply bound to happen.

‘And after those few basic but crucial inventions, after those patents and practices, it didn’t really matter. After that, the deluge. After that there came tens of thousands of designers and inventors, craftsman and manufacturers, customizers and luthiers, all trying to “reinvent” the electric guitar. But basically they were all too late. The job had been done and the party was over. The rest was just tidying and sweeping up.’

‘You certainly know your history,’ Kate says.

‘Those who don’t know history are doomed to do bad cover versions,’ he quips. ‘Now, there’s a reasonable argument that says the best electric guitars are the biggest failures. You see, the pioneers of the electric guitar wanted a device that could reproduce the sound of an acoustic guitar as accurately and with as pure a tone as possible, so that it sounded exactly like an acoustic guitar only louder. But electric guitars never quite do that. They add muck and growl and distortion. And the strange thing is, people discovered they preferred it that way.’

Kate’s face shows confusion. She says, ‘Why would people prefer muck and growl and distortion to accuracy and purity?’

‘People are funny like that, Kate.’

Kate shakes her head sadly.

‘And that’s why they like effects too.’

‘Effects? As in special effects?’

‘In a way, yes. If people liked a fuzzy signal, why not make a little machine that could create fuzz to order? And chorus. And phase. And tremolo. And echo. And chorus. And so on and so on.’

‘The more the merrier,’ Kate adds glibly.

‘Frankly, merriness is not one of the things I’ve ever really looked for in music,’ says Bob. ‘But yes, when it comes to guitar noise, less is generally not better. Jenny Slade may be many things but she’s never been much of a minimalist.’

Kate considers this proposition and finds some truth in it.

‘The other element in all this is the amp,’ says Bob. ‘The guitar and the pickup and the effects units create and modify the signal, and then the amplifier messes it all up some more in its own special way, and cranks it out at skull-crushing volume.’

‘And people like that even more?’ Kate asks.

‘Yes, Kate, some people really like that a lot, believe me.’

‘Yes, I’ll buy that,’ says Kate. ‘Jenny Slade’s performance wouldn’t have been the same if it had been quiet.’

‘Look, Kate, here’s the true juice,’ Bob announces. ‘You can quote me on this. Life is like a guitar solo. It’s loud, shapeless and it goes on too long. Sometimes it’s tuneless, sometimes it’s cliched, either way it’s damned difficult to get it right, and even if you’ve done your best and you’re pleased with what you’ve achieved, you can be sure a lot of people are going to hate it and dump all over you and tell you you’re a loser.’

‘Aren’t you the philosopher?’ Kate says, not unkindly. ‘Do I really need to know all this background just to be able to appreciate Jenny Slade’s music?’

‘Yes, Kate, you do. Because once you know and understand the background you’ll see that the whole of history, of invention, of technical and artistic development, has existed for one reason and one reason only; to bring Jenny Slade to us.’

‘Whew,’ says Kate, ‘that’s heavy.’ And she reaches for a drink.

‘Heavy is the word,’ Bob agrees, and he holds out his empty glass so that Kate can refill it.