Flesh Guitar

Flesh Guitar , a novel by by Geoff Nicholson, is one of the best reads I've had recently.
It's so good that I'm only reading little bits at a time, in the same manner one tends to nibble rich and tasty treats such as cheesecake or earlobes.

The central character, an iconoclastic female guitarist named Jenny Slade, who "...could play conventionally enough...but at other times she attacked the guitar with hammers, box spanners,nail guns, adzes,spokeshaves...
...She loved feedback, distortion,sheer noise. She liked to abuse both guitar and equipment. She knew this wasn't going to get her into the charts but it made her happy,and if it didn't always make her audiences happy that was OK, since for a long time she seldom had an audience".

This is my kind of woman. Too bad she's just words on paper.

Excerpts from 'Forty Guitar Solos for Jenny Slade':

4)THE FALL SOLO: The player selects a number of guitars , tunes them to Open E and places them under the spreading branches of a large deciduous
tree on a breezy day in mid-autumn. As the leaves fall they land on the strings and play fragile, delicate notes and half-chords.

9) THE DOG SOLO: The player finds a large dog, preferably of the bouncy, good-natured variety, and uses a length of sting to attach the dog's tail to the whammy bar of her guitar. The player now attempts to perform a version of the Shadows' 'Apache' , while the dog displays it's natural exuberance. The piece ends when player and dog can stand it no longer.

There's a scene where she's with a famous rocker named Kurt. He has announced to her that he plans to kill himself. She critiques his lame suicide note and attempts to help him write a better one. She comes up with the perfect line, but it's too late. She shrugs.

It's thoughtful and dark and really, really funny. If you or anyone you know has chased the music dream , they need to read this book.

I wish I knew where I got my copy.
I was looking for something else in boxes of old crap and there it was. I've never heard of the author or the publisher. I'm afraid to Google him for fear that this book doesn't even exist, and the whole reading experience is just another in a series of things that I wish were real but aren't.