Flesh Guitar (11 page)

‘Hell, you don't have to believe that stuff,' Johnson says dismissively. It's just showbiz. I had a friend called Ike claimed he learned to play guitar by sitting in a graveyard, letting the knowledge seep up through the tombstones into his ass. I don't think too many folks believed him.'

‘So you don't believe any of that stuff you peddle?'

‘I don't believe in it exactly, but it does no harm to pay a bit of lip service, you know what I mean?'

‘Are you sure it does no harm?' Jenny says, and she seems concerned. ‘You see, it seems to me that all this stuff about being in league with the devil is more than just bullshit, Robert. It's actually very demeaning. It suggests that a poor black man couldn't possibly have genius unless it was somehow handed to him from an external source. And that's bad, Robert. That's absolute crap. They try to pull the same stuff with women. You aren't in touch with any devil, Robert, you're just in touch with yourself.'

‘I'd sure like to get in touch with you,' he says.

It's a well-intentioned
offer but they both know that Johnson's in no condition to go touching women. Jenny sits down on the edge of the bed, but she's visiting the sick, not accepting any sexual invitation.

‘It's with the boys that you're really going to be a hit. You're going to be a big influence on lots of guys, a lot of them white.'

‘Now I know I'm dreamin'.'

‘There's going to be a guy called Eric who's going to base his whole career on playing “Crossroads”. Of course, it won't sound much like your version; he'll garble the words a bit and take a verse from a different song, and he'll add a Chicago-style riff, but you'll get a lot of the credit for it.'

‘And will I get money for it?'

‘You won't need money when you're dead.'

‘Yeah, but—'

‘And a band named after an airship will take some of your best tunes and lines and make them their own. And there'll be books written about you, scholarly articles, television programmes, movies.'

It's all getting too much for him now. All these words and ideas that he doesn't quite understand.

‘What are you?' he asks. ‘A fortune teller?'

‘No. And I'm not here just to tell you about your own future. I want to tell you about
everybody's
future.'

‘You sure are something. OK, go ahead, tell me about the future.'

‘Well, the first thing is, the future's going to be very loud.'

‘Guess I can live with that.'

‘Louder than you ever imagined.'

‘What? Like a thunder storm? Or a steam train?'

‘Like a train going through a storm with bombs exploding all around it.'

‘You mean there's going to be a war?'

‘Well, as a matter of
fact, there is, World War Two, but you needn't worry about that. You won't live to see it. But after the war everything will be different. The young people who missed it will want their music to sound as loud as a war.'

Johnson looks around again for his own scratched guitar, but it seems to have gone for good. He says, ‘Then I guess there won't be much use for guitar pickers.'

Jenny laughs. ‘There's going to be lots of use for guitar pickers, Robert. The word may not have got to Mississippi yet but there are already guys out there who are creating something called the electric guitar.'

‘Yeah? Would that be anything like an electric chair?'

She smiles but presses on. ‘You see there's this little thing called amplification. Imagine you plucked a guitar string and it made a noise like, oh I don't know, like a screaming banshee.'

‘That'd be spooky.'

‘That'll be standard, Robert. With an electric guitar and the right amplification you're going to be able to play to crowds of hundreds of thousands of people. And you're going to be able to change the way your guitar sounds. You'll be able to make it sound like you're playing in a big empty warehouse, or in a cave. And you'll be able to make it sound like a swarm of bees or a dynamite explosion.'

‘Why in God's name would I want it to sound like a dynamite explosion?'

‘Maybe you wouldn't, Robert,
but believe me there'll be plenty of guitarists who will.'

‘White folks?'

‘No, not exclusively white folks.'

‘You mean black folks are going to be able to afford these fancy electric things?'

‘Oh yes,' she says. ‘The electric guitar will be available to more or less anybody.'

‘Well, that sounds like progress. And what'll this amplification stuff look like?'

‘It'll be a box, just a little black box with a plug and a speaker.'

‘Devil's boxes.'

‘There you go again, Robert. And certain people will make music simply by ramming their guitars against these amplifiers. There'll be guys who smash up their guitars as part of the act.'

Johnson looks at her as though she's now telling the tallest of tall stories and has gone too far, passed the point of believability and sanity.

He says, ‘I once had my guitar smashed up by a couple of good ol' southern boys. It didn't sound so good to me.'

‘Well, it won't only be a question of the way it
sounds.
'

‘Didn't look too pretty neither.'

‘It's more a symbolic act, I guess,' she said.

‘You sure do talk fancy. Are you foreign maybe? From somewhere like England? Or from some other planet? Some other time?'

‘Sure,' she says. ‘I'm all those things.'

‘And that music I
keep hearing. You responsible for that?'

‘Yes, that's my music.'

‘You a guitar player?'

‘Definitely.'

‘That's nice. I like a woman who knows how to hold down a chord.'

Jenny is relaxed and softer now, as though she's done what she came for, got over the important and difficult part of her visit. She asks, ‘Have you got any advice for me about guitar playing?'

Johnson's face clouds over and he feels a twinge of pain rising and stabbing all the way from his stomach to his throat.

‘Sure,' he says with difficulty. ‘I got some advice for you. Next time you feel like going down to the crossroads don't.'

He laughs until it hurts, then screeches with pain. The terrible sound brings a man running into the bedroom. It's Honeyboy Edwards, Johnson's good friend, the man who brought him here when he saw how ill he was. Johnson looks around him, thinking he has some explaining to do, about how he comes to have a white woman in his room. At the very least he thinks that he should make some introductions, but suddenly Jenny Slade is nowhere to be seen. The music has gone too, and so has the relief from pain that her presence seemed to bring.

‘How ya feelin'?' Edwards asks.

Robert Johnson looks as though he's giving the question some slow, serious consideration. Then he says, casual as you like, ‘You know, Honeyboy, I do believe I'm sinkin' down.'

Audiences are strange
things. Sometimes
they can feel like one whole, living organism. Other times they are no more than a loose posse of separate, diverse, isolated individuals, with nothing at all in common, least of all a desire to see the act they happen to be watching.

Jenny Slade always liked to seek out the faces of one or two of her audience. It made the gig personal. It was a place to focus her energies. But usually that was all they were; faces. She didn't take in much about the owner of each face, couldn't have told you whether he or she was tall or short, old or young, how they were dressed, whether, for example, they were disabled.

It was November, and she had played a disappointing gig to a small, cold audience in a converted bus garage in South Yorkshire. Early on she'd looked out at the blank faces in search of a friend, someone warm and on her side. Sometimes, if she worked it right, that little centre of warmth could spread itself outwards and include the rest of the audience and bring them over to her, but on this occasion that had failed to happen. She'd found the face all right. It belonged to a young man with a shaved head and a big smile, and the smile had grown wider as the gig had gone on. He was obviously enjoying himself, but just as obviously he was in a minority, possibly a minority of one. By the end it seemed as though the whole gig had been directed solely at him.

Afterwards he was in the bar,
on his own, and looking much younger than he had from the stage, barely into his teens, and though Jenny didn't make a habit of talking to strange young men in bars, especially not at her own gigs, she found herself saying to him, ‘Thank God you were there.' And she tried to shake him by the hand but he made no attempt to reciprocate. He had a beer in his right hand and, as she suddenly saw, he had no left arm at all, just a jacket with a limp, empty right sleeve.

Jenny was duly embarrassed. She started to apologize, though that too was embarrassing and she knew she really had nothing to apologize for. The guy smiled and shrugged it off.

‘These things happen,' he said, and he seemed to be referring to all sorts of things: to bad gigs, to the loss of limbs, to being socially embarrassed.

‘They certainly do,' Jenny agreed, and that was the end of the conversation. But on the way back to her hotel she had a strange sense that there was something familiar about the boy, and though she had only the shakiest sense of there being anything meaningful about it, she got the curious feeling that she'd seen other one-armed boys at her gigs. She wasn't sure if that was odd or not. One-armed men could enjoy her music as much as anyone else, though clearly their personal knowledge of guitar playing would have to be mostly theoretical.

At the next gig, in a converted
distillery in Fife, there was another one-armed boy in the audience, and then another when she played at a jam session in Camden. She didn't get to speak to either of them, but when she was coming out of a guitar shop in Denmark Street a few days later and saw yet another one-armed boy gazing longingly at the secondhand Strats and Les Pauls in the window, she knew she had to talk. She stood next to him and joined him in looking.

‘Nice guitars,' she said.

‘I'll say,' the boy agreed and he smiled broadly at her, just the way the first guy had. There was something not quite right about that smile. It was a little too serene for Jenny's tastes.

She noticed that the boy was wearing a lapel badge. The letters SOFT were set in blue enamel against a red background littered with stars. And she remembered the first boy had also been wearing such a badge.

‘Is SOFT the name of a band?' she asked.

‘No,' the boy replied. ‘It stands for Sons of Freddie Terrano.'

‘Freddie Terrano?' she said. It was a name she hadn't heard in two decades. ‘Whatever happened to him?'

‘Oh, things,' he said, and he smiled again, shrugged philosophically and slouched off. If he knew what had happened to Freddie Terrano, and since he was wearing the badge she assumed he did, then he certainly wasn't telling.

Freddie Terrano, almost certainly not his real name, was one of those people who had found the guitar an almost laughably easy instrument to play. He could have been a great jazz player, an authentic bluesman, a classical soloist, just about anything he wanted. But he'd made his reputation as that most peculiar of all phenomena, the lead guitarist in a glam rock band called the Beams. In interviews he'd talked of wanting to write symphonies for guitar orchestras. He quoted Guitar Slim and. Debussy and Adorno; but when he got on stage he played loud, bludgeoning pentatonic rock over a leaden 4/4 beat created by the band's two drummers.

The Beams made two
successful albums and could no doubt have continued forever, playing revival tours and the supper-club circuits, but everybody knew Freddie Terrano was made for something better. He signed a solo deal and the Beams split up in a round of legal actions about who was entitled to use the name.

For a while Freddie Terrano's solo album was ‘eagerly awaited' and then it was ‘long delayed' and shortly after that nobody was waiting for it at all. The moment had been ripe, but the moment passed. The solo album never appeared. Those who still thought about Freddie Terrano at all, and few did, assumed he had blown it by one method or another; too many drugs, too little inspiration, too much fear of putting his money where his mouth was. His continuing silence gave him a certain mystique but Jenny still thought Freddie Terrano was an odd figure to have any badge-wearing ‘sons'.

Not having given Freddie Terrano a moment's thought in twenty years, she found herself thinking about him all the time. She dug out her old Beams records and it was weird, yes, the guitarist was pretty good, but it seemed as though he was doing his damnedest to hide the fact. The question of Freddie Terrano's fate became extraordinarily pressing. There were other questions too.

Finally, at a gig in a
converted army barracks in Aldershot, she cornered yet another one-armed boy with a SOFT badge on his jacket and demanded, ‘What is it with you guys? Why do you Sons of Freddie Terrano keep turning up at my gigs?'

The boy was terrified to find himself being interrogated by the artist he'd come to see, but he sounded like he was telling the truth when he said, ‘Because Freddie tells us to.'

‘What do you mean, he tells you to?' Jenny asked.

‘You know, we go to his place and we discuss things and he tells us you're pretty good.'

‘You go to his place?'

‘Sure. You want me to get you an invitation?'

Jenny found it strange to think that a man she hadn't given a thought to in twenty years was out there recommending her, gaining her an audience. She could use all the audience she could get, but it was still strange.

‘What happened to your arm?' she asked the boy bluntly.