Flesh Guitar

THE JENNY SLADE INTERVIEW

Bob Arnold chews the fat with Jenny Slade

Jenny Slade was looking especially good when I caught up with her in LA’s favourite watering hole, the Giant Anaconda Room. Her look was fearlessly eclectic: the bondage pants, the boob tube, the bolero jacket, the leopardskin pork pie hat, all creating a striking, provocatively sexual image that few could carry off. And yet why did I feel that these fine feathers were hiding a deep hurt? She might have looked like a major babe, but it seemed to me that she was blubbing inside.

I started with a lively and provocative question. ‘What happened to all your money, Jenny?’

‘Did I ever have any?’ she replied wearily. ‘Well, maybe I did. I don’t know where it went. I guess I spent it all on cheap boys and expensive guitars. Or perhaps it was the other way round; cheap guitars and expensive boys. I forget. Either way, I was never in it for the money, which I agree is perhaps just as well.’

‘And how long have you been playing the guitar?’

‘For about the same amount of time that the guitar’s been playing me,’ she quipped gaily, and I got the sense that here was one lady who wasn’t going to betray her age.

‘I think of you as a true radical,’ I said, getting bolder now. ‘Always out of step but never out of touch.’

‘Are you trying to say that I do not grow old as those who are left grow old?’ she intoned.

‘I think I’m trying to say that you have a different relationship to the space/time continuum than the rest of us poor mortals.’

‘Hmm,’ said Jenny, more seriously. ‘I will say this: as I get older the appetite for drink and drugs and untrustworthy boys recedes, but the urge to pick up an electric guitar and make a godawful noise just won’t go away.’

‘And would you say the guitar is a hard instrument to play?’ I quizzed provocatively.

She looked at me glancingly, and I knew there was going to be iron and irony in her reply.

‘Of course it is,’ she said. ‘If it was easy people like you would be doing it.’

I knew she meant it kindly and we laughed together like old buddies.

‘And who are your influences?’ I asked.

It was a corny old question but I knew Jenny would come up with a lively and original reply.

She thought for only a moment before replying, ‘Willa Cather, Margaret of Anjou, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pamela Des Barres, those sort of people,’ and with that she grinned girlishly.

‘Do you feel in touch with the modern world?’ I challenged.

‘I feel in touch with Charlie Christian and Eddie Durham,’ she said. ‘With Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and Hank Marvin and Duane Eddy, with Beck and Page and Clapton. With Guitar Slim and Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. With Henry Kaiser and Bernard Butler and Noel Gallagher and Vernon Reid and Winged Eel Fingerling. Sexy fellers, every last one of them. And I feel in touch with women too — though in a different way.

‘But mostly I feel in touch with all those lonely boys of the future, still sitting in their rooms trying to play guitar, solemnly believing that if only they could coax some music out of the damn machine they’re holding then somehow everything would be better, everything would fall into place; their sex lives, their shyness, their bad skin. And you know what, fellers, you’re absolutely right, it would.’

There was a poignant pause while she let that remark settle in.

‘You know,’ she added briskly, ‘it’s a long time ago that I decided to be my own woman, my own musician. I decided I was going to tear up the rule book, and then I realized there was no rule book.’

I smiled appreciatively but at last I thought it was time to end this verbal jousting. I looked her straight in the eyes and I said, ‘Who do you play for, Ms Slade? Yourself or others?’

Arching one carefully plucked eyebrow, she said, ‘I play for the nice guys, the filing clerks and computer nerds, the deceived and exploited, for the dysfunctional and the confused and the just plain wrong, for those who are unsure about their identities, their body politics, their genders.

‘I play for the decontamination squads, for the firework scientists, the mutants and sleepers. I play for the homely girls terrified by their first sight of menstrual blood, and for the sad boys suffering the attentions of their mothers’ special friends. I play for the number crunchers and the atom splitters, for the deformed and the brain dead, for the emotionally drained, for the synaesthesiacs (they make terrific listeners). I play for germ warfare enthusiasts, for the genetic goofballs, the Apple mystics, the road whores, the insurrection grrrls, the nylon broads, the fishnet lads. I often play for the tone deaf.

‘I play for those with extra senses and extra heads, for the bad mothers and the cheerful patricides, for the wreckers and the recyclers, the scanners and cyberniks, the video jerks, the steeplejacks of middle space, the boys in the bunker, the hyper-drive cadets, the ovary barons, the born-again crucifiers, the twang bar princesses, the wah wah dudes, the radon lovers, feedback addicts, fuzz theorists.

‘I play for the cryogenic fetishists, the orgone punks, the cosmetic surgeons with the shaky hands, the thrash throngs, the synth siblings, the napalm fanciers, the nuclear Klansmen, needlegun gangs, anarchs of the old school, neurone handymen, death metal alchemists.

‘I play for the people next door. I play for people like us. I play for people like you, Bob’

It was a tender and touching moment, but of course she was only telling me what I already knew.

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 4 Issue 3