FOREWORD
It seems like years since I commissioned this book. That was back
in the days when I was a juggler and naively thought I could write,
edit and produce the Guinness Encyclopedia Of Popular Music and
simultaneously be a publisher, commissioning editor and radio
broadcaster.
Neil Slaven first came to my notice as a name on the back of the
famous Beano album by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers featuring Eric
Clapton. His name would appear on dozens more Decca and
Deram albums as a (credible) record producer. The UK blues
boom of the late Sixties was an incredibly fertile time, and Slaven
carved a niche for himself producing many albums by the Savoy
Brown Blues Band, Chicken Shack and (very dear to my heart) the
excellent Keef Hartley Band. In those days blues, folk rock, heavy
rock and prog rock were feted by the same audience — much the
same that would have worn out imported copies of the Mothers Of
Invention's Freak Out! or Absolutely Free. This was back in the days
of US imports and Brace's record shop in Edinburgh and One Stop
in London. They were the days when John Peel spoke in mono-
tone, when everything, including Savoy Brown, Hartley and Zappa
were reeeerly amyyyyzzzing. Zappa was really amazing, although
most of us didn't understand why. Slaven was one of the very few
who did - he understood and appreciated Zappa then as he does
now. The closest I got to Zappa was outside the Rainbow Theatre
in London. Together with thousands of confused fans I waited for
the chalk board to appear: SHOW CANCELLED. I have never
forgiven FZ for getting thrown into the orchestra pit on the first
show instead of the second.
In the intervening years Neil Slaven has become one of the
leading authorities on the blues. He regularly compiles and writes
1

Frank Zappa
album sleevenotes and reviews records for a number of magazines
and journals. With the late Mike Leadbitter he wrote Nothing But
The Blues and the indispensable Blues Records: A Selected Discography
1943-1966. He has also been an important contributor to the
Guinness Encyclopedia Of Popular Music and the Guinness Who's Who
Of Blues. And there lies the problem; typecasting. Just as Fred
Astaire was made to dance, Neil Slaven was made to tell the blues.
Until now.
He was one of the earliest people to know that Zappa's cancer
had returned and that it would be only a matter of time. He acted
as a consultant for BBC television's documentary and got to meet a
sick FZ in his home fortress. A number of books appeared shortly
after his death and Slaven was hopelessly late with his. Mosdy it was
a case of overwriting - the more he wrote the more he realised just
how much he knew and felt about FZ and how similar they were
in oh so many ways. The book that takes it's time is the one worth
waiting for. I refused to pressure the author because he could have
lost confidence or stamped his feet and thrown in the towel. I have
dealt with a few Rumpelstiltskins in my time.
Frank Zappa's often brilliant combination of irreverent humour
and 'serious' music has and will continue to baffle many. This
musical bisexuality has made him misunderstood and hard to
market. Why does somebody who has the gift of satire and comedy
waste his time composing orchestral pieces? Why does a highly
literate composer and brilliant musician choose to trivialise his
work with pornographic humour? Because he is Frank Zappa.
At some stage, maybe not in Slaven's or my lifetime, FZ will be
widely seen as a musical genius and one of the greatest contributors
to music of the 20th century.
Electric Don Quixote is the best book that has ever been or is likely
to be written on the phenomenon that was Frank Zappa. I would
say that, wouldn't I, even though I have a strong belief that in years
to come, when FZ is finally recognised, the adage, 'pass me a copy
of Slaven's Zappa', will be a reality?
My thanks to Andy Childs, Bob Wise and Chris Charlesworth
for helping this masterpiece on its way.
COLIN LARKIN, March 1996
2

INTRODUCTION
When it happened, I was having a drink with friends at The
Mondrian, a hotel on Sunset down the street from the Comedy
Store, which 30 years before had been Ciro's. I'd been in town for
ten days, researching in the basement of the new Los Angeles
Library, a monolithic building that inside looks like Fort Knox in a
Slide Area, and junking in second-hand bookshops and memora-
bilia stores for obscure interviews and press reports.
From a number of sources, I knew that Zappa's health was
failing but people were still going up to the house. All week, I'd
agonised about ringing to ask if I could pay my respects. But in the
war between two principal character traits, timidity and arrogance,
timorousness prevailed. After all, I wasn't exactly a close friend of
the family.
Sunday morning was spent at the Pasadena Swap Meet, where I
found a few magazines and resisted buying all the boodegs on offer.
The evening was quiet until around eight, when the radio
announced that what we all knew had to happen - but please God,
not yet - had taken place.
Frank Zappa was dead. And buried. Gone on his final tour.
He'd left just before 6 pm on Saturday, December 4, 1993, with
Gail and Moon and Dweezil and Ahmet and Diva there to see him
off. The other ceremony, unheralded, took place on Sunday
morning, with family and close friends present. The rest of us
would have to wait for the opportunity to indulge in sentiments
that he always professed to be an inappropriate use of valuable time.
Well, Frank, I was upset anyway, OK? I'd only met you once
and that had taken 24 years to achieve. The occasion had been less
than momentous for you. Despite my advancing years, I'd been
overawed and the lines of communication between my brain and
3

Frank Zappa
my mouth had hung by a thread. Even so, you granted me several
hours of your precious time as, for the umpteenth time, you ran
through a long and productive career that needed days rather than
hours to detail adequately. Then you introduced me to your family
and showed me round the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. You
even set up the Synclavier and played some of'N-Lite', explaining
its operation to my uncomprehending ears.
Despite my being English and a journalist, you were tolerant and
polite even though you were obviously in some pain, and let me
gauge when my visit was over. Like many others before and since, I
was leaving with the impression that I'd made a friend, even if that
friend didn't have the time to indulge the need for further contact
that was already coursing through my veins. We stood in the dark
on the steps outside your house and shook hands. I looked into
your eyes and said, "Good luck." It was a lame thing to say; we
both knew that luck was not a factor in the inevitability to come. I
drove away wondering, "Why did I end up being so trite when I
wanted to be profound?"
But what do you say to a man whose music you've lived with
for half your life? Who'd probably helped to shape your view of the
world and your aspirations, even though the dedication and perse-
verance that he showed weren't yours to command? (We'd talked
about my still-unrealised ambition to compile a film history of
man's inhumanity to man, using Varese's Arcana as a soundtrack.)
Who relentlessly pursued every one of his objectives while others
wandered from indecision to self-indulgence? Whose thirst for
knowledge and grasp of detail over a wide range of subjects con-
tinued unabated, in parallel with his musical explorations?
Right from the release of Freak Out!, Frank gathered people like
myself, figuratively speaking, around him. In 1966, he chose to
term himself and them freaks. Needless to say, they treated as a
destination what he saw only as a point of departure. I never
diought of myself as a freak, except insofar as liking the Mothers of
Invention seemed to qualify me as one to friends who could only
manage the stylistic leap from the Shadows to The Rolling Stones.
As far as I was concerned, they took the easy option. I liked chal-
lenging music, so I'd heard Varese, Stravinsky and Penderecki. I
4

Introduction
didn't read music, I didn't understand what was happening. But I
responded to the result, as I did to the drums of Burundi, the gongs
of a Balinese gamelan orchestra or Moondog's eerie and unique
percussion instruments recorded on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue.
(We talked of him, too.) Even so, it was still hard to like Frank's
music at first hearing. It was demanding, densely layered, sardonic
and satirical. But once in a while there was a bluesy turn of phrase
from the guitar which connected the Mothers with another of my
musical interests.
Through all the subsequent (apparent) changes of direction and
personnel, I remained doggedly loyal, buying every album, even if
some got played less often than others. It wasn't possible to like
every one equally but then it was inconceivable that the faith
would be broken. I didn't get to see every tour but boodegs and
tape exchanges took care of that omission.
As the years passed, I became aware of a deeper purpose in the
music. It was no great achievement on my part, for Frank made it
plain in his sleevenotes and his interviews that there were situations
in the world and especially the USA that needed to be brought to
people's attention. It was equally evident that he was appalled by
the blind patriotism that kept most of his countrymen wilfully
ignorant of the inequities around them and the injustices com-
mitted in their name. During the Eighties, he enlarged upon his
mordant view of the alliances between State and Church, the
military and business cartels.
Frank was no people's champion, his Mr Smith was disinclined
to go to Washington; but in the end, he went anyway. Like some
modern Don Quixote he entered the lists, his lances tipped with
verbal venom, to defend the notion of individual freedom sup-
posedly enshrined in the American Constitution. Cervantes' original
was a deluded old man, his senses addled by tales of knight-
errantry, who tilted at windmills which he elected to view as giants
"with vast extended arms". But as the story progressed, his charac-
ter, initially both the object and instrument of satire and ridicule,
became broader and more complex. Instead of ignoring reality,
Cervantes forced his creation to justify his existence in the real
world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky thought the knight suffered from "the
5

Frank Zappa
nostalgia of realism". Frank Zappa abjured nostalgia and tilted at
more substantial windmills, convinced of a pernicious disparity
between the aims of government and organisations who invoked
'the American Way' and the reality behind them. Many of the
targets he engaged 'in fierce and unequal combat' were all too real,
all too fallible and all too devious to be caught in the spotlight.
Some were more fanciful than others but his arguments were
always supported by rigorous logic. He admitted, "I tend to view
the whole thing as a conspiracy."1
So, was the prevalence of LSD among Californian hippie com-
munes in the Sixties an experiment conducted in public with the
connivance of the CIA and the government of the day? Was AIDS
a military germ warfare research project that escaped from the
laboratory? Was there an unnamed secret police network whose
task it was to investigate and infiltrate whatever might be perceived
as a threat to America's stability? Were the leaders of the religious
Right intent upon suppressing the right of free speech and dissent
by any means necessary? Whatever the truth of these things, Frank
was ready with a hst of analogous events and circumstances that
lent a statistical probability to what he proposed. Further examples
will crop up in the pages that follow.
It's all too easy to label these accusations 'paranoia', the fantasies
of a man who expunged from his life anything he deemed a waste
of time or outside the scope of his enquiring mind. In order to
pursue those things, almost all related to music, that interested him,
Frank Zappa exercised inflexible control over his daily routine.
Some commentators portrayed him as arrogant and cold, but the
warmth, honesty and normality of his family life proved this to be a
misconception. His was a personality that had to be judged by its
own criteria. The prodigious work rate was the product of a mind
rarely at rest. That he made time to protest publicly about the
erosion of personal and artistic freedom was a reflection of how
seriously he perceived the threat.
Much to the surprise of his detractors, who still thought of him
as an exhibitionist and a freak, Frank proved a very eloquent and
humorously acute adversary of organisations like the Parents'
Music Resource Center. For someone who claimed never to read
books, he was extremely well-informed, able to cut through the
6

Introduction
emotional cant in which self-appointed protectors of the nation's
morals cloaked their restrictive intentions. "I'm really quite wild
and outrageous but in ways that people wouldn't understand," he
maintained. "Today, if you actually work 18 hours a day and you
like it, that's pretty outrageous. And if you don't compromise and
don't put up with a bunch of bullshit and you punch your way
through life, which I kind of manage to do on the budget available
to me, that's out-jucking-rageous."2
It was his insistence on using such terminology and his lack of
reverence for established institutions that incensed authorities in
America and Britain. While others ran like prisoners in an exercise
yard to stand in line at the sound of the warden's whisde, Frank
defended his freedom of expression as a musician and businessman,
and also that of groups for whose music he had little respect. For,
long before it became enshrined in Joe's Garage, he'd always main-
tained that "Music is the BEST".
Above all else, there is the music. Tens of albums, hundreds of
songs and fiendishly convoluted instrumental themes. His orches-
tral compositions adhered to Varesian principles, with unrelated
themes following in a free succession of contrast and surprise.
Audiences relished songtexts that told of enema bandits and sexual
deviants, as well as scathing critiques of public figures, their pecca-
dilloes laid bare. His guitar solos he regarded as compositions in
themselves, expositions of a unique playing style that matched form
and content with a bravura control of effects and amplification. No
one since Jimi Hendrix used feedback as creatively as Frank Zappa
did. But beneath all the harsh, angular phrasing was a gift for
creating starkly beautiful melodies that remain in the mind long
after their conclusion.
'Watermelon In Easter Hay' says more about Frank Zappa than
these words can. Play it now and when you finish the book.
This biography is an assemblage of facts and quotations that hope-
fully illustrate some of the character traits which shaped his music.
It's just one interpretation of a mass of material sufficient to write
the same story again using wholly different examples. Where
possible, I've used Frank's own words to illustrate the point at issue.
Like his music, which doesn't sound the same when he isn't there
7

Frank Zappa
to direct its intricacies, his beliefs and motivations are best ex-
pressed in his own terms. Rather than attempt the impossible by
preparing a laboriously detailed explanation of a complex mind,
I've tried to provide the reader with the means to arrive at their
own interpretation of a unique and irreplaceable personality.
What merit this manuscript contains would not have been
possible without constant application to two magazines dedicated
to the documentation and appraisal of Frank Zappa's words and
deeds. Society Pages, edited by Rob Samler and Den Simms, and
T'Mershi Duween, overseen by Fred Tomsett, are both essential to
anyone with an obsessional tendency where Frank is concerned.
Just as important to the comprehensiveness of the text was the per-
mission granted by the British Broadcasting Corporation to use
material from the complete transcript of the BBC2 Late Show inter-
view conducted by Nigel Leigh, obtained through the kind efforts
of the programme's director, Elaine Shepherd, who also located
the programme schedule for Juke Box Jury. My gratitude is here
insufficiendy acknowledged.
I received significant help from a number of people who still
remain friends and deserve thanks: Mary Katherine Aldin, for
acting as temporary landlady and patient guide around the obscure
backwaters of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley in search
of tempting morsels of information, and for maintaining her exclu-
sive cuttings agency; Ted Berkowitz, who witnessed at first hand
Frank's diligence as a chaperone; Tony Burke, for filling a multi-
tude of gaps with donations of magazines and tapes that facilitated
accurate dating of important gigs and the musical developments
that took place at them; Roy Carr for pulling the strings that set up
the interview, and IPC for access to their file of reviews, news
reports and articles covering Frank's war dance with the British
press; Norman Darwen, for his German being better than mine;
Roger Dopson, for climbing into his attic and manhandling boxes
of yellowing music papers down to ground level, and Jacky, for
overlooking the damage to the living room carpet; Andy Fletcher,
for sterling chauffeur work on trips to Pacific Grove and Lancaster
and for 'percussive maintenance'; Phil Holmes for the olive oil,
the grappa and the hoe; John O'Toole, for rummaging for
nuggets in his own store of magazines; Howard Thompson, for his
8

Introduction
encouragement, being a provider and eyewitness to a climactic
moment in Frank's Ufe; Alan and Pat Warner for sharing memories
and keeping me abreast of the tributes; Phil Wight for delving in
his Doumbeat's; Victoria Winston, for casting her mind back to
Frank's freak days.
Finally, an act of contrition. This project would not have been
completed without the tolerance and patience of Colin Larkin. I
never felt the lash, but it brought out the masochist in me. Now, if
I could just get this orange out of my mouth . . .
NEIL SLAVEN, January 1996
9

1
WHAT'S NEW IN BALTIMORE?
On December 21, 1940, the birth of Francis Vincent Zappa Jr 11
(by his own terminology) was. Baltimore, in the state of Maryland,
is one of America's oldest cities; guidebooks assure the visitor that
an air of previous centuries pervades its elegant brownstone houses
and Victorian terraces. A major port in days gone by, the harbour is
now a tourist trap of fast food and colonial nostalgia. Situated some
50 miles north-east of Washington, DC, it's about as close to
government as Frank was ever likely to get.
Baltimore was the birthplace of Dashiell Hammett, Billie Holiday,
harmonica maestro and ego Larry Adler, Mike Leiber, one half of
the Leiber & Stoller songwriting team, and Wallis Simpson, erst-
while Duchess of Windsor, the home of journalist and critic H.L.
Mencken, proto-rap deejay Douglas 'Socko' Hendenon and of
Richard Spellman, the FBI's own nomination for archetypal agent.
Among others, the town also claims Edgar Allan Poe, who died
there but was born in Boston, and baseball legend Babe Ruth,
champion of the Baltimore Orioles, the team named for the bird
that represents the state. The Orioles was also the name of the vocal
group led by Baltimore-born Sonny Til which had a 1953 hit with
'Crying In The Chapel'.
It was where, on September 14, 1814, in a fit of patriotic
fervour, Francis Scott Key wrote 'The Star Spangled Banner'. The
garrison of Fort McHenry, at the mouth of the Patapsco River,
withstood bombardment from General Ross's British Army, hot
from its destruction of Washington, thus preventing the sacking of
the town and thwarting the planned invasion. Ironic then that the
tune Key used, 'To Anacreon In Heaven', was English.
In 1977, preparing material for his album, Little Criminals,
Randy Newman wrote 'Baltimore' as a doom-laden elegy to a
11

Frank Zappa
dying city. Trouble was, he'd only ever passed through it on a
train. The Baltimore of his imagination didn't exist: the towns-
people told him so when next he played the city's Lyric Theater.
Film director Barry Levinson was on safer ground when he
mythologised his Baltimore upbringing in Diner, Tin Men and
Avalon (the latter with music, by way of belated atonement, by
Newman). It's also the home town of Hairspray heroine Tracey
Turnblad and her creator John Waters, Annie Reed, hankerer-
after-love in Sleepless In Seattle, the setting for the television series,
Homicide: Life On The Streets, and the stamping ground of Eugene
Victor Tooms, the hibernating liver-eating serial-killer in The
X-Files.
Maryland squats either side of Chesapeake Bay, a vast expanse of
water frequendy eulogised in the fiction of another native poly-
math, John Barth, comprehensively in Tidewater Tales and Sabbati-
cal but an integral part of several of his other books. With few
exceptions, Barth's texts are as dense, erudite, self-referential and
playful as Frank Zappa's music. It must be something in the water.
By contrast, Frank had litde good to say about his home state
after he left it as an asthmatic 10-year-old in 1950. Thirty-six years
later, and on Valentine's Day, he came back to appear before the
Maryland State Judiciary Committee. His purpose was to aid in the
defeat of a bill proposed by Delegate Judith Toth to bring records,
tapes and CDs under the existing pornography statutes. The
rhetorically tided 'What's New In Baltimore?' had appeared the
year before on Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention. On
that occasion, Frank saved his eloquence for his guitar. Like
parents, places of birth can't be chosen.
His father, Francis Vincent Zappa Jr, had come from Partinico in
northern Sicily, his antecedents Sicilian, Greek, Arab and French.
The family name, Frank informed Nicholas Slonimsky, translated
from Italian as 'the plough', but dictionaries define it as 'a hoe'. His
father had been a small child when his family arrived in America on
an immigrant ship. Growing up in Little Italy on Baltimore's
waterfront, he did his bit for the family business, lathering chins in
their barbershop. Frank's mother, Rose Marie, was first-generation
American, her heritage French, Sicilian and Italian. Her family
owned a restaurant along the same waterfront, where she and
12

What's New In Baltimore?
Frank's father may have met as children. More likely, that event
took place after he graduated from college in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, and returned to Baltimore to take up a teaching post at
Loyola College.
Francis Zappa never shrank from hard work. He paid his way
through college cutting hair and playing guitar for frat parties.
When he started a family, his 'old country' ethics dictated he
should strive his hardest to support it, which he proceeded to do
for the rest of his working life. Later he would declare: "All my life
I've made good money. It all went for food, clothing and environ-
ment. I've paid for everything I've wanted."1
Fourteen days before his son's first birthday, Japanese planes laid
waste to Pearl Harbor, America's Pacific naval base in Hawaii.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Japan the follow-
ing day, which prompted Japan's allies, Germany and Italy, to
declare war back at him. Now it was a world conflict, with
America committed both east and west. Francis resolved to do his
part towards his country's victory. As his son remarked 50 years
later, "It was not a good idea to be of a Sicilian or Italian extraction
at that point in American history; he had to try extra hard to be
patriotic, I think."2
Grouped around what John Barth calls the cervix of Chesapeake
Bay was a microcosm of military life. There was the Naval Academy,
the Aberdeen Ordnance Proving Ground, Norfolk Navy Yard,
Langley Air Force Base, Andrews Air Force Base, Fort Belvoir,
Fort Eustis, Fort Story, Fort Meade — where in the late Seventies
the CIA's 'remote viewing' unit working on programme 'Grill
Flame' was stationed - and the Edgewood Arsenal for Chemical
and Biological Weapons Development, 15 miles up Highway 40
from Baltimore (and a minor plot element in Barth's Sabbatical).
Francis became a meteorologist at Edgewood, "helping to figure
out the best kinds of weather patterns that would be used to dis-
perse poison gas in time of national crisis".3 The family moved into
15 Dexter Street, part of the project in which the Army housed its
ancillary workforce. The houses were cheaply built, thin-walled
and freezing in winter, swamp-like (flies all green and buzzin') in
summer. Little wonder Frank was a sickly child, prone to asthma,
earache and sinus trouble; his teeth were none too cute, either.
13

Frank Zappa
There was his mother's hot olive oil for his ears, the doctor's
radium-tipped swab to probe his sinuses and a mad Italian dentist
called Dr Rocca. It would take a change of climate to remedy his
asthma.
If the physical equipment went on the blink from time to time,
Frank's mental faculties were sharp and enquiring. When he was
five, he offered his father an original design for a warhead, which
was declined. "I wanted to help, and always have," he said in 1988.
"I happen to think if you have to have defence you want your shit
to work. I'm no peacenik."4 A year later, he and his friend Leonard
Allen had discovered the constituents to make gunpowder, the first
of several skills with which he would disrupt his school years.
"I certainly mixed a few potions in my time and got to be quite
an expert on making explosives. It was one of my main interests in
life, partly because I like fireworks."5 Unable to afford an A.C.
Gilbert chemistry set, Francis piqued his son's interest by bringing
laboratory paraphernalia home for him to play with. "If they would
have gotten me a chemistry set when I asked them to, I would have
been a fucking scientist right now," he told David Whalley.6
Francis would have liked his son to become a scientist or an
engineer but his parents couldn't afford the necessary education.
Nor could their son fail to observe what his father had to do to
maintain their upkeep. He would accompany his father when, after
a day's work, he fished the local creeks for crabs and catfish to
supplement the family diet. More often than not, Francis' arms
would be bandaged. "You could be a human guinea pig for these
things called pap tests," his son told Bob Guccione. "So he'd have
these big bandages on his arm, and sometimes come home with
two or three on his arms, and they'd itch and burn, and he'd suffer
with these things, but they'd be 30 dollars more a week."7 The rent
had to be paid.
Then there were the gas masks. Because of their proximity to
the Arsenal's tanks of mustard gas, every family on the housing
project was issued with them in case the tanks broke. There was a
rack of four in the Zappa home now that Frank had a brother,
Bobby. "Knowing what I know now about poison gas, everybody
would have died anyway. You would have kept on breathing but
the rest of your body would have exploded."8
14

What's New In Baltimore?
Frank liked to imagine that his mask was a space helmet but he
was curious to investigate the contents of the can hanging at the
end of the hose connected to the face mask. Having examined
the mixture of crystals and charcoal inside, he found that without
the can attached, his new hghtweight space helmet made it easier
for him to wander the universe, the coal bin his spaceship.
Right from the start, Francis knew his son was intellectually
gifted, with brains to spare. Because of his mental capacity, Frank
was easily bored, at home and at school, by subjects that didn't
interest him. He preferred books that told him what he wanted to
know and refused Francis' suggestion that he read Shakespeare. He
also liked to draw, to sketch and to paint. Once in a while, his
father would take his guitar out of the closet and strum a song but
Frank's attention was usually otherwise occupied.
He did, however, like some music. "I was a massive Spike Jones
fan," he told Charles Amirkhanian, "and when I was six or seven
years old, he had a hit record called 'All I Want For Christmas Is
My Two Front Teeth' and I sent him a fan letter because of that."9
Instead of receiving a photograph of Spike Jones, he was sent one
of George Rock, the tune's vocalist, whom he thought resembled a
master criminal. "I used to really love to listen to all those records.
It always seemed to me that if you could get a laugh out of some-
thing, that was good, and if you could make life more colourful
than it actually was, that was good."10 The principle of humour in
music had been learned: it would be useful in the future.
He also learned what he regarded as a physical principle of
music: "I went to my grandmother's funeral when I was little and I
sat there looking at the candles. The choir was singing, and when
they would sing a note, the candles would respond to it. I didn't
know why . . . But it was a physical manifestation of a sound. I
remembered it; I put it in the memory bank to see what I could do
with it later."11
With his son's health so poor, Francis got another government
job, this time in ballistics, in Opa-Locka, Florida, close by the
Miami Canal. It was a brief tenure but Frank's health improved in
the sunshine and he grew a foot in height. That, combined with his
mother's homesickness, meant that a return to Maryland could be
contemplated. Not to Edgewood but to a terrace house in Park
15

Frank Zappa
Heights Avenue in Pikesville, a north-western suburb of Baltimore
and part of the city's Jewish enclave.
Frank hated city life, he missed the woods where he could ride
his bike, climb trees and dream of experimenting with gunpowder.
Mr & Mrs Zappa didn't like Baltimore much either and Francis
looked further afield for job opportunities. He was offered a post at
Dugway Proving Ground, west of Salt Lake City, Utah, where
nerve gas was produced. Maps noted that there was 'no public
access' to the area, which was adjoined by Skull Valley Indian
Reservation. They, presumably, took their own chances.
Francis didn't take the job. Instead, he took a position in
Monterey, teaching metallurgy at the Naval Post-Graduate School.
So, in November 1950, the family set off in their Kaiser car for the
two-week journey to California, during which Francis distributed
their winter clothing to a needy black family. He didn't realise that
northern California, like Maryland, had its fair share of rain and
freezing fog in winter.
"Where we were living, it was damp and it was cold and it was
unpleasant. We were living in Monterey, which at that time was
pretty much a city in major decay."12 Shortly afterwards, the family
moved a couple of miles further onto the Monterey peninsula to
Pacific Grove, a small seaside community that had begun as a
Methodist camping ground in 1875 and was the winter retreat for
thousands of Golden Monarch butterflies. To eat better than the
winter visitors, the Zappas had to be inventive to make ends meet.
Twelve miles inland at Salinas was a lettuce-growing area to which
Francis and his son would drive once in a while. The family car
would follow the heavily laden lorries, picking up any lettuce that
fell in the road.
Frank's awareness of his family's circumstances added another
bitter dimension to his isolation. Moving to new schools as his
father went from job to job disrupted his education, most of which
he found boring anyway. "It was a little rough," he told Kurt
Loder, "because I had a moustache when I was 11 and I weighed
around 180 pounds."13 There was little time to form friendships in
the anonymous housing projects in which the family lived. "I
never had the ethnic neighbourhood upbringing experience. I was
moving around all the time and living in mixed company, so I
16

What's New In Baltimore?
never had that real strong meatball sandwich identity."14 Driven to
rely on his own resources, he built model planes, conducted
puppet shows using figures he had made and clothed himself, and
pursued an ongoing fascination with explosives that led to several
potentially harmful accidents.
While he lived in Pacific Grove, Frank became interested in
drumming. He attended a summer-school course intended for
children hoping to join the school's drum and bugle brigade.
Supervised by a teacher named Keith McKillop, the trainee batteurs
struck planks of wood laid across chair backs. When he got home,
Frank set about beating the paint off the bureau in his bedroom. To
save the furniture, his parents rented a snare drum on which he was
allowed to practise in the garage.
By 1953, there were six mouths to feed in the Zappa family,
with the addition of another brother, Carl, and sister, Candy.
Photographs from the period catch Frank on the threshold of his
teens, staring humourlessly at the camera, an incipient moustache
the pelmet for a compressed, tight-lipped smile designed to satisfy
the photographer and hide the dental work. His parents and
brother Bob have no such reticence and grin with undisguised
pleasure.
That year, Francis got a job as a metallurgist with Convair and
the family moved to Pomona, midway between Los Angeles and
San Bernardino. A year later, he transferred to San Diego to work
on the Adas missile project for two years, setting up home in El
Cajon, east of the city. Frank's education, both state-controlled at
Grossmont High School and self-promoted at home, continued
apace. He was in the ninth grade at Grossmont when he designed a
prize-winning poster for a Fire Prevention Week contest, entered
by 30 schools. A photograph of Frank posing beside his effort
appeared in the local press. A cartoon of three disgruntled children's
faces was surmounted by the words, "No Picnic." Beneath, it said,
"Why? No Woods. Prevent Forest Fire."15
It was his interest in art that led Frank to become intrigued by
musical notation. "I liked the way music looked on paper," he told
David Sheff. "It was fascinating to me that you could see the notes
and somebody who knew what they were doing would look at
them and music would come out. I thought it was a miracle."16
17

Frank Zappa
The aesthetic pleasure gained from making patterns on manuscript
paper didn't mean the results were necessarily playable but a per-
cussion piece entided 'Mice' did survive, written for a junior high
school competition.
Turning on the car radio one day, he discovered vocal group
music, specifically 'Gee' by the Crows. Other records that fed his
fascination included T by the Velvets, 'Riot In Cell Block
Number Nine' by the Robins (with Richard Berry taking lead
vocal), 'Johnny Darling' by the Feathers and 'Annie Had A Baby'
by Hank Ballard & the Midnighters. Needless to say, his mother
and father tried to discourage their son from finding the black
stations on the radio dial, thus enhancing the pleasure of getting to
hear the music.
After years of defacing furniture and the monotonous rataplan of
a solitary snare, Frank convinced his parents to buy him a second-
hand drumkit consisting of snare, hi-hat, bass drum, floor torn and
ride cymbal. By now, he was attending Mission Bay High School
in San Diego and had found a group of aspiring musicians who also
liked R&B and came together as the Ramblers. At first, there was
no drumkit for him to play, so at rehearsals at the home of the
pianist, Stuart Congdon, he had to be content — make a bongo
noise here — with beating on pots and pans placed between his
knees.
The drumkit arrived a week before the band's first gig at San
Diego's Uptown Hall, for which the sponsors, a local girl gang
called the Blue Velvets, would pay them the princely sum of seven
dollars. Things did not go well. On the way to the gig, Frank dis-
covered that he'd left his only pair of sticks at home.
The band was led by Elwood 'Junior' Modeo (known as 'Bomba
The Jungle Boy' on account of his Italian/Indian background).
"He was the lead guitar player," Frank said later. "He was really
excellent and I used to love to listen to him play. I couldn't play
very well, so eventually I got fired. As I should have, you know.
The band deserved a better drummer than me."17 He told David
Mead, "My main drawback was that I didn't have good hand-to-
foot co-ordination. I could play a lot of stuff on the snare and the
tom-toms and the cymbal and everything, but I couldn't keep an
even beat on the kick drum."18
18

What's New In Baltimore?
THE PRESENT-DAY COMPOSER
Alongside his interest in R&B, Frank had spent more than a year
searching for a record he'd read about in Look magazine. The
article extolled Sam Goody's New York record store and cited an
album of music by the French composer Edgard (more often
Edgar) Varese as an example of the store's ability to sell anything.
The album was The Complete Works Of Edgard Varese, Volume 1,
the piece noted was Ionisation a six-minute composition for 13 per-
cussionists playing 37 instruments. The article maintained it was so
dissonant and ugly that no one would want to own it. Except
Frank Zappa, who wanted it for that very reason.
Varese had written Ionisation in 1931 as the culmination of his
attempts to rid his music of everything but rhythm and intensity.
Born in Paris in 1883, he studied music under D'Indy and Widor
and became a protege of Debussy and Richard Strauss. In 1915, he
moved to New York where he set about expunging the diatonic
music system from his writing, along with melody and harmony. In
July 1921, he founded the International Composers' Guild. Part of
its manifesto stated, "Dying is the privilege of the weary. The
present-day composers refuse to die. They have realised the necessity
of banding together and fighting for the right of the individual to
secure a fair and free presentation of his work."
In a burst of creative exploration, Varese wrote Offrandes (1921),
Hyperprism (1922), Octandre (1923) and Integrates (1924). All of
these works were scored for wind instruments and percussion, in
line with his search for 'pure' notes played without the vibrato that
could be applied to strings. Integrates, also on the album that Frank
wanted to hear, used 14 musicians, of whom four were percussion-
ists. From some of the 'events' within the score, it was to some
extent a run-through for his next composition. Arcana was written
between 1925 and 1927 and required a massive orchestra of 120
musicians, including 70 strings and eight percussionists playing 40
instruments.
By contrast, Density 21.5 (1936), was written for solo flute; not
just any flute but one made from platinum, a metal whose atomic
density gave the work its title. This and Integrates were his last pub-
lished compositions before Varese suffered a creative impasse that
19

Frank Zappa
lasted 15 years. Because of his obsession with pure sound, Varese
had taken an interest in such early electronic devices as the
Theremin (featured on many Fifties science fiction film sound-
tracks and on the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations'), the Dynaphone
and the Ondes Martenot (an integral part of Oliver Messiaen's
Turangalila Symphony). But it wasn't until the development of taped
electronic music in the early Fifties that Varese discerned the way
out of his dilemma. He was emerging from this long period of
stalled creativity when the young Frank Zappa took an interest in
his music.
As Frank tells it, he was staying at his friend Dave Franken's
house in La Mesa, a San Diego suburb, when the pair decided to
check out a sale of R&B singles at the local hi-fi store. On his way
to pay for a couple of Joe Houston records, he glanced in an LP bin
and saw what looked like a mad scientist with a shock of frizzy grey
hair on an album cover. Closer inspection identified it as the very
record for which he'd been searching, The Complete Works Of
Edgard Varese, Volume 1. His pocket money came up well short of
the $5.95 price tag but some impassioned bargaining and the fact
that it had already been used as a demonstration record for the
store's hi-fi equipment closed the deal.
This was a pivotal moment, for the album was an important
catalyst in his musical development. In Varese's music, percussion
played an integral part in each composition and dissonance held
sway. "The way I perceived the dissonance was, these chords are
really mean. I like these chords. And the drums are playing loud in
this music and you can hear the drums often in this music, which is
something that you could not experience in other types of classical
music.
His parents had recendy bought a Decca record player in a sale at
Smokey Rogers' Music Store in El Cajon, along with two or three
free 78s, one of which, 'The Litde Shoemaker', became Mrs
Zappa's favourite accompaniment to her ironing. "It had little
triangular legs on the bottom, so that it would be raised off the table
and the speaker was in the bottom and it had one of those
five-pound arms. It was really an ugly piece of audio gear."20
It had never run at 33VS rpm before the Varese album arrived in
the household and it didn't take many plays for his parents to forbid
20

What's New In Baltimore?
him to play it in the living room. Thereafter, the machine vanished
into his bedroom, where Ionisation was played several times a day.
He gleaned what musical knowledge he could from the sleevenotes
and tested friendship's fortitude by playing it to his high school
classmates. "What I used to do," he told Paul Zollo, "was play
them parts of the Varese album and then play them Lightnin' Slim
things like 'My Starter Won't Work' or 'Have Your Way' or I'd
play them some Howlin' Wolf. .. usually that would get rid of the
girls and the ignorant boys and what was left over was somebody
you could have a conversation with."21
Rigorous as ever in pursuit of a subject that interested him,
Frank set about understanding the mechanics of music. There were
books to be read, such as H.A. Clarke's Counterpoint: Strict And
Free. But with no formal training, he exercised his habitual scepti-
cism over the rules of counterpoint and harmony. "I never studied
counterpoint," he told Don Menn. "I could never understand it. I
hated anything with rules, except for 12-tone, because it was so
simple-minded. It was as simple-minded as the idea of getting a pen
and some paper and some Higgins ink and just drawing some
music."22
One practical test was to find out what it was that made certain
R.&B records appeal more than others. Playing the Jewels' 'Angel
In My Life' to Mr Kavelman, the Mission Bay band instructor, he
was told that its particular charm rested in the use of parallel
fourths. Mr Kavelman also told him about 12-tone music, which
led to Frank's subsequent interest in the composer Webern.
For his fifteenth birthday, his mother proposed to give him $5
but Frank decided he'd rather call Varese long-distance in New
York. He got through to the apartment at 118 Sullivan Street, only
to be told by Varese's wife, Louise, that the great man was in
Brussels working on what became Pokme Eledronique. In The Real
Frank Zappa Book, he noted that when he eventually spoke to
Varese, the composer told him that he was working on a piece to
be called Deserts. He wrote, "When you're 15 and living in the
Mojave Desert, and you find out that the World's Greatest Com-
poser (who also looks like a mad scientist) is working in a secret
Greenwich Village laboratory on a song about your hometown (so
to speak), you can get pretty excited."23
21

Frank Zappa
In the interim, his interest in things that go bang! if you make
them had not been entirely superseded, and it had gone out in a
literal blaze of glory. He and a like-minded friend had filled a large
glass jar with a combination of zinc, sulphur and stink-bomb
powder. With the aid of a supply of paper cups and more willing
hands, he proceeded to disrupt an Open House Night with a series
of foul-smelling fires. The following day, he was summoned to the
principal's office for a terse lecture from the fire officer and an ulti-
matum: two weeks suspension or a 2,000-word essay. So he took
two weeks off and returned with a list of his R&B records by song
tide, artist and label and those that he expected to buy in the fore-
seeable future. "I laughed at them."24
Further retribution was prevented when Mrs Zappa informed
the probation officer (who just happened to be an Italian) that Mr
Zappa was about to be transferred to Lancaster. This was a sprawl-
ing community at the northernmost limit of Los Angeles County,
beyond the San Gabriel Mountains and alongside Edwards Air
Force Base in the Mojave Desert.
VILLAGE OF THE SUN
Lancaster was in Antelope Valley, dubbed in typical early Fifties
hyperbole the 'New Empire of Urban and Industrial Progress in
the Southland'. Before the arrival of the aerospace industry,
Lancaster had been a small town principally devoted to the cultiva-
tion of alfalfa. As the town grew, its streets were laid out on a
geometric grid, with the odd bend to keep drunk drivers alert. To
this day, many outlying roads only exist as 'Avenue F-10' or
'G-14'. Downtown hides amongst the endless rows of anonymous
streets. Dust from the Mojave makes Lancaster an arid, shabby
town of pastel colours.
It may have been a boomtown, as men like Francis came to
work on data reduction for the missile projects at Edwards, but
enervation was the local pastime. The Zappa family moved in at
45438 Third Street East, alongside the Antelope Valley Fair
Grounds. A hundred yards further, the street petered out into
scrubland. "I lived on a tract of little stucco houses," as Frank put it.
"Okies dying in their yards. You know how you always have to
22

What's New In Baltimore?
pull up a Chevrolet and let it croak on your lawn."25
"In a way I hated it while I was there, and in other ways I
thought it was a really great place to be. It's not a glamorous desert,
like Arizona. It's just desert, but that's nice. It's kind of ascetic,
which is not something you would imagine a 15- or 16-year-old
kid would be interested in."26
He was enrolled at Antelope Valley Union High School, which
occupied the north-east quadrant of the junction of Division Street
and Lancaster Boulevard. "It was a pretty strange place. It was not a
homogenised high school environment like you would see in
movies of high school life of the time."27 There were 2,500
students, made up of the children of the alfalfa farmers and those
from the Air Force base. "Anyone who came there to work on
defence was an outcast. We felt like squatters."28
As before, Frank only did well in subjects that interested him.
Consequently identified as a 'problem' student, he was put into an
art class where he created a 10-minute film with classical music
soundtrack for which he hand-painted every frame. But opportu-
nities for such self-expression were rare in a system that valued
conformity at any price. For Frank, nonconformity was the price of
lunch.
"I used to look forward to lunchtime because there was a place
down the street from the school that had really exceptional chilli,"
he told Nigel Leigh, "which was my favourite thing in the world to
eat. I would have a bowl of chilli with crackers, a large bottle of
RC cola and listen to the jukebox. That was my main interest in
school. The couple that owned the chilli place, Opal and Chester,
agreed to ask the man who serviced the jukebox to put in some of
the song tides that I liked. Because I promised that I would duti-
fully keep pumping quarters into this thing so I could listen
to them. So I had the opportunity to eat good chilli and listen to
'Three Hours Past Midnight' by Johnny 'Guitar' Watson for most
of my junior and senior years."29
"That's probably one of the most important musical statements I
ever heard in my life," he said in 1988. "What Watson was doing
was not just pentatonic scales," he told David Mead. "One of the
things I admired about him was his tone, this wiry, kind of nasty,
aggressive and penetrating tone, and another was the fact that the
23

Frank Zappa
things that he would play would often come out as rhythmic out-
bursts over the constant beat of the accompaniment."30 This latter
facet also recommended itself in the work of Eddie 'Guitar Slim'
Jones, composer of'The Things I Used To Do'.
The day that I was due to talk to Frank, I'd bought a CD of that
track and 25 of Jones' other Specialty recordings. It prompted me
to ask, what it was about Slim that interested him. "Mostly the
attitude but a little bit of the notes, too. Because the few solos that I
heard on those Specialty recordings, it just seemed Uke he grabbed
it, he got mad at it and he said, 'So there!' 'The Story Of My Life',
it'd be nice to hear it without the scratches because, let me tell you,
I played that song so many times, it was just dust by the time I
stopped listening."
When I showed him the CD, Frank's eyes lit up for the first time
in our conversation. I left the house several hours later but the
Guitar Slim CD stayed in its new home.
Despite his 'difficult' status, Frank continued to grace the pages
of the local press. "Versatile AVHS Student Is Winner Of State
Competition" headlined the story of his success in a painting com-
petition, sponsored by the California Federation of Women's
Clubs, on the theme 'Symphony Of Living' with an abstract paint-
ing, Family Room. The article went on, "He is presently engaged
in writing a book but his reply to a query as to whether painting or
literature would be his chosen career was, 'Music'."31
Ernest Tossi, vice-principal in charge of discipline, felt the need
to build an uneasy alliance with the single-minded newcomer.
"Frank was the forerunner of student militancy and the beatniks
because he was wearing sideburns and a moustache," he said later,
his words more simplistic than the hindsight that prompted them.
"Frank was an independent thinker who couldn't accept the Estab-
lishment's set of rules." But, he added, "To make progress you've
got to be creative. In my mind, if Frank chose to go academic to a
university and get a PhD, he could. I saw his test scores and I know
Frank has the talent of a genius."32
Frank referred to Ernest Tossi as "my favourite confrontation
with authority". They treated one another with wary respect, the
schoolteacher urging the teenager to obey the rules, the teenager
seeking to interpret them to his own advantage. He also listened to
24

What's New In Baltimore?
Mr Ballard, Antelope's music instructor and band director. William
Ballard indulged Frank's experimental mind by letting him write
music which the school band would attempt to play. "A high
school orchestra in those days tuned up to a box which put out a
tone," he told Andy Gill. "The B flat was used for tuning up the
marching band and the orchestra tuned to the A. So I took the first
violins and tuned them to the A, and took the second violins and
tuned them to B flat, guaranteeing that whatever they played
would be dissonant, no matter what was on the page."33
Frank remained grateful to Ballard: "He saved me a lot of effort
in later life just by letting me hear things like that. Of course, the
other people in the orchestra thought I was out of my fucking
mind."34 Back at home, the Zappa family couldn't afford a piano so
Frank wrote with the aid of a xylarimba.
"I had no oudet in music then to express my discontent. So my
aggravation with the way things were festered throughout my
high-school years," he told Dan Ouellette. "The only reason I got
training as a musician was because the school needed a marching
band at its football games." But cigarettes had already become part
of his lifelong diet. "We had to sit in the freezing cold and wear
these dorky maroon-and-grey uniforms and play every time our
team scored a touchdown. So, during a break, I went under the
bleachers for a smoke. I got caught and I was out of there. Not just
for smoking but for smoking in uniform."35 Even so, Ballard and
Tossi's names appear in the acknowledgements to Freak Out!, along
with Frank's English teacher, Don Cerveris, of whom more later.
Because of his 'unruly' status, Frank was given permission to take
harmony classes in the neighbouring junior college. His teacher
was Mr Russell, a jazz trumpeter in his spare time, who gave him
Piston's Harmony to study. "I don't think he enjoyed harmony very
much either, but that's what he was teaching."36 Walter Piston,
who died in 1976, wrote a number of symphonies and books on
musical theory and taught musicians such as Leonard Bernstein and
Elliott Carter. All of which counted for httle with Frank.
"I went through some of the exercises in there. And I was won-
dering why a person would really want to devote a lifetime to
doing this, because after you complete it you'll sound like every-
body else who used the same rules. So I learned enough of the basic
25

Frank Zappa
stuff so I got the concept of what harmony was supposed to do,
what voice leading was supposed to do, how melody was supposed
to function in a harmonic climate, what rhythm was supposed to
do. I learned all of that and then chucked the rest of it."37
He was more intrigued by the work of Moravian composer
Aloys Haba, one of the first to experiment with quarter tone inter-
vals. Haba studied at the Universities of Prague, Vienna and Berlin,
where his interest in birdsong and his country's folk music led him
to write microtonal music for string quartets and small orchestras.
Instruments, including harmonium, piano and trumpet, were made
for him and he wrote a book propounding the use of third, fifth
and twelfth tones. His most famous work was a microtonal opera,
The Mother, last performed in Florence, Italy in 1964.
Frank's constant flouting of the school authorities created fric-
tion at home. "I was also hearing it from my father who had a
security clearance and he was saying, 'You must behave, otherwise
I'll lose my clearance and therefore my job.' "38 Despite that, when
Frank was put on suspension (which happened frequently), Francis
would fight the school himself. "I got so goddamn sick and tired of
going to see these guys," he said later, "that I in turn gave them hell
and I talked the language which was very vernacular, so they could
really understand what I was saying, so that they didn't care too
much for Frank."39
It's hard to think of Frank Zappa as a representative of any
faction but to school authorities he was just another troublesome
adolescent who regarded rebellion as a way of life. America was still
reeling from 'reds under the bed' and the House Un-American
Activities Committee; it was the era of The Blackboard Jungle and
Rebel Without A Cause, of rock'n'roll and 'juvenile delinquency'.
As individuals and in gangs, teenagers fought authority and each
other to find a different conformity from that which Senator
McCarthy had pressed on their parents. "The impact of this poor,
mentally ill, alcoholic son of a bitch and what he did to the United
States, that naughty old Joe McCarthy ... I could never forgive
that guy."40
At high schools like Antelope Valley, there was social cachet to
delinquency which accorded with Frank's own highly developed
sense of nonconformity. While not exactly a loner, his varied
26

What's New In Baltimore?
interests and the single-minded way in which he pursued them,
had already marked him out as something of an outsider with httle
inclination for the gang mentality. The only group activity he
wished to indulge in was playing music and that was just a part of
his ongoing self-education. The second album he bought was a
budget version of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring by The
World-Wide Symphony Orchestra. To his way of thinking, there
was no difference between Varese and Stravinsky and Howlin'
Wolf, Lightnin' Slim, the Crows or the Robins. "To me it was all
good music," he wrote later.41
To feed his need for R&B, Frank worked lunchtimes and after
school in the local record store, becoming the buyer and thereby
upping the valley's awareness of groups like the Dells and the
Rocking Brothers, as well as Guitar Slim, Litde Richard and
Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown. He also discovered that Gilbert's
Dime Store sold used jukebox records for a few cents apiece and "it
was just crawling with Excello releases".
His interest in Varese still undiminished, Frank wrote to the
composer while spending the summer of 1957 with his Aunt Mary
in Baltimore, hoping for the opportunity of travelling to New
York to visit him. A handwritten reply, dated July 12, 1957, read:
Dear Mr Zappa,
I am sorry not to be able to grant you your request. I am
leaving for Europe next week and will begone until next
spring. I am hoping however to see you on my return.
With best wishes,
Sincerely,
Edgard Varese
The meeting never took place. Varese died on November 6,
1965. Frank later framed the letter and hung it in the workroom of
his Laurel Canyon home.
CHEAP THRILLS
With a disregard for convention that was already a finely honed
skill, Frank formed a racially integrated R&B band. He called them
the Blackouts, since members of the rocking teenage combo often
27

Frank Zappa
assumed the horizontal after drinking peppermint schnapps, their
tipple of choice. He and Terry Wimberly were of white immigrant
stock, Wayne Lyles, Johnny and Carter Franklin were black, the
Salazar brothers Mexican. The combination was guaranteed to
offend the Ivy Leaguers and cheerleaders who formed the high
school's social elite.
"At Lancaster the cheerleaders had such an importance, boola
boola wasn't enough for them," Frank scoffed in 1968, "they were
running what you call the student government too. They were just
pigs. It was too American for me."42 Of course, the pariahs in this
pastiche of real life American style were the black students whose
parents bred turkeys down the road in Sun Village, east of
Palmdale.
The Blackouts rehearsed a ten-song set that included 'Kansas
City', 'Behind The Sun', 'Okie Dokie Stomp' and Litde Richard's
'Direcdy From My Heart To You'. Their finest moment came at
an NAACP benefit at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium, when they
were the warm-up band for Earl Bostic. Another gig, sponsored by
the Eagles Lodge and entided The Summer Blowout, combined
Frank's past and present with the promise that the Blackouts and
Ramblers would 'wail' at Lancaster Fairgrounds Exposition Hall.43
More memorable, and parochial, was a gig arranged at the Lancas-
ter Women's Club. The evening before, Frank was arrested for
vagrancy at 6 pm and spent the night in jail.
Plainly the authorities didn't want the dance to take place. But
Frank was sprung by his parents and the dance went on to be a
success. At the end of the evening, the Ivy Leaguers made one last
attempt to express their disapproval. The 'varsity white-bread boys'
shaped up for a fight as the band were loading their equipment into
Johnny Franklin's Studebaker. They were dissuaded by the timely
appearance of a bunch of Sun Village residents with their hands full
of baseball bats and their minds on percussive maintenance.
28

2
CRUISIN' FOR BURGERS
In his final year of high school, Frank met another character who,
like him, had a reputation for singular conduct and poor school
attendance. Don Vliet had just left Antelope High to take over his
father Glen's job, after the latter's heart attack. Don had been born
in Glendale, California on January 15, 1941. He'd had an equally
unique, precocious and self-directed childhood. "I had my parents
trained from the time I was a baby," he told Kristine McKenna.
"I used to tell them they were my gas station. I remember one time
I branded my mother. She used to wear those mule type shoes. . .
you know, she'd clip clop across the room. One time, I was about
three, I put a piece of toast under the rug. She shuffled into it, went
flying and landed on the heater. It branded her with an 'H' that's
never gone away."1
He told interviewer John Yau that he'd picked up the harmon-
ica at about the same age. He also claimed a harmonica-playing
grandfather, Amos Vertenor Warfield, who was second cousin to
WalUs Simpson, "the gold-digger who got that English guy to give
up the throne."2 By the time he was five, he'd created a private
world in his bedroom, refused to attend school regularly and spent
his time creating clay animal sculptures. When he was 12, he met
the Portuguese sculptor Augustinio Rodriguez in Griffith Park one
day. His evident skill with clay led to him being featured on
Rodriguez' weekly television show. The following year, a local
patroness offered him a six-year scholarship to study art in Italy.
Glen and his mother Sue demurred on his behalf, delivering the
dictum that all artists were queers.
The family, including Uncle Alan and Aunt lone, moved to
Mojave and then Lancaster, where Glen drove a Helms Bread van
and Sue became an Avon lady. When Frank met him, Don had a
29

Frank Zappa
live-in girlfriend, Laurie, who was regularly flashed by Uncle Alan.
He'd leave the bathroom door open when he took a leak; as she
passed by, he would extol the virtues of his appendage, referring to
it as a 'beef heart'.
Frank discovered Don was the only other teenager in Lancaster
with an interest in blues and R&B. Music was their strongest point
of contact. Both had grown up as loners, creating their own worlds
to keep at bay a reality that each scorned. The difference was that
Frank used his as a shield in order to pursue his own ends, while
Don's was a living environment. He had what Langdon Winner
called "an unstructured consciousness"3, which allowed him to
perceive language and art with unique insight, as his later records
and paintings would prove.
Don and Frank spent their evenings playing records, memorising
lyrics, singing guitar solos and testing each other's knowledge of
artists, labels and catalogue numbers, while eating stale cakes from
the Helms Bread van. They would end the night by cruising the
desert roads in a vain search for girls. "His main interest in life at
that time was dressing sharp, having his hair done exactly right and
riding around town in a baby blue Oldsmobile with a homemade
werewolf head mounted underneath the plastic dome thing in the
centre of the steering wheel."4
The Blackouts lasted about a year and a half, after which Frank
sold part of his drumkit and rented the rest to a local band called
the Bluenotes. Through listening to Johnny 'Guitar' Watson and
Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown, he became interested in the guitar.
"My father had always had a guitar in the house," Frank told Nigel
Leigh, "and it stayed in the closet. Ever since I was a litde kid, I
would go in and see this thing and strum on it. But I couldn't
imagine how you would get anything other than the open string
sound. I couldn't conceive of what the frets were for.
"The first one in the family to figure it out was my younger
brother, Bobby."5 He'd bought "an arch-top, f-hole, ugly mother-
fucker"6 for $1.50 at an auction; it was old and the maker's name
had long since been scuffed off. "He learned to play the guitar
before I did. He knew chords, so I used to make him play chords in
the background while I played lead lines. Once I'd figured out that
the pitch changed when you put your finger down on the fret, I
30

Cruisin' For Burgers
was hell on wheels."7 The guitar's action was so high that he
couldn't play chords on it, so lead lines were all he could achieve.
"I didn't learn to play chords until after about a year but in four
weeks I was playing shitty teenage leads."8
"I liked it because it was so tinny-sounding," he told David
Mead. "It was just an acoustic guitar, but it was moving closer to
that wiry tone I liked with Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, especially if
you picked it right next to the bridge."9
An example has survived: 'Lost In A Whirlpool' is an R&B
parody recorded in an Antelope High classroom on a school tape
recorder. Don Vliet sings in falsetto, backed by a strummed rhythm
guitar played by Bobby Zappa and Frank's fairly accomplished lead
lines, perhaps played on his father's guitar to which he'd attached a
DeArmond soundhole pickup. The song grew out of a story
dreamt up by Frank and two of his friends, Larry Littlefield and Jeff
Harris, while they all attended Mission Bay High School in San
Diego. A boy addresses his girlfriend, who has flushed him down
the toilet. 'There's a big brown fish lookin' at me. He ain't got no
eyes, how could that motherfucker possibly see?' The boy pleads
for help; 'Pour some Drano down and get the plunger right after
me. I'll let you know a little secret, baby. I'm getting tired of all this
pee.' Ah! schooldays.
The guitar became a permanent accessory which Frank took to
school every day. It fitted right in with his 'student militant'
ensemble, blue-hooded parka jacket, sunglasses, moustache and
goatee. "I know I was weird."10
Hardly surprising that in middle age, Frank would reminisce,
"They didn't like me, and I knew they didn't like me, and I didn't
like them."11
Euclid James Sherwood recalls Frank sitting out study periods on
the school's front lawn, hammering out his shitty teenage leads.
Sherwood, in his freshman year, shared classes with Bobby Zappa.
He was another blues and R&B fan, prompting Bobby to intro-
duce him to his older brother. He remembers attending a gig at
"the Moose Lodge or something" shortly before the Blackouts
disbanded.12 With Don Vliet and Sherwood as occasional mem-
bers, they would become the Omens after the Zappa family had
moved away from Lancaster.
31

Frank Zappa
Frank graduated from high school on Friday, June 13, 1958,
with some 20 units less than the required standard. It was a measure
of the school's wish to see the back of him and mirrored Frank's
own feelings about state education. His father was urging him to
study music at the Peabody Conservatory in Maryland but he was
adamant that his school days were over.
RUN HOME SLOW
In the spring of 1959, the Zappa family moved again, this time
to Claremont, east of Pasadena. Frank used the opportunity to get
his own apartment in the Echo Park district of Hollywood,
between the Hollywood Freeway and the Dodgers Stadium. At the
time it was largely a Mexican neighbourhood and housing was
cheap. For that reason, a decade later it would become popular
with students and retained its youthful image to become the setting
and tide of a 1985 offbeat comedy film starring Tom Hulce and
Susan Dey.
Some time earlier, Don Cerveris, Frank's English teacher at
Antelope Valley had left to try his luck as a scriptwriter in Holly-
wood. They had kept in touch and now Cerveris convinced Tim
Sullivan, producer of his low-budget Western, Run Home Slow, to
hire Frank to write the music score. Unfortunately, the leading
lady had a miscarriage on the third day of shooting and the produc-
tion was shelved until Sullivan could raise more money. One of the
themes Frank had written turned up later as 'Duke Of Prunes' on
Absolutely Free.
In the meantime, Frank was nurturing the stomach ulcers he'd
had since he was sixteen. Heeding the advice of the failed film
project, he moved back to Claremont. He enrolled for a harmony
course, with required keyboard practice, taught by Miss Holly at
Chaffey Junior College in Alta Loma. He also sat in, unsanctioned,
on a composition course taught by Mr Kohn at the Pomona
College nearby. Joyce Shannon was head of the Music Department
at Chaffey and remembered Frank clearly: "He was a very excep-
tional music student, extremely bright. He had read the text I
used on his own, which was amazing to me because it wasn't an
easy book to read, and he was contemptuous of a lot of academia.
32

Cruisin' For Burgers
He went out of his way to study both books and musical scores."13
This last stab at formal education only lasted for one semester
either side of the summer vacation. Its one significant outcome was
that Frank met Kay Sherman, his first wife. The pair dropped out
of college and lived together for a while before getting married and
moving into a house at 314 West G Street. There's a fuzzy photo-
graph of them in The Real Frank Zappa. Light has damaged the film
but a conventionally clothed couple are seen standing on the
porch; she a blonde in dark cardigan and skirt, her hand coyly
placed flat beside her thigh, he with flat-top haircut, pencil tie, his
light-coloured cardigan unbuttoned.
Unbuttoned could not describe their life together. Kay worked
as a secretary for the First National Bank of Ontario and Frank got a
job at the Nile Running Greeting Card company. "I was in the
silk-screen department with the big rubber gloves," he told Matt
Groening, "pulling the Mylar off of these smelly things."14 He con-
vinced the owner to let him prepare a few experimental designs.
The front cover of one read 'Captured Russian Photo Shows
Evidence of American Presence on Moon First'. Inside was a
picture of a lunar crater bearing the legend, 'Jesus Saves'. Another
had 'Goodbye' on the front and a black hand inside. More mentally
challenging was die one with the word 'Tarky' on its cover, which
opened to reveal a picture of a pirate.
There were other jobs, as a copywriter and designer of ads for
local businesses, including his wife's employers, as a window
dresser, a jewellery salesman and a door-to-door salesman for
Collier's Encyclopaedias, at which he lasted only slighdy longer
than the three-day training period.
Music was confined to his ongoing and then-unheard experi-
ments with twelve-tone music and weekend bar and high school
gigs with his band, the Boogie Men, consisting of Frank's vocals
and lead guitar, Kenny Burgan on saxophone, Doug Rost on
rhythm guitar and Al Surratt on drums. They never earned enough
to afford a bass player. A local newspaper printed a photograph of
them rehearsing in Frank's garage.
Frank had hired his first electric guitar, a Fender Telecaster, and
found that he had to learn to play all over again. With that
achieved, he bought himself a Fender jazzmaster and had cards
33

Frank Zappa
printed: "F.V. Zappa Composer-Master Blues Guitarist", with his
G Street address and message service. When the Boogie Men
folded, he joined a 'really wretched' four-piece lounge band called
Joe Perrino & the Mellotones. Their picture appeared in the press
too, with Frank looking defiant and Joe flourishing a pair of drum-
sticks above his timbales. The caption noted that they were 'rockin'
the town from the bandstand of Tommy Sandi's Club Sahara on
E Street in San Bernardino . . . They're a real action group.'15
Picture the scene: Frank Zappa in white tuxedo, bow tie, black
pants and patent leather shoes, perched on a stool, strumming the
'Anniversary Waltz' and 'Happy Birthday To You', allowed to play
just one 'twist number' a night. "You had to read songs out of a
(thick) brown book, flip the pages in the dark and see what the
chord changes were."16 As well as the Club Sahara, the band oozed
their way through gigs at the clubs around West Covina. "I could
tolerate that for a short period of time (about ten months) but
eventually I hated it so much, I just put the guitar in the case, stuck
it behind the sofa and didn't play at all for about eight months."17
And he remembered the experience, which he commemorated as
'America Drinks & Goes Home' on Absolutely Free.
Luckily, other work offered itself. In June 1961, he began
writing music for another film, The World's Greatest Sinner.
Written, produced and directed by Timothy Carey, described
(probably by himself) as Hollywood's 'ugliest, meanest' character
actor, for Frenzy Productions, the $90,000 budget meant that
80 per cent of the film was made in Carey's El Monte garage. Was
it vaulting ambition or un-American irony that invested the story
of a frustrated insurance salesman who turns to music, religion and
politics before finally repenting of his attempt to identify himself as
God? David Koresh should have taken note.
In the March 9, 1962 Pomona Progress-Bulletin, under the head-
line, 'Ontario Man Writes Score for New Film', Frank noted that,
"The score is unique in that it uses every type of music."18 No
further explanation was given but it was revealed that "a small
rock'n'roll group — eight musicians — recorded last November". In
early December a 20-piece chamber ensemble recorded. Then on
December 17, the 55-piece Pomona Valley Symphony, augmented
by other musicians from Pomona High School and Chaffey Junior
34

Cruisin' For Burgers
College and directed by Fred E. Graff, was recorded in a 12-hour
session at the Chaffey Junior College Little Theater.
Since the proceedings were recorded on two microphones,
mixed to mono and recorded on portable equipment in a truck
parked outside, it was litde wonder that Frank later pronounced
the results 'rancid'. The final indignity was that, once again, he
never got paid. However, the main theme did appear as the B-side
of a single by Baby Ray & The Ferns in March 1963 and even later,
it was transmuted into the first, slow version of'Holiday In Berlin'
on Burnt Weeny Sandwich.
It's tempting to speculate whether the same resources were used
when Frank payed $300 for a concert of his own music which took
place sometime in 1962 at Mount St Mary's College. "It was all
oddball, textured weirdo stuff," he told Don Menn. "I was doing
tape editing of electronic music and part of all die pieces had this
little cheesoid Wollensack tape recorder in die background pump-
ing out through mono speakers."19 Frank had also been experi-
menting with home movies and so there were screens on which
these 16mm films were projected. This multi-media event was
broadcast by radio station KPFK, which perhaps helped to defray
Frank's costs. It was almost certainly the source for later boodegs of
the concert, which included such tides as Piece No. 2 or Visual
Music for Jazz Ensemble and 16mm Projector (written in 1957), Piano
Piece from 'Opus 5', Collage One For String Instruments and Opus 5
For Piano, Tape Recorder And Multiple Orchestra.
CUCAMONGA
Going west out of San Bernardino, Route 66 becomes Foothill
Boulevard and 16 miles later reaches Cucamonga, where it crosses
Archibald Avenue. Just north of the intersection at 8040 North
Archibald in 1963 was die Pal Recording Studio, owned by Paul
Buff. Buff had learned electronics in the US Marines and on his dis-
charge had rented the three-room premises and set about con-
structing a recording studio. The control room contained an
eight-channel Presto mixing desk, a Hammond spring echo unit
and a Rec-O-Cut cutting lathe for acetates. More importandy, he
built his own tape machine.
35

Frank Zappa
"I think he's a genius guy," Frank told William Ruhlmann. "He
built his own five-track recorder at a time when four-track was an
absolutely exotic piece of equipment in the industry. Three-track
was something that they used for filmwork. Four-track was rare."20
Buff also had pretensions as a recording artist and set about
teaching himself the rudiments of every instrument he needed to
imitate the hits of the day. "He would listen to whatever was on
the tracks and he would grasp what the hook element was and then
build his version of something that contained the same hook-type
materials."21
Frank was introduced to Buff by Ronnie Williams, "a guitar-
player that I was working with in some local bands at that time.
Ronnie had joined him up there and was putting guitar parts on
some of his things and then Ronnie brought me over and I worked
with him on some stuff."22 "Some stuff" turned out to be 14
singles over the course of two years by sundry real and invented
artists. The first record from the alliance was 'Breaktime' and '16
Tons', the A-side written by Buff, Williams and Zappa and released
as by the Masters on Emmy 10082, a label owned by Buff. 'Gotta
Find My Roogalator', written by Frank and sung by Paul Jameson,
followed on Penthouse 503, of which only promotional copies
survive.
Ten singles on various labels were issued during 1963, including
'Love Of My Life' and 'Tell Me' (Daani 101) by Ron Roman,
'Dear Jeepers' and 'Letter From Jeepers' (Donna 1380) by Bob
Guy, 'Cradle Rock' and 'Everytime I See You' (Donna 1381) by
the Heartbreakers, 'The Big Surfer 'and 'Not Another One'
(Vigah! 001) by Brian Lord & the Midnighters, 'Hey Nelda' and
'Surf Along' (Vigah! 002) by Ned & Nelda and 'Tijuana Surf' and
'Grunion Run' (Original Sound 39) by the Hollywood Persuaders.
Bob Guy introduced horror movies on a local television station;
Frank wrote the Jeepers songs in imitation of John Zacherle's
I	single, 'Dinner With Drac'. Brian Lord was a San Bernardino DJ
11	who imitated President John F. Kennedy. Vigah! was another of
j	Paul Buffs labels and he subsequently leased the record to Capitol
for $800. It received a catalogue number, Capitol 4981, and would
have been released in June 1963. It never reached the stores,
though. One of the record's jokes involving the Peace Corps
36

Cruisin' For Burgers
backfired when Medgar Evers, a field secretary in the NAACP, was
murdered in Jackson, Mississippi on June 12. Thirty-one years after
the event and exacdy two calendar months after Frank went on his
last tour, Byron De La Beckwith, 73, was finally convicted of
Evers' murder, having been twice acquitted back in 1964.
The other Vigah! release parodied Paul & Paula's 'Hey Paula', a
saccharine teen hit produced by Major Bill Smith, a Texas entre-
preneur. The Heartbreakers were two local 14-year-old Mexican
kids, while the Hollywood Persuaders consisted of Frank and Paul
Buff, who played all the instruments on 'Tijuana Surf'. 'Grunion
Run', a Zappa composition, was also covered by the Jim Musil
Combo.
Since Frank and Paul were both multi-instrumentalists of a sort,
the pair wrote and constructed their backing tracks with occasional
assistance from musicians that Frank would meet on the local club
circuit. One of these was Ray Collins, a veteran of several R&B
groups including Chicano doowoppers Little Julian Herrera & The
Tigers, who encountered Frank playing in The Sportsman, a
Pomona bar that didn't even have a stage. "I figured that any band
that played 'Work With Me Annie' was all right," he said. He sang
with the band that night and told Frank of an idea for a song based
on a catchphrase used by Steve Allen on his networked TV show.
Frank wrote the song and recruited Collins to sing it. 'How's
Your Bird' and 'The World's Greatest Sinner' were released on
Donna 1378 as by Baby Ray & The Ferns, a group that consisted of
Frank, Ray Collins, Paul BufP and Dick Barber, the last of whom
went on to become the Mothers' road manager and 'snorker'.
Collins also co-wrote with Frank the Ned & Nelda single and
'Memories Of El Monte', an affectionate parody of Fifties doo-
wop released by the Penguins on Original Sound 27.
It may have been through the Baby Ray record that Frank
appeared on the Steve Allen Show. It was reported in the local press
under the headline, 'Ontario Composer, Steve Allen To Play
Wacky Duet'. This was a concerto for two performers and a
bicycle. "It's very funny," Frank was quoted. "You play a bicycle
by plucking the spokes and blowing through the handlebars."23 He
was photographed with the show's host, dressed in acceptable dark
suit and tie, clutching a violin bow.
37

Frank Zappa
Other techniques of'cyclophony', it appeared, included stroking
the spokes with the violin bow, twirling the pedals and letting the
air out of the tyres. This was abetted by a man in the control room
'fooling around' with a tape recorder and a jazz group supplying
'toneless background noise'. The news item also noted that 'The
World's Greatest Sinner' had recendy had its premiere at the
Vista-Continental Theater in Hollywood.
Another project in the summer of 1963 was the formation of the
Soots, which brought Frank and Don Vhet together, along with
guitarist Alex St Clair and Vic Mortenson on drums. The group
made several recordings, including 'Metal Man Has Won His
Wings', 'Cheryl's Canon' and 'Slippin' And Slidin'', Don's take on
Little Richard. 'Metal Man' featured Don, recorded in the hallway
that served for a vocal booth, emitting a series of falsetto whoops
and barely audible barked asides that are almost swamped by
Frank's extended guitar solo. However, the repeated chanting of
the song's tide is clear enough to question how boodeggers could
have called this 'Metal Man Has Hornet Wings' for so long. The
lyrics were derived from a comic book that was pinned to a
notice-board beside the studio door. The tapes were sent to Dot
Records and on September 19, 1963, a standard rejection letter
(addressed to 'Mr V. Zappa') arrived from Dot A&R man, Milt
Rogers.24
Providentially, at the end of the year Frank's other film score was
resurrected when Run Home Slow finally went into production
with actress Mercedes McCambridge in a leading role. Better still,
Frank received $2,000, part of which paid for the Gibson ES-5
Switchmaster guitar which he used on the Mothers' first three
albums. Most of what was left went into the purchase of Pal
Studios. Paul Buff had been in financial difficulties for some
months, unable to keep up the lease payments. Frank agreed to
take over these payments and to rent and/or buy the studio equip-
ment. The contract, dated August 1, 1964, detailed the minutiae of
the deal, whereby Frank paid Buff $1,000, a reduction of $212 on
the supposed value of the equipment, and paid a rental of $50 per
month until individual items were sold.
"He showed me how to work the stuff and I went from being
kind of an incompetent commercial artist to a full-time obsessive
38

Cruisin' For Burgers
overdub maniac, working in this studio."25 Litde or none of what
was recorded over the next four or five months has been released,
apart from 'Charva', featuring Frank on vocal, piano, bass and
drums, which appears on the Mystery Disc included in The Old
Masters Box I. The original five-track masters are unplayable on
current equipment but two-track mixes of such things as 'Lonely
Lips' by Sonny Wilson could only be released if the original partici-
pants could be located.
Frank renamed the establishment Studio Z and threw an open-
ing night party attended by Ray Collins, Motorhead Sherwood
and Don Vliet, among others. A short sound collage from the event
also turns up on the above-mentioned Mystery Disc. The colour
scheme was changed to olive green and turquoise blue and Frank
painted 'Record Your Band' and '$13.50 Per Hour' on the walls
each side of the front door.
At about this time, his marriage to Kay finally cracked under the
strain that his lifestyle and pursuits had put upon it. Frank filed for
divorce and moved into Studio Z. It was to be a rigorous life, for
there were no domestic facilities and only an industrial sink to
wash in. He was quickly joined by Motorhead Sherwood, who
combined the attributes of saxophonist, car mechanic and food
scrounger. Through his efforts, their staple diet consisted of peanut
butter, instant mashed potatoes, coffee and honey, with the occa-
sional trip to the grocery store to exchange empty pop bottles for
cigarettes.
A few weeks after Studio Z opened for business, Frank bought a
job-lot of film scenery from an auction at the F.K. Rockett
Studios. For $50 he acquired a two-sided cyclorama, a kitchen, a
library interior and a building exterior. He repainted all the sets
himself, including the two-dimensional rocket ship illustrated in
The Real Frank Zappa. This was to be part of the scenery for
Captain Beejheart vs. The Grunt People, a science-fiction film script
written with Don Vliet in mind. 'The Birth Of Captain Beefheart',
included on the Mystery Disc in The Old Masters Box I, was a sample
of the dialogue.
Another project was 'a stupid piece of trash' called 'I Was A
Teenage Maltshop', an attempt at the world's first 'rock opera'. The
opening theme was played on the piano by Frank, accompanied by
39

Frank Zappa
Motorhead Sherwood's acoustic guitar and Vic Mortenson on
drums. After Captain Beefheart had introduced himself and pre-
dicted that "we've got a heck of a little teenage opera for you -
really", two unidentified female voices deliver a cheerleaders'
version of'Status Back Baby' before 'Ned The Mumbler' makes his
appearance. Described by Beefheart as "a teenage Lone Ranger",
Frank sings over a slow blues and then a fast rock vamp. 'Ned Has
A Brainstorm' consists of a short burst of overdubbed guitar non-
sense followed by an early version of what would become 'Toads
Of The Short Forest'.
THE STREETS OF FONTANA
At the time, one of his few sources of income was a weekend gjg
back in Sun Village. The Village Inn was a barbecue hut where
Frank would play with some of his old high school friends, includ-
ing Johnny Franklin on bass, for the princely sum of $7 a night. A
taped excerpt of one such gig, with 'Toby' on drums, Motorhead
Sherwood on tenor sax and 'Frankie Zappo' on guitar, was also
included on the Mystery Disc already mentioned. These occasions
enabled him to keep in touch with the ex-Blackouts, who now
called themselves the Omens. Motorhead was in the band and
remembers that during that time, Frank "would come up for
battles of the bands all the time".26 Years later, memories of the
period formed the basis for 'Village Of The Sun', a song that
appeared on the live album, Roxy & Elsewhere.
Less remunerative but more fun were the gigs he and Ray
Collins performed as a sardonic parody of a folk duo, calling them-
selves "The Sin City Boys". "We sang 'Puff The Magic Dragon' as
'Joe The Puny Greaser' and we played a perverted version of 'The
Streets Of Laredo' called 'The Streets Of Fontana'. We weren't
setting out to make any kind of impact on people. We were just
doing it for a laugh, to have fun."27 Ranging further afield, they
also appeared on 'Talent Night' at The Troubadour in Los
Angeles. "We went down there, and we're singing songs about
pimples and all kinds of other far-out things. It seems like a lot of
that was the basis of some of the things that the Mothers eventually
wound up doing."28
40

Cruisin' For Burgers
On that occasion, they appeared as 'Loeb & Leopold', named
after the young Illinois homosexuals, Richard Loeb and Nathan
Leopold Jr, who were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1924
for the murder two years previously of Robert Franks. The story
of how they did the deed as an expression of their 'superiority'
was fictionalised by novelist Meyer Levin and filmed in 1959 as
Compulsion by Richard Fleischer, with Bradford Dillman and Dean
Stockwell in the leading roles.
As he'd proved on 'Ned The Mumbler', Frank was still a reluc-
tant vocalist, largely because of his professed inability to sing and
play guitar simultaneously. But for a short while he assumed the
double role, forming a power trio he called The Muthers with
bassist Paul Woods and Les Papp on drums. The band worked
clubs and ban in the Pomona area, particularly at The Saints &
Sinners on Holt Boulevard in nearby Ontario. "We were playing
'In The Midnight Hour' to an audience of Mexican labourers,
entertained by four gogo girls in black fishnet stockings."29 When
they weren't ogling the dancers' latticed thighs, the audience
looked askance at the group's appearance. They affected 'longish'
hair; "that is to say, it was aiming downward and about three inches
long. In that day and age for that part of the country, I was a mutant
... I was wearing striped shirts unheard-of to a population that
thrives on the white short-sleeved T-shirt, because that's what you
wore to work."30
There was a constant police presence in the club, one officer on
weekdays and two at weekends. One night, a policeman sidled up
and asked Frank if he would be interested in making some training
films for the San Bernardino vice squad. When Frank indicated that
he would, the officer gave him his card and left; Frank thought no
more about it. Around the same time, the Sunday supplement of
the Ontario Daily Report wrote a feature on Frank's studio and his
attempts to set up Captain Beeflteart vs. The Grunt People. A casting
call went out for locals to fill the lesser roles, one of whom, Frank
subsequendy found out, was another member of the vice squad.
Some weeks later, this same man returned to the studio, posing
as a used car salesman. He and his friends were having a party on
the following Wednesday and could Frank supply him with a sex
film for the evening? Frank opined that a film would be too
41

Frank Zappa
expensive but that an audio tape might have the same effect. The
'salesman' gave him a list of the sex acts they'd like to listen to and
Frank told him to return the following day with $100 in his hand
for the tape of his desires.
Frank enlisted the help of one of the girls, Lorraine Belcher, to
simulate the requisite manoeuvres. "So I stayed up most of the
night manufacturing this bogus sex tape, fake bedsprings, squeaks
and grunts. I overdubbed a musical background and spent hours
cutting the laughs out of this thing." The following day, the 'sales-
man' came back and offered him $50. "I said to him, 'No, that's
not what the deal was, so goodbye.' The tape never changed hands.
I never sold him anything. But the next thing I knew, the door flies
open, photographers are rushing in and the place is raided."31 The
play-acting 'salesman' turned out to be Sergeant Jim Willis, vice
investigator of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office and
nemesis of local cottaging gays, with his playmates, Jim Mayfield,
Phillip Ponders and Detective Stan McCloskey. Between them,
they confiscated every tape and film reel on the premises, of which
Frank got back less than half.
'Vice Squad Raids Local Film Studio' screamed the headline in
the Ontario Daily Report. Ted Harp, fearless reporter, burst a brain
cell coming up with the sub-heading, '2 A-Go-Go To Jail' for his
coverage of what amounted to entrapment, a favourite pastime of
US enforcement agencies. Frank, 'a self-styled movie producer',
and Lorraine Belcher, 'his buxom, red-haired companion', were
booked on suspicion of conspiracy to manufacture pornographic
materials and suspicion of sex perversion. To make pornography
was a misdemeanour but 'conspiracy' made it a felony with a '10 to
20' sentence. "I mean, I had no intention of ever becoming a porno-
grapher. I'd never seen pornography, didn't have any idea what it
was. I knew that such a thing did exist but I had never seen any."32
Frank's father had to take out a bank loan to pay for his son's
bail. Once out, Frank contacted Art Laboe, owner of the Original
Sound label, and obtained a $1,500 advance against the royalties for
'Memories Of El Monte' and 'Grunion Run'. This he used to bail
out Lorraine Belcher and to engage the services of an attorney. At
the subsequent trial, the judge asked to hear the offending tape.
"We went into the judge's chambers and played this tape for him.
42

Cruisin' For Burgers
He started laughing, he thought it was the most ridiculous thing.
He was going to blow the whole thing off. But there was this
26-year-old district attorney who, if he'd had his way, I would've
gotten the death penalty.
"I pled Nolo contendere, which means, just like many people in
America, 'I'm too broke to fight the law.' And so, the net result
was a sentence of six months in jail with all but ten days suspended.
Plus three years probation, during which I was not to be in the
company of any unmarried woman under the age of 21, and not
violate any of the traffic laws of the state of California and so on."33
The convicted felon was committed to Tank 'C of the San
Bernardino County Jail. Frank would later say that he found the
experience 'educational'. "I had no plans of ever becoming a crim-
inal of any sort in my life, (so) it just was quite a shock for me to
find myself in jail. You can't appreciate what a jail is and what goes
on there unless somebody sticks you in one. In a way, I guess I have
to thank Detective Willis and the evil machinery of the San
Bernardino County legal system for giving me a chance to see,
from that perspective, what the penal system is like in this country,
and . . . how ineffectual and how stupid it is."34
It was summertime and very hot and there was no ventilation
in the cells. The lights were kept on all night, sleep was almost
impossible and the warden harassed their charges by day. The food
was virtually inedible, especially something that was called 'chop
suey'. "There's no telling what it was, but there was a certain
amount of vegetable content and a certain amount of protein
content, and a certain amount of gravy. It would have taken a
research grant to ascertain exacdy what 'chop suey' really was... I
remember one day they handed me this aluminium bowl with
some cream of wheat (which) arrived tipped over. The cream of
wheat fell out in one moulded helmet-Uke kind of thing, flipped
over, and there was a cockroach stuck in the bottom. So I pulled
this out, didn't eat the cream of wheat but saved the cockroach and
put it in an envelope with a letter to Motorhead's mother. The jail
censor caught it and threatened me with solitary confinement if I
ever tried anything like that again."35
The jail's scum-infested shower, just one stall for 44 men, was
immortalised in  'San Ber'doo'.   "There was  scum,  composed
43

Frank Zappa
perhaps of some soap material but other unknown substances, very
thick scum on the pan of this shower which had never been
cleaned. And even though it was hot and even though you were
forced to wear this horrible boiler suit while you were in there, no
way was I taking a shower in that thing."36
After paying his debt to society, Frank returned to Studio Z, but
his stay was short-lived. A real estate development which involved
the widening of Archibald Avenue was waiting to proceed and not
surprisingly, Frank had fallen behind with his rent. He wasn't par-
ticularly welcome at his parents' home, either. "My father didn't
buy the concept of long hair as brain-ends."37 It was then that Ray
Collins came to the rescue. He rang Frank to ask if he'd like to join
a band he'd been singing with for the last three months called the
Soul Agents.
Playing 'straight commercial rhythm and blues', the Soul Agents
had been formed by bass player Roy Estrada and drummer Jimmy
Carl Black. Black came from Anthony, a town on the Texas/New
Mexico border. He'd joined the Air Force in 1958 and after
leaving the service stayed on in Wichita, Kansas for a couple of
years as a professional drummer. In 1964, he moved west to Los
Angeles and became a starving musician, a role he would diligently
pursue over the next few years. He met Roy Estrada in a pawnshop
one day as he was hocking some cymbals to get money for food.
The Soul Agents grew out of their meeting.
The rest of the band was made up of saxophonist Dave
Coronado and guitarist Ray Hunt. Hunt and Collins quickly
developed a mutual antipathy which the guitarist compounded by
playing wrong chords while Collins was singing. The singer got the
best of the ensuing fight and the Soul Agents needed a new guitar-
ist. Frank made the trip to the Broadside, a bar in Pomona where
the band had a weekend residency. It was back to 'Gloria' and
'Mustang Sally' and 'Louie Louie'. But not for long.
Frank enjoyed working with the band and thought they were
too good just to play in bars, good enough to learn the songs which
he'd been stockpiling. "So I said, 'OK you guys, I've got this plan:
we are going to get rich. You probably won't believe this now, but
if you bear with me, we'll go out and do it.' "38 The only dissenting
voice came from Dave Coronado, who was nominal leader of the
44

Cruisin' For Burgers
band. "He was a wise gentleman," Frank told me. "He said, 'If you
play original material, you'll get fired from bar-band gigs and you
won't be able to eat.' We started playing original material and we
started getting fired. So he was right and we were wrong."
Coronado went off to his job at a bowling alley and the band
learned how to starve.
They practised at Studio Z for about a week before being turfed
out by the developers. Armed with their original repertoire and a
new name, Captain Glasspack & His Magic Mufflers, they prepared
to take on the British Invasion that was then at its height. If you
didn't sound like The Beades or The Rolling Stones, you didn't
get hired. "We weren't going about it mat way. We'd play some-
thing weird and we'd get fired. I'd say, 'Hang on,' and we'd move
to another go-go bar — the Red Flame in Pomona, the Shack in
Fontana, the Tom Cat in Torrence ... It was a strange time. We
even got thrown out of after-hours jam sessions."39
The problem was a simple one: if a band didn't play recognisable
songs, the punters weren't happy; if the punters weren't happy,
they didn't drink; if they didn't drink, the bar owners didn't make
any money. Even when the band got a gig, Frank wasn't happy. "If
you're the kind of musician who thinks it's a good idea to play
for beer, it would've been heaven. A lot of these places would
calculate your wages based on a certain number of dollars plus all
the beer you can drink. Which meant that you were getting a
lot of water in your diet, too. It was kind of a humiliating
environment."40
Eventually, they ended up back at the Broadside in Pomona.
Frank decided it was time for the band to change its name again.
"At the time, if you were a good musician, you were a mother-
fucker. And 'Mothers' was short for a collection of motherfuckers.
And actually, it was kind of presumptuous to name the band that
because we weren't that good musicians. But by bar band standards
in the area, we were light years ahead of our competition. But in
terms of real musicianship, I suppose we were right down there in
die swamp."41
It was May, the time when nuts are gathered and American
children remember their mothers. And which day did Frank
choose, quite by chance, to rename his musicians?
45

3
PROJECT/OBJECT
The symbolism of the date and the name change may not have
been arbitrary as Frank has since indicated. "It just happened by
sheer accident to be Mothers Day," he said in 1968, "although we
weren't aware of it at the time. When you are nearly starving to
death, you don't keep track of holidays.'1 Indeed. But, irrespective
of his calorific intake, Frank had already begun to lay plans for the
future and what decisions the prevailing circumstances allowed him
to make were taken knowingly. The resonance of the date and the
sleight-of-hand in denying it are typical of how he would later
manipulate public perceptions of his career.
In another 1968 interview, he admitted, "The Mothers project
was carefully planned some 18 months before it actually got off the
ground. I had been looking for the right people for a long time."
While he'd been in advertising, he went on, he'd done some moti-
vational research. He felt he'd identified a niche in the marketplace
for a form of music of his own devising. "I composed a composite,
gap-filling product to plug most of the gaps between so-called
serious music and so-called popular music."2 Is this the man who
renamed his band by "sheer accident" on the one day of the year
that gave the new name significance?
Six years later, his master plan was enumerated once again in a
press kit. "Perhaps the most unique aspect of the Mothers' work is
the conceptual continuity of the group's output macro-structure. The
basic blueprints were executed in 1962—63. Preliminary experi-
mentation in early and mid-1964. Construction of the project/object
began in late 1964. The project/object contains plans and non-plans,
also precisely calculated event-structures designed to accommodate
the mechanics of fate and all bonus statistical improbabilities
thereto."3
46

Project/Object
The project/object was the means by which Zappa incorporated
every aspect of his work into an undefined grand design. It meant
that every record and performance, every musician and member of
the audience, every critical reaction to each gig, record, video and
interview was integrated into a unifiable whole. Beneath all this
was the continuity of his compositions, which followed consistent
themes and experiments that, in turn, were adapted and augmented
by the influence of random events and circumstances chosen by
him for being either apposite or contradictory.
The press-kit was itself an event-structure that had as much to
reveal about manipulation as it did about a co-ordinated pro-
gramme of events. If at the start there was calculation, it was
Zappa's ability to provoke reaction and turn it to his advantage.
"Audiences just couldn't identify with or relate to the music, so we
got into the habit of insulting them . . . and we accumulated a big
reputation in that way. Nobody came to hear us play, they came in
to see how much abuse they could take. We managed to get jobs
on that basis but it didn't last very long because we'd eventually
end up by abusing the owner of the club."4
Hindsight jacked up the mythology but the reality of the time
was that the Mothers starved for ten months before journeying
west to try their luck in Hollywood. Frank took an apartment at
1819 Bellevue Avenue, back in Echo Park, which he described as
"a grubby little place on the side of a hill". He got a job as a sales-
man in the singles department of Wallich's Music City on the
corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood.
Through Don Cerveris he'd met Mark Cheka, a middle-aged
artist from New York who lived in West Hollywood at the time
with a waitress from the Ash Grove, LA's premier folk club on
Melrose Avenue. In the hope that Cheka's 'artistic' temperament
might qualify him to become the Mothers' manager, Frank enticed
him to the Broadside one night, a journey of some 50 miles, to
assess their potential. Cheka was probably nonplussed by the band's
appearance: Frank had encouraged the band to modify their attire
to reflect their performance. "I felt you couldn't play the sort of
music we were playing and look the way some of the guys did —
with processed pompadours."5
The pompadours were in fact a disguise that Jimmy Carl Black
47

Frank Zappa
and Roy Estrada adopted when they returned to their homes in
Santa Ana in Orange County, "which is a bad place to be unless
you belong to the John Birch Society".6 As well as intolerance in
the suburbs, the British Invasion held sway in Hollywood clubs and
bars and if you didn't have long hair, you weren't hired. Frank
himself had a problem there too because, as he told Sally Kempton,
"due to an unfortunate circumstance, all my hair had been cut
off."7 Without long hair and a manager, the Mothers didn't stand
much chance.
TINSEL TOWN REBELLION
Mark Cheka accepted the challenge but soon discovered that he,
too, would need help. He turned to a friend, Herb Cohen, whose
tenacity and taste for confrontation were ideal qualities for the task
of representing Frank and the Mothers. Cohen had considerable
experience in the entertainment business and much else besides.
Originally from New York, where he was born in 1933, he joined
the Merchant Marine at 17 as a deckhand, fireman and sometime
union organiser. During a brief stint of Army service, he was posted
to San Francisco, where he met and lived with folk singer Odetta.
He got involved in the local folk scene, promoting gigs during the
years that Senator McCarthy painted folk singers with a decidedly
pink brush.
At about the time that the Zappa family was moving to Lancas-
ter, Herb Cohen was in Los Angeles, managing a club called the
Purple Onion. Over the next two years he turned it into a folk
club, thus antagonising the owner who wanted his investment to
be a 'classy' collar-and-tie establishment. Borrowing money from
Theodore Bikel, one of the singers he'd been booking into the
Onion, in 1958 Cohen opened his own coffee-house/folk club,
the Unicorn.
There were a lot of earnest coffee-drinking Los Angeleans who
found protest songs an aid to digestion and the folk circuit boomed.
Herb Cohen took an interest in several other coffee-houses and
also a night club, Cosmo's Alley, which later became Bido Lito's,
and helped to launch Arthur Lee's group, Love. In 1959 Cohen
was busted on an obscenity charge after booking comedian Lenny
48

Project/Object
Bruce. He'd had frequent run-ins with the Hollywood police
department, who were suspicious of 'un-American activities' like
drinking alcohol in a coffee house. This time he beat the rap but
soon had occasion to take an extended holiday in Europe, the
Middle East and Africa.
While he was away, his attorney brother Martin (also known as
Mutt) Cohen managed the Unicorn. When Herb returned in
1963, he sold up and moved back briefly to New York, where he
picked up the management of the Modern Folk Quartet (including
the photographer Henry Diltz) and Judy Henske. Before long, he
moved his operations back to Los Angeles, where 'folk-rock' was
emerging. The new style took its lead from the Byrds, young
ex-folkies who'd graduated from groups such as the Limeliters and
the New Christy Minstrels. Their first name, the Jet Set, came from
leader Roger McGuinn's fascination with aeroplanes. But, taking
their lead from The Beades (as who didn't then?), they meta-
morphosed into the Byrds.
They quickly became the group to see on the Sunset Strip, the
winding, mile-long stretch of Sunset Boulevard between Doherty
Drive in the west and La Cienaga Boulevard in the east. Their
appearances at Ciro's, a rundown joint once the hang-out of film
stars that now looked, in David Crosby's words, like "a Fifties Las
Vegas showroom that had been done cheapy", and their hit version
of Bob Dylan's 'Mr Tambourine Man', heralded folk-rock, the
new trend in music.
Accompanying the band to their gigs was a rag-tag army of
dancers and 'freaks' led by beat artist Vito Paulekas and his
dionysian friend, Carl Franzoni, whose perennial costume was
black tights, leopard-skin leotards and a cape with an 'F' embla-
zoned on its back. Most took it to represent his surname but, as far
as he was concerned, it identified him as 'Captain Fuck'. He and
Vito indulged that particular pastime whenever possible, even
though Vito, in his mid-50s, was married to Sue, an ex-cheerleader
more than 30 years his junior. They had a young son named
Godot, who died aged three and a half when he fell through a sky-
light. Sue then produced a daughter called, at least for a while,
Groovee Nipple.
Vito had "long straggly white hair," Zappa told Andy Gill, "used
49

Frank Zappa
to wear tights all the time and part of a tablecloth taped over his
chest. Sue used to wear basically just doily-type tablecloths and
sandals." Their entourage he dubbed a "Bohemian bizarro group,
and every night they'd go out dancing, and as soon as they arrived,
they would make things happen, because they were dancing in a
way that nobody had seen before."8
Los Angeles freaks were different from the hippies congregating
in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Hippies preached
tolerance and love, fostered a herd instinct when it came to modes
of dress and vocabulary, and turned begging (in the name of
self-help) into a community service. Down in mercenary LA,
where they emphasised the second word of'show business', freaks
were more individualistic and ego-driven, taking 'love' where they
found it and equating 'tolerance' with 'every man for himself.
Frank had his own ideas about the differences. "Hippies don't
really care what they look like," he told Jerry Hopkins, "and the
freaks care an awful lot. Their packaging and image construction is
a very important part of their lifestyle."9 Expressed in those terms,
it was obviously an environment for an entrepreneur like Frank
Zappa to thrive — if he ever got the chance.
TOO UGLY FOR SHOW BUSINESS
Despite his plans and projects, Frank was starving. If his band had a
reputation it was for being unemployable and, through that, it was
hard to keep a stable personnel. The first addition to the band was
folk singer/guitarist Alice Stuart, "who played guitar very well and
she sang well." But — "she couldn't play 'Louie Louie', so I fired
her."10 For her part, Stuart claimed that she left after three months
because she'd grown tired of Frank "doing his Chicano rap". "I
had an idea for combining certain modal influences into our basi-
cally country blues sound," he said, "... we were playing a lot of
Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf-type stuff around that time."11 That
suited Stuart's replacement, Henry Vestine.
Frank continued to write songs, most of which turned up on
the Mothers' first three albums. Increasingly, they reflected his
antipathy towards both his peers and the authorities opposed to
them. Social unrest was rife in Los Angeles in 1965, in both the
50

Project/Object
youth and black communities. In August of that year, racial tension
in the Watts district finally provoked a riot that gained worldwide
attention. At 1819 Bellevue, Frank wrote 'Trouble Every Day',
initially referred to as 'The Watts Riot Song', along with 'Oh No,
Bowtie Daddy' and 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy'.
With his limited resources, he hung out whenever he could at
Canter's, a delicatessen on Fairfax Avenue that had become what
Frank later termed "The Top Freako Watering Hole and Social
HQ." Denny Bruce put it more succincdy: "Canter's was the only
place longhairs could go and not get the shit kicked out of them by
the suburbanites."12 It was also where Lenny Bruce, Tim Hardin
and Phil Spector held their respective courts. Vito's atelier was just
three blocks away on North Laurel Avenue, a store/studio where
Sue sold bric-a-brac and Vito taught clay sculpture on Tuesday
nights and dancing on Thursdays. The Byrds used the basement as a
rehearsal room and storage facility.
It was around this time that Mark Cheka arranged for the
Mothers to play at a party where they would be filmed as an
example of musical outrage for Mondo Hollywood, an exploitation
flick written, produced and directed by Carl Cohen (a co-
incidence?). Shot in the form of a semi-documentary, it featured
Rudi Gernreich, designer of topless dresses, and Richard Alpert,
sent down from Harvard for his LSD experiments, among a herd of
hippies and wannabes.
Love guitarist Bryan Maclean attended the party: "I stood near
the band in rapture for the entire evening. I couldn't believe my
eyes, I thought (Frank) was the greatest."13 Party Scene From Mondo
Hollywood, on the Mystery Disc, captures the event at which "freaks
and maniacs cavort licentiously". In his notes, Frank went on,
"The equipment we are playing on was lent to us by Jim Guercio.
Thanks again, Jim. In the background, listening to this spewage,
was Herb Cohen."14
Even though he didn't understand their music, Cohen liked
what he heard: "They had enough things going on to make it
obvious there was a viable commodity." He and Mark Cheka were
acquainted and introductions were made. In subsequent meetings,
Frank explained his aims and Cohen was impressed that here was a
musician who actually could express himself. "Not only did he
51

Frank Zappa
know what he was talking about," he said, "but he had a good
background and was an excellent musician."15
Zappa and Cohen may have recognised the manipulator in one
another. Neither was distracted by the 'enthusiasm' that was so
much a part of the 'freak' scene and both liked to confront author-
ity. Years later, long after artist and management had parted
company, the 'real' Frank Zappa noted, "Almost overnight we had
jumped from starvation level to poverty level."16 When inter-
viewed for BBC2's Late Show, he was asked how significant Cohen
was to the original success of the band; he answered, "I would say
that he was of major significance. He helped us get work."17
One of Cohen's first moves was to get the band an audition at
The Action on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was "kind of an
entry-level establishment. Their clientele was prostitutes, under-
world figures and television actors. There were some movie people
too."18 Six months previously they'd been turned down by the
management because their hair wasn't long enough. "It still wasn't
very long, so we went in wearing purple shirts and black hats,"
Frank told Jerry Hopkins. "We looked like Mafia undertakers. The
management of this establishment responded on a visceral level to
this packaging and hired us for a four-week tour of duty."19
Cohen's next move, to get the Mothers paid for appearing in
Mondo Hollywood, was not so successful. Their sequence was
deleted from the film. The next practical steps to stardom were
bookings at the Whisky A Go Go, on the corner of Sunset and San
Vicente, and The Trip, east on Sunset. "All the industrial types
would spend their time at The Trip," Frank told me, "because
that's where the 'better class of people' were." At The Trip,
the Mothers got frequent requests for 'Help I'm A Rock' and
'Memories Of El Monte'; both songs contained talking passages
and this encouraged listening rather than dancing. This was accept-
able at The Trip but not good policy for playing the Whisky.
The Whisky was the almost exclusive preserve of Johnny
Rivers, whose 1964 debut album, Live At The Whisky A Go Go,
yielded his number 2 hit, 'Memphis'. From time to time, Rivers
would go off on tour and some lucky group got to fill in. When
their turn arrived, Frank was disgusted to discover that their name
was not advertised outside the club until they paid for a sign to be
52

Project/Object
made. "The audience wasn't anything to brag about, they were just
a bunch of drunk people in go-go boots. But the money was a lot
better than the Broadside, because we were actually making union
scale."20
Elmer Valentine, owner of the Whisky and The Trip, insisted
that bands played music for dancing. After all, that's why the 'A Go
Go' was there. But Frank had other ideas. On one occasion, the
group played a medley of'Help I'm A Rock' and 'El Monte' for a
solid hour and nobody danced. "Immediately after that we were
selling pop botdes for cigarettes and bologna."21
SUZY CREAMCHEESE
Although Frank held himself somewhat aloof from the 'freak' com-
munity, he understood the importance of being associated with the
movement. He hadn't failed to notice the 'folk legend' that Vito
and his harem/troupe had already become. But wearing floral-
print stage clothes, as he and the band began to do (audiences saw
the flowers, he saw the irony), and inviting Vito to sanction his gigs
was not enough. There must be a Mothers' mythology, a plot and
cast of characters for impressionable minds to absorb and identify
with.
He cast his net with analytical skill for what was to be one of the
first "bonus statistical improbabilities". The band had to blend in
chameleon-like with its surroundings. "Now I didn't tell the guys
what to wear; I merely suggested their mode of dress conform to
what they were doing."22 They were still in the throes of changing
from an R&B bar band into something a whole lot different. "The
appearance of a group is linked to the music the same way an album
cover is linked to the record. It gives a clue to what's inside. And
the better the packaging, the more the person who picked up that
package will enjoy it."23
There were others like him who inhabited the periphery of the
'scene' and Pamela Zarubica was one of them. Drawn to the Strip
from her home in Inglewood, she hung out at The Trip, trying to
convince Phil Spector, already with most of his hits behind him, of
her love. Disabused of her dreams in that direction, she befriended
53

Frank Zappa
Frank at a time when he still had to pay admission to the club when
he wasn't playing there.
She first saw Frank at The Trip when he sat in one night with
the Grass Roots, who would soon change their name to Love in
order not to clash with the pop singles band created by P.F. Sloan
and Steve Barri. Pam nicknamed him Omar, since Frank was
wearing a fur coat making him resemble Omar Sharif's character in
the recendy released film Doctor Zhiuago. She was also present at the
Mothers' first gigs at the club. "They played 'Help I'm A Rock' for
20 minutes and everyone went 'Ugh'," she told David Walley.
"I loved it."24
With their similar views on the world, a friendship struck up
between them. There was a practical side to their alliance as well.
For a nominal fee, Pamela agreed to clean his wretched apartment,
in return for which Frank became her mentor and moral guardian
while using her Kirkwood Drive apartment as a staging post for his
forays onto the Strip. They would sit in Canter's together: "I
would stare at Phil Spector and he would look at all the girls but
none of them would have anything to do with him 'cos he just
wasn't getting any action."25
That wasn't the action he was looking for. What he wanted most
was a recording contract. That would legitimise his music, give
him some standing amongst his peers but, more importandy,
would open up a work circuit at present denied to the band, and
put up their price. Herb Cohen justified his 15 per cent by drag-
ging record producer Tom Wilson along to see them.
The Mothers had recorded some demos at Original Sound
Studios which had been sent to a number of record companies.
Everyone turned them down; Clive Davis, then head of Columbia
Records, declared that the band "had no commercial potential", a
resonant phrase that went straight into the Zappa artillery. MGM
didn't turn them down, they just never replied. But Herb Cohen
read the music press and knew that Wilson had been hired by the
company and was the man to impress.
Wilson was a Harvard graduate with a degree in economics. As a
producer at Columbia, he made Simon & Garfunkel's first album,
Wednesday Morning, 3AM, as well as Bob Dylan's Another Side Of
Bob Dylan and Bringing It All Back Home. In June 1965, he produced
54

Project/Object
the ground-breaking six-minute single, 'Like A Rolling Stone'. In
November he accepted the post of East Coast Director of A&R
with MGM/Verve and took the first opportunity to travel west to
check out the developing music scene.
HUNGRY FREAKS, DADDY
Cohen tracked Wilson down at The Trip on an evening when the
Mothers were filling in at the Whisky. By whatever means, he con-
vinced the producer to walk the four blocks to see his band. "It was
under duress," Frank said to me. "Herb Cohen dragged him away
from a girl he had sitting on his lap." They arrived while the
Mothers were giving 'The Watts Riot Song' an extended boogie
workout with Henry Vestine on guitar. "He only stayed for a few
minutes after which he came backstage, slapped me on the back
and said, 'Wonderful — we're gonna make a record of you . . .
goodbye.'"26
"He must have walked away saying, 'Hey, a white rhythm and
blues band,'" Frank told Jim Smith in 1974. '"We've got the
Righteous Brothers, now we're getting the Mothers.' "27
By this time, he and Henry Vestine had moved into a 'ginger-
bread' cottage on Formosa Avenue, just south of Sunset. It was one
in a complex of four that fronted onto a central courtyard. Another
was occupied by singer Victoria Winston, who'd attended the same
high school as Phil Spector and dated fellow Teddy Bear Marshall
Lieb. "At the time, the area was filled with musicians. Members of
Steppenwolf lived across the street and there were country players
down the block."28
Winston befriended her new neighbour and found him "serious-
minded, intelligent and focused. He knew where he wanted to go
with his music. We spoke about composers like Edgar Varese, who
we both idolised. He told me, 'Someday I'll get there. I'll be produc-
ing, writing and performing this sort of music'" In the few months
that he lived there, Frank wrote several songs for Winston and her
partner Curt Boettcher, who as Simon's Children had a contract
with Columbia Records. "I liked what he was writing, I wanted to
do something that had a political message or statement in it. But
our producer didn't like the material, so we didn't record it."29
55

Frank Zappa
It took another four months, until March 1966, for the Mothers'
contract to be drawn up and the band to be paid a $2,500 advance.
Henry Vestine left: "As our music got progressively stranger,
Henry found he couldn't identify with what we were doing."30
Steve Mann and James Guercio (later producer of Blood, Sweat &
Tears and Chicago) were temporary replacements who made way
for Elliott Ingber. The band rehearsed on a Hollywood sound stage
on Seward Street with an Akai tape recorder running. In his
Mystery Disc notes accompanying 'Original Mothers Rehearsal',
Frank reveals, "We were completely broke and the (Laurentide)
finance company was coming after Jimmy Carl Black's drum set."
The building was occupied by Tim Sullivan, the producer of Run
Home Slow, who loaned the stage to Frank in lieu of the money still
owed on the film score.
Eventually, the day of the first session, at TT&G Studios on the
corner of Sunset and Highland, arrived. As always, the band was
starving and Frank had to hit on Jesse Kaye, MGM's tight-fisted
accounts director, for ten dollars. Kaye was present to ensure that
the 3-hour session didn't overrun. There were strict Musicians
Union rules about session fees, which went to an overtime rate if
the session exceeded its limit, and the number of songs that could
be laid down in any one session. Having ingested ten dollars' worth
of calories, the Mothers set about 'Anyway The Wind Blows'.
Over the years, Zappa mythologised this day, implying that
Tom Wilson knew nothing about the Mothers' music until they
set about their second song, 'Who Are The Brain Police?'. He
painted a picture of a disconcerted Wilson phoning New York in
something of a panic. But in 1968 his memory was clearer: "He
came back to town just before we were going to do our first
recording session. We had a little chat in his room and that was
when he first discovered that R&B wasn't all we played. Things
started to change: we decided not to make a single, but an album
instead."31
Wilson and Frank entered into some sort of collusion; Frank
talked of orchestrations, so Wilson was aware of his intentions and
may only have been surprised by their scale. Far from panicking
after two songs, Wilson "was so impressed that he got on the phone
to New York — and as a result, I got more or less (an) unlimited
56

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budget to do this monstrosity."32 David Walley quotes Wilson:
"Somehow I suggested we should do something big."33
"The next day," Frank went on, "I had whipped up the arrange-
ments for a 22-piece orchestra not just a straight orchestra but the
Mothers plus 17 pieces . . . we all worked together. The editing
took a long time, which really ran the cost up - and Wilson was
really sticking his neck out... he laid his job on the line by pro-
ducing a whole double album."34
The second disc of what became Freak Out! was devoted to
longer, more impressionistic pieces than two-minute satires of
teenage angst like 'Anyway The Wind Blows', 'Go Cry On Some-
body Else's Shoulder', 'I Ain't Got No Heart' or 'How Could I Be
Such A Fool?' The budget became $21,000, a considerable invest-
ment in an unknown group, even when a proven hit producer like
Tom Wilson says, "Trust me." MGM/Verve executives must have
felt that trust usurped when they heard 'Trouble Comin' Every
Day' (a redding of'The Watts Riot Song'), 'Help I'm A Rock' and
'The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet', their confidence
already undermined by the subversion of the first disc's 11 tracks.
"All the songs on it were about something," Frank wrote in his
'real' book. "It wasn't as if we had a hit single and we needed to
build some filler around it. Each tune had a function within an
overall satirical concept."35 Many, like 'Any Way The Wind
Blows', 'I Ain't Got No Heart' and 'I'm Not Satisfied', sprang from
his own experiences and hovered between cynicism, anger and
self-pity. There were evocations of doo-wop in 'Go Cry On
Somebody Else's Shoulder', leering sleaze in 'Motherly Love' and
bubblegum in 'Wowie Zowie', all delivered in vocal timbres that
conveyed an imminent threat to the 'Great Society' that Frank was
satirising. 'Wowie Zowie' was one of Pamela Zarubica's mordant
pronouncements and she was credited as the inspiration for 'You
Didn't Try To Call Me'.
Frank threw down the 'freak' gaundet with the first disc's
opening track, 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy', written for Carl Franzoni
but criticising the inadequate education system as well as 'the
left-behinds of the Great Society', 'Who Are The Brain Police?',
his first heavily coded attack on institutionalised religion, and
'You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here'. Unlike the songs
57

Frank Zappa
that parodied lyrics and melodies of established pop fodder, music
that in Frank's opinion conditioned and anaesthetised young
record buyers, these three plus 'Trouble Comin' Every Day' (its
full tide only appearing on the record label) commented direcdy
upon what he saw as the debased quality of life in contemporary
America.
If the MGM executives were expecting Frank's 'protest' song to
contain the poetic imagery of Bob Dylan's stock-in-trade, 'Trouble
Comin' Every Day' disabused them of the fantasy. The Watts riot
is captured in stark images that evoke the violence committed by
both the police and the mob. Then he turned his basilisk stare on
the news media, 'Take your TV tube and eat it,' questioning the
voyeurism of filming as 'another woman driver gets machine-
gunned from her seat' and concluding, 'Our country isn't free.'
Nor was he afraid to bite the hand that was feeding him: "I
shopped (the song) briefly all over Hollywood but no one would
touch it," he wrote in the album notes, "... everybody worries so
much about not getting any air play. My, my."
'Help I'm A Rock' was in three movements; the first entided
'Okay To Tap Dance', established the tide chant; in the second, 'In
Memoriam, Edgar Varese', Frank developed a monologue which
began 'It's a drag being a rock', and progressed to 'Maybe if I passed
my driving test, I could get a gig driving a bus and pick up some
freaks in front of Ben Frank's' before a sudden butt-edit into the
third movement, 'It Can't Happen Here', a disjointed a cappella
chant enumerating 'freak outs' in various parts of America. At its
end, Suzy Creamcheese is addressed; Frank's comment, 'We've
been very interested in your (pause for lubricious swallow) devel-
opment,' is countered with a firm 'Ferget it' delivered by Jeannie
Vassoir.
For the climax of the project, Frank asked for $500 worth of
percussion equipment, 'all the freaks from Sunset Boulevard' and
sundry name guests like Les McCann, Paul Butterfield and Kim
Fowley for the late-night session booked at the end of a week's
recording. Victoria Winston reckoned, "It was wall-to-wall people
in there. From what I could see from the control room, it was a
well-orchestrated freak-out. I was there for the whole album
recording, day after day, and Frank was always organised. He
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always appeared to be in control."36 Kim Fowley was Featured on
hypophone on the album sleeve, a double-edged comment that
acknowledged Fowley's self-promotion and signalled disapproval.
Decades later, Fowley returned the compUment: noting Frank's
dry humour, he called him "a snob" and "vicious". "For all his
alleged humanity, there was a 'chitlin'' streak in him. He liked to
'keep the niggers down' — other white jerks, screwballs he could
exploit. Like people who contributed to the first Mothers album."37
In its final state, 'The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet',
while a notable achievement for its time, palled on repeated listen-
ing. Deliberately provocative in its formlessness, it allowed Vito's
troupe, already parodied in 'Help I'm A Rock', to 'freak out' in the
recording studio. At the time, the result had a decided effect on
some of his contemporaries. As his contribution to Jefferson Air-
plane's After Bathing At Baxter's, drummer Spencer Dryden came
up with an instrumental, 'A Small Package of Value Will Come to
You, Shortly'. He admitted his debt to Frank Zappa: "Frank said
that he hopes other bands will use his work as a point of departure
to kill Ugly Radio. So do I."38
Thirty years later, 'Magnet' sounds leaden; there's little impres-
sion of a hoard of celebrants cavorting in a confined space. And that
may well have been down to Tom Wilson. In conversation with
Frank in 1991, I commented that Wilson seemed to have been
rather a passive element in the production. "On the contrary," he
replied, "he was enthusiastic to the point that on the night that we
recorded 'It Can't Happen Here' and Side Four, with all the
screaming and waning and yowling and carrying on, he'd taken acid
so that he could 'get into it' more. So, if you can imagine your pro-
ducer on LSD, sitting in the control room giving the engineer
instructions on what to turn up and turn down ... In mitigation,"
he added, "but we have to be appreciative of Tom. He's passed
away now [after a heart attack in 1978] but he was visionary. He
signed the Velvet Underground, he signed a number of other really
obscure groups at that time. And we were just another of his
obscure groups that he was producing."
For his part, Wilson appreciated Frank's evident talent and
regretted the inadequate means of portraying it: "Zappa's a pains-
taking craftsman, and in some ways it's a pity that the art of
59

Frank Zappa
recording is not developed to the extent where you can really hear
completely all the things he's doing because sometimes one guitar
part is buried and he might have three different-sounding guitars
overdubbed, all playing the same thing."39
In all, the Mothers' first album took three weeks to complete at a
time when most albums were made in three days - if not in one.
Faced with a huge production bill, MGM/Verve were expected to
invest a significant amount in promotion. Fat chance.
Two weeks after the Freak Out! tapes were finally edited and
sequenced, Herb Cohen sent the band to work in Hawaii for most
of April, where they could starve in more exotic climes. Subsisting
on cigarettes and coffee, Frank devoted his time to writing. 'Call
Any Vegetable' was one of the songs completed there in prepara-
tion for the next album.
Returning to the mainland, they discovered that there was a
problem with their name at MGM/Verve. "Some pinhead there
had decided that this was a bad name for a group and that no radio
station would ever play our records because the name was too
risque." And, so the deathless cliche goes, of necessity they became
the Mothers of Invention. "But naturally, the radio stations didn't
play the music anyway, because it wasn't about the name of the
band. It was what we were singing and the way the music
sounded."40
Pretentious or not, Freak Out! was intended as a statement. As
rock music's first double album, it was bound to be regarded as
significant or preposterous, depending on the age and oudook of
the listener. The colour photographs on the outer sleeve used a
'solarisation' process to emphasise the implied threat of the band's
name and the album tide. Elliott Ingber looked almost cherubic
alongside Frank's shaggy mane, moustache and 'imperial' beard
that Pamela Zarubica likened to an inverted anchor. He also wore
his 'Omar Sharif fur coat; the Egyptian actor would've had to be
severely traumatised to look like Frank Zappa, 1966. Roy Estrada,
Ray Collins and Jimmy Carl Black resembled lapsed beatniks rather
than freaks.
The photographs were taken in the courtyard of the 'ginger-
bread' cottages on Formosa and Victoria Winston assisted photo-
grapher Ray Leong. "We were dressing them for the shoot and we
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said, 'Oh, it would be nice if they were wearing necklaces.'
Because they were all deciding what they were going to wear for
the album cover. So I brought out a bunch of my necklaces and Ray
Collins and Roy Estrada chose the ones they wanted to wear."41
The world was introduced to Suzy Creamcheese on the back
cover. Her letter, written by Frank, was composed of sentences
designed to attract the album's potential 'freak' audience and
repulse symbols of authority. "These Mothers is crazy," it began.
More than the dadaist concept of Suzy Creamcheese herself, the
letter seemed to have a profound impact on lonely 'individualists'
in hick-towns and red-neck fortresses across America, who sent fan
mail to the band. "We're getting letters from very strange places,"
Frank told Frank Kofsky. "These are really the cream of the
weirdos of each town, and they're coming from all over. Some of
them think just in terms of like, 'I feel funny because people think
I'm strange.' And, 'Say that you like me, please, Mothers of Inven-
tion, so that I'll keep being strange and I'll stay alive in my small
town.'"42
In contrast to the outer design's simplicity, the inner surfaces
were packed with information; there were 179 names of people
who had "contributed materially in many ways to make our music
what it is", with Pamela Zarubica at the head of the list; Frank's
sardonic notes to the individual tracks; 'biographical trivia' on the
members of the band; sundry relevant quotes and a mini-manifesto,
"What is 'Freaking Out'?", ending with an invitation to join the
"United Mutations", a fan club in all but name.
The manifesto encouraged like-minded 'freaks' to band together,
giving them status by labelling those who disapproved as 'less per-
ceptive individuals'. "The participants, already emancipated from
our national social slavery, dressed in their most inspired apparel,
realise as a group whatever potential they possess (orfree expression."
Rather than releasing them from the tyranny of being told what to
think and how to behave, Zappa was merely issuing fresh instruc-
tions without delineating their consequences. He plainly doubted
that they could apply the same intellectual rigour to their lives as he
already did to his own. For several years during the Seventies, there
was a graffito on a wall in London's Earls Court: "Do you do as
you're told? Revolt!"
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Frank Zappa
The problems with MGM/Verve didn't end with their name.
"They figured we were odd-ball," he told Jerry Hopkins. "One shot
novelty a-go-go. But we weren't. We had to show them ways that
they could make money on the product. From the beginning it was
hard to convince them of what we were talking about.
"Another thing . . . the interior of the Freak Out! album made
me vomit. The exterior packaging was pretty much under our
control. That was all carefully planned merchandising there. At the
time the packaging was being completed on that record I was in
Hawaii. I didn't give it to an expert. The result was a really ugly
piece of graphic art. Some of the worst reproduction work I have
ever seen. The picture in the lower right-hand corner — it is a great
panorama of all those people. They shrank it down and stuck it in a
corner. I screamed all over the place."43
As he railed against his record company, an auspicious gig was
arranged at The Trip which underlined disparities within the youth
movements of the East and West coasts. The Mothers, self-styled
darlings of the LA 'freak' community, were to appear alongside
Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured the
Velvet Underground and Nico, darlings of the New York scene
and yet another of Tom Wilson's MGM/Verve signings.
The projected month-long engagement, beginning on May 3,
brought together two of rock's great sneerers, Lou Reed and Frank
Zappa. While Frank was able to confine his principal emotion to
disdain, Reed appears to have broken out in full-blown hatred. He
was quoted as saying that Zappa was the single most untalented
person he'd ever met in his life. Apparendy, their limited acquain-
tance convinced Reed that Frank was two-bit, pretentious and
academic (now there's a put-down!). He was also incapable of
playing rock'n'roll because he was a loser and that was why he
dressed funny. Of course, the Velvets didn't dress funny and
appearing all in black could in no way be construed as a posture.
Frank barely strained a brain-cell with his reply from the stage:
"These guys really suck."
The Sheriff's Office closed the club after three days, helping to
exacerbate the tension between young people and officialdom. But
neither band was to escape, for they were joindy booked to appear
on May 27-29 at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium. This would
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be the Mothers' first gig at the Fillmore but they'd played the city's
Longshoreman's Hall the previous November on a gig promoted
by the Family Dog.
The first gigs at the Fillmore had been benefit nights for the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, who'd been busted in Lafayette Park for
performing without a permit. The first benefit took place on
November 6, 1965, the same night that the Mothers played the
Longshoreman's Hall, at the Troupe's loft on Fifth and Howard.
Such was the response that a larger venue had to be found. The
Fillmore was located on Fillmore and Geary and in its time had
seen artists like Duke Ellington, James Brown, Bobby Bland and
the Temptations on its stage. Further benefits were held at the
Fillmore on December 10 and January 14, 1966, with Jefferson
Airplane, the Great Society and the Grateful Dead performing.
The first gigs took place on the weekend of February 4—6, with
Jefferson Airplane topping the bill. Thereafter, gigs took place
every weekend; apart from two appearances by the Butterfield
Blues Band, the Mothers and the Velvets were the first out-of-
towners to perform there.
The Velvets fell foul of promoter Bill Graham. "When we went
to Frisco," Reed told Bruce Pollock, "Bill Graham was doing his
Fillmore, and he had a light show, right? So we walked in and we
saw a slide of the Buddha and we said, 'That's gotta go!' He hated
us, said we were the lowest trash ever to hit Frisco."44 Graham
exacted his revenge. Without warning, guitarist Sterling Morrison
was ejected from the building. "So I'm freezing my ass off on the
kerb feeling sorry for myself," he told Mat Snow, "and all these cars
come sweeping up: it's Andy and all his creeps who'd been to some
glamorous cocktail party to which they'd somehow neglected to
invite Bill Graham." Nor did it stop there. "Right before we went
on, [Graham] looks at us and says, 'You motherfuckers, I hope you
bomb.'"45
The Mothers returned to the Fillmore on June 24/25, sharing
the bill with Lenny Bruce, one of Brace's last gigs. Peter Berg, a
member of the Mime Troupe, was present: "I remember the horri-
fied look on Graham's face when Lenny Bruce did that last pathetic
performance, incredibly whacked out on amphetamine."46
"It was the living death of a genius," Graham said in his
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Frank Zappa
autobiography, Bill Graham Presents. "Really, the Mothers saved
the shows. It was really sad. He was a beaten soul and he was naked
on stage. About six weeks later [August 3, 1966], he was dead."47
In his 'On The Town' column for the San Francisco Chronicle,
Ralph Gleason was a litde less melodramatic: "It was something of
a tribute to him since the hall is not really the best site for his per-
formances. He could not work effectively with the noisy rock
dancers waiting for the music and his own fans were uncomfortable
from the heat and the chairs." But then he turned on the music
makers, dismissing meir show with some perception. "The Mothers,
the rock band which followed Bruce, and played for dancing, are
Hollywood hippies full of contrivance, tricks and packaging; a kind
of Sunset Boulevard version of the Fugs. They are really indoor
Muscle Beach habitues whose idea of a hip lyric is to mention
'LSD' or 'pot' three times in eight bars."48
64

4
FREAK OUT!
Freak Out! was released at the beginning of July 1966. Reaction
was understandably mixed, little of it uncommitted to an extreme
point of view. Only Cash Box hedged its bets: "A powerful rock
outing on which the Mothers of Invention live up to their name by
using such instruments as finger cymbals, bobby pins & tweezers
and guitarron . . . The album is colourfully packaged and contains
extensive liner notes. 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy', 'Who Are The
Brain Police?' and 'Motherly Love' are among the better tracks."1
Others had more scope for invective: "A new 'singing group',
the Mothers of Invention, have recently released their first album,
entitled Friek Out." Was the misspelling deliberate? "They needn't
have bothered," the outraged scribe continued. "With voices that
should put an alley cat on a fence at midnight to shame, these
'mothers' have wasted two records and an album cover of
indescribably (sic) poor taste recording 80 minutes of pure trash."
There was more in the same vein before an anti-climactic con-
clusion: "This horror is obviously a satire of today's long-mopped
singing groups, but it has failed. It is in a class by itself- if it can be
classified."2
In the Los Angeles Times, Pete Johnson tempered his disdain with
humour: "The Mothers of Invention, a talented but warped
quintet, have fathered an album poetically titled Freak Out!, which
could be the greatest stimulus to the aspirin industry since the
income tax." Johnson concluded, "There are a few tunes which
sound as if they might be semi-serious rock'n'roll, 'I Ain't Got No
Heart' and 'How Could I Be Such A Fool?', for instance, but most
of the tunes are very experimental and are hard on the eardrums
and the patience."3
Bob Levinson in the Herald Examiner wrote under the headline,
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Frank Zappa
'Mothers Invent Sounds Worse Than Music'. He interviewed
Frank, whom he likened to "an emaciated John Carradine", at a
pavement table at Canters. "Our whole bag is outrage," Frank
intoned. He'd tried to make the album as gross as possible: "Even
when it's supposedly serious, the whole thing is a satire. It satirises
all those groups that cut stuff that oozes. It's satirising every puker
rock'n'roll group and all that teenage nonsense with oversimplified
lyrics, ooh-wah, falsetto and mumbling business." Explaining how
to 'freak out', Levinson concluded, "The Mothers do it on their
records and, one infers, the delicatessen delegation on their rye
bread. Those who obtain the album may do it by discarding the
records and playing the cover."4
Not only were reviewers dismissing Frank's sardonic humour,
they were ignoring the intention it masked. "If you were to graph-
ically analyse the different types of directions of all the songs in the
Freak Out! album," he told Frank Kofksy, "there's a litde some-
thing in there for everybody. At least one piece of material is
slanted for every type of social orientation within our consumer
group, which happens to be six to eighty. That whole Freak Out!
album is to be as accessible as possible to the people who (want) to
take the time to make it accessible."5
More in keeping with the spirit of its creator's intentions was
Lorraine Alterman's piece in the Los Angeles Free Press. The Freep
had started life on May 23, 1964 as the Faire Free Press, when
ex-New Yorker Art Kunkin sold his eight-page broadsheet at a
Renaissance Pleasure Faire. Cannily, he also included a Los Angeles
Free Press logo so that he could turn the paper inside out after the
fair was over. He'd worked on various Leftist and radical news-
papers before setting up his own publication along the lines of New
York's Village Voice. Some attributed the origins of the under-
ground press to that organ but Underground Press Syndicate co-
ordinator Tom Forcade averred, "That history began with the
founding of the Los Angeles Free Press in 1964."6
"I wanted a paper that would draw together all the diverse ele-
ments in the community," Kunkin said, "and that would be not
only political, but cultural as well."7
Two years later, Lorraine Alterman was the Freep 'Teen Writer',
from her photograph a conventional soul but with a wry sense of
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Freak Out!
humour, as her opening sentences in the July 15 edition show.
"Mothers and fathers, you thought The Beades were bad. You got
up in arms about The Rolling Stones. Sonny & Cher made you
cringe. Well, as the man said, you ain't seen nothing yet.
"The Mothers of Invention are here with an album called Freak
Out! (someone suggested it should have been called Flake Out).
They come from Hollywood. Their clothes are dreadful - and I dig
mod clothes." She went on to mention the band's July 12 appear-
ance on Robin Seymour's Swingin' Time: the show's talent co-
ordinator, Art Cervi, confessed, "We've never had anyone on the
show that brought anything near the controversy they caused. The
switchboard was flooded with viewers either saying the Mothers
were great or awful."8 Any readers who'd missed the band's
appearance could watch the following week's edition of Dave
Prince's Club 1270 on Saturday, July 23.
The Alterman column also devoted several paragraphs to Frank's
pronouncements. "We play the new free music," he declaimed,
"music as absolutely free (another resonant phrase), unencumbered
by American cultural suppression. We are systematically trying to
do away with the creative roadblocks that our helpful American
educational system has installed to make sure nothing creative
leaks through to mass audiences."9 Unfortunately, the Freep didn't
reach a mass audience either. Even so, large campaigns start with
small batdes and Frank made extensive use of the paper's pages in
later issues, devoting whole sections to mosdy negative critical
reaction to the band, advertising upcoming gigs and vilifying their
detractors.
Immediately after appearing on Swingin' Time, the band went on
a brief promotional tour set up by MGM/Verve. The first date was
in Washington, DC, where they appeared on the Kerby Scott Dance
Party on WDCA and went on to make a surprise appearance at
Georgetown's Roundtable nightclub. Frank was interviewed by
Ronnie Oberman of the Washington Star. After explaining how to
'freak out', the social make-up of Sunset Strip youth and their tribal
dances, Frank made one of his earliest denouncements of drugs,
already prevalent among the 'freak' fraternity. "I don't use any and
I've never encouraged it," he said. "The same state of psychedelic
happiness can be induced through dancing, listening to music,
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Frank Zappa
holding your breath and spinning around, and any number of the
old, easy to perform and 100 per cent legal means - all of which I
endorse."10 He was far more pithy years later when asked by Kurt
Loder what he thought of the groups that got stoned and claimed
to play far-out music: "Well, basically, I saw assholes in action."11
Next stop was Detroit and another television show, where the
Mothers were expected to lip-sync their 'hit'. Frank used the
opportunity to deliver what he later called, "Detroit's first whiff of
home-made prime-time Dada."12 He also spoke to Reb Foster of
the Detroit Free Press: "We consider ourselves therapeutic workers
massaging the brains of people dancing to our music with the lyrics
to our songs." The Mothers regarded most people as 'Plastics',
people with no soul. "We get so tired of playing for these phoney
people in blue Velour shirts and Poor Boy sweaters."13 Only a short
time previously, the Mothers would have welcomed an audience
of any kind. But the ponies didn't know that.
The final stop was Dallas where they played live on yet another
television teenage dance show. Frank's lasting memory of the occa-
sion was the look on the innocent children's faces as they watched
the contortions of the band's 'go-go boy' Carl Franzoni's awesome
testicles struggling in the confinement of his ballet tights.
BARKING PUMPKIN (1)
Before he left Dallas, Frank rang Pamela and asked her to pick him
up from the airport. She took a new friend along with her. While
finishing off her schooling, Pamela worked evenings and weekends
at the Whisky and had got to know one of the secretaries there.
Adelaide Gail Sloatman had been born on the first day of 1945. Her
father, a Navy scientist and nuclear physicist, was posted to London
in 1959. Gail was placed in 'a severely Catholic all-girls school',
which she left to work as a secretary at the Office of Naval
Research and Development. It was the height of the Beatles era
and she spent her nights clubbing. Her father was transferred back
to America in 1965 and Gail lost her work permit. Returning to
New York, she briefly attended the Fashion Institute of Technol-
ogy before hitch-hiking to Los Angeles with her former London
flatmate, Anya Buder.
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Freak Out!
Once there, her previous lifestyle meant that she naturally gravi-
tated towards the 'freak' community. "Anya and I didn't even
bring a brassiere with us to California," she told Victoria Balfour.
"I don't remember if we were the first, but I certainly remember
bothering a lot of people."14 Joining the crowd that followed Vito
and Carl Franzoni around, Gail became by her own admission,
something of a groupie. "It was almost religious with the girls.
They were die worshippers and those guys were like priests on
the altar."15
Nevertheless, that experience in no way prepared her for Frank
Zappa. He and Pamela led something of a communal lifestyle at the
Kirkwood apartment, where most things were shared amongst a
floating population of musicians and groupies, including social
diseases. At the time, Frank was playing host to a thriving crab
colony. "He was infested, and so was his hair. He hadn't taken a
bath for months. Or combed his hair. I think it was not so much
rock'n'roll and not so much the road as it is that nobody was taking
care of him."16
The attraction when they first met at the airport was clearly
mutual and immediate - with reservations on Gail's part. "I
thought he was probably one of the grubbiest creatures I'd ever
seen," she told Drew Wheeler, "but he was compelling. He had a
compelling glare. He had major magnetic charm, I would say."17
In his autobiography, Frank refers to her as "a fascinating little
vixen"; and from the photograph which is reproduced three times
at the head of the page, Gail had eyes to die for. It's easy to believe
it didn't take her long to find the 'real' Frank Zappa. In a short
space of time, a deep bond was forged between the two, one that
survived everything that they and the world outside could throw at
it. In 1989, Frank had to admit, "It took a couple of minutes, but I
fell (don't laugh) in love."18
This reticence to reveal feelings and emotions was noticed by
others. Ian Whitcomb, the English singer who had a 1965 hit with
'You Turn Me On', met Zappa the following year and found him
"heavily intellectual, rather withdrawn, and curiously ambivalent
about his family memories. He showed us some slides of suburban
housewives in curlers with their pot-bellied men, which we were
all supposed to laugh at. But then, accidentally, he direw some
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Frank Zappa
shots of his family taken in the Fifties onto the screen and he fell
into a loving, nostalgic silence."19 Within a year, the Mothers
would record 'Mom & Dad', asking the question, 'Ever take a
minute just to show a real emotion?'
The Kirkwood apartment had now become the centre of
Frank's own troupe of followers. He'd moved in when the
Mothers returned from their November San Francisco gig and
almost immediately surrounded himself with band members and
sundry visitors such as the members of Them and the Animals. The
latter were in Los Angeles at the beginning of July 1966 to make
their next album with Tom Wilson. Wilson invited Frank to
participate but the group's enthusiastic drug consumption earned
his displeasure.
"I found out that not only were they not particularly original,"
he said later, "but were hung up in that R&B bag, which is dead-
ening when you get little white boys trying to be little black boys,
screaming the blues and being funky and all — that's shitty."20 No
mention of the Soul Giants/Mothers stock-in-trade before their
recording contract, perhaps because it had only been a means to an
end — or was it a case of "don't do as I do, do as I say"?
Eric Burdon got his own back the following year; "Frank Zappa
- the Hider of song, says Eric" was the eye-catching title to a Record
Mirror piece that detailed his reactions to America. The erstwhile
gun collector reckoned he wanted to spread peace through music
but Frank "excites violence as a reaction from the audience".21 In
the end, Frank wrote the arrangements for 'All Night Long' and
'The Other Side Of This Life', for the Animals' American album,
Animalism. Around this time, he also recorded a single with actor
Burt Ward, who played Robin to Adam West's Batman in the tele-
vision series; Frank wrote 'Boy Wonder I Love You' and arranged
the B-side, 'Orange Colored Sky'.
With Gail's arrival, things began to change. One consequence
was an inevitable rift between Frank and Pamela Zarubica, even
though theirs was not a sexual relationship. Her biggest grievance
seems to have been the loss of intimate contact with a man she
regarded as something of a guru. But Frank could be ruthlessly
self-oriented and dealt summarily with anything or anyone that
diverted him from his intended course. In 1974, he referred to the
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Freak Out!
girl who had befriended and housed him in these terms: "So I pro-
cured the services of another girl named Pamela Zarubica who was
hired to be the Suzy Creamcheese of the European tour. And so
she maintained the reputation of being Suzy Creamcheese after
1967."22
GUAMBO
In Issue 105 of the Los Angeles Free Press the "Great Underground
Arts Masked Ball and Orgy" (Guambo for short), given to celebrate
the paper's second birthday, was advertised. It was set to take place
between 9 pm and 2 am on Saturday, July 23 at the Aerospace Hall,
7660 Beverly Boulevard. Groups scheduled to appear were the
Sound Machine, the Factory and the Mothers. Filmmakers were
exhorted "Bring your own film and show it yourself."
Two days before the event the management of the Aerospace
Hall cancelled the booking; they'd received phone calls claiming
that 'the monster junk sculpture' to be erected in their parking lot
was part of a narcotics 'scene' and complaints from missile bases
around the state that their hall was to be used for an orgy. In the
end, the principal factor in the cancellation was that the hall
couldn't accommodate the expected attendance. At short notice,
the Danish Center agreed to stage the event. The groups would
appear in the upstairs ballroom and rooms on the floor below
would be used for 'happenings' and screenings of Gary Taylor's
film of the Pleasure Faire and 'Teague's footage of the Canter bust'.
Jerry Hopkins reported on the evening in Freep's next issue,
under the tide, 'Guambo Is An Act Of Love'. "Flickering and
flashing at both sides of the stage, strobe lights and op art patterns
[were] projected on the ceiling and musicians." First on was "Clem
Floyd's newly reorganised Sound Machine", followed by the
Factory, led by Lowell George, a multi-instrumentalist who as a
child had appeared on talent shows, played flute in the Hollywood
High School orchestra and oboe and baritone sax on Frank Sinatra
sessions. The rest of the band consisted of Warren Klein on lead
guitar, Martin Kibbee on bass and Dallas Taylor on drums.
The dancing intensified when the Factory took the stage. "Vito
and his acolytes are here," Hopkins notes. When the Mothers go
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Frank Zappa
on, "This is one of the truly wild scenes of the evening. Frank
Zappa in his suit of flowers. His sidemen are garbed similarly, and
behind them are five other musicians augmenting the group. Five
short-haired American Federation of Musicians types in black suits,
white shirts and black ties. Just sitting there, reading charts,
blowing with the Mothers' sound. And the Mothers Auxiliary
dancing, dancing, dancing . . ." Carl Franzoni led the pack. "He is
wearing what looks like zebra-skinned longjohns with a pop art
All-American Superman bib. Two nice ladies are dancing with
him, alternating with some of Vito's group . . . and from the dance
floor comes a man in a mummy suit to join in."23
With a legal capacity of 1,500 for the two floors, police and fire
marshalls kept an anxious eye on things. Roads were blocked for
miles around. Fire exits, too, were blocked and the ticket desk was
closed, allowing some 500 people to gatecrash through an un-
secured door. Police began to appear amongst the crowd, the amps
were turned down and shortly before 1 am, a claim that illegal
drinking was taking place was used as a pretext to end the evening.
Hopkins concluded, "Guambo was an act of love and not every act
of love is perfect." There were acts of larceny though, including
the theft of some light show equipment and slides and "One brand
new suit owned by Herb Cohen."24
Lenny Bruce died of a morphine overdose on Wednesday,
August 3, at the apartment he shared with John Judnich. His
funeral took place two days later, on the same day that Pamela
Zarubica graduated from Pepperdine College. Frank didn't want to
attend the funeral but Judnich, from whom the band rented their
stage equipment, rang to request their presence. That day's issue of
the Freep carried a four-stanza 'Tribute To Lenny' written by
Animal J. Huxley (daughter of Aldous and girlfriend of soon-to-be
Factory drummer, Richie Hayward). In his 'Making It' column
in Freep, Hopkins quoted Frank's "ad-lib-pop-art-gut-eulogy" to
Bruce: "They dug a hole in the ground and they put a box in it.
Then a little dump truck filled in the hole and these cowboy-dudes
started flattening the dirt with a trip-hammer. The grave is in the
[San Fernando] Valley and the Valley is a lousy place for Lenny to
sleep."
"Freak Out! Son of Guambo", the next Mothers' gig, would
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Freak Out!
take place at Santa Monica's Shrine Exposition Hall on Saturday,
August 13, where once again Factory were part of the supporting
bill. The next Freep noted Carl Franzoni had been spotted distrib-
uting leaflets for the gig on Venice Beach. Once again, the gig
drew widely varying responses. Hopkins reported that Frank was
unhappy about nearly everything, the sound system was terrible
and no one paid any attention to the music. "He is at least partially
wrong," he wrote, "because a lot of us heard what he was laying
down and it was some of the grooviest music ever splashed across
the consciousness of man."25
Stan Bernstein of the Los Angeles Times was less cosmically
impressed: "P.T. Barnum said there's a sucker born every minute
and about 500 wandered into the Shrine and found boredom. The
show lacked direction and there was little or no supervision. What
was supposed to be entertaining happened to be monotonous."
After Ukening the audience to domestic animals just mooing and
bleating, Bernstein lashed into the band, the light show and the
lack of ventilation before ending, "After an hour of having the ear-
drums punctured beyond repair, it was time to fight off ennui. A
guard warned at the exit that re-admittance was not possible. It was
the most welcome news of the night."26
There was no mention of the Factory's performance in either
review but Frank and Herb Cohen were taking an interest in
the group. On August 18, the band recorded three demos with
Cary Slavin on drums. 'Hey Girl!', 'Changes' and 'Candy Corn
Madness' were frantic and disjointed with an uneasy juxtaposition
of ideas that didn't really jell. Nevertheless, it was arranged that
Frank would produce a single with them.
'Lightnin' Rod Man', with Lowell strumming a dulcimer and
Frank contributing slowed-down Pachuco doo-wops, almost emu-
lates Don Vliet's ramshackle blues. Frank's slowed-down voice is
heard on the fade asking, "Why didn't you sing on the last bridge?"
George told Andy Childs he thought Frank had done a fantastic
job. "It's a cross between 'They're Coming To Take Me Away'
and 'Ian & Sylvia' - somewhere in the middle there."27 'The Loved
One' resembles Jagger's and Richards' songs of the era, a two-
chord vamp with a psychedelic chorus and lyrics about butterflies
and 'a big black helicopter'.
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Frank Zappa
The tracks weren't legally released until 1993, although 'Lightnin'
Rod Man' turned up on Zappa boodegs over the years. The band
got a deal with UNI Records and a single, UNI 55005, was
released, coupling 'Smile, Let Your Life Begin' and 'When I Was
An Apple'. These and four other titles were produced by Marshall
Lieb, who in 1958 had been a Teddy Bear, recording 'To Know
Him Is To Love Him' with Phil Spector and Annette Kleinbard.
Lieb also produced Timi Yuro and others before moving into
films.
There was a memorial 'Freak In' for Lenny Bruce on Sunday,
August 21, at the Eden Memorial Park on Sepulveda Boulevard in
Mission Hills. The notice in Freep added, "Those planning to come
should bring box lunches and noise makers." Frank, in flowered
bell-bottoms and sneakers, was one of the 200-strong crowd that
attended and of a smaller group that walked to KDAY disc jockey
Tom Clay's house, where Phil Spector and Dennis Hopper spoke
their eulogies.
The Mothers returned to the Fillmore on the weekend of
September 9/10, sharing the bill with Oxford Circle. Because of a
ceremony at the synagogue next door, the venue was changed to
the Scottish Rites Temple across town. That week's Freep carried
advance notice of the band's next LA gig: "Pat Morgan, Dallas pro-
ducer, is presenting one of the wildest light shows and dance
freak-out performances at the Shrine Exposition Hall, Saturday
night, September 17. The show will feature the Mothers Of Inven-
tion, Litde Gary Ferguson (seven years old and a star!), along with
the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Count Five, Kenny
Dino, and the Factory."28 Another 'Freak Out' was scheduled for
October 15 at the Earl Warren Showground in Santa Barbera.
The next two issues carried several pages of Mothers advertising
("Published when we can afford it. Mostly for fun.") along with a
hectoring letter from Suzy Creamcheese/Frank Zappa:
This is about the Mothers of Invention. We have watched them
grow, and with their growth, we hopefully have grown. Their
honesty has offended some and been provocative to many, but in
any case, their performances have had a real effect on their
audiences.
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Freak Out!
The Mothers' music is very new, and as their music is new, so is
the intention of their music. As much as the Mothers put into their
music, we must bring to it. The Mothers and what they represent
as a group has attracted all of the outcasts, the pariahs, the people
who are angry and afraid and contemptuous of the existing social
structure. The danger lies in the 'Freak Out' becoming an excuse
instead of a reason. An excuse implies an end, a reason a beginning.
Being that the easiest way is consistently more attractive than the
harder way, the essential thing that makes the 'Freak Out' audi-
ences different constitutes their sameness. A freak is not a freak if
ALL are freaks. 'Freaking Out' should presuppose an active freedom,
freedom meaning a liberation from the control of some other
person or persons. Unfortunately, reaction seems to have taken
place of action. We SHOULD be as satisfied listening to the
Mothers perform from a concert stage. If we could channel the
energy expended in 'Freaking Out' physically into 'Freaking Out'
intellectually, we might possibly be able to create something con-
crete out of the ideological twilight of bizarre costumes and being
seen being bizarre. Do we really listen? And if we really listen, do
we really think? Freedom of thought, conversely, brings an
awesome responsibility. Looking and acting eccentric IS NOT
ENOUGH.
A mad tea party is valid only as satire, commenting ironically,
and ending in its beginning, in that it is only a trick of interpreta-
tion. It is not creation, and it IS NOT ENOUGH.
What WE must try to do, then, is not only comment satirically
on what's wrong, but try to CHANGE what's wrong. The
Mothers are trying.
Very trying indeed. Whatever the cost of a whole page ad in the
Freep, of which this letter formed a small island in the centre, what
did Frank expect to achieve? Did he really believe that audiences,
already required to listen to his music rather than dance to it, would
also think about his message and act upon it? There's no mistaking
the earnestness in his sentences or the sententiousness in his call to
arms. Not for the first time, he was preaching to deaf and distracted
ears. But someone was taking note: McCarthyism had faded but
Richard Nixon's America was just around the corner and bridging
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Frank Zappa
the gap, J. Edgar Hoover, who also wore the odd floral number,
had his brain police on alert.
There were sound problems for all the acts that performed at the
Shrine on September 17. They were bad enough for the Mothers
to announce later in Freep that the October 15 gig had been can-
celled "due to a critical acoustic problem & virtually non-existent
PA. faculties." Even so, "the multitude roared their bliss to those
upon the platform," as Sean McGregor reported in his Tinsel Town
column. "A horny hand of sound laid its black shadow over the
evening," he went on, "and this would seem to be a problem that
just can not be beat by producer Morgan and Company."
McGregor's comments were not published until the October 21
issue, by which time the Mothers and the Factory had played the
Whisky on September 27 and October 2. Most of McGregor's
column was devoted to a rare attack on the Mothers in the pages of
Freep. His prime target was Herb Cohen, "a buddha-framed male
attired in his bushy black face-piece and running mouth". Applying
his sarcasm like stucco, he went on: "It is understood throughout
Tinseled City that Mr C is of the total 'in' and lays artistic claim to a
monstrous hate. He and his 'Mothers' shun the limelight like clean
tubwater. During the night, Mr C barred film-makers from shoot-
ing his 'Mothers', though he found heart later on, after all acts had
retired, to having his group painted on 16mm film.
"So great is Mr C's anger at any who'd impose upon real Freaks
that he and his 'Mothers' shelled out their hard-earned coin for two
full Free Press pages and condemned those who'd take out full
pages expounding their own virtues."29 McGregor's tortuous
grammar hammered out a few more insults but there seemed to be
a basis for his 'freakier-than-thou' criticism.
Frank's reply, in Freep, was swift and scathing. It seemed that
McGregor was in the employ of Pat Morgan, promoter of the
ill-fated Shrine gig, and his column's invective stemmed from an
argument between Morgan and Cohen which had ended in a
scuffle outside the offices of the Hollywood Reporter. Frank's densely
worded rebuttal strained for effect: "SEAN McGREGOR took it
upon himself to SUBVERT a QUASI-LEGITIMATE VEHICLE
(his litde column) in order to hurl a few cardboard thunderbolts at a
quiet & peace-loving group of local lads whose only offence was
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Freak Out!
having HERB COHEN for a MANAGER."30 About a quarter of
the page was devoted to an ad for the rescheduled gig at the Earl
Warren Show Grounds on October 29, with the headline "Legalize
Therapeutic Abortion with The Mothers". It was a conjunction of
commercialism and controversy that epitomised Frank's complex
thought processes.
UNDERGROUND ORATORIOS
The volatile situation between the police and the kids on the Strip,
which had already led to a 10 pm curfew imposed on under-18s,
boiled over during November. A near-riot took place on Novem-
ber 12, when a demonstration got out of hand, street signs were
torn up, buses attacked and dozens of young people clubbed and
arrested outside Pandora's Box, a popular alternative to Canters
located on Sunset at Crescent Heights Boulevard. A picket fence
was placed around the coffee house and the two sides glowered at
one another across it. Eventually, the police attacked and the
'hot-bed of insurrection' was razed to the ground. Stephen Stills
wrote 'For What It's Worth' for Buffalo Springfield, Frank Zappa
wrote 'Plastic People'.
Al Mitchell, owner of the Fifth Estate Coffee House, set up the
Right of Assembly and Movement Committee the day after the
first protest and took a leading role in setting up further protests on
November 26 and December 10. Another group, which included
Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, set up Community Action for Facts
and Freedom. Interviewed by Raymond Gruenther in Freep,
Mitchell didn't mince words: "It was in part the frank and open use
of police power on the part of one Strip economic group to
suppress another economic group - the heavy real estate people
against the places which cater to the young.
"The real estate people told the police, 'We don't care how you
get them off the Strip . . . just get them off' And the kids began to
experience the same kind of police fascism which was in the past
directed against minority groups in Watts and East Los Angeles. . .
They may be stopped at any time, searched at any time, arrested at
any time and slapped around during interrogation."31
Two issues earlier, Frank had said much the same thing in an
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Frank Zappa
interview: "The problem is not the police, 'cos they're only taking
orders," he said. "The problem is the merchants and the money
interests who are influencing the people who give orders to the
cops. If it's as simple as money, the way to take over would be to
have a few of the kids who are making bread from having long hair
pay their own cops off.
"The people in LA haven't realised yet that this is where it's
going to happen, the whole major breakthrough from a society
controlled by the youth will occur here. It looks like a revolution,
it's got all the hallmarks of a popular revolt, but it's so small that
it can't succeed and it's just like they've almost shot their wad.
Leadership? I think any leadership that announced itself from that
mass would be swiftly shot secredy someplace in these streets.
"I think that if there were ever one rallying point, something
real that the kids could identify with, that they could focus their
patriotism on and you know, really go for, you'd have a force in
the United States that nobody would believe — it would really
come back to life. Right now it's pretty hard to even walk in the
woods and say, 'Hey, this is nature and it's beautiful and I dig it,'
without remembering everything else that surrounds you that is
nothing but a big lie. The whole system has unfortunately got
down to a state where you can't believe anything anymore."32
The conversation touched upon the clubs and the quality of
music presented in them. By his answers, Frank indicated that he
was ready to move on to the next stage of his master plan. When
asked if he thought light shows and 'freakouts' would die out, he
replied, "Yeah. I hope it does, dies tomorrow."33
It was against this background that the Mothers returned to
TT&G during November to record their second album.
ABSOLUTELY FREE
The band had changed during the summer. Elliott Ingber had gone
off to form the Fraternity of Man with Richie Hayward. He was
replaced for a short period by Jim Fielder, before he left to join
Buffalo Springfield. Given his love of percussion, it was no surprise
when Frank added a second drummer; Billy Mundi had been in a
San Francisco band, Lamp of Childhood, and would leave in
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Freak Out!
January 1968 to join the Elektra band, Rhinoceros. The other new
members, Don Preston and Bunk Gardner, stayed until Frank dis-
banded the Mothers in 1969. "I'd known Don and Bunk several
years before I met the other guys," Frank said in 1968, "we used to
play experimental music a long time ago - we got together in
garages and went through some very abstract charts."34
Preston and Gardner added a dimension that had been lacking in
Freak Out! Frank could now add fresh tonal colours to his musical
palette: "When we became an eight-piece, we finally had a very
workable ensemble."35 One element was the insertion of classical
quotes in certain of the tunes that made up Absolutely Free. "I think
that the Stravinskian influence probably popped up on the second
album," he told Nigel Leigh (in 'Amnesia Vivace' and a musical
interlude in 'Status Back Baby' that reproduces 'The Shrovetide Fair'
introduction from Petrushka). "But I'd say there's a certain Varesian
aroma to the introduction of 'Who Are The Brain Police?' "36 And
this time, each side of the album was edited into a continuous per-
formance that reflected the group's live appearances.
Frank was also compounding the rhythmic complexity of his
music, as he explained to Frank Kofsky that it had taken a year to
learn to play 'Call Any Vegetable': "Can you tell why? The time,
the time - it's fantastic. It's four bars of 4/4, one bar of 8/8, one bar
of 9/8 - OK? And then it goes 8/8, 9/8, 8/8, 9/8, 8/8, 9/8 and
then it goes 8/8, 4/8, 5/8, 6/8 and back into 4/4 again." When
Kofsky asked him about the significance of the symbolism in 'Call
Any Vegetable' and 'Duke Of Prunes', Frank's reply was succinct:
"Dada dynamite."37
At the other extreme were songs like 'Plastic People' and 'Son
of Suzy Creamcheese', both based on Richard Berry's 'Louie
Louie'. 'Status Back Baby' was a refurbished version of a song from
'I Was A Teenage Maltshop', while 'Duke Of Prunes' had less to
do with Gene Chandler's 1962 hit, 'Duke Of Earl', than it did
with guying the nonsense of love lyrics in general. There were
two extended performances, one instrumental, the other vocal.
'Invocation & Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin' opens with
a quote from 'Jupiter, The Bringer Of Jollity', part of Gustav
Hoist's suite, The Planets. The tune, a feature for Frank's guitar and
Bunk Gardner's soprano sax, was dedicated to Gail, who appears in
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Frank Zappa
the front cover's main photograph taken by Alice Ochs, peering
over Frank's shoulder and labelled 'My Pumpkin' on its reproduc-
tion inside.
The other extended track was a major composition and the
album's highlight. 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It', a scathing attack
on those, high and low, who formed America's government, was a
compHcated piece made up of several sections, with frequent
tempo changes and numerous edits. It contrasted the average
American family's humdrum existence ('do you love it, do you
hate it, there it is the way you made it'), their limited expectations
('TV dinner by the pool, I'm so glad I've finished school'), the
corrupt minds of politicians ('a world of secret hungers perverting
the men who make your laws') and their triumphalism ('life is such
a ball, I run the world from City Hall').
"These unfortunate people manufacture inequitable laws and
ordinances," Frank told London's International Times, "perhaps
unaware of the fact that the restrictions they place on the young
people in a society are a result of their own hidden sexual frustra-
tions."38 'Brown Shoes' formed part of the album's second side,
sub-titled 'The MOI American Pageant'. Versions of the same
song, with contrasting arrangements, opened and closed the side;
'America Drinks' is a deconstructed stumbling parody of a cocktail
lounge love song; when it returns in jaunty 4/4 as 'America Drinks
& Goes Home', it's performed over a cacophony of ringing tills,
angry brawls, drunken revelry and seductions. Does this kind of life
look interesting to you?
"The one thing that I think is really good about our music,"
Frank said in September 1967, "is that the settings for the lyrics are
so carefully designed. Those things are so carefully constructed that
it breaks my heart when people don't dig into them and see all the
levels that I put in them."39 Once again, he wanted to have his cake
and eat it too. It was impossible for listeners to dissect such a delib-
erately complex sound collage; nor could they be expected to
divine the reasons for his methods of composition.
This was one of the fundamental conceits by which Frank would
separate himself from his audience and which would allow him to
reject or bypass all criticism. He was saying, in effect, "If you don't
understand musical theory (or the precise origin of a song's theme),
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Freak Out!
then you are not competent to comment." By 1972, he'd altered
his stance: "All I'm interested in doing is writing music that I want
to hear," he said in a radio interview.40
Throughout the album, Frank delivered snippets of dialogue,
which sometimes provided specific instances of a song's subject and
at others a counterpoint. 'Plastic People' began with a cryptic refer-
ence, 'There's this guy from the CIA and he's creeping around
Laurel Canyon.' Later, he intoned, 'I hear the sound of marching
feet down Sunset Boulevard to Crescent Heights and there, at
Pandora's Box, we are confronted with a vast quantity of plastic
people.' While Stephen Stills' lyric about young people being
attacked by 'the heat' fudged the issue, Frank called the police
Nazis and criticised the conduct of those that allowed themselves to
be manipulated.
MGM/Verve had placed a restriction on the amount of record-
ing time available for this second album and so its recording was
completed in four double sessions, totalling 24 hours. But the
mixing was done at MGM's own studios in New York City,
because the band had got its first East Coast engagement.
CITY OF TINY LIGHTS
The Mothers had been booked to play in New York during the
week beginning November 26, Thanksgiving Day, at the Balloon
Farm ('sort of a grubby location') at 23 St Marks Place, the building
which houses 'The Dom', where the Velvet Underground had
made their name. Reaction was such that they were retained until
New Year's Day. One review stated, "The Balloon Farm became
much more than a discotheque last weekend, and the resident
combo became much more than a pop-music ensemble." The
Mothers were from "deepest, freakiest LA. They are a perfect
embodiment of all that is super-hyped and stunningly creative
about West Coast rock."
'R.G.' went on: "These eight musicians made the Balloon Farm a
concert hall. They seized the stage and belted the world's first
rock'n'roll oratorio to an audience that was either too engrossed or
too confused to do anything but sit and listen. The show was a
single extended number, broken into movements by patter, and
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Frank Zappa
fused by repeated melody-themes. Especially notable was the use,
as leitmotif, of music from Boris Godunov, sewn into the fabric of
the song so that it became an integral part of the melody and not a
sequin pasted on for class." The review ended: "The Mothers of
Invention haven't arrived yet, but they strive with outstretched
fingers towards something perceptively unique. Their first album,
Freak Out!, is the most poorly produced package since the
Hindenburg Zeppelin but don't let this baby-dribble fool you. The
Mothers of Invention are to be watched, and leader Frank Zappa
deserves your attention, and your three bucks."41
Not that their money was worth much on the city's streets, as
Frank recounted to a Dallas radio interviewer: "We were grubby
and long-haired and stuff - that sort of thing hadn't really taken
over in New York — and it was the middle of winter and we were
warm-blooded. It was freezing there, snow and everything, and
we'd had to go to a used clothes store before we left Los Angeles to
get some old overcoats to wear. We looked like a bunch of immi-
grants standing out there in the streets, you know, and the cabs
wouldn't pick us up to take us home. We had to walk home in the
snow every night after the job."
Their month-long tenure also drew an appreciative article in the
Christmas Day edition of the New York Times by Robert Shelton.
Declaring them, "The most original new group to simmer out
of the rock'n'roll underground in the last hour-and-one-half,"
Shelton called Frank the "Dada" of the Mothers, as well as "a
spindly-framed, sharp-nosed gamester whose appearance suggests
some of the more sinister aspects of Edgar Allen Poe, John
Carradine (him again!) and Rasputin."42
Frank was on good form for the interview. "I am trying to use
the weapons of a disoriented and unhappy society against itself," he
said. "The Mothers of Invention are designed to come in the back
door and kill you while you're sleeping." He identified one of the
band's short-range objectives as doing away with the Top 40
broadcasting format because it was "basically wrong, unethical and
un-musical". Shelton also commented on the use of classical
elements in the band's arrangements, to which Frank replied,
"Stravinsky in rock'n'roll is like a get-acquainted offer, a loss-leader.
It's a gradual progression to bring in my own 'serious' music."43
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Another progression was taking place on the other side of the
Atlantic. In November, 'It Can't Happen Here' had been issued as
a single in England. It was reviewed on the November 12 edition
ofJuke Box Jury, a staid BBC television programme that voted the
week's releases 'hits' or 'misses'. The guests on that week's show,
presided over by disc jockey David Jacobs, were singers Bobby
Goldsboro, Carole Carr and Susan Maugham, and comedian Ted
Rogers, with audience member Robert Stringer as the casting
voter. 'It Can't Happen Here' was played between the Small Faces'
'My Mind's Eye' and Jonathan King's 'Icicles'. No prizes for guess-
ing how it fared. Other records reviewed that night included
'La-La-La-Lies' by The Who, 'Willow Weep For Me' by the Alan
Price Set, 'Pamela' by Wayne Fontana and Sandie Shaw's 'Think
Sometimes About Me'.
Writing in the December issue of Queen, Nik Cohn dismissed
the Mothers' music as "revamped Dada, souped-up Ginsberg and
warmed-over Dylan. The only thing new about the Mothers is the
speed and glibness with which they've become successful." Com-
paring the Mothers to those he called "the precursors", Cohn
found the Mothers "plain dull. This record is meant to be a brain-
storm, a wild fit, and it should be monstrous or lovely, obscene or
apocalyptic. Instead, it sounds tentative and self-conscious, pain-
fully aware of how naughty it's being." English pop intellectuals
were already running round with their tongues hanging out over
the Mothers, apparently, but Cohn didn't intend to join them.
"The only thing that depresses me is that I'd like pop to be genu-
inely progressive and alive, and I hate a supposedly new sound to
come out as tired and old-hat as the Mothers."
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5
LUMPY GRAVY
The Mothers needed more than hats when they travelled from
New York to Montreal for two weeks of gigs. "We played a club
called the New Penelope," Frank told David Sheff, "and it was
twenty degrees below zero. We walked from our hotel to the club
and the snot had literally frozen in our noses by the time we got to
work. The wind instruments got so cold that if you tried to play
them, your lips and fingers would freeze to them. The instruments
couldn't even be played until they were warmed up."1
Back in Los Angeles, work was still scarce and some of the band
had families to feed. Frank, as usual, had work to do. He'd been
commissioned by Nick Venet, the Capitol A&R man who'd
signed the Beach Boys and produced their first albums, to compose
and conduct an original orchestral work. Venet assumed that, even
though Frank was signed to MGM/Verve as a member of the
Mothers of Invention, the contract did not cover either of the roles
expected of him by Capitol. Unfortunately, he thought wrong.
Lumpy Gravy was conceived roughly as a half-hour oratorio that
combined the elements of rock band and orchestra, interspersed
with idiosyncratic dialogue, percussion interludes and musique
concrete. It's said that it took Frank 11 days to write but the
finished work was plainly created in the studio, for it's a dazzhng
combination of the above forces, edited with humour and often
with rapid precision. Much of Part One consists of different
arrangements of 'Oh No', following one upon the other, some-
times at double speed. A vocal version of 'Oh No' was later issued
on Weasels Ripped My Flesh, and the tune, with or without words,
became a staple in the repertoire of successive Zappa bands. All
this is punctuated by Varese- and Stravinsky-like orchestral inter-
ludes, Motorhead monologues about girlfriends and their cars, and
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conversations by various individuals with their heads in a grand
piano, the strings resonating to their voices.
This last was a typically contrived Zappa 'event', in which he
placed people in a controlled environment, suggested their topics
of conversation and recorded the outcome. In no time, people
were competing for the privilege of going in the piano. "The cast
of characters that wandered in and out of the piano covered every-
body from Motorhead and Roy Estrada to the sister of the guy who
owned the (Apostolic) recording studio (Gilly Townley) to Monica
the Albanian receptionist to bunches of people whose names I can't
even remember."2 These last included Spider Barbour, Ail-Night
John the studio manager and Louis Cuneo, responsible for the
'psychotic turkey' laughter. Over the course of three days, eight or
nine hours of bizarre conversations were recorded.
Part Two continued in the same vein and included the theme of
another Zappa mainstay, 'King Kong', before Zappa himself
intones, "Cos round things are (pause), are boring' and a perky
version of 'Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance' fades into
the ether. Some of the orchestral sessions, including woodwind
players breaking down in humorous frustration, took place in Los
Angeles before the tapes were taken back to New York for com-
pletion at Apostolic during February.
Capitol had invested some $40,000 before MGM/Verve got
wind of what was happening and threatened a lawsuit. The matter
went unresolved for over a year until Verve eventually bought the
finished masters at cost and released Lumpy Gravy after We're Only
In It For The Money, which had been recorded in the meantime. An
acetate exists of two tides, 'Gypsy Airs' and 'Sink Trap', which
Capitol may have considered releasing as a single.
While the first Gravy sessions were planned and recorded, a
'return' gig was arranged at the Lindy Opera House, 5214 Wilshire
for February 3/4 and advertised in Freep. "Yes, Ladies and Gende-
men, Boys and Girls, Policemen and Tourists. . .! The MOTHERS
return to play for what's left of the LA underground. We'll
mention the Police and Gov't and we can all nod our heads
together while we all cop out. We've been rehearsing a whole
bunch of new numbers like 'BROWN SHOES DON'T MAKE
IT', 'I'M LOSING STATUS AT THE HIGH SCHOOL', and
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Frank Zappa
a new Funset Strip version of 'WHO ARE THE BRAIN
POLICE?' that is guaranteed to titillate your Liberal backgrounds."
Another, this time full-page, ad appeared in the next issue with
the headline, "HEAR THE NEW M.O.I. SONGBOOK". The
"Songs Of Love" were 'Duke Of Prunes' and 'Memories Of El
Monte'; "Songs Of Spiritual Significance", the original 'Electric
Banana' - 'At last you too can know what Donovan picked up
on . . .', and 'Call Any Vegetable'; "Songs We're Sick Of Playing"
included almost all of Freak Out!; and "Songs We Just Learned This
Week That Will Sound Crappy" were 'Agency Man' 'Wherein
RONALD REAGAN is elected to the PRESIDENCY because
nobody took the time to stop him' and 'Archie's Home' - 'What if
Archie Shepp could play an ELECTRIC BASSOON?' In 1967,
Frank must have regarded the idea of Reagan being elected
President as oudandish rather than prophetic. But he under-
estimated 'the great communicator', if not the power of the
business interests who wrote his scripts.
Nat Freedland reviewed the evening in Freep 134: "Frizz-gated,
evil-goateed, wraithlike and stocking-less, Frank Zappa is — among
many more other things than anybody else in the pop explosion —
the Brecht and Weill of rock music. Much of his melodic approach
could be an electronic 'Son Of Threepenny Opera'. Marching
quarter-note melodies, one note per word, the magnificendy
precise Mother drummer accenting each word.
"Zappa is also the most avant-garde arranger in rock'n'roll. His
'Archie's Home' number interpolated the incredibly complex New
jazz sound of Archie Shepp's style into a series of nonsense word
turns. . . Sure, the Mothers run in a little protest and satire to keep
up the far-outnik image. But it's pretty much kiddie boo-hooing.
'SELL US A PRESIDENT, AGENCY MAN' . . . 'NAZIS ARE
RUNNING THIS TOWN' . . . It's gutsier than the ran of the
Top 40, but Dylan, Ochs, or the Fugs it is not. Why don't you take
on some of these cats' groovier art-rock, Zappa?"3 How about
that "groovier"? The final third of the review went into a Jack
Kerouac stream-of-consciousness vision of the extended improvi-
sation section of the programme and ended, "Welcome home,
Mothers."
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Lumpy Gravy
TREACHEROUS CRETINS
How the Mothers came to be invited to play at the ceremony for
the ninth Grammy awards in New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel is
lost to posterity. The blame for initiating the awards can be laid at
the door of the Hollywood Beautification Committee. In 1955,
this august body was planning the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a
sequence of stars to be set in the concrete of Hollywood Boulevard
going west from the junction with Vine Street, in an attempt to
halt the area's slide into sleaze. As the film Pretty Woman illustrates,
they failed signally in their endeavour; even in daylight it's the
seediest part of town, pimps and hookers of all faiths commandeer-
ing the star-set sidewalk after dark.
The Committee asked the five gnomes of the music business —
Jesse Kaye of MGM, Lloyd Dunn of Capitol, Sonny Burke of
Decca, Paul Weston of Columbia and Dennis Farnon of RCA — to
suggest a list of names for the 1,200 stars planned. The gnomes did
what was asked of them but then began to consider an award that
would be presented for artistic merit rather than commerciality.
The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS)
was duly formed on May 29, 1957 in the back room of the Brown
Derby restaurant. The Grammy was named after the statuette of a
wind-up gramophone with its amplifying horn, a composite design
based on Edison, Victor and Columbia originals.
The award ceremony for the 1966 awards took place on Febru-
ary 14, 1967. The programme read "Music by Woody Herman;
Entertainment by the Mothers of Invention". NARAS was look-
ing for credibility; Frank didn't intend to give it to them. His
resolve hardened when he read the otherwise hilarious Stan
Freberg's pompous Credo that NARAS judged records "on the
basis of sheer artistry and artistry alone".
When the Mothers took the stage, Frank went for the fat cat's
throats: "All year long you people manufactured this crap, and one
night a year you've got to listen to it! Your whole affair is nothing
more than a lot of pompous hokum, and we're going to approach
you on your own level."4 The band then proceeded to ravish 'Satin
Doll', the tune with which the Woody Herman band had opened
the evening, dismembering dolls and handing the limbs out to the
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Frank Zappa
stunned audience. The only bright note in an ugly evening was
when John McClure, head of Classical A&R for Columbia Master-
works, approached Frank to say, "When you get tired of that dipshit
label you're on, why don't you come and make a deal with (us)?"5
The New York chapter of NARAS met the following Monday
and told one another how disgusting it had been. "Everyone rolled
their eyes in the back of their heads and said, 'What a schmuck,
what a tasteless dope,'" said Nick Perito. "The idea (in inviting
Zappa) had been to lend some energy to a prestigious af&ir. He
turned it into a bar-room."6
Frank may have regarded the band's performance as prestigious,
too. If Absolutely Free had been in the shops, it would undoubtedly
have sold in greater quantities. But, once again, MGM were com-
plaining about the album artwork. Frank's vertical design for the
gatefold sleeve incorporated a photographic collage and a brightly
coloured cartoon representation of brown-shoed America's typical
habitat. The word 'buy' appears frequently, most notably on a flag
that says, 'BUY America' and 'Move Your Goods With Patriotic
Sell!'. Another message read 'You must BUY this album now. Top
40 radio will never ever play it'. 'KILL UGLY RADIO', in large
letters, appeared on the inside sleeve. What MGM's legal depart-
ment objected to was the phrase that ran along the top edge of the
American flag: 'WAR means WORK for all'. This was not
included in the truths that Americans held to be self-evident and
MGM refused to print it. Eventually a compromise was reached
whereby the phrase remained but printed in a light grey rather than
100 per cent black.
No compromise could be reached on Frank's intention to
include a libretto of the album's lyrics. On that, MGM were not to
be moved; customers could listen to the 'naughty' words but they
couldn't see them in print. 'Brown Shoes' in particular posed them
many problems: in a bizarre list of suggested changes, 'I'd like to
make her do her nasty on the White House lawn' would have
become 'I'd like to make her do the crossword puzzle on the back
of TV Guide'. To paraphrase the well-known saw: 'when truth and
euphemism exist, print the euphemism'.
In the end, Frank Zappa Music printed the libretto and the inner
sleeve directed those interested in receiving one to send their
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Lumpy Gravy
money to 'The Mothers Idea Fund'.
Nigel Leigh asked Frank, "Did the record company by that
time have any idea of re-packaging you into something more
commercial?"
"Oh, I don't think they ever thought for a minute that that
could be successfully accomplished. I think that their attitude was
that they were involved in a contract which had a certain number
of years to run and they were obliged to put out a certain amount
of product. And they were just going to hold their noses and go
through with it."7
Nor was the meddling at an end. On March 1, 1967, Freak Out!
was issued in England - as a single album. Curiously enough, the
tracks omitted were not the extended strangeness of the second
album but three of the pastiche pop songs, 'How Could I Be Such
A Fool?', 'Any Way The Wind Blows' and 'Go Cry On Somebody
Else's Shoulder'. A press release was issued by EMI the day before,
with the impenetrable headline, "The Mothers' Mind-Manifesting
Music". The single page began, "A lot of interest has been aroused
lately over the 'Freak Out' form of music" and went on to quote
Frank's definition of 'freaking out'. It concluded, "Their musical
style is a mixture of solid rock'n'roll and weird noises - except the
last two tracks on side two, 'Help I'm A Rock' and 'The Return
Of The Son Of Monster Magnet' which have paved the way for a
whole new concept in popular music."
The press release was written by Nick Massey, who went on to
become an independent publicist with clients that included Tom
Jones, Rod Stewart, the Moody Blues, Bucks Fizz and Bill
Wyman. Twenty-three years later, having adopted the expensive
lifestyle of the people he represented, he committed suicide in a
hired Daimler while facing investigation for embezzling KA Pub-
licity, the PR company he shared with Keith Altham. "I was
thrilled to bits for him when he died," his first wife said. "In the
end he got what he wanted. If one of his artists had got so much
publicity, it would have been unbelievable."8
PIGS AND REPUGNANT
In the Mothers' absence, the LA authorities had clamped down on
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Frank Zappa
the clubs on the Strip and discouraged owners of larger venues
from staging 'freak' events, be they 'in', 'on' or 'out'. Work had
temporarily dried up for many bands and the Mothers had never
averaged more than a couple of gigs a week. Apart from the Lindy
Opera House, their only other notable gigs were two weekends at
the Fillmore, February 17-19, with Blues Project and Canned
Heat, and March 3-5, with Otis Rush and Morning Glory. "We
were never that popular in Los Angeles," Frank told Nigel Leigh.
"In fact, if we hadn't left, we never would have gone anywhere.
We would have just evaporated after the first album."9
Lucky then that the success of their Balloon Farm residency led
to an Easter weekend booking at the Garrick Theater, a 300-seater
on Bleecker Street in New York's Greenwich Village. The
weather was terrible, freezing cold and driving snow, but there
were queues around the block for their two shows a night. "We
thought: 'Oh, this is it, this is the big one'," Frank told Kurt Loder.
"We're in New York City, and there's lines around the block."10
As soon as their audiences went back to school, there were as few as
three to five people attending each night.
Even so, the theatre management were sufficiently encouraged
by Easter's business to book the band for six nights a week for the
rest of the summer. Their five-month tenure grossed $103,000,
which, after deductions for overheads, left each man with about
$200 a week. Not a lot, when you have to live in New York.
When they first arrived, Frank and a pregnant Gail lived at the
Hotel Van Rensslaer on Eleventh Street. "It was dreadful," Gail
told Drew Wheeler. "We were living in a horrible hotel, sharing it
with very large cockroaches. I think I lived off grapefruit and Frank
lived off peanut butter. And coffee — we made coffee from the
bathtub because the water that came into the bathtub was so hot
you could really scorch yourself. You did not need to boil it. It was
frightening, instant coffee."11 After a while, they were able to rent a
$200-a-month apartment at 180 Thompson Street, conveniendy
close to the Garrick.
The engagement began on Wednesday, May 24, and was
reviewed the following day in the New York Times by Dan Sullivan.
"Their music is . . . more often than not, frankly hostile - both in
its headachy volume and in those lyrics that you can make out amid
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Lumpy Gravy
the roar ... As pure sound, though, some of this approaches genius.
From an electrified kitchen [would that be a dangerous kitchen?] of
percussion, saxes, guitars, flutes, etc., they produce a thick black
sound shot through with odd treble sunbursts and pinwheels - the
exact aural equivalent of the nervous, ever-changing abstract pro-
jections flashing on the screen behind them."
"The Mothers of Invention are seven young men of saturnine,
malevolent and hairy aspect," wrote Jerry Tallmer in his 'Across
The Footlights' column in the New York Post. "They . . . put on
an air of having as much nonchalant contempt for their audiences
as for society in general." He went on about "defecatory and
expectorant humour, animus toward Ronald Reagan", "the chew-
ing of turnips" and "an interestingly profane romance between a
plastic doll and a common tropical fruit", but the music remained
"brilliant verging on great".
Diane Fisher wrote her review for The Village Voice, finding
herself liking the music and noting that the band's "scandalously
unrespectable appearance" couldn't disguise the fact that they were
a generation older than their audience: "Their attitude hasn't much
to do with age. It might be called surrealistic enlightened."
Eric Clapton, in town with Cream to record Disraeli Gears, was
an enthusiastic visitor: "The Mothers were at the Garrick Theater
and there would be nobody in the audience — nobody! They were
experimenting every night . . . Frank would come off and sit in
the audience and talk to someone while the band played. It was
madness! He took me home one night to his house and he made
me play into a Revox and told me to play all the licks I knew . . .
He was very manipulative and knew how to appeal to my ego
and my vanity and I put everything on this tape. I think he
just had files and files of tapes of people and I was in there
somewhere."12
Regular work, the first that the Mothers had had, improved
their proficiency at playing Frank's progressively complicated
songs. As Absolutely Free showed, he was developing material that
reflected the quirkiness of speech patterns and their rhythms.
Writing in Downbeat, Larry Kart noted, "In the pieces with lyrics
the often elaborate rhythmic and melodic patterns are tied direcdy
to the words (one beat and one note to each syllable, with few large
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Frank Zappa
melodic intervals). This effect carries over into the instrumental
pieces, where the tight rhythmic-melodic motifs expand and con-
tract as if they had a life of their own."13
Speaking at the end of their first Garrick run, Frank explained,
"The spoken word is differentiated from the sung word, in its
rhythmic sense, as in poetry. But even normal speech patterns are
beautiful in themselves. Because the way people talk, it doesn't
make a shit what they're saying; in fact, most of the time what
they're saying is really ugly. But when you think about the rhythm,
or the way certain gas-station attendants might speak, you know,
what they're saying is useless; but if you listen to it as a piece of
music ... I like to simulate things like that."14
Many things were simulated on the Garrick stage that summer.
Many times, the shows were not concerts but events. At least two
marriages were performed on stage. Members of the audience were
co-opted into taking part in the mayhem, to perform songs with
the group or take over their instruments, subject themselves to
ritual humiliation with varieties of foodstuffs, both solid and liquid,
or assist in whatever spontaneous or planned 'dada' happenings that
evolved. "You could do anything," Frank admitted. "And because
they were New Yorkers, they would at least consider it. You
couldn't do that in Hollywood."15
Doon Arbus and Valerie Wilmer reported on their visits to the
Garrick. Arbus described the band: "Frank Zappa ambles on stage.
He is wearing a purple, high-school cardigan, knit pants, and
butterscotch-coloured shoes with pointy, turned-up toes. His face
is made of planes and angles, like a house of cards, and is framed by
a mande of squiggly, black curls. He is like a wild, woodsy hermit,
either very benign or very ferocious."16 The other Mothers each
resembled a distinct character: Billy Mundi, "a baker from the
French Revolution"; Roy Estrada looked "perplexed and deter-
mined, like a Polish anarchist"; Don Preston, "well-intentioned
and vague, a Don Quixote before the windmill encounter"; Bunk
Gardner exuded "the unruffled elegance of a riverboat gambler";
Jimmy Carl Black, "a Mexican bandido"; and Ray Collins, "a
high-browed Viking".
Zappa ignores the audience as he tunes his guitar and adjusts the
amplifier controls. "His nonchalance is, of itself, a kind of frenzy.
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Lumpy Gravy
Finally he approaches the centre microphone and peers past the
lights, scanning rows like a surveyor.
" 'Hello, pigs.' A few people giggle briefly."17
Wilmer described how the show began with a medley of classic,
tacky pop songs such as 'My Boyfriend's Back' ("a rock'n'roll song
which some of you may have gotten pregnant to"), 'Hanky Panky'
and '96 Tears'. "'Soft and shitty, soft and shitty,' whispers Zappa
into the mike, sobbing gendy as he falls down on to one knee.
'Give it to 'em soft and shitty because Young America wants it that
way and Young America doesn't know any better.' "18
At that time, it didn't. "When we moved to New York," Frank
later reminisced, "there was virtually no scene at all. There was no
long-haired anything there. People looked at us like we were from
Venus."19
"Our market was middle-class Jewish boys from Long Island
with hair that was just growing out. That's where the line (in 'Who
Needs The Peace Corps') came from: 'Oh, my hair's getting good
in the back'. You used to hear these kids coming in from Long
Island with httle rags around their heads; that's an actual quote
from one of them."20
"In the middle of the show," Arbus went on, "Zappa introduces
'this strange little person in her mod clothes', who is called Uncle
Meat. She is a very young, expressionless girl with silky hair, who
sings, sometimes in duet with Ray. They stand with their arms
around each other rubbing chests and looking tender and mourn-
ful. They even dance with each other, separated by a century of
style. Uncle Meat also gazes through a kaleidoscope or rattles a
hypnotic rhythm on the tambourine or parries Ray's carrot sword-
play using a lettuce leaf for a shield."21
Uncle Meat was actually the folk singer Essra Mohawk, who'd
had a single released on Liberty, 'The Boy With The Way', under
the name Jamie Carter. Just for good measure, her real name was
Sandra Hurvitz, born on Long Island and a student at Philadelphia
Community College before arriving in New York via California.
As well as opening the act and becoming an auxiliary Mother,
Mohawk performed with flautist Jeremy Steig & The Satyrs, who
also opened at the Garrick for part of the Mothers' stay.
"After a couple of months of it," Sandra told Bruce Pollock, "I
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Frank Zappa
said, 'Hey, I really don't want to be Uncle Meat,' and Frank said,
'I'm sorry, but I must insist you are.' And I said, 'Well, excuse me.
Here I thought you were Frank Zappa, the wonderful musician,
and now I find out you're God and you're going to tell me who I
am.' So a few days went by and he said, 'OK, you don't have to be
Uncle Meat. If you don't want to make money out of the name, I
will.'"22 Despite that, she was the first artist to record for Frank's
Bizarre Productions and her album, Sandy's Album Is Here At Last,
was released on Verve the following year.
Amongst the Mothers' more pointed satires were ragged ver-
sions of songs like 'Big Leg Emma', 'Call Any Vegetable', 'Brown
Shoes Don't Make It', 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy', 'Status Back Baby'
and 'America Drinks And Goes Home' and then the band would
stretch out on an extended version of'King Kong'. "The only part
of the show that's planned is the building blocks," Frank told Jerry
Hopkins, "certain items, the noises, the songs, the cues for the
songs and noises. The sequence is the most important part of the
show and it will tell you how to listen to the music. It's all con-
trolled by signals."23
The band would rehearse during the afternoons and that led to
one of the most bizarre evenings of the whole engagement, the
story of which Frank told many times but most fully to Frank
Kofsky in August 1967. "A Marine was killed in the Village,
remember? And there was a rumour that every Marine within
shooting distance was coming down to beat up everybody they
found with long hair. The week following that rumour, we're
rehearsing in the theatre and in walk three full-dress Marines. So I
said, 'Oh, hello there, why don't you come in and sit down.' I just
went on with our rehearsal; we didn't pay any attention to them.
When we were done, they said, 'We just bought your album and
we really like it.' These kids, nineteen years old, stationed on the
carrier Wasp at shore here, clean, you know? I said, 'Well I'm glad
you do. Hey, listen, how would you guys like to work with us
tonight?' They were really turned on. I said, 'Can you sing?' They
said, 'Yeah.' 'What do you know?' 'Well, I know "Everybody
Must Get Stoned" (Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 & 35')
and "House Of The Rising Sun".' So we went across the street to
have dinner; I ate and they practised their songs. Come back, we
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do this number. I said, 'Now look, there's one little thing I want
you to do. When I give you the signal, I want all three of you guys
to lunge for the microphone and start screaming, "Kill!"' So we
played like that 'Archie' [Shepp] weirdness, with the dissonant
chords and all that, and on cue they ran right to the mikes, started
screaming 'Kill!' The audience just went - they couldn't handle it.
Then when it was over, they clapped. So I said to the audience,
'Thank you'; and then Ray says to the audience, 'Thank you'; and
then when I pointed to the Marines to have them say, 'Thank you',
the first one walks up to the mike and says: 'Eat the apple, fuck the
corps.' And everybody went, 'Whew!' (The second man repeats
the phrase.) Point to the third one; he goes up, he says, 'Hey, you
know, I feel the same way as my other two buddies: eat the apple,
fuck the corps. Some of us love our mothers more.'
"Court-martial city, all right? So then, we took an intermission
and they stuck around. I said, 'Do you guys know . . . ?' 'I don't
care, man. They can only get you once.' All right, [we] go back on.
I told Gail to get the doll. This is the first time we ever used the
doll. We had this doll that somebody gave us, it was really shitty —
big plastic doll. Bring it down and I say, 'Hey, ladies an'
gennlemen, the guys are, uh, gonna sing 'Everybody Must Get
Stoned'.' They go through all that shit and I says, 'Now, we're
gonna have basic training. Uh, ladies an' gennlemen, this is a gook
baby; and the Marines are going to mutilate it before your very
eyes. Kill it!' Tossed it to them, they ripped the arms off, beat it up,
stomped on it, and just completely tore it apart. After they're all
done, the music got real quiet, the Ughts went down, and I held it
by the hair and showed the audience all the damaged parts of the
doll's body, pretending . . . There was one guy in the front row, a
Negro cat just come back from Vietnam, was crying. It was awful
and I ended the show there."24
The conflict of emotions can be sensed, both that night and in
the recounting; satisfaction at proving the inhumanity of war, the
men who perpetrate it and those who train them; and the discom-
fort of realising that, for the sake of satire, a line has been over-
stepped, that the shock tactics have rebounded on their instigator,
that the surreal and the real have somehow merged and engulfed
everyone present. That, in the end, the portrayal was as savage and
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Frank Zappa
implacable as the deed. As Frank admitted, "It was an atrocity . . ."25
He'd evidently forgotten the strength of feeling evoked that night
when he said later, "Music always is a commentary on society, and
certainly the atrocities on stage are quite mild compared to those
conducted on our behalf by our government."26
Not every night produced such dramatic results but, after that,
dolls and toy animals became an integral part of the act. "We had a
system rigged with a wire running from the light booth at the back
of the theatre to the stage and the lighting guy would send stuff
down the wire. First, maybe a spreadeagled doll. . . followed by a
salami, that would ram the baby doll in the ass. Our big attraction
was the soft giraffe. We had this big stuffed giraffe on stage, with a
hose running up to a spot between the rear legs. Ray Collins would
go up to the giraffe and massage it with a frog hand puppet. . . and
then the giraffe's tail would stiffen and the first three rows of the
audience would get sprayed with whipped cream shooting out of
the hose. All with musical accompaniment, of course. It was the
most popular feature of our show. People would request it all the
time."27
Because of this interest, Frank wanted to do some live recording.
"We had a deal with Wally Heider who at that time had a record-
ing truck in New York City," he told William Ruhlmann. "He
had all this gear in a van and he needed a place to park his van. And
I wanted to make a deal with him that we'd give him parking space
for the van outside of (the Garrick). All he had to do was just turn
the tape on every night. And we could have had it. Verve wouldn't
do it."28
FLOWER POWER SUCKS!
When the band weren't rehearsing or performing, Frank was
writing material for the next album. His first intention, as he told
Frank Kofsky during August, was for the album to combine his
songs with tapes of a Lenny Bruce performance and be called Our
Man In Nirvana. "We have some material that's going into the next
album about the concentration camps in California — you're seeing
this before the world even knows what the tune is because I turned
these out the other day."29
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Lumpy Gravy
The project never came to fruition, probably because Herb
Cohen and Frank, already dissatisfied with MGM/Verve, were in
the process of creating Bizarre Productions, which along with
Nifty, Tough & Bitchen, Youth Market Consultants, and Frank
Zappa Music Co. Inc., would handle Frank's multifarious enter-
prises. The Lenny Bruce tapes were released (on Bizarre) in 1969 as
The Berkeley Concert and the Mothers songs went into We're Only
In It For The Money, Frank's jibe at other musicians that many
critics took at face value.
The basic sessions took place during August and September 1967
at Mayfair Studios, with Gary Kellgren engineering. Further
dubbing and the final mix were done at Apostolic Studios on East
10th Street, with Dick Kunc driving the desk. The songs were
recorded on eight-track but, despite the scope for overdubbing, the
system had its drawbacks. "We were working in a studio in New
York that had one speaker for every track," Frank told William
Ruhlmann. "You sat in front of eight speakers. And you couldn't
punch in and out without leaving an enormous click on the tape. It
was living hell to mix something from that machine because every
time you had punched in to add a part, in advance of pushing that
part up in the mix, you had to first duck it out to get rid of the
click."30
1967 was The Summer of Love and the targets for Frank's
acerbic wit were plentiful. 'Flower power' was at its commercial
height, unaffected by his suggestion of vegetables as substitutes, and
The Beades had finally delivered themselves of Sgt Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band on June 1 in England, a day later in America — a
week after Absolutely Free. Sgt Pepper was hailed as innovative and
the 'very zenith of rock'n'roll', perhaps the first 'concept' album,
even though the songs were unrelated.
By coincidence, both albums made extensive use of the segue;
the songs on each side ran in unbroken sequence. But while Frank
relied on sudden changes of tempo and precise editing to create
his effect, The Beades used cross-fades and bits of 'business' like
the laughter at the end of'Within You Without You' to make the
transitions between songs. Frank was punctilious when he called
his sides 'oratorios'; his was very much a concept album but The
Beades effortlessly stole his thunder.
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Frank Zappa
Because of its combination of melodic appeal and imaginative
production, Sgt Pepper became a symbol of the mood of the time,
encouraging both radicals and hippies to see it as an affirmation
of their cause. Absolutely Free had a harder lesson to teach; it also
spoke to the imagination but its purpose was a call to action, not
euphoria. Under the circumstances, it fared considerably well in
the Billboard album charts, reaching number 41.
Frank had seen the San Francisco hippie movement for himself
and had been scathing of its banal conformity, its opting out of
responsibility. Now its apparent ethos had been cosmeticised and
sold to the world. On June 16-18, the Monterey Pop Festival took
place, with Paul McCartney on its board of governors and a
massive cast list including Big Brother & the Holding Company,
Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead,
Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar and
the Who. As Ralph Gleason wrote in his San Francisco Chronicle
review on June 19, 'The Sgt Pepper buttons set the theme.'
While the world swooned in cosmic brotherhood and groups
rushed to emulate The Beatles' studio-craft, Frank Zappa used Sgt
Pepper as a catalyst for a swingeing attack on the meretriciousness
and self-deception that he felt it embodied. On We're Only In It For
The Money he brought together a sequence of songs that punctured
the blissful bubble all those around him were trying to inflate.
Hippies had to be a prime target; 'Who Needs The Peace Corps?',
with Frank reciting a diary of hippy aspirations, 'Absolutely Free'
and 'Flower Punk', the latter a wicked piss-take of Jimi Hendrix's
recent hit, 'Hey Joe' (which he'd also performed at Monterey),
were new but the old 'Cucamonga' tune, 'Take Your Clothes Off
When You Dance', also on Lumpy Gravy, took on fresh ironic
significance.
'Concentration Moon', based on rumours that camps used to
intern Japanese—American citizens during the Second World War
were being readied to receive hippies and drop-outs, was the song
shown to Frank Kofsky. The attitudes and ignorance of their
parents were incisively captured in the sequence of'Mom & Dad',
'Bow Tie Daddy', 'Harry, You're A Beast' (whose chorus, 'Don't
come in me, in me' had to be aurally distorted on the original
release) and 'What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?'. 'Mom &
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Lumpy Gravy
Dad', with its story of a daughter 'shot by the cops as she quiedy lay
by the side of the creep she knew', was grimly prophetic. On
May 4,1970, four students were killed on the campus of Kent State
University by the National Guard, part of a nationwide protest
against America's invasion of Cambodia. President Nixon called
the protesters 'bums'; 'Dickie's Such An Asshole', though not
intended as one, would never be an adequate response.
'What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?' was reprised on Side
Two of the finished album, in imitation of Sgt Pepper, and 'The
Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny' reversed the long die-
away piano chord of 'A Day In The Life' before becoming a
collage of twisted percussion, prepared piano, panting woodwind
and hysterical laughter. "The percussive-type noises," Frank told
Rick Davies, "the thing that sounds like litde squirts and explo-
sions, was done by using a box that we built at the studio called the
Apostolic Vlorch Injector. It was a litde box with diree buttons on
it. The console at the studio had three master faders — a separate
fader for the left, the centre and the right. So these three buttons
corresponded to inputs to the three master faders, and you could
play it rhythmically. There's a tambora in there, a koto in there
someplace. Some filtered tapes of industrial noises, horses, all
collaged together."31
Frank advised listeners to read Franz Kafka's In The Penal Colony
and imagine themselves in 'Camp Reagan' before playing this
track. He explained the tide to Kurt Loder: "Before they started
making dolls with sexual organs, the only data you could get from
your doll was looking between its legs and seeing that httle chrome
nozzle — if you squeezed the doll, it made a kind of whistling
sound. That was the chrome plated megaphone of destiny."32
Each side opened with sound collages, speech (in both cases fea-
turing Eric Clapton) and snatches of music. Clapton remembered
being told, " 'I want you to pretend to be Eric Burdon on acid.'
And that's what I did -1 was just saying, 'I can see God', and all diis
stuff, and it was just funny to be involved with diese people."33
'Are You Hung Up' also featured the whispers of engineer Gary
Kellgren, threatening to erase all the Frank Zappa tapes. He returns
in 'Concentration Moon'; when the album was remixed for CD,
the sentence 'And the day after that', cut off at that point on the
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Frank Zappa
original issue, goes on to say, 'I get to work with the Velvet Under-
ground, which is as shitty a group as Frank Zappa's group'.
'Nasal Retentive Calliope Music' was a more imaginative
creation, even featuring a snatch of 'Heavies', one side of the
Rotations single that Frank had produced in 1963. That was
followed by songs "about people with strange personal habits . . .
many of which happen to be my dearest friends." 'Let's Make The
Water Turn Black' and 'The Idiot Bastard Son' entered the
strange world of Kenny and Ronnie Williams, the latter of whom
introduced Frank to Paul BufF in Cucamonga. The unreality of
the situations the songs describe is enhanced by the fact that the
lead vocals, like many on the album, have been recorded with the
tape machine slowed down by a semi-tone. When played at
normal speed, the voices sound speeded-up, making them more
'bizarre'.
The Williams brothers were experts at what Frank called 'The
Manly Art of Fart-Burning' and more besides. When Kenny was
sent to reform school, Ronnie and his friend Dwight Bement
played poker in Ronnie's bedroom, smearing their bogies (or
boogers, if you're American) on the window, until his mother,
disapproving of the dense green light, screamed for their removal.
Kenny returned from what he called 'boarding school' and took up
residence in the garage, where he was joined by Motorhead
Sherwood for a while. During the poker sessions that followed,
they and their friends relieved themselves in the mason jars that
Ronnie used to make raisin wine. Saved as 'trophies', the jars were
examined months later, by which time they were populated by
creatures resembling tadpoles which had to be consigned to the
Ontario sewage system.
'Mother People', a self-proclaiming threat to 'normal' America,
contained an orchestral sequence from Lumpy Gravy "conducted
by Sid Sharpe under the supervision of the composer". The sleeve
also noted that a verse had been censored out, recorded backwards
and placed at the end of Side One, identified as 'Hot Poop'. This
was done on purpose, Frank anticipating MGM/Verve's reaction
to the line, 'Shut your fucking mouth about the length of my hair'.
It wasn't until 1969, when Jefferson Airplane strong-armed RCA
Victor about the lyrics of 'We Can Be Together', which opened
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the album Volunteers, that 'fuck' was heard in a pop lyric. Even so,
the songsheet in the album reproduced the offending word as 'fred'
on the two occasions it appeared.
FOR CALVIN
The cramped Zappa apartment on Thompson Street was playing
host to a number of people. There was Bobby Zappa, Dick Barber
the 'Snorker' and Bill Harris camped out in their sleeping bags in
the living room. And then Cal Schenkel arrived. Frank needed
an artist capable of creating a parody of the Sgt Pepper cover.
Sandra Hurvitz suggested an ex-boyfriend of hers in Philadelphia.
Schenkel came to New York, flourished his portfolio and got the
commission.
The result was a faithful but satiric recreation of Peter Blake's
original design. Where the Beades' name was set out in a neat
suburban herbaceous border, the Mothers' was spelt in vegetables.
Instead of brighdy coloured bandsmens' uniforms, the Mothers,
never known for their physical beauty, wore dresses. As well as the
band, Tom Wilson, a very pregnant Gail, Jimi Hendrix (who'd
jammed with them at the Garrick) and Cal Schenkel, crouching
with a carton of eggs (his favourite food) in his hands, were also
present. Ray Collins was nowhere to be seen and a fresh-faced
Ian Underwood stood diffidendy at the rear. An accomplished
musician and Yale graduate with a masters degree in music from
Berkeley, he'd joined the band after seeing one of their shows,
accosting Frank in the Apostolic control room and auditioning on
the spot.
Where The Beatles had amassed portraits of their heroes, Frank
was far more pointed in his choices, which ranged from Lyndon
Johnson (twice) and Lee Harvey Oswald to Galileo, Beethoven
and Herb Cohen. Some, including the Statue of Liberty, Jimmy
Reed, James Brown, Nancy Sinatra and Eric Burdon had their eyes
blacked out — to protect their identities.
The initial pressings also contained an insert with cut-outs of the
grinning band, Frank's moustache combination, a bunch of his
hair, a nipple badge, a School Safety Patrol Lieutenant's badge con-
taining Gary Kellgren's photograph and half of a United Mutations
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Frank Zappa
One Navel note with Billy Mundi's pouting ditto in its centre.
For the centre spread photograph, most of the band managed to
keep their faces expressionless but Frank, his hair in bunches,
looked quizzical, as though in the presence of an objectionable
odour. Motorhead got to face the camera on the rear sleeve, which
also featured the first appearance of the Bizarre logo and Frank's
hectoring note: "THIS WHOLE MONSTROSITY WAS CON-
CEIVED & EXECUTED BY FRANK ZAPPA AS A RESULT
OF SOME UNPLEASANT PREMONITIONS, AUGUST
THROUGH OCTOBER 1967."
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6
DEAD GIRLS IN LONDON
Frank set off across the Atlantic in the middle of August 1967 to
talk to the press about the Mothers' British debut at the Royal
Albert Hall on September 23, the first date on a brief European
tour that would also visit Holland, Sweden and Denmark. Earlier
in the year, it had been announced that the band would be part of
the original line-up for the '14-Hour Technicolor Dream' to take
place at Alexandra Palace on April 29. The April 2 edition of New
Musical Express noted that they would be flying in specially for the
show to perform alongside Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, the Move
and the Pretty Things. Presumably their success at the Garrick had
caused a change of plan.
Both NME and Melody Maker announced in June that the
Mothers would be coming to Britain in October as part of an
exchange deal with the Move. At the time, the local Musicians
Union would only allow American artists to tour if such a deal could
be struck. Move manager Tony Secunda said, "We are looking for
one really big venue for the Mothers. We're also looking for
genuinely interested people to help us set the whole thing up."1
By the end of July, both papers reported the Albert Hall
booking, adding that the band would be backed by a 15-piece
orchestra. The August Music Maker announced the band had "a
reputation for incredible behaviour on stage during their Stateside
gigs. One reliable observer tells us that they often harangue the
audience, insult them mightily and even resort to mild profanities.
It would therefore be keenly intriguing to book them in an East
End hostelry where reciprocal badinage from the crowd might add
spice to the occasion and give the Mothers something more to
invent - such as a good reason not to be clobbered."
After a day of interviews and discussions on August 18, Frank
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Frank Zappa
renewed his acquaintance with Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and
Ginger Baker, who were playing at the Speakeasy, a members-only
basement club popular with musicians and record business 'heads'.
Nick Jones reviewed the night in the August 26 Melody Maker.
"The late-night looners have favoured the Speak's environment
because as boss Mother Frank Zappa so quickly realised, 'the vibra-
tions are groovy'. And that's how Zappa introduced 'this dandy
little combo', otherwise known as the Cream, to a club full of
Speak-goers last Thursday."
Frank stared balefully from the front cover of that edition; beside
the headline "Meet A Mother!", he sat in a chair thrusting his
falsies out in a floral mini-dress and fishnet stockings, his hair once
again in bunches. Inside, the breathlessly groovy Nick Jones inter-
viewed him. "Frank Zappa is 26 years old. He is a very beautiful
person, very aware of everything going on all around. Zappa is
very aware of the 'crumbling society' and 'environment' that the
American lives in. What Zappa and the Mothers are trying to do —
through their incredible gestures, through the freaking pastures of
the mind, through their music - is to stir the young American into
action." Gosh.
Wading knee-deep in Jones' hyperbole, Frank speculated on
how his band would be received in Britain. "Generally we seem to
thrive in areas where there is unrest between the generations,
because we tend to pep things up!" After acknowledging that few
Britons knew about the Mothers, he continued: "From what I can
see so far, people in Britain have no idea what a real San Francisco
love-in is like. There is a popularisation of the Flower Power
movement. Everybody seems to have an idealised image that love
must be good, and, you know, flowers must be OK, but you don't
have the tension between the cops and the kids." Rather than
aping what they'd heard about the 'hippy' movement, British
youth should be working out how to supplant the society created
by their parents. "We're the ways and means committee. I'm not
talking about hot teenage blood in the street, bashing society over
the head. It's just a matter of phasing them out."2
The following edition's letters page quaked with outrage: E.H.
Tull of Abingdon, Berks reckoned Frank must be joking. "Lipstick
and a handbag were all that were missing, or do MM readers fancy
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Dead Girls In London
him as he is?" was the question. The answer?: "Thank God for
Tom Jones." "Own up Zappa!" wrote Londoner, Paul St Claire
Johnson. "You are part of that rotten, commercial and crumbling
society in America." Mike Wade, another Londoner, had never in
his life seen such a horrid, vile and disgusting picture. "Effeminate
flower power has turned our pop scene into a charade of rubbish."
Jeff Cooke from Derby thought that groups like the Mothers and
The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown were "degrading pop to the
level of animals."3 Tucked away in 'The Raver' column was a short
paragraph: "Our front page picture of Frank Zappa was nothing,
folks. You should have seen Bobby Davison's tasteful study of
Zappa - in a loo. But our lips are sealed."4 Not for long, it turned
out.
Anne Nightingale in her 'My World of Pop' column in the
Daily Sketch revealed "Why this bearded Mother isn't flower
powered." Frank was blunt: "A lot of nonsense, this love thing.
How can you love complete strangers when a lot of them are
unpleasant people? I want nothing to do with flower power. If
people try to put beads round my neck, I just tell them to get lost."5
The Observer reporter, after noting Frank's past in advertising,
went on, "Even now he has the Mothers ploughing all their earn-
ings back into an agency that advertises themselves and other youth
products. Zappa sees no contradiction between being an adman
and a hippy. 'Advertising is beautiful,' he says."6
Intro magazine reckoned that Frank basically saw himself as a
businessman. "If the hippie movement's idea of changing the
world is to sit around the parks smoking pot and getting beaten
by the cops, they're welcome," he told them. The Mothers' act
was "a type of entertainment, seeking out other levels of human
endurance."7
While being interviewed by David Griffiths of Record Mirror,
Paul McCartney came on the phone to talk about the Mothers'
spoof of the Sgt Pepper sleeve. McCartney said he'd have to refer
the matter to the Beades' business managers, to which Frank
replied that business managers were there to be told what to do by
dieir artists. When he returned, Frank told Griffiths that McCartney
was "disturbed that I could refer to what we do as a product but
I'm dealing with businessmen who care nothing about music, or
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Frank Zappa
art, or me personally. They want to make money and I relate to
them on that level or they'd regard me as just another rock'n'roll
fool."8 Frank returned to America with the problem unresolved.
The long run at the Garrick ended in the first week of Septem-
ber. Work continued on We're Only In It For The Money and there
were gigs in Detroit, Cincinnati and Miami. Preparations for the
European tour included summoning Pamela Zarubica, herself just
back from her prolonged stay in Europe during which she'd
become pregnant, to look after Gail while Frank was away. By
now, the Zappas, along with Cal Schenkel, lived in the floor-
through basement apartment of a brownstone on Charles Street
with Beatles posters on the walls. A life-size doll with a bayonet
through its stomach occupied a chair in the living room. The room
between the kitchen and the garden was used as the office for
Nifty, Tough & Bitchen.
When Pamela learned that Frank had been asked to bring along
Suzy Creamcheese on the tour, she made it very plain that the role
was hers. Herb Cohen didn't like the idea much but Pamela, and
thus also Frank, was adamant. Pamela went to the studio and
added her contributions to the album tapes, singing back-up on
'Absolutely Free' and some spoken segments, delivered in a
deadpan monotone, including a phone conversation with her
friend Vicky, back in California.
A few days before he was due to fly to England, Frank married
Gail at the New York City Hall, using the 10-cent ball-point pen
he'd had to buy to fill out the licence form as a substitute for a
wedding ring. Having punched their form in a machine that
resembled a time clock, the official watched as Frank pinned the
pen on her bulging maternity dress. His last words to Gail as he left
for Europe were, "If it's a girl, call it Moon and if it's a boy, call it
Motorhead." Two weeks later, Moon was born.
BRIXTON STILL LIFE
A modey crew posed for photographs on the tarmac at Heathrow
Airport on Monday, September 18. Melody Maker was confused;
there were two Suzy Creamcheeses, Other newspapers contented
themselves with identifying her as just 'a girlfriend' but it was in
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Dead Girls In London
fact Sandra Hurvitz. Back in August, Tony Secunda had said that
the band might bring along "another chick called Mother Meat".9
The Daily Sketch, with a style of prose that surely helped to bring
about its demise, said, "They are, we understand, an American pop
group. Or dealing as we are in a contradiction of terms, a beat
group. There is of course no biological accuracy in their choice of
title; at least as far as is visually determinable."10 The piece ended
with a dictionary definition of'freak': "A product of sportive fancy;
monstrosity; abnormally developed specimen."
The Sun, some way from locating its lowest common denomi-
nator, reported, "Frank Zappa, their leader, is an anarchist whose
incredible clothes and haircuts (sic) make normal hippies look as
respectable as bank clerks. He and Herbie Cohen, the group's
manager, will stay at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington. The
rest will be salted away in a secret suburban hotel, to keep them
away from metropolitan temptation. The Royal Garden seem to
be awaiting Zappa with fortitude. Last time he stayed there he felt
warm in the restaurant, so he stripped off first his jacket, then his
shirt, then his vest, to finish lunch half-naked. The staff, who
would normally turn you away if you arrived without a tie, turned
not a hair."11 Perhaps little has changed at the Sun, after all.
That evening, Frank and Pamela caused heads to turn at the
Marquee, where The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown were
playing, and at the Speakeasy. The Evening News located the band
the following day rehearsing at a bingo hall in Brixton. The
reporter found Frank drinking tea in a nearby cafe and declared his
hair to be 'long, very long'. Frank played along: "The only trouble
with it this length is it gets in your mouth when you eat. So I use
elastic bands." While they talked, a waitress came over. "'Can I
settle a dare?' she said. 'Is your hair real?' Frank took off his cap and
allowed her to pull it. It was."12
Frank was also tentative in his curiosity about the English and
their habits. When we talked, I asked for his first impressions. "One
of my major recollections of that trip was Tom Wilson, who had
been there several times before, was showing me around London
and took me to a pub and introduced me to a pork pie. I took this
thing and, wisely, opened it to see what was inside it before I ate it.
And when I saw that grey, melted wax-like who-knows-what-
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Frank Zappa
the-fuck-it-is? squatting in the bottom of this pastry shell - and
realised that people around me were eating them - you think, who
are these people? How did they come to this?
"Because in 1967, Britain was quite a different place. I thought
the atmosphere was pleasant. I thought the attitude of the people
on the street was positive. I thought that there was something
creative going on there. I thought it was a positive thing for the
young people in the country at the time to see The Beatles and
The Rolling Stones being successful and all the other people in the
British Invasion that had gone to foreign shores and made a lot of
money. And now they could come back and live a lifestyle that a
guy in a poor part of town could only dream about in his wildest
fantasies. And here were these guys living like kings, which has a
'trickle down' psychological effect. Like, 'He did it. I went to
school with him, why not me?'"
While rehearsing, Frank hung out with Hendrix and Jeff Beck
and visited other 'psychedelic dungeons' like Middle Earth at the
Roundhouse, where he disconcerted a hobbit or two when
presented with a nugget of hash by not only not wanting it but
having to ask what it was first. A large proportion of his Albert Hall
audience would have been similarly disappointed. But some of us
there attended out of curiosity. I'd watched Juke Box Jury and been
intrigued but it was a matter of chance that a ticket came my way.
Like most of those around me, I sat stunned by the evening's
events. My musical background was Buddy Holly and R&B; I'd
never encountered satire in music, nor a band that could encom-
pass 'Baby Love' and contemporary classical music, which that
night was played by ten members of the London Philharmonic
Orchestra.
Bernard McElwaine gave his impressions in the following day's
Sunday Mirror. "It was probably the weirdest, hippiest, most psy-
chedelic — frankly, way out — happening that London has endured
since it started swinging. Peeps, pauses, scratches, bops, hisses and
shrill, sharp noises belted out from a frightening assortment of elec-
tronic gear as coloured spotlights swept the stage. The Chief
Mother is a gendeman called Mr Frank Zappa. He speaks in a
pleasant, well-modulated voice, softer and more soothing than
some of his music. Dressed like his colleagues in clothes apparendy
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Dead Girls In London
grabbed from a burning warehouse, his profuse hair flowing in
Biblical style, Mr Zappa did not pull any punches. He told the
audience, who unlike the music, did not fill the hall: 'I will recite
the lyrics of this song before the band starts because you won't be
able to hear them when they do. You will hate it.'
"Sometimes the music built up a mental picture of a tin con-
venience being attacked by whistling banshees armed with rubber
hammers. It seems that Mr Zappa was right. His reception was less
than rapturous. Then he said: 'You will find it repugnant.' Right
again. Perhaps the bombardment just stunned the audience into
silence. Or, as Miss Creamcheese rather apdy put it: 'Perhaps you
are not ready for this kind of music yet.' Not that audience reaction
really worries the Mothers. Mr Zappa's associates send out photo-
graphs of him sitting nude on a lavatory. This may be a subtle
comment on what he thinks of those who come to hear him."13
And those that wrote about it.
I told Frank that I had never before seen anyone on stage with
such apparent indifference for his audience. "Well, I don't think
you can really ask for much more than that," he replied. "Unless
you're one of these ass-licking pop performers that must always do
a song that people must enjoy in the traditional sense of enjoyment.
If that's your job, to provide traditional enjoyment, then you really
have to be a lot more pandering to an audience. But if you're doing
something — I hate to use the word 'experimental', but it was at the
time — if you're doing something experimental then you have
to take the attitude that the audience is part of the experiment;
and they're not necessarily there to engage in the same sort of
'enjoyment' exercise that they would be getting from something
from Top Of The Pops."
The most notable event-structure of the evening was Don Preston's
assault on the Albert Hall pipe organ, commemorated on Uncle
Meat. Far from being stunned into McElwaine's silence, the tape
shows that we were very much into the iconoclasm that the
Mothers seemed to represent; the strains of 'Louie Louie' invading
the hallowed portals of the Albert Hall tickled our Carnaby Street
consciousness. Nick Jones couldn't restrain himself. "Without
doubt, this the debut of the Mothers in England, was one of the
greatest live performances to have shaken this earth on this side of
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Frank Zappa
the Adantic for a long, long time." But he got it right when he
ended his Melody Maker review: "As a colleague said, 'They're
about two years too early.' "14
By contrast, the NME reviewer struggled to get his mind out of
neutral: "This was the greatest send-up (or down) of pop music, of
the audience, America and the group themselves I've ever wit-
nessed. As musicians they were fantastically good and the entire act
was unbelievably professionally presented. But, frankly, what was
the point of it all? An entire concert of biting ridicule, both verbal
and musical — however well done — is just a bore."15 Londoner
Tony Kerpel's letter in the October 7 MM spoke for some of us:
"Out of sheer curiosity I decided to go to the Mothers of Invention
concert at the Albert Hall, fully expecting an evening of meaning-
less noise. I could not have been more wrong. The Mothers pro-
duced the most original music that I have heard from a pop group.
They managed to fuse pop music, modern jazz, fragments of
modern classical music and music concrete. Surely this is an
achievement which must give them much wider recognition.
Here, at last, is one American group that really lives up to its
name."
The tour moved on into Europe, playing concerts in Amster-
dam, Copenhagen (after which Frank got the news that Gail had
given birth to a girl), Gothenburg (where Frank developed what
was later diagnosed as food poisoning), Stockholm (Frank had to
leave the stage half-way through the show), a return visit to
Copenhagen, where they had to use John MayaU's gear because
their own failed to arrive, and a final gig in Lund.
Despite the overall success of the tour, Frank was unnerved by
the attitude of those he had met and been interviewed by, many
of whom regarded him with something approaching messianic
fervour. He was expected to behave like a leader of youth opinion
and instruct his followers on how to overthrow the system, what-
ever that system was. It was the same undirected revolutionary urge
that he'd dissociated himself from in America. But while he liked
to provoke and declaim from the stage, Zappa had no pretensions
to real power. He may have believed the polemics he delivered but
his audiences failed to realise it was part of the show, just as his
songs were but one aspect of his musical output. Whatever he said
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Dead Girls In London
by way of observation on the inequities he saw were almost a
by-product of a mind that was dedicated to music — and nothing
else.
STINKFOOT
That dedication continued when he returned to New York and set
to work on the next album. And, as the October 28 edition of Intro
reported, the band returned to the Garrick to revive the Absolutely
Free concerts. "The evening opens with a spot from a duo calling
themselves The Times Square Two. After having sung, crooned
and screeched their way through a series of parodies of old vaude-
ville numbers, the Mothers themselves come on. The sax player
looks like an escaped Beach Boy. The vocalists (all with below
shoulder-length hair) look like left-overs from the court of
Charles I. Highlight of the evening for many people was a handout
of pizza and beer."
In November, Frank flew back to Los Angeles to perform a
walk-on part in The Monkees film, Head, written by Jack
Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, who also directed. Frank played
'The Critic', who led a prize bull out of the studio after witnessing
Davy Jones perform Harry Nilsson's 'Daddy's Song'. With his
unruly hair draped over the collar of his blue blazer, he instructs
Jones in a tone of increasing irony to spend more time on his music
"because the youth of America depends on you to show the way".
By a long coincidence — or was it conceptual continuity? —
Timothy Carey, 'The World's Greatest Sinner', also appeared in
the film as 'Lord High'n'Low'.
Drummer Billy Mundi left the band in December. The Mothers
were winning acceptance but the musicians were still on salary; for
someone like Jimmy Carl Black, with five children, it was hard to
understand that greater popularity didn't bring automatic benefits.
"I think they liked the idea that they were in a group that had a
certain amount of notoriety," Frank said later, "and they liked the
fact that they got a regular pay cheque. But other than that, if
anybody had come along and said, 'I'll pay you more money to be
in this group over here,' they would jump.
"That's borne out by the fact that Billy Mundi was hired away
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by Elektra. When Elektra decided to put together this supergroup
called Rhinoceros, they went shopping for band members through-
out the New York area . . . and gave them a bunch of money
($80,000) and locked them away for months on end so they could
develop fresh new vibrant material."16 In the event, Rhinoceros
made three albums before becoming extinct in 1970.
Luckily, a replacement was quickly found. Dick Kunc's wife
knew Art Tripp's wife and in Arthur Dyer Tripp III, Frank
acquired a classically trained percussionist who'd spent two years
with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and had given solo con-
certs of music by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. His arrival
made the recording of what was to be a predominandy instrumen-
tal set that much easier. At the same time, Frank was also recording
an album of original songs that on the surface would be his tribute
to Fifties doo-wop.
Cruisin' With Ruben & The Jets sounded deceptively simple in its
execution but in fact the banality of the lyrics and the absence of
more typical Zappa flourishes disguised some complex arrange-
ments. "Actually, what it is is a mutated version of Stravinsky's
neo-classic period," Frank told Nigel Leigh, "where in his writing
he took the norms and traditions of the classical period and then he
did it in his own style and created a body of work in that vein. And
I thought, 'Well, that's an interesting concept.' So I would take
music from a certain classical period in US musical history and
perform my own personal tweeze on it.
"I think that if you look at some of the neo-classic writing of
Stravinsky, there's just a certain amount of irony in there in the
way that they handle the classical traditions. So, to the same degree
that it exists in Stravinsky, it happens in Ruben & The Jets. The
music of the early Fifties was characterised in that harmony group
vocal stuff, themes that went on in the background, the so-called
words which were usually quite limited in scope."17 As an instance,
'Fountain Of Love' combined a Moonglows background chant
with the opening theme of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring. "There's all
these different vocal parts and they're all cliches and they're care-
fully chosen for nostalgic value and then built into this song with
the most imbecile words in the world."18
Apostolic Studios was booked for the entire month of January;
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Dead Girls In London
180 hours, made up of 30 double sessions. Sally Kempton wrote a
piece for The Village Voice entitled "Ugly Can Be Beautiful", part
of which detailed a visit to the studio while Ian Underwood on
harpsichord and Bunk Gardner on flute were recording an insert
for the instrumental album. Frank explained that this was to be the
soundtrack of a movie, shot in "hand-held Pennebaker bullshit"
style. "Then we're going to do a monster movie in Japan -Japan is
where they do the best monster work. And we're starting our own
record company. We'll record our own stuff and also some obscure
new groups."19
After her time with Frank, Sally Kempton wrote: "Frank Zappa
is an ironist. He is also a serious composer, a social satirist, a
promoter, a recording genius but his most striking characteristic is
his irony. (It) arises from an immense self-consciousness, a distrust
of one's own seriousness. It is the most modernist of defence mech-
anisms, and Zappa is an almost prototypically modernist figure;
there are moments when he seems to be living out a parody of the
contemporary sensibility."20
W.H. Manville reported on a different Frank Zappa in the
January 13 Saturday Evening Post. In an article headlined "Does
This Mother Know Best?" he described his encounter with Frank
and Herb Cohen at the offices of Unicord, Inc., encapsulating the
Zappa business style. "They were lying on the rug. It was clear that
they had carefully, with great artistry and the utmost contempt,
constructed of themselves everything that the businessman at the
conference table would find most objectionable; they were the
standard figures of protest of our time. The first one had long, thick
ringlets of hair hanging down below his shoulders, plus an evil,
black-pointed beard and heavy moustache. He was wearing skinny
Yale 1912 football pants with no padding or colour, and a child's
sweatshirt that did not come down far enough to cover his bare
belly. His shoes were broken at the toes, which, incidentally,
peeped out through the crack since he wore no socks. The second
figure was similarly decorated, and he seemed sound asleep, his
head pillowed on the rug."
Frank's photo was helping to advertise the company's amplifiers.
They'd advertised on FM radio, offering a photograph of Frank
and the Mothers if kids wrote in for a catalogue. " 'We got 14,000
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requests.' Mr Mersky (company vice-president) sounded awed."
"Most music companies," Frank told Manville, "they hype the
kids. Our ads are true. There's nothing wrong with advertising,
only with liars. I hate liars."
"Why should I believe that?" Manville asked. "Why should I
believe anything you say? For instance, here you are - a business-
man talking to his clients. Why are you wearing those ridiculous
clothes? Isn't it a pose?"
Manville noticed Frank's charming wolfish smile, almost of
complicity. "I dress like this, half because I like it, half because it's
my trademark." Frank paused. "And mostly to put you on."
Manville liked Frank all the better.
Frank took Manville on a tour of the factory, explaining that
kids didn't want pretty, distortion-free amplifiers. "The amplifier is
their weapon of destruction." After the meeting, Frank took him
to the Charles Street apartment, where Freak Out! was played.
Before they left for the Garrick, Herb Cohen arrived to accompany
them.
"As we walked," Manville's article continued, "the business
manager told me about the new, powerful amplifiers that Zappa
was recommending that Unicord build.
" 'Frank thinks that they should call them, literally, "Weapons of
Destruction".' 'Or maybe just "Death",' Zappa said."21
The article was accompanied by a photograph of Frank in jeans
and braces with no shirt, seated with right ankle on left knee, a
wrinkled foot thrust at the photographer. Grimacing through
tobacco smoke, he was holding a sock in the direction of a speaker
cabinet.
This was not the only adventure into advertising pursued while
Frank was in New York. He'd done one commercial for Luden's
Cough Drops, which won an award for 'Best Music In A Com-
mercial' in 1967. He then got a request from Remington Razor to
put music to one of their ads. With assistance from Ian Underwood
and a vocal by Linda Ronstadt, then managed by Herb Cohen, he
produced a demo for which Remington paid $1,000 and never
used.
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UNCLE MEAT
After the basic backing tracks had been recorded, most of the work
was completed by the four band members who could read music,
Frank, Art, Bunk and Ian. As the sleevenote indicated, some
sections contained as many as 40 overdubs. This sort of manic pro-
fusion was only possible because Apostolic had a prototype Scully
12-track tape machine. Even so, it required a very quiet desk to
ensure that excessive tape hiss didn't build up during the frequent
mix-downs.
"There was this music left over from ['Run Home Slow'],"
Frank told me. "What we tried to do was play all the individual
lines in this orchestral score. We had two wind players who could
read, that was Ian and Bunk. And so they would be playing these
parts two at a time, and we'd be stacking them and bouncing them
together. And then we added the percussion and the woodwind
and the other stuff. It took days just to do a few seconds of music
that way. But it was an experiment that needed to be done."
It was to be a pivotal album. In it, Zappa deliberately moved
away from the confrontational stance that gave Freak Out!,
Absolutely Free and We're Only In It For The Money their abrasive
identity. He announced on the inner sleeve: "The words to the
songs on this album were scientifically prepared from a random
series of syllables, dreams, neuroses & private jokes that nobody
except the members of the band ever laugh at, and other irrelevant
material. They are all very serious & loaded with secret under-
ground candy-rock psychedelic profundities."
Uh huh. That certainly applies to 'Dog Breath', 'In The Year Of
The Plague' and 'The Uncle Meat Variations', but there's some
continuity of sense in 'The Air' and 'Cruising For Burgers';
'Electric Aunt Jemima' (written about an amplifier) and 'Mr Green
Genes' fall somewhere in between. Live, 'A Pound For A Brown
On The Bus' and 'Sleeping In A Jar' were usually performed
together under the tide 'The String Quartet', since they originated
in a string quartet that Frank had written in high school. Spoken
interludes on Uncle Meat were rationed to interjections by Suzy
Creamcheese, Jimmy Carl Black complaining "this fuckin' band's
starving" and Ian Underwood explaining his arrival in the band.
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Frank Zappa
For the first time, live recordings were interlaced among the
studio tracks. The most celebrated was the moment when Don
Preston assaulted the Albert Hall organ; there was also a brief
satirical rendering of 'God Bless America', recorded at the Whisky
A Go Go, 'Ian Underwood Whips It Out', from Copenhagen, and
the final segment of'King Kong', recorded in March at the Miami
Pop Festival. The latter, lasting 18 minutes, took up the album's
fourth side, skilfully spliced together from a number of takes.
The album's main themes, like 'King Kong', would become
concert favourites; 'Uncle Meat' and 'The Dog Breath Variations'
were often combined on stage, and 'A Pound For A Brown On
The Bus' launched many extended solos. By contrast, 'Nine Types
Of Industrial Pollution', its title inspired by a drive through New
Jersey, was created in the studio, a guitar solo which quickly freed
itself of rhythmic and tonal constraints as it developed against a
backdrop of spluttering percussion. 'Zolar Czakl' was a brief
reversal of the main theme, a dazzling patchwork quilt of different
musical fragments edited together as one continuous performance.
'We Can Shoot You' and 'Project X' both stretched Ian Under-
wood's and Bunk Gardner's breath control as they alternated
between dense harmonic clusters and sustained slurred notes. Once
in a while, speeded up woodwinds and keyboards skittered across
the aural picture.
Another fresh feature throughout these tunes was the precision
of the percussion overdubs, for which Art Tripp was joined by
Ruth Komanoff, later to become Mrs Underwood. She had been a
regular at the Garrick: "One night my brother and I went to the
Village Gate to hear Miles Davis. We were standing around
waiting for show time and Frank was just walking down Bleecker
Street. This was before bodyguards; he was just a guy on his way to
work. My brother accosted him and said, 'You should hear my
sister play! She's a great marimbist!' I was totally embarrassed. Frank
turned to me and said, 'Fine. Bring your marimba backstage and
we'll check ya out.' The next thing I knew I was recording Uncle
Meat at Apostolic Studios on East 10th Street."22 Interviewed for
BBC2's Late Show, she admitted, "I remember being very upset
when they finally finished their stint at the Garrick Theater and
went back to LA. I felt as though the real heart had gone out of
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New York City and I had to get back on with my conservatory
music training life, which seemed very dull after this."23
Bizarre Records commenced operations in March with offices at
5455 Wilshire Boulevard; as with all of Frank's enterprises, it was a
division of Intercontinental Absurdities. The Bizarre logo, an
arcane Victorian stirrup pump, appeared on what should have been
the outer sleeve of We're Only In It For The Money, which finally
escaped Paul McCartney's clutches that month. Frank's visual satire
remained but MGM/Verve's craven lawyers had forced him to
invert the artwork, so that the front and back covers now formed
the inside spread. The company had also finally bought the Lumpy
Gravy tapes, thus allowing Frank to add a speech bubble by his
grimacing face — "Is this Phase One of Lumpy Gravy?"
Eighteen months after suggesting in the Los Angeles Times that
aspirin should be taken before listening to Freak Out!, Pete Johnson
evinced more respect than enthusiasm in his review. "Zappa is a
brilliant musician with a flair for satire," he wrote. "Unfortunately,
he tends to do things a couple of years before people are ready for
them and often crowds so many ideas into such brief musical space
that they get lost in the confusion." He concluded: "The record is
largely a series of polemics but Zappa's barbs are witty enough to
make his messages entertaining. Zappa is pop music's bravest
iconoclast and perhaps its bnghtest."24
Melody Maker reviewed the album in June, although its release
was delayed until October, when the Mothers played at the Royal
Festival Hall. Under the headline, "Zappa masterminds a Mothers'
masterpiece", reviewer Bob Houston wrote: "Musically, the
Mothers are streets ahead of most pop groups. The send-ups of
various styles, from Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks, New Vaudeville
Band(!) to Beatles' neo-Indian are brought off brilliandy and incor-
porated into the overall scheme of the album."25
THE HANDSOME CABIN BOY
By the time that review was published, everyone had been back in
Los Angeles for a month. Frank had sent Gail and Moon on ahead
in April to scout out fit living accommodation for the rock star he
was becoming. Frank's brother Carl described her eventual choice:
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Frank Zappa
"The house she selected is a stunning early American dwelling
right in the heart of Hollywood (on the corner of Laurel Canyon
Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue). The exterior is taste-
fully done in scrub pine and eucalyptus bark. To enhance this
rugged facade, clumps of moss treated with Karo syrup are neatly
ticked into delicate crevices. This unusual effect gives the house the
appearance of a blighted avocado."
Inside, the decor was "cheerful Ruinic, done in malaga, mauve,
gold ochre and muted khaki cream . . . On one of the living room
walls are mounted two mahogany-stained shadow boxes. Each
contains a ceramic duck, a miniature storm lamp and tiny dolls
dressed in colourful Japanese, Scandinavian and Latin-American
costumes. The clever blend of warm decorating techniques and
zany originality on the part of the designer was scarcely noticed by
Frank when he arrived. What he was most interested in was the
seemingly endless room the house afforded."26
This was the Log Cabin, once reputedly owned by Tom Mix,
set in several acres, with caves, a stream and a small lake in the
grounds, which also contained the remains of his beloved horse,
Tony. When Gail signed for the $700-a-month lease, the cabin
already housed a commune of freaks, presided over by Carl
Franzoni, who lived in the one-lane bowling alley at the back of
the premises. In the vault next door lived two girls, Lucy and
Sandra; a large dressing room opposite was occupied by Christine
Frka. They, along with Sparky and Pamela (Miller), were members
of Vito's dance troupe; they referred to themselves as the Laurel
Canyon Ballet Company but would soon become Girls Together
Outrageously.
Frank flew in on Sunday, May 5, and was still investigating his
new home when Carl came to visit two days later. The pair went
through a door in the foyer and down a stone staircase into a cave
which was actually the entrance to a tunnel that led to Harry
Houdini's house opposite. The tunnel was sealed with concrete
and stone, the reason for its excavation long forgotten. Back above
ground, Carl met Frank's secretary, Pauline Butcher, who was to
help prepare an encyclopaedia of 'useless information' to be pub-
lished by Stein and Day in New York.
Carl borrowed a few Johnny Otis albums and left so that Frank
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could get ready for his appearance on The Les Crane Show that
evening. "On my way home I couldn't help thinking that what
Frank does and how he does it has become a recognisable phenom-
enon," he wrote. "As a composer and performer, he's amazingly
proficient. As a creative person, I know he has all the qualifications.
As my brother, he's really a mother."27
The Log Cabin became the home of Frank's commune, which
included Pamela Zarubica, Cal Schenkel, Christine Frka, who'd
been hired to be Moon's nanny, not to mention sundry Mothers,
road managers and the almost constant presence of the LCBC. One
evening the girls turned up in plastic baby bibs and oversized
nappies, their hair in pigtails. Frank was so impressed, he invited
them to dance on stage with the Mothers at their Orange County
gig that night. He wanted them to call themselves Girls Together
Only but, after some discussion, Outrageously was setded on.
However, the Orange County coneheads wouldn't allow half-
naked girls on stage and their only audience that night were the
men detailed (but not de-sexed) to prevent their appearance.
The final element of The GTOs persona was bestowed upon
them by Herbert Khaury. Before coming to Los Angeles, he'd per-
formed Twenties' Rudy Vallee songs in Greenwich Village, where
he called himself Darry Dover and Larry Love. As Tiny Tim, he'd
become a frequent celebrity guest on The Johnny Carson Show,
made an album, God Bless Tiny Tim and a hit single, 'Tiptoe
Through The Tulips', for Reprise. The girls went to see him at the
Sunset Marquee and his quaint punctiliousness in calling them Miss
Lucy, Miss Pamela, etc. completed the image that the GTOs
would present to the world.
The momentum of the Mothers' career was mounting. Gigs in
larger halls for more money were becoming more frequent, and
even though radio exposure was unthinkable, the press were
beginning to pay more than sneering lip service to the music. Jazz
& Pop voted Frank 'Pop Musician of the Year' and Newsweek ran a
feature in their June 3 issue, in which he was ranked second behind
John Lennon as the "leading creative talent in pop music". The
Mothers were "missionaries with a message, first-line musicians
using their gifts to reshape the minds of America's teenagers". A
"hawk-nosed, spectral Frank Zappa" explained their show as "the
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sound of your transistor radio burped back at you, a panorama of
American life". With the memory of his near-deification in Europe
in mind, Frank stated, "Half of America is under 25, yet there is no
real youth representation in government. It's not my job to organ-
ise them. The best I can get them to do is ask a few questions. If we
reach a million, maybe 500 will become active and get out and
influence the opinion of others. But those 500 could be dynamite.
I'd be happy to have that."28
On June 5, Frank and some of the Mothers went into RCA's
Hollywood studios to work on a collaboration with Jefferson Air-
plane's Grace Slick. A largely improvised piece, 'Would You Like
A Snack' bore litde resemblance to the song that would later be
part of 200 Motels. In fact, it languished in the RCA vaults for
25 years before being included in the box-set retrospective Jefferson
Airplane Loves You.
The June 1968 issue of Life contained Frank's article, "The
Oracle Has It All Psyched Out", in which the genesis of rock'n'roll
and its effects on society and business was filtered through his own
experiences as a Fifties teenager. He concluded with a teasing nod
to brainwashing techniques already featured in films like John
Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, planting the disturbing
thought (for Life-enhanced parents) that loud noises and flashing
lights might be used as tools for the indoctrination of innocent
American youth. The seed of this conclusion had been sown in an
earlier digression about 'The Big Note' and its theory that the
universe was made up of vibrations.
It was his way of advertising the release of Lumpy Gravy, which
was reviewed in the June 22 Rolling Stone. Jim Miller found the
music "strangely sterile" but called Frank a "protean" talent (twice)
and concluded: "It might be said that Zappa makes mistakes other
rock composers would be proud to call their own best music;
Lumpy Gravy is an idiosyncratic musical faux pas that is worth
listening to for that reason alone."29 Not too many agreed with him
and the album spent just five weeks in the charts, peaking at
number 159.
Two issues later, Frank was the subject of the Rolling Stone inter-
view, conducted by Jerry Hopkins, now graduated from the Freep.
Hopkins asked how Frank looked back on his albums. "It's all one
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album. All the material in the albums is organically related and if I
had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them
apart and put it together again in a different order, it still would
make one piece of music you can listen to."30 He also previewed
his next two releases; Whatever Happened To Ruben & The Jets? was
referred to as "a secret project", the other would be a three-record
set, No Commercial Potential. The latter had "such eight-minute
titbits as police busting our recording session. New York cops!
Live! In person!" 'The Bust' was never to be released, as the set
shrank to two records and became Uncle Meat; similarly discarded
were 'Agency Man', 'Randomonium', 'All The Way Down To
The Tonsils', 'Get A Litde IF, 'Wedding Dress Song' and 'Hand-
some Cabin Boy'.
Also from this period was a proposed live album, culled from the
tapes of the Mothers' July 18 gig at The Ark in Boston. Frank took
a set of rough mixes home from TT&G but someone absconded
with the master tapes. Some time later, a boodeg album appeared
with artwork imitating Cal Schenkel's Uncle Meat dental frenzy.
After the 'warm-up trash' of'Big Leg Emma', 'Some Ballet Music'
was a six-minute piece for flute, clarinet, klaxon, car horn and
drums, elements of which turned up later in Greggary Peccary.
'Valarie' and 'My Guitar' completed Side One, while Side Two
comprised a medley of 'Uncle Meat' and 'King Kong'. "I know
(they're good)," Frank told Black Page, "because the tapes were
made on a 4-track machine and they've been stolen from me: so
that's the worst kind of boodegging."31
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7
OUR BIZARRE RELATIONSHIP
Frank had Bizarre business on his mind. The MGM/Verve con-
tract had been due for renewal in March 1968 but someone in the
legal department neglected to take up the company's option. With
Herb Cohen, he'd negotiated the release of Cmisin' With Ruben &
The Jets and a 'best of compilation, Mothermania. But that wasn't
all. "I filed suit against them right around the time that the deal was
lapsing," Frank told me. "There'd been a certain boost in sales right
around that period with We're Only In It For The Money, which did
a lot better than the first two albums. They didn't really want to let
us go but they were fucking around with accounting procedure.
The royalty statements were in the realms of science fiction." The
situation would not be resolved until 1976.
Now that they were free to seek another distributor, Herb met
with Mo Austin at Warner Brothers and convinced him that
Frank's projects were exciting enough for Warners to provide
finance. There would be two labels; Bizarre, already incorporated,
would be for Frank's projects, while Straight, as a division of
Bizarre, would release more diverse material principally from artists
also managed by Herb Cohen. The initial Bizarre releases would
both be double albums: Lenny Bruce — The Berkeley Concert and An
Evening With Wild Man Fischer.
Larry Fischer was one of life's casualties; committed to mental
institutions twice by his mother, he sang for dimes outside the
Whisky and other establishments. As well as street recordings, his
album consisted of songs and monologues recorded at Sunset
Sound and in the basement of the Log Cabin. Some tracks featured
percussion overdubs by Art Tripp, Frank constructed backings for
'The Taster' and 'Circle', and Strip personalities Kim Fowley and
Rodney Bingenheimer cried up Fischer's talents on a meandering
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monologue, 'The Madness & The Ecstasy'. 'In The Wild Man
Fischer Story', Larry conducted a Norman Bates dialogue with his
mother. Finally, 'Larry Under Pressure' revealed the vertiginous
panic underlying Fischer's 'wildness'; the listener becomes an
unwanted intruder in a private hell.
"I don't know if people will enjoy him," Frank told Chris
Welch, "but for the first time in recording history you will have a
chance to hear a man's thoughts as they happen. You'll be laughing
at home and saying, 'He's out of his mind', but he's not out of his
mind. You will be hearing a person who has been stuck in an insti-
tution and told he is insane."1 Frank talked about recording another
character, Crazy Jerry, with a craving for electricity, who made
Larry Fischer look like 'a mere buffoon'.
At the end of July 1968, the Mothers played the Whisky and
the GTOs performed 'Getting To Know You' and danced with
the group. Before leaving on a short summer tour, Frank told the
girls to write songs with a view to making an album of their
own. He also launched the idea of The Groupie Papers, which if
they'd ever been published would have created the sub-genre of
'fuction' 25 years before it was applied to UK MP Edwina Currie's
Westminster bodice-ripper, A Parliamentary Affair. The principal
contents would be Pamela Miller's diary and the extensive notes of
Cynthia, one of the Plaster Casters of Chicago.
AHEAD OF THEIR TIME
Frank had been introduced to Cynthia and Dianne by Eric Clapton,
when the Mothers had opened for Cream at Chicago's Inter-
national Amphitheater. Characteristically declining their atten-
tions, he was fascinated by their method of making plaster casts
of group members' members. Dianne (who'd taken over from
Cynthia's friend Barbara) was the 'plater' or oral exciter while
Cynthia, with her sometime assistant Marilyn, prepared a vessel of
alginate. This was a powder used by dentists to take casts of
patients' teeth; when mixed with water, it first became rubbery and
then hardened to make an exact mould. The vessel, varying in size
from a vase to a plastic coffee cup (sorry, boys), was plunged over
the fully excited 'rig'. When the alginate had hardened it was
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removed, along with any ancillary foliage; small talk (or larger) and
energetic pastimes ensued while the resulting mould was filled with
plaster and a triumphant 'statuette' ultimately emerged.
Interviewed for the 'Groupies' issue of Rolling Stone, the girls
reckoned they'd approached 150 to 200 groups, although most
times the band had chickened out, to be enthusiastically replaced
by their roadies. The girls wore logo-ed T-shirts and toted their
equipment around in a similarly emblazoned suitcase. "Eventually,
I'd like to get other types of people," Cynthia told the magazine.
"You know, have a whole museum of casts. Wouldn't that be
nice? A whole room of pedestals and these things on them! I'd like
to get a common labourer. I'd love to get the President. Maybe a
Zulu chief, too."2
This was the sort of social phenomenon that Frank loved. "It
was the most fantastic thing I ever heard," he told R.S. "I appreciate
what they're doing, both artistically and sociologically. I want to
make one thing clear. The girls don't think this is the least bit
creepy and neither do I. Pop stars are idolised the same way
General Grant was. People put up statues to honour war heroes.
The Plaster Casters do the same thing for pop stars. What they're
doing is making statues of the essential part of the stars. It's the same
motivation as making statues of Grant."3
He encouraged Cynthia and Pamela to correspond and eventu-
ally Pamela flew to spend two weeks in Chicago, during which
they compared notes on Noel Redding, who had flunked his cast
but passed his 'fuction' test with Pam. Frank asked Cynthia to join
the GTOs but she was fundamentally shy and preferred building
alginate mountains (and foothills) in the privacy of hotel rooms to
making records and cavorting on stage.
The Mothers took off on another European tour during
September and October. Frank flew into London on September 24
for a press conference. The Evening News thought him "the
scruffiest pop singer around — blue jeans, brown shoes, long black
hair knotted into a gipsy pony tail behind his head," clearly
offended that he didn't sound as stupid as they thought he looked.
The Evening Standard plainly wanted a fashion review: "First
impressions of a close-up of Mr Zappa are brain-curdling. He's an
amazingly thin man and when I saw him, he appeared to be
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wearing a kind of buttonless, cream liberty bodice, with long black
sleeves, half-mast black bell-bottoms, pea-green wool socks and
brilliandy shiny cow-brown brogues — a sort of out-of-office-hours
look."4 Hidden within the piece was the news that the Mothers
would be at the Festival Hall on October 25.
His best coverage was in the Guardian, where Stacy Waddy gave
Frank three columns to express his views on flower power, protest,
and pop music. "I feel bad about the words sometimes. I enjoy
writing the music more. Unfortunately, the level on which an artist
communicates with the audience is still pretty much limited to the
verbal. Instrumental music is a coming thing in pop, but for years
if you didn't sing a song, you didn't make a record. I'm forced
to write words to put on a piece of music in order to make it
accessible for an audience. I'm not going to deny anything I've said
in my songs, but my main interest is in composing music. If I
wanted to be a lyricist, I'd write books."5
Starting in Germany, the tour progressed through Denmark,
Holland, France and Austria before finishing in London. The
summer of 1968 had seen near-revolution in Paris and the students
at the Berlin Sportpalast on October 16 pined for the barricades.
Their leaders demanded Frank should show support for their cause
by inciting the audience to set fire to a nearby Allied fuel dump.
What followed was reported with Germanic precision in Der Abend
the next day by Helmut Kopetzky, under the headline, "The Toys
Are All Broken".
"The first missile, something green, buzzed through the air at
20.40; for the moment unconcerned, the Mothers carried on
removing sundry toys from a hatbox and symbolically destroying
them. Then the first (rotten?) egg smashed to pieces on Zappa's
yellow (Les Paul) guitar. The Mother Superior opined, 'You
people act like pigs!' Battle lines were drawn: 'Evolution versus
Revolution'.
"At 12 minutes past nine the stage hangings were in tatters;
'Evolution' left the stage. There was a feeling of helplessness every-
where. Mothers manager (Dick) Barber, only outwardly calm
himself, groaned, 'No, no - this can't be happening.'
"The forces of 'revolution' created havoc on stage and made it
plain that worse would happen if the band didn't return. After
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Frank Zappa
telling the crowd that the band was there to play music, Frank said,
'Your situation in Berlin has got to be desperate for you to behave
like this. You're behaving like Americans.'"
Kopetzky continued, "The band, with damaged equipment,
hammered out the 'Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh' chant of the stage
occupiers, making it sound like the martial rhythm of a Nazi
parade. Organiser (Fritz) Rau threw himself forlornly between the
two camps, hoarse from imploring, 'Friends, let's talk.' But nothing
came of it. The police, who up until then had stayed discreedy in
the background, gave both friend and foe ten minutes to leave the
battlefield. The evacuation took place without any clashes. Frank
Zappa pondered: 'It was a very enlightening experience.' "6
Footage of the gig appears in the Uncle Meat film; even without
sound, the sense of menace is evident. Nevertheless, 'conceptual
continuity' was observed; 'Holiday In Berlin' became Frank's
ironic response. And he gave everyone in the band a medal, 'The
Berlin Survival Award, 1968'.
The Mothers arrived in London three days before their Festival
Hall gig. For almost two months, Frank had spent his daylight
hours in various hotel rooms, writing music. He'd had an idea for a
playlet that would take up the first half of the London concert
requiring the services of 14 members of the BBC Symphony
Orchestra. It would be recorded for a possible "European Album"
and filmed for inclusion in the ongoing Uncle Meat chronicles. In
the event, just two excerpts found their way onto record; 'Prelude
To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask' (which
cocked a snook at Debussy's faun) and part of'The Orange County
Lumber Truck' appeared on 1970's Weasels Ripped My Flesh.
Twenty sundry minutes made up the first side of the Mystery Disc
in The Old Masters Box II; but it wasn't until the 1993 release of
Ahead Of Their Time that those of us present could relive the
evening.
Frank's original title for what he'd written was 'Music For The
Queen's Circus'. The initial piece for piano, clarinet and per-
cussion would become 'This Town Is A Sealed Tuna Sandwich' in
200 Motels and ultimately a component of 'Bogus Pomp'. The
play, directed through a bull-horn by Frank in plus fours, outsize
jacket, dark glasses and beret, depicted the clash between the
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Our Bizarre Relationship
'talented' members of the 'rocking teenage combo' (Ian, Bunk and
Art) and Don Preston, who advocated macrobiotic food and the
death of diatonic music.
The subsequent mayhem included the BBC Symphony Orchestra
members joining the 'talented' boys' 'band with a lot of discipline';
Jimmy Carl Black donning Hendrix fright-wig and Regency jacket
to score some 'pussy' in the audience; and Roy Estrada as the
Mexican Pope, in chain-mail, metal tits and bishop's mitre, distri-
buting 'birth pills' from a bucket. We laughed a lot but Frank told
Dick Lawson a year later that we'd "missed the whole point of it".
Our lack of apparent appreciation was somehow connected with
the fact that "that show cost us $5,000 just to get those musicians
to record it, film it, get the costumes, make arrangements with
the Hall itself to put on that kind of show. But I thought it was
worth it."7
The Daily Sketch didn't. "Having watched them at the Festival
Hall the only 'invention' they seem to have developed is how to
make boredom a paying proposition. The most extraordinary thing
about their performance was that they were allowed to get away
with it. Their leader, Frank Zappa, publicises himself as guitarist by
appointment to the world. I'd put Eric Clapton against him any
day."8 For what purpose?
The band stayed on to appear on BBC2's Colour Me Pop, taking
over the 25-minute show to play 'In The Sky' and an extended
'King Kong'. While the band played, the director and his camera-
men played their usual game of'spot-the-soloist', made harder for
them by Frank keeping his back to the cameras as they improvised
with solarisation and fast zooms. In a brief interview, Frank was his
usual scathing self. "We're involved in a low-key war against
apathy. I don't know how you're doin' on apathy over (here) but
we got a lot of it, boys and girls. A lot of what we do is designed to
annoy people to the point where they might just for a second
question enough of their environment to do something about it. As
long as they don't feel their environment, they don't worry about
it, they're not going to do anything to change it. And something's
got to be done before America scarfs up the world and shits on it."
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THE STRING QUARTET
Cruisin' With Ruben & The Jets, the last album for MGM/Verve
was released in November. Cal Schenkel's cartoon cover of
dog-faced Mothers set an appropriate tone. "When we were still in
New York," he said, "I started working on the Ruben & The Jets
story, which is connected with the Uncle Meat story in which this
old guy turns this teenage band into these dog-snout people. That
came out of my love for comics and anthropomorphic animals."9
Billboard thought it, "One of the great put-on records of our
time"; Record World called Frank, "more a parodist than anything
else," but redeemed itself by rating it, "One of the highpoints of
the rock'n'roll revival." Early copies of the album included leaflets
with helpful diagrams on 'How To Comb & Set A Jellyroll' and
how to dance the 'Bop'. Despite a speech-bubble on the front
cover - "Is this the Mothers of Invention recording under a
different name in a last-ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on
the radio?" — potential customers were put off by the concept,
which required an interest in original doo-wop, and the music,
which subverted it, so it only reached number 110 in the album
charts.
Back at the Log Cabin, Frank perused the GTOs lyrics, found
them 'inspiring' and suggested that the newest Mother help them
with their melodies. This was Lowell George, the late Factory hand
who'd spent time with the Standells and helped the Fraternity of
Man to make their second album, Get It On. He'd been hired as a
replacement for Ray Collins, but he spent most of his time in the
Mothers playing rhythm guitar, making pronouncements in a
stereotyped German accent and singing pachuco falsetto harmonies
with Roy Estrada.
Preparations were also made for a pair of gigs at the Shrine
Exposition Hall in Santa Monica on December 6/7. As well as the
Mothers, the GTOs and Wild Man Fischer, the bill promised two
other bands, Easy Chair and Alice Cooper. Easy Chair had sup-
ported the Mothers at the Sky River Rock Festival in August and
moved to Los Angeles after Frank offered them an audition. While
they waited to go into the studio, they changed their name to
Ethiopia but split up before they'd recorded a note. Their bass
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Our Bizarre Relationship
player, Jeff Simmons, stayed on to work on soundtrack music for a
biker film, Naked Angels.
The story was that Alice Cooper was a 17th-century witch
who'd been reincarnated in the body of Vincent Furnier, the
group's lead singer. He was from Detroit but had formed the band,
called at various times the Earwigs, the Spiders and the Nazz, in
Phoenix, Arizona. They'd come to California earlier that year and
had established a reputation as being the worst band on the LA bar
circuit. Frank can't have thought so, because Alice Cooper had
opened for the Mothers (and Wild Man Fischer) on November 8 at
Cal State in Fullerton. Miss Christine was smitten with Vince but
that had no bearing on the band being signed to Bizarre Productions.
Before the Shrine gigs, the Mothers went north to play two
nights at the Berkeley Community Center on November 30/
December 1. San Francisco had taken to the band, helped by
Ralph Gleason's review of their previous appearance. "Those
Mothers Can Really Play" headed his 'On The Town' column. In
it, he called them "brilliant satirists and absolutely unique and first
rate musically as well". Gleason also appreciated Frank's audience
control. "He explained his hand signals for the orchestra's vocal
effects and then directed the audience to stand and make the indi-
cated vocal sounds while the two side sections waved their arms
and the centre section grasped its crotch. And it did!
" 'Don't we look foolish with the lights on?' he remarked and
then told the people they were an audience again and would
respond en masse to 'hootenannies, politicians' promises and Madison
Avenue, as well as instructions like this.' A more devastating
demonstration of his point could not have been made."10
Another time, as reported by Larry Kart, an audience was offered
the chance to hear the band play 'Caravan' with a drum solo, an
offer they declined. Frank then instructed the band to play
'Wipeout', which they did in three tempos at once. "The mindless
riff of'Wipeout' melts like plastic."11
Warner Brothers' money was now supporting Frank's extended
family of musicians; even the GTOs were receiving $35 a week.
Mercy Fontenot, a migrant from San Francisco, had joined the girls
and she in turn introduced Cinderella as the last and, at 17, the
youngest GTO. One of the songs they rehearsed for the Shrine
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Frank Zappa
Christmas concert was 'The Captain's Fat Theresa Shoes', about an
outsize pair of women's shoes worn by Captain Beefheart. Another
was 'I'm In Love With The Ooo Ooo Man', Miss Pamela's paean
of love for Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf. Don Preston was
brought in to help them with arrangements for their recording
debut. As Miss Pamela noted, "We had serious trouble harmonis-
ing, so we all sang together like a grade-school choir, which didn't
faze Frank - he thought of us as a living, breathing documentary."12
The Mothers rhythm section provided backing tracks for the
GTOs album, which got its tide, Permanent Damage, from Miss
Mercy's physical status. She and Miss Christine and Miss Cinderella
had taken up residence at the Landmark Hotel and were shooting
heroin in Room 229. When Frank found out, he put their album
on indefinite hold. The girls featured in the centre spread of the
February 15 Rolling Stone - "The Groupies" issue. "The act they
debuted at the Shrine Exposition Hall here a few weeks ago was
beautifully choreographed," the article ended, "and so what if one
of the Mothers thinks they're astonishingly flat, can't carry a tune in
a bucket."13
Elsewhere in the issue, Frank gave his assessment of road ladies:
"New York groupies are basically New York chicks. They're
snobbish and uptight — they think they're big. San Francisco
groupies are OK, but they think there's nothing happening outside
San Francisco. LA groupies are without doubt the best — the most
aggressive and the best fucks, and the only drawback is the incredi-
bly high rate of venereal disease." Bands travelled with the neces-
sary preventive medicines. "It's sort of take your choice," Frank
instructed. "Cuprex burns something awful; it'll take the skin right
off. But A-200 smells something fierce."14
The magazine noted that Frank had presented The Groupie Papers
to Stein & Day. "They asked me to write a political book," he said.
"I couldn't get into that, and I had a January 1 deadline. So I did
the groupie book. I wonder what their first impression was." He
also expressed the opinion that pop music had done more for oral
intercourse than anything else that had ever happened, "and vice
versa".15
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RIGHT THERE
The Mothers put that proposition to the test in February, with an
East Coast tour from The Ark in Boston down to Thee Image in
Miami and recording sessions at Miami's Criteria Studios and A&R
Studios in New York. 'My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama' was
cut at both locations and 'Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue', later
released on Weasels Ripped My Flesh, came from the New York
session.
On the road, sets contained staples such as 'Trouble Every Day',
'Let's Make The Water Turn Black', 'Oh No', and 'Plastic People',
as well as 'Charles Ives' (of which more anon) and themes from
Frank's score for Run Home Slow. Lowell George got to sing oldies
like 'Here Lies Love' — "a minor-key blues on which we did
basically the same arrangement as the record." The original by Mr
Undertaker was one side of the Music City single that featured
'WPLJ' by the Four Deuces. Sometimes Frank would leap on a
drumkit to do battle with Art Tripp while Jimmy Carl Black kept
time.
Every night, he'd conduct spontaneous improvisations, some-
times, as on 'Right There', to the accompanying gasps of one of
Bunk Gardner's night partners. Years later, with titles such as 'You
Call That Music', 'Proto-Minimalism', 'Chocolate Halvah' and
'Underground Freak-Out Music', these would turn up on various
volumes of You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, a prophetic
title whose significance only became clear when the series was
almost over. Then again, a concert might start with what Frank
called "a chamber piece for electric piano and drums" like that on
YCDTOSA 5, based on a 'module' of 'Bogus Pomp'. Or Ian
Underwood might sit down to play Mozart's Piano Sonata in
Bflat.
Relatively little of releaseable quality exists from this period.
"There wasn't that much recording going on at that time," Frank
told me. "Today, you take it for granted that you can take a little
pocket cassette machine with you and bootleg yourself anyplace.
But portable recording gear at that time didn't exist. So, if you
were going to make a recording someplace, you really had to make
some special arrangements to do it."
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Frank Zappa
All this was abstruse fare for the Mothers' audiences, whacked
out and weaned on Cream, Hendrix and Vanilla Fudge. Although
band members appeared to be cranking up for standard rock
emotion overload, their playing never succumbed to Pied Piper
simplicity. Larry Kart witnessed the phenomenon: "Zappa would
stomp off a number that had 'Watch Out! Explosion Ahead!'
written all over it, and the people around me would murmur,
'Yeah', and a blank look of anticipated ecstasy would settle on
their faces. By the end of the piece no explosion had occurred
and they looked vaguely bewildered, although they applauded, of
course. l0
Uncle Meat was issued in April 1969 in a lavish package, includ-
ing a 12-page booklet with Cal Schenkel cartoons on the front and
back covers. On the front, a cherry-flavoured jelly in the shape of a
roadster was chasing the Mothers, while on the back in a rear-view,
the roadster, incorporating the Mt Rushmore monument, was
attacking the Vatican. Inside was a scenario for an Uncle Meat film
that never got made, lead scores for 'Uncle Meat' and 'King Kong',
and story-boards of government troops opening fire on a mutant
monster vegetable. There was a diagram of a "Doll Foot As Young
Rifle Showing Mu Meson Voluptuizer" and of its application to
the rear end of a startled girafFe while it was singing lines from
Captain Beefheart's 'Moonlight On Vermont'. Two photographs
portrayed the same utensil deputising for a vibrator, nuzzling the
chin of an appreciative female. A speech bubble introduced the
immortal words, "torch stroking Fast N' Bulbous".
MGM/Verve chose the same month to release Mothermania, the
first and only anthology prepared by Frank. Once again, concep-
tual continuity was served; Schenkel's gruesome dentistry on Meat's
cover was echoed by the inside spread of dubious embouchures in
Mothermania's gatefold sleeve. The record became collectable since
Frank had slipped in an uncensored version of 'Mother People'
while no one was listening and 'Idiot Bastard Son' was a radically
different mix.
The first Straight albums also began to appear: Alice Cooper's
Pretties For You, its cover a painting by Ed Beardsley; Farewell
Aldebaran by Judy Henske and husband Jerry Yester (late of the
Modern Folk Quartet); and Trout Mask Replica, the brilliant double
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Our Bizarre Relationship
album by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. During the album,
Don Vliet satisfied those of an analytical bent: 'A squid eating
dough in a polyethylene bag is fast n' bulbous. Got me?'
FROWNLAND
Since collaborating in the Soots and other Cucamonga confections,
Beefheart had recorded for A&M, Buddha and Blue Thumb, been
hailed as a true original and sold fewer records because of it.
General opinion was that his previous album, Strictly Personal,
recorded in the last week of April 1968 at Sunset Sound, had been
violated by producer Bob Krasnow, who reacted to the Captain's
surreal word pictures by twirling every knob on the mixing desk he
could reach. Protectors of Beefheart's Grail pronounced it shoddy
goods but some liked it. One thing was certain, its creator, away on
tour, had had no control over the presentation of his work. The
capper came when the money ran out and his band deserted him in
the middle of the European leg of the tour.
Beefheart returned to Lancaster to start again. He and Frank are
supposed to have run across one another at a Kentucky Fried
Chicken stand soon after Straight's inception. They reached an
agreement and Beefheart set about putting together a new Magic
Band. "He told me that he would give me complete freedom, as far
as freedom goes," Beefheart told Ben Edmunds. "When another
man tells me that he'll give me complete freedom, all I can think is
that he's in a cage. But since he was in a cage, I thought maybe I
could run around the outside and play a little bit."17
Over the years, legends have left their accretions on the truth of
what happened next. Beefheart said that he wrote almost all of
Trout Mask's 28 songs in one eight-hour stint with a piano and a
tape recorder - and it wouldn't have taken that long if he'd been
able to play the piano. Then followed some six months while every
note of every arrangement was taught to his musicians, Zoot Horn
Rollo (Bill Harkleroad), Antennae Jimmy Semens (Jeff Cotton),
The Mascara Snake (his cousin, Victor Haydon), Rockette Morton
(Mark Boston) and Drumbo (John French).
In a suspicious echo of their composition, the songs are said to
have been recorded in another eight-hour session. "Dick Kunc
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Frank Zappa
(the engineer) wasn't happy with the fact that we weren't given
enough time," Beefheart said. "He did the majority of the produc-
ing and everything. I think that Frank was trying to stay out of my
way, actually. The band played straight through on all the cuts in
one night. It took them four hours to do the entire album. We
didn't use overdubs or anything."18
Frank's memories of the experience, however long it took, were
substantially different. "The original plan for the album was to do it
like an ethnic field recording," he told Matt Groening. "He and his
group lived in a house out in (San Fernando) Valley, so I wanted to
take a portable rig and record the band in the house, and use the
different rooms in the house as isolation — very slight. The vocals
get done in the bathroom. The drums are set up in the living room.
The horn gets played in the garden, all this stuff. And we went over
there and set it up, and did tracks that way. I thought they sounded
good but suddenly he was of the opinion that I was just trying to be
a cheapskate producer, and not do any studio time."19
When Nigel Leigh asked what he thought he'd brought to the
album, Frank's reply was initially succinct: "Tolerance." Pressed
for further comment, he continued, "That was difficult to produce
because you couldn't explain, from a technical standpoint, any-
thing to Don. You couldn't tell him why things ought to be such
and such a way. And it seemed to me that if he was going to create
a unique object, that the easiest thing for me to do was keep my
mouth shut as much as possible, and just let him do whatever he
wanted to do, whether I thought it was wrong or not. Like cover-
ing the cymbals and drums with cardboard and overdubbing his
vocals with no ear phones, hearing only vague leakage through the
studio window, rendering him only slightly in sync with the actual
track that he's singing on. That's the way he wanted it.
"I think that if he had been produced by any professional famous
producer, that there could have been a number of suicides
involved. I remember that I finished editing the album, it was
Easter Sunday. I called him up and I said, 'The album's done,' and
he made all the guys in the band get dressed up and they came over
here early in the morning and sat in this (living) room and listened
to it. And loved it."20
Interviewed in November 1969, Beefheart reckoned that the
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album had "a natural sound - as natural as you can get from
amplifiers."21
Frank saw the roots of Beefheart's music in Delta blues and
avant-garde jazz. "You can really hear that influence," he said, "and
it's perfecdy blended into a new musical language. It's all his. And
it bears no resemblance to anything anybody else is doing."22
Some of the field recordings made it onto the finished tapes,
including 'China Pig', 'The Dust Blows Forward 'N The Dust
Blows Back' and 'Orange Claw Hammer'. 'The Blimp' was the
only track that didn't feature the Magic Band. It was one of the
clearest examples of Frank's capacity for spontaneous creation. He
was working on some Mothers tapes at Whitney Studios in Glen-
dale when a call came in from Beefheart, eager for the lyrics of his
latest composition to be recited over the phone. Before this was
done, Zappa lined up a take of 'Charles Ives' and gave Antennae
Jimmy Semens his cue to start. The random combination was com-
pletely successful, even down to the conversation with Beefheart at
the song's end.
Trout Mask Replica was perhaps the most celebrated Straight
release but, of course, it didn't sell. Only critics, fanatics and the
terminally curious were prepared to shell out for a double album of
such dizzying originality. It didn't take long for the ultra-suspicious
Beefheart to fall out with his friend/producer. "I was told by Frank
that I would have, if you want to call it, special treatment, that I
would not be advertised or promoted with any of the other groups
on the label. But somehow, I guess he got hard-pressed for cash,
and decided that he'd round me up and sell me as one of the animal
crackers. I didn't like the idea of being labelled and put aside as just
another freak."23
Given the costumes that his quaindy named crew adopted, this
was a rather disingenuous statement. No one could doubt the
seriousness of the endeavour on Beefheart's part but, as Frank obvi-
ously realised, audiences reacted to surfaces not contents, and if the
music wasn't labelled, they would invent one for themselves. The
Magic Band looked like freaks, whatever your interpretation of the
word, and the music could hardly be said to sound normal. And
then there was the celebrated front cover photograph. "The origi-
nal concept came from Don's tide," Cal Schenkel revealed, "then I
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Frank Zappa
decided, 'Well, why don't we get a real fish head?' We went to the
farmers' market and got this actual fish head, a real fish and rigged it
up for a prop. It was just an amazing session."24
I'M NOT SATISFIED
At the end of May, the Mothers set off on another European
tour. For the first time, there was a tour of England, with gigs in
Birmingham, Newcasde, Manchester, Bristol and Portsmouth
before a return engagement at the Royal Albert Hall. Needless to
say, there was the usual amount of negative publicity. Worst of all
was that Pye Records, distributors of Warner Brothers at the time,
had refused to issue Uncle Meat and die Lenny Bruce album for
their use of what they considered bad language. The baton eventu-
ally passed to Transatlantic Records but they didn't put the album
out until September, three months after the tour, and their poor
distribution didn't help sales.
Even before the first gig in Birmingham on Friday, May 30,
Frank had got himself into the newspapers. On Tuesday, May 27,
he talked to students at the London School of Economics. It turned
out to be a rerun of the Berlin Sportpalast without the music. The
LSE that year was rife with -fists and -isms, the Paris revolt was still
fresh in the angry young men's minds and they were eager to
import anybody else's social outrage as an excuse to be seen
holding a demonstration or sit-in.
"The bar was a very good place, very political," David Widgery
reckoned. "Constant arguments with people always trying to
convert each other. Odd Situationists knocking around being rude
to everyone, a few proper Anarchists arguing with the Trotskyists,
all the Trotskyists would be arguing with each other, and occa-
sionally the Labour Party emerged and everyone howled them
down."25
The Daily Sketch reported on the event, with a photograph of
Frank seated on stage with microphone in hand. "The students,
who for once put down their protest-daubing paintbrushes and
sandwich-boards to crowd into the assembly hall, heard the articu-
late promoter of 'underground socialism' pronounce on extra-
curricular subjects. But they didn't like all they heard. Zappa was
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Our Bizarre Relationship
predictably pro-youth, but anti-drug and, horror of student horrors,
he worked in ADVERTISING before making it in pop."26
The Daily Mirror had an acerbic comment: "America's explosive
pop man Frank Zappa lectures on evolution to London School of
Economics students. I don't like the Zappa image. I like less the
LSE students. They deserve each other."27
Virginia Ironside's Daily Mail article was more clear-sighted.
"Zappa talks sense," she stated, "and in the States, the Mothers, for
all their freakishness, are dug by middle-class kids with short hair
who rebel against their parents. Here, misled by their appearance
and their music which is definitely in the progressive pop bag,
they're heroes of the Underground who are fast getting confused
where their loyalties lie."28
Frank, as usual, knew where he stood: "I am a composer but I
happen to care enough about politics to talk to people about it."29
On the day, the students watched 18 minutes of film, which the
UK edition of Rolling Stone identified as Intercontinental Absurdities
but was in fact Burnt Weeny Sandwich, before Frank took the stage
to answer questions. The students expected to hear inflammatory
rhetoric and wanted to know about the recent Berkeley campus
riots. "I got the feeling from the audience there that they thought
of me as a political candidate," he said.30 "I told them that what
they were into was just the equivalent of this year's flower power,"
he told Larry Kart. "It's really depressing to sit in front of a large
number of people and have them all be that stupid, all at once. And
they're in college."31
"They are not, as they imagine themselves to be, the spearhead
of some fantastic revolution that's going to turn the planet into
some kind of Garden of Eden after they're done," he told Dick
Lawson. "They're into revolution on a carnival level and they
aren't thinking in terms of the best things for the most amount of
people."32 He told Beat Instrumental, "The same kids who a year
ago were wandering round with beads and all that gear are now
yelling, 'Kick out the jams.' They are at the mercy of the establish-
ment when they act like that. The establishment looks at these kids
and sees they are not going to do anything, but if a guy comes into
the office and acts on his choice to try and change it, they are going
to be hard-pressed to stop it."33
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No wonder that Frank reacted as he did at the Albert Hall, with
a rejoinder that found its way onto Burnt Weeny Sandwich and into
Zappa folklore. When attendants hustled fans invading the stage at
the end of the performance back to their seats, bovine voices from
the back of the hall shouted, amongst other things, "Get the uni-
forms off the stage, Frank!" His reply, "Everybody in this room is
wearing a uniform and don't kid yourself," drew applause but
didn't silence the lowing catde.
Talking with Lawson before the gig, Frank defined the band's
music as "electric chamber music" and revealed that five of the
pieces to be played that night had been written on the plane.
"We've been rehearsing them in our hotel with just the bassoon
and the flugelhorn and the clarinet." Later, Frank told us that one
of these pieces was going to be recorded on stage and that if the
band didn't get it right the first time, we'd sit quietly while they
played it again. They didn't and we did.
Now that Frank had moved into more instrumental music, it
was difficult for interviewers to identify his intentions. Music
without words was one of two things, serious or jazz, and Lawson
opted for the latter. "It's foolish, every time you hear someone
improvise, to assume that it's jazz," Frank scolded. "One of the
main problems we've had all along is making people realise that
you can improvise in any given set of themes or chords or basic rules.
I mean, is John Cage's music jazz? - much of it is improvised."34
"The kids are going to be confused by what we are moving on
to," he told Beat Instrumental, "because people don't know how to
listen to music."
Not only that, he felt that few were actually interested in his
music, "which is one of the Mothers' great failings. No one bothers
to listen to the music and I rarely get asked about the music. I think
it's likely that the Mothers will fail and this year is a crucial point
because we are breaking out to music with less commercial
potential — concert music."35
There was more evidence that Frank was dissatisfied with the
position he found himself in. Larry Kart noticed divisions within
the band. He saw Frank as basically pessimistic and the group as
good-naturedly optimistic and illustrated it with a conversation
between Frank and Don Preston. Frank didn't think the typical rock
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Our Bizarre Relationship
fan smart enough to know when he'd been dumped upon. "The
best responses we get from an audience are when we do our worst
material." Don Preston didn't agree but Frank pressed on. "I think
most of the members of the group are very optimistic that every-
body hears and adores what they do on stage. I can't take that point
of view. I get really bummed out about it. Because I've talked to
(audiences) and I know how dumb they are. It's pathetic."36
The summer of'69 had litde to do with love. Frank had choices
to make and no room for sentiment. The Mothers in their current
form could hardly continue; there were now ten musicians on the
payroll, each receiving $250 a week, irrespective of the gig sheet.
That money came out of Frank's rapidly diminishing publishing
royalties. "We'd been touring such an awful lot and sustaining
huge financial losses," he told Richard Green. "One of the other
problems, my attitude was getting very sour because we were
working in places where it just seemed like I was banging my head
against the wall."
Part of that "wall" was the widening gulf between their audi-
ences' expectations and what he was attempting to achieve with
the band. "We had developed the music of the group to a stage
where it had really evolved. We would go on stage and we didn't
need to play any specific repertoire. I could just conduct the group
and we could make up an hour's worth of music that I thought was
valid. On the spot it would be spontaneous and new and interest-
ing. It would be creative because the personalities of the people in
the group were contributing just as much as their musicianship."
But "nobody knew how to take the band, they didn't know if we
were Spike Jones with electronic music or whether it was serious
or what it was. I just got tired of it."37
There was also the matter of the band members' attitudes: "Most
of the people in the band didn't want to rehearse," he told William
Ruhlmann. "It was just a job to them. You couldn't get them to
put in extra effort to make the group move forward to do anything
spectacular. They didn't have any faith in it, it was their gig."38
At the beginning of the last tour, Frank took $400 from his bank
account to cover his food costs. By its end, he was $10,000 in debt.
The end of the Mothers as a working unit was plainly in sight. It
wasn't a matter of how, but when.
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SHUT UP 'N PLAY YER GUITAR
The discontent within the band was later voiced by Lowell
George: "The band at that time was very much like the Lawrence
Welk of rock'n'roll. Frank wrote all the charts. Everything was
very prescribed. There was no room at all for any emotion. The
band felt very hurt and ripped ofF because Frank was living in a
$100,000 house in Beverly Hills and they were all still down in the
valley. Frank would write piece after piece after piece and they
would all have to play it exact. They were hurt by the fact that he
was making more money, but more than that they became more
alienated by the fact that he would overwork and become totally
inhuman."1
Frank and Gail had left the Log Cabin, moving further up Laurel
Canyon to a large house cut into the hillside on Woodrow Wilson
Drive. Their entourage moved with them, including Carl Zappa,
Janet Ferguson, who'd taken over as nanny to Moon Unit and her
new baby brother, Dweezil (named after one of his mother's toes,
his birth certificate read Ian Donald Calvin Euclid), the GTOs,
retrieved from limbo to finish their album, and the usual band
members and roadies. When he was at home, Frank slept through
the day and spent his nights in his still-under-equipped basement
studio, editing tapes and writing scores, surrounded by his record
collection and the burgeoning tape vault.
In April 1969 the band took part in the fourth Boston Globe Jazz
Festival, a two-day event which also featured Roland Kirk, B.B.
King, Nina Simone and Sun Ra. Kirk and the Mothers played on
the first night, sandwiched between the Newport All-Stars and the
Dave Brubeck Quartet. "I met (Kirk) after he had done his part,"
Frank told Dick Lawson, "and I said, 'Would you be interested in
playing with us?' He said he didn't know. And I said, 'Well, you've
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Shut Up 'NPlay Yer Guitar
never heard the group before - you don't know what we do. If you
like it - come on out on stage and start playing, and we'll back you
up.' So we'd played for about five or ten minutes and he came
wheeling out there with horns hanging all over him and blew his
brains out."2
The Downbeat reviewer found it "quite literally indescribable"
before making a brave attempt to do so. He thought the Mothers
"make the East Village look like a Brooks Brothers showroom" but
he acknowledged that they could play . . . "and then pandemonium
broke out as Kirk wandered out and jammed with them for the rest
of the night. All stops were out; Kirk wailed, the Mothers dug it
and responded with uncanny support . . . Kirk sounding as raspy
and earthy as he ever has. Zappa instantly picking up Kirk's con-
cepts and playing telepathic guitar counterpoint . . . the audience
was close to berserk. Wein had to close the curtains, turn up the
house lights and beg them to leave, which they ultimately,
happy-sadly did." He concluded, "That particular set is lost
forever, but Kirk and Zappa are crazy if diey don't make a record
together."3
Wein put together a short East Coast tour, teaming Kirk and the
Mothers with Gary Burton and Duke Ellington. Frank thought
they were there "as bait to get the teenaged audience". But, on a
sultry day in July in Charlotte, North Carolina, the most significant
nail was driven into the Mothers' coffin. "We went into a 30,000
capacity auditorium with a 30-watt public address system. It was 95
degrees and 200 per cent humidity, with a thunderstorm threaten-
ing."4 Worse still, Frank witnessed a pathetic vignette. There was
still bitterness in his voice when Frank recounted the story to me
more than 20 years later. "Here's Duke Ellington, after all these
years in the business, on the same tour with us, begging the road
manager of the tour for a $10 advance. And the guy wouldn't give
it to him. That's like a glimpse into your future." After that, there
was a band meeting where he told them of his attitude towards
"grinding it out on the road".
On his return to LA, he went back to working on a solo album
with Ian Underwood and sessionmen John Guerin, Paul Humphrey
and Max Bennett. Working with musicians who were undaunted
by elaborate arrangements and could improvise creatively in any
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time signature reminded him yet again of the shortcomings of his
own group. I asked him if this had been in part an opportunity to
jam in the studio. "I don't like playing in the studio. I hate it. The
real reason for Hot Rats was to do the overdubbing. Because I don't
think there'd been anything outside the early experiments of Les
Paul where there was that much over-dubbage applied to a piece of
tape. We were using a primitive, maybe even a prototype 16-track
recorder for that. So it was the first time we could really pile on
tracks. I think that that album is more about overdubbing than it is
about anything else."
Interviewed in November 1969, Frank was a little more frivo-
lous. "It's surprisingly easy to listen to. Some people have even
been known to tap their feet to it. The emphasis is split between
the composing, arranging and playing. I play guitar and Ian Under-
wood plays all the reeds and all the keyboards on it - including a
real pipe organ [referred to on the sleeve as 'organus maximus'],
with a lot of special effects like percussion sounds and tin whistles,
which were in the studio."5
The result was a masterful combination of taudy conceived and
arranged themes and extensive improvisation. Ian Underwood
built up whole saxophone sections and multiple keyboard parts.
'Peaches En Regalia', the album's enduring opening track, and
'Litde Umbrellas' (the latter basically an Underwood feature) were
short and accessible to ears unaccustomed to Frank's music; 'Son
Of Mr Green Genes' and 'It Must Be A Camel', though still intri-
cately scored, gave more scope for soloing; while Willie The Pimp
and The Gumbo Variations were vamps for extended improvisation,
the first for Frank's guitar, the latter for Ian Underwood's sax and
Sugarcane Harris' violin.
Don Harris, one half of the Fifties rock duo, Don & Dewey, was
one of two violinists of widely divergent styles featured. He played
amplified alley fiddle, its whining discordant wail the perfect foil
for Frank's effect-laden guitar. He played a backing role on 'Willie
The Pimp', which also featured Captain Beefheart's appropriately
salacious vocal, and took his fair share of'The Gumbo Variations'.
Years later, when compiling the Mystery Disc for the second Old
Masters box, Frank included 'The Story Of Willie The Pimp', a
short interview with Annie Zannas and Cynthia Dobson from
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Coney Island, talking about one girl's father and referring to him as
Willie the Pimp, from the Lido Hotel. "You can see where the
song came from," Frank told Rick Davies.6
The other violinist, present on 'It Must Be A Camel', was Jean-
Luc Ponty, a French classical musician who had made the transition
to jazz during the early Sixties. Ponty had already recorded two
albums for World Pacific Jazz. His producer, Richard Bock, had
played an acetate of Jean-Luc's music to Frank, bringing about the
violinist's inclusion in the Hot Rats cast list. Their interest in each
other's music led in September to Ponty recording an album of
Frank's compositions, and his own How Would You Like To Have A
Head Like That. The album took its tide from a succinct reading of
'King Kong', one of three vintage Zappa tunes, the others being
'Idiot Bastard Son' and 'America Drinks And Goes Home'.
'Twenty Small Cigars' had been part of the Hot Rats sessions but
that version was issued later on Chunga's Revenge.
The principal focus of the album was an extended orchestral
piece Frank had developed, incorporating 'The Duke Of Prunes'
and 'A Pound For A Brown On The Bus'. Frank asked for a
97-piece orchestra but the budget could only stretch to 11 musi-
cians, explaining its eventual tide, 'Music For Electric Violin &
Low-Budget Orchestra'. Sleevewriter Leonard Feather waxed
eloquent in its description: "It emerges not as a segmented series of
ideas arbitrarily linked together, but as a securely integrated whole
that moves with almost subliminal subdety from one tempo, metre,
mood or idiom to another, and from reading to blowing; from the
opening bassoon figure to the demonic closing violin passages in
7/8, it sustains this validity throughout its multi-textured duration."
Ian Underwood conducted the 19-minute piece and played
tenor sax on 'King Kong'; both tracks also featured Art Tripp, the
only other Mother involved. The other significant musician
present was pianist George Duke, then working with Ponty after a
stint with trumpeter Don Ellis' big band. Before that, he had
worked in the house band at San Francisco's Half Note jazz club,
while still studying at the city's Conservatory of Music. He com-
bined formidable technique with a sense of humour that erupted in
'America Drinks'; Feather quoted Frank's assessment, "I'm only
surprised that he didn't happen sooner." Frank confined himself to
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Frank Zappa
writing arrangements, only getting his guitar out for a short solo on
Ponty's composition.
Hot Rats (a pithy phrase first seen in an advert for a Mothers gig
with the Doors and Tim Buckley at the Hollywood Bowl on
Sunday, September 10, 1967) was released on Friday, October 10,
1969 and failed almost immediately, barely entering the album
charts. Lester Bang's Rolling Stone review was enthusiastic but mis-
guided: "The new Zappa has dumped both his Frankensteinian
classicism and his pachuco-rock. He's into the new jazz heavily .. .
and applying all his technical savvy until the music sounds a far and
purposely ragged cry from the self-indulgence of the current crop
of young white John Coltranes." While he thought the "mosdy
litde-known talents" came up with some interesting ideas, Bangs
concluded the album was "a good stepping stone to folks like
(Albert) Ayler, Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor - the real titans these
cats learned it from."7
When the album was released in Europe in February 1970, it
was a hit in both Britain and Holland. Its British success, Frank told
me, was "partly because it was useful to many British shop-
owners." He was in England during the Spring "and every
boutique that you'd go into on Kings Road was playing Hot Rats in
the background. It was like the muzak of Boutique Row at the
time." He told Nigel Leigh, "Compared to other things that were
being done at the time, I don't think that it sounds like a commer-
cial record at all."8
Concurrent with the album's American release the end of the
Mothers of Invention, "infamous & repulsive rocking teen combo",
was announced. Setting aside any personal differences, Frank also
dispensed with modesty. "The Mothers set new standards for per-
formance," he wrote. "In terms of pure musicianship, theatrical
presentation, formal concept and sheer absurdity, this one ugly
band demonstrated to the music industry that it was indeed possible
to make the performance of electric music a valid artistic expression
. . . The Mothers managed to perform in alien time signatures and
bizarre harmonic climates with a subde ease that led many to
believe it was all happening in 4/4 with a teenage back-beat."
In the October 18 Rolling Stone, he gave Jerry Hopkins his
reasons for the break-up, citing the North Carolina gig as the
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principal instigation. "The last live Mothers performance was in
Montreal. The last 'otherwise' performance was a television show
in Ottawa the following night - August 18 and 19.... I got tired of
playing for people who clap for the wrong reasons," he said. "I
thought it time to give the people a chance to figure out what
we've done already before we do any more."
While in print he held out the vague chance that the group
might reform, in reality he'd put a definite end to this stage of his
career. For their part, band members felt exploited. "Frank
borrow(ed) a lot of music from a lot of players that are in the
group," Lowell George, who played uncredited on Hot Rats but
had left before the band's dissolution, told David Walley. "Don
Preston has been ripped off all along. A lot of chord passages are
Donny's concepts that Frank borrowed. Frank's attitude is, 'The
guy plays in my band. I pay him $250 a week, sure I can borrow
anything from him.' "9
Art Tripp and Don Vhet made similar comments. "If he does
make some money, I hope he does look back at some of those
people like Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada," the Captain said,
"and slips them a parcel of loot under their doors, because he's used
those people to get as far as he got."10
For his part, Frank was unrepentant. Had he felt that the band
wasn't able to perform his music effectively, I asked him. "They
could barely perform it at all. Not only that, when they did per-
form it, they didn't want to perform it." Later he added, "Musicians
left to their own devices are incredibly lazy. Outside of sea slugs, I
don't think there's any species less oriented toward punctuality."
But bitter reactions from both sides didn't hide the fact that lack of
money was the fundamental reason for the band's demise. "I'd
done everything that I could but there's no logical way you can
expect any employer to just keep shovelling out money for no
services rendered."11
For years thereafter, Frank had to counteract nostalgia for the
'original' Mothers. "I don't share the enthusiasm," he told me. "I
think that, in an ideal way, the nostalgia for that band is for the
concept of the band - and also for the fact that such a thing could
exist as a touring musical entity in spite of everything that was
going on. You really have to put your mind back to what else was
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Frank Zappa
on the road at that period of time. It's quite unbelievable that a
band like that could get work anywhere for a period of years. I
think that what it represented to a lot of people was the idea that
there's a certain type of freedom that's involved in doing weird
stuffjust because you feel like it, and getting paid to do it."
In the Rolling Stone article, Hopkins enumerated projects upon
which Frank was engaged. These included the GTOs, Beefheart
and Ponty albums; the resurrection of Captain Beefheart vs The Grunt
People, now a 92-page shooting script with parts for the members
of the Magic Band, Bob Guy, Motorhead Sherwood, Grace Slick
and Howlin' Wolf, which had offers from three major film studios
(never taken up); and a weekly television show for which a deal
was imminent (which again never transpired). He also announced
that he was talking to Playboy magazine about the creation of
a Mothers of Invention Record Club, which would release 12
albums of material recorded live and in various studios over the
group's five-year lifespan. These even had titles: Before The Begin-
ning, The Cucamonga Era, Show And Tell, What Does It All Mean,
Rustic Protrusion, Several Boogie, The Merely Entertaining Mothers of
Invention Record, The Heavy Business Record, Soup And Old Clothes,
Hotel Dixie, The Orange County Lumber Truck and The Weasel Music.
There was one other project that would occupy Frank's time
during October 1969, a European tour by Captain Beefheart & his
Magic Band, which he would accompany in the role of road
manager.
DAMP ANKLES
Most noteworthy of the gigs the Magic Band and their roadie
played in Europe was the Paris Actuel Music Festival. By the time
it took place at the end of October, the site had been changed a
number of times, ending up in a large marquee in a turnip field
near Amougies, just across the border in Belgium. It was an
ambitious three-day event, involving a unique blend of musicians
from America and Europe, including Archie Shepp, the Art
Ensemble of Chicago, proto-minimalist Terry Riley and a host of
British bands of every kidney, from Soft Machine, Colosseum, the
Nice and Pink Floyd to Caravan, East of Eden, Aynsley Dunbar's
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Retaliation and Black Cat Bones.
I was present as a representative of The Decca Record Com-
pany's A&R department; Caravan and Black Cat Bones were on
the label and I and fellow producer David Hitchcock were there to
try to convince Soft Machine to join the Decca subsidiary label.
The whole weekend was a nightmare, our hotel was in Lille,
multi-kilometres away, and each night's drive was a voyage of dis-
covery through freezing fog that never seemed to dissipate. Once
there, unlike the audience that resembled a peasant army on winter
manoeuvres, we could at least stand close to the industrial heaters
that failed to warm the backstage area. Several times, Frank's path
and mine crossed. As I told him later, I very much wanted to speak
with him but bis basilisk stare warned me off. I apparendy did the
right thing.
In the course of the weekend, he acted as MC and stood up with
a surprising mixture of bands, with Archie Shepp, Retaliation,
Pink Floyd, Caravan and Black Cat Bones as well as the Magic
Band. "What else was I going to do? You had your choice at
Amougies: you could either watch the green weenies bobbing up
and down in the tank; you could eat the Belgian waffle wrapped in
cellophane; you could freeze to death out in the secondary tent; or
you could go in the main tent and freeze to death if you didn't
stand next to the jet-blast furnace that they had backstage. It was
that horrible. You remember?"
We both remembered the Art Ensemble's attention-grabbing
ploy. "Everybody was in the big tent in their sleeping bags and they
were asleep. Here comes the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the guy
lights a highway flare, they start playing and he throws it into the
middle of these sleeping people. And a few of them woke up
because their things were on fire." I said I didn't know if that was
dumb or creative. "Both." Frank hesitated and then added, "I
think that the real reason that I ended up going there in a cosmic
sense was to finally wind up with Aynsley Dunbar in the band."
Aynsley remembered the circumstances of their meeting later.
"He was compering, linking the groups, but it was so cold that he
wanted to do something. He wanted to sit in with (the band) and
we did about two numbers together. We chatted about a few
things in the beer tent later when we left for another gig."12
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Frank Zappa
Highlight of my weekend was probably standing right behind
the Magic Band for their set. Since Trout Mask Replica had yet to
arrive in Europe, the glorious cacophony sounded more akin to
avant-garde jazz than anything else. There was a ramshackle genius
to it all, epitomised by Drumbo's bass drum skin, which had a large
hole in it, held together with gaffer tape. The ensemble were all
dressed in the costumes they wore for the Trout Mask sleeve photo-
graphs. Earlier that afternoon, I'd had a brief word with the
Captain, along with East of Eden's alto player, Ron Gaines. Ron
introduced himself and announced with a total absence of humility
that his band sort of played the same type of music, which from the
look on his face Beefheart doubted absolutely. The Magic Band
were standing about 30 feet away, in their sundry capes, kaftans and
twin sets. We looked in their direction. "What's it like being on
the road with those guys?" Ron asked. We all looked again. "What
do you think?" the Captain replied.
When interviewed in London the following week, Frank had
recovered sufficiently to pass judgement on the event. "I guess it
was more of a political than a musical success. The festival was
moved around so much that it was a triumph to get it on at all. It
was so disorganised that when all the lights and amplification
worked on the first night, the organisers looked at each other in
amazement. They couldn't believe that it was really going to
happen. But I was there. Six to 12 hours a night, I was there." He
was asked if any groups impressed him. "Yeah, I really liked the
Nice. They were good musically and they've got a very exciting
stage act, too. And I dug Colosseum - particularly Dick (Heckstall-
Smith), the guy who plays tenor and soprano. Does he do sessions
in London? He ought to - he's really a bitch."13
In the meantime, the various Mothers had instigated projects of
their own. Jimmy Carl Black and Bunk Gardner formed Geronimo
Black, named after Jimmy's youngest son and featuring Denny
Walley on guitar. Don Preston went to New York to work with
Meredith Monk's multi-media musical theatre. For a while, Ian
Underwood contemplated forming his own jazz group with wife
Ruth (nee Komanoff) on drums but continued to work with
Frank on various recording projects. Roy Estrada joined Lowell
George's band, Little Feat, which took its name from Jimmy Carl
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Shut Up 'NPlay Yet Guitar
Black's remark about the size of Lowell's pedal extremities.
Negotiations for the band to sign with Straight fell through, which
may in turn have sharpened George's opinions of Frank and Herb
Cohen, and they went with Warner Brothers instead.
Two months after their demise, the Mothers' latest album, Burnt
Weeny Sandwich, was released. More tighdy organised than Uncle
Meat, it took the previous album's emphasis on instrumental music
to a formal extreme while offering fresh interpretations of older
themes. The album was topped and tailed by straight renditions of
two doo-wop gems, 'WPLJ' by The Four Deuces and 'Valarie' by
Jackie & The Starlites. In between was a rich filling which again
benefited from Ian Underwood's versatility. 'Holiday In Berlin', its
theme less turbulent than the event it referred to, had been devel-
oped from 'Run Home Slow', and the extended version of'Little
House I Used To Live In', featuring solos by Sugarcane Harris on
violin, Don Preston on piano and Frank on organ, had grown out
of a 'module' that had been previously known as 'The Return Of
The Hunch-Back Duke'. 'Theme From Burnt Weeny Sandwich'
was a random skirmish between a wah-wah guitar solo and invad-
ing war-parties of percussion. 'Igor's Boogie', a piece for formal
and informal wind instruments, existed in two brief'phases'.
With the New Year, Frank took a break from public perform-
ance. He concentrated on his writing and finding the finance to
finish the film of Uncle Meat. As would happen again, the original
script had gone by the board. Frank had several hours of film that
documented real and staged craziness by members of the band and
scenes of the reluctant mutant Dom De Wild, personated by Don
Preston, drinking from foaming cloudy beakers and turning into
the hunch-back duke. Preston clawed at the camera over a
hunched shoulder while squinting and sticking his tongue in his
cheek, which was an appropriate place for it.
Frank had secured the services of cameraman Haskell Wexler,
who donated a week of his time. They had already collaborated on
Wexler's directorial debut, Medium Cool, which used the violence
of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as the
backdrop for a story about a dispassionate TV newsreel camera-
man's discovery of political and personal awareness. Wexler filmed
his principals, Robert Foster and Verna Bloom, wandering through
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the crowds as they were set upon by Mayor Daley's goon squad
and the National Guard. Frank's 'Oh No', heard for the first time
with lyrics, played over these scenes and 'Who Needs The Peace
Corps' turned up in another sequence.
It was a far cry from that to be filming Don Preston and Phyllis
Altenhaus (once Tom Wilson's assistant and now Uncle Meat's film
editor) standing in a shower rubbing raw hamburger on each other.
The vagaries of scenes like this and Cal Schenkel (as 'Zolar Czakl')
and Motorhead attempting music in the Hollywood Ranch Market,
and the refusal of the original Mothers to be interviewed on film,
led to what financing that Frank could find being withdrawn. He
was left with 40 minutes of edited film that would not be com-
pleted until the mid-Eighties.
HOT RATS
Meanwhile, there were unpublicised screenings of Burnt Weeny
Sandurich. Kathy OrlofF from the Hollywood Reporter attended a
showing in the second week of January at San Fernando Valley
State College. The film had to be screened five times for the 2,000
students that turned up in pouring rain when only 200 had been
expected. In the following question-and-answer session, Frank
stressed that the film would "hold relevance for anyone who is
concerned with social change as it applies to the period in which
we now find ourselves."
Orloff ended, "With narration by Zappa, the film just may unlock
some of the mysteries which have been plaguing Motherophiles
and pop culture historians ever since a doll's foot and a giraffe first
came together at the Garrick Theater."14
There was no such aberrant behaviour at two gigs performed
with the Hot Rats line-up, including Ian Underwood, Sugarcane
Harris, Max Bennett and Aynsley Dunbar. "I wanted not just to
play more guitar," Frank told Richard Green, "but play it in the
context of a stronger rhythmic feeling, 'cos if there was one weak
point of the old Mothers it was the rhythm section because it was
too static. In order to synchronise both drummers they had to be
limited in the types of things they could play so that the beat stayed
pretty monotonous."15
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He'd been impressed by Aynsley when they jammed at
Amougjes; he reckoned his own playing "took off within a couple
of bars".16 When Frank had been in London around Christmas-
time, he'd tried to make contact with Aynsley, leaving messages for
him at the Speakeasy. "When I rang him up, he offered me the job
of playing with him," Aynsley said. "I turned it down because I had
just formed Blue Whale but I thought about it and a week later
accepted. It was only after very careful consideration and thought
that I decided to join."17
Frank was considering a follow-up album to Hot Rats and he
needed a drummer that would do for him at live gigs what Ralph
Humphrey and John Guerin had done in the studio. "The first day
he arrived," said Frank, "we got to work in my basement studio.
Aynsley has a rhythmic concept that none of my other drummers
have had. If I get it off then he's with me and the others just stand
there."18 The gigs at San Diego's Sports Arena (February 28, 1970)
and LA's Olympic Auditorium (March 7) confirmed the viability
of Frank's fresh approach. Inevitably, a bootlegger was present at
the latter venue and an album containing 'Sharleena', 'Twinkle
Tits', 'Direcdy From My Heart To You' and 'Chunga's Revenge'
was soon available. But using studio musicians already in demand
restricted the possibility of gigs further afield. So in April, Bennett
was replaced by Jeff Simmons, who joined Ray Collins, Billy
Mundi, George Duke and Aynsley Dunbar for a short US tour
which ended at the Fillmore on April 19. After that, Frank dis-
banded them.
The following month, Frank was able to realise something he'd
wanted for almost 15 years, to have an established symphony
orchestra play his music. The opportunity had come about through
talking with KPFK's David Raksin earlier in the year. Frank had
been bemoaning the difficulty of getting his scores played and
Raksin invited him to sit in on an interview with Zubin Mehta,
conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. After the
interview, Mehta informally commissioned him to write a piece
for the LAPO's 1971 season. Frank said he already had something
written and negotiations were eventually concluded for 200 Motels
to be performed on May 15 at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion. However,
"they wouldn't play my music unless there was a rock group on the
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bill called the Mothers of Invention," he told Richard Green.19
The Pauley Pavilion was a vast basketball dome with horrendous
acoustics. Two of the six rehearsals were taken up with attempts to
balance the sound. The evening, part of Mehta's Contempo '70
series of concerts, was also scheduled to include Mel Powell's
Imtnobiks 1-4 and Frank's interpretation of Varese's Integrates.
Powell, dean of the California Institute of the Arts' School of
Music, disapproved of the attempted fusion of rock'n'roll and sym-
phonic music. He chose to demonstrate his antipathy by withdraw-
ing his composition while the concert was in progress.
Frank sounded almost awed when he addressed the 11,000-
strong audience about what the Los Angeles Philharmonic was
going to "crank off". He described 200 Moteb as "a collection of
sketches that was orchestrated recendy, the sketches having been
written over a period of years when I thought it would be fun to be
a composer. And then, during the last week, I got to hear 'em
playing this stuff at rehearsals and I saw all the horrible errors that
I'd made. Too late to change 'em. You get to hear all the mistakes,
too! It's not really a great piece of music but we might be able to
get off a couple of times in it. All right, Zubin, hit it!"
Zubin and the boys didn't hit anything until some way through
'A Pound For A Brown On The Bus', which then segued into a
version of 'Bogus Pomp'. The suite continued with 'Holiday In
Berlin', 'Duke Of Prunes', 'Who Needs The Peace Corps?' and a
convoluted piece that bootlegs have identified as the 'Eric Dolphy
Memorial Barbecue'. The rest of the evening became increasingly
anarchic as Frank subjected orchestra members to his spontaneous
whims. During the encore of 'King Kong', clarinettist Michele
Zurkovski had a toy giraffe, minus the doll's foot, inserted under
her dress. Her reaction went undocumented.
There was implicit sympathy for the orchestra in Time maga-
zine's report on the evening, but, it indicated, this was balanced by
the box office takings of $33,000. It noted that Mehta had excised
Part Two from the four-part score, which Frank had completed
during the last three months of 1969. Rolling Stone looked down its
nose at rock/symphonic collaborations in general, dismissing Deep
Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra as a "pompous bit of crap".
But David Felton obviously revelled in what he saw as the LAPO's
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Shut Up 'NPlay Yer Guitar
humiliation. "It took Zappa to break fresh wind among those suffo-
cating old toads." Felton continued: "Mehta and the Philharmonic
were simply new lab toys for his mad genius and they became
better people for it."20
Once again, Frank had cause to regret his own pretension. He'd
had to hastily reconvene an ersatz Mothers, including Collins,
Mundi and Motorhead, in preparation for the concert. The band
toured briefly, playing two nights at the Fillmore East in New
York and Philadelphia's Academy of Music to get ready. He'd paid
a team of copyists some $7,000 to prepare the orchestral parts. "I'll
guarantee you I didn't make anything like that from the concert,"
he told Don Menn.21 And he'd fought the local Musicians Union,
who refused to allow him to tape the resulting performance, even
when he assured them it was for his sole use as a composer. "They
told me that if I turned the tape on, I would have to pay the whole
orchestra Musicians' Union scale."22 In the event, the boodeggers
did what Frank couldn't and none of the musicians benefited.
FLO & EDDIE
In the audience that evening were Howard Kaylan and Mark
Volman, until very recendy lead singers of the Turtles. Along widi
Al Nichol, the pair had formed the group, originally called the
Crossfires, soon after leaving Westchester High School. By 1965,
they were working a weekend residency at the Revelaire Club in
Redondo Beach. They were on the point of breaking up when
they were signed up by White Whale Records on the recommen-
dation of the club's owner, who quickly became the Turtles'
manager, ex-DJ Reb Foster.
As the Turtles, their debut single, Dylan's 'It Ain't Me Babe',
became a hit, to be followed in the next year by no less than four
others, 'Let Me Be', 'You Baby', 'Grim Reaper Of Love' and 'Can
I Get To Know You Better'. As a prime instance of Frank's con-
ceptual continuity, Foster's comment that "I'd like to clean you
boys up a bit and mould you. I believe I could make you as big as
the Turtles," had been a 'relevant quote' on the inside sleeve of
Freak Out!
1967's 'Happy Together' was their biggest hit, ending up as the
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Frank Zappa
eighth bestselling song of the year. The same issue of Melody Maker
(May 17) that announced the Mothers' first Albert Hall gig had also
carried details of the Turtles' UK tour in June, during which they
also appeared on UK television and radio, notably Saturday Club,
Dee Time, Easy Beat and Top Of The Pops. Their success put paid to
the break-up of the band that was imminent even then, and two
other hits followed that year, 'She'd Rather Be With Me' and 'You
Know What I Mean'.
Internal divisions within the band, which operated on a notional
co-operative basis, led to bizarre gigs and publicity, including a
naked photo session with strategically placed fig-leaves that adorned
a November 1968 NME article. Ann Moses' piece was a preview
of the band's latest album, Battle Of The Bands, in which each track
was meant to sound like a different group. Among the names they
used were the Crossfires, the Fabulous Dawgs and the Atomic
Enchilada. But what was intended as versatility merely emphasised
the chameleon-like character of a band that had no discernable
identity.
Dissension intensified through 1969, despite moderate hits like
'You Showed Me' and an album, Turtle Soup, produced by Ray
Davies of the Kinks. In May, they played alongside The Tempta-
tions at a White House party for Tricia, daughter of Richard
Nixon, during which cocaine was hoovered up from Abraham
Lincoln's desk. "We weren't having any fun anymore," Howard
told Rolling Stone, "and one evening everybody came to my house
and we said, 'Fuck it,' and we broke up."23
Howard, Mark and Frank were not unknown to one another.
They'd worked at the Whisky and the Trip, they'd gone to the
Garrick Theater shows and visited Frank's Thompson Street apart-
ment at a time when Joni Mitchell was sleeping on his floor — with
or without Cal Schenkel. Howard Keyless was a distant cousin of
Herb Cohen's and he and Mark went to see him for advice. Herb
gave them tickets for the McCauley gig and may well have told
Frank of their circumstances. After the concert, they went back-
stage to congratulate him and Frank told them of an upcoming
European tour, including an open-air festival in England, a Dutch
television special and the filming of 200 Motels, and asked if they
were interested. Two days later, they went to Frank's house and
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auditioned, proving that their prowess on saxophones didn't match
their tonsils.
"It seemed like a good idea," Frank said to me years later. "We'd
worked some gig with them when they'd been the opening act as
The Turtles. We had a lot of laughs backstage, so it wasn't incon-
ceivable that I could imagine going on the road with them. They
had the 'road rat' mentality. In order to tour, you really have to
have a special mentality. No matter how good a player is, if he
doesn't have that 'road rat' sense, he'll die out there. I've learned
the hard way about a few guys that I thought could play the parts
but they just weren't 'readable'. They couldn't stand the pressure
and the isolation and they cracked up and I had to send them
home."
Since the Turtles were being sued, individually and collectively,
by their record company, Howard and Mark were unable to work
under their own names, so Frank's offer represented a very accept-
able compromise. Even so, they weren't exactly prepared for the
difficulty of the task they took on. Both were more or less
pitch-perfect singers but they weren't accustomed to the precision
required by Frank's arrangements. "Frank demanded something of
us that we had never really experienced in rock'n'roll," Mark told
Co de Kloet, "which was fitting ourselves into a band, not just as
singers, but as musicians using our voices as musical instruments.
"This was a process that took hours and hours and hours of
rehearsal time, and that was something that Frank never had any
problem with ... it demanded learning notes, and singing those
exact notes, or they wouldn't fit with single notes being hit by a
piano, a saxophone, a guitar and a bass . . . Those were notes that
we had to sing out of our mouths the same way every time or it
would sound wrong, because of what everybody else was playing."24
The intensively rehearsed group flew to Europe and recorded
the Dutch TV documentary on Thursday, June 18. Two days later,
they arrived in London and played what Friends magazine described
as "a late and somewhat unsatisfactory set" at the Speakeasy. For
what Frank must have regarded as a public rehearsal, George Duke
and Aynsley Dunbar had to use the equipment of the band booked
that night, Aquila. The reporter was impressed by Aynsley's
dramatic improvement as a drummer. "His work is more fluid and
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Frank Zappa
he is to a large extent the sweaty driving force of the band, while
Zappa is the delicate finger-tipped dictator.
"The set began with what is basically the Rats, without Sugar-
cane Harris' lunatic violin . . . and later they were joined by the
two ex-Turtles. Instead of getting lighter the music became more
intense and strained as they searched for the right combinations."25
Some of these were obviously found, for the band spent most of
the following week recording in Trident Studios with engineer
Roy Thomas Baker. From these sessions and others at The Record
Plant in Hollywood came six of the ten tracks that made up
Chunga's Revenge.
The Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music was held at the
Bath & West Showground in Shepton Mallet. Eleven acts, includ-
ing Fairport Convention, Colosseum, Johnny Winter, Steppen-
wolf, John MayaU, Canned Heat and Pink Floyd, were to perform
during 12 hours of Saturday, June 27, with a further ten, the
Mothers, the Moody Blues, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin,
Santana and the Byrds among them, on Sunday. One of the acts I
was producing, The Keef Hartley Band, played early on the first
day and I took up position in the stockade built behind the stage.
Things rapidly got out of hand. There was a carnival atmosphere
in the stockade that sunny Saturday afternoon; the members of
Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green with flowing beard and floor-length
kaftan, processed across the greensward and "an awful lot of dope"
was smoked. On stage, road crews struggled to break down and
build each group's gear and the timetable was abandoned sometime
after dark. I woke from a cramped sleep in my hired station wagon
to hear Canned Heat performing at four o'clock in the morning.
The Mothers were scheduled to play at 6.40 pm on Sunday but
appeared somewhat earlier. My chemically josded brain took in
litde of their set, beyond recognising 'Holiday In Berlin' in its vocal
version and being unaccustomed to the air of vaudeville that clung
to many of the songs. This was a new Zappa for whom most of us
were unprepared.
"When we played the Bath Festival the group had been together
about 20 days," Frank said six months later, "ten days of which was
rehearsal, and the group hadn't really got together psychologically
and the personalities still hadn't meshed in."26
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Even so, Peter Cole of the Evening News thought the Mothers
were "one of the few bands which really brought (the Festival) to
life. The reformed Mothers, which include the British drummer
Aynsley Dunbar, have a more direct sound now. It is still very
complex in structure but its appeal must be wider because of its
more commercial sound." Cole asked Frank about his work pro-
ducing other artists. "In general I've had really horrible personal
experiences producing other acts," he said. "You try to do the best
thing you can in a very difficult situation. If the artist has his own
creative talent, the best thing you can do is stay right out of his way
and let his music get on to the record the way he wants it to be.
"In which case, the artist takes 100 per cent responsibility for the
success or failure of his music. So it's distressing when they come
back to you saying, 'WHY didn't I make $200 million from that
record? You produced it.' "27
The unnamed subject of this statement was Captain Beefheart, as
became clear in the conversation he then had with Richard Green
and Allan McDougall. "I'm now Beefheart's biggest enemy, it
seems. He just don't talk to me anymore . . . (He) asked me to
assemble a bluesy, commercial album because he wanted to earn
some money. So, I got a whole set together for him, and the next
thing I know he hates me for selling-out to commerciality or
something ... I think Don is fantastic but he's un-marketable." He
was in better humour when asked about 200 Motels and Zubin
Mehta: "Oh, that went along just fine, but Zubin is really the pub-
licity-seeking, would-be playboy image. Wants to be a big star
with all the kids."28
His orchestra had its eye on the main chance, too. "About a year
after I did that concert with the LA Philharmonic," Frank later told
Matt Resnicoff, "they said they would like to have me write a
two-piano concerto and they would give it the world premiere. I
said, 'Oh, that's really very nice of you.' They said, 'Yeah, but we
want you to buy us two grand pianos.' And that was the last thing I
had to do with the LA Phil, OK? Why pick on me? 'Cos I'm in
rock'n'roll? What, you think I should go out and spend $100,000
to get you a pair of Bosendorfers, so that you'll do two rehearsals
and play my two-piano concerto? Go fuck yourself."29
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9
WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH
The original Mothers' swansong, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, was
released in August, 1970. This was yet another compilation from
the unrealised 12-record set, consisting of both studio and live
recordings. Some tides, like 'Oh No' and 'The Orange County
Lumber Truck', were familiar, as was the improvised texture of
'Didja Get Any Onya' and 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A
Sexually Aroused Gas Mask'. In this context, the exposed blues
roots of 'Direcdy From My Heart To You', sung and scraped by
Sugarcane Harris, portrayed stark simplicity when placed alongside
'Dwarf Nebula Processional March & Dwarf Nebula' and 'Eric
Dolphy Memorial Barbecue'. The album tide proved apposite for
what was two minutes of glorious undigested feedback from the
end of the Mothers' Birmingham gig on May 30, 1969.
It also gave aural enhancement to a cover illustration that alien-
ated and amused in equal measure. It had been painted by Neon
Park (real name, Martin Muller), a poster artist working with the
Family Dog in San Francisco. The inspiration came from the cover
of the September 1956 edition of Man's Life, which depicted a man
naked to the waist and standing in a river, being attacked by a
number of small reddish-brown flesh-eating mammals. Frank's
challenge was to come up with an even more gruesome picture, for
which Park would be paid $250.
Twenty-one years later, Rolling Stone chose it as number 30 in its
special issue devoted to The 100 Greatest Album Covers Of All
Time. It seems no one at Warner Brothers liked it, although they
were finally convinced that their corporate image wouldn't suffer.
But that wasn't the end of it. "The printer was gready offended,"
Park revealed. "The girl who worked for him, his assistant, she
wouldn't touch the painting. She wouldn't pick it up with her
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Weasels Ripped My Flesh
hands." Both he and Frank had no such qualms. "I was greatly
amused by the cover, and so was Frank. I mean, we giggled a lot. It
was an infamous cover, although I guess by today's standards, it's
pretty tame. It's not like eating liver in Milwaukee."1
The release of an album that for some celebrated the definitive
Mothers union didn't help to ease the acceptance of the latest
incarnation. Part of the problem was that the new musicians had a
considerable amount of material to master and they were being
judged by their performance of what audiences saw as others'
repertoire. There were gigs in San Rafael in August and at the
Hollywood Bowl in September and rehearsals continued through
the autumn.
Chunga's Revenge was issued towards the end of October as a
Frank Zappa release. But it wasn't the Hot Rats sequel that was the
general expectation. Rather, it was an uneasy amalgam of material
drawn from at least three musical aggregations. 'Twenty Small
Cigars' was a remnant from the Rats sessions with Max Bennett and
John Guerin, while 'Transylvania Boogie' and 'Chunga's Revenge'
documented Aynsley Dunbar's arrival. As the sleeve noted, six of
the vocal tracks that had been recorded in England represented a
preview of 200 Motels. The seventh was 'The Nancy & Mary
Music', recorded live at Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater in
the summer.
There was an air of haste about the tracks cut in London; the
vocals were buried in the welter of over-dynamic bass and drums
that typified English engineering of the period. 'Road Ladies', 'Tell
Me You Love Me', 'Would You Go All The Way' and 'Sharleena'
were quickly incorporated into the stage show. Because of their
legal problems, Howard and Mark became The Phlorescent Leech
& Eddie, named after two members of the Turtles' road crew.
The inside spread of the gatefold sleeve featured a Cal Schenkel
cartoon which was explained on the front cover. "A Gypsy mutant
industrial vacuum cleaner dances about a mysterious night-time
camp fire. Festoons. Dozens of imported castanets, clutched by the
horrible suction of its heavy-duty hose, waving with marginal
erotic abandon in the midnight autumn air." Chunga had one
wheel on a wah-wah pedal and the whole scene was viewed
through the control room window of a recording studio.
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Frank Zappa
In November, the winter tour schedule began with four days at
the Fillmore West, followed by two at the Fillmore East with
Sha-Na-Na also on the bill. Lisa Mehlman, American correspon-
dent for Disc, typified prevailing opinion with her piece, "Why I'm
Sick Of Zappa": "The music was done extremely well but some of
the visual excitement is gone. I for one am getting a bit tired of
Frank Zappa's cynicism and put-downs of the audience."2
She evidendy wasn't present at the show when the Mothers
were joined by Joni Mitchell. "She is very shy and we had to lead
her on eventually," Frank told NME, "then I said to her, 'Look,
we don't play any of your songs and you don't sing any of ours, so
just make up some lyrics and we'll follow you.'" Timid Joni
stepped up to the mike and sang, 'Penelope wants to fuck the
sea . . .' "When she sang that first line, she blew all the kids' minds.
They couldn't believe it was coming from her. She did another
song that sounded a bit like 'Duke Of Earl' and we finished up
doing that song."3
Boodegs from the shows appeared (none featuring Miss Mitchell's
contributions) and Freaks & Motherfuckers and Tengo Na Minchia
Tanta were eventually included in Frank's two box-sets, Beat The
Boots, released through Rhino Records. No reasons were given for
why particular boodegs were chosen for the series, although docu-
mentary value came into it. It's intriguing to recognise fixture
songs amid certain arrangements; the coda of'Holiday In Berlin' at
this time contained a riff that would become 'Easy Meat', and 'Inca
Roads' was in there, too.
The band arrived in England at the end of the month and there
were gigs in Liverpool and Manchester before they played the
London Coliseum on November 29. This show began with a stage
full of performing dogs, midget tap dancers and jugglers before
Frank and the band arrived. 'Call Any Vegetable' now contained a
monologue by Frank that was the basis for what would become
known as 'The Groupie Routine'. It heralded the arrival of the
'200 Motels' suite which combined new songs with adaptations of
older material such as 'Litde House I Used To Live In', that now
became 'Penis Dimension'. Roy Carr thought the evening was
"Zappa at his bizarre best", although the music "fluctuated between
sheer brilliance and naughty schoolboy pornography."4 He singled
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Weasek Ripped My Flesh
out Howard and Mark and Aynsley (called 'The Silver Rivet' by
the band for his extra-curricular activities on this night and at every
other opportunity) for particular praise.
Frank was content; "The essential thing I like in a band is now
present in this group - there's a group spirit that transcends just
friendship among the members of the group and there is now a
certain devotion to some mythological cause and I think it comes
across on stage." He felt that band members knew that they had
"their whole musical world within which they can operate and
anything they do in there is fine by me as long as they play the
songs. They have freedom to express themselves in a number of
different ways. . . even the old Mothers of Invention numbers that
we play in our repertoire have been re-arranged to the point where
it's not even the same song anymore, for instance we do 'Who Are
The Brain Police?' but it sounds like Canned Heat."5
The tour continued into Scandinavia and Europe during Decem-
ber. When they played the Palais Gaumont in Paris on December
15, they were joined on stage by Jean-Luc Ponty, who took
control of a half-hour version of 'King Kong' during which he
took two extended solos, the latter turning into a free improvisa-
tion with George Duke. Aynsley Dunbar also got a chance to
batter his kit into submission before Frank announced 'the George
Wein variations', which included a manic version of 'Ain't She
Sweet' and Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonies. The bootleg that
emerged from the evening, Disconnected Synapses, became part of
Beat The Boots, Box 2.
DANCE OF THE ROCK'N'ROLL INTERVIEWERS
On Monday, January 11, 1971, reporters assembled at Nash House
in Carlton House Terrace, London, for the press launch of 200
Motels. Frank was there to explain the film's story and to announce
that live excerpts from the film score would be performed at the
Royal Albert Hall in four weeks' time, with the Royal Philhar-
monic Orchestra in attendance. Before the conference could get
under way, he had to apologise for the fact that the previous day's
Sunday Mirror had already run a feature in which he was quoted
extensively on the film and the resources being used to make it.
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Frank Zappa
After all, this was the first time that a film would be made with
video equipment, at that time the sole preserve of television.
"After nine days' rehearsal, the whole cast go into the studios,
where there are four video cameras running all the time," he'd said.
"Then we let it all happen and afterwards it's transferred to film. All
that hanging around, waiting for a dozen technical prima donnas to
do their pieces, is eliminated." That left a shooting schedule of five
days. The Mirror noted, "As this is the time it takes for many stars to
get their dressing rooms redecorated, it's a schedule that would
appear to be litde short of a miracle."6
Given the truculence of Fleet Street's finest in those days, it
would've been a miracle if they'd accepted Frank's apology with
the same good grace with which it was offered. They didn't and
the tone of the meeting was set. At one point, one reporter called
Frank "luv". "Don't call me 'luv', buddy boy," came the retort.
The Daily Sketch wanted to know if there'd be any nudity and sex.
"Well," Frank pondered, "I don't know if you'll be turned on by
any of the actual hairs between the legs. I don't know what you
like."
On a more serious note, he explained, "We're working to a
basic 180-page script. Improvisation will be limited basically
because all the musical material and dialogue is going to be
rehearsed in advance, so that when the cameras are pointed at the
artists, they are going to perform it just like it was a concert." The
budget had been set at $630,000 and 200 Motels would be shot and
edited on video before being transferred to 35mm film stock.
After 40 minutes of sniping and sneering, Frank fired a final
broadside: "There's one sequence in the movie where a girl
journalist in a stereotyped reporter's outfit . . . comes on to the
stage and sits in a chair and begins asking me a series of really banal
questions. At one point, I get up and from behind an amplifier
place a rubber dummy of myself in the chair. Without looking up,
she continues to interview the dummy. After a time, I pick up the
dummy and cast it into the screaming mass of dancers who proceed
to kick it to death until the stuffing comes out of its head. The
reporter jumps down off the stage and begins to play with the
rubber hand, still asking questions."7 With that, he left the room.
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Weasels Ripped My Flesh
200 MOTELS
This was but a prelude to the actual filming, which proceeded in
the first week of February in an atmosphere of chaos not helped by
the reluctant co-operation of most of the forces marshalled at Pine-
wood. The Royal Philharmonic, the Top Score Singers, the
Classical Guitar Ensemble supervised by John Williams, Theodore
Bikel and Gillian Lynne's dancers had litde idea of what 200 Motels
was about. How could they? You had to have been on the road
with a rock band to respond to the craziness of the real thing or the
fantasies that Frank meant to depict. Ringo Starr (as Larry the
Dwarf/Frank Zappa) and Keith Moon (as a groupie nun) had no
such problems. Why couldn't a newt rancher fall in love with a
gypsy mutant industrial vacuum cleaner? How many towns had
they been in that resembled a sealed tuna sandwich? And didn't
everyone steal the hotel towels?
Nor did Frank make life easy for himself when he engaged Tony
Palmer as assistant director. Palmer had filmed Cream's Albert Hall
farewell concert and promotional films for Colosseum and Juicy
Lucy. He'd made All My Loving for the BBC, a film combining
pop music with (often violent) documentary footage, which had
been greeted by the press as 'magnificent', 'brilliant', 'hypnotic'
and 'overwhelming'. He'd also written Born Under A Bad Sign, a
slim volume with collage illustrations by Ralph Steadman and a
foreword by John Lennon. It was Palmer's personal view of pop
music in which he included interviews with various music
personalities, including Frank. In his preface, Palmer wrote, "I do
not know whether pop music is good or bad and I'm not con-
cerned with its musical stature or social significance. Such conclu-
sions as might become evident in the course of the book, therefore,
are yours and not mine."8 The description of the "grotesque ugly
and grisly" Janis Joplin as "King Kong in drag", therefore, must
have been somebody else's.
Palmer took himself (perhaps too) seriously; his determined
clutch on reality may have begun to slip at a script conference
where Frank asked Art Director Leo Austin for "a Newt Ranch
complete with newts, a rancid boutique, a Cheesy Motel, a bank, a
fake nightclub, a Redneck Eats Restaurant, a theatre groupies'
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Frank Zappa
room, a liquor store, four houses, Main Street, a concentration
camp, a crashed Spitfire, the Ku Klux Klan, a Pan-Am Jumbo and
something called a Tinsel Cock Car". Hearing Frank's score,
Palmer pronounced, "Some of it was overwritten and over-scored
but it had pretty tunes. Occasionally," he added, in a barely tolerant
tone, "rock musicians imitate classical music lest they be thought
musically illiterate."
When he discovered that Frank intended to direct his actors
from the floor, Palmer offered to leave the premises but was per-
suaded by producer Jerry Good to stay and supervise the technical
side of things. "Maybe this was the role of the electronic director of
the fixture," he wrote later, "happy enough to point the electronic
cameras in the right direction and push the buttons. I was per-
suaded that this was a sufficiendy complicated job to warrant my
staying with the picture and who was I to complain?"
Miffed at being merely an assistant director, "pushing the
buttons proved to be quite as hazardous as trying to direct the
actors," he said, "the whole operation threatened to descend into
chaos. Still, I needn't have worried nor underestimated the infinite
talents of Zappa, because when we finally got to the editing stage,
he decided to take over that, too."9 The words, "Do you know
who I am?" hovered in the ether.
Hadn't he seen eye-to-eye with maestro Palmer? I asked Frank.
"Well, I'm the one who hired him," he replied. "He had a lot of
problems during the making of the film. He was on the verge of a
divorce, he had the 'flu and he seemed to be a fairly ill-tempered
individual even on a good day. I don't want to be unkind to him
but on the production of the film, he did two things which I will
always remember. One: at the completion of principal photo-
graphy, he had demanded of the producer that his name be left off
the credits for fear that it would harm his career. And then, once
the editing was started on the film, he decided he did want to have
his name on the credits. And the other thing was, in a little fit of
pique in the middle of production, Gail happened to be walking by
and overheard him saying that he was threatening to erase all of the
master tapes of the movie if something wasn't done to his satisfac-
tion. So it was not easy working with him.
"I had a certain amount of control over what got done and
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actually it would have been quite a different movie if he hadn't
decided that he didn't want to have his name on the credits.
Because at that point he refused to even go into the editing suite.
And I'd never edited video. Now, remember, they did not have
computers then. All editing was done by using a felt pen and
making a mark on the edge of the tape, reeling it back ten seconds,
playing it in, waiting for it to lock and then your edit would roll.
And it was all manual and it was unbelievably primitive. And to
edit you stood in an ice-cold room for ten hours a day. That's a far
cry from today's video editing suites. It was like guerrilla warfare to
put this film together."
And what about the Royal Philharmonic, had they been reluc-
tant? "That would be the nicest way to put it. I think that there's
always been, since the invention of rock'n'roll, anytime that some-
body from that other musical world walked into their musical
world, it would be regarded as an intrusion or an inconvenience."
What happened when they discovered that what he'd written was
quite demanding? "Well, that's adding insult to injury. It's one
thing to say, 'Oh, look at this weird guy and what does he want
now? 'Course, he's paying us to do this.' Then suddenly, they get a
piece of paper that they can't really play. And then you compound
that with the fact that there was never enough rehearsal time to
teach them how to play it to make it sound right. So the level of
commitment to a proper musical performance simply wasn't there.
"I know that there are some parts in it that are pretty hilarious.
This is musical jokes, the whole thing is a musical joke. They could
have gone on shooting for a few more days but they refused to.
And at the end of 56 hours, only one third of the shooting script
had been shot. So, in order to make any kind of a story out of it at
all, I had to invent the thing in the editing room. So what you see
on the screen is the result of the people at United Artists saying,
'Well, why did we do this at all? We're not going to spend another
penny on this.'
"There originally was a story and it involved the groupie routine
from the Fillmore East album and a whole bunch of other stuff that
was really supposed to be about going on the road and how it
makes you crazy. But there was no way to tell the story with the
chunks at different points of the script that had been shot and all the
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continuity pieces had not been shot. Jeff Simmons disappeared just
before the film was to be shot. His girlfriend convinced him that he
should be a blues musician. She told him that he was too heavy to
be in this group and he went for it and on the evening of the
second script reading at the hotel, he announced that he was
resigning from the band. He had the best part in the movie. So, in
order to replace him, we went through all kinds of weird shit and
we ended up with Martin Lickert, who was Ringo's driver."
Howard Kaylan took up the story when he spoke with Harold
Bronson: "Now we're thinking, not only do we need a bass player
who has to learn some complicated shit, but he had to act. The
next day, Frank shows up at Pinewood Studios with Wilfrid
Brambell. It was gonna be real cute and we'd just have to overdub
the bass later - we were gonna play with the Philharmonic live, so
it was gonna be difficult at that. So he got his lines, rehearsed with
us, even hung out with us to get to know us."
Brambell had trouble with lines like, "Zappa's fucked". "Finally,
on the last day of rehearsal, he just went screaming down the
yellow halls at Pinewood Studios yelling, 'Aaugh . . . this is crazy.'
We started shooting the next day and we were just fucking
panic-struck. Then Frank said, 'Look, the next person who walks
in is it — what the fuck.' The next guy who walked through the
door was Ringo's chauffeur, Martin Lickert, a pretty-boy type of
about 21 with a psychedelic Chelsea shirt on, and everybody went,
'Hmmm'. He read the lines in a cute Liverpudlian accent, and not
only that but Ringo said that he could play bass."10
Miss Pamela was recruited for the part of the reporter, while
Miss Lucy Offerall and Janet Ferguson were groupies. The GTOs
had moved into history and Pamela Miller had gone through such
luminaries as Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger before ending up in
London with Duncan (Sandy) Sanderson of the Pink Fairies.
Jimmy Carl Black was Bertram Redneck, Motorhead was the
hare-lipped newt rancher and Dick Barber was the embodiment of
an impassioned industrial vacuum cleaner.
Keith Moon seems to have been another last-minute recruit. "I
was at the Speakeasy with Pete [Townshend]," he told Jerry
Hopkins, "and Frank happened to be at the next table. He over-
heard some of our conversation and leaned over and said, 'How'd
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you guys like to be in a film?' We said, 'OK, Frank.' And he said,
'OK, be at the Kensington Palace Hotel at seven o'clock tomorrow
morning.' I was the one who turned up. Pete was writing and sent
his apologies, and I was given the part Mick Dagger was to play -
that of a nun. Mick didn't want to do it."11
There's a desperate sense of mix and match about the finished
film. Groundbreaking it may be in its use of video techniques, now
long superseded, but what was already an elliptical flight of the
imagination was rendered incomprehensible by the compromised
nature of the final edit. "I want to get 'em out there and make 'em
know that they went someplace and then get 'em back again,"
Frank had told Miles the previous November. "And that ain't easy
to do."12 In the end, it proved impossible.
Years later, Frank released a Honker Home Video, The True
Story Of 200 Motels.
THE LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN ARCHES
The same forces that had struggled through the previous week
arrived at the stage door of the Albert Hall on Monday, February 8,
1971, for a lunchtime rehearsal of that evening's concert. They
found the doors locked against them and the gig cancelled. It must
have been a surprise to Herb and Frank but they weren't unaware
of the management's caution over what had been scheduled to
happen within their hallowed portals.
On January 18, Marion Herrod, secretary and lettings manager,
had requested a copy of what The Times termed the 'Ubretto'. But
despite further requests, samples of the lyrics didn't turn up until
Friday, February 5. "We read it, decided that many people would
be offended, and because time was so short asked for a revised
version by the next morning," Miss Herrod was quoted. "This was
not forthcoming, so we had no alternative but to cancel the
concert." She declined to specify what they'd found objectionable
but said, "There were words I did not want to be spoken in the
Albert Hall."13
The Daily Telegraph quoted Sir Louis Gluckstein, president of
the Royal Albert Hall, who reckoned that the Mothers had used
the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra as "a cover for the undiluted
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filth" they planned to perform that night. "If people were going to
produce a lot of filth, as appeared likely according to the un-
amended script, our officials were perfectly right to cancel the
concert," he thundered.14 A few days later, he wrote a rallying cry
for the paper's letters page: "It is time that a stand was taken against
the production of what many regard as dreary and inartistic filth for
money."15 That's an awful lot of filth.
A spokesman for the RPO said that they'd accepted the film and
concert deal, worth £20,000, purely to play the music. If the
orchestra had been required to do anything obscene, they wouldn't
have taken part. Trumpeters John Wilbraham and Ray Allen didn't
take part anyway; they withdrew their services at the first rehearsal.
"The whole thing revolted me," Wilbraham told The Times. "I am
a person pretty much in the public eye and I did not think I could
play a trumpet concerto one night and do this the next."16
More than 4,000 tickets had been sold and the event had cost
£5,000 to mount. Herb Cohen told the press that he intended to
take legal action to recover the money. Not to be outdone, pro-
moter Harold Davison took out a High Court writ against him,
seeking damages for the cancellation and claiming that he was liable
to indemnify Davison's company against all claims by the Albert
Hall.
Many of the ticket-holders turned up and were given their
money back. They also received personal apologies from Frank and
the group who turned up for the purpose. "It's ridiculous," Frank
said. "We are all very upset. It was all right for us to appear at the
Albert Hall in 1968, when the place was black and dirty. Now
they've had the place cleaned up, they don't want to know us."17
Most of the band went straight back to California, Frank stayed
on to edit his footage and Aynsley spent some time at his Essex
home. The NME asked for his thoughts on recent events. "The
Albert Hall is behind the times," he said. "The woman who
decided to ban us is a very weird person, she picked out words that
are in everyday use and said we couldn't use them there." He had
fulsome praise for his employer: "You just have to put Frank out
on his own. He is helping people to listen to other aspects of music
they've never heard. Frank's just taken the plunge. If people don't
appreciate it, they don't, so he'll keep on doing it until they do."18
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Frank worked on the music tapes for the United Artists sound-
track double album back at Whitney Studios in Glendale during
April and early May. George Duke went off to work with
Cannonball Adderley, so Bob Harris came in on keyboards with
Ian Underwood and another ex-Turtle, Jim Pons, came in on bass
for a tour which started at Bridges Auditorium, Pomona College,
Claremont on May 18. This tour saw the premiere of another
magnum opus, 'Billy The Mountain'. It moved east during the rest
of the month, including Chicago, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio.
They were booked into the Fillmore East on June 4/5 as part of the
venue's closing series of gigs.
Bill Graham, tired of coast-to-coast commuting, had decided
that the Fillmore East was no longer the white man's Apollo
Theater. So between May 20 and June 27, he put on ten separate
shows that began with Leon Russell and Taj Mahal, included
Humble Pie, Laura Nyro, Alice Cooper, B.B. King and Johnny
Winter before finishing with the J. Geils Band and the Allman
Brothers. Support for the Mothers' gigs was provided by Head
Over Heels.
SCUMBAG
Saturday night's two performances were recorded for a live album.
Fillmore East, June 1971, released just two months later, had a delib-
erately rushed air about it, prompted by Cal Schenkel's scrawled
artwork (referred to by the band as 'the pencil front cover') with its
bracketed caveat, 'he made me do it'. Its contents juxtaposed
recognised favourites such as 'Litde House I Used To Live In',
'Willie The Pimp' and 'Peaches En Regalia' with the 'groupie'
routines that had evolved from band members' encounters.
"The reason we were performing that is because it was a true
story," Frank told Martin Perlich. "It actually happened to Howard
Kaylan. It was just a process of commemorating a piece of folklore
that was peculiar to the group. I think that other groups that ignore
the folklore that happens to the members of that group are missing
a good shot for preserving a litde history. Because I also take the
position that contemporary history is going to be retained on records
more accurately than it's going to be within history books."19
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Frank Zappa
'What Kind Of Girl Do You Think We Are?', 'Bwana Dik'
(adapted from the opening theme from Lumpy Gravy), 'Latex Solar
Beef' and 'Do You Like My New Car?' (the latter dialogue taking
place in the Tinsel Cock Car was never filmed for 200 Motels) were
tighdy structured but also called for a high degree of spontaneity
from Flo & Eddie. There were other aspects of their 'vaudeville'
act whose visual elements precluded their inclusion. 'The Sanzini
Brothers' was eventually included on Playground Psychotic, its
sodomy trick lost on those that never witnessed it. Likewise 'Little
Carl', the subject of 'Penguin In Bondage', an inflatable penguin
that was launched through 'a hoopla real fire', consisting of a pair
of coat-hangers wrapped in burning toilet paper.
At the end of the second show, which ran into the small hours of
Sunday, an extended encore brought John Lennon and Yoko Ono
on stage to a rapturous greeting from the crowd. They had met the
Mothers earlier in the day after Howard Smith, whose 'Scenes'
column appeared in The Village Voice, had told Lennon he was
interviewing Frank that afternoon. Smith reckoned that Lennon
acted deferentially at their meeting, while Yoko Ono asserted
herself to all those present. Smith was also the one to propose that
the Lennons join the Mothers on stage that night.
Lennon launched into a song he remembered from his days at
the Liverpool Cavern, 'Well (Baby Please Don't Go)', which
without his wife's caterwauling would have been moderately suc-
cessful. After that, things got out of hand. 'King Kong' degenerated
into a duel between the band and Yoko Ono's tonsils before Frank
led them through a series of falsetto punctuations of her noises. By
the audience's laughter, someone should have felt foolish, but then,
true art must expect ridicule. 'Scumbag' was a fast vamp over
which Lennon and Flo & Eddie chanted the title. Mid-way, Frank
broke in to inform the audience that they should join in: "Right
on, brothers and sisters! Let's hear it for the Scumbag!" As interest
in the puerile goings-on waned on stage, a bag was dropped over
Yoko Ono's head. Lennon set his guitar to feedback and everyone
else left the stage while the bag-lady evoked the sodomisation of
birds and small animals. By their applause, the audience was plainly
enthralled.
Over lunch the following day, it was decided that the Lennons
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would be given copies of the 16-track masters for their own use.
The possibility of further live concerts was discussed but neither
party pursued the idea. "It may have been a lot of pleasant thoughts
in an Italian restaurant," Frank said in an interview six months
later.20
"We wanted to make the Mothers Fillmore East album a double
one," Howard Kaylan told Rolling Stone, "shove 'Billy The Moun-
tain' on one side and put the Lennon stuff on the other. Unfortu-
nately Allen Klein (Lennon's manager) doesn't move as fast as
Lennon does."21 The Lennons released their version of the tapes on
June 12, 1972, as part of a bonus album released with Some Time In
New York City that also contained their 'War Is Over' gig at
London's Lyceum Theatre on December 15, 1969. This was the
epitome of their revolutionary phase, combining paeans to Angela
Davis and John Sinclair with Ono's 'Woman Is The Nigger Of
The World' and Lennon's 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'. Despite
Frank's injunction that everything should be properly credited and
paid for, 'King Kong' was renamed 'Jamrag'. No doubt Lennon
expected the British slang word for a tampon to go unnoticed in
the land he was trying to make his home.
Frank's version of the tapes eventually surfaced in 1992. His
sequence on 'Playground Psychotics' was shorter than the Lennons'
but better mixed. They had overdubbed Klaus Voorman's bass on
'Well (Baby Please Don't Go)', edited out band solos and swamped
everything in cavernous sub-Spector echo. The band tracks were
poorly balanced and Flo & Eddies improvised humour in 'Scumbag'
was missing. Frank restored the edits (but deleted 'King Kong'),
redressed the balance and also nailed the final soliloquy by naming
it 'A Small Eternity With Yoko Ono'.
Fillmore East didn't get a good press. Frank's year-long obsession
with 200 Moteb and its depiction of life on the road had crafted a
piece of theatre that was self-referential and full of in-jokes. Other
rock musicians got the point but the attitudes displayed in the
'groupie' routines offended many who would never be 'jooked by
a baby octopus' or 'spewed upon with cream corn'. Rolling Stone
gave the lead: "It may seem a quaint notion now, but there actually
was a time when Frank Zappa was considered one of the prime
geniuses of rock." With swipes at his "arrogance" and the "steady
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Frank Zappa
downward curve in quality" of his albums, Fillmore East apparently
represented "a real nadir. The sometime ribaldry of the early
albums has finally been allowed to bloom like a Clearasil jackoff
fantasy, resulting in two sides mosdy filled with a lot of inanity
about groupies and exotic fuck-props."22
Don Preston had joined the Mothers on the Fillmore stage for
'Lonesome Electric Turkey', an encore excerpt from 'King Kong'.
He now returned to the band after Bob Harris' brief tenure as
another gig was recorded for future issue. The return to UCLA's
Pauley Pavilion on Saturday, August 7 included another stab at
'Billy The Mountain', which occupied Side One of Just Another
Band From L.A., when Zubin Mehta's name was substituted for
Felix Pappalardi in the New York version. Cal Schenkel's poster
for the show contained a thumb-nail sketch of said mountain and
his wife Ethel, "a tree growing off of his shoulder"; more than
20 years later, he plagiarised his own work to make it the cover art
of Playground Psychotics. It had already been lifted for the cover of
Safe Muffinz, a boodeg issue of the band's appearance at El Monte
Legion Stadium that summer.
Like most of Frank's film scripts, Billy The Mountain went
through several changes; the central plot devices remained the same
while the incidental details changed. As he revealed to Roy Carr,
"In the opening part, God decides to make a home movie with a
sofa, a short girl and a squat magic pig. Then he gives the film to
winged holy children who take it to a lab where they don't ask any
questions. While he's waiting for his dailies to come back from the
lab he lays down on the sofa, crashes out and he dreameth a
great dream."23 This dream involves Old Zircon, a "phased-out
Byzantine Devil", whose dancing cloven hooves strike sparks and
smoke which congeal into a number of lumpy mountains, one of
which can talk.
As recorded in New York and Los Angeles, Billy gets a royalty
cheque for all the postcards he'd posed for and decides to take
Ethel on a walking holiday across America. Since Edwards Air
Force Base gets destroyed on the first day's journey, informed
sources in Washington call in special agent Studebaker Hoch to put
a stop to the devastation by serving Billy with his induction papers
for the Army. To locate Billy, Hoch has a unique mode of
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transport involving Aunt Jemima Syrup, sundry flies and a phone
booth. The performance ended with Hoch being destroyed in die
avalanche caused by Billy's laughter. Later episodes from the script
involving a Government agent called Little Emil, who is later
revealed to be the head of die Electric Mafia, don't seem to have
been performed.
"What a lot of people wouldn't realise," said Dick Barber, "is
that each night they did that show, Mark and Howard and some-
times Jim Pons would alter the lyrics slighdy to tie them in more
with the local area . . . They'd just doctor the lyrics up, and change
'em around, partly to amuse themselves, and also to amuse Frank,
because if Frank was in a good mood, it made it easier for every-
body."24 It also got them taken to jail in Virginia Beach, after they
forgot that the local chief of police had warned them not to say
'fuck' on stage.
The rest of Just Another Band contained up-to-the-minute
retreads of'Call Any Vegetable' and 'Dog Breath', 'Eddie, Are You
Kidding?', a Kaylan/Volman/Zappa collaboration about tailoring
double-knits for the portly, and 'Magdalena', a tale of prospective
incest conceived by Howard and Frank. This gig was also the last
time diat Jimmy Carl Black appeared on a Mothers' stage. His
guest appearance on 'Lonesome Cowboy Burt' later appeared on
YCDTOSA 6, in a 'mutant blend' of this and a performance from
Genoa during Frank's final 1988 tour, at which the song became
'Lonesome Cowboy Nando'.
Howard Kaylan talked about being a Mother in the September 16
edition of Rolling Stone. "Zappa has the last word - don't get me
wrong, it's definitely Frank's group. I don't believe it's any more
oppressive than working in (John) Mayall's group, or anybody
else's band. Except for the last musical say and how the thing is
brought to the stage, it's fairly open. It's a well-known fact that if
anybody brought a song to the group, and if it fit in with what we
were doing, we'd do it. It's hard to do diat though." Was there a
contrast between being a Turtle and being a Mother? "If you think
it takes some heavy acid flash or a change in intelligence to go from
singing 'Happy Together' to a song like 'Mudshark', you're wrong.
Outside of the fact that this is Frank's group, the road's the road,
getting high has always been neat, money's good when it's here,
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Frank Zappa
groupies are fantastic. It's all the same."25 The road rat's charter had
never been put so succinctly.
STRICTLY GENTEEL
200 Motels, as a film and a double album, was released in October
1971. The film began an exclusive run at the Doheny Plaza in
Beverley Hills on Friday, October 29. Writing in the Los Angeles
Times, Robert Hilburn found it "a stunning achievement". "It is at
its best when it seems off-balance," he continued, "giving a
glimpse of the way time, space, sanity, get confused during a long
rock tour . . . Some of the film's best sequences are those which
show all the energy devoted by musicians and the groupies to
getting together." Despite its evident flaws, Hilburn thought that
the film had "a sense of vitality and excitement akin to some of the
feelings generated by the early rock records" and that, in the final
analysis, "Zappa has come up with a minor classic."26
It opened at New York's Plaza Theater on November 10. The
following day in the New York Times, Vincent Canby thought that
it was "not all bad" but "a movie with so many things going on
simultaneously, it becomes too quickly exhausting — in actual
effect, soporific." There were "several dozen potentially funny
ideas that are never developed, since the movie has the attention
span of a speed freak." Ultimately, though, 200 Motels was "an
anthology of poor jokes and spectacular audio-visual effects, a few
of which might expand the mind, but which, taken together, are
like an overdose of Novocain."27
Over in England, the 'celebrated' film director Tony Palmer was
busy dissociating himself from his work. He told the NME that in
his estimation, 200 Motels was the worst film in the history of
Western cinema. "I've been trying to get my name removed from
the credits for months," he expostulated. "The story behind the
film is horrific, but the picture itself is a complete abuse of tech-
nique and ideas and, in my opinion, is a total waste of half-a-
million dollars."28
There was a special preview at the London Pavilion on Wednes-
day, November 17, after which Frank and the band hosted a party
at the Hard Rock Cafe. Two days later, the latest European tour
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began in Stockholm and was scheduled to continue through
Denmark, Germany, Holland, Austria, Switzerland and France,
before they returned to England to appear at London's Rainbow
Theatre on Friday, December 10 and Saturday, December 11.
Frank talked to NME's Roy Carr about his film, parts of which
Carr thought were an expensive in-joke which placed the audience
in the position of eavesdropper. "Well, the film was designed for
people who already know something about the legend and lore of
the Mothers of Invention," Frank replied. "I would say that the
hard-core Mothers of Invention freaks are gonna get off on it prob-
ably more so than those people who dislike the group or don't
know anything about it."29
The conversation moved on to how the Mothers reproduced
the complexity of the records on stage. "I was interested in the
juxtaposition of various musical textures — pieces of recordings
from different times - one from now, one from a few years ago. At
the same time, I got interested in the editing technique. All the
albums were heavily edited to make abrupt changes, then we were
faced with the problems of duplicating that on stage. So I devised
the hand signals that would allow things to change, and so we
rehearsed in such a way that it was a question of. . . keep your eyes
open for a signal every once in a while ... so that when it comes it
will sound just like an edit on stage."30
Did this mean that every gig was recorded? "No, but this
formula allows us to do so if required." Frank then revealed that
the Rainbow gigs would be recorded for a possible album. Mark
Volman, also present, described what would soon become standard
procedure for Frank's recordings. "For me that's the greatest way
to get the best recordings. (Frank) is very smart, he tapes just the
tracks in a lot of cases, so you've got something that's being played
in front of people and generally when you play in front of people
the performance of any tune exceeds itself, 'cos you've got some-
thing really happening. So we get just the band track and then go
back into the studio, change it from four- to 16-track and you've
got endless amounts of room to do something."31
He didn't know it but soon Frank would have what must have
seemed endless amounts of time to do anything but pursue a
normal life.
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10
SMOKE ON THE WATER
The European tour was nearing its end when the band arrived in
Switzerland to play in the Montreux Casino on Saturday, Decem-
ber 4. The ballroom of this aged and elegant edifice was also the
venue for the annual Golden Rose TV awards ceremony, and this
was to be the last gig of the season before the Casino shut for the
winter.
As documented by two boodegs, Swiss Cheese and Fire!, that
subsequendy became part of Beat The Boots, Box 2, the gig was
slow to take off. For 14 minutes, a synthesiser drones on as the
various members of the band take their places on stage and begin to
play. Frank tunes up after ten minutes and solos until, four minutes
later, the band moves into a pedestrian version of 'Peaches En
Regalia'. 'Call Any Vegetable', during which it is made plain that
the secret word for the night is 'fondue', and 'Anyway The Wind
Blows' are most notable for Aynsley Dunbar's energy. The rest of
the band begins to hit its marks during an 18-minute version of
'Sofa', with all its variations, in German and English.
"The translation was done by a girl who used to be our
babysitter," Frank told Matt Groening. "That particular tour, I
tried to convince Mark and Howard that it was a good idea to learn
these things phonetically, because most American groups, if they
go and play in another country, make no attempt to communicate
in the native language, and I thought it would be a worthwhile
gesture and probably a ground-breaking thing to do."1
'Sofa' formed the prelude to 'Billy The Mountain', during
which God, along with his faithful St Bernard, Wendell, decides to
make a raunchy home movie with an unnamed small girl, Squat
the Magic Pig and a fat, floating sofa. Sung by Flo & Eddie in
German and spoken in English by Frank, the everyday story of a
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Smoke On The Water
girl and a magic pig sharing an intimate experience on a sofa -
without soiling it - has its moments. Though never committed to
record in its complete form, the section describing the action,
'Stick It Out', eventually turned up on Volume Two of Joe's
Garage, by which time the protagonists were the eponymous guitar
playing Joe and a chrome-plated kitchen apphance adorned with
marital aids that merely looked like a magical pig.
Since this film is directed by God, the special effects have to be
just that. Just over 14 minutes in, as the lyrics depict sparks shooting
out and nebulas being revealed, Frank intones, "Sheets of fire,
ladies and gentlemen. Sheets of real fire." After 'A Pound For
A Brown On The Bus' and a medley of 'Wonderful Wino',
'Sharleena' and 'Cruisin' For Burgers', the band is just a minute
into 'King Kong' and Don Preston is winding his moog up to
sound like a siren, when someone fires a Very pistol and the flare
lodges itself in the ceiling's electrical wiring. Soon, Frank's words
appeared to have been an omen. Mark Volman thought that Frank
felt "his anti-Christianity stance . . . might have played a litde role
in the negative things that happened in Montreux."2 In the light of
'Dumb All Over', recorded in 1980, it's unlikely that Frank's
Catholic upbringing caused him a moment's doubt, either then or
later.
The members of Deep Purple, who had booked the ballroom
for the next three weeks to record their next album, were in the
audience that night. "Within seconds," said Ian Gillan, "the whole
thing was really sparking and the room filled with smoke. Zappa
was great - he stayed very calm."3 Having told the audience to
calmly go towards the exits, he and the band left their gear on stage
and were led through an underground tunnel from the back of the
stage into the parking area outside. "Everyone was a bit dazed,"
Gillan continued, "and we went back to the hotel and sat in the
restaurant watching this beautiful building blaze. Flames were
shooting two, three hundred feet, and the wind coming down the
mountains blew the smoke across Lake Geneva — an incredible
sight, I shall never forget it. And Roger Glover came up with the
idea of 'Smoke On The Water' and scribbled it down on a
napkin."4
Twenty years after the event, Frank was stoic in his assessment of
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Frank Zappa
the hit record that emerged from his misfortune: "It's too bad there
had to be a fire in order to produce the song."5 Frank watched the
Casino burn from the veranda of his hotel and said to Dick Barber,
"Get me on the first plane back to the US."
"Prior to that, we had blown up two or three trucks," Barber
said, "including one big semi tractor-trailer on the Autobahn in
East Germany . . . because a week before, it had frozen up in
Malmo, Sweden." The crew had managed to fix it but were a day
late getting to Odense in Denmark, forcing the band to use a local
band's equipment, "a couple of stacks of Marshalls and a little P. A.
and borrowed instruments".6
The whole tour, in Dick Barber's words, "was a disaster". Now,
with all their equipment destroyed, some of it customised to the
music's demands, Frank's desire to cut the group's losses, cancel the
remaining gigs and return to America was strong. But, according to
Mark Volman, "The band felt we needed to make the money, and
it was Christmas time. So Frank went along with it."7
The gigs in Paris, Lyons and Brussels were cancelled but the four
Rainbow shows in London went ahead, using yet more borrowed
gear. After two days' rehearsals with unfamiliar equipment that also
proved to be unreliable, the first show on Friday, December 10
went well enough. As previously agreed, the band's first encore
was The Beades' 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'.
Howard Thompson, a long-time fan of Zappa's music seeing his
hero for the very first time, was sitting in the front row. "After 'I
Want To Hold Your Hand', everyone left the stage again and then
Frank came out to announce the next encore. Suddenly, out of the
corner of my eye, I saw this guy run down to the orchestra pit, leap
over it onto stage right, run across about five feet to where Zappa
was standing and just shove him. And Zappa tumbled into the
orchestra pit, right in front of me. I leaned over the barrier and
looked down into the pit, which was about 15 feet below the stage.
Zappa was just lying there, prone. The kid continued running
across the front of the stage and got collared by some roadies. And
then the band started coming out to do the next encore. Mark and
Howard were looking around for Frank and then they looked to
where we were all pointing."8
"I remember looking down at him from the top of the pit," said
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Smoke On The Water
Mark Volman, "and his leg was bent underneath him Uke a Barbie
doll; his eyes were open but there was no life in them. Two or
three of us were cradling him in the pit and the blood was running
from his head to his knees. We weren't sure if he would live
through the night."9
Luckily, Frank's injuries looked worse than they were — but not
by much. He had a fractured ankle, at least one broken rib, a tem-
porarily paralysed arm and a number of contusions and gashes to his
head. In addition, his head had been forced round over his shoul-
der, which resulted in a crushed larynx. An ambulance took him to
the Royal Northern Hospital, where he was kept overnight in
considerable pain, since his head injuries precluded the use of
painkillers.
Saturday's press identified Frank's assailant as Trevor Charles
Howell, a 24-year-old labourer of Hatherly Road, Walthamstow,
London El7. The Daily Express quoted the Rainbow's business
manager, Michael JafFe: "The audience went absolutely mad. They
all rushed towards the stage. The man ran off across the side of the
stage but he was quickly caught. He said he was upset because his
girlfriend (Susan North) had a crush on Zappa."10 Howell appeared
at North London Court, accused of causing grievous bodily harm,
and was remanded on £100 bail.
At much the same time, Frank was transferred to the Weymouth
Street Clinic. Herb Cohen was involved in a scuffle with a press
photographer, grabbing the man's camera and dashing it to the
ground. John Morris, managing director of the company that leased
the Rainbow, intervened and later presented Stuart Goodman with
a cheque for £100, as compensation for the loss of his camera.
Two days later, the Daily Mirror reported that Frank would be in
hospital for at least a month. Herb Cohen said, "I'm not able to say
when Frank will be able to go back to work. He has received a
compound fracture to his ankle. His foot should be in a cast for
about eight weeks."11
Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman later claimed the band had
been approached to continue the tour without him. "I can't even
imagine what would have happened if we would have showed up
at some of these shows as the Mothers of Invention without
Frank," Kaylan said.12
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Frank Zappa
The band got to see Frank a few days after the incident. "We
went in and there was Frank on his back, arm in a sling, one leg in a
cast on a sling in the air," said Mark Volman. "His head was
bandaged like a mummy. You couldn't see his hair or his
moustache -just his lips where they had cut a hole in the bandages,
and his eyes, which followed us to the foot of the bed. And then he
said,' "Peaches En Regalia" - one, two, three . . .' We died laugh-
ing. It was the sorriest of jokes. But it was his way of saying, 'It's
OK.'"13
But it wasn't OK. On January 7, 1972, the Daily Mail reported
that Frank would be in plaster up to his hip for the next four
months and that he had to stay at the Clinic for at least another ten
days. "Things can hardly get any worse," said Herb. "I don't know
how long it will be before he will be able to perform again. He's
very depressed about it."14
ANY KIND OF PAIN
1971 had been Frank's annus horribilis, a burnt weeny sandwich
with a filling of hard work encased in two slices of misfortune, both
of them at the hands of the British. Because of it, as he says in his
autobiography, the nation earned a special place in his heart.
While he convalesced before returning to America, Frank was
interviewed by Keith Altham for a two-part feature in NME. In
the February 5 edition, a compassionate sub-editor headlined the
first part, "Forget The Leg A While. It's ZAPPA on rock, porn and
blues". Altham persisted in trying to find ways of bringing John
Sebastian into the conversation until the subject was summarily dis-
missed by Frank. The journalist also found it odd that Frank should
be "an extremely astute businessman", since "one of the 'cutest'
features of the deal he negotiated with Warner Records is that at
the end of their five-year contract, the group get their masters
back." "That's what I call a good deal," said Frank. "You make a
record, and what normally happens is that the record company
owns the tapes forever - it's not your music anymore. I happen to
like the idea of retaining my so-called works of art."
Enforced rest had apparendy turned his mind to some of his
musical roots, R&B in particular. "I still enjoy that music," he said,
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"and it may seem absurd but if I were in the proper circumstances,
and I told the guys in the band this, I would be just as happy
playing R&B. That's because I love it, it sounds good to me. It has
definite musical merit. The emotional quality of the music of the
Fifties, and the feel of those performances - everything they have is
cheap. But the sound that comes out is just great, it inspires you.
When they have the cheapest stuff they come out with a piece of
art at the end."15
In the second instalment, Frank had a tilt at rock journalists:
"The level of pop journalism in the UK seems to be superior to
that of the US, although it may be an illusion. However, neither
are good." Asked if there was an age limit to being a musician,
Frank replied, "No. I hope I will still be on stage playing the guitar
when I'm 50.1 love to play the guitar. It's one of the great physical
sensations of all time."16
A less welcome sensation was provoked by another article in the
same issue, "Svengali Zappa and a horrible freak called Beefheart".
On the eve of a British tour, the Captain was in an unforgiving
mood. "Zappa is an oaf," he boomed. "It was disgusting and totally
degrading that Zappa should do this to me. The trouble with Frank
Zappa is that he's not a good artist or a writer and by surrounding
himself with good musicians and exploiting them he boosts his
own image."17
By now, Beefheart had three ex-Mothers in his band, Elliott
Ingber, Roy Estrada and Art Tripp, each of whom had reason to be
discontented with their ex-boss; they each took their turn to run
with the ball. Beefheart expressed disappointment at Ringo Starr's
involvement with Frank: "I'm not into pornography and so I
wouldn't look at 200 Motels but from what I hear, it's nothing
more than cheap smut. It's not worth getting into the bullshit to
see what the bull ate."18
Trevor Howell had his day in court when his case was heard at
the Old Bailey on Wednesday, March 8. Judge Rigg sentenced
him to 12 months imprisonment when he admitted maliciously
inflicting grievous bodily harm on Mr Zappa. His reason for the
assault was that he thought "Mr Zappa was not giving value for
money", The Times reported the following day. No doubt he'd
been advised that his girlfriend's crush would not be seen as a viable
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Frank Zappa
defence. Eleven days later, the Daily Telegraph announced that
Frank had begun a High Court action for damages against Howell.
"Mr Zappa, leader of the 'Mothers of Invention' group, and his
company, Bizarre Productions, are also suing the theatre owners,
Sundancer Theatre Co., of Oxford Street, claiming damages for
alleged negligence and breach of duty and contract."19
THE GRAND WAZOO
After spending a short while recuperating in Hawaii, Frank was at
home but still confined to a wheelchair. Some time later, he
learned to walk on crutches but his leg refused to heal. Doctors
wanted to break it and reset it but Frank opted to take his chances.
Eventually the cast was removed and his leg was put into a brace.
When it finally healed, the leg was slightly crooked and shorter
than the other. Luckily, he never wanted to be a Dancin' Fool.
Now, instead of directing enforced recreation live on stage,
Frank had some of his own. It was time to take stock of the situa-
tion. Even without the climactic events of one week in December,
this tour had been only a conditional success. There was more than
enough justification to regard this particular phase of his career as at
an end. 200 Motels had monopolised his attention for the best part
of 18 months. The compromised film he'd ended up with, con-
fusing to fan and foe alike, fell short of their and his intentions. The
stage repertoire he'd developed from its elements, though un-
doubtedly entertaining, had had a trivialising affect on audience
perception of the instrumental expertise supporting it.
Limited mobility gave him the time to do what he often stated
he liked best, compose music, but inevitably that wasn't all.
Between February and August, he worked on a number of
projects, some of which, like an album for Jeff Beck, never came
to fruition. One that did was to oversee the creation of an
actual Ruben & The Jets. The band consisted of Ruben Ladron
De Guevara, rhythm guitarist Robert 'Frog' Camarena, Johnny
Martinez on bass and keyboards, and guitarist Tony Duran, all of
whom shared vocals, Robert 'Buffalo' Roberts on tenor sax, bassist
Bill Wild and drummer Bob Zamora. Motorhead Sherwood also
came in on baritone sax and tambourine. A deal was secured with
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Mercury Records and Frank produced the album, writing and
arranging 'If I Could Only Be Your Love Again' and co-arranging
'Mah Man Flash' and 'Santa Kan' with Ruben Guevara.
As for bis own work, he conceived Hunchentoot, a science fiction
musical of which only fragments were ever released. The story
concerns an evil alien female, Drakma, who means to invade Earth.
The final 72-page script, including stage directions and costume
designs, called for a cast of 42, of which 31 were musicians. In the
end, only small group versions of three songs, 'Time Is Money',
'Spider Of Destiny' and 'Flambay', were issued on Sleep Dirt, one
of the three shoddily presented albums with which Warner
Brothers said goodbye to Frank seven years later. The 1979 vinyl
issue used the instrumental tracks but the 1991 CD reissue featured
vocals by Thana Harris.
The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary is the tale of a nocturnal
gregarious wild swine who one day invents the calendar and the
consequences thereto. Though written during the summer of
1972, it was not recorded until at least two years later and then not
released until September 1978. Originally conceived as a ballet
with recitation, the recorded version is dotted with references to
'Billy The Mountain', 'Big Swifty' and 'Toads Of The Short
Forest'. The music is as complex as the story is bizarre, fragmented
with sequences for percussion and frenzied brass and passing gibes
at the hip (a snatch of Herbie Hancock's 'Chameleon' from his
1973 album, Headhunters) and the hairy (Elmore James' 'Dust My
Broom').
Greggery worked for Big Swifty & Associates - Trendmongers.
With his habitually mordant eye, Frank concentrated his scorn on
merchandisers and advertising agencies, investing them with 'the
frightening litde skills that science has made available'. No doubt
he chose to ignore the irony implicit in criticising others for utilis-
ing the very methods he'd used to promote the Mothers (and thus
himself). When he hijacked the freak banner, he'd attracted a
following not, as many thought, to formulate the strategy of an
alternative lifestyle but for them to buy his product.
The latest piece of product, the last Mothers' swan song, Just
Another Band From L.A., was released in May. Because of the
lop-sided nature of its contents, with one side devoted to 'Billy
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Frank Zappa
The Mountain' and rearrangements of 'Call Any Vegetable' and
'Dog Breath' on the other, critical reaction was wary and mixed.
Since the magnum opus relied upon local detail every time it was
performed, references to LA districts were incomprehensible to
New Yorkers, let alone Europeans. One reviewer thought it "very
simply the best thing Frank Zappa and his resident crazies have ever
done," but his was a lone voice. Writing two years later, Charles
Shaar Murray, long a Zappa zealot, thought it "the total triumph of
style and technique over content". "Technically," he went on, "it's
extraordinary, and it contains some staggeringly funny moments,
but it has no real content - presumably because Zappa has abso-
lutely nothing to say and was therefore content to experiment with
style."20
By setting high standards and creating high expectations, Frank
had made a rod for his own back. Apparendy, musical complexity
and wit were no longer enough, Zappa compositions also had to
mean something. More than that, the meaning had to be compre-
hensible to critics and journalists who increasingly were becoming
the protagonists in their work, at the expense of their interviewees.
By simultaneously courting and disparaging the press, Frank laid
himself open to adverse comment any time his motives were mis-
understood or fell short of the precarious regard in which he was
held. He had not lost the guru's cloak that so many still wanted to
drape about his shoulders and any perceived lapse of divinity called
down censure.
As Frank told Martin Perlich, "All I'm interested in doing is
writing music that I want to hear. If I'm going into an area that
you're not interested in going, fine, you stay home. I'll tell you
what happened when I get back. I'll do you a public service, I'll
find out what's out there. The only problem is, if you don't go
there with me, you're gonna have to take my word for it when I
give you my report. Now that's not too smart. You should at least
come along for the ride and find out what's happening out there."
While on the subject, he couldn't resist a tilt at a favourite wind-
mill. "Judging from the quality of the rock'n'roll writers that are
appearing in rock'n'roll publications, I would say they're not doing
quite as good as the people who're actually making the records.
Therefore, if in a hundred years, people want to find out what was
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going on during this period of time, they'd be better offlistening to
the source rather than to read the thing in print."
In another part of the conversation, Frank gave an indication of
the direction that his current writing was taking when he was asked
whether he would return to satire. "I think that satirical content in
music does not necessarily have to lean on the verbal aspect. There
are plenty of satirical things that you can do with a mere note or a
mere inflection and never say a word. It's unfortunate that the
audience that thought that the satirical aspect . . . had vanished
from the Mothen of Invention music was insensitive to the other
aspects that remained in the music. In other words, they were so
verbally oriented that by the time we'd progressed into other forms
of commentary, they didn't go along. You missed the road, boys
and girls."21
In late spring 1972, still confined to a wheelchair, Frank booked
sessions at Paramount Studios in Hollywood from which two
albums would emerge. First was his solo follow-up to Hot Rats,
taking its title from one of the tunes, Waka/Jawaka. The basic
rhythm section consisted of George Duke, Alex Dmochowski, bass
player in Aynsley Dunbar's Retaliation, and Aynsley himself. Don
Preston contributed to the title track and a pardoned JefF Simmons
played Hawaiian guitar on 'It Just Might Be A One-Shot Deal'.
'Sneaky Pete' Kleinow took a pedal steel solo on the same number
and Tony Duran added slide guitar to it and 'Big Swifty'. Brass and
woodwind players Sal Marquez, Joel Peskin, Mike Altschul, Bill
Byers and Ken Shroyer in a variety of combinations, added tonal
colour.
Despite a close identification with the original Hot Rats, this
music had less of Frank's heretofore characteristic stamp to it. 'Big
Swifty' was a side-long extravaganza with extended solo space for
George Duke, Sal Marquez and Tony Duran as well as Frank's
guitar. After a series of opening variations which put complex
melodies to Aynsley's drum patterns, the piece slid into a medium-
paced shuffle that required a lighter touch than Dunbar gave it.
Though plainly holding back, his rock'n'roll roots lent a weight
and deliberation to his continual excursions around the kit, dis-
tracting attention from the soloists he was meant to underscore.
Frank's solo indulged in pyrotechnical phrasing that suggested he'd
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Frank Zappa
been listening to John McLaughlin, the British guitarist who'd
worked with Miles Davis and Tony Williams' Lifetime before
forming the Mahavishnu Orchestra with ex-Flock violinist Jerry
Goodman, Jan Hammer and Billy Cobham. Their first album, The
Inner Mounting Flame had just been issued.
'Waka/Jawaka' itself was another blowing vehicle with solos by
Marquez, Don Preston, Frank and Aynsley. It also called for more
complicated playing from the brass and woodwind contingent as
layers of intricate overdubs provided the piece with a lush climax.
Sandwiched between these instrumentals, 'Your Mouth' and 'It
Just Might Be A One-Shot Deal' featured indistinct vocals by Chris
Peterson, Sal Marquez and Janet Ferguson. She'd taken over as
nanny to the Zappa children, a job which she no doubt performed
with more confidence than she shows as a vocalist.
Other material from these sessions became The Grand Wazoo, a
suite of tunes which made a coherent whole, even without the
elaborate fiction which Frank wrote as a sleevenote. The story,
which ties together the title track, 'Cletus Awreetus-Awrightus'
and 'Eat That Question', concerns the Funky Emperor Cletus and
his fight with the dastardly Mediocrates of Pedestrium. He also
regularly deals with a "grotesque cult of masochistic ascetic fanatics
who don't like music" known as 'Questions'. "The original name
of that song was 'Eat That Christian'," Frank told Bob Marshall. "I
thought Question was better - it's a more twisted concept"22
Cletus allows the 'Questions' two chances to redeem themselves
before they are pitched into tanks of'Undifferentiated Tissue'. The
Wazoo itself is the 'oversize primitive-but-effective megaphone'
through which he addresses them.
'For Calvin (And His Next Two Hitch-Hikers)' is a dream-like
piece with an almost sublimated pulse which regularly disintegrates
into communal improvisation. During the burbling muted trumpet
solo, first a trombone and then Frank's guitar play the theme of
'New Brown Clouds', the finale of Greggery Peccary. 'The Grand
Wazoo' is another extended solo vehicle intercut with richly
orchestrated themes. Cletus has a militarily strutting theme and
terse sax solo by Ernie Watts, identified on the sleeve as the original
Funky Emperor. 'Eat That Question' opens on a free improvisa-
tion by George Duke's electric piano before the staccato theme is
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established; it's repeated with massed overdubs at the piece's end.
'Blessed Relief is the most overtly jazz-oriented tune present, as if
Frank finally gave full rein to the direction in which the music had
been leaning throughout the sessions.
FOR REAL
While these sessions took place, the other erstwhile Mothers pon-
dered their future. "For months and months and months, we had
no contact with (Frank) whatsoever," said Howard Kaylan, "we
had no contact with his office whatsoever. .. members of the band
were sitting around their homes waiting for the phone to ring,
wondering if they would ever work again, wondering if there
would ever be another Mothers of Invention."23 In the absence of
any hard information, Kaylan and Volman put together a demo
tape of songs and began searching for a deal of their own. But when
Roy Carr interviewed them for the June 3 NME, they were careful
to leave the door open. "Though we still work with Frank," said
Kaylan, "we now have the freedom to do exactly as we please. This
album that we're making has been born out of this new-found
freedom."24
The July 5, 1972, release of Frank's brand new solo album,
Waka/Jawaka, dispelled any uncertainty about their future. They
signed with Reprise and Phlorescent Leech & Eddie, on which they
were joined by the other ex-Mothers including Aynsley Dunbar,
was issued in August. Meanwhile, the success of the Wazoo
sessions encouraged Frank to take a 20-piece orchestra on the road.
He recruited many of the musicians who'd played on the album,
adding a couple of familiar names and substituting others. It took
three or four months to accomplish, because most had studio
commitments.
"It came as a considerable surprise to them to learn that they
were going on the road," Frank told Charles Shaar Murray. "They'd
never experienced it before, and I'd never been out on the road
with a group that large trying to perform electric music."25 The full
run-down of the Grand Wazoo orchestra was: Sal Marquez,
Malcolm McNabb and Tom Malone on trumpets; Glen Ferris and
Ken Shroyer on trombones; Mike Altschul, Jay Miglori, Earl
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Frank Zappa
Dummler, Ray Reed and Charles Owens on various flutes, clari-
nets and saxophones; Joanne McNabb on bassoon; Ian Underwood
on piano and synths; Tony Duran on slide guitar; Dave Parlato on
bass; Jim Gordon on 'electric' drums; Jerry Kessler on electric cello;
and Tom Raney and Ruth Underwood on sundry percussion.
Rehearsals took place in the Glendale Civic Auditorium, the
repertoire consisting of 'New Brown Clouds', 'Big Swifty', 'For
Calvin (And His Next Two Hitch-Hikers)', 'Approximate', 'Think
It Over' (another Hunchentoot song), 'Low Budget Dog Meat' (a
medley of themes from Music For Low-Budget Orchestra, The Dog
Breath Variations and Uncle Meat) and 'The Adventures Of Greggery
Peccary'. The necessarily brief tour of what Frank called 'The
Mothers Of Invention/Hot Rats/Grand Wazoo' began at the
Hollywood Bowl on September 10 and moved to Europe for gigs
at the Berlin Deutschlandhalle (15), the Oval Cricket Ground in
London (16) and The Hague's Hourast Halle (17), before returning
to America for gigs at New York's Felt Forum (23) and the Boston
Music Hall (24).
News of the tour appeared in the British music press in the
August 26 editions and Frank did telephone interviews for the
following week's papers. "I have mixed emotions about coming
back," he told Caroline Boucher of Disc. "I'm still on a full
leg-brace and walk on crutches. It was a terrible break and I've still
got to wear this thing for another two months."26 From the size of
the band, it was obvious that this music would be very different
from what Britain had heard before. "What we really have here is
an electric symphony orchestra," he explained to NME's Danny
Holloway. "Aside from the recognisable pieces which are rock-
oriented, there are two or three semi-symphonic-type pieces
which are of a humorous nature simply because of the subject
matter. But we're not going to have people jumping around on
stage or falling down with tambourines and saying zany stuff -
we're not supplying that this season."27
Both journalists asked for his reaction to comments made by
Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman as part of the promotion for
their new album. His comment to Boucher was succinct: "I think
it's highly unlikely that I'll be playing with Mark and Howard
again."28 He was a bit more forthcoming with Holloway. "I would
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say that the press releases they put out are involved with their own
promo as a group and have been very unfair in terms of the con-
ditions under which the group disbanded. The main thrust of all
that press material is geared to exploiting them as new artists and
partly due to the record company's interest in selling their records.
Apparently, they believe it's ethical to do it at my expense. I'm
extremely disappointed in their behaviour, because there was a
time when I thought they were my friends."29
Once again, it seemed that misunderstandings were rife on both
sides. Flo & Eddie, like other Mothers before them, had ended up
feeling exploited; Frank had assumed ownership of their contribu-
tions to the band's records and gigs. Frank's idea of friendship
seemed to include the right to incorporate the bands' characteristics
and adventures into his material, blurring the line between salaried
employees and acknowledged collaborators. In an accompanying
NME piece by Ian McDonald, even the mild Ruth Underwood
was quoted to devastating effect: "Frank Zappa is a cynic but totally
destructive. He doesn't believe in anything, not even love. He's
just empty inside."30
Further justification for Frank's cynicism wasn't slow in making
itself apparent. At the press conference held on the day before the
Oval gig, he was presented with a £15 bouquet of flowers by Susan
North, girlfriend of Trevor Howell, his Rainbow assailant. The
Evening News reported her words to Frank: "You don't know how
sorry I am for what my boyfriend did. I hope this can go some way
towards apologising."31
Frank didn't know until later that North had been put up to the
'gift' by Ronnie and Ray Foulks, promoters of the next day's gig.
"I discovered the depths to which the British will sink in order to
sell a concert ticket," he said in his autobiography. Ah, the British
again. The tilt was irresistible, even though by then he'd toured
enough to know that promoters as a species, with some notable
exceptions, shared characteristics that transcended nationality. But
only in England . . .
It was lucky he wasn't aware of the original idea put forward by
press officer Peter Harrigan that the Foulks had rejected. They
had publicised their previous promotion, a rock'n'roll festival at
Wembley, by having a naked girl walk up Downing Street to
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Frank Zappa
knock on the Prime Minister's door. This time, the idea was to
have a naked couple play the two-backed beast on the hallowed
Oval turf. On a bed, of course. They'd even considered offering
Susan North £50 to be the female part of the equation.
Hawkwind had been engaged as a support band but on the eve
of the concert, both bands' managements were still demanding to
go on last. Originally scheduled to last from noon until 9 pm, the
attendance had been limited to 15,000. Eventually, Frank agreed to
go on first - but only if the second half of his £12,000 fee was paid
in cash before the band went on stage. Having dealt with Chuck
Berry at their rock'n'roll festival, the Foulks should have been pre-
pared for this demand. Unfortunately, insufficient gate receipts
meant that there wasn't that much cash available. Tense moments
passed until a cheque was reluctandy accepted. Frank struggled
onto the stage and, in Philip Norman's words, "delivered an elec-
tronic symphony, like the disputing of many xylophones, to a
largely expressionless night".32
By the time he finished at 10.00 pm, the Greater London
Council licence had expired before Hawkwind had even taken the
stage, let alone played a note. The atmosphere was tense. "As Zappa
left the backstage enclosure," wrote Norman, "a girl shrieked
something at him and was pushed aside by his black bodyguard. An
admirer of the girl started to attack the roof of Zappa's limousine
with a wooden post. He was laid senseless by the black man. The
same black man had also dealt with one of the West Ken Mob (a
gang employed as 'Security') who now leaned against a drainpipe
with a diagram in red where his lips ought to have been."33
This was in marked contrast to what Frank had written in the
intended tour programme, where he referred to the group's "green
limousine consciousness" and described their staid stage presence.
"The concert will be performed in a relaxed, tolerably direct and
non-theatrical style. Only a few members of the Wazoo are used to
playing popular music or are able to function safely if disguised by
fringes, leaves and tinsel."34
The MOI/HR/GW managed to function properly for the
remaining dates in New York and Boston. And then they fulfilled
their destiny, as prescribed by Frank: "The Wazoo has probably
earned its place in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame (something he
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never did in his lifetime), for the simple reason that it is the only
'new' group in rock history which has known from the start that it
will not be as successful as The Beades, and has also known
throughout its history the exact time and place that it will split up:
after the Boston show, in the dressing room, on September 24. "35
In the same circular, Frank also announced his intention of imme-
diately beginning rehearsals of another band, this time a ten-piece,
and a new repertoire.
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11
OVERNITE SENSATION
"It was a worthwhile experience," Frank commented after the
Grand Wazoo tour. "It only cost me $2,000. That's how much I
lost on the tour. The tour grossed $97,000, and the expenses
exceeded that by $2,000. A group that size, carrying that much
equipment, going to Europe, playing that few jobs in that amount
of time cannot make money at all."1
Three years later, his attitude had changed: "I think the overall
impact of that group would be that it was between pseudo jazzette
and cranial. And the people who were in the band at the time -
with a couple of exceptions - were genuinely boring people. I
mean — I don't appreciate a band that likes to play chess in their
off-stage hours. If you have to spend a lot of time with people who
are interested in their chess-boards and httle card games and shite
like that, it can drive you nuts."2
It didn't cross Frank's mind that drawing clefs and crotchets on
manuscript paper, as he spent most of his time doing, wasn't a road
rat's idea of how to spend time in a hotel room, either. But the tour
had been a calculated risk that hadn't entirely failed, and one that
had perhaps been anticipated by the creation of the streamlined
ten-piece band that as previously announced now evolved from
the larger group. At least the tour had enabled Frank to assess the
practicality of the band arrangements and to consider ways of
achieving comparable results from a more compact unit.
All but one of the musicians were retained from the Grand
Wazoo, the exception being trumpeter Gary Barone, who replaced
Marquez. Rehearsals by the Petit Wazoo took place during the first
weeks of October and the tour, more specifically two groupings of
gigs, began in Syracuse, New York on October 28. Although an
entirely new repertoire had been promised, there was a judicious
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Overrate Sensation
sprinkling of old favourites in new apparel. 'America Drinks',
'Duke Of Prunes', 'Chunga's Revenge', 'King Kong' and 'Willie
The Pimp' paved the way for tunes such as 'Cosmic Debris' and
'Montana' that would soon turn up on the next couple of albums.
There was also a medley of themes identified as 'Father O'Blivion',
beginning with an element of Greggery Peccary and containing other
parts which would later become 'Cucamonga' and 'Be Bop
Tango'. This medley was sometimes confused with the song
'Father O'Blivion', which formed part of a sequence that appeared
on Frank's next solo excursion, Apostrophe (').
The balance of the Petit Wazoo's five appearances ranged from
Binghampton, NY to Portland, Oregon and finished on New
Year's Eve 1972 at Washington DCs Constitution Hall. The latter
was a return date, for they and Tim Buckley had played the hall on
Saturday, November 11, when the evening had been reviewed for
The Star News by Richard Harrington. He thought the Wazoo
possessed "one of the most dazzling, powerful and talented horn
sections" he'd seen "in all too long a time". Picking out Bruce
Fowler, Dave Parlato and drummer Jim Gordon for particular
mention, Harrington saved his fullest praise for Frank: "His guitar
breaks reflect the general attitude of his music —jams built around a
concrete concept, the development of a statement as opposed to
mere technique. Zappa played long and well and, like a magician,
left everyone filled, not with questions of how and why, but the
knowledge of wonder."3
Despite such praise, the New Year's Eve concert in Washington
put an end for the time being to Frank's experiments with purely
instrumental ensembles. Having taken his performance music from
one extreme to the other, he now chose to combine instrumental
and vocal dexterity. To achieve this, he assembled a group of
musicians whose abilities, for the most part, were already known to
him and each other.
Most important was the return of George Duke and Ian and
Ruth Underwood, all dependable collaborators in the past, along
with trumpeter Sal Marquez. Jean-Luc Ponty's violin added a valu-
able solo voice, trombonist Bruce Fowler returned and brought
along brother Tom on bass and the line-up was completed by
drummer Ralph Humphrey. Rehearsals, as usual, were gruelling;
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Frank Zappa
"You would go into the studio at noon or one o'clock," said
George Duke, "and be there until seven or eight o'clock in the
morning."4
Barry Hansen described a rehearsal that he attended from this
period: "(It) was devoted to the meticulous honing of several
especially angular and asymmetrical instrumental passages. The
musicians worked diligendy, oblivious to the light crews who scur-
ried about in their midst, setting up strobe lights and such. Except
for the flashing lights, and the scarcity of music stands, the process
resembled a symphony rehearsal far more than the usual loose rock
session, with nary a beer botde or joint to be seen. Zappa is a per-
fectionist, but what may be more remarkable is his prodigious
energy level, which enables him to be a prolific writer/composer
despite a heavy touring schedule."5
That continued as the new band travelled to the East Coast for a
series of gigs beginning on February 23 in Fayetteville, NC. Con-
tinuing through Durham, Adanta and Athens, Georgia and three
gigs in Florida, they returned via Arlington, Texas to LA where the
now road-tested material was recorded for the next Mothers
album.
After two predominandy instrumental releases, Frank opted for
an album of songs where solos were kept to a strict minimum.
Having stimulated his fans' heads, he would massage their other
parts. It was also an opportunity for him to flex his own vocal
chords. "I'm back in the singing business again," he announced to
Charles Shaar Murray. "For the kind of lyrics that I write, it's hard
to get somebody else to identify with them to the extent that they
express 'em properly." He'd made a similar comment in the days
immediately before he joined the Soul Agents. "I have a pretty
limited range - I can't sing very high, so there are certain things
that have to be done by other people."6
In terms of longevity, Ovemite Sensation contributed a high pro-
portion of future concert favourites. Whether it was because
'Camarillo Brillo', 'Dinah-Moe Humm' and 'Dirty Love', which
Frank referred to as 'glandular epics', conjured up the perfumes and
sauces of sexual encounters is debatable. As it was probably
intended to do, 'Dinah-Moe' provoked extremes of reaction.
Masturbation and 'coming from behind' were topics guaranteed
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Ovemite Sensation
to titillate young audiences and offend self-styled guardians of
the nation's morals. In Frank's words, it became "the one that
really gets the most mongoloid audience glee-factor. They always
demand it."7
'Dirty Love' was less graphic but how explicit do you need to be
when you write a song about a woman receiving oral gratification
from a poodle? Frank kept a straight face when he explained,
"Poodles serve as a convenient mechanism for conveying certain
philosophical ideas that might otherwise be more difficult."8 When
did bestiality become a philosophy? On the other hand, Tm The
Slime', a warning about the insidious influence of television, and
'Montana', a bizarre fantasy about pygmy ponies and a dental floss
farm, though devoid of sexual content, were equally popular.
By comparison, 'Zomby Woof and '50-50' made less frequent
appearances over the years.
The album was released two months later, the first to be issued
with the DiscReet logo. Bizarre and Straight had been wound up,
"partly for economic reasons," Herb Cohen told Sounds. Indeed,
there had been no releases on the latter label for at least two years.
'Reet' was an important component in the 'vout' language
invented by multi-instrumentalist Slim Gaillard during the Forties.
By another fortuitous coincidence, the album was also issued in
quadrophonic sound which was referred to as a 'discrete' system. It
was a typical piece of Zappa opportunism, a label identity with
more than one layer of meaning.
Critical opinion varied widely. Arthur Schmidt toed the usual
Rolling Stone line; Frank Zappa was a spent force descending into
obscene self-parody. He was "tempted to compare Zappa to Henry
Miller, with whom [he] shares a vision of sex as rancid, dumb and
funny. Like Miller getting older, he is less shocking, tape-worming
himself [what!] and overwriting." Reserving what praise he could
muster for 'Camarillo Brillo' and noting that 'Montana' "could
have been a great Mothers ditty,"9 Schmidt quoted a line from
'50-50' and concluded that Frank had nothing to say.
Charles Shaar Murray thought it was "a very relaxed album of
slight-but-charming songs . . . decorated with all kinds of musical
razzle-dazzle" but "certainly not one of Frank's most outstanding
efforts."10 Another reviewer, having expected further tales of the
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Frank Zappa
Grand Wazoo, thought that the album needed a smell sachet,
because it was "all about Buttons and Zips and the furry, vibrant
wonders that lie beneath." Overall, the album was a disappoint-
ment; "most of the time we are obviously meant to be paying
attention to the various and vile songs about all those lovely, soft,
sticky, gooey, salt-smelling, strange-tasting plasms and secretions
that the human body is just bursting with."11 Funny what crosses
your mind when you listen to music.
Noe Goldwasser, writing in Crawdaddy, thought that 'Dinah-
Moe Humm' was "a seemingly misogynist work which, upon
deeper inspection is just a funny, horny song ... It is above (or
below) feminist reproach; its comic tensions embody the textural
psychosis of the super-musical vision, as it were." Were it?
Goldwasser saw the album as the beginning of a new chapter in
Frank's career: "It's as if he's finished having to proselytise and
everybody's already been converted so there's nothing left to do
but gird the loins, enter the breach and massage the musical clit."12
Which Frank and the band proceeded to do. After ten American
dates during May 1973, the Mothers spent three weeks in Australia,
appearing in Brisbane on June 21 and then Sydney, Melbourne and
Adelaide, before returning to Sydney for two more days at the
Hordern Pavilion. Frank addressed a press conference in Melbourne,
at which he floated the idea of a live album from their Australian
gigs. It never happened but it could have, for he included a Sydney
performance of'Farther O'Blivion' on YCDTOSA 6.
For some time, he'd been recording most of the various bands'
gigs. "Starting in 1969," he told Don Menn, "Dick Kunc . . . built
this Htde James Bond suitcase recording apparatus. He took a
couple of Shure mixers, and packed it all in there, and we had a
Uher (tape recorder). He accompanied us on part of the US tour
that year, and would sit in the corner of the room with earphones
on and try to do a mix on whatever we were doing. When we did
the Pauley Pavilion recording (Just Another Band From L.A.), I had
just bought this Scully four-track, and that was the first of the
four-track recordings that we did. We recorded four-track for, I
guess, ten years, nine years."13
The band bade goodbye to Sal Marquez on its return to
America. "I felt bad about leaving the group," he said later, "but we
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Ovemite Sensation
were broke. One day I called Frank and tried to get him to give us
a per diem. And he got all upset, claiming he never paid his groups
that way. 'Not even $15?' And he said, 'No, man, I've never done
it and I'm not going to start. You can hand in your music, too.'
And that was it. I was shocked. I thought he liked me."14
RUTHIE RUTHIE
By the time the Mothers set off to Europe in the middle of August
1973, their evident success on stage and with their audiences had
sent Frank's creative muse into overdrive. As the tour progressed
and the musicians developed an intuitive empathy, new material
was continually added to the set. The individual dexterity of the
Underwoods and George Duke made the complexities of'Dupree's
Paradise', 'Echidna's Arf (Of You)' and 'RDNZL' palatable to
untrained ears more likely to respond to the 'Father O'Blivion'
song cycle. For the first time, Frank had musicians around him who
could realise both the humour and the technical brilliance of his
writing. In particular, Ruth Underwood's phenomenal skill with
vibes, marimba and other percussion brought a pointillistic exacti-
tude to the jagged terrain of Frank's melodies.
"I was ready to dedicate myself completely to Frank's music,"
she said later in tribute. "He really knew what buttons to push,
emotionally and musically. He was a remarkable referee. He knew
how to synthesise people's personalities and talents. That's a very
rare gift. He wasn't just a conductor standing there waving his
arms; he was playing us as people! I became a perfectionist, I
suppose because I had to be."15
In a two-part interview that began in the August 25 NME,
Frank was guardedly pleased with the band's success. "Our audi-
ences are generally larger than they've ever been before, but there's
no guarantee that the understanding has increased proportion-
ately." Irrespective of their audiences' comprehension, he was well
content with his musicians. "You ought to hear the stuff we're
playing now. It's hot sheeit! Lemme tell ya - this band is playing
the hardest repertoire you ever heard. They got some unbelievable
things to do - from memory. With the Wazoo they were all
playing off sheet music."
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Frank Zappa
And there was choreography 'of the most absurd variety'.
"We're playing songs like the 'Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue'
now and it has choreography. We have a new song called 'Don't
You Ever Wash That Thing?' which has some very mysterious
choreography. You'll have to imagine ... all the sheer hurt and
anguish that went into 'Penguin In Bondage'. There is degrada-
tion; there's also perversion and hotness."16 Well, it made good
copy; but all it proved was that Frank was "a booga of a good
talker", which was the gnomic headline of a dwarfish interview in
the same week's Record Mirror.
The European tour was extensive; after dates in Scandinavia, the
Mothers played four gigs in Italy and four more in Germany, with
Zurich in between. Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris followed before
they arrived at Liverpool on Tuesday, September 11. The city's
Stadium was the venue for the world premiere of 'T'Mershi
Duween', the latest fiendishly complicated module, written the
week before in Frankfurt. Two days later, they played Birmingham
and the next day, Wembley's Empire Pool.
Frank was in typical sardonic mood. The NME's Charles Shaar
Murray was present: "He prefaced the performance with a short
rap to the effect that 'in accordance with our long established
policy that "the hits just keep on comin' atcha", we will be pre-
senting material that you have never heard before [loud applause].
However, in the latter half of the programme we will be referring
back to the first half. In fact, we'll leitmotif our fuckin' brains out
up here' . . . One member of the audience compared the show to
being 'bludgeoned into catatonia', while another just thought it
was 'horrible'. Me, I dug about half of it."17
The music papers didn't mention the other member of the
Mothers' entourage. "He is Frank's bodyguard," the Sun explained,
"a rugged, former Los Angeles policeman who will stick close to
Frank on and off the stage. Frank is taking no more chances. He
said: 'Sure, that attack still bothers me. A thing like that makes you
realise just how careful you have to be in this business. You get a
lot of very strange people at any rock concert. And the drugs
people use at the moment increase the risk of a crazy, violent
attack.'"18
The Mothers returned to America for a busy autumn schedule
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Ouemite Sensation
that began with Halloween concerts in Chicago. Most of Novem-
ber was spent in New York state, Canada and New England.
When the band played two days at Toronto's Massey Hall, Frank
was interviewed in bullish mood by Jim Smith for NME. "Nobody
has combined music and theatrics the way I have. I'm looking for
scope in music. My problem is economics.
"A lot of people think I'm a millionaire, and I'd just like to say
I'm not, nor is there any chance in the near future of me becoming
a millionaire. The reason is that the largest percentage of my
money has gone back into equipment. Then you have to hire the
technical people to move it, plug it in, and repair it. For every
person on-stage, there's another person off-stage helping to make it
happen."
It was always difficult, he said, to find musicians with the right
ability and character. "There are plenty of people interested in
playing with the group and there are good musicians among them.
But the ones who are technically skilled don't have a sense of
humour. And the ones who have a sense of humour usually don't
have the mechanical chops. Whether it's easy or hard to play with
me depends on the character of the person involved. Some people
like a challenge and other people like it soft. For the second group,
it can be a traumatic experience playing with me."19
On their return to LA, the band took up a week-long residence
starting Friday, December 7 at The Roxy, the latest club on the
Strip, located alongside The Rainbow Room. Half of the shows
were recorded, at least one on video, for future release. The band
was augmented on various nights; Jeff Simmons sang and played
rhythm guitar, Don Preston drove a synthesiser and Walt Fowler
came in on trumpet. Frank reverted to two drummers and brought
in Chester Thompson on the second drumkit.
The most notable addition was the extrovert Napoleon Murphy
Brock on tenor sax, flute and vocals. On his way back from
Australia, Frank had found Brock leading a Top 40 soul band in a
Hawaiian nightclub. Frank watched a set and then asked him to
join the Mothers for the August 1973 European tour. Brock turned
him down because his group was booked into the club for the next
seven weeks, but told him to call after he got back. Which Frank
duly did.
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Frank Zappa
Brock's arrival brought important changes to the context of the
group. He had a distinctive and flexible voice and struck up an
immediate and overtly warm rapport with George Duke, sharing
the broad and quick sense of humour that Frank had drawn out of
the keyboard player. Their on-stage badinage, which both cele-
brated and satirised black consciousness, contrasted with Frank's
own studied bizarre humour and there were moments when one
sensed that he was happy and relieved to become a sideman in his
own group. But these moments were no more than a fleeting
relaxation of the rigid control which was the keynote of a Mothers
gig-
Even though the evenings were recorded on Wally Heider's
16-track remote equipment, the number of musicians crowded
onto the Roxy's stage made separation something of a problem.
The final mixes on Roxy & Elsewhere lack the clarity that Frank
would later achieve with digital equipment. Each side of the
double album featured a  'Preamble'  in which the origin of
the following song was explained. Frank wouldn't always provide
this service, thinking perhaps like Gustav Mahler that audiences
shouldn't always have a safety net.
As it was, Frank's introduction to 'Penguin In Bondage' was
vague and cryptic: "This song suggests to the suggestible listener
that the ordinary procedure that I am circumlocuting at the present
time in order to get this text on television is that if you want to do
something other than what you thought you were gonna do when
you first took your clothes off— and you just happen to have some
DEVICES! around, then it's not only OK to get into the Parapher-
nalia of it all but hey -." The sexual connotations were deliberately
mystifying; even the stage antics described in the notes of 1992's
Playground Psychotics failed to equate with the events 'way over on
the wet side of the bed' with which the song concerned itself.
Luckily, the introductions to 'Village Of The Sun', 'Cheepnis'
and 'Be-Bop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen's Church)' were con-
fined to more literal terms. The tatter's 'Preamble' ended with
Frank's instruction: "Not too fast, now, 'cos I want to get the right
notes on the tape. This has to be the one . . . and this is a hard one
to play." But it was no harder than 'Echidna's Arf', a fiendishly
tortuous theme that George Duke would record even faster the
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Ovemite Sensation
following year for his solo album, The Aura Will Prevail. 'Don't
You Ever Wash That Thing?' was similarly complex, with the
added impediment of a series of staccato interjections between
solos by trombone, electric piano, both drumkits and guitar before
a marimba cadenza from Ruth Underwood.
One song performed during these gigs and often during this
period was 'Dickie's Such An Asshole', Frank's acerbic commen-
tary on the events that would eventually bring down Richard
Nixon, the only American President forced to resign while still in
office. It had received its 'world premiere' on October 26, 1973 at
the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas. The Nixon
administration had been collapsing ever since the June 17 break-in
at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee.
The subsequent trial had revealed a world of dirty tricks, slush
funds, wiretapping and the clandestine recording of Nixon's Oval
Room conversations. Wriggle as he might, Nixon could not avoid
public revulsion at the machinations of his advisors, performed
under his instruction, or the lengths to which he was prepared to
go in order to conceal them.
Even so, the apparent ultimate purpose of the break-in didn't
come to light until much later. "Cointelpro was what they were
trying to hide with Watergate," Frank told Don Menn. "It wasn't
just breaking into the Democratic headquarters. What they're
trying to cover up is the fact that Nixon had decided to create a
secret police. There was no legal authority to spy on US citizens.
He felt he had enemies everywhere, so he created a programme
called Cointelpro. It was all the domestic spying on political
groups, people he perceived as enemies. And since it couldn't exist
under law, it had to be financed by a slush fund."20
"The money to finance the dirty tricks and the spying on US
citizens was coming from tangential sources," Frank told me.
"From the minute that there was such a thing as a youth culture in
the United States, when long hair first started appearing in Los
Angeles, the people who were doing the spying were part of a
special LAPD secret police unit. And then Cointelpro would be
the national version of that. When Cointelpro was revealed, that it
existed, everybody said, 'Oh, we won't do it again.' Nobody proved
it was ever dismantled.
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Frank Zappa
"All you gotta do is look at the way people were treated during
the Reagan administration who supported Nicaragua, who didn't
like the idea of the Contras going in there and having a private war.
The same kind of break-ins occurred in their homes and their
offices. And whether it was being done by the FBI, an offshoot of
the FBI, the Cointelpro leftovers or something, there is a secret
police in the United States that's got a name someplace and some-
body tells them what to do. And they still work and they're still out
there and they have better equipment than the KGB ever did."
The shifty-eyed 'asshole' was still almost nine months from his
resignation when this version of the song, released on YCDTOSA
3, was taped. Frank hadn't been this blunt for some time, first
calling him 'a cocksucker by proxy' and noting 'the man in the
White House has got a conscience black as sin'. It's little wonder
that no performance of the song was made available until 1988's
Broadway The Hard Way, but the Roxy recording benefits from its
currency with unfolding events. Only a few days before, Nixon
had announced on national television, "I am not a crook," and
Frank intoned those words during 'Son Of Orange County', one
track that did get released.
There were favourable reviews of the gigs in the Los Angeles
Times, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and even Variety. Ruth
Underwood came in for particular praise; the Times thought her
"deft", but Robert A. Kemnitz in the Herald-Examiner wrote that
she "kept up with the band's frenetic pace without missing a single
swat of the gong, and she was incredible."21 Variety was unequivo-
cal: "Highlight of the evening was the Ruth Underwood, Frank
Zappa duo on vibes with double drum sets beating perfect rhythms
while the other musicians supported. Underwood's striking per-
formance was phenomenal as she rushed about the percussion
section playing the various instruments."22
EXCENTRIFUGAL FORZ
Recording sessions during the first two months of 1974 put the
finishing touches to Frank's next solo album, Apostrophe ('), and
material that appeared on Bongo Fury the following year. Apostrophe
(') combined recent recordings with the current Mothers and
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Ovemite Sensation
others that went back to the Hot Rats sessions, involving past
collaborators such as drummers John Guerin and Aynsley Dunbar,
violinists Sugarcane Harris and Jean-Luc Ponty and a final contri-
bution from Ray Collins. The tide track was a studio jam recorded
the previous September in New York's Electric Lady studios
between Frank, Jack Bruce and Jim Gordon, with Tony Duran on
rhythm guitar.
"I found it very difficult to play with him," Frank said in 1977,
"he's too busy. He doesn't really want to play the bass in terms of
root functions; I think he has other things on his mind. But that's
the way jam sessions go."23 As it went, it was atypical of the rest of
the album, which combined humour and instrumental dexterity in
equal measure. If there were serious subtexts, such as seal culling,
mysticism ('Cosmik Debris') and black protest ('Uncle Remus'),
they were viewed through the distorting prism of Frank's laconic
wit. The marriage was particularly evident in the sequence of
'Don't Eat The Yellow Snow', 'Nanook Rubs It', 'St Alfonso's
Pancake Breakfast' and 'Father O'Blivion', which quickly vaulted
into the surreal to the well-nigh impossible accompaniment of
Ruth Underwood's dazzling mallets.
The lyrics of 'Excentrifugal Forz' were obscure beyond analysis
but the title's image could have represented Frank himself, drawing
influences and events into his creative vortex to emit them recast as
original compositions.
Well, maybe. A case in point was 'Uncle Remus', which George
Duke helped to compose and would also include, in a more
gospel-based arrangement, on The Aura Will Prevail. The lyrics
dealt with black fashion and styling ('can't wait 'til my 'fro is
full-grown') before ending with the random destruction of jockey
statues on rich peoples' lawns at the crack of dawn — your average
association of ideas.
'Stink-Foot' made an equally bizarre shift, inspired by a Mermen
foot spray commercial, from the subject of smelly feet to thoughts
on conceptual continuity addressed to its master by a poodle
puppy. In this case, appropriately enough, the crux of the biscuit
was the apostrophe. Was this the puppy (first identified as Frenchie
in 'Dirty Love') that grew into the giant Frunobulax who menaces
the Power Plant in 'Cheepnis'? And to which breed did 'Evelyn, A
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Frank Zappa
Modified Dog' belong? Was there any significance to the fact that a
poodle-faker was defined as someone who cultivated female
society? The legend would grow and books would be written to
plumb the mystery.
Apostrophe (') was released on April 22, 1974, and was an instant
success. It was no doubt helped by the 'Tenth Anniversary' tour
that began two days later and continued until mid-August. In that
time, the album had gone gold and climbed the album charts,
peaking after 11 weeks at number 10 in the week ending June 29.
Belatedly realising the need to climb on the bandwagon, Rolling
Stone reviewed it seven weeks after its release and found it "Truly a
mother of an album".24
In a dramatically positive move, Warner Brothers sanctioned
some television advertising; Frank and Cal Schenkel put together a
30-second commercial which they placed during the transmission
of monster movies, figuring that their target audience would be
watching. Frank was so pleased with the outcome that he ordered a
celebration, described in Rolling Stone: "Frank Zappa, happy that
his Apostrophe (') album is in the Top 10, hired a 50-piece marching
band to thank Warner Brothers Records. They tooded past head-
quarters led by a sign-bearer with the message: 'Anyone who can
get Frank Zappa even to the bottom of the Top 10 is OK in my
booklet'."25
Frank thought he knew why the album had been a success.
"That was an accident," he told William Ruhlmann, "because a
radio station in Pittsburgh took 'Don't Eat The Yellow Snow', cut
it down ... to three minutes and put it on the station. The guy
who did it heard the song, perceived it as a modern-day novelty
record and put it on right alongside of'Teeny Weeny Bikini' and it
became a hit. But it was nothing that Warner Brothers ever
foresaw, it was nothing that I could have foreseen as a guy at
DiscReet Records, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary. Who
knew? The credit goes to the DJ."26
Reception in England was mixed. Melody Maker thought it
showed "a touch of genius" but NME had reviewed an advance
copy in their April 6 issue, under the headline, "The unsighdy
debris of Francis Vincent Zappa". Ian MacDonald had a 'Z' in his
bonnet; the last "remotely listenable" album had been Fillmore
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Ovemite Sensation
East and subsequent releases were "more or less grotesquely indul-
gent on the musical level and lyrically ... despicably irresponsible."
This time, Frank had "retreated into his studio with a bunch of
faceless yes-men virtuosi and squandered two years of his life pro-
ducing some of the most carefully constructed redundant dreck
ever to find its way into the record-racks of the Western world."
He saved his broadside for a direct remark: "With Apostrophe ('),
you've blotted your escrutcheon but permanently."27 Pity about the
spelling.
MOTHERLY LOVE
There was much to celebrate in the summer of 1974. The seventh
gig of the Anniversary tour was at Chicago's Auditorium Theater
on May 11. At midnight, Frank announced to the sell-out crowd
that it was now Mother's Day, the exact anniversary of the naming
of the Mothers of Invention, and talked about the early days of the
band. Then, with typical sentiment, he said, "You're gonna hear
Freak Out! 'til it's coming out of your ass," and led the present
Mothers through a 40-minute medley of songs from his first album.
The resulting bootleg of the event, Unmitigated Audacity, was later
included in Beat The Boots, Box 1. The most notable element in the
proceedings was Frank's impromptu first verse of 'More Trouble
Every Day' as feedback interrupted the opening words, which he
instantly changed to, 'Well, I'm about to get sick of listening to this
monitor system.'
"What I'm going to do is play twenty of those things in a row,"
he told Barbara Charone before the gig, "and I think the audience
will love it. Those songs are all so easy compared to what we've
been doing recently. In rehearsal we learned two and three of them
in a day - which is sickening, because when we first put out Freak
Out! it took weeks just to get one little song right. Today (it)
sounds like a bunch of demos to me." Charone's piece included a
timely quote from the soon-to-be-ex-President: "There is no
undertaking more challenging, no responsibility more awesome
than being a Mother."28
Four days later, a new Zappa entered the world. Frank and
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Gail's second son was named Ahmet Rodan. His first name was
that of an imaginary person "we always had hanging around back
when we had no one on our payroll," Gail told Victoria Balfour.
"We'd snap our fingers and say, 'Ahmet? Dishes. Coffee, please.' "29
He was also named after a giant pterodactyl that would have
ravaged the world if the Japanese film director Ishiro Honda hadn't
destroyed it in 1957. The proud parents could have carried on
using names from the same source, Majin, Mothra, Gamera,
Barugon and Ghidorah among them, but fortunately their next
child was a daughter.
Frank stayed at home during June, overdubbing and mixing
Roxy & Elsewhere (elsewhere being the May 8 gig at Edinboro,
Pennsylvania and the Chicago Mother's Day bash), appreciating his
new son and editing a film by Seatde animator, Bruce Bickford.
Barry Hansen interviewed him during the process: "As I was about
to compliment Zappa on composing music that so perfecdy fit the
Hadesian mood of the film, he told me that the music had not been
written for the film at all, but had been extracted from live record-
ings of Mothers concerts which took place before Frank had ever
seen the movie.
"I got the work print," Frank explained, "and edited that
without sound. Then, just last night... I put the (Mothers) tracks
on, and it worked. It's so unbelievable . . . when you think what it
would take to actually score a film like that, and last night I put on
this music, which was something constructed for completely differ-
ent purposes, spontaneously at another location and another time,
and I put them together and they worked perfectly."30
This was yet another opportunity for 'conceptual continuity' to
be explained. Hansen thought that the chance matching of Mothers
music, deliberately chosen, to Bickford's film was a rather more
subde manifestation of a haphazard phenomenon, and perhaps the
product of Frank's single-minded dedication. "Zappa is so absorbed
in his work that he appears to need no other pleasures.
" 'When I'm home, I have a work schedule that goes like this. If
I'm not rehearsing, I spend about 16, 18 hours a day down here (in
the workroom) writing music, typing, working on film . . . and if
I'm not here, I usually do about 10, 14 hours in the studio, seven
days a week, until rehearsal schedule starts. The only thing I would
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Ovemite Sensation
see as a worthwhile interruption would be 100 per cent concentra-
tion on a feature film.' "31
Hansen commented that few people were as thoroughly com-
mitted to their work, nor enjoyed it as much. In hindsight, Frank's
reply supplied food for thought: "What else you gonna do, work in
a gas station?"32 Instead, he went back on the road with a
stripped-down sextet of himself, Brock, Duke, Underwood, Fowler
and Thompson for July gigs in Arkansas, Florida, Arizona and
California. The band spent two days in Culver City Studios,
recording a television special. The following day, August 8, they
were back in Hollywood for a gig at the Shrine Auditorium. There
was more than just an anniversary to celebrate that night; Richard
Nixon had resigned earlier in the day. His step, as he boarded his
Presidential helicopter for the last time, was firmer than his succes-
sor Gerald Ford, whose ability to take prat-falls could have earned
him a lifetime achievement award.
During the rest of the month there were rehearsals for the next
European tour by a new, streamlined Mothers. The intensity of
their workload reflected the intensity of the tour itself, 23 dates in
29 days, travelling through Italy, Sicily, Austria, Germany, Scandi-
navia, Holland, France, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain. But not
to England.
An angry Frank held a press conference in the Sandringham
Suite of Kensington's Royal Garden Hotel on September 5, the
day before the tour's opening gig in Rome. "Ordinarily, we come
to England to play concerts, to promote an album," he said. "This
time I have the unfortunate duty to announce that we can't play in
this country. The reason for this is something that dates back to
the case we have against the Albert Hall."33 The August 26 Daily
Telegraph had announced that Bizarre Productions had taken out a
High Court action over the concert ban three years earlier and
were claiming damages for conspiracy against Marion Herrod, the
lettings manager, and Frank Munday, the general manager, even
though he'd died the previous February. There was also an action
against the Rainbow, too.
Fred Bannister, the promoter of the proposed UK tour which
would have covered September 21-26, had met with 'unusual dis-
crimination' in his dealings with controllers of the London halls.
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Frank Zappa
"Certain halls were available," Bannister explained, "but they
would not rent to me because of the Albert Hall thing. Two actu-
ally said that. We talked about getting the Drury Lane Theatre and
the Palladium with a Mr Verner (of Moss Empires), and he told us
that the halls were free but that he wouldn't be happy to let us use
either of them in the light of the Albert Hall lawsuit. We then
spoke to a Mr Fishman, on behalf of the New Victoria Theatre, the
Odeon Hammersmith and the Kilbum State Theatre (all controlled
by the Rank Organisation), who said much the same thing but in a
more roundabout way."
"We had to give a big concert in London to make our per-
formances in the provinces financially viable," Frank said. Herb
Cohen reckoned that the cost of keeping the 21-piece entourage
on the road for a day, including seven and a half tons of hired ELP
p.a. (costing around £18,000 for the European tour), exceeded the
estimated gross from the proposed Birmingham concert. A measure
of Frank's desperation was evident in the dramatic offer he made at
the end of the press conference. "I would like to announce that I
will pay for Ms Herrod to fly anywhere in Europe for any length of
time to attend any of the concerts ... I will even take her on the
whole tour, myself, personally, just to show what a nice clean whole-
some group we are - and I guarantee she'll have the best time of
her life . . ,"34 Ms Herrod was not available for comment. A less
convinced conspiracy-theorist than Frank would have found it
hard not to feel victimised.
These were still the days when the British bulldog occasionally
emitted a rheumy gruff at the influx of all things American, and it
was Frank's turn in the barrel. Any doubt was dispelled when John
Blake wrote his pop piece for the Evening News, after he'd travelled
to Paris on September 27 to see the show and interview the
aggrieved party. Under the headline, "Zappa - is it goodbye for
ever?", he described how Frank "fixed me with a baleful stare and
spelt out the news that will bring gloom to his fans — and cheer to
everyone else. 'It is possible I may never perform in London again,'
he said."35
Smug antipathy suffused Blake's piece. "I have two or three bad
memories of London," Frank told him. "We have played there
about six times and I haven't enjoyed myself most of the time. And
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I don't like the attitude London's pop Press have. The journalists
are virtually unconcerned with what I am doing musically." Blake
thought his music "a pain in the ear", having found the Grand
Wazoo Oval concert "spectacularly dreary". His final thrust quoted
an ex-Mother: "It's so easy to convince yourself that he is the
genius he thinks he is. But really he just bewilders the audience so
much that some of them walk away believing that anyone that bad
and that popular must be great beyond their comprehension." The
quote went unattributed, of course.
In fact, the music press gave ample space to this same Paris gig, at
the Palais de Sport, and the 30,000 party (paid for by Warner
Brothers) afterwards at the Alcazar nightclub. It was, in Charles
Shaar Murray's words, "a kind of acrobatic-musical-sexual-satirical
cabaret with a cast of thousands."36 Melody Maker's Allan Jones was
also present: "The climax is a real bazooka. Cecil B. De Mille
meets Fellini in a head-on crash at a hundred miles an hour, with
choreography by Busby Berkeley, out of his brain on bad acid."37
The evening started badly when the gear, delayed by customs
and a ferry, failed to arrive in time for the afternoon sound check.
The previous gig, in Gothenburg on September 25, had been the
second of two that replaced the British dates. And the first? What
sort of conceptual continuity was it that caused Frank to choose the
almost-complete September 22 Helsinki gig as Volume Two in the
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series? It can only have been
the long arm of coincidence that a concert that wouldn't have
taken place without the cancelled British gigs was chosen.
Whatever the circumstances, the concert was very good indeed,
in spite of Napoleon Murphy Brock having pneumonia and Coy
Featherstone, the band's lighting director, being maced in the face
by a guard at the Hotel Hesperia the night before. In his booklet
notes, Frank pointed out, "The repertoire is basically the same as
the Roxy album. However, the ultra-fast tempos on the more
difficult tunes demonstrate what happens when a band has played
the material for a year, and is so comfortable with it they could
probably perform it blindfolded."
The other manifest quality is the good humour with which the
music is performed, even when 'Montana' has to be begun three
times before proceeding. As George Duke told Keyboard: "If you
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Frank Zappa
didn't get it, Frank would know it. He would look around at you
and make you do it again. On stage! He would make us go over
one lick until there was no way we could forget it. That was some
of the most difficult music I've ever played, partly because he com-
posed a lot of it from the guitar. Frank's music was like organised
chaos. That's exacdy what it was."38 One listen to 'RDNZL'
(during which Frank takes a solo that includes part of the melody of
'Conehead'), 'Echidna's Arf', 'Approximate' (in its three guises)
and 'T'Mershi Duween' bears out the truth of Duke's remark.
He had another reason for the release: 'One of the things that
was good about that show was that there was a lot of improvised,
funny talking and witty stuff in there. So it's got part of the attitude
of the band and I think it's a good record. It's got some good spirit
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12
ONE SIZE FITS ALL
There was more good spirit on display when the Mothers played at
New York's Felt Forum on Halloween Night, establishing a prece-
dent for subsequent tours. The stage was Uttered with assorted
theatrical props; a female dummy wearing a 'Don't Eat The Yellow
Snow' T-shirt; a dangling skeleton; a rubber chicken suspended
from an iron beam; and a lifebuoy liberated from a production of
HMS Pinafore draped over a microphone. There was much for the
audience to enjoy - but not for a reviewer anticipating the
momentous and encountering the momentary.
Michael Watts typified the sense of betrayal felt by all his ilk
who'd espoused Frank's music when it flattered their sense of their
own radicalism. But now Frank was reneging on the contract
they'd drawn up by apparendy moving in a direction that trivial-
ised their pretensions. Moreover, the spectacle of musicians who
could not only play seriously difficult music but had fun doing it
was confusing for journalists accustomed to trenchant postures and
loaded statements. One critic thought Roxy & Elsewhere "the
lowest point in Zappa's career", asserting that too many artists were
"simply farting around instead of getting down and producing
work of real importance or merit; to see Frank Zappa joining the
legions of rock'n'roll suicides and producing dull, trivial work is
nothing less than offensive".1
Watts' review of the Halloween show, headlined "Zany Zappa
runs out of ideas . . .", acknowledged "this is not Serious, there is
Fun and much In Joking up there onstage." But while he joins in
the audience's laughter, he hears "alarm bells" as he watches Ruth
Underwood "laughing and waving her arms as if she's partaken of
some vile, foamy liquid," aided and abetted by Napoleon Murphy
Brock who's  "quite,  quite  daft".  He's left wondering "what
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Frank Zappa
happened to the Great Satirist when I see the Zee now inflating
into tomes one-liners about dental floss and other inconsequential
paraphernalia."2
Much of the current repertoire was recorded in KCET-TV
Studios in early December 1974, including an extended version of
the 'Room Service' routine, during which Frank referred to "that
wretched state of Maryland", from where he, Chester Thompson,
Napoleon Murphy Brock and their roadie and dog enthusiast,
Marty Perellis, all came. The programme, A Token Of His Extreme,
was later used in The Dub Room Special, Frank's video combining
live music from 1974 and 1981 with the convoluted clay animation
of Bruce Bickford. The basic tracks of two 1974 tides, 'Inca Roads'
and 'Florentine Pogen', were used in the next Mothers album, One
Size Fits All. Frank spliced an edited version of his 'Inca Roads'
guitar solo from the recent Helsinki concert into the finished master.
Further recording for the album took place during December at
Jim Guercio's Caribou studio in Colorado, where basic tracks for
songs from Hunchentoot were also laid down. Sessions also took
place at the LA Record Plant and Paramount Studios, although
some material like 'The Adventures of Greggery Peccary', 'Revised
Music For Guitar & Low-Budget Orchestra' and 'RDNZL' would
not be released until 1978, and then in less than ideal circum-
stances. Another song, 'A Little Green Rosetta', didn't appear until
a year after that on Joe's Garage Acts II & III. Demoed in Studio D at
the Record Plant, it was "just George Duke playing a tack piano
and me singing on top of it," according to Frank. "It was just a little
stupid song."3
The same combination also recorded 'Evelyn, A Modified Dog',
the latest instance of canine conceptual continuity. "It recurs on
each record," Frank said. "It's an abstract concept, much in the
way that Rembrandt added brown to all his colours. That's the
level."4 Evelyn, her modifications unspecified, is the dog sitting in
Apostolic Studios during the Lumpy Gravy sessions, bewildered by
sounds emanating from the covered piano as strings resonate to the
conversations taking place within.
Mark Volman's alter ego, the maroon sofa, adorned the cover
of One Size Fits All along with other abstruse cosmology; more
comfortable than a 2001 monolith, it sped through the heavens
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One Size Fits All
with a formica-topped aluminium table and chair as satellites. Its
musical manifestation made two appearances on the album, one
vocal, one instrumental, George Duke's moog bass adding a touch
of funk to the original landler rhythm. 'San Ber'Dino', containing a
verse that referred to Frank's brief incarceration in the city jail,
featured harmonica by Don Vliet as 'Bloodshot Rollin' Red and
the flambi vocals of Frank's first guitar hero, Johnny 'Guitar'
Watson. The latter also sang on 'Andy', which was alleged to be a
veiled reference to one of Beefheart's erstwhile managers.
On both 'San Ber'Dino' and 'Can't Afford No Shoes', Frank
played a fretless guitar. "At one time Acoustic ... made a prototype
and tried to interest people in it," he told Steve Rosen, "but
nobody wanted it. So the prototype ended up at Guitar Center. I
walked in there one day and asked them if they had anything new,
and they said, 'Have we got one for you!' It's different than a
regular guitar; you don't push the strings to bend them, you move
them back and forth like violin-type vibrato, which is a funny
movement to get used to."5
Work on One Size and the television special carried on in the
first months of 1975. At one point, Tom Fowler broke his left hand
and James 'Bird Legs' Youmans came in to play bass. Tour dates
had been scheduled for this period but they were cancelled, in
order for the work to continue. Time was also needed for Frank
and Herb Cohen to prepare for their High Court case against the
Albert Hall management, which was due to be heard in London
during the second week of April.
During the lull in group activity, George Duke spent time
during January making The Aura Will Prevail, his fourth solo album
for MPS, at Paramount Studios with regular Zappa engineer Kerry
McNabb driving the desk. He was accompanied by Alphonso
Johnson on bass and Leon 'Ndugu' Chancier on drums. Both were
members of Weather Report, the fusion band formed in 1970 by
Miles Davis alumni, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter. In the
ensuing weeks, Chancier would leave and be replaced by Chester
Thompson. His tenure, including the sessions for Black Market, one
of Weather Report's more successful albums, would be brief.
The drummer's departure brought to an end one of the most
highly regarded incarnations of the Mothers. By the end of the
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Frank Zappa
year, only Napoleon Murphy Brock would remain in the band,
which would be the last to tour as the Mothers. Most of the band
had been with Frank for two years, during which shrinking
numbers placed increasingly heavy workloads on the eventual
sextet. "Frank was the hardest worker I've ever played with,
hands-down," said George Duke. "I never saw anyone work
harder than he did. From the time he got up to the time he went to
bed, he was thinking music."6
"I've always thought the work ethic was one great thing about
him," added Bruce Fowler. "He was completely tireless. In a sense,
he never stopped. Also, he was really open-minded. He wanted to
learn."7
"It was the greatest experience of my life and the most difficult
experience of my life," Ruth Underwood averred. "He just
devoured music; that was all he thought about. We listened to his
music on the bus; we rehearsed it at sound checks; we played it that
night; we analysed it the next day. Everything was music."8
Well, not quite everything. There was a court case looming. But
in the meantime, Frank had to put a band together for two months
of gigs booked through April and May. First, there had to be audi-
tions for a new drummer. Having listened to Roxy & Elsewhere and
Apostrophe (') for 48 hours, Terry Bozzio flew down from San
Francisco and found himself in a rehearsal room with a crowd of
hopefuls, playing by turns on two drumkits set up for the occasion.
The failure rate was so high that he considered applying for the
Weather Report job until he found out that Chester Thompson's
departure to join them had brought about this audition.
"The one thing I'd noticed was that a lot of the drummers were
sort of flaunting their chops," he told Andy Greenaway. "So I did
the best I could: sight-reading a very difficult piece, memorising a
very difficult piece, jamming in a very odd time signature - like
19/16 - and then playing a blues shuffle. At the end of that, Frank
said, 'You sound great; I'd like to hear you again after I hear the
rest of the guys.' I turned to his road manager, his road manager
turned to the 20 or so guys that were hanging around and they're
all shaking their heads, and the road manager turned around and said,
'That's it, nobody else wants to play after Terry.' So Frank turned to
me and said, 'Looks like you've got the gig if you want it.' "9
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One Size Fits All
Napoleon Murphy Brock, George Duke and Tom Fowler
retained their places in the band and Bruce Fowler returned on
trombone. Denny Walley, an ex-member of Geronimo Black, the
band that Jimmy Carl Black and Bunk Gardner had formed after
the original Mothers had disbanded, came in on slide guitar and
vocals. But the most noteworthy addition to the band was Don
Vliet, his own career on temporary hold, stalled in a legal logjam.
"Don had the ability and the inclination to sign any piece of
contractual paper shoved under his nose at any time," Frank
explained, "without comprehending what these papers said and
how they interacted with each other. And so his career fell on evil
days, because he had signed papers with companies all over the
place that all had conflicting claims on his services. He was in a
position where he couldn't tour and he couldn't record. It was at
that time that I put him in the band to do the 'Bongo Fury' tour.
That was the only way he could make some money because he was
just legally tied up all over the place."10
"He called me up and asked for help," Frank told NME. "I told
him that the Mothers were holding auditions on Tuesday and
Thursday (just before their Halloween show), and that he should
come along."11
"He flunked," he told Steve Weitzman. "See, he had a problem
with rhythm, and we were very rhythm oriented. Things have to
happen on the beat. I had him come up on the bandstand at our
rehearsal hall and try to sing 'Willie The Pimp' and he couldn't get
through it. I figured if he couldn't get through that, I didn't stand
much of a chance in teaching him the other stuff."12
Things went better at the Spring 1975 rehearsals. "Although he
still has trouble remembering words and making things happen on
the beat, he's better," Frank said. "Just before the tour, I tried him
again and he squeaked by."'3 He denied that there was animosity
between them, even diough the Captain had hardly wasted an
opportunity to bad-mouth him over the last few years. "Any idea
of a feud between us is quite pointless." But any affection he had
for their almost 20-year friendship didn't prevent Frank from a
stark assessment of Vliet's unique talents.
Speaking after the tour's first gig at Bridges Auditorium at
Pomona College in Claremont on April 11, he said, "The way he
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Frank Zappa
relates to language is unique, the way in which he brings my text to
life. Of course, he has problems. His memory causes him trouble.
He won't be separated from his sheets of paper that have his words
written on. He clings to them for dear life. He also has a literacy
problem. He can hardly read. He also has trouble staying on a beat.
Captain Beefheart has no natural rhythm. He does have this thing
inside him. It's dynamic and he wants to express it. In a voice like
Howlin' Wolf."14
SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE
Frank had flown to London after the Friday night gig, where he
took up residence at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane. His com-
pany's law suit against the Albert Hall management began at 10.30
on the morning of Monday, April 14 in Court No. 7 of the Strand
Law Courts, presided over by Mr Justice Mocatta. What should
have been a straightforward action for breach of contract was
guided by Michael Ogden, QC, on behalf of the Albert Hall, into
the lurid realms of obscenity, the threat of which was the manage-
ment's sole justification for cancelling the Mothers gig.
What transpired over the next three days was pure farce, with no
attempt by either side to comprehend the other. The judge was a
figure out of caricature, fit to have sat bewigged beside Sir John
Willes when Hogarth painted The Bench in 1758. Willes had been
a notorious lecher but Mocatta had little knowledge of and no
inclination for the pneumatic world of sex that Frank's music
delineated. There were other gaps in his experience, too.
"Is a groupie a girl who is a member of a group?" he asked
Frank. "No," Frank replied, "she is a girl who likes members of a
rock'n'roll band." Did any of the court staff note the use of the
word "member"? Sometime later, Mocatta made an admission:
"When I started this case, I knew very little about pop and beat
music. I knew it was to do with rhythm, banging, and an infectious
atmosphere. I didn't know it was anything to do with sex or
drugs."15
Ogden made sure the veil dropped from his eyes. When Frank
took the stand on the second day, Ogden just had to produce the
toilet poster for comment and then spent hours dissecting his songs,
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One Size Fits All
line by line, trying to find sexual references wherever he could.
Even though that wasn't difficult to do with songs like 'Half A
Dozen Provocative Squats' or 'Penis Dimension', Frank com-
plained, "You are attempting to direct my lyrics to sexual inter-
course and I don't think that is accurate or fair." At another point
he protested, "I don't think the reproductive process is to be
feared. You are making it sound frightening and horrible."16
With all the moral rectitude he could summon, Ogden descended
through age groups to discover where Frank considered his lyrics
to be inappropriate for children. Despite the QC's condescending
tone throughout much of the questioning, Frank kept his emotions
under control and answered in his customarily articulate manner;
but sometimes, he bit back. "Are you sure that 'newts' just means
newts? That there is nothing at all suggestive about that?"
Ogden fearlessly probed. "Anyone who is disturbed by the idea
of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous," Frank retorted.
Alan Campbell, QC for Bizarre Productions, had some of the
songs from 200 Motels played in court. The judge held his head in
his hands as he listened to 'Lonesome Cowboy Burt', 'She Painted
Up Her Face' and 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy'. As 'Penis Dimension'
was about to be played, he asked Campbell if he had to listen to it.
When Campbell said he didn't, Mocatta intoned, "I do not think I
want to hear this objectionable song."17
It was Frank's contention that he'd offered to rewrite any lyrics
that were deemed objectionable or even to perform the concert
without vocals. As an example, Campbell got him to rewrite 'Half
A Dozen Provocative Squats', which Frank did in just five minutes.
The point was made but it had no bearing on a case that was
already building to a foregone conclusion. When asked by Camp-
bell to comment on Sir Louis Gluckstein's contention that he
wrote "filth for filth's sake", Frank replied, "My only response to
that is that if I were in his position, I would not make an irrational
statement like that."18
After a day and a half on the witness stand, Frank flew back to
America on Thursday, April 17, to prepare for the next gig on the
Mothers tour in New Haven, Connecticut. Herb Cohen took the
stand and reckoned that up to 80 per cent of pop music dealt with
sex in one way or another. After further questioning, he said that
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Frank Zappa
anybody who got erotically stimulated by Frank's music was in
serious need of treatment. Alan Campbell referred the judge to a
James Brown concert that took place at the Albert Hall on March
10, 1971, for which Brown was described as 'Superking of Funk'.
With a straight face, he informed Mocatta, "Funk does not mean
what it meant when we were at school - a coward. It means here a
mood of idle depression."19 The depression in the Zappa camp got
more active by the minute.
The following day, Tony Palmer spoke up on Frank's behalf.
The judge asked him, "Is this stuff about sex a necessary part of
pop?" "It is an essential ingredient," Palmer replied, "even if you
are talking about music hall or opera. The entire history of pop
music is the history of the way we express that sort of thing."20 He
told the judge that none of Frank's songs, including 'Penis Dimen-
sion' and 'Bwana Dik', could reasonably be objected to as part of a
pop concert. He described Frank's lyrics as "feeble" compared to
some other 1971 hit songs but didn't feel they would have caused
offence at the time.
After the weekend recess, George Melly gave Frank another
glowing character reference on Monday, April 21. The judge asked
him to explain about girls "who cannot manage a silicone beef-up".
Melly replied, "Girls who feel that their 'mammary glands' or
'titties' are too small can have them injected with silicone to make
them larger. It is what is known as vanity surgery and is common in
the USA. I personally think it is absurd." Commenting on 'Penis
Dimension', he said, "The myth is that pop stars are supermen. To
show that a pop star can worry about the size of his penis takes
away some of the mythology and can only create reassurance in the
minds of the pop public." Frank was turning "the spotlight of his
intelligence" on pop's more absurd aspects, Melly thought. "Gilbert
& Sullivan satirised the conventions of light opera in the 19th
century," he added, "at the same time contributing considerably to
the tradition. This applies to Zappa, I would say."21
After 15 days, Mr Justice Mocatta reserved judgement in the
case, which would be delivered on June 10. Frank gave his impres-
sion of the case to Robin Denselow: "It was like a ritual oriental
drama. They'd never believe it in LA. I tried to buy a wig as a
souvenir."22
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One Size Fits All
Mocatta's decision when it came can hardly have been un-
expected, but its ramifications were. Losing the claim for £8,000
was bad enough; paying the costs of the trial, estimated at £20,000,
was the real blow. As reported in The Times, Mocatta "made no
ruling on allegations that Mr Zappa's songs were 'obscene, objec-
tionable or indecent', but based his decision on the fact that under
the contract the Albert Hall management could cancel if it thought
the concert was open to 'reasonable objection'."23 The Daily Mirror
carried a further quote: "What might be open to reasonable objec-
tion at a performance at the Albert Hall might not be open to such
objection at a performance at, say, the Round House."24
"Yeah, that was pretty weird," Frank said to me years later.
"Expensive, too. But it's not every day that a guy like me gets to go
to the High Court. Justice Mocatta was a unique individual. I'm
sure the Crown was proud of him for what he did. He agreed that
the contract had been breached. He agreed that the show was not
obscene. But basically, they were royal and I wasn't and there was
no way I was gonna win a lawsuit, so go fuck yourself."
Would an American court of the time have been any better, I
asked. "I think so. One of the reasons I say that is that there's more
of a tradition for awarding damages here. For one thing, in the
United States it would have been a jury trial. And for another
thing, the whole rules of evidence are different in court here. And I
think that it's demonstrably ludicrous that this spinster closed the
door on us because of words like 'brassiere'. And I think that, as
long as you can point out to a jury that this is a breach of contract
suit, not an obscenity trial, did she or did she not breach the
contract?"
I thought that the trial showed hypocrisy on a grand scale.
"On a royal scale."
BONGO FURY
The Spring 1975 tour continued after Frank's return from England.
A curiously subdued Captain Beefheart was interviewed at the
Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, explaining the reconcilia-
tion between him and Frank. "I said some silly things because I'm a
spoiled brat and I don't understand business to the degree that
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Frank Zappa
Frank does. I probably felt neglected. I'll admit it... and I told him
so. I said, 'I'm sorry Frank and I don't mean that for an excuse.' We
shook hands and that was that."25 It was uncharacteristic behaviour,
perhaps a measure of the bad situation in which he'd found himself
before the tour started.
Maybe it was also because Beefheart wasn't used to being merely
a band member. He got to do 'Willie The Pimp' and some of his
own compositions like 'Orange Claw Hammer', 'Sam With The
Showing Scalp Flat Top' and 'Man With The Woman Head', as
well as things that Frank had written for him, such as 'Debra
Kadabra', 'Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead' and 'Why
Doesn't Someone Get Him A Pepsi?' When he wasn't singing,
which was quite often, he'd sit on the side of the stage, jostling his
song sheets.
Frank wanted him "to relax to the point where he can improvise
words. He can do really funny stuff when he's sitting around in a
room. But he hasn't really gotten comfortable enough yet." For his
part, Beefheart was having "an extreme amount of fun on this tour.
They move awfully fast. I've never travelled this fast. With the
Magic Band — turtles all the way down." And he had a compliment
for his leader: "Frank is probably the most creative person on this
planet. He writes things for instruments that haven't even been
invented. He's another Harry Partch - only he hasn't dried up yet.
Get it?"26
Years later, Frank told Nigel Leigh, 'Don is absent-minded and
it was a great challenge for the road manager on this tour to try and
keep him integrated with the rest of what was going on. All the
other musicians in the band were well seasoned road rats. They
knew how to pack up and get out of a motel; they knew how to
show up at the sound check on time; they knew how to live that
life on the road. They knew how to do it. Don carried his posses-
sions in a shopping bag, including his soprano sax which stuck out
the shopping bag, and was forever leaving it in hallways and not
knowing where he was or what he was doing.
"He would forget the lyrics to the songs, requiring that large
sheets of cardboard had to be provided that were lying on the stage,
so that he could follow his own lyrics. He was always complaining
about the monitor system never being loud enough for him to hear
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One Size Fits All
his own voice." Beefheart sang so loud that the pressure caused his
ears to close down. "So the harder he sang, the more he would
have to turn up the monitor system to the point where anybody in
the vicinity with their clothes (on) would catch fire."27
The tour schedule was fairly intense, with only nine days off
between April 18 and the final two-day stint at the Armadillo
World Headquarters in Austin, Texas on May 20/21. These gigs
were recorded by the LA Record Plant's remote facilities for
the requisite album release, augmented by '200 Years Old',
'Cucamonga' and the introductory passages of'Muffin Man' from
the Record Plant sessions.
There's a formlessness about Bongo Fury which is engendered by
the clash between Frank's precision and Beefheart's spontaneous
effusion. Their only real collaboration is in Frank's 'Debra Kadabra',
written about his and Don's love of third-rate Mexican horror
films and isolated incidents from Don's colourful past. The compli-
cated arrangement over which Beefheart hollers is not particularly
well played. The band's involvement in 'Sam With The Showing
Scalp Flat Top' is minimal, confined to a recap of 'Louie Louie'
behind Don's chanting of'Bongo Fury!'; 'Man With The Woman
Head' is pure Beefheart recitative.
Frank's own material divides most of its attention between sex
and the coming bicentennial, which he satirised in 'the cowboy
song', 'Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead'. He prefaced its
performance with a warning: "This is a song that warns you in
advance that next year everybody is going to try and sell you things
that maybe you shouldn't ought to buy." The suggestion being that
the political agenda behind the patriotism was just as tawdry as the
merchandise with which the country would be regaled.
Beefheart sang '200 Years Old' after Franks' opening mono-
logue about life on the road, but any relevance to forthcoming
events is obscured by the Captain's diction. Cucamonga was a
fragment that referred back to Studio Z days, while 'Muffin Man'
contained the first reference to the Utility Muffin Research
Kitchen. Accompanied by George Duke's piano, even Frank
himself couldn't recite the bizarre scenario without laughing:
"Arrogandy twisting the sterile canvas moot of a fully charged
icing-anointment utensil, he poots forth a quarter-ounce green
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Frank Zappa
rosette near the summit of a dense but radiant muffin of his own
design." After that, any song would be an anticlimax and this was.
Even so, it became a concert favourite because of its simple repeti-
tive melody line and the humorous put-down in the lyrics. Or, as
Frank put it, "The bigger the venue, the more need there is for
'Muffin Man'."28
'Advance Romance', with a lead vocal by Napoleon Murphy
Brock, was the longest track on the album, allowing extended solos
by Denny Walley, Beefheart and Frank. The coda re-introduced a
character first encountered in 'San Ber'Dino'; 'Potato-headed
Bobby was a friend of mine . . .'. This potato fetish would culmi-
nate in Thing-Fish, where 'Sister Potato-Head Bobby Brown'
would become a Mammy Nun and have a 'head like a potato . . .
Ups like a duck.' By that time, the tuber-pated Bobby Brown had
also been a gender-bending record plugger with a hit in Scandinavia.
One significant song in the repertoire didn't make it onto the
album. 'Why Doesn't Someone Get Him A Pepsi?' referred to
high school days: "When I used to go over to Vliet's house . . . the
only thing you would ever hear him say was, 'Sue! Get me a Pepsi!'
He was always yelling at his mother to get him a Pepsi, and some-
times the Pepsi wouldn't arrive, so it was like, 'Please! Somebody
get him a Pepsi!'"29 Sung by Beefheart over a metronomic riff
played by Denny Walley that echoed Howlin' Wolf's 'Smokestack
Lightning', a radically altered arrangement of the song appeared on
Frank's next album, Zoot Allures, as 'The Torture Never Stops'.
The original version was eventually released on YCDTOSA 4.
When the British press announced Mr Justice Mocatta's tortu-
ously reasoned decision on June 11, most indicated that there
would be an appeal. The August 29 edition of the Evening Standard
noted that one had been lodged by Bizarre Productions Inc., but
this was subsequently withdrawn. During the same month, Frank's
company also entered a $2 million suit against MGM-Verve,
through which he hoped to regain possession of his master tapes.
One Size Fits All was released on June 25, to rather indifferent
reviews. In Melody Maker, Michael Watts referred to the Felt
Forum gig, at which a "disappointingly inconsequential" Frank
had acted "like a snotty sixth former with a large IQ". Proving that
he knew what that meant, Watts noted that Frank's lyrics had "an
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One Size Fits All
irrelevancy that's dadaist and a detachment that's Bufiuelian". Con-
sequendy, the album was "daft but interesting and recognisably
Frankie the Zee"30 but broke no new ground.
Writing a week later in NME, Charles Shaar Murray managed to
sit on the fence while at the same time voice his disapproval. Frank
had "consciously withdrawn something of himself from his music";
his guitar playing was merely "consistendy adequate" and there
were only two acceptable songs ('Can't Afford No Shoes' and 'San
Ber'Dino'). But, perched on his picket, Shaar Murray conceded,
"the thing is that these days Zappa has Commercial Potential . . .
and all those early albums which us Zappa connoisseurs think are so
great were commercial lead balloons by comparison, so who's the
bozo?"31
ORCHESTRAL FAVORITES
During 1975, through circumstances not entirely under Frank's
control, the Mothers went through three changes of personnel in
which Napoleon Murphy Brock was the only constant. Each
change led to fresh arrangements and new material. While that was
the sort of challenge to which Frank could readily respond, it con-
founded the expectations of audiences. When unspecified contrac-
tual difficulties held up the release of One Size Fits All until after the
'Bongo Fury' tour, the Commercial Potential that Shaar Murray
identified was damaged and the album did not do as well as its
predecessors.
Public perception of what Frank was doing was inevitably
guided by bis concerts and albums. Critics like Shaar Murray
plainly cherished their own idea of what his work represented; by
trying to identify a logical progression in a career remoulded as
much by arbitrary necessity as choice, their observations were
based on false criteria. The assumption that what was presented live
or on record was the sum total of Frank's creativity fell fir short of
the reality, which was that it was merely the visible tip of a large
floating mass of themes and variations undergoing constant change.
"The putting out of material is not the desired end result," he
told Tom Mulhern. "I really don't care whether it comes out; I like
to hear it. But I do it for my own amusement. The fact that it
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Frank Zappa
comes out is just something that has to do with the business world,
rather than the artistic world. The composing actually takes up the
smallest amount of my time. I've already written so much that
hasn't gone through all those in-between steps before it turns into
music on tape, or music in the air, or whatever, that I could sit still
for five years and have tons of stuff coming out."32
For all his compulsion to write music, Frank still fought shy of
being regarded as a composer. "I don't think a composer has any
function in society at all," he said in 1986, "especially in an indus-
trial society, unless it is to write movie scores, advertising jingles, or
stuff that is consumed by industry. If you walk down the street and
ask anybody if a composer is of any use to any society, what kind of
answer do you think you would get? I mean, nobody gives a shit. If
you decide to become a composer, you seriously run the risk of
becoming less than a human being. Who the fuck needs you?"33
There was htde awareness of the flow of compositions and scores
that Frank wrote while on the road, notwithstanding the fact that
200 Motels was known to have been produced in this manner. The
opportunity to stage an orchestral concert presented itself very
rarely. The Albert Hall debacle had frustrated his attempts to do so
in England, but Frank now turned his attention to a pair of orches-
tral concerts, conducted by Michael Zearott, to be given at Royce
Hall on the UCLA campus on September 17/18. For them, he
assembled a 37-piece band, including Terry Bozzio, Dave Parlato,
Emil Richards and others from Grand Wazoo days, which was
christened the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Orchestra.
The repertoire combined old and new and rearranged material:
'Duke Of Prunes', 'Dog Breath' and 'Uncle Meat' mutated afresh,
as did 'Stricdy Genteel', 'Rollo' (part of 'Farther O'Blivion'),
'Black Napkins' (first played at LA's Shrine Auditorium in August
1974) and 'Revised Music For Guitar & Low-Budget Orchestra',
while 'Pedro's Dowry', 'Naval Aviation In Art?' and 'Bogus Pomp'
made their debuts. Parts of these performances, all of which were
recorded, were subsequendy released under contentious circum-
stances on Orchestral Favorites.
Bongo Fury, its artist credit a terse 'Zappa/Beefheart Mothers', its
cover a glowering Zappa and a modest Beefheart with downcast
head seated at a backstage table, was released in America on
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One Size Fits All
October 2, 1975. It ran into trouble in England because of Don
Vliet's contractual problems. In 1973, he'd signed a two-album
deal with Mercury, while in England the rights were acquired
by Richard Branson's Virgin label. The albums, Unconditionally
Guaranteed and Bluejeans And Moonbeams, were intended to broaden
Beefheart's appeal but were poorly conceived and badly received
by fans with no taste for the mundane nonsense that they con-
tained. The consequences of this catalogue of disasters produced
the morass from which Frank had saved him. Now it seemed that
the respite was only temporary.
Virgin Records, who regarded Beefheart as their exclusive artist,
took out an injunction against Warner Brothers issuing Bongo Fury
in England. Neither company could agree on a suitable formula for
its release and the album would not be officially issued in England
until 1989. Meanwhile, Virgin were content to sell it as an expen-
sive import in their record stores. Beefheart was on tour in England
in November and protested the situation from the stage of
London's New Victoria Theatre: "They have no right to stop the
world from hearing Frank and I having fun. Who are they kidding
with a name like that? There are no more virgins, we all know that.
The dance of the seven veils is over!"34
FILTHY HABITS
By this time, Frank had been back out on the road for a month
with his third personnel of the year and the last to bear the name
Mothers Of Invention, a stripped-down combo consisting of
Napoleon Murphy Brock, Andre Lewis, Roy Estrada and Terry
Bozzio. When the group played a Halloween concert at New
York's Felt Forum, they were augmented on saxophone and vocals
by Norma Jean Bell. She'd been suggested by Ralph Armstrong,
bassist with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Frank invited her to
accompany the tour. But, as Terry Bozzio explained, "By the time
we got back to LA at the end of the tour, she had pretty much suc-
cumbed to hanging out with the wrong people and doing a lot of
drugs. So Frank said, 'Forget this!' "35
She did, however, get to go to Yugoslavia on a two-concert trip
officially sanctioned by the Yugoslav Tourist Board. The gigs took
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Frank Zappa
place in Zagreb and Ljubljana: "I recall Zagreb was literally the
smokiest gig I've ever played," said Terry Bozzio. "I had never
been in a hockey rink with 10,000 people filled with so much
smoke in my life. It was probably terribly unhealthy. But the gig
went over great."36
"It's my understanding," Frank said later, "that Yugoslavia was
the most liberal of all the East Bloc countries (at that time). But
lemme tell ya, if Yugoslavia was the most liberal of the 'workers'
paradises' of that era, the other places must have been pure hell."37
For anything other than the road rats Frank liked to employ, the
next three months would have been pure hell, too. Immediately
after Christmas 1975, the band played Oakland and San Francisco
before returning to LA to play The Forum in Inglewood on New
Year's Eve, with Captain Beefheart and Todd Rundgren's Utopia
also on the bill. At the end of January 1976, there was a tour of
Australia followed by gigs in Japan, from which sundry recordings,
including 'Black Napkins', 'Zoot Allures' and 'Ship Ahoy', turned
up on later albums. With just a few days' break, the band (including
sometime-engineer Davey Moire on vocals) continued to Europe
for 23 dates that took in every country but Britain.
By now, Frank was being systematically bootlegged and at least
six albums from the European tour were circulated, one three-LP
set, Good Evening Vienna, even had individual air-brushed artwork
for each of its 500 copies. From these, it can be gathered that the
band's repertoire was fairly evenly drawn from most periods of the
Mothers' 12-year existence. 'Stink Foot', 'Dinah-Moe Humm',
'Advance Romance' and 'The Torture Never Stops' were already
concert favourites, and the nostalgia section included 'How Could
I Be Such A Fool?', 'I Ain't Got No Heart' and 'I'm Not Satisfied'.
The new material comprised 'Tryin' To Grow A Chin', 'Wind Up
Working In A Gas Station', 'Naval Aviation In Art?', 'Honey,
Don't You Want A Man Like Me?', 'Black Napkins', 'Filthy Habits'
and 'The Illinois Enema Bandit'. Frank told Nigel Leigh how the
latter came about: "I actually heard about it on the radio. We were
returning from a job in Normal, Illinois and had the radio on in the
station wagon. The announcer said, 'The Illinois Enema Bandit'
has struck again, and I went, 'What!' Apparendy, this guy had been
ravaging the area of Southern Illinois for a number of years. He
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One Size Fits All
would find a co-ed's apartment with the door unlocked and he
would walk in with a ski mask on and I guess a revolver, and force
the woman to experience a severe internal rinse at gunpoint."38
Thirty-year-old Michael Kenyon was finally arrested and pleaded
guilty in Urbana, Illinois to six counts of armed robbery and admit-
ted to administering enemas to at least three of his victims. But, as
Frank said, "since there is no law against giving anyone an enema,
he went to jail because he took money from the ugly ones.
"Many of the things that I've written have been true stories in
songs about obscure people who did obscure things, and they func-
tion in the same folk music tradition except that it's been
performed on electric instruments." To Frank, Michael Kenyon's
anal obsession was "the chance to do a folk song, especially since
we were playing a lot of jobs in the Midwest. He's like a household
word here, he should have a song. It's not exactly John Henry and
the steamhammer, but, you know, he needs to have a song."39
Other tunes, like 'Black Napkins', had more prosaic origins. The
composition had been around for a while but "it was finally named
last Thanksgiving when we were having this horrible Thanksgiving
dinner in Milwaukee. Sliced turkey roll with the fucking preserva-
tives just gleaming off of it, and this beat-up cranberry material.
The final stroke to this ridiculous dinner was the black napkins,
sitting next to the dishes. That really said the most about the
dinner."40 'Tryin' To Grow A Chin', which began life as a one-
verse vocal by Frank over 'Black Napkins', was "constructed using
every kind of cliche that folk-rock brought to the world — all those
stupid bass lines. And it's sung by (Terry Bozzio) who has a squeaky
little teenage voice. "41
The tour ended in Bilbao on March 17 and once back in LA,
Frank turned his attention to a backlog of album projects that were
at various stages of completion. "There are three things that are
important to me right now," he said in April. "The 40-piece
orchestra album, the guitar album and the ten record set."42 The
previous year, the latter had been a 12-piece set of previously
unissued material documenting the history of the Mothers. Then
he'd said, "This is a very difficult and expensive project. We cur-
rendy have someone canvassing retailers. If we can get orders for
5,000, the company will release it."43
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Frank Zappa
Now, he admitted, "The problem with that - we got the 5,000
orders - is that if you deliver a double album, that still counts as one
album. But if it's a ten record album? I don't feel that it's right to
count that as one album. Warner Brothers aren't even sure they
want to count it as a single album against my contract et cetera . . .
that it's maybe not commercial."44
That wasn't the only problem Frank faced in the summer of
1976.
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13
ZOOT ALLURES
In addition to all the existing projects, there was the matter of a
new album to be considered. For this, Frank block-booked the LA
Record Plant and for the first time approached his task literally as a
solo venture. He told Steve Rosen, "I did a lot of tracks just starting
with a Rhythm Ace and building all the stuff up from there."1
With the exception of a Uve version of'Black Napkins', recorded
in Osaka the previous February, and the tide track, all nine tunes
on Zoot Allures were basically duets between Frank and Terry
Bozzio, with selected instrumental embeUishment from Ruth
Underwood, Don VUet, Dave Parlato and harpist Louanne NeU,
and vocal assistance by Roy Estrada, Davey Moire, Ruben Ladron
de Guevara and Sparkie Parker.
Asked whether he'd ever consider using a producer again, Frank
repUed, "I would if I thought I could find somebody who would
produce things the way I want to hear them. But the details that I
worry about when I go into a studio are how the board is laid out,
what EQ is going to be on the stuff you're Ustening to in the head-
phones, what kind of echo you're going to be using, how long you
should be taking to do such-and-such, because at $150 an hour
you don't want to be wasting your time in there. It's hard once
you've got aU that stuff set up to just walk in and play and forget
about it. I'U spend anywhere from three to nine hours just getting
the sound on the rest of the band right before I'U record."2
But, while this method of working eliminated some of the likely
misunderstandings that take place when human beings congregate
in a recording studio, Frank discovered, like Paul McCartney,
Andrew Gold and Todd Rundgren before him, that the finished
product lacked the warmth and accessibility that coUaborative
effort imparts. Solo albums can be flattering exhibitions of versatiUty,
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Frank Zappa
but they can also be cold and impersonal. And when the subject
matter, including soft porn, leisure devices, dead-end jobs and
dead-beats, is filtered through Frank's habitually cynical perspec-
tive, that can get pretty cold.
'Wind Up Workin' In A Gas Station', 'Wonderful Wino'
(co-written with Jeff Simmons in 1970 and part of the Flo & Eddie
band's repertoire), 'Find Her Finer' and 'Disco Boy' are repetitive
and static, lacking the energy evident in stage versions. Neither the
balance nor the sound of individual overdubs was particularly
precise and Frank's double-tracked sleazoid vocals seldom varied.
The latter song had the distinction of being a good enough parody
of its genre to be mistaken for the real thing. Frank's opinion of it
was typically scathing: "Disco music makes it possible to have disco
entertainment centres. Disco entertainment centres make it poss-
ible for mellow, laid-back kinds of people to meet each other and
reproduce."3
By comparison, a marathon version of 'The Torture Never
Stops' is a complete success, Frank's quiedy salivating vocal
enhancing the ominous atmosphere of the arrangement and the
lyrics. These conjure up the baroque black humour of The Pit And
The Pendulum and The Fall Of The House Of Usher, two of film
director Roger Corman's finest moments, although Frank's leering
Evil Prince misses the camp elegance that Vincent Price brought to
his characters. And throughout, females groan and squeal in a
manner more appropriate to the (then double) album's original
title, Night Of The Iron Sausage.
"The sound effects to 'The Torture Never Stops' were an
evening's work," he told Pauline McLeod. "We did most of it in
the bedroom of my house. There were two chicks there — one was
my wife — plus myself. I think they enjoyed it very much. We got
four hours on tape and then cut it down to just under ten minutes.
My friend opens up with the first grunt and it carries on from there.
Er, I don't think it's worth telling you precisely what went on . . .
you wouldn't be allowed to publish it."4 From her photograph,
McLeod didn't look gullible but, unless she'd done her research,
there was no way she'd have known about Frank's bust at Studio
Z, otherwise the similarities would have been all too apparent.
Less epic but unrepentantly disgusting is 'Ms. Pinky', a lumbering
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Zoot Allures
and salacious paean of praise to a 'lonely person device'. Frank
came across this one in a Finnish porno magazine. 'It was a head
with its mouth wide open and its eyes shut and a short haircut.'5
When the band reached Amsterdam, he sent bodyguard John
Smothers out to buy one to use on-stage. "Sure enough, for
$69.95, he came back with Ms. Pinky. It was even worse than I had
imagined. Not only is it a head, it's the size of a child's head. The
throat is sponge rubber and it's got a vibrator in it with a battery
pack and a two-speed motor. Sticking out of its neck is a nozzle
with a squeeze-bulb that makes the throat contract."6 'Lonely
Person Devices', recorded in Copenhagen the previous March and
released on YCDTOSA 6, tells the story to the accompaniment of
much Danish laughter.
Best of all were the instrumentals. 'Black Napkins' and 'Zoot
Allures' are two of Frank's most distinctive themes, the first con-
sisting of a terse introductory riff and a fleet-fingered extended solo
of flashing brilliance, the second a measured, chord-based melody
with precisely controlled feedback and poised harmonies over the
drums' steady pulse and Ruth Underwood's burbling marimba. In
fact, so mesmeric is the latter theme that there's an acute sense of
regret when the track begins to fade after Frank's solo has only just
begun.
'Friendly Litde Finger' opens with a quasi-oriental theme on
guitar and marimba and then becomes an extended improvisation
on bass and guitar by Frank, with Terry Bozzio's drums shifting
accents and tempos. Its principal interest lies in its being an early
example of what Frank termed 'xenochrony', or strange synchro-
nisations. Prior to this, the most striking instance of what he would
develop as a full-blown technique was 'The Blimp' on Beefheart's
Trout Mask Replica, when Antennae Jimmy Semens' lyric chant and
Don Vliet's horn flourishes were randomly added to a Mothers
master with an intriguing result.
On 'Friendly Little Finger', while the bass and guitar share the
same tonality, the tempo and time signature of what they play are
unrelated, creating a random but coherent whole. On later albums,
Frank would combine instrumental tracks from different record-
ings to create the illusion of simultaneous improvisation and paste
live guitar solos onto studio backing tracks.
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Frank Zappa
He explained his attitude toward soloing on record: "I try to
have the event that's going on the record make musical sense and
fit in with what's going on; because a record is a fixed object, it
doesn't change. It's not a song anymore, it's an object. If you're
playing a song on the road it can change every night. It can be
something, it comes alive each time you play it, and it has its own
existence. But once you've committed it to wax, it never changes.
So if you're going to leave your guitar solo on, you're stuck with
that for the life of the record."7
To achieve satisfactory results with such precise criteria, he had
to have reliable backing musicians. "It's hard to explain to guys just
coming into the band, the rhythmic concept I have about playing,
because it's based on ideas of metrical balance, long, sustained
events versus groupettoes that are happening with a lot of notes on
one beat. This is sort of against the grain of rock'n'roll, which likes
to have everything in exacdy duple or triple, straight up and down,
so you can constandy tap your foot to it. But I prefer to have the
rhythm section be aware of where the basic pulse of the time is and
create a foundation that won't move, so I can flow over the top
of it.
"It's hard to do, it's hard to get people to do that. And it's also
hard to get them to leave some space for where the fast notes occur.
Rhythm sections always have a tendency to copy; if they hear
somebody else playing fast notes, they want to play fast notes too,
and then you can't hear any fast notes any more. I've always had
good rhythmic rapport with Aynsley Dunbar - I thought he was
really good, drum-wise. And Terry Bozzio ... is excellent.
He has a tendency to frenzy out a litde bit, but I just figure that's
because he's from San Francisco."8
He elaborated on the subject in conversation with Nigel Leigh:
"I like to find players that have unique abilities that haven't been
challenged on other types of music. I mean, a good example would
be a guy like Bruce Fowler, who has an incredible range on the
trombone. When he plays the trombone, you hardly recognise it as
a trombone because his technique is so bizarre. Or Terry Bozzio,
whose idea of constructions for drum solos was in a whole musical
realm that nobody had touched before. And Tommy Mars, this is a
guy that you could hold a conversation (with) and Tommy could
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Zoot Allures
harmonise it while you were talking. You would just follow dia-
logue with chords. How often do you get a chance to apply these
unusual skills on other types of music.
"I could always make do. You can't always get what you want,
so a lot of times I would be stuck with musicians that were merely
competent. (I) would try and push the envelope and teach them
new techniques and see whether they could adapt and grow into
another style. But for me, it was always more interesting to
encounter a musician who had a unique ability, find a way to
showcase that and build that unusual skill into the composition. So
that for ever afterward, that composition would be stamped with
the personality of the person who was there when the composition
was created.'9
ANY DOWNERS
It's surprising that Frank had any stamina left for recording during
these summer months. After returning from Europe, Frank had
gone to Michigan to record the basic tracks for the new album by
Grand Funk Railroad. One of America's quintessential heavy metal
bands, Grand Funk had received ten consecutive platinum albums
but had intended to disband in 1975, after the release of Bom To
Die. But when Frank expressed an interest in producing them, they
stayed together long enough to record Good Singin', Good Playin'.
The album was completed at the LA Record Plant, with engineers
Michael Braunstein and Davey Moire, the team he would use on
Zoot Allures. As well as producing, Frank played guitar on 'Out To
Get You'. The band broke up soon after the album's release in
August.
But the most distracting event was the end of his partnership,
after more than a decade, with Herb Cohen. Amidst the lawsuits
and recriminations, there were two tangible consequences; both
Frank's Zoot Allures and Captain Beefheart's new album, Bat Chain
Puller were prevented from being released. "Listen to this," Frank
told Miles, "I am the chairman of the board of DiscReet and the
president of the company — also those guys (at the Record Plant)
are supposed to be my friends - but they wouldn't release the
master tapes to me unless Warner Brothers indemnified the studio
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Frank Zappa
from any legal action that Herbie might take against them."
Warners agreed to do that but insisted that Frank indemnified
them. "Can you believe it? An individual artist having to indem-
nify one of the biggest record companies in the world so that they
can bring his record out?"10 In the event, the album was mastered
from Frank's own safety copies, and after several months delay, Zoot
Allures was released on the Warner Brothers label on October 29.
As for Beefheart: Frank hadn't produced the album, but the
master tapes of Bat Chain Puller were in his basement. Still, they
couldn't be sent to Virgin in England while the Cohen/Zappa
dispute continued. Miles' NME article implied that the Beefheart
album had been financed with Frank's money, and both he and
Herb Cohen were claiming the album advance. Beefheart had no
choice but to be philosophical about his situation, but there was a
note of sympathy in his comments in a phone interview with
Miles. "When Frankie left Herbie, he reckons (it) opened up a
whole can of worms - a whole new can of worms he didn't even
know was there. It seems that over the years Frank had signed these
pieces of paper, you know, signed in order to be able to keep on
with his art. . ."n If it was true, how ironic that Frank should be as
susceptible as Beefheart to fine-print blindness; how different was
his reaction.
In the wake of this flurry of legal action, Frank decided not to
pursue his argument with the Albert Hall. "It's cost me $50,000 so
far," he said to Miles, "and the lawyers want another $8,000 to
appeal. It's not worth it." Even so, an appeal was eventually lodged.
There was some good news: his lawsuit against MGM-Verve was
setded: "We made a settlement in which we get the masters back
plus $100,000. But MGM gets a 3 per cent production over-ride
on all future use of them."12 Out of the five albums that the
Mothers had recorded for them, the label had managed to repack-
age 11, an inventive abuse of creativity. Unfortunately, these funds
too were tied up in Frank's action against Cohen. He wouldn't
take physical possession of the master tapes until 1982.
With so much contention in the air, it was only common sense
to dispense with the name, Mothers of Invention. Since the last
Mothers had, by most people's reckoning, been the twenty-fourth
to bear that name, Frank had every justification in saying "any
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Zoot Allures
resemblance between this group and die original Mothers of
Invention is purely conceptual." Not using the name would also
prevent Herb Cohen from putting any restraint orders on Frank's
work schedule and earnings.
The new group, which began yet another tour in mid-October,
was just known as Zappa. It consisted of Terry Bozzio on drums,
Ray White on guitar and lead vocals, Patrick O'Hearn on bass and
Eddie Jobson on keyboards and vocals. In the early stages, Bianca
Odin also played keyboards and sang. Like Bozzio, White and
O'Hearn were both from the Bay area, with backgrounds in funk
and jazz. O'Hearn was Bozzio's friend and earlier in the summer
had been staying at his Los Angeles house while playing with saxo-
phonist Joe Henderson at The Lighthouse. The Mothers had been
disbanded and Frank and Terry were laying down tracks at the
Record Plant. The drummer invited O'Hearn down to the studio
to listen to what had been laid down.
"I stopped by at about 2.30 in the morning," he told Robert L.
Doerschuk. "Not being one to leave my upright bass in die car, I
carted it into the studio. Frank, upon seeing me with this bass,
remarked, 'Do you play that dog house, fella?' I said, 'Sure do.'
Then, without even a formal introduction, he said, 'Well, how
would you like to put some acoustic bass on this track?' I said,
'Let's do it.' The cut was finally released as 'The Ocean Is The
Ultimate Solution'."13 Frank liked O'Hearn's playing enough to
invite him back the following night to play electric bass on anodier
track. As they listened back to the first take, he offered O'Hearn a
job in the new band.
"At one point, Frank, Terry and I were just a trio. We jammed
and played throughout the summer as such. Frank was producing
Good Singin', Good Playin' at the time, and diose guys would come
in and encourage Frank to 'revive the power trio'. This was
before the Police; die last trios had been Hendrix and Cream. We
thought about that and actually rehearsed it for a while. But
eventually Frank felt that he needed at least five guys to make
things interesting.'14
Eddie Jobson had replaced Darryl Way in Curved Air at me pre-
cocious age of 17, and then in the summer of 1973 joined Roxy
Music as the replacement for the sacked Brian Eno. He was never a
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Frank Zappa
full member of the group, merely a salaried employee like the
members of Frank's bands. He'd met Frank when Roxy Music
supported the Mothers at a gig in Milwaukee in May 1974, when
he'd sat in with one of his musical heroes. At the end of Roxy's
American tour, he remained in Los Angeles and played with an
early incarnation of Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. Then Frank
invited him to accompany the Mothers on a week of Canadian
gigs-
Jobson and Frank played together at sound checks and in dress-
ing rooms as Frank assessed both his musical ability and his capacity
to memorise arrangements. But he did get to play on-stage at two
shows. "He'd sort of say maybe five minutes before he was due
on-stage, 'It'd be nice if you played along tonight,'" he told Chris
Salewicz. "You know, there's 10,000 people out there and he tells
you like five minutes before and you just have to go on-stage and
jam, really. I mean, he goes into a riff that you've never heard
before in your life and just points at you and you have to do a solo.
It was really good for me ... I mean, that's his strength. He
stretches his musicians beyond their capabilities all the time. And
then when it comes to a performance he'll just relax it slighdy to
the point where people can actually play what he wants."15
With an open invitation to join the band whenever he could,
Jobson returned to England, where he was offered gigs with Ian
Gillan and Procol Harum. Then he was told that Roxy Music were
taking an indefinite break, during which he wouldn't be paid. He
rang Frank, and Frank sent him a plane ticket. He'd passed the test
but even so, the matter of his origin couldn't go unnoticed; the
tour programme pointed out that Jobson brought to the band "a
sort of damp English charm, smothered in rosy-cheeked appeal".
"I remember when Frank went through the law-suit," said
Terry Bozzio, "he said he might not be able to pay us. We all said,
'Well, we're willing to hang in there for a few months as long as
the savings hold out,' in the hopes that things would get better.
Frank was really depressed at that time. It was just me and Patrick
O'Hearn and Eddie Jobson. I was going to be the sort of lead
singer, and do the stuff that Napoleon did. It was a very strange
time, you know. Then he got Ray White."16
Both O'Hearn and White would stay with Frank for some years,
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Zaot Allures
but Jobson left at the end of the tour and Bianca Odin's tenure only
lasted a few weeks. Her presence in the band is commemorated on
YCDTOSA 6 in her lusty singing on a version of 'Wind Up
Workin' In A Gas Station' from the October 29 gig at The Spec-
trum in Philadelphia.
Despite little or no promotion by Warner Brothers, Zoot Allures
(with cover photographs that featured Zappa, Bozzio, O'Hearn
and Jobson, though the latter pair were not on the record) sold
117,000 copies in its first week of release. Speaking towards the
end of November, Frank still wasn't particularly impressed with his
record company. "They've been giving me the shits on this new
album. Normally you come into town and there's the local
Warners representative to take you to the local radio station. Well,
so far on this tour I've seen five guys ... In New York we sold out
three nights at the Felt Forum. Warner Brothers bought 15 tickets
for the press."17
Surprisingly, the song content was not preventing album tracks
from being played on the radio. "It's getting played everywhere,"
Frank told NME, "except oddly enough in Toronto, Canada. I was
doing an interview on what used to be one of the most progressive
stations there when I noticed that the album had white stickers on
two of the tracks, 'Black Napkins' and 'The Torture Never
Stops'." Frank proceeded to have an argument about censorship on
air with the station manager. "What it amounted to was that he
didn't understand the lyrics. All he knew was that they made him
hot so he thought they must be bad!"18 How an instrumental could
arouse a station manager's ardour was never revealed.
At Cobo Hall in Detroit on November 19, Flo & Eddie
appeared as the opening act and returned to jam with their old boss,
along with bass player Ralph Armstrong from the Mahavishnu
Orchestra and drummer Don Brewer from Grand Defunct Rail-
road. Flo & Eddie had auditioned for Frank's latest band and he'd
wanted them but their record company, Columbia, wanted them
to go on the road with their own group, which included Bruce and
Walt Fowler, to promote their new album, Moving Targets. When
their guitarist, Phil Reed, fell to his death from a hotel window,
Frank agreed to let them join his tour.
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Frank Zappa
SUPERNAUT
Back in April 1975, while in London for the Albert Hall case,
Frank had given journalist Giovanni Dadomo a list of 'faves, raves
and composers in their graves'. At the head of the list, which also
included Abbey Road, The Best Of Muddy Waters, The Complete
Works OfEdgard Vartee, The Story Of My Life by Guitar Slim and
"anything by Richard Berry", was Black Sabbath's 'Supemaut'. "I
like it because I think it's prototypical of a certain musical style, and
I think it's well done." A couple of years later, he'd changed his
mind. He told Hugh Fielder, " 'Iron Man'. Are you kidding me?
'Iron Man'! That's a work of art. I used to like 'Supernaut' but I
think 'Iron Man' is the one now."19
Now there were plans for Frank to learn three Black Sabbath
numbers so that he could jam with them at New York's Madison
Square Garden on December 6. It didn't quite turn out that way.
Frank had asked to go to their sound check but this never hap-
pened. When he turned up to the gig, he found a mini-wall of
Marshalls set up for his use, but he refused to play without knowing
what his sound would be like.
"What happened was that Tommy (Iommi) had some trouble
with his guitar and decided to change his strings at the very last
minute. The audience had already been sitting there waiting for an
hour or so since Ted Nugent, and they wanted me to go out there
and make an announcement and calm them down. So I did. And I
introduced them and then sat by the side of the stage over by
Ozzy's orange juice. I just sat there and marvelled at it. I dunk it's
great. Especially in a place like Madison Square Garden with
20,000 people grunting and wheezing and shoving each other."20
Five days later, the Zappa band did a 15-minute live set on
Saturday Night Live, the hugely successful satirical NBC television
show that had begun back in October 1975, made media stars of
Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, and won four
Emmys seven months later. As well as 'Peaches En Regalia' and
'Dancin' Fool', 'The Purple Lagoon' featured Belushi as a Samurai
Be-Bop Musician and 'I'm The Slime' let veteran NBC announcer
Don Pardo come in front of the cameras to assume the tide role.
Pardo enjoyed himself so much that Frank invited him to appear
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Zoot Allures
with the band during its four-day residence between Christmas and
New Year at the Palladium in New York City.
"He's never been seen," he told Tim Schneckloth. "The man's
been working (for NBC) for 30 years and nobody knows what he
looks like. So I thought, fantastic, let's bring Don Pardo live out on
stage and let the world see him. We got him a white tuxedo; he did
some narration for some of the songs we were doing; we brought
him out to sing 'I'm The Slime'. And the audience loved him . . .
the highlight of his career." Schneckloth tried to be facetious by
asking how Frank had managed to get Pardo to debase himself.
"Debase himself? That's really not right. First of all, he has a good
sense of humour. Second, he really enjoyed doing that. I don't
think it was debasing at all. It was giving him an opportunity to
expand into other realms."21
For the Palladium gigs, Frank expanded the band to include a
five-piece brass section of the Brecker Brothers, Randy and Mike,
Lou Marini, Ronnie Cuber and Tom Malone. David Samuels
played timpani and vibes and on assorted percussion was the indis-
pensable Ruth Underwood. Along with John Bergamo and Ed
Mann, she would also add Various humanly impossible overdubs'
to certain tracks, and Louanne Neil overdubbed 'osmotic harp'
(absorbing stuff). The four nights were recorded as part of the
package of albums with which Frank hoped to finish his Warner
Brothers contract.
Once again, the set had changed to enhance both the vaudeville
elements, with an emphasis on oral sex, and the fiendishly difficult
instrumental themes. It reached back to 'Big Leg Emma', which at
this stage had only appeared on a Verve single, 'Pound For A
Brown' and 'Cruisin' For Burgers'. As well as 'Sofa' and 'The
Purple Lagoon' (which also incorporated 'Approximate'), the band
had to weave its tortuous way through 'I Promise Not To Come In
Your Mouth', 'Manx Needs Women' and 'The Black Page'.
Of the latter, O'Hearn said, "The toughest chart I ever had to
play with Frank was the straight version of 'The Black Page'. It's
mainly difficult for the drum chair, but it's a tough chart all around.
We actually worked up two arrangements of it: the straight one
and the disco arrangement, which was hilarious. Terry would slip
into sort of a Latin hustle beat, and I did the ubiquitous bass octaves
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Frank Zappa
that had been made popular by God knows how many groups of
the era."22
Having thrilled to the legend of'The Illinois Enema Bandit', the
audience could revel in 'Titties & Beer', a mountain-top encounter
between Frank as a rancid biker and Terry Bozzio as the Devil,
'Honey, Don't You Want A Man Like Me?', charting a couple's
evening that climaxed in a blow job, and 'Punky's Whips'. The
latter came about, as Frank told it, when Terry Bozzio "came into
contact with a Japanese music magazine called Ongaku and saw in
the middle of this magazine a large head shot of a guy named
(Edwin) 'Punky' Meadows, who was the lead guitar player from a
group called Angel, which was one of those manufactured super-
groups from the people who brought you Kiss (Casablanca
Records). Kiss wore black, Angel wore white.
"Again, nobody had ever heard of an Angel record, but here
they were being promoted rather severely in Japan when we were
there - and to Terry, Punky looked good. He had a nice hairdo, his
lips were pooched out in this pose and Terry went for it. He
thought diat this was something pretty sensational, so it was like
one of those revelation kind of things. We gave Terry a new direc-
tion and behaviour, clothing, comportment, the whole deal. So I
wrote this song about what happened to Terry as a result of seeing
this picture."23
DONG WORK FOR YUDA
The British music press announced in December that Frank Zappa
would be playing dates in England and Scodand for the first time
since September 1973. As Frank commented to Miles, "I have
made statements in the past that I would not come back to England
until I got a personal apology from the Queen. Well - one has not
been forthcoming - and I figured I couldn't wait forever. But there
is still time. She can repent. I'll even give her a backstage pass."24
The six-week swing through Europe ignored the Mediterranean
countries this time and concentrated on Scandinavia and Germany,
with no less than eight gigs in the latter. As for Britain, gigs in
Stafford, Glasgow and Edinburgh were sandwiched by two stints at
London's Hammersmith Odeon on February 9/10 and 16/17. By
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Zoot Allures
now, Frank had trenchant views on European audiences: "The
audience in London is very similar to the audience in LA, which is
to say, singularly boring and jaded. The audiences in some of the
smaller places in Germany are more like East Coast or Midwest
audiences. They have a good sense of humour, they like to make a
lot of noise, but they're not obnoxious. And then you have your
pseudo-intellectual audiences like in Denmark. Paris is a pretty
good audience; I'd have to give Paris like a San Francisco rating."25
The Times sent Clive Bennett along to the opening night at the
Hammersmith Odeon. Although Frank had "substantial musical
virtues", Bennett questioned his self-discipline. "He veers too hap-
hazardly between unorthodox virtuosity and childlike, though not
childish, silliness, and goes too far too often." All in all, "Zappa
may represent a minor threat to entrenched values, but his concerts
are a welcome breath of bad air."26
Miles didn't have to stoop to enjoy himself; it was "a real Zappa
concert" for him. He attended both concerts and noted dieir
differences. "On the first night (Frank) played one totally miscon-
ceived solo - there was no way that anyone could have resolved it
- though he did his best. The same solo spot on the second night
he excelled himself, playing a solo so strong and inventive that the
other guys were all laughing with him as more and more riffs
appeared and were developed. Even Frank was smiling."27
Some songs had undergone radical changes; 'Titties & Beer' had
another verse augmenting the drug indulgence and regurgitation
before he and his girl went on their ride 'up the Mountain of
Mystery'. In London, it was also the occasion for a wicked imita-
tion of Black Sabbath. 'Broken Hearts Are For Assholes' now
segued into 'Dong Work For Yuda', an affectionate tribute to
Frank's bodyguard, John Smothers. As Frank told the Hammer-
smith audience, "Mr Smothers purportedly speaks the English
language but he speaks it in such a way as to add new dimensions to
it." Sung in the style of an a cappella vocal group, Terry Bozzio as
'Bald-headed John' referred to water as HtO and saliva as salima;
'Take me to the falcum' was the order to a confused Danish
cabdriver when Smothers had to get to Copenhagen's Falkoner
Theatret.
Frank found it hard to overcome his prejudice about London. As
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Frank Zappa
Miles noted, "He berates his audience. He called them 'stodgy,
tense, neo-Victorian, hung-up, and more concerned with clothes
than what's happening out in the world.' The ecstatic reception
given him restored his confidence. He encored with 'Camarillo
Brillo' and 'Muffin Man' on the first night, and spoke to the audi-
ence about his accident at the Rainbow and his law suit — he was
genuinely moved."28
The prejudice was fully operative once again when Chris
Salewicz interviewed him for NME. It was a mean-spirited
exchange which served to confirm the preconceptions of both
parties. Salewicz expected 'Rent-a-Spiel' and said so; Frank shot
back, "I don't pretend that anyone who ever talked to me for any
one minute of my life wanted to know anything about me." When
it resumed, the conversation inevitably came round to his record
company.
"I've been associated with Warners for five years and I just think
it's time to go someplace else. You know, I go in the studios and I
really think I'm doing something wonderful. And there are people
who think it's wonderful, too. But there isn't anyone at the fuckin'
record company who'd agree with that. As far as they're concerned
it's a box of shoes." To underline the message, he added, "There's
no way to do too many interviews when you're signed to a record
company like Warners. Somebody's got to sell the records!"29
Soon after he got home, at the beginning of March Frank took
several boxes of tapes to the Warners offices. "The DiscReet con-
tract was coming to an end," Frank said to me, "and I owed them
three or four albums. Whatever it was. I had a deadline to deliver
these things and the fact of the matter was, the albums were in
the can. So I walked into their office and handed the master tapes
to this girl about three months ahead of the deadline. And I'd
spent the money out of my own bank account to make those
albums."
The albums constituted the bulk of recordings made of material
written since his enforced lay-off during 1972. Two were live
recordings; Live In New York was a double album taken from the
Palladium shows during Christmas week, 1976; Orchestral Favorites
came from the September 1975 concerts recorded at Royce Hall,
Los Angeles. Studio Tan and parts of Sleep Dirt used studio sessions
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Zoot Allures
from Spring 1974, with George Duke, Bruce and Tom Fowler,
Ruth Underwood and Chester Thompson. The balance of Skep
Dirt consisted of hybrid tracks begun with the 1974 band and
overdubbed later, with the aforementioned 'The Ocean Is The
Only Solution' and 'Filthy Habits', an instrumental from the 1976
Record Plant sessions that Frank had originally intended to include
on the double album version of Zoot Allures.
The contract stipulated that Frank should receive $60,000
advance for each album. No money was forthcoming and from that
moment yet another law suit was inevitable. At this point, Frank
had no effective management, the litigation with Herb Cohen was
ongoing, with no resolution in sight, and his record company was
refusing to release the albums he'd already made. Anyone of a
nervous disposition would have become a Child of God or moved
to Oregon and bought the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh a couple of
Rolls Royces. Instead, Frank embodied Hunter S. Thompson's
dictum: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
No suit was left untended. The May 7 NME carried a news
item: "Zappa sues previous licensees of Rainbow". Frank "and two
US companies" were claiming $250,000 damages from Sundancer,
which might prove difficult to obtain since the company had gone
into voluntary liquidation. "Zappa and the two companies with
exclusive rights to his services are now claiming for loss of earnings
during that period. No date has been set for the hearing."30 It was
also reported that he'd entered an appeal against the 1975 Albert
Hall judgement, which was due to be heard shortly.
THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT NOTHING
Throughout the summer, Frank concentrated on assembling an
almost totally new band, which would significandy increase the
quality and extent of what could be realised on stage. Retaining
Patrick O'Hearn and Terry Bozzio, he recruited percussionist Ed
Mann, keyboard players Tommy Mars and Peter Wolf, and guitar-
ist Adrian Belew. For what Frank wanted to achieve, it was
important that as many of the band as possible could read music.
Adrian Belew was the one exception.
Frank had seen Belew playing in a Top 40 cover band in
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Frank Zappa
Nashville the previous November. The band, Sweetheart, was the
favourite of Frank's chauffeur that night, so when Frank asked to
be taken to hear some music after his own show, he and John
Smothers were driven down to Fanny's, the bar where Sweetheart
were appearing. "I saw him walk in from the back and just watch
us, which made me a litde nervous," Belew told H.P. Newquist.
"In the middle of playing 'Gimme Shelter', he came up to the side
of the stage and reached over and shook my hand. Later, he got my
name and number from the chauffeur, and not too long after that
he gave me a call to come audition for him.
"We began three months of rehearsal, and it was pretty tough.
Ten hours a day, five days a week. I'd spend my weekends with
Frank, and he'd prep me before the next week's rehearsals so that I
was ready when we went to play with everybody else. During
those weekends I'd watch him arrange pieces of music and it was
just amazing. For those three months it was just a joy being around
him because I picked up so many things."31
Peter Wolf received a Conservatory training for ten years in his
native Austria, before forming a rock band, Gypsy Love, with Carl
Ratzer and Lalomie Washburn. He'd been in Los Angeles for two
weeks, playing keyboards on Washburn's album sessions. Through
her, he met Andre Lewis, who passed his phone number on to
Frank. "The next day at nine in the morning I got a call from
Frank. 'This is Frank Zappa; I'm looking for a keyboard player. Do
you want to audition?'"
After listening to some tapes of Zappa In New York, Wolf was put
through his sight-reading paces, after which Frank said, "Play me
something."
"I took a piano solo. Patrick O'Hearn was there and he whipped
out his acoustic bass. Finally, Frank said, 'Well, what do you think,
Pat, you want to play with this guy?' And Pat said, 'Yeah.' So
Frank turned around and said, 'You're hired.' That was it."32
Tommy Mars had had a more chequered career before becom-
ing a band member. He graduated from Hart College of Music in
West Hartford, Connecticut in 1972; by 1976, "I was working in
this revolving organ bar in Kodiak, Alaska, with Japanese and
Russian fishermen kicking me in the back if I couldn't play an
ethnic folk song to their drunken satisfaction."33 He was living in
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Zoot Allures
Santa Barbara, working as a choirmaster, organist and occasional
jazz pianist, when he got a call from Ed Mann.
He'd known Ed Mann back in Connecticut and Ed told him,
"Frank has a keyboard player already and he's thinking of audition-
ing another one as well. Why don't you give him a call?" Mars
went through a torturous audition, which he sensed was going
nowhere, until Frank asked him to sing something. Not one song
came to mind. "So I told him, 'Frank, I can't think of anything so
I'm going to improvise something.' So I just started playing and
singing. I have a style of scatting that is very definitely my own and
it's co-ordinated very basically and organically with what I'm
playing on the piano. It totally knocked Frank out. He called Gail,
his wife, downstairs and said, 'Listen to this guy blow.' And that
saved me. My reading was only adequate for what he wanted but
the improv saved me, I'm sure."34
Frank put him on a temporary retainer and gave him some music
to learn over the next week. "A week later, I came back down
from Santa Barbara," he told Robert L. Doerschuk. "I had learned
every piece that he gave me as a solo piano arrangement, even 'The
Black Page' and 'Punky's Whips'. He thought I would just learn
the chords and some of the melodic licks, but I did everything as if
I would do it solo. So he was utterly flabbergasted."35
Perhaps not. "I'll tell you, the kind of musician I need for the
bands that I have doesn't exist," Frank told Tim Schneckloth early
in 1978. "I need somebody who understands polyrhythms, has
good enough execution on the instrument to play all kinds of
styles, understands staging, understands rhythm and blues, and
understands how a lot of different compositional techniques
function.
"The main thing a person has to have is very fast pattern recog-
nition and information storage capability. That's because we play
like a two, two-and-a-half-hour show non-stop with everything
organised ... So it requires a lot of memorisation — fast memorisa-
tion. You can't spend a year teaching somebody a show." Frank
pointed out that three months constant rehearsal was an expensive
investment, "because it's $13,250 a week for rehearsals — we
rehearse with full equipment, full crew and a soundstage. So I
prefer people who learn fast." In order to keep it all on the move,
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Frank Zappa
the stage gear required one 22-foot and two 45-foot trucks. "In
Europe we were using two 40s. For every person on stage playing
an instrument, there are two other guys in the crew. There's seven
people in the band, 21 total travelling. And they all work."36
BABY SNAKES
After a warm-up gig at the University of California in San Diego
on September 9, 1977, the band took to the road for the next
couple of months, including a four-day stint at the Palladium in
New York City that ended with shows on Halloween Night.
These shows were recorded on the Record Plant's 24-track mobile
facilities, and film crews were also present to shoot footage for
Frank's next project, Baby Snakes. With sundry backstage japes,
including Roy Estrada's interminable liaison with a full-bodied Ms.
Pinky, interpolated into the performance, the complexity of
the music is matched by Bruce Bickford's mind-clenching clay
animation, including a sequence in 'Disco Boy' where 'Billy The
Mountain' and 'Greggary Peccary' are both briefly glimpsed.
A 'soundtrack' album was eventually released in 1983, contain-
ing an introductory conversation between Frank and Warren
Cucurullo, and versions of 'Baby Snakes', 'Titties & Beer', 'The
Black Page', 'Jones Crusher', 'Disco Boy', 'Dinah-Moe Humm'
and 'Punky's Whips'. The film also contained an extended pre-
amble to 'Dirty Love', later released (along with 'Tryin' To Grow
A Chin') on YCDTOSA 6 as 'The Poodle Lecture', in which
Frank enumerated God's three mistakes, those being Man, Wo-Man
and the Poodle. Having no truck with snakes and apples, Frank
recounts how Eve took a fancy to certain parts of the poodle and
sent Adam out to work for the money needed to buy some clip-
pers, scissors and the inevitable zircon-encrusted tweezers, with
which to give the dog of her dreams 'the disco look that's so
popular these days'. Frank squatted on a suitably primped life-sized
replica to show how Eve brought bestiality to the Garden.
This being the site of his previous live New York recordings, he
couldn't resist a dig at his previous record company during the
preamble to his parody of an English pop-star's recent American
hit. Released on YCDTOSA  6 as 'Is That Guy Kidding Or
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Zoot Allures
What?', Frank asked his audience, "How many of you people feel
that rock has gotten entirely too preposterous?" He went on to be
moderately scathing about Peter Frampton's 1976 number two US
hit, 'I'm In You', and put forward an imaginary scenario in which a
teenage groupie took her pop star idol back to her appropriately lit
teenage bedroom, removed her own teenage clothes and granted
entry to the pop star appendage, only to have the immortal words
of Frampton's song whined in her ear. Frank's parody, 'I Have
Been In You', typically dispensed with 'in-you-endo' in its tale of
bedroom athletics.
He saved his most scathing record company attack for the ad-lib
section of 'Titties & Beer'. "I have been through hell," he spat.
"Remember, I was signed with Warner Brothers for eight fuckin'
years. Now how bad is that?"
He was about to get his answer.
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LATHER
"I'm here to play an album for you and I'm rapping a little -
rapping is one of those words you say when you go on rock'n'roll
radio stations - I'm rapping a little bit at this point to prepare each
and every one of you for the grand and glorious experience of
getting your httle cassette machines out. Because I would like to
have you tape record this album off the air. Because this album is
not going to be available in stores. Because Warner Brothers is
trying to ruin my darn career."
Frank was sitting in a studio at KR.OQ in Pasadena. He was
about to play Lather, a remixed and re-programmed four-album
version of the tapes he'd presented to Warner Brothers in March.
When the DiscReet contract ran out in June, he'd set about
finding a new record company to distribute his product. First he
approached and was declined by Capitol (part of the EMI organi-
sation); they used the same law firm as Warner Brothers and
pressed Warners' records at the time. Mercury/Phonogram then
agreed to release the set on his own Zappa label on October 31.
And then . . . Warner Brothers announced they'd scheduled
Zappa In New York, as per the DiscReet contract; since Lather also
contained some of the same performances, Mercury/Phonogram
could not issue it. Three hundred box-sets (catalogue number:
SRZ 4-1500) had already been produced and were now useless.
But Frank had a set of test pressings and he was going to use them.
He briefly explained the circumstances to the KROQ audience as
they readied their cassette machines.
"Warner Brothers does not have the rights to this material,
although it was delivered to them. They refused to pay me for the
material and so I claimed a breach of contract and set out to negoti-
ate with some other record companies. And in several instances,
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Lather
Warner Brothers interfered with those negotiations and spoiled the
possibility of releasing this material elsewhere. First place they did it
was with EMI and the second was with Mercury/Phonogram; they
were ready to press the album, the cover was printed. What you're
listening to now is actual test pressings that Mercury/Phonogram
had prepared. At the last minute, Warner Brothers threatened them
with legal proceedings and so they backed out of the deal.
"The way it stands now is my future as a recording artist is
dangling in mid-air, pending court procedures which in California
can take anywhere from three to five years for civil cases just to get
a day in court and get your case heard. So, since I don't think
anybody wants to wait three to five years to hear my wonderful
music, I've taken it upon myself to come down here and advise
anybody interested in the stuff I do to get a cassette machine and
tape the album. You can have it for free, just take it right off the
radio. Don't buy it, tape it."
Some time later, wouldn't you know it, a bootleg box-set was
issued, including his opening preamble. Some time after that, a
double-album bootleg, Leatherette, devoted three sides to tracks
from Lather, while the fourth side featured a 1972 radio interview
with Martin Perlich and the complete conversation with KROQ's
Jerry Kay.
It was a frustrating time; access to his film and audio archive had
been denied him and Warner Brothers' proprietorial attitude
towards Frank meant that he'd become a pariah in the record busi-
ness. "They had made it impossible for me to get a record contract
with anybody," he told Den Simms. "There was a period of time
where I was kind of locked out of the music business, and since I
didn't have a recording studio at that time, and since I didn't have a
contract, and I couldn't go into a recording studio, in an act of
desperation, I took my four-track and hooked up a bunch of litde
dipshit equipment here in (my) basement, just like every other
garage band guy would do, and I was making some one-man tapes
here."1
The only thing to do was to get out on the road. As in previous
years, 1978 opened with another European tour, which this time
began and ended with shows at London's Hammersmith Odeon.
The first of these was a five-night stand, from Tuesday, January 24
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Frank Zappa
to Saturday, January 28. Paul Rambali interviewed Frank for NME
while final rehearsals were taking place. He opened his piece
dramatically: "There exists a very real possibility that we won't
hear any new recordings from Francis Vincent Zappa until at least
the turn of this decade."2
The next paragraphs detailed the machinations of managements
and record companies, and revealed that "the fate of Live In New
York is undecided due to some defamatory material included
therein about a certain Punky Meadows." The Angel story was
related, as was a further deterioration in Terry Bozzio's conduct:
"He has lately been seen on stage sporting S&M gear replete with
fido studs and butt strap." It turned out that the hunk in question
had heard 'Punky's Whips', had felt flattered and given Frank his
permission to release it, but that wasn't enough for Warners.
Later in the conversation, Frank deflected a question about
feminist attitudes to his more lubricious material: "I'm saying
simply this: it's as much of a hype as punk rock as far as I'm con-
cerned. Some of the things they wish to achieve are quite noble,
but I resent the manner in which they are being advertised. It's not
the ideals, it's the packaging. I find it repulsive and think it's an
insult to men and demeaning to women."
Finding his stride — and this being England — he roped in an
all-too-familiar hobby horse. "Punk rock is a phenomenon manu-
factured by managers. It's almost a matter of survival the way I
sense it here — the pressure to be a part of whatever is the going
trend. In the States the pressures are different. You still have peer
group acceptance pressures, but they're not based on rock as a
culture ... I get the impression that in order to survive in this
country you have to be absolutely dedicated to what has been
announced as the trend of the day, otherwise you're a nerd — and
nobody wants to be a nerd. As an amateur sociologist then, I would
say they are in a better mental health condition rock-wise in the
States than they are here."
America wasn't completely healthy, though. As far as learning
from the cultural upheavals of the Sixties, he was less sanguine.
"They haven't learned some of the most important lessons of the
Sixties. The single most important one I think is that LSD was a
scam promoted by the CIA and that the people in Haight-Ashbury
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Lather
who were idols of people across the world as examples of revolu-
tion and outrage and progress were mere dupes of the CIA." Had
the government been experimenting on its own people? "I think
it's a process they wanted to go through to find out what the appli-
cations are in terms of controlling segments of the population. It's
one thing to use these drugs on enemy soldiers, but what happens
in situations in cities?"3
It was a theme that Frank had developed in a radio interview
with Jim Ladd: "Look, in the 1950s a teenager was an unwanted
commodity. Nobody knew yet that that was the new big consumer
market. They were just troublemakers, you know, so teenagers
were just sort of swept under the rug. They were the wild teenage
thrill seekers and juvenile delinquents, and nobody had any use for
them until they found out that those little spare-time jobs that they
were getting and the money they were getting for allowances when
added up turned out to be billions of dollars a year for certain
products. At the point that that was discovered, one of the great
truths of business lit up over the heads of all those people in the
places where they work on those kind of things."
According to Frank, the next step was, "We can't just get their
bucks, we have to keep diem under control because money means
power. If these kids have money then they have power, and if they
ever find out that they have power, then we're in trouble, you
know, they'll be unco-operative. So they have to be dealt with,
and there are ways of dealing with them."4
Rambali found all that hard to believe. "That's because you're not
in America. But the way I see it is that those crooks who wind up
being president of the United States and the other smart litde
persons they have working for them will do anything. They believe
that they are the law." As he'd said in the earlier conversation: "The
best thing that the government has working for them is that the
people that they are trying to control are willing to be controlled."5
The idea may have seemed bizarre but the logic was devastating.
It prompted Rambali to ask whether Frank considered himself the
arch-cynic he was portrayed to be. "I think being a cynic is the
only rational stance to take in a contemporary society. I would call
it quite a compliment to be called an arch-cynic; that almost sounds
important."6
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Frank Zappa
What was important about his prolonged stay among his favour-
ite people was that the Hammersmith gigs were being recorded for
the next album, for which there was as yet no oudet. But not for a
live album; improved technology, via The Basing Street Truck,
was finally enabling Frank to achieve the (albeit intermediate) goal
of recording live backing tracks on multi-track equipment, of
sufficient quality to then be overdubbed in the studio with all the
embellishments that he could envisage. The ultimate goal for this
approach, which would also be achieved, was the combination of
musicianship and technical expertise that would mean his com-
positions could be performed and recorded live with no additional
studio work.
Just to keep Frank's prejudice fresh and corrosive, the British
press reported a new outrage to add to their catalogue of Zappa
indiscretions. The group were leaving Heathrow on their way to a
gig in Frankfurt as the Sunday papers reported the arrest of certain
members overnight. The Sunday Express piece bore the headline,
"Zappa Group In Hotel Uproar". While Frank had stayed in a
hotel 'offHyde Park', the band were at the Holiday Inn. Frank was
quoted: "Four members of the road crew and one member of my
group were taken to Paddington police station after police burst
into their hotel rooms this morning. They did not have a warrant.
They simply broke open the doors and cut the burglar chains with
wire cutters. I understand that a member of the hotel management
made a complaint. We didn't smash anything, attack anyone or
scream blue murder all night."7 A police spokesman said that
'various substances' were found in their rooms. One man was
released immediately and the other four were freed on bail "to
report back on February 27 to see if analysis of the substances con-
stitutes an offence." Nothing more was heard.
During a four-day stint in Paris, Frank went down the Metro to
find a musician he'd read about in the New York Herald Tribune.
Harmonica player Sugar Blue and his French girlfriend Cecile were
playing blues on the platforms of Odeon station. Frank brought
him to the Nouvel Hippodrome, where he jammed in front of
10,000 people. "Zappa," he told Phillipe Manoeuvre, "that mother
has a lotta soul. I felt so close to him on stage. I could feel his heart
beating while we were playing. He gave me a lot of room to play,
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Lather
and when we went out, he just asked me, 'How much do you
want?' I sure didn't know what to tell him."8 Shortly after, Blue
played harmonica on the Rolling Stones' 'Miss You'.
COCAINE DECISIONS
Warners finally released Zappa In New York on March 3, 1978, five
months after its intended release date, only to withdraw it immedi-
ately after the first pressing. The company's legal department were
still concerned about 'Punky's Whips' and now took exception to
some more ad-lib remarks about Punky Meadows and Jeff Beck in
the badinage between Frank and Terry Bozzio during 'Titties &
Beer'. The latter was re-edited and, despite Meadows' consent,
'Punky's Whips' was removed altogether. The excision of almost
11 minutes playing time meant the running order of the first two
sides had to be changed and the album was drastically shortened
overall.
"They took it out," an indignant Frank told Hugh Fielder. "First
of all they had no right to tamper with the tapes. Secondly, they
didn't pay me for any of the stuff that I delivered to them. I mean,
they're just so far in breach of the contract and they're just so
grossly unfair." Reacting to criticism of the short playing time, he
said, "It wasn't my fault. I didn't have any control over it."9
"Warner Brothers were never interested in giving people value
for money," Frank said to me in 1991. "From my knowledge, I
think that that company was probably more infested with white
powder than just about any other in the business at that time. It was
an industrialised procedure. They had people that would show up
at concerts with suitcases full of drugs."
The bowdlerised version of Zappa In New York was released in
Britain the following month but the British company quiedy let
stocks of the original album and cassette reach the shelves of some
Virgin stores. The only light note in the proceedings was an adver-
tisement that featured a picture of a facially decorated Margaret
Thatcher emerging from her Jaguar at the Houses of Parliament
with a copy of the album under her arm, alongside the headline, "I
heard Zappa In New York, but it didn't do a thing for me."10
It wasn't until 1991 that the unexpurgated album, with 30
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Frank Zappa
minutes of additional material, was released on a double-CD. For
the immediate future, Frank concentrated on the new album, to be
called Sheik Yerbouti, a pun on K.C. And The Sunshine Band's
1976 chart-topping hit '(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.'
"We worked for months on that," Tommy Mars remembered.
"For instance, on the song 'Baby Snakes', I was watching a Twilight
Zone on TV late one night and I got this phone call from Frank. He
said, 'Hi, Tommy, how are you? Feel like doing a litde singing
tonight?' And I said, 'Sure.' I came down to (Village Recorders)
and did 'Baby Snakes' that night about six times, my own voice on
one line, no harmonies, just a straight linear thing."11
Other songs, like 'Yo' Mama', involved even more work. "On
an orchestrated section of (that) song, the actual things that were
reinforced happened at different times. On that guitar solo, there
are three different sections from three different concerts, and Frank
just juxtaposed them. It was an augmentation of what happened at
a live performance, but an actual arrangement that evolved in the
studio. He'd say, 'Go free, interpret it,' and all these counter-
melodies evolved out of the arrangement that was there.
"Frank wrote that song at the very beginning of the '77 Euro-
pean tour, and it has a personal relevance to me. We were doing
this rehearsal in London and Frank was getting very tense. I got
fined because I hadn't memorised this little piece called 'Litde
House I Used To Live In'. I hadn't realised he wanted it totally
memorised. So this rehearsal ended in a total fiasco. The next day,
he came in with these lyrics: 'Maybe you should stay with yo'
mama . . .'It was really autobiographic; that's how things evolve
with Frank."12
The majority of the album's 16 tunes would be built up from
backing tracks recorded at Hammersmith. Two others, 'Jones
Crusher' and 'Jewish Princess', were recorded in similar fashion at
the Palladium in New York City, and two instrumentals, 'Rat
Tomago' and 'The Sheik Yerbouti Tango' were four-track record-
ings from the February 15 gig at Berlin's Deutschlandhalle. There
were also two typically obtuse spoken interludes, 'What Ever
Happened To All The Fun In The World' and 'We've Got To
Get Into Something Real', the latter commenting on how the
songs were 'two tours old' and incorporating the mention of
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Lather
LEATHER. Finally, there was 'Rubber Shirt', the most perfecdy
realised example of xenochrony thus far. Frank explained its
creation in the sleevenotes and ended with a typically sardonic
flourish: "All of the sensitive, interesting interplay between the bass
and drums never actually happened ..."
Frank took most of the lead vocals, but Terry Bozzio and Adrian
Belew each had their features. Some of the material, like 'Broken
Hearts Are For Assholes' and 'Tryin' To Grow A Chin', was
indeed much older than just two tours. The latter song chimed
well with the recent upsurge of punk rock, and 'I'm So Cute' was
also specifically written for Terry 'Ted' Bozzio to lampoon the
trend. Having already guyed the disco craze with 'Disco Boy',
Frank came up with an even better synthesis of pastiche and satire,
'Dancin' Fool'. Two other songs, 'Bobby Brown' and 'Jewish
Princess', would each contribute in different ways to the eventual
success of the album, making it Frank's biggest seller.
With the sessions completed, auditions and rehearsals began in
July for an autumn tour of Europe and America. Both Patrick
O'Hearn and Adrian Belew had left, the latter to work with David
Bowie. They had met backstage at a German gig, and Bowie had
asked Belew to join his band. "It worked out later that Frank was
sort of finished with his thing and it was time for me to go and do
something else," he said in discussion with Steve Vai. "I remember
one night we were playing 'Yo' Mama'. Frank changed the words
to, 'I think maybe you should stay with your David.' Apart from
that he never gave me any grief about it. He wished me well and it
was very generous of him. I often felt like it was an opportunist
move on my part and I wish I hadn't done it, but those things
happen. I was young and stupid."13
On the very first day of rehearsals, another major change took
place. Terry Bozzio had auditioned with Group 87 before coming
to the rehearsal. "I went in; I'd cut my hair, I was wearing different
clothes, I'd just played this audition and been offered a deal with a
record company (Columbia). We started to rehearse, me and Pat,
and Frank could tell I wasn't really into it. He called me into his
office, as he would say — actually we stepped behind the stage and
he said, 'I think it's time you go off and do your own thing,' just
like a good father would."14
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Frank Zappa
O'Hearn and Bozzio were replaced by Arthur Barrow and
Vinnie Colaiuta, while Belew's place was filled by the return of
Denny Walley and the introduction of Ike Willis. Peter Wolf said
of Barrow, "When he got into the band, he could play everything.
He just walked in and knew all the old parts, all the old bass lines.
He was actually correcting Frank in some places."15 Willis was a
native of St Louis, he'd first seen the Mothers at the city's
Ambassador Theater in 1974. Three years later, on October 2,
1977, the Zappa band played a concert at Washington University,
where Willis was studying. He met Frank after the sound check
and auditioned for him in the dressing room, playing Frank's guitar
and singing a new song called 'Bamboozled By Love'. They then
harmonised on 'Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy' and Frank had made a
note of his phone number. "He just sings his ass off, it's fantastic,"
Frank told Christopher Kathman. "I told him at that time that
when we were having auditions, I'd bring him out."16
"Nobody's universal," Frank told Wayne Manor in an NME
piece, "The Monk On Zappa's Back", that never explained its
tide. "People have different abilities, and if you're working in a
special idiom, you want people who are comfortable in that idiom.
There's plenty of stuff for anyone to learn when they come in the
band. It's like, I think my band's probably the finest music school in
America. It gives you on-the-job training, and if you're lucky
enough to get into the school, you get paid while you learn."
What conversation there was picked over the corpse of Lather
and detailed the three albums that were to come from Warner
Brothers. In a rare instance of candour, Frank talked of his family.
"I've got a brother who sells college textbooks for McGraw-Hill.
He spent three years in the Marines. I got another one who's
working in an old folks home. ['In the kitchen,' says Gail.] My
sister started out by marrying an Okie, and later divorced him and
married a former basketball player. She spends her time working in
a Photo-Mat."
There was one prophetic observation, however. "I see that
people are drifting toward the Rdght today, in a very hypocritical
way. They're not really right-wing people. But they figure that the
more they look right-wing, the more they'll be able to get away
with in the closet. The whole right-wing trend is people who want
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to look upstanding while they go home and do as much weird stuff
as they can get away with."17 Was there a scent of Ronald Reagan
and Jimmy Swaggart in the wind?
ARE YOU HUNG UP?
Before spending the autumn touring America, the Zappa band
came to Europe for seven dates, five in Germany, one in Sweden
and one in England. No less than four were open-air festivals,
including that in the grounds of Knebworth House which also
featured the Boomtown Rats, Peter Gabriel and the Tubes. After
the first gig in Ulm on August 26, Frank had intended to stay in
Munich, but his request for a piano in his suite could not be met.
So, reluctandy, he came to London and took a four-room suite on
the fifth floor of the Hyde Park Hotel. Hugh Fielder went to meet
the Anglophobe.
"I hate playing in England," Frank declared. "I don't mind
playing in Europe too much. The audiences on the Continent are
pretty good. I can't stand this place, though. It's the people . . . the
thing that's always depressed me about the English audience is that
they're oriented towards dressing up and queuing up and anything
in between that is irrelevant." Fielder pointed out that he'd sold
out six shows on his last visit. "God knows why," Frank replied. "I
mean, even when they're clapping it doesn't feel right to me. It's
like they like you for the wrong reason."18
In our conversation, Frank's reaction to London audiences
proved to be only part of a wider-ranging antagonism. "On each
successive visit," he said in 1991, "I saw Britain turning into a
Third World country, much like our own here. People being
depressed, getting meaner, getting more desperate and things
getting more peculiar. Behaviour becoming more peculiar. And
that's saying something, because it was plenty peculiar in 1967.
Things got meaner and cheaper and dirtier and it started to remind
me of the kind of growth decay that happens in large US cities,
where things just fall apart. And the main thing that you feel when
you arrive in the city is just a big ball of hatred that's not especially
directed at anybody or anything, it's just, Hate lives there."
On a lighter note in his interview with Fielder, he was happy to
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Frank Zappa
announce that Warner Brothers would not be getting his new
album. "That will be coming out in January and it's probably going
to be on Virgin in the UK and it will be on my own label in the
United States and Canada." The British deal wasn't definite,
though. "I don't demand very much. Just give me the money to
make a record and make sure that it gets into the stores. With
them, there's no sweat; they've got the stores. They're a little bit
tight on the money, though." Nor was Richard Branson very
enthusiastic about the ten-album set, taking the same view as
Warner Brothers that it represented one unit rather than ten. "I
can't afford that. I've already invested my money in making the
thing, so I have to get reimbursed for doing it."19
The prolificness of Frank's musical output had always been a
bone of contention with whichever label he was signed to. He
explained to Tim Schneckloth, "record companies, in order to
protect their investment, try to avoid putting out more than two
albums per year on an artist because they want to milk the sales on
each release as thoroughly as possible. I think that's a fantasy in my
case because we sell so much in catalogue. Whether the album
becomes a hit when it's first released is irrelevant, because the stuff
just keeps selling. People hear about it by word of mouth."20
Another orchestral project, this time with the Vienna Symphony
Orchestra, had fallen through. Frank showed Fielder a full orches-
tral score on which he was still working, having so far completed
two movements. "It was supposed to be for next May. What I'll
probably do is to finish the piece off and hire an orchestra and
record it." That would be an expensive proposition, Fielder
thought. Frank's reply became one of his most famous aphorisms:
"Well, some rock'n'roll musicians make a bunch of money and
stick it up their noses. I stick mine in my ear."21
The set played by the Zappa band in the early evening of
Saturday, September 9 at Knebworth was identical with that at
Saarbrucken six days earlier. A bootleg double album, Saarbrucken
1978, later became part of Beat The Boots, Box 1. Most of the
songs came from Sheik Yerbouti, although 'Easy Meat', 'Keep It
Greasy', 'The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing', 'Bamboozled By Love'
and 'Conehead' would appear over the course of several albums,
often in radically altered form. 'Conehead' had already changed
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significandy from the instrumental version played by the previous
band on New Year's Eve at LA's Pauley Pavilion. It now had lyrics
and a repetitive riffsimilar to that used on 'Muffin Man', but would
not appear on record for another three years.
The following week, Warner Brothers released Studio Tan in a
garish cartoon cover, by Raw Comix artist Gary Panter, completely
devoid of recording information or personnel details. "They were
doing whatever they could to hurt my career," Frank said to me.
"You've heard the expression, 'You'll never work in this town
again'?" At that time, sales had dropped off since Apostrophe (') and
were averaging between 50,000 and 70,000. The shoddy manner
in which Studio Tan and the last two albums were dumped on the
public seemed to justify Frank's on-stage comments, which centred
around the basic mantra, 'Warner Brothers sucks'.
Critical reaction was mixed, or in Ian Penman's case, confused.
"Here the texture and dimension - parodies of repression, parodies
of techniques to achieve same - are intertwined and cross-
referenced until one imitates the other and background is fore-
ground, until attack is lull - and joke is judgement." Er, yes.
"These are repossessions and deftly engineered dry echoes of older
and other work. It still bounces. It could be an anonymous sound-
track (there are no credits) for a Stigwood production of Uncle
Meat. It's a package, a fun and games machine."22
Part of the album's problem was that most of the material was at
least four years old. 'Greggery Peccary' had been written in 1972;
its 20-minute duration encompassed a dazzlingly edited combina-
tion of orchestral and small group themes, tied to a rambling story
that josded together several of Frank's abiding antipathies. Unlike
'Billy The Mountain', who also puts in a brief appearance, it lacked
spontaneity. Dense orchestral arrangements overlaid with long
passages of verbose exposition lacked the humour of the earlier
piece, not to mention the manic dimension of Flo's & Eddie's
personalities. In fact, most of one speech, by 'the greatest living
philosopher' Quentin Robert de Nameland, had been replaced by
Bruce Fowler's trombone solo.
Two of the album's other three tracks featured the 1974 band;
'Revised Music For Guitar & Low-Budget Orchestra' is a self-
explanatory reworking of the piece first featured on Jean-Luc
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Frank Zappa
Ponty's King Kong album; 'REDUNZL' (the vowels were later to
be omitted) made full use of George Duke's lush piano harmonies
before Frank's guitar solo developed into a group improvisation,
which after some more staged 'events' became a fleet piano solo.
'Let Me Take You To The Beach' was an incongruous trifle in this
company, satirising the vacuous triviality of the Hit Parade. Engineer
Davey Moire's falsetto lead vocal conjures up such masterpieces as
the Newbeats' 'Bread And Butter'.
The American section of the tour concentrated on the East
Coast for the balance of September and all of October, with the
now traditional residency at New York City's Palladium for
the four nights up to Halloween. Joining the band on that night
for the second time on the tour (the first was in Berlin on Septem-
ber 7) was violinist Lakshmirnarayna Shankar. Originally from
Madras, Shankar had been playing violin since the age of five. He
came to America in 1969 and studied ethnomusicology at the
Wesleyan University. He met John McLaughlin in 1973, during
the latter's Sri Chinmoy phase, and two years later the pair formed
Shakti, an acoustic quartet which attempted the difficult fusion of
classical Indian music and jazz. After three albums, the group had
broken up earlier in 1978. Two examples from the Halloween per-
formance, 'Thirteen', in which Frank coaxes the audience to clap
in 13/8, and 'Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance', appear
on YCDTOSA 6.
Another participant that night was Warren Cucurullo, a young
guitarist who'd spent the last three years attending every one of
Frank's East Coast concerts. He befriended soundman Davey
Moire and was eventually introduced to Frank, who was impressed
that Cucurullo had learned not only his tunes but many of his
guitar solos. Celebrating his birthday one night in a New York
restaurant, Frank introduced him to William Burroughs and Allen
Ginsberg, seated at the next table: "This is Warren, he's a guitar
player."
"After that," Cucurullo said, "I spent a lot of time just practising
in my basement."23
His contribution to the Halloween show was reciting 'Ms X', a
story he'd first told to Frank in Florida six weeks previously.
Towards the end of the year, he received a phone call from Frank
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telling him about the next European tour and asking him if he'd
like to audition for the band. "I left for California the next day, and
then the next thing I knew I was playing the Hammersmith Odeon
- plucked right from the basement to the big stage."24
Denied the means to spend weeks at a time in recording studios,
Frank concentrated on touring. Tim Schneckloth asked him if he
still found it worthwhile. "It's the greatest thing there is," Frank
replied. "As a matter of fact, it is the only thing that makes it
worthwhile. Some of the drudgery you have to go through on the
road is so boring. And once you get a chance to do that ... I
wouldn't even care if there wasn't an audience there. It's just that
you've got all the equipment set up, the musicians are there and
paid for, it's just the right temperature, the stage is the right colour,
it's the right mood. And then you play, and you can create things
right there. And fortunately, there are cassettes of it so you have a
chance to hear it back later and see if your experiments were
successful or what. That's one of the prime reasons for me going
out on the road and touring.
"I like playing in hockey rinks," he added. "The problem about
playing hockey rinks is that it's hard to hear the words. If you're
word oriented, OK, that's tough. But that air space you have in
there is such a great thing to work with - it's this huge tonnage of
air. And when you go 'wham' and hit a big chord, you've taken all
that and spewed it over 15,000 people. It's not just a feeling of
power. If you want to play really soft, think how soft one note is
diluted in the air space of a 15,000 seat hockey rink. That's really
soft. And one note played really loud is really loud. So the dynamic
range in a place like that - softest note versus the loudest note, the
top to bottom of your sculpture — with the right equipment, gives
you a chance to do a more interesting and complicated sound
event. Forget about whether it's a song or a drum beat or a scream
on the microphone or whatever it is - those are sounds that
are moving air around. Taken in the purest abstract sense, the
opportunities in a large, enclosed, resonant place like that are very
interesting."25
An opportunity of a different kind came at the beginning of
December. William Burroughs was the subject of the three-day
NOVA Convention at New York's Entermedia Theater, during
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which Laurie Anderson performed, Patti Smith played the clarinet
and the Fugs' Ed Sanders read an account of a fictional rock group
called J'Accuse. Allen Ginsberg recited 'Punk Rock You're My
Big Cry-baby' and Frank read the 'talking asshole' section from
Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Frank and Burroughs were pictured
together at the event in Rolling Stone; later, over dinner, they dis-
cussed the possibility of making a Broadway musical out of
Burrough's book, but the project got no further.
TOUCH ME THERE
Frank arrived in London yet again in mid-January 1979 with a full
work schedule. The first priority was to record an album with
L. Shankar for Zappa Records, his new label to be distributed in
America by Polygram. In Britain and the rest of the world, Virgin
had disappeared from the frame to be replaced by CBS, with Sheik
Yerbouti scheduled for release at the beginning of March. There
were also rehearsals for the European tour that would begin on
February 10 with nine British dates.
As Frank finalised arrangements for his first new album in two
years, Warner Brothers divested itself of Sleep Dirt. It had originally
been titled Hot Rats III and took its new tide from an acoustic
guitar duet between Frank and James 'Bird Legs' Youmans which
ends suddenly with Youmans' muttered, "Damn!" Frank asks,
"Getting tired?" "No," replies Youmans, "my fingers got stuck."
Three of the tunes come from Frank's science-fiction musical,
Hunchentoot; 'Flambay', 'Spider Of Destiny' and 'Time Is Money'
were recorded in early 1974 at Blood, Sweat & Tears' producer Jim
Guercio's Caribou studio in Colorado. The fact that here they
sound like backing tracks was confirmed when Sleep Dirt was re-
issued on CD in 1991, with vocals by Thana Harris and Chester
Thompson's original drum tracks digitally replaced by Chad
Wackerman.
'Regyptian Strut' retains the original band personnel on a slow
tune that is all exposition apart from Bruce Fowler's eccentric
trombone flourishes. Later in the piece his multiple overdubs
confirm Frank's high assessment of his talent. 'Filthy Habits' is a
seven-minute  exercise in  controlled feedback;  multiple guitar
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overdubs, some recorded backwards, howl and whine behind
Frank's solo, which itself operates on the verge of constant distor-
tion. Towards the end, Frank adds bursts of keyboard overlays that
are reminiscent of the work of pioneer minimalist, Terry Riley.
The last track on the album is also the longest; at 13 minutes,
'The Ocean Is The Only Solution' is a trio improvisation that
scurries through a series of complex rhythmic patterns before
setding into a fuzz guitar solo over a fast, tumbling riff that probably
provided more entertainment for the musicians than for the
listener. "What actually happened," Terry Bozzio told Andy
Greenaway, "was that Frank, Dave Parlato and I jammed at the
Record Plant for about 35 minutes and filled up two reels of tape.
Zappa, out of all that material, edited down to about 13 minutes.
He played it on a real interesting Fender 12-string that had a
pick-up in the neck. He had this glass-shattering 12-string sound —
it was really unique."26 Parlato's bass track was then replaced by
Patrick O'Hearn.
Graced with another cartoon cover by Gary Panter but, like
Studio Tan, devoid of any recording information, Sleep Dirt sounds
(as was later proved) unfinished. If the tapes were delivered as put
together here, then Frank must have been fulfilling his contract
quota. It makes more sense to believe that they were intended as
part of an album set like Lather, where individual tunes would be
contrasted with vocal performances and perhaps gain from the
comparison. Lumped together in this arbitrary fashion, the merit of
a particular performance, such as 'Filthy Habits', is challenged by
the similarity of tempos elsewhere and an absence of the inner logic
that the listener expects from a Zappa compilation.
The recording of L. Shankar's debut solo album had been
switched to London from California since none of the facilities that
Frank normally used was available. Backing tracks were recorded at
Advision Studios, which Frank found 'primitive', with a British
band consisting of keyboard player James Lascelles, guitarist Phil
Palmer, Dave Marquee on bass and drummer Simon Phillips.
Overdubs were done at the 'New York standard' AIR Studios and
the album was mixed at The Townhouse.
'Touch Me There' explored the microtonal variations of
L. Shankar's acoustic and amplified violin work, although the latter
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Frank Zappa
more often resembled a bumble bee on Valium. The overall tone of
the album, exemplified by 'Windy Morning' and 'Love Gone
Away', was reflective and curiously unengaging, only igniting on
'Litde Stinker' and 'No More Mr Nice Girl'. The latter was one of
four collaborations with Frank, including the tide track, 'Knee
Deep In Heaters', its lyrics rendered almost incomprehensible by
Shankar's schoolboy falsetto, and 'Dead Girls Of London'. This last
was originally intended to feature Van Morrison's lead vocal, but
Warner Brothers vetoed his appearance. His performance was
replaced by Frank and Ike Willis harmonising as 'Stucco Homes'.
Other, more ethereal vocal embellishment was provided by Vicky
Blumenthal and Jenny Lautrec.
These days, rehearsals were supervised by the Clonemeister, the
new alias for bassist Arthur Barrow. "Frank would always show up
for the last four hours of rehearsal, and I would tape that part. He'd
say to various band members, 'OK, now you do this here, and you
make the fart noise there, and you do that there.' So, after the
rehearsal I'd sit down with a notebook and make notes about who
was supposed to make what fart noises and stuff. It was like being a
drill sergeant, kind of.
"When Frank was there at the rehearsal and inspired, he would
write with the band the way someone else might write at the
piano, or with a piece of score paper, or at a computer. It was really
amazing how quickly he could get stuff together, and get really
good players to interpret it and make it sound like Frank Zappa
music. Frank's just about the only guy who did not compromise his
music at all, and still make a living at it."27
"He rehearsed us to death," Peter Wolf averred. "I've never
rehearsed that way in my life, before or since. First, he would lay all
this music on you, which was a conglomerate of styles: 'Fifties
rock'n'roll, punk rock, new wave, jazz, Bela Bartok, Greek folk
music, and weird 12-tone stuff. You had to put on all these differ-
ent hats, and be quick and spontaneous about it.'28
"Frank loved to test the band members," Tommy Mars remem-
bered. "I'll never forget one tour. We were getting ready to go
to England. Then, three days before we went out, Frank came to
rehearsal and said, 'I want every piece in this show to be done
reggae. I don't care if we stay here until the tour starts, that's what
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Lather
we're gonna do.' So we burned out that night, we burned out the
next day. Then, the day before the tour, he comes back all happy
and says, 'We're not gonna do that reggae anymore.' I mean, he
put us right in front of the muzzle of the gun, man!
"He was extremely difficult sometimes. He knew exactly what
button to push. I saw people who revered him so much, who were
very dropsy but who didn't have exacdy what he needed, abso-
lutely cremated on the spot by him, in rehearsals, in auditions,
on-stage. He pushed every boundary personally, sociologically,
politically, comedically, and tragically. He couldn't be happy until
it was ready to break."29
"Well, I'm a hard taskmaster all the time," Frank told Nigel
Leigh. "For whatever I do. I don't have any control over the way
they perceive me but this is a situation where they get a pay cheque
and they either do the job or they don't do the job. I don't hire
them to be my buddies."30
In another interview, he admitted, "I'm the worst person you
could work for and the best. Yes, there is tyranny and personal
abuse. It produces the desired effect."31
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15
SHEIK YERBOUTI
A year to the day since the release of Zappa In New York, the
Zappa visage, swathed in an Arab burnous, peered from the cover
of the first album of new material since Zoot Allures, released back
in October 1976. The contrast between Sheik Yerbouti and the
albums Warner Brothers were foisting on the public was great.
Although the new album contained a number of songs that had
been 'toured' for a while, their sometimes scabrous, always scath-
ing lyric content ranged over a number of controversial subjects
guaranteed to offend anyone unaccustomed to Frank's withering
wit. With the exception of the instrumental features, there was an
absence of the complex tempo changes that characterised so much
of Frank's music. This time, his messages were delivered hard and
straight.
A stately version of 'I Have Been In You' opened Side One,
devoid of its explicit on-stage prologue. Thereafter, the incompe-
tence of US service industries, anal sex, rapacious women, punk
rockers, gender-bending record pluggers, drug addicts, dancing
fools and Jewish princesses came under review. Was Frank going
for the easy options? Nick Kent thought so. Flourishing his creden-
tials, he stigmatised Sheik Yerbouti as "the same old slop, whether it
be the 'serious' orchestral flotsam he can flaunt to justify his
noxious condescending broadside wildly directed at the poor saps
who still think he's some bona-fide genius, or the gross-out
whacko 'yucks for the bucks' flimflam."
Barely pausing for a stimulant he went on, "this is wall-to-wall
four-sided dreck that may even actually represent a new look for
Zappa's swindling artistic returns so far . . . here is a man obsessed
with peddling cheap laughs that, beyond the odd witty couplet or
two, aren't worth even a gratuitous smirk most of the time." Only
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Sheik Yerbouti
bad typesetting blunted his scorn: "Buy this album and you can
check you {sic) arsehole-rating."1
After such a review, what better consequence than that people
with secure fundaments bought Sheik Yerbouti in sufficient quanti-
ties for it to reach number 21 in the US album charts and make it
Frank's best-selling album, selling more than 1.6 million units
worldwide. "The reason for that was 'Bobby Brown'," he said
in 1991. "If it weren't for some twist of fate where somebody in
Norway decided that they liked that song very much and kept
playing it in discos, that's where the whole thing started from.
"Picture a disco in Norway with people dancing to 'Bobby
Brown'. College students got cassettes of it and hooked up speakers
in their cars and drove through town blaring this song. It was
unreal. And then it went from Scandinavia, a year later, to be a hit
in Germany. Not quite with the same rabidity. And you could
never even play the record on the air in the United States."2
The explicit story of a record plugger who realigns his sexual
preferences after an encounter with a lesbian could never have
been a hit in any English-speaking country. The gay community,
still in the first flush of its liberation and largely unaware of the
harsh fate in store for many of its number, was not amused.
Replying to the inevitable accusations of being sexist, misogynistic
and homophobic, Frank said, "Some people miss the joke. In
general, I was a convenient enemy and they could get exposure
for their causes by coming after me. But I'm not anti-gay . . . I'm a
journalist of a sort. I have a right to say what I want to say about
any topic. If you don't have a sense of humour, then tough
titties."3
"If you looked at the number of songs that I've written and how
many characters in the songs are men," he pointed out to Charles
Shaar Murray, "most of the songs are about men. No men's group
ever said, 'Hey, how come you're sayin' we're stoopid?' Women
are sensitive if you say they're stupid. I like women: women are
fine. But - men do bad stuff, women do bad stuff. Who's the
worst? You guys arm-wrestle over it. I'm not gonna tell ya."4
Nor was he anti-Semitic, but that didn't deter the Anti-
Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith from filing a complaint
when 'Jewish Princess', a lubricious catalogue of sexual attributes
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Frank Zappa
expected from one of her persuasion, received heavy airplay on
California's radio stations. "They wanted to convince the world
that there's no such thing as a Jewish princess, but, I'm sorry, the
facts speak for themselves. They asked me to apologise and I
refused . . . Well, I didn't make up the idea of a Jewish princess.
They exist, so I wrote a song about them. If they don't like it, so
what? Italians have princesses, too."5 To that end, he announced
that his next album would contain the song, 'Catholic Girls'.
He expanded on the subject in conversation with Nigel Leigh:
"I'm making comments about society, and the society that I was
commenting on was engaged in what they loved to describe as the
sexual revolution — a world of sexual incompetents encountering
each other under disco circumstances. Now can't you do songs
about that?" But those songs always associated sex with human
stupidity. "Well, have you ever looked at people fucking? Oooo. I
mean that's a silly looking thing to begin with. It's silly looking.
Let's face it, it looks silly. Why not say so? And from that you could
develop a number of theories about it, whether or not it should be
celebrated. I mean, so what if it feels good? It's still silly."6
Did he think that he was the cultural enemy of the many
pressure groups? "No. I'm sure they might have had a different
viewpoint because anybody who would write the kind of material
that I write was a pretty convenient target. I mean, it's pretty easy
to hate me for whatever you choose to hate me for. Because I'm
virtually unrepentant, and I just don't care." Did he accept the
criticism that he'd dealt insensitively with the subject of female
sexuality and female rights? "I hope that in those instances where I
have dealt with that topic that I have been as insensitive to them as
I've been to everybody else. I think that my insensitivity is pretty
evenly spread around."7 Perhaps it was also the case that his records
didn't sell in sufficient quantities to warrant a law suit by those he
offended.
It was a fact, though, that Frank's sense of humour was becom-
ing increasingly sour, perhaps as a result of the real and perceived
slights and injuries that seemed to dog his career during the
Seventies. George Duke had noticed a change during his tenure
with the Mothers. "The only change I saw in Frank over those
years was that he went from being funny/sarcastic to being almost
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Sheik Yerbouti
serious/sarcastic. The latter part of the time I was in the band, his
sense of humour became kind of vindictive."8
David ShefF asked Frank if there was rhyme or reason behind the
subjects he chose to attack. "Whatever I'm mad at at the time," he
replied. "I like things that work. If something doesn't, the first
question you have to ask is, 'Why?' If it's not working and you
know why, then you have to ask, 'Why isn't somebody doing
something about it?' ... I like carrying things to their most ridicu-
lous extreme, because out there on the fringe is where my type of
entertainment lies."9
Mark Ellen, reviewing the first of three Hammersmith gigs on
February 17/19, thought that Frank "walks the line between the
ageing tackiness of his sagas and the sheer complexity of his music
. . . it's clear that his lyrics have never veered much from the gross
and narrow." Ellen offered a potted version of Frank's career and
the observation that, "The shock/horror mystique has long since
been replaced by 'total control'."
The control slipped towards the end of the three-hour show
when a member of the audience passed Frank a book. "He looks
delighted. It's passed around the whole band, who all crack up in
hysterics. We're treated to an extract - a clinical aid to the canine
birth process, advising the use of sterilised scissors."10 What Ellen
didn't tell NME readers was the title of the book and thus its
particular significance - Breeding From Your Poodle by Margaret
Rothery Sheldon and Barbara Lockwood. For once, conceptual
continuity had been contrived, but there it was, nonetheless.
The Rolling Stones Mobile was parked outside the theatre and
all three nights were recorded. Two new songs, 'For The Young
Sophisticate' and 'Bamboozled By Love', and fresh arrangements of
'Brown Shoes Don't Make It' and 'Peaches III', were issued in
1981 on Tinsel Town Rebellion. Several songs from February 18
were later included on separate volumes of You Can't Do That On
Stage Anymore, including a version of 'Don't Eat The Yellow
Snow' with bizarre poetic contributions from a distraught young
bard in the audience. His second piece, 'Broadmoor', delineated
his desire for a 'garden' as bleak and colourless as his diction. As he
declaimed, 'I want to water that garden with my tears,' Denny
Walley retorted, 'Oh, you want kindergarten.' The event was
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Frank Zappa
recalled three years later at the same venue, with Frank referring to
the unfortunate poetaster as "that asshole". When he inserted the
sequence in a mutant-edit version of'King Kong' on YCDTOSA 3,
Frank also included Walley's original comment.
It was events like this that prompted Frank's observation to
Nigel Leigh: "After a certain amount of touring, especially in
Europe, the people who would come to the shows understood
what the game was. You knew that things could change on the
spot, right there on stage. It's not like you would rehearse in the
afternoon and say, 'Tonight's surprise will be . . .' You try and
work with musicians who have the flexibility and the kind of spon-
taneity that if a musical situation arises, or a social situation arises
with somebody in the audience, that they can play off of it and
develop it into something else. So those were the kinds of surprises
that were being delivered. Things that were unique just to that
audience. Just for that concert. At one time only."11
The principal use that Frank made of the Hammersmith tapes
was in the compilation of Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, three albums
of guitar solos first made available in 1981 by mail order only. Half
of the 20 tracks came from the Hammersmith recordings; no less
than four were solos taken from performances of 'Inca Roads'.
One track, 'Pink Napkins', came from a February 1977 per-
formance by the Eddie Jobson/Ray White band, another, 'Ship
Ahoy', from the 1976 Japanese tour. The balance would come
from the 1980 American tour.
The Spring 1979 European tour was the most extensive Frank
had ever undertaken, stretching from February 10 through to
April 1, with only ten days off. "The tours keep getting longer and
longer," he said. "And I need them more and more and more." He
refused to do a television broadcast on February 20, in between
gigs in Brussels and Paris. "If you don't start having your days off
when you come over on these things, your health just starts falling
apart."12 After finishing in Zurich, the band flew on to Japan for
more gigs, before returning to California in mid-April.
Talking about his popularity in Europe, Frank said, "1 think the
reason why we're better known there is because of all the US
groups that could tour in Europe, we probably did it more
frequendy, on a regular basis throughout the years, than most of the
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Sheik Yerbouti
other US groups. We played regional dates. We took the music
right there and stuck it in their face, French provincial dates and
lots of small dates in Germany. We played towns outside of
London. The big groups would come over and just do the one big
show in one town. We went out and played for everybody. One of
our best British dates was in Newcastle. If I had to choose one place
in England to play, I'd say Newcasde would be my favourite
British audience."
JOE'S GARAGE
The last of the three disputed Warner Brothers albums, Orchestral
Favorites, was released on May 4,1979, with the most inappropriate
cover art of them all. Gary Panter's cartoon depicted a head with
piano keys for teeth, a guitar fretboard for a nose and a stubbled
cleft chin in the Desperate Dan mould. Nothing could have better
revealed the record company's purpose. It was plain that they had
no interest in, nor respect for, the serious side of their former artist's
music.
The poster for the original September 1975 concert at UCLA's
Royce Hall had promised premiere performances of 'Pedro's
Dowry' and 'Bogus Pomp' and both were included here, along
with 'Strictly Genteel' (the finale of 200 Motels), 'Naval Aviation In
Art?' and an orchestral arrangement of 'Duke Of Prunes'. The
Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Orchestra consisted of 37 musicians,
along with Frank on guitar, bassist Dave Parlato, Terry Bozzio on
drums and Emil Richards on percussion. The majority of the hired
help consisted of brass and woodwind players, with only four string
players. The murky sound of the original vinyl issue was cleaned up
for its CD reissue, thus enhancing the enthusiasm with which the
ensemble approached their unconventional task.
The most adventurous piece was 'Pedro's Dowry', which avoided
the regular pulses that drove most of the other compositions.
'Naval Aviation In Art?' was litde more than a fragment, an eerie
minute or so that contrasted staccato violin events with sustained
chords from the woodwinds. This was perhaps the most imagina-
tive piece, the more so for ending just when its ominous and
threatening atmosphere had been established. 'Duke Of Prunes'
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Frank Zappa
was basically a grandiose framework for a guitar solo that made
creative use of feedback. 'Bogus Pomp' shed a humorous light on
the sort of episodic writing that goes into film soundtrack music.
Some of its themes were first performed by members of the BBC
Symphony during the Mothers' Royal Festival Hall appearance
way back in October 1968. Three of these pieces would be
recorded in 1983 by the London Symphony Orchestra with less
than satisfactory results.
Frank was already in the throes of his next multi-album project,
Joe's Garage, conceived as a three-record set and released as a single
album followed by a double album. The original intention was to
record a single of the tide song and 'Catholic Girls', his equal
opportunity response to 'Jewish Princess'. "It started out to be just
a bunch of songs," he said. "Then I figured out a story that would
hold 'em together. It's all exercise. It's like doing crossword
puzzles. In looking at it I saw that not only did it make a continu-
ous story, but it made a good continuous story."13
Good for a fully fledged conspiracy theorist, that is. Act I's
gatefold sleeve set forth the various hypotheses that drove the
narrative. In simple terms, devoid of the individual targets for
Frank's invective, a US President just might seek to abolish music
by identifying it as a principal cause of the energy crisis and infla-
tion in general, and further, that people just might think it was a
good idea. As Frank admitted in his next paragraph, it was a stupid
story, done in the manner of a cheap high school play. The sting in
the tail was to point out that, in Iran, music was illegal. The sleeve
of the concluding double album developed the idea of 'Total
Criminalisation', a Kafka-esque concept whereby a system of
surreptitiously promulgated laws ensured that everyone was guilty
of something, especially if it had to do with music.
In fact, the story was operating on two levels: overtly, it was
working out the above hypotheses; on a more mundane level,
some of Frank's perennial bugbears, such as the dumbness of pop
music, the bands that played it, the people that watched them, the
groupies that serviced them and especially the journalists that wrote
about it, lined up to be pilloried one more time.
In order to get through the reams of exposition that were
needed to explain both the supposition and the plot line, Frank
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became The Central Scrutinizer. His voice EQ'd to sound as if it
was issuing from a cheap plastic loud-hailer, he announced it as his
responsibility to enforce all the laws that hadn't been passed yet.
With a licence to commit mayhem thus granted, the hapless Joe's
story unfolded, interrupted by the Scrute's explanations.
Joe is a guitarist in a garage band that regularly annoys the neigh-
bourhood. His Catholic girlfriend, Mary, becomes a 'Crew Slut'
before taking part in 'The Wet T-shirt Contest'. Meanwhile, Joe is
seduced by Lucille, who works at a Jack-In-The-Box concession
and generously passes on a social disease which makes his balls feel
like a pair of maracas, provoking the perennial question, 'Why
Does It Hurt When I Pee?' Act 1 ends with a rambling reggae
version of'Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up', the title song of Jeff
Simmons' Straight album. So far, so literal. Thereafter, things get a
trifle bizarre.
In Acts II & III, the stricken guitarist pays an exorbitant fee for a
consultation with L. Ron Hoover, head of the First Church
of Appliantology, who deduces that Joe is a Latent Appliance
Fetishist. Visiting The Closet, a club where the sexually damaged
can interact with kitchen appliances, Joe dresses up as a housewife
and learns to speak German. By these circuitous means, 'Stick It
Out', a song from Flo & Eddie days, becomes the explicit serenade
through which Joe importunes Sy Borg, an XQJ-37 nuclear
powered Pan-Sexual Roto-Plooker and a mutant relative of
Chunga, the industrial vacuum-cleaner who had her revenge
several albums ago. Ike Willis' mother was responsible for the word
'plonk', which here receives a meaning quite at variance with what
Mrs Willis intended.
Unaware of the (or his) ramifications, Joe plonks Sy to death and
is committed to a special prison full of musicians and redundant
record executives (from Warner Brothers?) and 'promo person-
ages' (Bobby Brown?) who gang-bang him to the tune of'Keep It
Greasey'. Sorely troubled, Joe lapses into semi-catatonia and
dreams of guitar notes. Eventually, he's released into a world
without musicians that, in 'Packard Goose', provokes a sort of
madness in which his imaginary music is criticised by equally fanci-
ful journalists.
A vision of his long-lost girlfriend, Mary, comes to him and
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Frank Zappa
delivers THE AUTHOR'S MESSAGE: "Information is not
knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth."
(OK, so far.) "Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not
music. Music is THE BEST." Lit from within by this simplistic
mantra, Joe consigns all journalists to squat on the Cosmic Utensil
and dreams one last imaginary guitar solo, 'Watermelon In Easter
Hay', before going to work in the Utility Muffin Research
Kitchen, arrogantly applying his fully charged icing anointment
utensil. Festivities are brought to a close with 'A Little Green
Rosetta', in which the entire cast gather round their author/direc-
tor and sing his 'stupid song' in a party atmosphere that deliberately
echoes, though less imaginatively, 'America Drinks And Goes
Home'.
Because it operates on a number of levels, Joe's Garage is a hard
record to enjoy, even when its achievements are acknowledged.
The story is indeed stupid, its targets are easy and ones that had
borne the brunt of Frank's wit many times before. As George Duke
had noted, his humour, laced with a large shot of cynicism, was
taking on an increasingly bitter and sardonic edge. Sex in his songs
had become brutal and demeaning, as if he equated it with what he
thought record companies and pop journalists had done to him.
'Packard Goose' is particularly paranoid, referring to all journalists
as 'the worst kind of sleaze', dubbing them 'the government's
whore' and inviting them to buss his buttocks.
'Catholic Girls' is small beer compared to the explicit 'Jewish
Princess', its lyric content subordinated to the plot. To make sure
the listener gets the connection, Warren Cucurullo's electric sitar
plays part of the latter tune's melody during the fade-out. 'Crew
Slut' mentions a group whose name sounds suspiciously like Toto.
When remastered for CD, 'Toad-O Line', supposed to emulate
one of the group's hits, was blandly retitled 'On The Bus'.
'The Wet T-shirt Contest' ruffled a few feminist feathers. One
of Frank's roles in the unfolding melodrama metamorphoses from
Father Riley at the local CYO into Buddy Jones, compere of the
contest at 'The Brasserie . . . Home of THE TITS'. Nigel Leigh
was questioning Frank's motives when he interrupted, "Think
carefully before you laugh or even answer this, that the guy who
invented the wet T-shirt contest came up with a bad idea. 'We
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Sheik Yerbouti
need some more people coming to this bar. How do we get them
in? Oh, I'll give $50 to the girl with the biggest tits who will go on
stage and let some dumb fuck dump a bucket of water on her with
a white T-shirt on, and then we'll sell more beer. What do you
think, Billy?' I mean, surely he would have been a failure if it
weren't for the fact that there is a virtual species of women in the
United States that would kill each other to enter these contests and
prevail for $50 or less. Shouldn't we recognise this fact? As Ameri-
cans, we have to come to grips with this.
"It's a wonderful institution. Look at the people in the audience
who experience what they really are interested in. Maybe not to
the n'th degree, which would be total removal of the T-shirt.
Some places, they do that. But you know, the girls get to fight it
out for that $50. The bartender sells more beer. The band gets to
watch whatever is going on up close, so long as the water doesn't
damage some of their equipment. I mean, that's the only real down
side to this."14
Several of the compositions in Acts II & ///had been around for a
while and only required minimal adaptation to be shoe-horned
into the story. There was litde new writing and what there was
provided continuity or formed the framework for Frank's on-
going experimentation. It wasn't until five years later that a chance
question revealed that, with the exception of 'Watermelon In
Easter Hay', all of the guitar solos heard in Joe's Garage were
xenochronous.
"In the studio, they called it the 'Ampex guitar'," Frank told
David Mead. "I had all these quarter-inch tapes of guitar solos that
I liked from the '79 tour, and I'd go through my files, see what key
a certain solo was in, and just experimentally hit the start button on
the playback machine and lay it onto the multi-track." Any tuning
variations were adjusted with a Variable Speed Oscillator. "We'd
wiggle the pitch around to make sure it sounded like it was in the
right key.'n5
If there is a musical reason for Joe's Garage to exist, it has to be for
the random creativity of its instrumental passages. The one excep-
tion, 'Watermelon In Easter Hay', is atypical Zappa, a simple
soaring melody that belies its creator. When we talked about the
album, I told Frank I thought it was the highlight of the entire
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Frank Zappa
album. "Well, it is," he replied. "It's the best song on the album.
But Downbeat didn't think so. The review in Downbeat was so un-
favourable towards Joe's Garage and especially 'Watermelon In
Easter Hay'. The jazzbo reviewer of that album just hated that
song. It was supposed to be that character's last imaginary guitar
solo before he quits the music business. So it's a sad song." Ironic,
too, that the so-called "imaginary guitar solo" is die only real
one.
The recording of Joe's Garage was not without its problems.
"When we first went into die studio, Peter (Wolf) was back in
Vienna and Tommy (Mars) started the album off," Frank told
Michael Davis. "With. Tommy, we worked for several days and
wound up with two tracks, whereas with Peter, we could do two
or three tracks a day. They're equipped difFerendy. Tommy is
definitely a creative keyboard player with a good musical mind, but
in the discipline department we had some problems. He just can't
control himself to sit down and play something simple that's
required for a simple song. So Tommy plays on only two songs on
all six sides of Joe's Garage; the rest of the keyboard work is Peter.
"The first few sessions were very chaotic. I hate to have to act
like an umpire or referee and go scream at everybody because
they're jamming. I don't pay $200 an hour studio time to have guys
go in there and jazz out. If you want to practise, do it at home;
don't do it in the studio. The studio is the time to make a record."16
BABY SNAKES
That was probably foremost in Frank's mind throughout the Joe's
Garage sessions, for with any luck this would be the last time he
would be reliant on commercial recording facilities. The Zappa
basement was being converted into a recording studio, suitably
named the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Because of the
ongoing construction work and the fact that Gail was due to give
birth in August, he cancelled the late summer tour that had been
scheduled.
The press quoted Frank as saying about their fourth child, "If it's
a boy we'll call him Burt Reynolds and if she's a girl she'll be called
Clint Eastwood." On a Dallas radio interview, he announced, "If
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Sheik Yerbouti
it's a girl, her name will be Peru." In the event, their second daugh-
ter arrived at the beginning of the month and got to be called Diva
for possessing the loudest scream in the hospital. "And it turns
out," Gail told Victoria Balfour, "that Diva has this incredible
voice and she can knock you over from a distance of 30 feet."17
Finishing touches had to be put to the latest concert film, Baby
Snakes, due to be premiered in New York in December. Once
again, Bruce Bickford's clay animation was an integral part of the
production. Early in the film, Frank asks the artist how he got into
animation; the ensuing conversation shows that, like so many of
the people that fascinated Zappa, Bickfbrd has an original but
warped mind. "My first animation," he says, "was cars running
over the tops of hills. And then I branched out into, well, anything
I could do with cars; and the clay people I had in the cars, I started
animating."
Frank then gets caught out in an assumption that trapped many
of his own interviewers over the years, the supposition that certain
elements when repeated must have meaning. "There's an image
that you use quite frequendy in these films," he says, putting
forward a small clay structure that resembles a viaduct leading to a
tunnel. "This image here, would you mind explaining what this
image is?"
Bickfbrd replies, "That was a face originally, but it turned into
this bridge, the guy's nose and lips elongated out into this bridge."
A piece of animation illustrates the action.
"Yeah," Frank presses, "but you've done this transformation
several times. What's that symbol really mean?"
"I don't know," Bickfbrd replies, mystified by his own inven-
tion. "Noses are easily animatable into something else."
Another amusing exchange follows. Bickfbrd haltingly describes
how one day he accepted "a few tokes" from a passer-by's joint and
went to sit on some rocks on a nearby beach. "I felt like I was
trapped there ... I was so weak that I couldn't get up and I
couldn't walk back to the sand. These rocks had -", he wavers.
"An unearthly power over you?" Frank prompts.
"Yeah, the magnetism in them or something - They were
thrown in there with no regard for their original — well, the origi-
nal magnetism they'd picked up over the ages as they formed and
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Frank Zappa
everything. They were put in contrary to that pattern."
"How long were you trapped?"
" 'Bout a half hour."
"How'd you get away?"
"I finally - well, the effect of the dope wore off."
Bickford plainly lived his life with the handbrake on. The final
sequences of his stop-time animation flash past with such manic
energy that the viewer forgets the enormous patience and attention
to detail that have gone into their creation. The screen is crowded
with mobile clay, each part fastidiously moved a fraction of an inch
for each frame. Much of his work deals with die rapid meta-
morphosis of faces, within themselves or devouring each other, as
when one mutates into a hamburger and sucks his neighbour into
his bun. At other times, undulating sexual images fill the screen,
changing too rapidly to do more than suggest the actions that vault
from the viewer's imagination.
There are also several sequences of Frank playing his guitar; in
one, he transforms into a demon, in another, his chording hand
suddenly sprouts 20 fingers, in yet another, a fingertip becomes a
head which then bites a chunk out of another, only to be punched
into submission by a third. There are also narrative sequences of
figures stumbling through forests and a red car being pursued by
others over increasingly rugged terrain. To paraphrase Frank's
on-stage opinion of some pop superstars, "This guy is seriously
fucked-up."
Frank was sufficiendy impressed to commission The Amazing Mr
Bickford, a 50-minute video compilation released in 1989 and
featuring some of the artist's earliest work and sequences from The
Dub Room Special and Baby Snakes. The soundtrack consisted of
music recorded by Kent Nagano and the London Symphony
Orchestra and Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain.
Six months after Frank's death, Richard Hanson, a teacher at
Mifflinburg High School in Pennsylvania, was suspended without
pay for screening the video for students in his llth-grade English
class as part of a study of absurdity in art. Following an anonymous
complaint about 'pornographic' content, the school board watched
the video and by their action proved yet again that art merely
reflected life.
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Sheik Yerbouti
Joe's Garage Act /was issued on September 17, with a front cover
three-quarter profile portrait by Norman Seeff of Frank in black-
face make-up, nestling a mop to his cheek. The inside of the
gatefold sleeve, designed by John Williams, included a collage of a
naked Maya, a sequence from Eadweard Muybridge's photo-
graphic explorations of movement, sundry unspecified technical
drawings, the Pyramids, fingers on a lute fretboard and a 'Perspec-
tive Drawing Of A Garage'. The lyric insert had similar illustra-
tions, but these did have a passing relevance to the songs' content.
The photograph of cloth-capped workers wearing gas-masks that
adorned the centre-spread didn't need explanation.
The cover portrait of Acts II & III, issued two months later on
November 19, wittily subverts the supposed symbolism of Act I.
Frank, this time face-on to the camera, is having the black-face
make-up delicately applied around his eyelids by the make-up girl
whose blonde head occupies the lower right quadrant of the sleeve.
What is the significance of the fact that she has red nail-pohsh on
the fingers of her left hand but none on those of her right? Or was
she caught halfway through the application? Who gives a fuck?
The inside gatefold similarly deconstructs the previous artwork.
Torn elements of the collage surround the head of a man taken
from a medical journal; his transparent skin reveals the skull with
the sinus cavities highlighted in a clear reference to Frank's child-
hood asthma and the radium-tipped swab that was used to treat it.
Muffins with generous toppings of icing also surround the face and
reoccur in the illustrations that skirt the lyric sheet, ending with an
Edwardian picture of a muffin-man, his tray on his head, plying his
trade on a suitably aproned housewife's doorstep.
Throughout the autumn, Frank concentrated on the installation
of his studio's equipment and the final print of Baby Snakes. He also
prepared another triple album, Warts And All, compiled from the
1978 Halloween show at the Palladium, New York and the Febru-
ary 1979 shows at London's Hammersmith Odeon. But it seems
the market couldn't stand another three record set just then. Most
of the 23 tracks, though not always in the same versions, would
appear spread over Tinseltown Rebellion, You Are What You Is and
the Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar series, while 'Ancient Armaments'
ended up on a single with 'I Don't Want To Get Drafted' during
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Frank Zappa
the following year. 'Dead Girls Of London' was set aside yet again,
along with 'Magic Fingers', 'Ms X' (Warren Cucurullo's mono-
logue), 'Persona Non Grata' and the return of'Little House I Used
To Live In'. 'Thirteen', featuring L. Shankar on violin, and 'Little
Rubber Girl' eventually appeared in the YCDTOSA series.
Baby Snakes was premiered at the Victoria Theater, New York
on Friday, December 21. Critical opinion was generally dismissive.
Tom Carson's review in The Village Voice was typical: "In Baby
Snakes, Frank Zappa manages to come off as avuncularly benign as
David Crosby," he began. Noting that, at two hours, forty-three
minutes, it wasn't the longest rockstar self-indulgence (that acco-
lade went to Bob Dylan's Renaldo and Clara), Carson pilloried Baby
Snakes as an ego trip, "but on a picayune (that's 'insignificant', if
you're not American), low-rent scale. It may be the first rockstar
movie ever designed from the outset as a cult item."
Flourishing his scalpel, Carson thought that Frank was "still
trying to act as if he symbolises a whole culture, but the culture
isn't there anymore; in this movie, it's more like the Lost Patrol. At
the same time, by turning himself into warm, lovable Uncle Frank,
telling the same jokes over and over for an audience that already
knows all the punchlines, he obviates whatever edge his satire
might have left. He's become the ageing avatar of the same hippie
pieties he once worked to subvert." Presumably Carson had
blocked out the whole of Frank's lecture at the beginning of 'I
Have Been In You'. He concluded: "Once, Zappa built a satirist's
career on the idea that all of fife was just like high school; now it
turns out that all he ever wanted, apparendy, was a high school
clique of his very own - and on the evidence of Baby Snakes, he's
found one."18
The high-school metaphor is easy to apply to any rock concert,
but by the same token, that 'apparendy' is a 'prefect' word,
designed to imply superiority when incomprehension stalls the
critical faculties. Earlier in the review, Carson noted that without
Bruce Bickford's "decorative touches", this was just "another
rock-concert film". It was easier for him to appreciate the anima-
tion work, since the visual is more easily described than the
musical. For example, he thought the concert sequences "some of
the best I've seen — cleanly photographed, smoothly edited"; but
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Sheik Yerbouti
the music had "little life to it". Forgot to listen, eh?
Critics like Carson got caught out by confusing the arbitrary
with the meaningful. They should have taken their cue from the
opening, speeded-up sequences of Frank using an editing machine,
and his questioning of Bruce Bickford, where the point is made
that the artist has no responsibility for the way in which others view
his work. Frank experimented with film in the same way he did
with music. He wanted to see what would happen when separate
elements were put together in a certain way. They could just as
well be placed in other ways to obtain the same result.
Long-time road manager and 'snorker' Dick Barber made the
point when talking about the making of 200 Motels. "With Frank,
nobody knew what was gonna happen from one night to the next,
which was one of the reasons it was exciting and challenging,
because nobody knew what was happening. Now, I think Frank,
in some way, in a lot of ways, approached the making of 200 Motels
the same way, and so, we kinda ended up in England, and we got
this script, but the script was being rewritten by the minute, and I
think that was a little frustrating for Tony Palmer. You really can't,
and shouldn't, for the most part, make movies on that basis."19
Frank's literal, nuts-and-bolts approach to assembling film denied
those expecting meaning the means of their satisfaction. Even the
on-stage sequences sometimes cut back from tight head shots to
reveal Frank stalking the stage apron with cameras on either side of
him. At other times, he involves the camera in his cueing of the
band, gestures at it with a toy poodle, and during Patrick
O'Hearn's bass solo, one cameraman shows Frank instructing
another on how to frame his shot. It seemed that at all times, Frank
was intent on puncturing the idea that any of this had any meaning
beyond what was taking place at the time. Similarly, the animation
sequences were prefaced in a way that undermined pretentious
interpretation.
Baby Snakes had its faults. Some of the backstage sequences were
tedious, unfunny and inconsequential; Roy Estrada, with his
demented busby of a haircut, takes far too long doing far too little
with his inflatable friend; band members mug and talk to the
camera, and carry on 'faggot' badinage with a kaftaned John
Smothers. The layered sound sometimes makes the words of the
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Frank Zappa
person on camera hard to distinguish; and the fens' contributions
add nothing of value or interest. Since its premiere, it has been
shown rarely. Two years later, it was awarded the Premier Grand
Prix for a musical film at the First International Music Film Festival.
Though available on video in America, it has yet to be issued in
Europe.
As 1980 began, Frank had been off the road for nine months and
hadn't played a gig in America since November 1978. He spent
February and early March rehearsing a band that dispensed with
Peter Wolf but saw the return of Ray White. Tommy Mars, Ike
Willis and Arthur Barrow, who occasionally doubled on key-
boards, were retained, while Vinnie Colaiuta was replaced by die
nebulous David Logeman. Keyboard magazine sent Michael Davis
to interview Frank to the cacophony of workmen putting the
finishing touches to the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen.
Despite the considerable talents of his current band, Frank was
not satisfied. "I think I'm probably gonna start auditioning again,"
he said, "because I haven't yet found a keyboard player who is
'readable' and who can really read music . . . I'm talking about
someone who can look at the most difficult stuff on a page and the
notes come flying off, that means less time and trouble teaching the
stuff to the rest of the band. Then he would have to be roadable.
By that, I mean have the flexibility to go from playing simple back-
grounds to really difficult written-out stuff, plus have the attitude
so that he would enjoy touring. I haven't had too much luck
finding someone who can do all those things because he probably
doesn't exist. But maybe there's someone out there and I just
haven't found him yet."
Another problem that he encountered was his keyboard players'
lack of understanding when it came to their efforts being used for
texture rather than emphasis. "Well, see, the music is based on
contrasts, contrasts between things that are very simple and things
that are very complicated . .. This is a problem I face as a composer
and an orchestrator; musicians always look at it like anyone who
tells them what to play is inhibiting their lifestyle. Once the
musicians learn the songs in rehearsal, once they learn the arrange-
ments and we get out on the road, the songs sound good. But as
soon as the lights go on and the audience claps a few times,
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Sheik Yerbouti
everybody starts adding their own little things. By the end of the
tour, a lot of things sound like chaos. This is one of the reasons why
some people lose their jobs."20
Perhaps that was what had happened to Peter Wolf. Frank had
more to say on the subject of keyboard players' on-stage attitudes.
"The rigs I provide for (them) to monitor themselves with are
really elaborate. Each guy can sound like a million bucks to himself,
but they always crank the bass up so they can rattle their groin
while they're doing it. . . The mixer is always telling them to take
some bass off, and this makes them unhappy that they can't give
themselves a scrotal massage while they're playing. At the end of
the show, you have these keyboard players walking around like
you'd stabbed them in the heart because the mixer told them to
lower the low end out of their set-up or told them to play softer."21
Starting with a gig at the Seattle Center Arena on March 25, the
Zappa band spent much of 1980 on the road, with a European tour
sandwiched between two American tours. In the break from mid-
July until the end of September, a new album would be recorded,
the first to be made in Frank's own custom-built facilities.
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16
UTILITY MUFFIN RESEARCH
KITCHEN
As his fortunes waxed and waned through the Seventies, Frank had
always ensured that, within the constraints of available finance and
any ongoing litigation, the instruments he and the band played and
the equipment they used were at the leading edge of whatever
technology was available at the time. Nigel Leigh asked to what
extent his work had developed in tandem with technology. "Right
along with it," he replied, "because in many instances we were the
bait, a test site for some of these things, or at least some of the first
customers for the objects themselves. There have been a number of
items where I bought the prototypes and I used them right away in
recordings, like Syn-Drums, for example.
"The guy who invented these things brought them over and
showed them to me and I bought 'em right away and started incor-
porating them into the arrangements. When you're doing electric
music, every new device that comes along that allows for the
creation of a sound that might not have existed before should be of
interest to you. This is to a certain degree contingent on your
budget, because none of these things are cheap; and so you take a
risk purchasing the new piece of equipment. It might make a really
wonderful sound but then explode in your face three weeks later,
and the company will be out of business and then you will have laid
down a bunch of money. And I've been that route before. But
generally speaking, if there's something new and if I think that for
the kind of music that I do there's a use for it in my writing, I'll
get it."1
He'd been an early experimenter with a wah-wah pedal. "I
think I was one of the first people to use (one). I'd never even
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Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
heard of Jimi Hendrix at the time I bought mine; I didn't even
know who he was."2 Later, Jimi's guitar roadie, Howard Parker,
gave him the sunburst Strat that Hendrix burned at the Miami Pop
Festival, which Frank would pass on to Dweezil. He also used
something made for him by Bob Easton called the Electro
Wagnerian Emancipator. "It's a very attractive little device that
combines a frequency follower with a device that puts out
harmony notes to what you're playing ... Its main drawback is that
the tone that comes out of it is somewhat like a Farfisa organ."3
Frank would also search for different guitar sounds in the studio.
Since the Over-Nite Sensation sessions, he'd used a tiny Pignose
practice amp, giving him stadium-quality distortion at low volume
which he could then record in stereo for either an ambient sound
or so that each track could be separately EQ'd. Alternatively, he
could place it in an echo chamber to get that 'hockey rink'
resonance.
These and other considerations went into the design of the
Utility Muffin Research Kitchen (UMRJC). As well as providing
him with a range of possibilities when it came to recording his
guitar, Frank also ensured that his facility would have a wide
variety of keyboards, acoustic and electronic, at his disposal. "I've
got a warehouse full of keyboards," he informed Michael Davis. "A
lot of my synthesisers are going to be mounted on a semi-
permanent basis in my studio. In the control room, there's going to
be one master keyboard that's patchable out to the other synthesisers,
so that instead of one big toot coming out, you play the keyboard
and the individual voices can be played in the live echo chamber
through eight speakers going through an air space with stereo
microphones in the chamber."4 Pride of place went to a Bosen-
dorfer Imperial grand piano with its extra octave in the bass, and a
Hammond B-3 organ, intended primarily for road use, with a
modified keyboard that also drove a Minimoog and a set of
Syn-Drums.
Frank enthusiastically embraced the development of synthesiser
technology. "All the heavy-duty hardware that a rock'n'roll tour-
ing band would use, I've purchased and supplied to whoever the
keyboard guy is who does the tour. So I know basically what the
consumer end of the synthesiser stuff is like, even though I'm not a
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Frank Zappa
keyboard player and never expect to be."5 He told Downbeat that
the string synthesiser was "the best thing that could happen to pop
music because when you consider the attitude of normal string
players, even jazz string players, it's so disgusting doing business
with them that it's great that somebody has finally invented a box
that will help you do away with them and their aura."6
Tim Schneckloth asked him if it had got any harder to find
sounds that wouldn't quickly become bland. "Absolutely not," he
replied. "That surface hasn't even been scratched yet. Without
even touching a synthesiser, there are so many things you can make
with normal instruments, and in a diatonic context. There are so
many people who are dashing away from diatonic music in order to
give the appearance of being modern - which I think is a waste of
time. I've developed different types of notation that accommodate
the different things that synthesisers can do . . . If you're a com-
poser or arranger and you want to use the synthesiser, you have to
know all the basic language of what the instrument is dealing
with ... so you can communicate with the people who play the
instruments."
What about the people who claimed that all electric instruments,
including synthesisers, detracted from the 'humanity' of music?
"People who worry about that are worried about their own image
as a person performing on the instrument. In other words, the
instrument is merely a subterfuge in order for the musician to com-
municate his own personal, succulent grandeur to the audience
which to me is a disservice to music as an art form. It's the ego of
the performer transcending the instrument ... I don't want to go
and see somebody's deep inner hurt in a live performance. I don't
want to hear their personal turmoil on a record, either. I like the
music."7
Frank had once maintained that Americans hated music but
loved entertainment. "The reason they hate music," he explained,
"is that they've never stopped to listen to what the musical content
is because they're so befuddled by the packaging and merchandis-
ing that surround the musical material they've been induced to
buy. There's so much peripheral stuff that helped them make their
analysis of what the music is . . . The way in which the material
is presented is equally important as what's on the record. It's the
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Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
gami du jour way of life . . . Americans have become accustomed to
having a.gami dujour on everything . . . It's equally true of the jazz
world. The whole jazz syndrome is smothered in gami dujour."6
YOU ARE WHAT YOU IS
UMRK came into commission on a piecemeal basis. One of the
first fruits was 'I Don't Want To Get Drafted', a single recorded
with Vinnie Colaiuta on drums and released in May 1980. The
idea for the song grew out of a discussion during a rehearsal break.
"We were having a dinner break," Tommy Mars said, "and it was
just around the time when there might have been the draft in
America. Frank was talking about World War Two . . . Then all of
a sudden, he was working on [the melody line]; that was like a
guitar-solo at the time. So he said, 'Put down the burritos, I think
we got a new tune, boys.' And he started writing the lyrics right
out."9 On the B-side was a guitar solo, 'Ancient Armaments', taken
from the 1978 Halloween show at New York's Palladium and
previously slated to appear on the three-album set, Warts And All.
CBS were happy to release the single in Britain but Mercury-
Phonogram declined to distribute it in America.
The Kitchen's first major task was the next album, due for
release towards the end of 1980. The Zappa band had been on the
road for over three months before the sessions began in July. By
that time, much of the material had been thoroughly road-tested.
From March 25 to May 11, they played 26 dates across the United
States; after a 10-day break, they then set off to Europe for another
34 dates, ending on July 3 in Munich, the last of 15 gigs in
Germany. That gig was later broadcast in America on the King
Biscuit Flour Hour on June 28, 1981.
As usual, Frank continued to write on the road. On Saturday,
May 3 at Boston's Music Hall, he addressed the audience before the
last song of the evening: "Here's the deal. We have a new song
here — we have this song that was written about three days ago and
we rehearsed it this afternoon. We're getting it together, you know
what I mean? We've never played it for anybody before. You
guys'll be the first people on the face of the Earth to hear it." Then
he counted the band in on a very tentative version of 'You Are
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Frank Zappa
What You Is'. Interestingly, the first verse began, 'A dandy young
man from a nice Jewish family'; by the time it had been recorded,
the young man had become 'foolish' and his 'fam'ly' middle class.
A significant part of the set consisted of two suites of inter-
related songs. 'Society Pages', 'I'm A Beautiful Guy', 'Beauty
Knows No Pain', 'Charlie's Enormous Mouth', 'Any Downers'
and 'Conehead' were all performed in one unbroken sequence,
and in another, 'Mudd Club', 'The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing',
'Heavenly Bank Account', 'Suicide Chump', 'Jumbo Go Away',
'If Only She Woulda' and 'I Don't Wanna Get Drafted'.
Frank's initial intention was to compile a single album, to be
called Crush All Boxes. Its first side would contain 'Doreen', 'Fine
Girl', 'Easy Meat' and 'Goblin Girl', and the second side the
'Society Pages' suite of songs. At some stage that all changed as
Frank envisaged a way to rejig elements of the aborted Warts And
All in an ambitious set of releases that would emphasise different
aspects of his several talents. In the meantime, he set about record-
ing the current band repertoire, adding 'You Are What You Is' and
a handful of other songs.
One of these was 'Teen-age Wind', which came about through
Arthur Barrow's childhood friendship with Chris Geppert, who
grew up to become Christopher Cross and sign a deal with Warner
Brothers. His debut album, released in 1980, featured 'Pvide Like
The Wind', a song that became a Top Five single and earned Cross
Grammy awards for Best Record, Best Album and Best Song.
Barrow heard it while he was driving to a rehearsal: "I recognised
the voice immediately. I went up to Frank when I got to rehearsal
and I said, 'I can't believe it! This guy I went to high school with
has got a song on the radio.' And I started playing it on the piano
and singing as much of it as I could remember. Frank says, 'Aw,
gimme a pencil and paper and I could write a song like that in five
minutes,' and he whipped out the lyrics to 'Teen-age Wind'.
When Cross heard that Frank was writing a take-off of his song, he
remarked, 'Oh God, I hope he doesn't release (it) while I'm
peaking.' "10 Soon after, Frank took to commenting, "I'm peaking,
I'm peaking," on-stage.
Then there was 'Dumb All Over', a devastating critique on the
blind prejudice of institutionalised religion. "I was on a flight back
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from Germany when I came up with the idea for the song," Frank
said. "I scrawled out three pages' worth of ideas on the plane. I
couldn't wait to get into the studio to record it."u The song was
inspired by the hostage crisis in Iran and the jingoistic fervour
motivating various televangelists, modern-day hucksters who'd
traded their tents for television stations, to call down God's nuclear
wrath on anyone who didn't agree with their particular brand of
spiritual guidance.
Frank savaged the notion that religious fanatics of any persuasion
could use their book of rules to commit murder for righteousness'
sake. The mode of dress might differ, but the call to butchery was
the same. Which brought him to his coup degrke. Referring to the
Bible's assertion that God made us in his image, logic must dictate
that if we were dumb, then God must be dumb and "maybe even a
little ugly on the side". Litde wonder that Frank told Alex Kershaw
he was a devout pagan: "I detest religion for what it has done for
the human species . .. The difference between religions and cults is
determined by how much real estate is owned . . . Look, how
many people died as a result of the Bible compared to the Kama
Sutra? There's no competition."12
'Dumb All Over' was placed between 'The Meek Shall Inherit
Nothing' and 'Heavenly Bank Account', songs that shone a harsh
spodight on the likes of Jim and Tammy Bakker, Pat Robertson,
Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart, televangelists
who blurred the distinction between 'pray' and 'prey'. The
Bakkers headed a conglomerate called the PTL Club, which stood
for Praise The Lord or Pass The Loot, depending on the quality of
your faith. Bakker had prayed with President Carter on Air Force
One and knew the new president, Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately,
in 1980 he also 'knew' Jessica Hahn, a 21-year-old church secre-
tary. At the same time, Tammy Faye was allegedly having knowl-
edge of Gary Paxton, producer of her solo album and of'Monster
Mash'. The scandal didn't break until 1987, after Bakker had paid
$265,000 hush money to Hahn, her surname pronounced as in
'enhanced', which is what happened to her breasts before she posed
nude for Playboy.
'The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing' pointed out that the religious
right, hand-in-glove with an administration that relied upon its
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financial support, was devoted to the pursuit of self-interest.
'Heavenly Bank Account' pilloried Jerry Falwell, creator of the
Moral Majority (later renamed Liberty Federation for tax reasons).
To make sure the message got through, Frank intoned after the first
verse, 'Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down
and bending over'. When performing the song live, he would
state unequivocally, 'TAX THE CHURCHES' and 'TAX THE
BUSINESSES OWNED BY THE CHURCHES'. "I think the
Moral Majority is weird," he said. "I think television religious
fanaticism and 'send me your money' is weird. I think the people
who send the money are weird. I think the people who broadcast
the shows are sick. And I think the people who do the shows are
the worst."13
This segued into 'Suicide Chump', suicide being 'the sport of
chumps' in Frank's mind, sung over a generic boogie shuffle with
slide guitar by Denny Walley. 'Jumbo, Go Away' dealt harshly
with the unwanted attentions of an unattractive groupie. 'If Only
She Woulda' used a wicked imitation of a Doors vamp, complete
with lurching Farfisa organ solo, as an introduction to 'Drafted
Again', a reworking of the recent single with Ahmet and Moon
singing separate verses.
'Society Pages' and its satire of the complacent matrons who ran
small town American society, began a sequence that relentlessly
savaged their empty lifestyle, their dumb but attractive offspring
and their masochistic willingness to endure anything in the name of
'beauty', leading to 'Charlie's Enormous Mouth', another stark
denunciation of drug addiction. 'Any Downers?' evinced another
addiction with which the weak-willed avoided the pain of real life,
while 'Conehead', drawing some inspiration from the regular
Saturday Night Live sketches, underlined the banality of the average
American couch-potato's humdrum existence.
The album's opening sequence of four songs, starting with
'Teen-age Wind', were not segued. 'Harder Than Your Husband',
a song that subverted C&W conventions, was a solo feature for
Jimmy Carl Black in his guise as 'Lonesome Cowboy Burt'. Ray
White sang lead vocals on 'Doreen', a doo-wop song for the
Eighties with staccato backing from Frank's guitar. The mix that
would have appeared on Crush All Boxes faded at the beginning of
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Frank's blistering guitar solo, which here continued to the backing
track's end. 'Goblin Girl' ensured that oral sex would not be for-
gotten but as it progressed the song became the pretext for a
dazzling array of harmonised vocal overdubs which reprised
'Doreen' and ended with a soliloquy for lighting man Coy
Featherstone.
While there were guitar solos spread throughout the album's 19
songs, there was just one instrumental, 'Theme From The 3rd
Movement Of Sinister Footwear'. Strictly speaking, this wasn't a
product of xenochrony; the basis of the piece was the opening
instrumental interlude from the late show at New York's Palladium
on October 27, 1978, which was to have been released on Warts
And All as 'Persona Non Grata'. Frank's solo was then transcribed
and played again by percussionist Ed Mann and on bass clarinet by
David Ocker, who'd also worked on Sheik Yerbouti. Careful listen-
ing to the stereo reveals another guitar doubling the original
improvised melody. This was played by Steve Vai, credited on the
album for 'Strat Abuse'.
Vai was a native of Long Island who took guitar lessons from Joe
Satriani at high school before studying jazz and classical music at
the Berklee College in Boston. Having listened to Frank's music
since the age of 13, he set himself the task of transcribing 'The
Black Page' and sent the result to Frank, along with a demo tape of
his guitar playing. Frank was impressed enough to invite him for an
audition. "I told him that I was 18. He said, 'You're what?' -
clearly too young to be involved with a high-energy operation like
a Frank Zappa tour. Shortly after that Zappa changed his phone
number and I thought I'd been unlucky."14 But contact was
re-established and Frank asked him to transcribe the guitar solos
from Joe's Garage. The following year, Vai moved to Los Angeles
and Frank got him to add rhythm guitar parts to songs that would
end up on You Are What You Is and ultimately made him a band
member.
"Steve Vai got the job," he told Tom Mulhern, "because ... I
could tell that he had a superior musical intelligence and very great
guitar chops. And this showed me that there was a possibility to
write things that were even harder for that instrument than what
had already been used in the band."15
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The care and meticulous preparation that went into the creation
of 'Sinister Footwear' was typical of the attention paid to every
aspect of the project. The power of the messages Frank wanted to
convey was matched by a technical excellence not previously avail-
able to him. Songs were not only textually inter-related, but
linking material ensured that attention was not lost in the transition
between tracks. For the first time, the complexity of the music was
matched by the layering of vocal overdubs on the extended codas
of songs like 'Doreen', 'Goblin Girl' and 'You Are What You Is'.
The work of engineers Mark Pinske and Alan Sides was an
achievement in itself, but the vision was Frank's.
He was jusdy proud of UMPvK's first project. "That's a really
good album," he said in 1991. "The production values on that
album are unbelievable. I had just opened the studio and so I had
more control over the production elements than I had ever had in
the past. Because, before that, if you're going to make an album
with a lot of overdubs and if you're renting commercial space from
another studio, you either have to block book it and spend a
fortune or go in and out on every other day or something like that.
And every day that you're not there, somebody is using it and you
have to reset the board and relocate the microphones and it's very
difficult to keep a continuity of audio texture. So this album was
not only recorded there, it was mixed there."
I remarked that, despite Sheik Yerbouti's success, I thought You
Are What You Is was the better album. Frank nodded, "I think
so, too."
BARKING PUMPKIN (2)
With Mercury-Phonogram becoming difficult, Frank elected to
wait out the end of his distribution contract, even though he'd
wanted to release Crush All Boxes before the end of the year. Once
again there was a significant backlog of material waiting to be
issued. It was time to create another label identity. Since Columbia
were already handling his product outside America, it made sense
to propose that the deal became worldwide. The new label would
be called Barking Pumpkin. "Gail used to smoke," Frank explained
to Don Menn. "She quit. But she used to smoke Marlboros, and
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she coughed all the time. And so I had always referred to her as my
pumpkin, and so at that point she was a barking pumpkin."'6 The
logo depicted a Halloween pumpkin barking 'arf!' at a suitably
startled cat under the company's banner headline.
In the meantime, the Zappa band played almost 40 dates during
October and November 1981, crossing America from west to east
and taking in three Canadian gigs, before finishing with dates in
Berkeley and Santa Monica at the beginning of December. Both
the California gigs provided material for Tinsel Town Rebellion,
slated to be the first Barking Pumpkin release. Vinnie Colaiuta had
returned on drums, Bob Harris came in on keyboards, trumpet and
'high vocals', and Steve Vai took along his 'stunt guitar'.
"We toured the US for three months," Vai said, "and it was one
of the most tiring experiences of my life. I grew up pretty fast.
Zappa doesn't tour like the average rock band. He works long, he
works hard. I like that. I wasn't used to it, of course, but I really
learnt the tour life."17 At a price. "I was a nervous wreck," he said
on another occasion. "I wasn't eating right, I was sick, I was fooling
around all the time. I was 19 years old and I was out there and I got
no respect from anybody on the crew. I was under a lot of pressure
because the music was so hard to play and I didn't want to make
any mistakes. I did — it was inevitable — but the music was extremely
hard and I had to keep practising all the time. But it was all really
just nerves. I thought Frank was going to send me home. Why he
didn't, I don't know."18
Frank posed a rhetorical question to Matt Resnicoff. "What is
Steve Vai going to do? As a young musician, how do you get to be
unique, when a record company doesn't want to sign unique
people? The easiest gig for a unique person is a format where
uniqueness is acceptable ... I always saw him as a thoroughly pro-
fessional, on-the-case, totally talented, fabulous musician, and you
couldn't ask for a better guy to be in your band."19 Few other
ex-band members received such a glowing endorsement from their
employer.
But then, few other band members could transcribe guitar solos
the way that Steve Vai could. "It was a lot of fun," Vai said,
"because it was like an art project ... I had an opportunity to
explore these twisted notational rhythms. I really got my ears
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Frank Zappa
together because I transcribed for four years and it came to the
point where I didn't use a guitar anymore or any instrument. My
relative pitch got really good. Frank started sending me all sorts of
things from lead sheets to orchestra scores where he had orches-
trated certain sections, like 'Greggary Peccary'. Other sections
weren't orchestrated, they were just put together by Frank and he
wanted to have the score for it."20
There was a practical reason for his work as a transcriber. As well
as producing albums to be distributed by Columbia, Frank also
compiled three albums of guitar solos, which were to be made
available through mail order. As Gail explained to Don Menn,
"We were involved in litigation with a major record company. We
were virtually prevented from having an income by them. They
froze us out. We were an insignificant entity facing this huge cor-
poration. They had Frank's earnings tied up in order to prevent
us from fighting them, and on top of that we were fighting old
managers. I realised we were going to be in a position where we
weren't going to have a lot of money because the legal fees at that
point were just phenomenal. Plus we had a lot of money tied up
with the current management. So I started a mail-order company."21
Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar Some
More and Return of The Son of Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar consisted
mainly of solos drawn from live recordings from the 1979 and 1980
tours. Nine of the 20 tracks involved came from the three-day
residency at London's Hammersmith Odeon. Six 1980 solos were
from gigs in New York City, Dallas, Tulsa, Berkeley and Santa
Monica. 'Pink Napkins', a variation on the usual coloured napery,
also came from the Hammersmith Odeon, but this was the 1977
five-piece band with Eddie Jobson on keyboards. Even older was
'Ship Ahoy', from a February 1976 gig in Osaka, originally sched-
uled to appear on Lather under the title, 'Duck Duck Goose'. The
remaining oddments were 'While You Were Out' and 'Stucco
Homes', recorded at UMRK, and 'Canard du jour', a duet
between Jean-Luc Ponty on baritone violin and Frank playing a
bouzouki.
The first months of 1981 were spent in mixing these tapes and
those for Tinsel Town Rebellion; all four were to be released during
May. The latter double album used tracks from 1979 first scheduled
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for Warts And All, one studio track, 'Fine Girl', that would have
been on Crush All Boxes, and several taken from the last tour, pre-
dominantly from the December 5 gig at Berkeley's Community
Theater. As had become usual, sections of songs and solos were
seamlessly intercut from other performances.
'Easy Meat' was taken from the April 29 gig at Philadelphia's
Tower Theater. It had been mixed, with "massive over-dubbage of
keyboards on the classical section (all done by Tommy Mars)", as
Frank's sleevenote revealed, and sequenced into Crush All Boxes.
But where that version (later included in the boodeg, Demo's) used
Frank's original feedback-enhanced guitar solo, the final released
track edited from the 'classical' extravaganza into his solo from the
December 11 gig at Santa Monica, which, dispensing with feed-
back, was a more pointillistic and rhythmically diverse performance
inspired by Vinnie Colaiuta's hyperactive drumming. Typically,
both solos were excellent in their own right.
Tinsel Town's 15 tracks were a confusing combination of the
known and the new. There were rehashes of 'Love Of My Life',
'Tell Me You Love Me' and 'I Ain't Got No Heart' recorded at
Berkeley, and 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It' and 'Peaches En
Regalia' (renamed 'Peaches III' for its radical reorganisation) from
the Hammersmith Odeon. Perhaps his new young audience
weren't familiar with them, but did they need to be enshrined in
vinyl? A more puzzling inclusion was 'Dance Contest', which did
little for the listener except to note that the participants unzipped
their brains before climbing on-stage. "I'm makin' it up as I go
along," Frank told Den Simms, "so I think that the people from the
audience who come up there, they want that. I don't think that
they wanna come on-stage and know that I've planned something
for them, 'cause then they would feel like a victim. If they come up
there, and I'll just cook something up on the spot, I'm gonna
invent it based on what I think they can handle, and if I guess
wrong, then it's my fault."22
Critics chose to condemn 'Panty Rap' for its perceived chauvin-
ism and bad taste; it was apparendy not funny to refer to female
body secretions as 'voodoo butter', and as for drawing olfactory
gratification from warm undergarments . . . Frank explained the
history of panty-gathering: "A few years ago, in Philadelphia, a girl
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approached the stage and pitched up this little pair of blue panties. I
knew the drummer and one of the other guys in the band liked to
sniffgirls' underpants, so as soon as she pitched them up, I made the
drummer get off the stand and come down and sniff them. He did
and immediately pretended to gag and faint and rolled all over the
stage. The audience loved it. The girl, however, was somewhat
chagrined, but I have it on good authority that the panties were
semi-lethal."23
Bad taste, undeniably, but Lyons, Colorado resident Emily James
was making a quilt out of the burgeoning stock of donations. She'd
specifically asked for them not to be washed, "thereby maintaining
some exquisite sort of organic miasma in the vicinity of the finished
work of art," as Frank put it. The fate of the mulch-laden artefact is
lost to history. "At the point where I handed her these garbage cans
full of underpants, and she went to work to commit her artistic
deed, I didn't speak to her after that," Frank said in 1991.24 Lyons
had been flattened by a tornado the year before, but there were no
reported sightings of migrating underwear. If indeed the quilt was
ever finished, its fabric was so uniquely biodegradable that little can
now remain.
The two most significant compositions appeared in sequence.
First was 'The Blue Light', the most original song on the album and
an indication of Frank's will to experiment. The tune was com-
plex, incorporating many changes of tempo; parts of the lyric
followed Vinnie Colaiuta's intricate drum fills, others followed
speech patterns over more regular accompaniment. Frank's dead-
pan delivery was punctuated at dramatic intervals by band
harmonies emphasising certain phrases.
He used a vocal technique variously identified as sprechstimme
(speaking voice) or sprechgesang (speechsong). Its first notable use
was in Humperdinck's 1897 work, Konigskinder, Schoenberg used
the technique in Gurrelieder (1900-11) and Pierrot Lunaire (1912), as
did Alban Berg in Wozzeck (1917-22). Frank's adoption of the
technique may have been inspired by one of Tommy Mars' quirky
habits: "This is a guy that you could hold a conversation (with) and
Tommy could harmonise it while you were talking. You would
just follow dialogue with chords."25
'The Blue Light' was a devastating put-down on the hopelessness
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and amorousness of a generation that spent its time huddling in
groups at fast food joints and in squalid clubs. Nor did the psyche-
delic generation escape. Mention of Donovan and Atlantis moved
on to 'the giant underwater pyramid'; at which point Frank
extrapolated, 'Excuse me, Todd.' After recording the RA album,
on which they were pictured in Egyptian dress, Todd Rundgren's
band, Utopia, had toured extensively with a stage set that made
prominent use of a pyramid.
Frank reiterated his theme towards the end of the song and, as if
as an afterthought, spoke-sang, 'You can't even speak your own
fucking language.' It was a clear reference back to 'Panty Rap', also
recorded at Berkeley, during which a piece of paper had been
handed to him, asking him to wear the person's hat. Frank was
incredulous: "How about this, this is a college community, right?
'How about wearing', w-e-r-e-i-n-g, never mind." Unfortunately,
the force of his message was dispelled by the musical hoops through
which he made it jump. Nor did the audience catch his ominous
prediction, 'Death Valley Days straight ahead'.
More attention was paid to the album's title track and its attack
on the exploitation of punk music. In another sprechstimme sequence,
he noted, 'Did you know that in Tinsel Town the people there
think substance is a bore?' But, he went on to explain, this was a
system where spectacle was more important than content and it
was sustained by 'all those record company pricks' who put musical
quality low on their scale of priorities. He was also critical of
musicians who forsook 'real' music in order to cash in on the latest
trend; 'who gives a fuck if what they play is somewhat insincere'.
He may have been out of step with the times, but if Frank was to
be a 'boring old fart', he'd make sure that someone noticed the
stink.
On April 17 in New York, Frank was able to do his bit for 'real'
music by introducing A Tribute To Edgard Varese, an evening of
music that celebrated the 90th birthday of his widow, Louise. He'd
been invited by Joel Thome, conductor of the Orchestra For Our
Time, who visited him in Los Angeles to discuss arrangements and
talk about his own music. The concert was to have been held at the
Whitney Museum, but at Frank's suggestion it was moved to the
Palladium, which had once been an opera house. "What they were
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trying to do was get a younger audience to come and hear the
music of Varese . . . The concert was at the Palladium. They were
behaving like a rock'n'roll audience. They sat completely still
when the music was being played, but as soon as the music stopped
there was pandemonium."25
Frank had thought that he ought to find out some information
to pass along to the audience about Varese, but it turned out that
his efforts were unnecessary. It did, however, give him the oppor-
tunity to contact Nicholas Slonimsky, the St Petersburg-born
pianist and conductor, who'd overseen the world premiere of
Varese's Ionisation, as well as the symphonic works of Charles Ives
and Bela Bartok's First Piano Concerto. Slonimsky had written
several books on music, including the Lexicon Of Musical Invective
and the Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns, which had inspired
Frank to make contact. A friendship developed that enabled him to
grasp the theories behind Slonimsky's ways of creating chords and
harmonies.
Around this time, Frank had expected to begin rehearsals with
the Residentie Orchestra for a concert of his music as part of the
Holland Festival in Amsterdam. After arranging with various
organisations including the Dutch government and Columbia
Records that sufficient finance would be available, a short Euro-
pean tour was arranged in order to cover salaries and expenses for
travel and rehearsal time. Each member of the nine-piece group
was to be paid $15,000 for 17 weeks' work. But before the Ameri-
can rehearsals began, two musicians surreptitiously tried to increase
their salaries. When this came to light, Frank made it a strictly
orchestral event, but not for long. The orchestra committee
announced it had hired a lawyer to negotiate a royalty which they
expected to be paid over and above the usual session rate. Enough
was enough. Having invested $250,000 in preparatory work, Frank
withdrew his music, his involvement and his permission from the
enterprise.
WHY JOHNNY CAN'T READ
Indeed, as Hunter S. Thompson would say. That was the tide of
one of the solos on Return Of The Son Of Shut Up 'N Play Yer
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Guitar, which along with its companions, became available for mail
order on May 11. Tinsel Town Rebellion was released six days later.
To general surprise, the mail order albums sold very well right
away, while the distributed release struggled. Speaking two years
later, Frank said, "Actually, they have surprised everybody because
the quantity that we sold mail-order went into a profit within two
weeks of being out there. That is, they paid for the cost of manu-
facturing within two weeks." Asked if any follow-up albums were
likely, Frank pointed out, "I'm not funded by any foundation or
grants or any money from the sky, so what comes in gets trans-
ferred again into the next product that goes out. And I can only
spend the money to make the next product versus the profit that
comes in on the previous one."27
There was also the matter of rehearsing a new band for an
autumn 1981 tour of America. Chad Wackerman was engaged to
replace the venal Vinnie Colaiuta, Bobby Martin came in on key-
boards, saxophone and vocals and Ed Mann returned on per-
cussion. Steve Vai, Tommy Mars and Ray White kept their places,
but Arthur Barrow was replaced by Scott Thunes. Thunes' guitarist
brother Derek had rung Frank in the hope of securing an audition.
Frank informed him that he didn't need a guitarist but he was
looking for a bass player; Derek unselfishly suggested his older
brother. It took three auditions and the memorising of 'Mo 'n
Herb's Vacation' for Scott to secure the post.
You Are What You Is was released in September 1981, just prior
to the three California gigs that began an intensive tour taking in
more than 50 dates in just over three months. Frank had made a
video for the tide track but it had been banned by MTV for includ-
ing a Ronald Reagan lookalike who was eventually strapped
into an electric chair. The album's gatefold sleeve included a
bizarre article, written for Newsweek but rejected for being too
'idiosyncratic'.
Headed 'Say Cheese', it suggested that modern America was
wilfully deluding itself into accepting a number of fictions about its
status and that its self-regard prevented it from acknowledging a
woeful lack of true values or accomplishments. "No society has
managed to invest more time and energy in the perpetuation of the
fiction that it is moral, sane and wholesome than our current crop
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of Modern Americans." In addition, these Modern Americans
behaved as if intelligence was some sort of hideous deformity. In
order not to be ostracised as intelligent, the population was
prepared to be guided by COMMITTEE CHEESE, UNION
CHEESE and, worst of all, ACCOUNTANT CHEESE.
In this proscribed society, art was judged by its financial cost and,
along with "taste" and "the public interest", was "all tied like a tin
can to the wagging tail of the sacred Prime Rate Poodle". Frank
concluded, "Yes, Virginia . . . there is a FREE LUNCH. We are
eating it now. Can I get you a napkin?" The implication was that it
was already too late to reverse the insidious progress of state-
controlled aesthetic judgement. The deeply ironic tone of the
piece and its allusive terminology rendered it incomprehensible to
many, thus making it 'subversive' and probably 'unpatriotic' in the
minds of the Moral Majority. The article was dated April 1, 1981,
but Frank wasn't fooling. However, he was being idiosyncratic,
and that was enough for Newsweek to protect its readership from
the pain of original thought.
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DROWNING WITCH
How many of those that came to a Zappa concert thought about
what Frank tried to bring to their attention? For many, it was the
opportunity to see a highly talented and regimented band being put
through its paces for a couple of hours. And during the evening,
they'd get to sing along with 'Bobby Brown' or 'Broken Hearts
Are For Assholes', with the prospect of 'Dinah-Moe Humm' or
'Muffin Man' as an encore. For all of his sarcasm, Frank adopted a
paternal attitude towards his young audiences. Old enough to be
their father, he delighted them by ridiculing political figures their
parents believed in and the antics of pop stars whose shows they
nevertheless attended with equal enthusiasm. During the show,
many rock conventions were so accurately satirised that at least part
of the audience may not have noticed the difference.
Frank's hectoring tone was reminiscent of their teachers, but in
his case, you got the music as well. Sometimes, though, people
went too far. Arthur Barrow recalled an incident at an East Coast
gig: "I was standing near Frank on the stage and he was playing one
of his long guitar solos. He was just there enjoying himself; he had
his eyes closed, playing away. And I look at him, and all of a sudden
he's like knocked back. I think, 'Oh my God, he's been shot or
something.' He almost fell over. And it turns out somebody from
the upper level seats had thrown a pint vodka bottle and it struck
him on the shoulder. It didn't really hurt him, but it scared him.
"He was so great at this, I guess it was all those years of handling
an audience. He really knew how to do it. He says, 'Hey, wait a
minute, stop the music. Everybody stop playing.' So we just
stopped. And he said, 'Turn on the lights. I wanna find out who
threw that botde at me.' And the light guy starts flicking the spot-
light around the audience. 'No, no, I don't mean the spotlights, I
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mean the fucking house lights, turn on the big light' . .. And
people sort of pointed their fingers in a certain direction, the
security guys walked up there and they found the guy, and they
took him off. Because Frank says, 'We're not playing another note
until the guy who threw that bottle at me goes to jail.' They went
and got him and took him off and then we resumed playing."1
Another unfortunate went too far at the Santa Monica Civic
Center on December 11, 1981. The band were playing 'Broken
Hearts Are For Assholes' and had just begun the last verse when
someone threw popcorn onto the stage. "Stop! Stop!" Frank
shouted to the band. "That was very wrong to do. Bring that man
back and make him lick this shit up." Smothers was detailed to lift
the culprit by his ankles and run his face through the mess. When
he was brought to the stage, Frank exclaimed, "All right! Now at
last, the attention that you so jusdy deserve! Step right up, intro-
duce yourself and prepare to dine as you've never dined before."
The plaintiffbabbled some nonsense and tried to protest, but Frank
just said, "Get your face in it, buddy." As a struggle ensued, he
made sure that there was no violence. After an 'enormous napkin'
had cleared up the residue, he led the band into the last verse.
The Santa Monica gig was notable for the appearance of
Nicholas Slonimsky during 'A Pound For A Brown On The Bus'.
Frank brought the band down behind him and addressed the audi-
ence: "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to a real
national treasure, Nicholas Slonimsky. He's 83 yean old. If there's
any musicians in the audience, then you know who Mr Slonimsky
is. If you're not a musician, well, let's see, how can I put it to you?
This man has not only conducted the world premieres of many of
the greatest works of modern classical music, but he's the author of
many books, including the bible of improvisation, the Thesaurus Of
Scales And Patterns [published when Frank was six years old] . . .
Besides writing these books, Mr Slonimsky plays the piano and
that's what he's gonna do right now."
With that, the octogenarian launched into the 51st and final piece
from his Minitudes, his left hand stabbing descending triads while
his right scrabbled across the treble keys with surprising energy. His
solo was brief but dramatic and was greeted with cheers from the
audience. "To my surprise," he noted in his autobiography, Perfect
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Pitch, "I sensed a growing consanguinity with my youthful audi-
ence as I played. My fortissimo ending brought out screams and
whistles the like of which I had never imagined possible."2 As he
left the stage, Tommy Mars sketched the melody line of'Young At
Heart'. "The concert was a great success," Slonimsky told Don
Menn. "Usually I have just a hundred or two hundred people, but
this was a huge audience, and they shouted and everything!"3 The
bemused musical lexicographer later wrote, "Dancing Zappa, wild
audience, and befuddled me - I felt like an intruder in a mad scene
from Alice In Wonderland. I had entered my Age of Absurdity."4
There were guest vocalists at each of the day's two shows. At the
first, young Ahmet made his debut, singing his own composition,
'Frogs With Dirty Little Lips'. Lisa Popeil illuminated several songs
at the second show, her voice equal parts operatic and athletic.
"We were having an open call for drummers," Frank told Den
Simms. While her drummer boyfriend was auditioning for him,
Tommy Mars discovered that Lisa could sing, sight read and play
the piano. Frank was duly impressed when she sight-sang 'Be-Bop
Tango'. "And so she attended a few of the rehearsals, I guess for
about a week, and there were some things that she could do, and
do very well, and other things that she couldn't, and it just turned
out that there were more of the things that she couldn't do, that we
needed, for a second keyboard position in the band."5 Lisa showed
her vocal expertise on her semi-improvised 'Life Story' (included
on YCDTOSA 6), 'Teenage Prostitute' and 'The Dangerous
Kitchen'.
'Teen-age Prostitute' became part of the next album, Ship
Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch. The tide came from
Droodles, a book of minimahst cartoons by Roger Price, first pub-
lished in 1953. The one that Frank chose consisted of just five lines,
one of which denoted the horizon. The prow of a ship juts in from
the left, while a steeply pitched triangle represented a witch's
conical hat. The congruence of the slanting lines suggests a large
'Z'. To assist the motif, the letters of'Zappa' are represented where
appropriate as circles, straight lines and triangles. "I always liked the
picture," Frank said, "and recendy I tried to find the guy who did
it, and found out that he lived about 10 miles away from me, and I
bought permission to use the picture on the cover of the album."6
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Frank Zappa
Once again, the marriage of live and studio recordings was
for the most part unnoticeable, except at the end of 'Teenage
Prostitute', where audience applause denoted the end of the album.
Drouming Witch itself betrayed none of the time-consuming editing
that had gone into its production. "Do you know how many edits
there are in Drouming WitchV Frank asked Tom Mulhem. "Fifteen!
That song is a basic track from 15 different cities. And some of the
edits are like two bars long. And they're written parts - all that fast
stuff. It was very difficult for all the guys to play that correctly . . .
So there was no one perfect performance from any city. What I did
was go through a whole tour's worth of tape and listen to every
version of it and grab every section that was reasonably correct, put
together a basic track, and then added the rest of the orchestration
to it in the studio."7
Such microscopic attention to detail was only possible now that
Frank took adequate recording facilities with him on the road. In
1980, he'd upgraded from four-track to an eight-track machine.
For the 1981 tour, he travelled with a 24-track recorder. During
1982, he bought the Beach Boys' mobile truck and stocked it with
three Ampex 24-tracks, with one as a standby in case either of the
others broke down. The only drawback to this system was the time
it took to locate and construct a backing track.
VALLEY GIRL
An indication of the average gestation period of a Zappa tune could
be gleaned from the creation of 'Valley Girl'. "It was a riff that
started off at a sound check about a year before," Frank said, "and I
had been piddling with it for a long time."8 Then, at the end of a
drum tracking session with Chad Wackerman, Frank got an idea
for a background riff and decided to get it on tape before he forgot
it. "So I went out to the studio with him, and in about half an
hour, we had put down this backing track, which didn't have any
words or any idea of where it was gonna go, and it was maybe a
couple of months later that I got the idea for what the words might
be for this thing, and at the end of one of the vocal sessions for
Thing-Fish, I had Ike, Ray and Bob Harris sing the chorus. A few
weeks later I got the idea to have my daughter go out and do this
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monologue on top of it. The last thing that was added was the bass
part, and then it was mixed. We went off on a tour in 1982. We're
in Europe, touring around, and I find out that I've got a hit
record... by accident!"9
Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch was released as
the band set off for Europe at the beginning of May. As well as
revisiting the northern strongholds of Zappa fervour, this time
there were to be 11 Italian gigs. Throughout its two and a half
months, the tour was dogged by natural disasters, technical prob-
lems and belligerent audiences. The May 23 Kiel concert lasted just
ten minutes because the band were being pelted with various
objects. Heavy rain stopped the gig at Mannheim on June 6, and
the June 17 show in Lille was cancelled after the sound check.
The tour concluded at Palermo in Sicily on July 14; here a
full-scale riot, with police firing tear gas into a volatile crowd,
erupted after 30 minutes. Frank commemorated the event with
two tracks on YCDTOSA 3; the band were playing 'Cocaine
Decisions' when the first tear gas grenade was fired. Frank wrote,
"The Army and the local Police (who didn't like each other, and
who were completely unco-ordinated) began a random process of
blasting these httle presents into the crowd. We could see fires in
the distant bleachers. Tear gas seeped onto the stage." The band
segued into 'Nigger Business' and John Smothers had to wipe the
tears from Ray White's eyes while he was playing. It was the last
show that the 1982 band would perform.
"That was our last European tour," Frank said the following
month. "It's too expensive to play, too expensive to travel around,
and with the anti-American sentiment around, it is hard to go
on-stage and do what you do with the emotional freight that is
attendant to European attitudes toward American foreign policy."10
That foreign policy, dictated by the CIA and Defense Depart-
ment vultures perched on Ronald Reagan's shoulders, included
trying to keep leftist guerrillas from seizing control of El Salvador,
while bankrolling the Contras in their bid to overthrow the
Sandanista government in Nicaragua. In his attempts not to be the
'wimp' he'd accused his predecessor Jimmy Carter of being,
Reagan was convinced the following year to send troops into the
Lebanon, where Israel and the PLO were religiously killing each
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Frank Zappa
other. His action resulted in a car bomb that destroyed the Ameri-
can Embassy in Beirut and 241 Marines inside.
Material from the tour made up the second disc of YCDTOSA 5;
the ill-fated Geneva show provided a number of its 13 tracks, with
the balance from Munich, Balzano and Frankfurt. Frank was
generous in his notes: "The '82 band could play beautifully when it
wanted to. It is unfortunate that the audiences of the time didn't
understand that we had no intention of posing as targets for their
assorted 'love offerings' cast onto the stage [in Milan they threw
used hypodermic syringes]." Frank himself was in good form, as his
solos on 'Easy Meat', 'RDNZL', 'A Pound For A Brown On The
Bus', and a reggae version of'The Black Page #2' with the guitar
riff of'Ya Hozna' running behind it showed. Even though the CD
exceeded 70 minutes, an air of disappointment was evoked by
'Geneva Farewell', as Frank first warns the audience to stop throw-
ing objects on-stage, and when they continue, announces, "House
lights. The concert's over."
By way of consolation, he was well on his way to having a hit by
the time he returned to California. "With 'Valley Girl'," he told
Charles Shaar Murray, "my daughter did a radio interview and
brought along an acetate of the song. They played it on the air, and
the phones went crazy. The station held on to the acetate and kept
playing it, and the thing was such an instant grassroots hit that other
stations were taping it off the air and playing it. It didn't sell a lot
maybe 350,000 copies - and the album Ship Arriving Too Late To
Save A Drowning Witch maybe did 125,000 units; but sociologically
it was the most important record of 1982 in the United States."11
What began as a satirical gibe at a generation of teenage girls
whose chosen habitat was the shopping mall, and who spoke a
form of English that foresaw the advent of Loyd Grossman, had
been taken at face value as a celebration of a dystopian way of
life. "I'm not too thrilled about the (San Fernando) Valley as an
aesthetic concept," Frank admitted, "to me, [it] represents a
number of very evil things."12 Moon revealed the origin of her
bizarre dialogue: "I would go to bar mitzvahs and come back
speaking Valley lingo that everyone at the bar mitzvah was speak-
ing and the song came out of that."13
Her father was slightly bemused by the song's success: "Who
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Drowning Witch
would have thought in their wildest dreams that a record like
that would drive people crazy?"14 But he was reluctantly good-
humoured about it: "First, it's not my fault," he told Tom
Mulhern, "they didn't buy that record because it had my name on
it. They bought it because they liked Moon's voice. It's got
nothing to do with the song or the performance. It has everything
to do with the American public wanting to have some new syn-
drome to identify with. And they got it . . . you wouldn't believe
what kinds of things will be coming out with the words 'Valley
Girl' on them. You name it, everything from lunch boxes to cos-
metics, including a talking Valley Girl doll in February."15
No doubt it said 'Bag your face' and 'Gag me with a spoon' or
some of the other totally bitchen expressions that drawled from
the lips of Encino cheerleaders. Nicholas Slonirnsky used another,
'Grody to the max', as the name of his mischievous cat. The
14-year-old Moon suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous
fame. "The people at my school are pretty supportive," she said.
"But the ones I never was very friendly with and the ones I didn't
like are really negative. They finally have a chance to categorise
me. They call me a soc or a snob - God knows what."16
"We've had calls from Universal, United Artists, even Norman
Lear asking to do a film on 'Valley Girl'," her father added. "If we
do [it] as a movie, she'll be in it, so she'll have to miss some school.
But she'll have a tutor. I refuse to let her just walk away from
school."17 In the event, Valley Girl the film starred Nicholas Cage
and Deborah Foreman in a tale of forbidden romance between a
Val and the typecast Cage as a Hollywood punk.
Meanwhile, the guitar albums continued to sell well. Because of
the way the deal with Columbia was structured, the company had
the right to release them commercially as a three-record set outside
America. "That did really well in Europe," Frank said, "and sud-
denly they started importing them into the United States." All
those who'd bought the albums mail-order got upset, to the extent
that Frank had to release them as a box-set himself.
"They pressed 5,000 sets to begin with, and they went immedi-
ately. So, they ordered another 7,000. It's kind of an unusual item
since it is fairly expensive, it's in a box, it's hard to rack, and you
wouldn't think there'd be much demand for it because it is
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Frank TLappa
instrumental music by some guy who is not normally recognised as
being a musician. People think of me as some kind of deranged
comedian. So CBS was kind of surprised that there were that many
orders coming in."18 They were happier about 'Valley Girl', which
eventually reached number 32 in the singles chart; and although it
contained some demanding music, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save
A Drouming Witch climbed to number 23 in the Billboard album
charts.
Despite putting out albums that demonstrated his guitar playing,
when he came off the road Frank hardly touched one at all. "The
only time I play my guitar is when I know I'm going to tour," he
said. "I practise a litde bit before we go into rehearsal, to get the
calluses built up again. Then I play during rehearsals, and when we
get out on the road, I usually practise an hour a day before each
show. Once the tour is over, I don't touch it."19
"I really like the instrument and I really like to play," he added,
"but when the responsibility for running the business rests on my
shoulders, there isn't any time to practise." Nor did he feel the
need to wear it on-stage all the time. "I'm not a very good singer
and I don't have very good breath control. And the weight of the
guitar on your shoulder pushes down on your lungs. I find it easier
to sing in tune with the other guys on-stage if I don't have that
weight on my body . . . Why dirty up the arrangement, which is
planned to be concise and accurate, by randomly whacking a
couple of chords or a couple of extra tweezy notes just because
that's what everybody else would do? The music isn't designed that
way. That's not the reason why I have the thing out there. It's
something to make music on. And I really don't care what I look
like out there as long as I can get my work done."20
BOGUS POMP
In the second half of 1982, Frank concerned himself with a number
of orchestral projects. Sinister Footwear was to receive its world
premiere in the spring of 1984 with the Berkeley Symphony
Orchestra and the Oakland Ballet Company. The Perfect Stranger
was a commission from Pierre Boulez, to be premiered in Paris on
January 9,1984, with his Ensemble InterContemporain, with some
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other Zappa compositions. "Right now, we don't have any
guarantee that even if he conducts the premiere that it will get
recorded," Frank said in 1982. "And I'm interested in getting it
recorded so that I can hear it. It's never enough just to hear it
played once live in a hall. You may be able to listen to the stuff
carefully so that you can go further and advance your craftsman-
ship, but it's just a litde bit hard to do that by hearing it only once,
so I do want to get it recorded."21
First, there was the preparation of scores for his collaboration
with the London Symphony Orchestra. It would entail a per-
formance in London's Barbican Hall on January 11,1983, followed
by three days of recording of'Envelopes', 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation',
'Bob In Dacron', 'Sad Jane', 'Pedro's Dowry', 'Bogus Pomp' and
'Strictly Genteel'. The orchestra and the location were both reluc-
tant compromises. The concert was originally scheduled to take
place at New York's Lincoln Center with the Syracuse Symphony
Orchestra, "but they decided to hose me by doubling the price in a
couple of days," Frank told Robin Denselow, when the reporter
visited his home. His next choice had been the BBC Symphony
Orchestra, but they were unavailable. "It will be exciting to hear
them for the first time, if they are played right," Frank added. He
admitted to Denselow that the scores were very difficult and that
the LSO had a chance to make musical history, because what was
required from them in the score was "quite unusual".22
Frank took Ed Mann, Chad Wackerman and clarinettist David
Ocker, the featured soloist in 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation', with him.
The entourage was completed by engineer Mark Pinske, who had
recorded the 1982 tour. "The entire orchestral thing is on my own
budget," Frank said. "I've had requests from orchestras all over the
world asking to play music, but basically it comes down to one
thing - they want me to pay for it . . . What I'm hoping to do is
have [the LSO] rehearse it for about a week, and it may turn into
something that they will keep in their repertoire, and it will con-
tinue to be played especially after the record comes out because
then it will be something that will sell tickets for them."23
But then, no British institution was going to grant Frank's
dreams, least of all the tabloid press. "Zappa takes the dance out of
ballet," announced the Daily Express on January 7, 1983. "The
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Frank Zappa
42-year-old musician said of his ballets without dancers: 'The
scenarios and plot-line will be described in the programme. When
the music has been heard, a choreographer can come forward.'"
That wouldn't happen on the Barbican stage, as Frank discovered
when he first entered the hall. A row with the organisers ensued;
"It is tiny and pitifully inappropriate," Frank told them.24 At a later
press conference, he added, "Well, having seen the stage I'd rather
get k over with as quickly as possible and do the recording. The
sort of audience that will go to see classical music concerts and even
rock groups in England are just trying to be cool anyway."25
Frank enlisted Kent Nagano, conductor of the Berkeley Sym-
phony Orchestra, to realise his scores. Nagano had been aware of
him since 1967 but hadn't realised there was more to Frank than
the Mothers until he visited some friends at Pierre Boulez's
L'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique
(IRCAM) in Paris. There he noticed some of Frank's compositions
in a list of future works and learned of the Perfect Stranger project.
Back in the States, the two met backstage at a Zappa concert and
Frank showed him some scores. "I looked at them and realised they
were far too complicated for me to comprehend just sitting there,"
Nagano said.
"These kinds of musical syntaxes usually take a master's degree
to even grapple with, and even then, most composers with degrees
don't necessarily have the inspiration to go along with their knowl-
edge," he added. Nagano asked if he could perform Frank's music
with the Berkeley Symphony, but Frank had another purpose in
mind. Four months after their initial meeting, Nagano got a phone
call asking if he'd be interested in conducting some of Frank's
music with the LSO. "It was much more than, 'Would I be
interested?'" he told Andy Greenaway. "I considered it a real
privilege, a real honour to be able to work with someone like
Frank. We did some initial rehearsals together at his home in Los
Angeles, and there I realised it was indeed going to be an extremely
exciting project. From my knowledge of his music and his incred-
ible musicianship, I knew that for him it was just as important
to have music performed as close to perfection as possible as it was
forme."26
Nagano compared what Frank was doing to the work of Pierre
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Boulez, but Frank didn't agree. "Boulez writes complex rhythms,"
he told Denselow, "but they are mathematically derived, while the
rhythms I have are derived from speech patterns . . . they should
have the same sort of flow that a conversation would have, but
when you notate that in terms of rhythmic values, sometimes it
looks extremely terrifying on paper." His orchestral works con-
tained a "purely original system for balancing the tension zones and
relaxing zones".27
"The evening of the performance, I had butterflies in my
stomach," Nagano admitted, "but it was more a combination of
anxiety and enthusiasm than actual fear. There was definitely a
feeling that something enormous was about to happen. The recep-
tion was pretty predictably unpredictable in that the hall was
half-filled with normal LSO concertgoers and half-filled with
Frank Zappa enthusiasts, some of whom had never seen a sym-
phony orchestra before. Because of that mix of listeners, there was
an electric tension in the air, since people had no idea what to
expect. But the London Symphony was 100 per cent behind the
concert and behind Frank, and they played extremely well."28
The Daily Mail reviewer evidently didn't notice. Under the
headline, "Zappa keeps the hippies hushed", he fluted, "Many
feared a riot as the American premiered his two new ballets -
without dancers - with a concert by the London Symphony
Orchestra at the Barbican Centre. Instead, there was a cathedral-
like reverence from the 2,000 capacity crowd as long-haired denim
clad hippies from the Sixties mingled with dinner jacketed classics
lovers... his loyal fans seemed happy — even though it was hard to
tell the difference between the orchestra tuning up and the
cacophany [51c] that followed."29
In The Times, Richard Williams showed considerably more
awareness. He began his review, "Frank Zappa was the first rock
musician to saturate his work with irony, setting a fashion so widely
copied that the music has practically drowned in self-awareness. It
also makes his music interesting to deal with in critical terms, since
it is often difficult to guess his intention and thereby assess his
achievement." He thought that Frank's music was never wholly
serious nor totally given up to satire, parody and ridicule. "To
maintain such ambiguity is an achievement of its own, although
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Frank Zappa
some may feel that it closes off the opportunity for emotional
expression. Perhaps that was never his aim.
"The first half ('Envelopes' and 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation')," he
thought, "was hugely depressing." There were echoes of Charles
Ives, Bartok and Varese, Williams gauged, but none of the 'new
harmonic technique' promised in the programme. "The remainder
of the programme was less ambitious, less diffuse, and not surpris-
ingly, more enjoyable." 'Bogus Pomp' "began with broad parodies
of Hollywood movie music and ended, to the merriment of the
orchestra, with visual and musical slapstick. The safest music had
fared best, always an unsatisfying conclusion."30
Afterwards, Frank said, "I'm glad people liked it but it wasn't a
very accurate performance of the music. There were a lot of wrong
notes in the show and the acoustics of the place were really shitty. If
they liked it then the record will kill them because only on the
record will you hear what the things are really supposed to be." He
was grudgingly appreciative of the orchestra: "The LSO has an air
of professionalism above and beyond most other orchestras, which
is not a lot, but I've been associated with a few. I Uke the attitude of
the LSO and whatever the liabilities might be from some of the
individual performers, or the attitude of some guys in the orchestra,
the net result of working with them was really positive."31
The following day, the massed forces of the LSO made their way
to Twickenham Film Studio. "Frank was right there next to me,"
Kent Nagano remembered. "He demonstrated that he had impecc-
able ears and absolute command of the scores... I include Frank in
the category of composers who are keenly in tune with their own
work, how it's being rehearsed, how it's developing, and who can
participate and help correct the wrong notes, make suggestions,
and change phrasing on the spot in ways that might be easier or
more musical to play."32
There was some 90 minutes of music to be recorded over the
course of three days. Under normal circumstances, for musicians of
the LSO's supposed standard, that would have been within the
bounds of accomplishment. But not for Frank's music. In his note
for Volume One of the recordings, he wrote: "as with every per-
formance of new music, errors will occur. Every effort has been
made to remove these, but without a much larger budget for
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Drowning Witch
rehearsal and recording time, the possibility of perfection in a
premiere situation such as this is somewhat remote."
Four years later, when the second volume was issued, he was
brutally honest about the circumstances of the last piece to be
recorded, 'Strictly Genteel'. "The performance included here was
recorded in the last hour of the last session of the last night. .. with
no possibility of overtime (at any price) to correct mistakes. During
the final 'rest period' just before the big push to get a good take, the
entire trumpet section decided to visit a pub across the street. They
returned 15 minutes late. No recording could be done without
them. The orchestra refused to spend another 15 minutes at the
end of the session to make up for their glowing brass section neigh-
bours. I have done as much as possible to enhance this fine British
'craftsmanship' (at least 50 edits in 6.53), but to no avail . . . the
'human element' remains intact."
Nagano was diplomatic: "Costs make Frank's works very diffi-
cult for a traditional institution to mount. They call for huge
orchestras - much larger than normal, and the scores are expensive
to produce. They're difficult from a technical standpoint, and that
requires much more rehearsal time than a standard repertoire
piece."33 Fewer visits to the pub and a professional observation of
working hours, especially when the composer is footing the bill,
would also have been appreciated.
INFIDELS
Before Christmas, Frank had given Robin Denselow a list of his
projects: "There's a new album, The Man From Utopia, due out in
two weeks, then I've just finished three film treatments and a treat-
ment for a Broadway show. I've made a deal for an animated TV
show on 'Valley Girl'. I've finished an 88-minute film, , involving
live concert footage and animation, there are two other 90-minute
videos . . . I've waded through 300 of the 400 reels of tape from
our last tour and there's enough for five albums there . . "M
He also told of a late-night visitor one recent December: "I get a
lot of weird calls [at home], and someone suddenly called up
saying, 'This is Bob Dylan, I want to play you my new songs.'
Now, I've never met him and I don't know his voice, but I looked
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Frank Zappa
at the video screen to see who was at the gate, and there, in the
freezing cold, was a figure with no coat and an open shirt. I sent
someone down to check to make sure it was not a Charles Manson,
but it was him."
Dylan was led down to the studio, where he sat at the piano and
played 11 songs and then asked Frank to produce his next album.
"It could be tunny," Frank grinned. "It's so ridiculous and off the
wall that I feel I should do it. He doesn't have much of a sense of
humour, but his new sounds are nice, so I'd like to produce them,
though it would be a bit of an adjustment. I said he should
sub-contract out the songs to Giorgio Moroder. I said he should
do a complete synthesiser track and Dylan should play guitar and
harmonica over the top."35
For Dylan, that would have been over the top. He later main-
tained that the project foundered because Frank asked for too
much money and wanted to use his own musicians. In any event,
Frank didn't hear from him again and the new album, Infidels, was
recorded with co-producer Mark Knopfler and Mick Taylor on
guitars, and Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar provided the
propulsion.
By then, there were two new Zappa albums on the market. The
Man From Utopia, as good a description of the position Frank found
himself in as any, was released in March 1983. Its cover painting, by
Gaetano Liberatore, depicted a massively muscled and snarling
Frank as a clone of 'RanXerox', the robotic hero of a political
comic strip 'Tanino' drawn for the Italian magazine, Frigidaire. His
left hand has crushed the neck of his Stratocaster, while with the
right he tries to swat the mosquitoes that beset the band at the
Parco Redecesio in Milan. Behind him, a signpost indicates some
of the other Italian towns the band played in.
The back cover, showing the scene from behind 'FranXerox',
was even more detailed. The location has switched to Palermo at
the start of the riot. Tear gas drifts across the crowd as police
buckle on their shields. In left foreground, John Smothers is crush-
ing a photographer's head alongside two furtive cocaine sniffers
('Cocaine Decisions' opened the album). To the right, Pope John
Paul gestures from a throne carried by Swiss guards. In front of
him, a bare-breasted woman holds aloft a rolled copy of Frigidaire
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in a pose that echoes the Statue of Liberty. Italy had just
beaten Germany in the World Cup, so a banner announces '3-1
Vaflanculo'; telling the Germans to 'fuck ofF must have been a
novel experience.
For some Zappa fans, the cover was more attractive than the
contents. Songs like 'Cocaine Decisions' (another broadside aimed
at Warner Brothers) and 'Stick Together', which attacked the
mob-ruled union movement, were in the Zappa mainstream, as
was the medley of two doo-wop songs, 'The Man From Utopia'
and 'Mary Lou'. Less listener-friendly were three excursions into
sprechstimme, 'The Dangerous Kitchen', 'The Radio Is Broken' and
'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats'. The musical achievement, partic-
ularly in the first two numbers, was considerable, but their value as
entertainment, even at the first listening, was questionable.
"We have this thing called meltdown," Frank told Rick Davies,
"where, depending on what's in the news that day, or what hap-
pened in the audience during the show, I'd start talking in a sing-
song tone of voice and then Tommy Man would chop changes
behind it. Now that's very freeform, kind of like 'The Dangerous
Kitchen' or 'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats'; those are both melt-
down events. In the case of'Dangerous Kitchen', it's a fixed set of
lyrics that has variable pitches and variable rhythms. In the case of
'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats', it was completely spontaneous,
100 per cent improvised by me and the band. It ended up right
on the spot in this concert in Illinois. So that type of rampant
behaviour is good as a contrast, but I think that for today's audience
you can't go out and do a whole evening of random behaviour.
They're not going to tolerate it; they want to see a structured
show."36
The tortuous vocal line in 'The Dangerous Kitchen' was tran-
scribed by Steve Vai, who then overdubbed an acoustic guitar part
on the live recording, which featured Vinnie Colaiuta on drums.
"It's not 100 per cent accurate, as a matter of fact," Frank pointed
out to David Mead, "because if you play the pitches of his tran-
scription without the vocal, there are certain things that just sound
a little bit weird. I'd give it 99 per cent, though.
"When you're transcribing something to publish in a magazine,
that's one thing. But when you're transcribing it and you know
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that within a day or so you're going to be overdubbing on the
track, and you're going to be sight-reading your own transcription,
and it's got to synch up exactly with what's on the track — that's
when you'll really know whether you're a good transcriber or not.
But that's how he did it; he wrote it out, he came in, we turned on
the tape, he read it and he did it in two or three takes. He even put
in a string-scratch for when I laughed! I went, 'Huh, huh, huh,'
and he's got that little 'scrape, scrape, scrape' in there. He nailed
everything."37
'The Radio Is Broken' was a studio creation which interspersed
a dialogue between Frank and Bobby Martin on the subject of
shoddy sci-fi B movies over a complicated rhythm passage that had
Scott Thunes1 bass utilising the riff from The Knack's 'My
Sharona'. It was the sort of 'audio junk sculpture' with which
Frank liked to tease his fans; The Knack had recorded 'My
Sharona' at Village Recorders while he was there cutting Joe's
Garage. The song's composer, Doug Fieger, claimed Frank as "a
big, big influence in my life. I met him one time, and he insulted
me. It was at an airport. It was good-natured, but he was ever the
iconoclast and the kind of 'grumpy old man' ... I gave him a
Knack button, and I said, 'We're gonna be a big band.' And he
said, 'So what!' "38
'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats', again with Colaiuta on drums,
is probably the most tasteless song in Frank's whole catalogue. The
song concerned the band's visit to Albuquerque, New Mexico and
two unnamed band members' attempts to pooch some local college
girls. The story of a panty-snifEng session while one of the girls
skinny-dipped in the hotel pool gets just a little too graphic ('He
told me later the stuff in the bottom was like punching an eclair').
There is no way of telling what Frank's attitude is to the events he
recounts, except when he refers to the panty-snifBng fetish as "part
of a great American Tradition".
There were three short instrumentals on The Man From Utopia,
none over-arranged. 'We Are Not Alone' was an updated echo of
Fifties R&B bands, featuring the massed saxophones of Marty
Krystall. Frank referred to 'Moggio' as "a very complicated instru-
mental for the full ensemble, featuring Steve Vai playing some very
hard guitar stuff." The title came courtesy of his daughter: "One
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day, when Diva was real young," he told Den Simms, "she crawled
into bed with us, and I was going to bed, like, seven o'clock in the
morning, and she had been sleeping in bed with Gail during the
night. As I got into bed, she was just waking up, and she was telling
me about this dream that she had, that she had a tiny, litde father
named 'Moggjo' who lived under the pillow . . . and gave me
this complete scenario about this character that she was familiar
with."39
Most interesting of all was Tink Walks Amok', a showcase
for Arthur Barrow's bass-playing. It was originally a band piece,
'Thirteen', that was renamed when Frank learned Barrow's nick-
name from Christopher Cross, at a time when neither were
peaking. "The band versions of it were much cooler than the
album track," was Barrow's modest opinion. "We did it by starting
to a click track, then I put down a basic bass track. Then I
overdubbed bunches of other tracks, micro bass and some other
stuff. We were sitting in the studio with the tape rolling. Frank
would say, 'OK, move the whole pattern up to the D-string, get
ready, NOW!' All while the tape was rolling. That's the way it is
on the record."40
When the album was digitally remixed for CD, the air of cold
calculation in much of the material was accentuated, rendering an
already difficult record appreciably harder to enjoy. The original
running order was changed and an extra track, 'Luigi & The Wise
Guys', an inconsequential a cappella doo-wop parody that accused
a crew member of being a dork, was added. Released to mail order
at the same time was a picture disc of the Baby Snakes soundtrack,
beginning with the original track from Sheik Yerbouti and versions
of'Titties & Beer', 'The Black Page #2', 'Jones Crusher', 'Disco
Boy', 'Dinah-Moe Humm' and 'Punky's Whips' from the 1978
Halloween concert. The set was remixed and formally released
three years later.
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18
SYSTEMS OF EDGES
Frank may have felt he was at some sort of impasse in the early
months of 1983. There was progress with his 'serious' music but
also a disheartening failure of nerve and execution by the orchestral
forces at his disposal. After recording with the LSO, Frank got an
opportunity to conduct an orchestra in public when he was asked
by the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Musicians to take
part in an Edgard Varese Memorial Concert on February 9. The
first half of the evening was conducted by Jean Louis Le Roux; in
the second half, Frank conducted Ionisation and Integrates and pieces
by Anton Webern.
"The orchestra is the ultimate instrument," he wrote in The Real
Frank Zappa Book, "and conducting one is an unbelievable sensa-
tion . . . From the podium (if the orchestra is playing well), the
music sounds so good that if you listen to it, you'll fuck up. When
I'm conducting, I have to force myself not to listen, and think
about what I'm doing with my hand and where the cues go."1
On the band front, tour schedules had become more extensive
and demanding, their costs secured by a never-ending series of
bank loans. The 1982 tour had suffered from circumstances beyond
his control, making the treadmill that he'd fashioned for himself, of
touring to earn revenue to finance UMRK to produce albums that
needed to be promoted by another tour, even more burdensome.
He was also frustrated by the persistence of bootleggers that made
capital from his gigs. He was unwilling to persist in basing each tour
on new material, filled out with songs from previous albums. "I
stopped doing that because people usually boodegged it, and they'd
have it out in the market before I'd even have an album out," he
told Rick Davies.2
Nor would there be a 1983 band tour. "Well, whenever we go
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Systems Of Edges
off the road, there isn't any band," Frank told Guitar Player.
"Everybody is hired for the tour; nobody is on a yearly salary. I
used to do it differendy years ago: everybody was employed, and
they got the same amount of money every week whether they
worked or not. And some of the guys said, 'I'd rather get paid more
money just for the time I'm on the road.' And I said, 'Fine,' and
that's the way it is now. So when they're not on the road with me,
they go out and do other work. It's going to be a while before I'm
back on the road, so it's good they have other work." As for Frank:
"I have a lot of things to do that can't be done while you're on the
road. We've got video and movie stuff happening right now, and
you can't be a touring musician and still have control over that
stuff."3
He was about to embark on a project, ambitious even by his
own standards. After years of legal wrangling with MGM-Verve
and Warner Brothers, he'd finally got back all the tapes and masters
of the early Mothers albums. He was asked if he still listened to his
old albums. "Well," he replied, "I'll be listening to those things a
whole lot because we plan to re-release the entire catalogue of my
albums next May. We're remixing everything ... I don't know
whether we'll be able to pull it off in time because there's an awful
lot of work to be done to meet the deadline, but I'm hoping by
Mother's Day to have five boxes with seven albums in each of
them, covering the entire catalogue. And we'll divide them up so
that the first box is like all the early Mothers stuff plus one extra disc
of material from that era that's never been released before. And the
same goes for the rest of the boxes: each will have one disc of things
that were done during that time that never got released.
"All the stuff is either going to be remastered, as is the case with
the things that already have a good mix, or completely remixed.
This includes 4-track, early 8-track or early 16-track or anything
done when science wasn't there to make it sound right."4 The task
was even bigger than he envisaged, and The Old Masters Box I
would not be released until April 1985. A contributory factor in
the delay was a decision that would prove to be controversial with
Zappa enthusiasts. This was the removal of the original bass and
drum tracks from both We're Only In It For The Money and Cruisin'
With Ruben & The Jets. One reason put forward was that the oxide
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Frank Zappa
on the original multi-tracks was crumbling away and affecting the
sound quality.
Arthur Barrow, who played the new bass parts, was the first to
express misgivings: "I had mixed feelings about it. On the one
hand, as a musician, I'm always happy to be employed and doing
sessions is always fun. But on the other hand, I did try to talk Frank
out of it the best I could. I said, 'Are you sure you want to do this?'
He said, 'I don't like the old bass and drum tracks.' " Apart from
the aural contrast between the original sound and the pristine
digital precision of the new recordings, there was the anomaly of
Barrow's use of the 'My Sharona' riff during 'Flower Punk', since
The Knack's song had not been released until 12 years after We're
Only In It For The Money.
"Actually," Barrow added, "how could the oxide be falling off
the tape on one track and not on other tracks? But it's Frank's
album. It's his music. He can certainly do what he likes with it. But
I think it would be nice for those of us that like the original version,
to put that out also ... As for Ruben & The Jets, I kinda think that's
bad too. Because one of the coolest things about that album origi-
nally was the tape loops for the drums. It sounded like a machine, it
was a great sound."5
The answer to several of Frank's current frustrations was another
machine. For years he'd been accustomed to keeping pace with the
developments in synthesiser technology. Though not professing to
be a keyboard player, he made himself conversant with the poten-
tial of each innovation as it became available. But the Synclavier
had applications beyond the scope of his other equipment. "You
see," Frank told Paul Gilby, "the thing that got me hooked on the
Synclavier was the music-printing aspect of it. Before getting that, I
would carry manuscript paper around with me in my briefcase and
write music on the road, in a hotel or on an airplane. It was a very
manual procedure where, having come off the road, I would
collate my ideas and then write out the new arrangement and that
would go to a copyist, and so on. It was really expensive, very
time-consuming, and at the end you really didn't know what you
were going to get till you heard it played."6
In conversation with Rick Davies, he elaborated on the process:
"Then the musician takes his part and under the baton of the
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Systems Of Edges
conductor attempts to interpret what you dreamed up in the first
place. And this interpretation is subject to such questions as how
much time they have for rehearsal, which is based on how much
money they have to lose, and the acoustics of the hall in which the
thing is going to be played. So basically your chances, as a com-
poser writing for human beings, of getting your idea accurately
performed are really not too good. Not good at all, unless you
write very simple music, which I do not."7
Manufactured by New England Digital, the Synclavier had been
developed as a composer's tool, enabling its operator to test
melodic structures and the voicing of arrangements. With his
enquiring mind, Frank's interest rapidly became an addiction:
"When I first got it I probably did the same thing that a lot of
people do when they buy a complex piece of equipment — I said,
'Oh my God, do I have to read all those big books?' So I didn't! . . .
But on the other hand I did happen to hire people who had read
them, and they did all the stuff that I didn't want to do. What I
wanted to do right away was write music on it, not learn how to
write computer programs. I still don't know how to do that and I
will probably never bother to find out, because it took me about
two or three months before I could turn round and say, 'I can type
music into that!'
"I remember I had a guy (Steve DiFuria) operating the machine
and the way it happened was — and, boy, how this man suffered! I
was working on a piece and I had to get the musical information
into the computer. Since I didn't know how to type it in, I had to
sit next to him and say, 'Make that one a C, make the next one a G,
etc' Then one day he said, 'Look, Frank . . . if you would just do
this, then I wouldn't have to sit here!' So I said, 'OK, let me try,'
and it only took about a day to learn the process. From that point
on he couldn't even get into the room to use the machine because I
was there day and night!
"You see, once you learn how to do this stuff, it's dangerously
addictive. If you love music, and you desire the ability to write
down your music and then push a button and hear it played back to
you right away - the Synclavier is the instrument for you."8
For someone obsessively involved in creating music, capable of
sustaining 16- to 18-hour days of intensive work, the Synclavier
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Frank Zappa
was a godsend. "You see," he explained, "when I'm composing,
my main idea often starts with various musical theories and I ask
myself what happens if I do this or that, and what are the physical
limits of what a listener can comprehend in terms of rhythm? How
big is the 'data universe' that people can take in and still perceive it
as a musical composition? That's the direction I'm going in."9
The trouble was, once the programing aspects of the machine
were mastered, the number of musical problems he could set
himself proliferated alarmingly. Ideas flowed onto disc and some-
times waited years to be completed or adapted into other com-
positions. "For example," he told Don Menn, "when I first bought
the Synclavier, it wasn't even a sampling machine, and I started
writing things for it that just used the FM synthesis. The main
charm with [it] at that time was the power of its sequencer and the
fact that you could have multi-tracks and things colliding with each
other. So some of the pieces that were started even in the
pre-sampling days . . . have gone through permutations over the
years and still haven't been released yet."10
He explained the Synclavier in layman's terms to Nigel Leigh:
"It expedites everything. All the different mechanical aspects of
putting a piece together — it's like a musical word processor that
would read to you. Like if you were writing a novel, for example,
on a computer and the word processor helps you to move your
paragraphs around and do all that stuff, and when it was all done,
you'd push a button that would read your book to you. That's kind
of what the Synclavier does."11
THE PERFECT STRANGER
On the conventional front, The London Symphony Orchestral/Zappa
Volume 1 was released in America on June 9. Despite Frank's caveat
about errors in the performances of 'Sad Jane', 'Pedro's Dowry',
'Envelopes' and 'Me 'n Herb's Vacation', it would be hard for
anyone but the composer to notice. What does strike the un-
tutored ear is that there are frequent instances of whole sections of
the 100-strong band being unoccupied, and that in general the
opportunity to engage the full sonority of such a large aggregation
has been missed. The LSO's performance of 'Pedro's Dowry' is
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Systems Of Edges
more cumbersome than that by a 40-piece band on Orchestral
Favorites. Similarly, 'Envelopes' is taken at a more deliberate tempo
than the version on Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning
Witch, making what was potentially bizarre almost contemplative.
'Sad Jane', the least bombastic of all Frank's orchestral pieces,
based in part on a 1968 guitar solo transcribed by Ian Underwood,
is very much in the same vein, even when Chad Wackerman's
overloud drumkit provides a more regular pulse. For much of its
duration, the piece alternates between passages for strings, wood-
wind and brass, and rarely uses the LSO's full resources. 'Mo 'n
Herb's Vacation' is in three movements, the first a feature for
David Ocker's clarinet, closely followed by Chad Wackerman's
drumkit and supported by woodwinds. Violins lead off the second
movement, playing long sliding notes reminiscent of Gyorgy
Ligeti. For the first time, the listener becomes aware of the orches-
tra's fullness. But once again, the sequential nature of the writing
doesn't allow the impression to last. The final movement opens
with a convulsive flourish before the angular melody line passes
around the sections of the orchestra. For much of its 13 minutes, it
combines a long series of ominously eventful episodes that finally
resolve in a tumbling climax incorporating blasts from a klaxon
horn.
It's as if with this record, and Volume 2 released in September
1987, Frank is laying to rest the urge to emulate the techniques of
the composers who sparked his youthful interest, and thus their
influence. From now on, he would be able to work in a medium
that was not available to his musical antecedents; he could create
his own compositional language, exploring tonal and rhythmic
theories that were inconceivable at the time of Varese's death. The
older man had been excited by the possibilities of electronic sound,
an alien universe which he strived to embrace. But the embryonic
resources at his disposal could provide no more than the crudest of
wave forms with few inherent musical qualities. The Synclavier,
even in its basic form, let Frank's imagination take flight in an
infinity of directions.
"Every composer has some image in his mind of what he wants
his stuff to sound like," he said, "not just the composition, but the
overall tonal quality of what he's writing. In my head I have an
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Frank Zappa
audio image, not just of the notes, but of the way the notes will
sound played in an idealised air space, which is something you can't
get in the real world. The closest you can get to it is a digital
recording with digital control over imaginary audio ambience.
"The moment you get your hands on a piece of equipment like
this," he added, "where you can modify known instruments in
ways that human beings just never do, such as add notes to the top
and bottom of the range, or allow a piano to perform pitch-bends
or vibrato, even basic things like that will cause you to rethink the
existing musical universe. The other thing you get to do is invent
sounds from scratch. Of course, that opens up a wide range."12
It was this potential to explore the unknown that also motivated
the eminent composer/conductor Pierre Boulez to create L'Institut
de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) at
the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The building of the £9
million music resource centre stemmed from a meeting between
Boulez and the French President in 1970, at which Boulez
explained his vision of the music of the future. Pompidou was so
taken with the idea that he agreed to a continuous subsidy of £2
million a year to maintain the two-and-a-half tier underground
complex of offices, laboratories, studios and computer room.
The Institut opened in 1977; the Italian composer Luciano Berio
was made head of the electro-acoustic department, the Yugoslav
composer Vinko Globokar researched the potentialities of voices
and instruments, and Jean-Claude Risser oversaw the computer
section. In 1980, Boulez sacked these and many other employees
and took on a younger team better able to make the technology
user-friendly for visiting composers. A year later, the resident
Italian computer expert, Giuseppe di Giugno, invented the 4X, a
digital signal processor capable of 200 million operations per
second.
Frank was said to be 'enthralled' by the 4X, which he used to
develop ideas for The Perfect Stranger, before its premiere at the
Theatre de la Ville in Paris on January 9, 1984, played by Boulez's
Ensemble InterContemporain. The 29-strong chamber group also
gave performances of Dupree's Paradise and 'Naval Aviation In
Art?', as well as works by Carl Ruggles, Elliott Carter and Charles
Ives. The three Zappa compositions were then recorded over the
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Systems Of Edges
next two days at IRCAM. Rumours persisted that there was a
falling-out between the conductor and the composer, which
served to explain why the resulting album became an amalgam of
human and electronic resources. But since only three works were
rehearsed and performed, that doesn't seem likely.
Once again, Frank was not satisfied with their live performance.
He thought the Ensemble under-rehearsed and he was most
unwilling to take the bow that Boulez forced upon him. "I was
sitting on a chair off to the side of the stage during the concert," he
wrote in his autobiography, "and I could see the sweat squirting
out of the musicians' foreheads." He went on to describe how
everyone present at such occasions has to take a chance, with the
composer most at risk, subject to inaccurate performance, leader-
ship and the audience's lack of awareness. Not only that, "even
though the programme says World Premiere, that usually means
Last Performance."13
Boulez was said to be "attracted by the energy and spontaneity
of some pop artists". "They have not the mass of education and
repertoire that paralyses many musicians," he said. "They are not
afraid to experiment. With scores like Zappa's I have the opportu-
nity of breaking down musical ghettos in a dignified way. That is a
good thing."14 Whether Frank was a willing participant in the
great man's crusade went unrecorded. But he was able to have a
closer relationship with the Ensemble. "First of all," he told Don
Menn, "there were fewer of them, so you could actually have
memorable conversations with them. And a number of them had
asked me to write solos for them. One of the brass players was also
the head of a brass quintet that worked within Boulez's Ensemble
InterContemporain. And he wanted me to write some brass
music. And usually percussionists will come up to me and ask me
for music. I never did manage to do any of those things, because
they all take time."15
On the album sleeve, Frank wrote a scenario for each of the
compositions. The Perfect Stranger depicted a licentious dalliance
witnessed by Patricia, a dog sitting in a high chair, between a
'slovenly' housewife, a door-to-door salesman and his 'faithful
gypsy-mutant industrial vacuum cleaner'. Their menage a trois is
delineated in woodwind and violins, while percussion and muted
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Frank Zappa
trombones depict 'the spiritual qualities of chrome, rubber, elec-
tricity and household tidiness'. The Ensemble attacks the piece
with apparent gusto, as they do Dupree's Paradise. Only 'Naval
Aviation In Art?' suffers from a certain staidness in a performance
that fails to emulate the ominous qualities of that, a whole minute
shorter, on Orchestral Favorites.
Frank returned to America with the tapes and spent the next
three months compiling the Synclavier pieces that would make up
the completed album. These were 'The Girl In The Magnesium
Dress', 'Outside Now', 'Again', 'Love Story' and 'Jonestown'.
The first piece was another example of Frank's perverse and
enquiring mind, in that it was composed by using what he referred
to as 'digital dust'. This was his name for the normally unseen
instruction codes that told the machine how to operate. One set
were called "G numbers", which came into use if a guitar was
interfaced with the Synclavier. Frank and his engineers found a
way to transform these "points in time" into note blanks. "So we
converted this dust into something that I could then edit for pitch,
and the dust indicated a rhythm. So what I did was take the
rhythm of the dust and impose pitch data on the dust and thereby
move the inaudible G number into the world of audibility with a
pitch name on it."16
'The Girl In The Magnesium Dress' employed tones akin to the
sound of marimbas and glockenspiels which chatter across the
stereo. The aural effect was the equivalent of drops of mercury
merging and separating over an undulating surface. Similar effects
could be heard in both 'Love Story' and 'Jonestown'. The former,
just one minute long, Frank described as "an elderly Republican
couple attempting sex while break-dancing", the britde crumbling
sounds resembling detuned zithers. Frank called 'Jonestown' "a
boring, ugly dance evoking the essential nature of all religions." It
referred to the 1978 'Jonestown massacre' perpetrated by a charis-
matic preacher who styled himself the 'Rev. Jim Jones'. A native of
Indiana, he moved to California in 1967 and joined the People's
Temple in San Francisco in 1971. Hounded for alleged abuses
against his followers, in 1977 Jones took them to Guyana and set up
Jonestown in the North West district, close to the Venezuelan
border.
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On November 14, 1978, US Representative Leo Ryan of Cali-
fornia brought newsmen and relatives to the commune to conduct
an unofficial investigation. Four days later, Ryan and 14 defectors
were ambushed on Jones' orders at the nearby airstrip. Ryan and
four others (three of them newsmen) were killed. Aware that more
investigations would now follow, Jones put into effect a plan for
mass suicide which he'd rehearsed with his brainwashed followers
several times before. Large tubs of Gatorade, laced with cyanide,
were prepared; all present drank the lethal preparation, parents
dosing their children. In all, 913 misguided people died, 276 of
them children. Jones was found shot through the head, in a manner
indicating that it wasn't a self-inflicted wound. Unfortunately, it
hadn't been done until after last orders.
'Jonestown' establishes a bleak aural landscape of tremulous sus-
tained chords that imply paranoia. Percussion effects cut through
the stereo but the principal elements are raw, gouging metallic
sounds that increase during the middle section of the seven-minute
piece, accompanied by siren-like ascending notes. The effect is
other-worldly and threatening, maintaining an absence of hope
that underscores the tragedy of the real event and Frank's own
opinion of the perniciousness of all forms of religion.
FRANCESCO ZAPPA
Cyanide was still on his mind when he delivered the keynote
speech at the 19th Annual Festival Conference of the American
Society of University Composers held at Ohio State University in
Columbus on April 4-8. After referring to himself as a "buffoon",
he proceeded to puncture any complacency in the room, calling
their (and his) work "baffling, insipid packages of inconsequential
poot". He told them that popular American musical taste was
determined by Debbie, the 13-year-old daughter of "Average,
God-Fearing American White Folk", unwitting dupes of "the
people in the Secret Office Where They Run Everything From".
Frank reiterated his belief that serious contemporary composers
were superfluous to American society and should remove them-
selves from the world before it removed them. He suggested that
ASUC change its name to "We-Suck" and "get some cyanide and
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Frank Zappa
swizzle it into the punch bowl with some of that white wine 'artis-
tic' people really go for, and Bite The Big One."17
"I was on this little podium," Frank told Den Simms, "and then,
on the stage with me, seated in chairs was the music faculty, sitting
like a bunch of puppets on-stage, and they didn't know what I was
going to say and they did not enjoy it. Actually, there was quite a
bit of backlash at the subsequent banquet, where I was forced to sit
at a table with some of the composers that had attended. The
drunker they got, they started attacking me at the table. It was
really quite laughable."18 There were no reports of unrest when
'Naval Aviation In Art?', 'Black Page #2' and 'The Perfect
Stranger', were performed later by Relache, the Columbus Sym-
phony and the Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra.
On May 20, he spoke about 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation' when he
was the subject of the 'Speaking Of Music' series held in the
sensory museum, the Exploratorium, in San Francisco's Palace of
Fine Arts. He played a number of Synclavier pieces, including
those to be featured on The Perfect Stranger, as well as tracks from
other planned albums. There were also excerpts from another
ongoing Synclavier project which focused on the works of the
18th-century Milanese cellist and composer, Francesco Zappa.
Frank wrote a brief play, Francesco, The Almost Fictional Life Of An
Obscure Italian Composer, which was read by Calvin Ahlgren and
later featured in the video, Does Humor Belong In Music?
Frank's namesake was discovered by Gail while browsing
through the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Music scores
were provided by Michael Keller from the Music Library at UCLA
in Berkeley, which were then typed into the Synclavier by David
Ocker. "Then, on the first day, after he typed in Op. 1 and we
listened to it, I thought, 'Hey, that's a nice tune. I wonder what the
rest of it sounds like?'" Frank said. "[David Ocker] spent about a
month typing in a huge amount of these string trios — they were all
string trios, by the way. They sounded nice, so I thought, 'Why
not make an album out of it?'
"It was written for two violins and an upright bass - not exacdy
the world's most appealing audio combination. Even if I had suit-
able synthesiser replicas for those instruments, I'm not sure that
would have made the most interesting album. So I just added a
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Systems Of Edges
little technicolor to it and let the music speak for itself."19
Frank's own music did more than that when the Berkeley Sym-
phony Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano, held 'A Zappa
Affair' on June 15/16 in me Zellerbach Auditorium on the Berkeley
campus of the University of California. Frank's symphonic works
were performed as ballets using members of the Oakland Ballet,
who wielded large marionettes made by John Gilkerson for the San
Francisco Miniature Theater. The programme consisted of'Bob In
Dacron', 'Sad Jane', 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation', 'Sinister Footwear'
and 'Pedro's Dowry'. The same programme was repeated four days
later at the San Jose Center for Performing Arts.
During the month, rehearsals began for the 'Twentieda Anniver-
sary World Tour', beginning in Los Angeles with a five-day stint at
the Palace Theater on July 18 and continuing with dates in the
Midwest and on the Eastern Seaboard. Video cameras recorded the
August 25/26 gigs at The Pier in New York City and Does Humor
Belong In Music? was released the following year. In the first week
of September, a series of European dates took the band through
Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, France, Spain, Austria
and Italy, before returning to the USA towards the end of October.
More dates in America and Canada would culminate on December
23, back in Los Angeles at the Universal Amphitheater.
Ray White, Bobby Martin, Scott Thunes and Chad Wackerman
were retained; Napoleon Murphy Brock and Ike Willis returned
but Tommy Mars was replaced by Alan Zavod, late of Jean-Luc
Ponty's band. There would be no more 'stunt guitar', since Steve
Vai had already begun a successful solo career. Brock lasted only
two weeks, his indulgence in chemical enhancement disqualifying
him from further employment.
A typical set contained material from all eras of the various
Zappa bands, from 'Trouble Every Day' to 'The Dangerous
Kitchen'. Newer compositions like 'What's New In Baltimore?',
'Ride My Face To Chicago', 'Truck Driver Divorce' and 'Hot
Plate Heaven At The Green Hotel', and selections from the forth-
coming Thing-Fish, were interspersed throughout the average
evening. Two of the recent additions that also became concert
favourites, one a tune that had gone through numerous identities
before becoming known as 'Let's Move To Cleveland', the other
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Frank Zappa
the almost invariable set-closer, 'Whipping Post', illustrated in
different ways Frank's ability to draw from the totality of his
experience.
The first grew out of a commission he'd received in 1968 from a
concert violinist whose name has gone undocumented. "I never
completed the piece for violin and piano," Frank told Den Simms,
"but there was enough of a group of sketches for the thing, that I
could, at the point where I had a band who could actually play it, I
could build a stage arrangement. . . The first band that tried to play
it was the [1976] band with Roy Estrada, Terry Bozzio, Napoleon
and Andre Lewis . . . and at that time, it was called 'Canard Du
Jour'."20
It was also played in the 1980 band with Vinnie Colaiuta on
drums. At his insistence, the tide changed to 'Young And Mond'
and was given its 'world premiere' at the Berkeley Community
Theater on April 1, 1980. "A guy who wears a leisure suit with an
enormous medallion, that's 'mond', according to Colaiuta," Frank
said.21 A rather deliberate performance in Cologne by the 1982
band was included on the bootleg As An Am, which was issued in
Beat The Boots, Box 1.
When it became part of the 1984 repertoire, the tide had
changed once again, variously spelt as 'Creega Bondolo' or
'Kreegah Bandolo'. This, claimed Ike Willis, was the sort of cod
native language to be found in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan
books. "And then, 'Bon-do-lay-bofTo-bonto' was contributed by
Ray White, who asserted that it was a Swahili expression meaning
'white people taste good' or 'white people are good eating' or
something," Frank added. One of the best live performances
in this guise, performed at the Saratoga Springs Arts Center on Sep-
tember 1, was included on the boodeg Big Mother b Watching You.
Tiring of that nonsense, the band then sang, 'Let's move to . . .'
wherever the gig was taking place, or anything else that sprang to
mind. "It could be anything. You get a bunch of syllables that'll fit
that part of the song, and you just sing it. That audience in
Cleveland was so good, that's the reason we sang it at the end of
that performance . . . 'Let's Move To Cleveland'." Zappa played
Cleveland twice during the 1984 tour, on August 12 and Novem-
ber 14. Since the tune is identified on several European boodegs
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Systems Of Edges
from the tour as 'Kreegah Bandolo', it's safe to assume that the tide
change took place on the latter date.
'Whipping Post' also enjoyed a long gestation period. It began at
the Mothers gig in Helsinki on September 22, 1974. The moment
is captured on YCDTOSA 2, when a member of the audience
shouts out "Whipping Post!". After some jocular confusion, Frank
admits that the band doesn't know it. "Sing me 'Whipping Post',"
he suggests, "and then maybe we'll play it with you." After a per-
functory yodel from the hall, he says, "Judging from the way you
sang it, it must be a John Cage composition, right?" Then the band
play a suitably altered version of'Montana'.
"We didn't know it," he said later, "and I felt kind of bad that
we couldn't just play it and blow the guy's socks off. So when
Bobby Martin joined the band, and I found out that he knew how
to sing that song, I said, 'We are definitely going to be prepared for
the next time somebody wants 'Whipping Post' - in fact we're
going to play it before somebody even asks for it.' I've got probably
30 different versions of it on tape from concerts all around the
world, and one of them is going to be the 'Whipping Post' - the
apex 'Whipping Post' of the century."22
THEM OR US
Before the end of the 1984 tour, no less than four albums were
released. Having spent almost 18 months off the road, Frank had
built up a backlog of product, brought about in part by the fact that
he'd fallen out with CBS. Once again, a major company had appar-
endy indulged in some 'creative accounting'. The search for a new
distributor was further hampered by management troubles. "You
see," Gail said, "in about 1984, we'd gotten into a situation where
we were really subsidising Frank's manager. He owed us a lot of
money, and so in order to keep the business going we were taking
care of all his outstanding debts, and I was getting very agitated
with that. Things weren't working in an efficient way, Frank was
on the road, and the shit hit the fan.
"He fired the manager, and I took over the business, and the first
thing I did was fire everybody that worked for us. The lawyers,
accountants - I just said, 'That's it, I don't want any help from any
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Frank Zappa
of those people,' and went out and found replacement parts. I took
over in 1985, and it was trial by fire. It took several years to get
through the outstanding nasties." With a $12,000 bank loan, she
bought two computers, fed in a mailing list and sent out a question-
naire which also offered a Barking Pumpkin T-shirt for sale. "I
made the $12,000 back right away. I set up this company, which
we called Barfko-Swill, which Frank named. I had my sister and
this guy who worked for Frank in production and myself, and we
sat on our living room floor stuffing envelopes full of T-shirts."23
Distribution deals were agreed with MCA in America and EMI
for the rest of the world. Angel Records, an EMI subsidiary,
released The Perfect Stranger in America on August 23, 1984.
Francesco Zappa was released in November, with a typically pedan-
tic artist credit to the 'Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification Con-
sort'. These and the double album Them Or Us, released on
December 21, used the paintings of 'American Artist: Donald
Roller Wilson'. Each one portrayed the dog Patricia, wearing dark
glasses and a red dress with a white lace collar.
Wilson exhibited a visual wit and originality that easily equated
with Frank's own. He worked in a style that combined bizarre
photo-realism with the sort of reflected light that imbued the
paintings of Georges De La Tour. Each painting was dated, num-
bered and timed, presumably on its completion, and given an enig-
matic tide (in capital letters) that varied in length and oddity. The
tide of that used for The Perfect Stranger, painted on February 1,
1983, ran to 18 lines; by contrast, Francesco Zappa sported a harshly
lit portrait fashioned on August 22, tided: 'PATRICIA SAW
RICHARD ACROSS THE ROOM AND WAS CERTAIN
MRS JENKINS HAD TURNED HIM GREEN'.
Them Or Us showed Patricia standing against a wall between two
small wall brackets on which a Heinz Ketchup bottle and a baby's
milk botde, with teat attached, stood. These latter had stood on the
cluttered table beside Patricia's high-chair on the cover of The
Perfect Stranger. The rear cover of the double album had a sepia
portrait of Frank, his chest-hair sprouting coyly from the cleavage
of his double-breasted linen jacket. His left hand, encased in a
green oven glove, was raised in a clenched-fist power salute. We
know who 'us' are, but 'them' could be any one of the Reagan
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Systems Of Edges
administration, the fundamentalist right, the major record com-
panies, or all three and more besides.
Any hypothetical identifications are not reflected in the song
texts, however. Sandwiched between the cheesy doo-wop of
the Channels' 'The Closer You Are' and the Allman Brothers'
'Whipping Post' is a collection of songs that simultaneously cele-
brate and denigrate their subjects. 'In France' is sung by Johnny
'Guitar' Watson in a wired, impatient parody of soul techniques, as
he tackles pissoirs, standing toilets and 'mystery blow jobs'.
Ahmet's 'Frogs With Dirty Little Lips' carries a distant echo of
francophobia in its conclusion, 'Dirty little frogs is what you eat.'
The relendess, chain-saw guitar riff that drives 'Ya Hozna' was
used as a background element during Frank's solo in 'The Black
Page #2' on the 1982 tour. Here it supports three separate back-
ward vocal tracks taken from 'Sofa #2', 'Lonely Little Girl' and
Moon's 'Valley Girl' aerobics work-out from a version of 'I Don't
Wanna Get Drafted' used on the demo tape of'Thing-Fish'. Steve
Vai plays a solo that shows he never needed xenochrony to hear
oudandish harmonies. The resurrection of'Sharleena' from Chunga's
Revenge contains the first of two solos by the 14-year-old Dweezil,
showing commendable dexterity for someone with two years'
experience of playing the guitar, albeit with teachers of the calibre
of Steve Vai and Eddie Van Halen.
The latter's nbrillating, hyperactive style can be heard in Dweezil's
solo in 'Stevie's Spanking', providing a contrast to Vai's fluid but
lurching, hammered-on fretboard athletics. The song tells of Vai's
November 1981 encounter with the generously proportioned
Laurel Fishman and his efforts to gratify her taste for sex with inani-
mate objects, in this case a hairbrush and a banana. Such was her
belief in the efficacy of this behaviour that Laurel willingly gave
Frank written permission to use her real name in the lyrics and was
interviewed on video. "I've had many enjoyable afternoons in the
grocery store that have resulted in enjoyable evenings," she told
him.
Frank's own guitar has its say in 'Sinister Footwear 11', 'Marque
Son's Chicken' and 'Them Or Us', all recorded live with the 1982
band, the latter taken from a performance of 'The Black Page' in
Bolzano, Italy on July 3. With the exception of'Baby, Take Your
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Frank Zappa
Teeth Out' (also issued as a single), 'The Planet Of My Dreams'
and 'Be In My Video', all the tracks were recorded, in whole or in
part, during the 1981/82 tours. Some, like 'Frogs With Dirty Little
Lips', performed at the Santa Monica Civic Center on December
11, 1981, and Frank's guitar solo in 'Truck Driver Divorce', taken
from Zoot Allures at The Ritz, New York exactly a month earlier
and mixed xenochronously with other backing tracks, can be
accurately dated.
In the case of'The Planet Of My Dreams', it consisted of a 1974
backing track of George Duke and Patrick O'Hearn on which
Chad Wackerman's drums were later overdubbed. This was yet
another song from Hunchentoot, its offhand brevity masking a
serious message. Despite disillusionment with a world of ineffective
education and military proliferation, Bob Harris' vocal states that
he won't despair and 'CHEAT like ALL THE REST'. Then the
composer declares himself with the words, 'I'D just keep on with
what I do the best!'
For many of Frank's fans, that was playing the guitar — even
though his opinion of his own work was typically scathing.
"During the 1984 tour," Frank noted in his autobiography, "I
would usuaDy play eight solos per night (five nights a week, times
six months), and out of that there might have been 20 solos that
were musicaUy worthwhile enough to put on a record. The rest of
it was garbage. It's not that I wasn't trying to play something; most
of it just didn't come off."24
That's borne out by the fact that of the 65 tracks taken from the
1984 tour that found their way onto various volumes of You Can't
Do That On Stage Anymore, Does Humor Belong In Music? and
Guitar, roughly 20 are instrumentals. The latter was the 1988
double-CD foUow-up to Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, which con-
tained 32 solos taken from the 1979,1981/82 and 1984 tours. Even
though Frank plainly set himself the highest standards, it's interest-
ing to note that no less than 14 solos on Guitar come from the 1984
tour.
Unlike the video of 14 songs shot at the Pier in New York
City, the CD version of Does Humor Belong In Music?, released in
England in 1986, is made up of ten tracks from nine locations.
Some are whole performances, but most are composites of up to
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Systems Of Edges
four separate recordings. As usual, it's not easy to notice the edits,
although Frank appeared to have a cavalier attitude to the sanctity
of a performance. 'Let's Move To Cleveland' consists of a piano
solo from St Petersburg, Florida, a drum solo from Vancouver
and Frank's solo from Amherst College in Lowell, Massachusetts,
with the introduction and coda from Los Angeles. However,
YCDTOSA 4 contains another portion of the Amherst per-
formance, featuring solos by Archie Shepp and Alan Zavod.
The CD also contains a version of'Whipping Post', with a guitar
solo by Dweezil, taken from the Los Angeles gig on December 23,
"the last song of the last show of the last tour". Whatever his inten-
tions may have been, Frank could not have realised that when he
laid down his guitar at the end of the show, he wouldn't pick it up
again for almost four years.
335

19
THING-FISH
"The simple thought behind Thing-Fish," Frank told me in 1991,
"is that somebody manufactured a disease called AIDS and they
tested it. They were developing it as a weapon and they tested it on
convicts, the same way as they used to do experiments on black
inmates, using syphilis. That's documented. They used to do these
experiments with syphilis on black inmates in US prisons. That's
fact. So we take it one step further and they're concocting the
special disease which is genetically specific to get rid of 'all highly
rhythmic individuals and sissy boys'. So I postulate that they do this
test in a prison and part of the test backfires and these mutants are
created."
Just another conspiracy theory? In his autobiography, Frank cites
passages from A Higher Form Of Killing, a book by Jeremy Paxman
and Robert Harris in which an Army manual is quoted on the
feasibility of manufacturing 'ethnic chemical weapons', and a 1969
Senate appropriations hearing that was addressed by an unidentified
speaker looking for funds to develop a virus that would be
'refractory' (i.e. resist treatment) to the human immunological
system. None of the names of those involved is mentioned or
whether money was allocated. Could such ghoulish research be
possible in the jewel of Western civilisation?
Consider the Tuskegee experiment, briefly mentioned in an
episode of the television series on the paranormal, The X Files; this
was a projected six-month study of syphilitics in the communities
around the small agricultural town in Macon County, Georgia in
1932. Its aim was to monitor the course of the disease, without the
benefit of medicine, in 400 black males. Two Public Health
Service doctors, Raymond Vonderlehr and Taliaferro Clark, were
supposedly seeking a cure and offered 'special free treatment' to the
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Thing-Fish
men, who in reality got everything but their syphilis treated. Clark
retired a year later, leaving Vonderlehr clear to extend the study for
the duration of the subjects' lives.
Because of the isolation and backwardness of these communities,
no one bothered to inform the victims of their involvement in an
experiment nor was their consent sought. "Informed consent was
not the vogue in those days," Dr Sidney Olansky, who worked on
the project in the Fifties, said by way of belated justification. "We
have no compunction about sending our youth to war in the
national interest," Dr John Cuder claimed. "And it was in
the national interest to know as much about syphilis as quickly as
possible."1
The study was not officially terminated until 1972, by which
time more than 100 had died as a direct result of the disease. The
survivors were paid compensation of up to $32,500 each, but none
of the doctors involved was prosecuted or even reprimanded. Nor
did any of them consider the programme racist or immoral or even
criminal, even though the Nuremberg trials had exposed the Nazis'
genetic experiments. In the Fifties, the PHS launched a nationwide
anti-syphilis campaign - except in Tuskegee. "Well," said Olansky
with logic worthy of Josef Mengele, "if we'd given them penicillin,
there'd have been no Tuskegee study."2
"We have a batch of religious fanatics now in the United States,"
Frank told Today, "who believe that Armageddon is a Biblical
necessity." One such was the Jubilee Tabernacle in Amarillo,
Texas, where all America's nuclear weapons were made. Its leader,
Reverend Royce Elms preached that nuclear war would destroy
the world. But, in an event called the Rapture, God would scoop
his chosen people into the clouds just before the first bomb went
off.
Back on earth, Frank continued, "A few years ago, genetic
engineering became a huge stock market issue. It was suddenly
possible to mutate bacteria and produce super-specific germs which
would affect only certain ethnic groups. You then have a really
cheap cost-effective way of putting your enemies' lights out
without damaging real estate. Now, put this power in the hands of
a very wealthy religious fundamentalist and it presents him with
some mind-blowing possibilities, like producing a disease to stop
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Frank Zappa
people having sex. After all, fundamentalists believe that sex is a sin,
especially the way that gay guys do it. Weird? Well, I don't think
so. Especially after the rhetoric flying around when AIDS was first
'discovered'. Religious leaders like Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell
were gleefully claiming that it was divine retribution from God - it
gets rid of gays, prostitutes and intravenous drug users."3
Little wonder that when Thing-Fish was conceived as a satire
on Broadway musicals, the wind that came 'rushin' down the
plains' bore something weightier than Rodgers & Hammerstein's
chocolate-box platitudes. The 'Original Cast Recording' three-LP
box-set, with libretto, was released on December 21, 1984. It had
been at least two years in the making, even though a third of its
tracks were reworked versions of material from Zoot Allures, Tinsel
Town Rebellion, Drowning Witch and You Are What You Is. Three
songs from the latter album made the final cut, but a demo tape
exists with a further six selections suitably altered.
The central role of Thing-Fish was taken by Ike Willis. The
name was adapted from Kingfish, a character from the Fifties US
television series, Amos & Andy, played by ex-prize fighter Tim
Moore. Frank referred to Thing-Fish's grotesque language as
a 'pseudo-negrocious dialect'. Willis himself helped shape the
dialogue: "In my family, we sort of joke around with dialects, and
what it sounded like to me was Paul Laurence Dunbar. He was a
black poet from the late 19th century who used to write poems in
dialect like that ... I asked Frank if he had ever heard of this guy,
and he said, 'No,' so I started giving him examples of Dunbar's
work, and eventually, that ended up being a big influence on the
Thing-Fish dialect."
Willis confirms the malleable nature of the original script. "We
put everything together in song form first, and things were struc-
tured like that, but the thing was, it changed every day, because the
script grew every day. Frank would come in with a revised script.
A lot of the things we'd leave, but there might be certain things he
wasn't quite satisfied with, or I wasn't quite satisfied with. Mostly
him, of course, since he is the boss. Through that kind of tweezage,
it got much better. It got tighter."4
In fact, the AIDS premise is swiftly dispatched in the 'Prologue',
in which Thing-Fish lectures the tiny 'Sister Ob'Dewlla "X"' on
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Thing-Fish
the 'potium' that the 'Evil Prince' has fed to the 'San Quentim'
inmates in their mashed potato. When nothing happens, the rest of
the 'potium' is added to a shipment of'Galoot Co-Log-Nuh' and
within a month 'fagnits be droppin' off like flies'. But the hardier
prison inmates have mutated into 'Mammy Nuns', with 'head like
a potato . . . lips like a duck', wearing voluminous gingham skirts
and an apron referred to as a 'nakkin'.
The majority of the ensuing action concerns Harry and Rhonda,
two members of the audience convinced that any show with
coloured folk in it guarantees 'GOOD, SOLID, MUSICAL
ENTERTAINMENT'. They are co-opted into the action, which
quickly degenerates into fetishism and bizarre sexual athletics. Each
is confronted by an alter ego, Harry-As-A-Boy and Artificial
Rhonda, the latter marking the return of 'Ms. Pinky'. 'Briefcase
Boogie' finds Harry in S&M gear, a chain hanging from his pierced
nipples, craving 'homo-sectional' knowledge of Sister Ob'Dewlla
'X'. Meanwhile, an outraged Rhonda in a rubber body suit screws
her briefcase and uses her fountain pen as an anal dildo. By the
penultimate song, 'Drop Dead', she has become a caricature
feminist, berating her husband as an 'all-American cocksucker' and
indulging in the self-referential triumphalism that all zealots chant
as a mantra.
It's hard to know what to make of Thing-Fish. The idea that
inspires it, that government-funded genetic research is killing
specific sections of the community — or that such research might be
happening at all — has far more potential for controversy than the
tawdry little drama that follows. By its familiarity, the reworking of
so much recent material undermines whatever strengths the plot
possesses. The potentially promising clash of ideas could have
engendered satire of a higher order, but the action narrows down
to some rather desperately perverse behaviour by cardboard char-
acters mouthing platitudes.
Because of its mix-and-match construction, Thing-Fish ulti-
mately disappoints. It's impossible not to feel short-changed by the
percentage of recycled songs. Nor is much to be gained from the
new material. Most consists of dirge-like vamps over which
Thing-Fish narrates the convoluted plot while Harry and Rhonda
and their miniature clones act out the consequences. Some songs,
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Frank Zappa
like 'The Evil Prince', 'Brown Moses' and 'He's So Gay' were
already in the touring repertoire.
It did have the distinction of containing Frank's first use of the
Synclavier. "Listen to 'The Crab-Grass Baby', which opens Act
Two," he pointed out. "The background vocals are a repeated
vocal chant with this computer singing over it. The computer
voice is done with a little card that fits into an IBM computer, and
the stereo background vocals were our first attempt at stereo
sampling using the mono system."5 More Synclavier introduces the
following track, 'The White Boy Troubles'.
Frank had trouble of his own with Barking Pumpkin's distribu-
tor, MCA Records. A woman in the Quality Control department
had heard the test pressings of Thing-Fish and complained. Conse-
quendy, MCA had withdrawn from the deal and a hasty agreement
was made with EMI for Them Or Us and Thing-Fish to be distrib-
uted in America by CapitoL All this prompted Frank to include a
warning sticker on the inner sleeve:
"WARNING/GUARANTEE: This album contains material
which a truly free society would neither fear nor suppress.
In some socially retarded areas, religious fanatics and ultra-
conservative political organisations violate your First Amend-
ment Rights by attempting to censor rock & roll albums. We feel
that this is un-Constitutional and un-American.
As an alternative to these government-supported programs
(designed to keep you docile and ignorant) Barking Pumpkin is
pleased to provide stimulating digital audio entertainment for
those of you who have outgrown the ordinary.
The language and concepts contained herein are GUARAN-
TEED NOT TO CAUSE ETERNAL TORMENT IN THE
PLACE WHERE THE GUY WITH THE HORNS AND
POINTED STICK CONDUCTS HIS BUSINESS. This guar-
antee is as real as the threats of the video fundamentalists who use
attacks on rock music in their attempt to transform America into
a nation of check-mailing nincompoops (in the name of Jesus
Christ). If there is a hell, its fires wait for them, not us."
It was his first salvo in a war of words that would occupy a lot of
his time during 1985.
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Thing-Fish
PORN WARS
In 1984, the diminutive symbol then known as Prince starred in
Purple Rain, a film that gaudily recorded one small person's escape
from impoverished origins onto the broad uplands of world recog-
nition through music. The soundtrack album yielded three hit
singles, the tide track, 'Let's Go Crazy' and 'When Doves Cry'.
But it was 'Darling Nikki' which inspired the right-wing backlash
that perennially lies in wait for errant rock'n'rollers.
Mary Elizabeth Gore, wife of the Democratic senator for
Tennessee, Al Gore, and known by her childhood nickname,
Tipper, bought the album for her eight-year-old daughter and was
'shocked' to learn that one verse of the song referred to the said
Nikki masturbating with a magazine in a hotel lobby. Recognising
a threat to the entire fabric of American society, she convened a
meeting of like-minded friends who, like her, just happened to
have influential husbands, including Susan Baker, wife of Treasury
Secretary James Baker, Pam Howar and Sally Nevius, wed to
prominent Washington captains of industry. Together they formed
the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC), with Howar as its
president.
Their first action was to write to Stanley Gortikov, president of
the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to demand
that the industry instigate a rating system for records similar to that
used by the film industry. The suggested categories were: 'X' for
'profane or sexually explicit', 'O' for 'occult', 'D/A' for 'drugs
or alcohol' and 'V for 'violent'. Although this coven of self-
appointed moral guardians had no power or mandate, their hands
were close to the organs of power, and that made them hard to
ignore. One of their male members, Allan Bloom, said that the
PMRC only wanted to promote art that was 'noble, delicate and
sublime'. Frank had a reply for that: "This is not a noble, delicate
and sublime country. This is a mess run by criminals. Performers
who are doing the crude, vulgar and repulsive things Bloom
doesn't enjoy are only commenting on that fact."6
"We're not censors," Gore claimed. "We want a tool from the
industry that is peddling this stuff to children, a consumer tool with
which parents can make an informed decision on what to buy.
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What we're talking about is a sick new strain of rock music glorify-
ing everything from forced sex to bondage to rape."7 She cited
Prince's 'Darling Nikki' and Judas Priest's 'Eat Me Alive', which
she reckoned was about 'oral sex at gunpoint'.
On August 5, Gortikov wrote a reply which essentially rejected
their demands, since they involved "complications that would
make compliance impossible". However, he indicated that his
members would consider developing a sticker which would advise
concerned parents of a record's explicit content. With this con-
cession, the industry implicitly accepted that censorship was
necessary. By the merest of coincidences, H.R. 2911, a bill to
impose a blank tape tax, was at the committee stage in Congress.
This tax would effectively penalise the home taper and benefit
no one but the industry itself. "If they could've got the Congress to
pass that," Frank said later, "they would've picked up a quarter of a
billion dollars a year in found money, and it would've been col-
lected for them by the US government."8 It seemed that a trade-off
was in the wind.
That wasn't enough for the PMRC. The 'Washington wives'
met with Edward Fritts, President of the National Association of
Broadcasters (NAB), after his wife attended one of their lectures.
Panicking, he requested that record labels send lyric sheets with
new releases to all radio stations to help programme directors
choose what should be broadcast. Not everyone was willing to join
the lemmings in their rush over the cliff. Charlie Kendall, of New
York's WNEW-FM, reckoned, "We know what the lyrics are to
the songs we play, and I know what my community can take.
There is always gonna be an element that doesn't like rock'n'roll.
But as long as I keep it clean and within FCC guidelines, I say,
'Fuck 'em.' "9
Frank wrote an open letter to Cashbox, entided 'Extortion Pure
And Simple', spelling out the possible connivance whereby the
Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of free speech might be
compromised by the record industry's lust for revenue. He also
wrote to President Reagan, that pious paragon of American virtues
who in the early Fifties had loyally fingered his fellow actors as
Communist sympathisers to McCarthy's HUAC committee while
others kept their council. "The PMRC is an unlicensed lobbying
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Thing-Fish
group," Frank wrote, "comporting itself outrageously. While
threatening an entire industry with the wrath of their husbands'
powerful committees, they blithely spew frogwash and innuendo
with the assistance of an utterly captivated media."10
In August, Frank debated the issue with PMRC representative
Kandy Stroud in Washington, DC on CBS television's Nightwatch,
in front of a live audience. During a question-and-answer session, a
local DJ noted that the proposals smacked of the secret radio black-
list of the Sixties. His comment never made the transmission. A
week later, Frank was being interviewed on WNEW in New York
when the DJ admitted to having seen a blacklist; it was hardly sur-
prising that he refused to admit it under oath.
The PMRC's proposal was heard by the Senate committee for
Science, Commerce and Transportation on September 19. Among
those giving depositions were Frank, John Denver and Dee Snider,
lead singer of Twisted Sister, whose 'We're Not Gonna Take It'
was on the PMRC's 'Filthy Fifteen' list, along with W.A.S.P.'s
'(Animal) Fuck Like A Beast', Sheena Easton's 'Sugar Walls' and
AC/DC's 'Let Me Put My Love Into You'. "The atmosphere
there was really very strange," Frank said, "because the hearing
itself was such a mongrelisation . . . There were 50 still photogra-
phers and something like 30 video teams. It was a big media
event."11
Frank's statement revealed the instinct of a raptor; the PMRC's
proposal was "an ill-conceived piece of nonsense", their demands
the equivalent of "treating dandruff by decapitation". "Taken as a
whole," he went on, "the complete list of PMRC demands reads
like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of 'toilet training
programme' to housebreak ALL composers and performers because
of the lyrics of a few. Ladies, how dare you?"
He pointed out that the PMRC had no members, but it raised
money by mail, had tax-exempt status and was advocating what
amounted to restraint of trade. How could it be proper that three
senators on the committee he was addressing had wives who were
"non-members" of the PMRC? Whatever happened to "conflict
of interest"? How long before another fanatic demanded the letter
"J" be affixed to anything written or performed by a Jew? "What
hazards await the unfortunate retailer who accidentally sells an 'O'
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rated record to somebody's little Johnny? Nobody in Washington
seemed to care when Christian Terrorists bombed abortion clinics
in the name of Jesus. Will you care when the 'friends of the wives
of big brother' blow up the shopping mall? Bad facts make bad
law," he asserted, "and people who write bad laws are in my opinion
more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality."
He was then questioned by individual senators, with the excep-
tion of the splenetic Senator Slade Gorton, who denounced his
statement as "boorish, incredibly and insensitively insulting" and
doubted his ability to understand the Constitution. By contrast,
Senator Gore was almost friendly, expressing his esteem for Frank's
music before repeating that no legislation or regulation was being
suggested. Senator James Exon of Nebraska made a perceptive
aside; "I wonder, Mr Chairman, if we're not talking about federal
regulation, and we're not talking about federal legislation, what is
the reason for these hearings?"12 No legislation followed. Nor did
H.R. 2911 become law. But 'Parental Advisory' stickers began to
appear and, as Frank predicted, record distributors and retailers
began to arbitrarily ban product they thought should be stickered
and some states tried to make it illegal to even sell stickered
albums.
Flushed with victory, Tipper Gore turned her attention to rock
videos. "I'm disturbed by the portrayal of women and the graphic
violence on MTV," she said. The PMRC also wanted offensive
album covers kept from public view and warnings to be issued
about rock concerts they found tantamount to "burlesque shows".
"We're going to have to put a national organisation in place, on a
state-by-state basis," Gore envisaged. "We're seeking a coalition
with the PTA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, labour,
anyone who is willing to help."13 For a while it seemed that Frank's
prediction in Thing-Fish would come true: "Only the boring and
bland shall survive!"
THE MOTHERS OF PREVENTION
His reaction to the hearing was to hastily compile Frank Zappa
Meets The Mothers Of Prevention, an album of band and Synclavier
material released during October. Its focus was a 12-minute sound
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collage entitled 'Pom Wars'. Employing the same techniques with
which he'd assembled 'The ChromePlate Megaphone Of Destiny',
Frank used the voices of Senators Danforth, Hollings, Trible,
Hawkins, Exon, Gorton, Gore and the crusading Tipper herself,
editing their words with jump cuts and speeded-up repeats to
emphasise the dread weight of their self-righteous pomposity.
Key phrases were used as loops to interrupt and underpin various
statements. Most prominent was Senator Paula Hawkins' "fire and
chains and other objectionable tools of gratification in some twisted
minds", spoken in a robotic monotone that eerily resembled
Pamela Zarubica's Suzie Creamcheese. Frank termed her "the
Nancy Reagan lookalike from Florida she had the reputation of
being the least effective senator, she was really a disaster."14 Other
phrases included Senator Hollings' "outrageous filth" and "maybe I
could make a good rock star", and an unattributed (Bobby
Martin?) "bend up and smell my anal vapour". Synclavier excerpts
propelled sections of the verbal tirade, while two short passages
from the Lumpy Gravy piano conversations and one from Thing-Fish
formed a surreal and ironically prophetic counterpoint.
As well as Barking Pumpkin's usual 'Warning/Guarantee',
Frank printed the First Amendment of the Constitution on the
inner sleeve. Underneath it was Senator Hollings' assertion, almost
inaudible on the record, that "... if I could find some way consti-
tutionally to do away with it I would." Such a statement by any
one of the artists being pilloried, or by Frank himself, would have
been regarded as tantamount to treason. Apparently, the PMRC
and its toadies had a moral imperative to ignore any law or statute
in order to achieve their ends.
'Porn Wars' was a scathing response to the PMRC hearing, but
the same inspired haste that created it couldn't compile an album
of comparable and consistent quality. The first side of Mothers Of
Prevention comprised four band tracks of some vintage, since both
Steve Vai and Tommy Mars were present. The two songs, 'We're
Turning Again' and 'Yo Cats', were both mean-spirited afFairs.
The first was an almost petulant attack on Sixties revivalism; Frank
set the scene with some withering comments on the hippie ethos
('1967: drug-crazed youth discovered vagrancy as a way of life'),
before Ike Willis in Thing-Fish mode laid into Jim Morrison,
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Frank Zappa
Keith Moon, The Mamas & The Papas and particularly Jimi
Hendrix.
'Yo Cats' continued the assault, taking on the session musician
mentality. "Well, a 'Yo Cat' is beyond being a sight-reading
cretin," Frank averred. "A 'Yo guy' is part of this special species
that popped up in Hollywood studios - the A-team mentality... A
handful of guys get all the work. That's the A-team. And they do it
day in, day out, three sessions a day; they grind it out. And one
must ask at the end of the day: 'Was it music? Did they care?' "15
Co-written by Frank and Tommy Mars, it was sung by Ike Willis
with smug glibness: 'I play shit but I love that loot.'
Both instrumentals, 'Alien Orifice' and 'What's New In
Baltimore?', proved Frank's musicians were anything but 'Yo
Cats', Ed Mann's chattering xylophone led the pointillistic melody
of 'Orifice' before Frank contributed a typically fluent, and prob-
ably xenochronous, guitar solo. Percussion also led off'Baltimore',
a rather mechanical studio-bound version that failed to breathe life
into the shifting metres of its opening theme. Frank's guitar played
the almost stately tide theme which resembled 'Watermelon In
Easter Hay' in its uncharacteristic romanticism. Live versions, like
that on 1986's Does Humor Belong In Music?, were taken at a faster
pace and featured a vocal chorus on the title phrase.
Two Synclavier pieces sandwiched 'Pom Wars': 'Little Beige
Sambo' proceeded at a relendess clip, employing organ- and
harp-like tones on a theme that could have graced Uncle Meat, even
if the lightning-fast percussive flourishes would have needed the
use of a vari-speed control. 'Aerobics In Bondage' was slower and
in some ways ironic after the effusion of senatorial pronounce-
ments. Sampled tom-toms and cymbals added a realistic context.
The European version of the album was issued in February 1986
minus 'Porn Wars', which Frank deemed "uninteresting to listen-
ers outside the US". His note continued, "This special European
edition contains three new songs not available in the US album.
We hope you appreciate the difference." "Not that much" might
have been a typical response. 'One Man - One Vote' and 'H.R.
2911' were both realised on Synclavier. The first acted as a preview
for 1986's Jazz From Hell, bearing a broad similarity to one of its
most notable tracks, 'G-Spot Tornado'. 'H.R. 2911' was cut from
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Thing-Fish
the same musical cloth as the piece which added its dread deliberate
rhythm to the central section of'Pom Wars'.
Least impressive of all was 'I Don't Even Care', co-written with
Johnny 'Guitar' Watson and consisting of a stolid and repetitive
backing track over which Watson and a vocal chorus chanted the
title. Stretched beyond four minutes, Watson struggled with his
ad-libs, at one point asserting that 'the cow jumped over the
moon'. Ray White joined in towards the end and easily outshone
Watson's flagging spontaneity. The arbitrary nature of the track
served to underline that 'Porn Wars' was fundamental to the
original compilation; without it, Mothers Of Prevention became a
divided, almost schizophrenic entity divested of its heart. The 1990
CD reissue, which combined the material from both vinyl releases,
wisely placed 'Porn Wars' at the beginning, setting the tone for
what followed.
During the succeeding months, by his own estimation, Frank
did as many as 300 talk shows and interviews on the subject of
censorship, spending up to $70,000 on phone-calls, travel and print
costs for what he termed 'The Z-Pack', an ongoing dossier of
cuttings and comment, available free from Barfko-Swill. His most
powerful weapon was his withering scorn. "They can't stand for
people not to take them seriously," he said. "They hate to be
laughed at. If they weren't so fucking dangerous, it would be fiin to
laugh at them all the time, but sometimes you have to take into
account how much damage they can do."16
"The people who want to censor do not care about saving your
children," he told David Sheff. "They care about one thing -
getting re-elected. Let's face it, folks: Politicians in the United
States are the scum of the earth. We have to go after them indi-
vidually because they're varmints. The legislation they are passing,
piece by piece, converts America into a police state."17
NONE OF THE ABOVE
Although he turned into a tireless campaigner against the forces
of repression, other more fruitful work was not neglected. April
had seen the premiere of another major Zappa work, None Of
The Above, commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet. The
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Frank Zappa
group played the first movement on KPFA's Morning Concert on
April 8. It was followed by a Synclavier version of the same move-
ment and a rehearsal/discussion of the work. Four days later, they
gave the world premiere of the complete 20-minute work at the
Herbst Theater in San Francisco. The performance was repeated at
UCLA's Schoenberg Hall in Los Angeles on April 19, and in
Arhus, Denmark on April 28.
Within days, there was a second Zappa premiere. This time, the
Aspen Wind Quintet performed Time's Beach at the Alice Tully
Hall in New York's Lincoln Center. The original work was in
three movements but when it was to be repeated, at Washington's
Coolidge Auditorium, the composer suggested that the first move-
ment be omitted. "As winners of the (Walter W.) Naumberg
Award, we were awarded a commission, to commission an Ameri-
can composer," said the group's oboist, Claudia Kuntz. "We felt
that Frank Zappa was the quintessential American composer
encompassing a wide range of musical experiences, and we felt that
he was a really great musician of our time."18
April had also seen the release of The Old Masters Box I, contain-
ing all the Verve albums, except Mothermania, and a Mystery Disc,
which anthologjsed selected moments from Frank's musical past
and the earliest incarnations of the Mothers. Once the Mothers Of
Prevention was out of the way, he set about compiling the CD
version of Does Humor Belong In Music? from recordings of the 1984
tour. For undisclosed reasons, this CD-only release appeared early
in 1986 in England and Germany and was not made generally
available until 1995.
Whatever the explanation, it was another example of Frank's
willingness to embrace new technology. Another was the deal he
negotiated at this time with Rykodisc for the pioneering CD label
to reissue the majority of his back catalogue. The company had
been mooted at the 1983 MIDEM in Cannes, and president Don
Rose had Zappa in mind even then. "He was high among the list
of appropriate artists for early CD release," he said, "and one of my
first ideas. He was a pioneer in digital recording. He had purchased
one of the first Sony multi-track digital recording machines, and
was one of the first popular artists to commit to digital. And he was
well known as an innovator — both musically and technologically
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Thing-Fish
. . . So it made perfect sense for us to go after such a forward-
thinking artist who controlled his own material and was already
digital-friendly."19
In 1986, the CD market was still in its development stages, and it
was hard for fringe artists like Frank to get releases in the new
format. Capitol distributed Barking Pumpkin but they weren't
interested in manufacturing CDs of Zappa material. Rose saw an
opportunity for his fledgling company, based in Salem, Mass. "I
hadn't even heard of them before," said Frank. "Then here's this
guy named Don Rose who knew something about my catalogue
and was interested, and it was like one cottage industry talking to
another."20
Billboard reported the deal early in February but the initial
eight-title release didn't take place until the following autumn. "It
was probably the biggest back-catalogue issue by a single artist on
CD at the time," said Rose. "Frank insisted that they come out
simultaneously for greater impact. We went along with him only
to find out he was right."21
It was the sort of conviction that drew Frank to fight off yet
another censorship attack, this time by the moralising vote-catchers
of his home state. The Maryland House of Delegates had passed a
bill which, if ratified, would alter the state's existing pornography
statutes to include records, tapes and CDs. To become law, it had
to be heard by the Maryland State Senate Judiciary Committee.
Frank, accompanied by Bruce Bereano representing the RIAA,
attended the hearing on February 14, having met delegates at a
cocktail party the previous evening and secured recantations of
their votes from five of them.
The bill was proposed by Delegate Judith Toth, who along with
Delegate Joseph Owens demonstrated a rabid variant of the
PMRC's sanctimonious moral guardianship of the nation's young.
Toth called her bill "constitutional"; "And stop worrying about
[children's] 'civil rights'. Start worrying about their mental health
and the health of our society." Owens declared that rock music was
"mass child abuse", while Toth maintained that "these records"
advocated "incest", "rape" and "sexual violence". "You've got to
read this stuff to know just how dirty it is," she chided.
In his testimony, Frank pointed out that to refer to rock music
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Frank Zappa
as "mass child abuse" was "sky-high rhetoric". Once again, he
prompted general laughter as he pilloried the bill's proposed
banning of anything that depicted 'illicit sex'. In Maryland, that
apparently included human (but not animal) masturbation, "sexual
intercourse or sodomy", the "fondling or other erotic touching of
human genitals" and the female nipple. "Now, I like nipples," he
averred, "I think they look nice." So did babies, who got to have
that "nozzle" right in front of their faces. "You grow up with it, so
to speak - and then you grow up to live in the state of Maryland
and they won't let you see that litde brown nozzle anymore."
With this and other testimony, the bill was rejected. The
April 9 edition of the Evening Standard called it "A Win For
Zappa". On the phone from Los Angeles, Frank was quoted, "I
get asked all the time to run for President. If I ever decided to go
into politics, I would jump right in." The zealous Toth was
undeterred; she'd reintroduce the bill and "bring the record
industry to its knees". But she'd have to reckon with Frank. "I've
got a personal stake in all this," he told Josef Woodard. "I'm a
record company owner, I'm a composer, I'm a publisher, I'm an
artist, and these people are fucking with my business ... I went
there speaking as a private individual on my own behalf, not on
behalf of the industry, not on behalf of any other artists, just me as
a businessman. In a true conservative attitude, I want the federal
government off my back."22
ELECTRIC HOEDOWN
Back at UMRK, he and engineer Bob Stone were producing
Dweezil's first album, Havin' A Bad Day, which was released by
Barking Pumpkin in August. Apart from adorning several of his
father's gigs, Dweezil had made his recording debut four years
earlier in 1982. With assistance from Steve Vai and his sister,
Moon, he'd recorded a single, 'My Mother Is A Space Cadet' and
'Crunchy Water'. Now he was backed by Scott Thunes and Chad
Wackerman on an album of bludgeoning guitar rock defined by
the influences whom he acknowledged on the sleeve, Eddie Van
Halen, Randy Rhoads, David Lee Roth and Steven Tyler. Moon
sang 'You Can't Ruin Me' and 'Let's Talk About It', but like
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Dweezil's own vocals, these were rather drowned in the mix.
Most intriguing were two instrumentals, 'The Pirate Song' and
'Electric Hoedown', the latter inspired by Eddie Van Halen's solo
from 'Cathedral', that hinted at the sort of original thought
expected of a Zappa. "I wanted the first record to sound like a
digital garage band," Dweezil told Guitar World. "I wanted it to be
straight-ahead honest, with no slick production."23 That could be
heard on Miami Vice actor Don Johnson's solo album, Heartbeat,
Dweezil contributed some feedback frenzy to 'The Last Sound
Love Makes'.
Frank divided the rest of his time between preparing The Old
Masters Box II for release in October and an album of new
Synclavier material. The second anthology of re-mastered albums
covered the period from Uncle Meat to Just Another Band From L.A.,
and included another Mystery Disc. The first side was made up of
some 20 minutes from the Mothers' Royal Festival Hall appearance
on October 28, 1968, while the second featured studio out-takes
like 'Agency Man' from 1967 and 'Wedding Dress Song'/'Hand-
some Cabin Boy' from the Uncle Meat sessions, sundry live excerpts
and oddities like 'The Story Of Willie The Pimp'.
Synclavier technology had improved significantly since Frank
had acquired the basic system in 1983. For him, the most important
development was the sampling unit that allowed him to stockpile
recordings of musical instruments, which he could then recombine
and modulate in whichever ways his enquiring mind fancied.
Grasping that the Synclavier divided sound up into segments or
'frames', affecting pitch variations in the same way that film
recorded movement, Frank realised that he could create sounds
that were beyond human contrivance.
The process was laborious. First the samples were recorded in
digital stereo on a Sony 1610 machine, then Frank's assistant, Bob
Rice, entered them in the Synclavier, one side at a time. Then the
stereo sides had to be matched up, the sample trimmed and cata-
logued. Interviewed for Keyboard in December, Frank admitted
that Race was probably eight months behind on sample trimming.
"As the samples get trimmed and organised, I build them into
various types of patches, according to what composition I'm
working on. We have things called pintos, which are mix-and-
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Frank Zappa
match patches. Instead of having a patch that is just a saxophone,
for example, you can have a patch that is a few notes of the sax, a
few of a clarinet, a few of an oboe, a few of a trombone, all differ-
ent instruments, appearing on different notes, all of them on the
keyboard."24
In addition, up to four harmony parts which moved in different
directions but eventually resolved could be assembled in each
patch. These were called "evolvers" or "resolvers". " 'Evolvers' are
timbres that start with one kind of sound in re-synthesis," Frank
explained, "and you take a certain number of frames from that, and
they cross-fade into another timbre. For example, a horn could
fade into a clarinet and then into a string section over a predeter-
mined time. "Resolvers" are a classification of sound which has
some sort of melody line built into it, but all under control of one
key on the keyboard."25
What he hadn't done was to sample his own guitar playing,
although Dweezil had done an exhaustive session. "A guitar player
I may be, but when I first went to one of those music equipment
conventions in New York City and saw the Synclavier system, I
tried out the guitar interface and it wasn't really for me ... I haven't
been satisfied with it, generally because of the way I play, known as
I am for being incredibly slovenly with my technique of rubbing
fingers all over everything!"26
Given the amount of work required just to formulate the
sounds from which its tunes could be assembled, it's hardly sur-
prising that it took eight months to complete Jazz From Hell.
Frank had an analogy for the process: "Sculpture is a subtractive
medium, and you start off with more than you wind up with. So
the analogy here is that the raw material that I'm working with is
whatever is in my imagination versus what samples are at my dis-
posal. And building the mountain is building your collection of
_1	»27
samples.
It was expensive keeping pace with the flow of software.
"Before you can make (a Synclavier) do what you hear on Jazz
From Hell," he told Keyboard, "you've got to spend a quarter of a
million dollars."28 He took pride in the fact that he'd not applied
for any foundation grant money to finance his operation. It was
solely financed from record sales. "But as the record sales go down,
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Thing-Fish
so does the amount of money that I can turn around and re-invest
into the hardware - which has a price that's steadily rising - and it
squeezes me into a weird kind of position, because it keeps me
constantly in debt to the bank to pay off loans in advance to buy the
equipment."29
Jazz From Hell consisted of seven Synclavier pieces and one
guitar solo, 'St Etienne', recorded in that city on May 28, 1982.
The solo, played while Frank sat cross-legged on a stool, was cap-
tured on video by Thomas Nordegg and included in Video From
Hell. The rest of the album showed the phenomenal progress Frank
had made in his enhancement of the Synclavier's resources. 'Night
School' represented the ideal transition from the old music to the
new. Beginning with a complete but sonically fragmented drumkit
and sustained by a three-note bass pulse, lush piano chords echoed
by synthesised strings provided a floating backdrop for a 'solo' that
in previous years would have been played on a guitar but here was
a combination of grand piano and trumpet, complete with pitch-
bends.
Similar innovatory skill was evident throughout, leavened by the
humour to be expected on a Zappa record. The frenetic attack of
'G-Spot Tornado' simultaneously mocked the expected conse-
quence of caressing that erogenous area of the vagina and the
'scratch' techniques of disco DJs, with a melody that resembled
a tap-dancer on acid. 'The Beltway Bandits' had a scurrying
mechanical melody line that for Frank symbolised the Washington
pressure groups and 'think tanks' that preyed on the Reagan
administration. 'While You Were Art II' rearranged 'While You
Were Out', a guitar solo from Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar. The
complex arrangement used a technique Frank called 'hocketing'
(also known as klangfarbenmelodie), whereby the melody is broken
down into segments each played by a different instrument or
sound. He'd first used it in 'Zolar Czakl' on Uncle Meat, and also
used it here on 'Damp Ankles', where it was complimented by
ambient sound and 'industrial' samples.
The tide track parodies what Frank referred to as 'noodling', his
term for the formless wandering which some jazz musicians charac-
terised as improvisation. Asked if Jazz From Hell was an ironic
reference to the PMRC's assertion that rock music contained
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Frank Zappa
satanic messages, Frank replied, "No. You know the expression: if
there's somebody in show business and he's an asshole, he can be
referred to as an Entertainer from Hell. It arrived from that type of
concept. This is it. If this is jazz, then it's Jazz From Hell"30
The album excited a lot of media interest and Frank made the
front cover of the February 1987 editions of Keyboard, Music Tech-
nology and Sound On Sound. The latter magazine talked to Frank in
November at the 1986 AES Convention in Los Angeles, at which
he played tracks from the album. "The sequences that I will be
demonstrating on the Synclavier at today's show are very tame by
my standards," he told Paul Gilby. "They've been chosen because
they are the most accessible of the pieces I'm working on. The rest
of my stuff is mathematical and very strange and it's definitely not
foot-tapping stuff!"31
In Music Technology, he gave some idea of his prodigious work-
load. "There's tons of stuff planned for future recordings. You
Can't Do That On Stage Anymore is a ten-record box, a live collec-
tion that I've been working on for the last 22 years. I have a huge
collection of tapes and stuff, and I've been going through the final
examples of strange stuff that happened on stage with all the differ-
ent bands. And there is the sequel to Lumpy Gravy, which is done.
That's an amazing piece. It's all the missing dialogue that will help
you understand it. If there is anything to understand about Lumpy
Gravy, this is all the missing components . . . Then there's another
guitar box coming out, there's a three-record box called the
Helsinki Concert, which was done in 1974 with George Duke. The
London Symphony Orchestra Volume 2 will be out shortly . . . I've got
three albums of Synclavier chamber music. It's done, it's just sitting
there."32
As usual with Frank's scheduling, things didn't quite work out
the way he envisaged them that day. But what it did prove was that
he wasn't "just sitting there". He was too shrewd not to realise the
value of his massive archives. The best way to generate the income
he needed to finance his Synclavier habit was to make some small
part of that available to the legion of fans who made up the Barking
Pumpkin and Barfko-Swill mailing lists and others around the
world whose reaction to a new Frank Zappa album could out-pant
Pavlov's dog.
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20
ONCE AGAIN, WITHOUT
THE NET
What held good for records also went for video. During the first six
months of 1987, Frank prepared the first releases from his own
company, Honker Home Video. The idea came from Waleed Ali,
head of MPI Home Video; his company had stepped into the
breach in 1984, when Sony Video had refused to release Does
Humor Belong In Music? without a warning sticker. "For obvious
political reasons, the whole idea of stickering original home video
product was something that rubbed me the wrong way," said Ali.
"What was interesting about Frank's idea for a label — and we
shared it with him - was the idea of really exploiting home video
for everything that it stood for, which was the last bastion of the
ability to deliver truth and points of view."1
The last bastion? Let's hear it again for sky-high rhetoric. Frank
didn't want his profile added to Mount Rushmore, he meant to
make money. His first releases would be the three-hour version of
Baby Snakes and Video From Hell, a sampler of intended Honker
product, including Uncle Meat, An American Dissident and You Can't
Do That On Stage Anymore. Only Uncle Meat would appear before
his death. "I think that it's a mistake to assume that everybody in
the US who watches television likes what they watch," he said.
"There's a substantial portion of the American public that watches
broadcast TV and wishes they were getting a little bit more bang
for their buck - or a little bit more content."2
More content was a by-product of the April 1987 interview in
Guitar World. Editor Noe Goldwasser had visited UMRK to plan a
34-minute cassette called The Guitar World According To Frank
Zappa, to be offered with their July edition. In the course of the
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Frank Zappa
interview, Frank induced journalistic trauma by admitting that he
hadn't touched a guitar for two years. "The problem is, most of the
best stuff that I will physically be able to do on the guitar is already
on tape. You just haven't heard it yet. I mean, I don't have much
incentive to play it."3
He went into more detail while talking with Paul Zollo: "I
didn't think there was any great demand in the marketplace for
what I do on the guitar. I mean, why should I bust my chops, so to
speak? There's plenty of people who play faster than I do, there's
plenty of people who dance around more than I do, and there was
nobody doing what I was doing on Synclavier. Rather than stand
in line and be just another redundant guitar player plying his trade
in the music business, I thought I'd better come up with somediing
new."4
Another new endeavour was a projected television show. In
mid-March, he met with ABC network representatives to discuss
Night School, his concept for a weekday late-night programme. The
aim was to show raw, uncut news footage, point out what had
been deleted or ignored and speculate on the reasons for each
omission. A live band would be in the studio, the musicians
doubling as actors in 'pre-enactments' of the 'possible social con-
sequences' of specific news items. There would also be an oppor-
tunity to purchase a degree for a Psychology Course dealing in
sexually related topics for $100, students could graduate cum laude.
The show would carry the warning: "This programme deals with
reality, using easy to understand colloquial American Language. If
you fear (or have difficulty accepting) either of the above, feel free
to change the channel."5
Frank had enlisted the participation of Daniel Schorr, a senior
newscaster/journalist with CBS and National Public Radio. Schorr,
as 'Professor Of Recent History', would be in a Washington
studio, while Frank and the band would be in Los Angeles. He'd
first contacted Schorr's Washington office in August 1986. "Why
me," Schorr wrote later, "a senior citizen totally alien to the rock
culture? Ah, because the 'kids' didn't trust their contemporaries
and saw in me an incorruptible maverick like him."6
Given the nature of what Frank intended, it's litde wonder that
neither ABC nor any other television network would touch his
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idea. The wonder was that they saw him at all, and he probably had
the PMRC and the Maryland Senate to thank for that. His appear-
ances before the various Committees had made good (if dangerous)
television and those who knew of him as a 'wild man of rock' were
surprised by his eloquence. He soon found himself on the celebrity
quote list. "Every time somebody wants an opposing point of view,
they call me up," he told Rick Davies. "Unfortunately, they do call
to get an opposing point of view, because before I started doing it,
there was no opposition ... I do at least one interview a week on
the PMRC, and some weeks five."7
He'd found a different way to deal with another bite noire, the
religious Right. Papers were filed in Montgomery, Alabama for the
incorporation of a new religion, the Church of American Secular
Humanism, or CASH for short. It was Frank's response to a judge-
ment handed down in the state by Judge Brevard Hand, that
Alabama schools were riddled with Secular Humanism, thereby
violating the civil rights of decent Christian folks who wanted their
children to grow up book-burning, beer-swilling, gun-toting,
God-fearing Commie-haters in their image. Frank countered that
since it hadn't been officially recognised as a religion, it was about
time it was. He parodied the judge's ruling in his "Tenets of Faith",
and paraphrased the odious Oliver North (the bungling patriotic
mastermind of Irangate, the 'arms for hostages' scandal during
which the Gipper showed he couldn't remember the lies he'd been
programmed to tell) by stating that his "religion" would be "an
off-the-shelf, stand-alone, self-financing organisation, capable of
worldwide covert action".8
Barking Pumpkin re-released Joe's Garage as a box-set in June,
and The London Symphony Orchestra Volume 2 in September. The
Old Masters Box III was prepared for release in December. Baby
Snakes and Video From Hell also appeared that month and were
advertised in Billboard. Frank was pictured in garish jacket and
bow-tie, his hair tweezed vertically in Eraserhead mode, wearing a
pair of'No-D' glasses. These were explained: "HONKER NO-D
GLASSES provide opaque cardboard protection for viewers who
fear exposure to unexpectedly mind-boggling theoretical concepts.
They are reversible for protection against heavy-metal video
radiation, and, by poking out the convenient perforations, little
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Frank Zappa
peek-a-boo  flaps  can  be  created,   accommodating the young
sophisticate.
"HONKER believes that WHAT YOU WATCH and WHEN
YOU WATCH IT should be a matter of personal choice, and such
decisions are not appropriately made by third parties or organised
pressure groups. Nonetheless, for the deranged few who feel that
censorship is a good idea, HONKER provides NO-D GLASSES
so they can do it to themselves."9
While all these projects were being worked on through the
summer, he told SongTalk, "I keep [a guitar] sitting next to my
chair in the studio and I occasionally pluck around on it, but I'm
only barely getting some calluses back."10 A tour was in the offing.
Exploratory rehearsals began in October, with Bobby Martin, Ray
White, Ike Willis, Ed Mann, Scott Thunes and Chad Wackerman.
Tommy Mars was present for a week, but pulled out. Ominously,
one of his reasons was that he was "having a problem with Scott
Thunes". Ray White also disappeared early on, summoned away
by a phone call. Nothing more was heard from him.
Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman attended several early
rehearsals, but they had an aversion to revisiting the material they'd
sung with him more than a decade before. "We had spent 15 years
cleaning up ourselves for the public," Volman said. "It took doing
a lot of children's projects," Kaylan added. "We wrote for tele-
vision and we were radio personalities in Los Angeles, and we got
very, very mainstream, and by the time Frank came back to us and
asked us to rejoin the group, we had finally, finally broken all those
negative barriers [of having been Flo & Eddie]."11 Nor did they like
Frank's overt political stance and the fact that this would be a
'Zappa' tour and not the Mothers Of Invention. And they'd be
giving up a healthy income as the Turtles. Some fans sighed with
relief.
Mike Keneally, a Long Island-born guitarist living in San Diego,
heard about the rehearsals and phoned up for an audition. He'd
played piano since the age of seven and picked up the guitar four
years later. Although he was no sight-reader, his knowledge of
Frank's music carried him through the initial audition. At its end,
Frank told him, "Come back on Monday so that the rest of the
band can witness your particular splendour." After rehearsing for
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most of the following week, Frank decided not to wait for Ray
White and told Keneally the good news.
TOURING CAN MAKE YOU CRAZY
In the final weeks of rehearsals, ten hours a day for five days a
week, a horn section was added, which consisted of Walt Fowler,
trumpet, Bruce Fowler, trombone, Paul Carman on alto, soprano
and baritone saxes, Albert Wing, tenor sax, and Kurt McGettrick
on baritone and contrabass clarinet. The first leg of the tour was
scheduled to begin in Albany, New York on February 2, 1988,
taking in 27 locations on the Eastern Seaboard and as far west as
Detroit and Chicago, and ending in Uniondale, NY on March 25.
Several of the gigs, like those in New York City, Washington,
Philadelphia and Detroit, were three-day stints. After a two-week
break, the tour continued on to Europe, where 43 dates in France,
Germany, England, Scandinavia, Spain and Italy occupied all of
April, May and the first ten days of June. There should have been a
further ten-week US tour, taking in the South and the West
Coast, but the band self-destructed before the final leg could
begin.
Later, with bitter hindsight, Frank would say this was the best
band he'd ever taken on the road. "I'd been very happy with that
band," he told David Mead, "the audiences really liked it too, and
the reviewers thought it was great. It was unique because it com-
bined a very strong five-piece horn section with all kinds of elec-
tronic stuff, with effects on the percussion section, on the drums,
multiple keyboards — a very interesting blend of this horn harmony
and very strange sound effects."12
The harmony didn't extend to the band's personalities, though.
The problem emanated from Scott Thunes' role as 'clonemeister',
a role previously performed by Ed Mann and Arthur Barrow.
"He's very abrasive," said Mike Keneally. "He's very honest. He's
brutal. He's blunt. And when he was in charge of running the
rehearsals in Frank's absence, these qualities came to the fore, but it
was in service of getting the job done."13
"If it's not the right energy, it doesn't work, somehow," Ed
Mann reckoned. "It's a difficult position for the guy who has to run
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Frank Zappa
the band, and Scott, in his defence, was in that position, and he
took it very seriously, and everybody else didn't wanna hear it."14
Mann played down the exact nature of his role in what hap-
pened. "The others all decided that they hated Scott's guts," Frank
explained. "It was very weird. Basically the ringleader was Ed
Mann, and he and Chad Wackerman decided that Scott had to go,
and they brought about most of the discontent in the band."15
Perhaps two dictators was one too many. "Scott has a unique per-
sonality," Frank told Matt ResnicofF. "He also has unique musical
skills. I like the way he plays and I like him as a person, but other
people don't. He has a very difficult personality: he refuses to be
cordial. He won't do small talk. And he's odd. So what?"16
Everyone got odd, that's what. On the last German date, pro-
moter John Jackson presented the band with a big cake with all
their names on it. One of the ringleaders sneaked off stage and
scraped the bass player's name off the cake. Things were obviously
going badly awry. Frank polled the band and discovered that no
one, apart from Mike Keneally, wanted to work with Thunes. "If
you replace anybody in a band that has rehearsed for four months,
you've gotta go back into rehearsal. I couldn't replace Scott to
assuage everybody in the band who hated him. There's no bass
player who could have done that job. The repertoire was so
large, the workings of the show so complex, you had to know
so much — there was no way. So I had to lose the income of all
those dates . . . Everybody on that tour got paid but me; I lost
$400,000."17
It was an expensive show to mount, involving five trucks, two
buses, and some 43 people. "And we weren't doing fireworks or
anything spectacular out there, it was like a basic touring package:
enough lights to see the show, enough PA to hear the music and
enough crew to set up the gear. It's not like taking a glamorous
entourage out there; it was just not a money-making proposition.
In a way, I'm glad I did it, though, just because of some of the
musical things that did get recorded."18 But it hadn't been easy. "I
just spent the last six weeks of the tour trying to wend my way
through this garbage that was going on onstage. On a good night,
the ideas I had for guitar solos came out. On a bad night, it was me
versus the band. The audience didn't really know, but it was
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another example of the kind of thing that made me want to put the
guitar down in the first place."19
Several months later, all those that supposedly couldn't bear
being on stage with Thunes admitted they'd made a mistake and
fell over themselves to apologise to him. No wonder Frank was
disgusted. "If that band had stayed together all this time," he said in
1991, "not only would it be the most outrageous touring band on
the planet, but I'd still be playing guitar . . . And one of the most
egregious things: one of the sax players who'd been complaining
that Scott didn't give him enough support on his solos after he
heard The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, came over here
and said, 'Oh, he sounds good, man.' Stuff like that makes me
sick."20
The pity was that this band's repertoire was the most eclectic and
comprehensive he'd ever attempted. There were songs from every
era of the Mothers and subsequent bands, and a raft of cover
versions, from Lennon & McCartney's 'I Am The Walrus' and
Page & Plant's 'Stairway To Heaven' to Stravinsky's L'Histoire du
Soldat and Ravel's Bolero. "I always liked Bolero," Frank said. "I
think that it's really one of the best melodies ever written."21 The
new songs addressed America's current religious/political stew,
satirising Nixon, Reagan and Bush, along with the Rev. Jesse
Jackson, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Bakker. Michael Jackson,
who now owned Northern Songs, the Beatles' publishing com-
pany, was the object of ridicule in 'Why Don't You Like Me?', a
withering re-write of 'Tell Me You Love Me' from Chunga's
Revenge.
The most fruitful source of derision was Jimmy Swaggart. When
Jim Bakker's knowledge of Jessica Hahn was finally revealed in
1987, Swaggart was his loudest and most righteous accuser. His
vehemence increased when Bakker was convicted of defrauding
his followers of some $158 million and sentenced to 45 years
imprisonment by Maximum Bob Potter, the Judge Roy Bean of
his generation. Bakker wasn't Swaggart's first prey. In July 1986,
he'd denounced fellow Assemblies of God minister Marvin
Gorman as an adulterer. The following year, Gorman learned of his
denouncer's visits to the Texas Motel in Metairie, across the parish
line from New Orleans, for unspecified 'relief'. Gorman hired a
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Frank Zappa
private detective, and on October 17 caught Swaggart outside the
Travel Inn, where he'd just been professionally entertained.
Another prostitute, Debra Murphree, told WVUE-TV, "He
told me to get naked and maybe lay on the bed and pose for
him ... To me, I think he's kind of perverted . . . talking about
some of the things that we talked about in the rooms, you know, I
wouldn't want him around my children."22
She wasn't alone in that thought. Another minister in Ferriday,
Louisiana, hometown of Swaggart and his cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis,
was forced to leave his parish. Jerry Lee's sister, Frankie Jean, was
quoted, "We call it the crime of the century. This poor litde
Assemblies of God man was arrested over here. They say he raped
his two daughters, and they're lookin' at the parakeet."23
Swaggart spent months avoiding his promised public confession.
Eventually Gorman took his evidence, including photographs, to
the Assemblies of God headquarters in Springfield, Missouri.
Swaggart was banned from preaching, first for three months and
then a year. On the first Sunday of Lent, February 21, 1988, he
made a tearful, histrionic public confession in front of his wife and a
stunned television audience. Vengeance might have been the
Lord's, but Frank's was as swift and gleefully condign. In Pough-
keepsie, New York, two days later, he debuted 'Swaggart' versions
of 'More Trouble Every Day' and 'Penguin In Bondage'. By
March 8 in Pittsburgh, there was a 'Swaggart' version of 'Lone-
some Cowboy Burt'. Most damaging of all, and regrettably
unreleaseable, were adaptations of three classic Beades songs,
which showed up a week later at the Royal Oak Music Hall in
Troy, on the outskirts of Detroit; 'Norwegian Wood' became
'Norwegian Jim', 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' was recast
as 'Louisiana Hooker With Herpes', while 'Strawberry Fields
Forever' masqueraded as the 'Texas Motel'.
Other songs were written in response to specific news items and
performed only once. 'Promiscuous', from the February 26 Detroit
gig was about Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, a rather ludicrous
figure affecting quasi-military dress who assured the American
public that AIDS had started in Africa, when some poor unfortu-
nate had been infected by the blood of 'a litde green monkey'.
Frank had a nickname for him: "Dr. God! . . . What the fuck is this
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shit, OK? And besides, he's a Reagan appointee. That's strike
number one. Strike number two is the Dr God suit - no explana-
tion given. Why does he look like an admiral? Is he the Admiral of
Health? And I question any medical advice given by a man who
joins the PMRC on-stage during their symposium and talks about
anal sex while they talk about backwards masking."24
YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE
While the tour pursued its inexorable course, records continued to
appear. In April, Barking Pumpkin released Guitar, the double-
album follow-up to Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, consisting of solos
from the 1981/82 and 1984 tours, with two from 1979, one of
them the original version of'Outside Now', which began life as a
solo in 'City Of Tiny Lites'. The following month, Rykodisc
issued a 2-CD version with an additional 13 tracks. At the same
time, Barking Pumpkin released a double-album sampler for the
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series which Frank had
announced the previous February. Then, it had been on ten
albums, now it was to be a 13-hour series of six 2-CD sets.
"The aesthetic goals of the series," he told William Ruhlmann,
"have more to do with the growth of the music and a celebration
of the good parts of live performance. There are a lot of good
things to be said about playing on the stage in terms of unique
events that will happen only for that particular audience and if
you've got a tape running and you've captured it, you've got a little
miracle on your hands . . . Sometimes the recording quality is not
as good as some other version of it, but I want to put as much of the
unique stuff in there as possible."25
YCDTOSA 1 traversed the years from 1969 to 1984 in the
course of 28 tracks. Since he'd always been an incisive and creative
editor, Frank juxtaposed bands of different eras, in this case sequen-
tially but on later volumes, within the context of a single song. "So
that you have the feeling that you're at a concert, but it's an
impossible concert. There's no way you could ever see all these
people on-stage at the same time, but if you've got a fairly decent
imagination, you could especially put the earphones on and be at a
show that spans, what, 25 years, with some of the most amazing
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Frank Zappa
musicians that were ever put onto a record and there they are, just
performing their little hearts out for you."26
Having lost so much money, Frank had no intention of losing
any time; he set about selecting and mixing tracks for Broadway The
Hard Way, bringing together the new songs from the tour and
some others that hadn't yet appeared in America. In his notes
for the YCDTOSA sampler, Frank expressed the hope that it pro-
vided "some incentive for the acquisition of a CD player". With
Broadway, he reinforced that message by creating two very different
packages. The Barking Pumpkin vinyl album released in October
contained nine tracks; the Rykodisc CD added a further eight,
among them versions of 'Hot Plate Heaven At The Green Hotel'
and 'Outside Now', Oliver Nelson's 'Stolen Moments', and Sting
singing a hastily contrived arrangement of 'Murder By Numbers'
recorded in Chicago on March 3.
The overtly political nature of much of the material reflected the
fact that this was an election year. The "virtually brain dead"27
Reagan had come to the end of his second term and now the
Republicans intended to elevate Vice-President George Bush to
the Oval Office. The Democrats conspired to ensure his victory by
nominating the ineffectual Michael Dukakis, brother of actress
Olympia, one of Cher's co-stars in Moonstruck. The Libertarian
Party had offered to make Frank its presidential candidate, but he'd
refused. "I read the Libertarian platform and I said, 'Basically, you
guys are closet anarchists. If you could have your way, there
wouldn't be any government at all.' "28
Instead, he tried to contact Dukakis' advertising people with
some 32 ideas for television commercials. "I thought the best way
to start reducing the effect of the Republican disinformation cam-
paign was to run a series of spots that called into question who these
fucking people think they are. So one of the spots had a guy -
obviously a Republican — standing on a lawn in front of a mansion,
saying, 'I'm a Republican, and I care about the environment.' He
points to his house: 'My environment.' "29
"Bush-Quayle is a scandal waiting to happen," he told Kurt
Loder. In October 1980, Bush had met with Iranian representatives
in Paris, allegedly to offer a $5 billion arms deal in return for delay-
ing the release of American hostages until after Reagan had
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defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. If that
came to light, Frank thought, it might lead to another impeachment.
"And then you'll see the real reason for Dan Quayle being pasted
onto the ticket: he's the lowest form of impeachment insurance."30
When as President he was asked about tax rises, Bush said, "Watch
my lips," while keeping his mouth shut. By the same token,
Quayle only opened his mouth to change feet; sometime later, and
on television, he would attempt to correct a child's spelling of
'potato' by adding an 'e' at the end.
Then there was the 'religious right'. "Come on, let's call a spade
a spade here," Frank spat. "These fuckers are fascists. Fascists with a
cross.
"What has happened to the presidency as an institution in the
United States is a disaster," he told the Los Angeles Times. "It's not a
matter of conservative versus liberal, it's a matter of fascist versus
freedom. Because what you've seen for the last eight years is
bunting-encrusted fascism waving a flag in one hand and a cross in
the other."32
Broadway The Hard Way attacked what he regarded as an insidi-
ous threat to all sorts of freedoms. 'Rhymin' Man' characterised the
posturing Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Presidential pretensions.
'When The Lie's So Big' was about another Presidential hopeful,
Rev. Pat Robertson, who told his audiences he was on a mission
from God to lead the Republican Party. 'Jesus Thinks You're A
Jerk' was a nine-minute assault on both Robertson and Jim Bakker.
Ike Willis' monologue raided skeletons in Robertson's cupboard,
including a 'love-child' and his claim of'honourable' service in the
Korean War, when a phone call to his father, a US Senator, had got
him off the troopship.
Even 'What Kind Of Girl' contained rewritten verses with
veiled and overt references to Robertson, Swaggart and Ed Meese,
the one-time Attorney General who swung both ways on Irangate.
Nelson Riddle's 'The Untouchables' contained another Ike Willis
monologue vilifying various Reagan henchmen, including Admiral
Poindexter, Oliver North, Michael Deaver and William Casey, all
forced to leave high office or White House employ for their
nefarious exploits.
Their leader was further lampooned in the sleeve artwork. Using
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Frank Zappa
another shot from the Honker advertising campaign, a quote from
Reagan's address to the 1988 Republican Convention was sprayed
on Frank's 'office' wall: "Facts are stupid things." His former chief
of staff Donald Regan coined the memorable phrase, "The Presi-
dential mind is not cluttered with facts." In Death Of A Salesman,
Frances FitzGerald noted that Reagan's mind "contained a number
of precepts, each one backed up by a quotient of anecdotes and
personal reminiscences - some of which had a basis in fact."33 He
was indeed the personification of his dictum.
Broadway The Hard Way was released in October, along with
YCDTOSA 2, subtitled The Helsinki Concert. This latter proved
Frank's enduring regard for the 1974 band. In the booklet note he
wrote, "This band had a lot of skill (and miserable touring equip-
ment — it was always breaking down, and full of hums and buzzes).
In spite of this, it has remained one of the audience's favourite
ensembles, and so, for those of you who crave what they used to
do, we present a full concert with a little bit of everything — includ-
ing stuff that you can't do on stage anymore." The fact that it con-
tained much the same repertoire as Roxy & Elsewhere didn't matter;
"the ultra-fast tempos on the more difficult tunes demonstrate what
happens when a band has played the material for a year, and is so
comfortable with it they could probably perform it blindfolded."34
Releasing The Helsinki Concert created something of a rod for his
back, at least in interviews, since everyone wanted to know if there
would be more such releases. Matt Groening seemed to be siding
with the boodeggers when he expressed his pleasure at hearing a
complete show. "That to me is excruciating," Frank replied,
"because when I've listened to those, it's hard for me to imagine
one show that had so many good things in it that you'd want to
release the whole show."35 The boodeggers and their customers
thought otherwise.
ONCE UPON A TIME
As well as documenting a 25-year career on record, Frank was
also preparing The Real Frank Zappa Book for publication in May
1989, an idiosyncratic combination of selective autobiography and
polemical discourse. In this he was helped by Peter Occhiogrosso,
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who taped their conversations and then transcribed and edited
them onto floppy disc. These were then re-edited by Frank and the
resulting manuscript was sent to Ann Patty of Poseidon Press in
New York. "If you're gonna do a biography of a rock star, you
probably can't get one more interesting than this one," she said.
"It's a good mission in life."36
The book's autobiographical sections were somewhat reticent
and quickly over; thereafter, Frank's thoughts ranged far and wide
on subjects that exercised his interest, exemplified by chapter
headings such as 'All About Schmucks', 'Marriage (As A Dada
Concept)', 'Porn Wars' and 'Church & State'. With typically
mordant humour, the penultimate chapter was tided 'Failure' and
listed some Zappa projects, including the Night School television
show, that had come to nothing. In it, Frank was pragmatic about
the inevitability of failure. "I would say that my entire life has been
one massive failure," he'd said two years earlier. "I live with failure
everyday because I can't do the things that I really want to do ... I
enjoy sitting down here [in the studio] all by myself typing on the
Synclavier. I can do twelve hours and love it. And I know that
ultimately it doesn't mean a thing that I did it. It's useless. That's
OK; it makes me feel good."37
In dedicating the book to "Gail, the kids, Stephen Hawking and
Ko-Ko," he recorded that the manuscript was finished in the early
morning of August 23. In Chapter 19, 'The Last Word', he noted
that he finished reading the first galley proofs on the even earlier
morning of Christmas Day, generating "an eye-popping headache"
in the process. In winding up, he couldn't resist a few last barbs
against Ted Turner's CNN network, Surgeon General Koop and
Ronald Reagan. 'Would a Kind And Loving God let an asshole
like that (and all his fabulous appointees) escape unpunished after
eight years of Constitutional desecration?"38 You betcha.
The December 24 edition of Billboard had a video supplement in
which Honker advertised their forthcoming videos, Uncle Meat and
The True Story of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels, to be released on
January 31, 1989. The advert, parodying E.T., bore the headline,
"The Story That Touched The Weird". Frank was shown in a
chunky pink sweater, scratching his ear with the prehensile thumb
of a silver lurex glove. Along with Does Humor Belong In Music?,
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Frank Zappa
there were now five Zappa videos on the market.
In February Gail's brainchild, Joe's Garage, opened. The three-
room rehearsal facility was created in the warehouse that for 15
years Frank had used to store band equipment. It was run by
Marque Coy, Frank's monitor engineer since 1981. The name was
his idea, too. "The Zappas didn't know what they were going to
call it," he told Don Menn. "I said, 'Well, you own the name.'
They said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'The line in the song goes:
"You can jam at Joe's Garage . . ." Let's call it "Joe's Garage".'"39
Acts 1 and 2 were the large and small rehearsal rooms, while Act 3
housed a 24-track studio linked for audio and video with the other
rooms.
The new year saw Frank working as hard as ever. "Even though
I've got a busy schedule editing albums and doing all the mechani-
cal stuff to stay in that part of the record business, I still manage
30 hours a week on the Synclavier," he told William Ruhlmann.40
But by his own admission, Frank spent "virtually 100 per cent" of
his time until November 1989 mixing and editing the 1988 tour
tapes. This amounted to approximately 1,970 takes of 120 titles.
"Out of that, somebody has to decide which parts of which song
are the best version available from any given city, remember it, tell
the engineer to mix this city to match that city and then glue it
together to make the album. You don't farm that out to anyone
else, so that's what I've been doing here."41
"The only time I took time off was for four trips to Russia and
one trip to Czechoslovakia," he told Gary Steel. "After the Czech
trip, I was side-tracked into some foreign trade stuff that I'm doing
with my Why Not? company. It's a Delaware corporation chartered
to licensing, consulting and social engineering . . . When I went
over there, I met all these very interesting people who wanted to
do a wide range of business things with people from the West, and
there was no way for them to get in touch . . . kind of like a dating
service. Find out what somebody wants over there and try to find
'em a partner over here."42
His initial February visit came about after Dennis Berardi, owner
of Kramer Guitars, told him he was thinking of opening a factory
in what was then the Soviet Union. "I told him he was crazy,"
Frank told Neil Cohen. "I knew exactly what everybody else in
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Once Again, Without The Net
the United States of America knew at the time about the Soviet
Union - nothing. You can't know anything unless you go over
there and look at it. IT'S ANOTHER PLANET." There were
further visits in March, April and May. "I was not prepared for the
amount of data I was receiving. I was given an education in [the]
politics, sociology, and anthropology of the Soviet Union that you
couldn't buy anyplace else."43
Part of that education, and something that may have dampened
his relish for the new-found role of entrepreneur, was that Russian
businessmen had an altogether different approach to negotiation,
honed in the thriving black market that formed such a vital but
debilitating part of the Soviet economy. Frank met the director of
the Luzhniky Sports Complex in Moscow, who told him he
wanted to add a hotel, casino and shops to the site. Frank put him
in touch with Wesray Capital, a New Jersey-based investment
firm. But when Wesray indicated its interest, the Luzhniky director
doubled his price.
"Until there is an increase in knowledge as far as how the deals
work and the idea that WESTERN CAPITAL IS NOT A
PRESENT THAT COMES FROM HEAVEN AND LANDS
ON YOUR DOORSTEP AND SUDDENLY WONDERFUL
THINGS HAPPEN, nobody is going to invest a nickel in there
unless they're going to get a profit out of it," Frank said. "And
profit is another word they don't understand."44 Other schemes
faltered in similar ways, initial enthusiasm worn down by mistrust,
misunderstanding and the dread weight of Russian bureaucracy.
One small success was a San Fernando Valley jewellery maker who
was put in touch with several suppliers of amber. "It would be frus-
trating if this was the only thing I did for a living," Frank admitted.
"I probably would be crazy if by every Friday I had to post a deal
someplace. But since I do have another source of income, I don't
have to worry."45
The most surprising aspect of Frank's visits was the realisation of
how much he was appreciated in a country where none of his
records had been officially released. While being shown around the
Stosnomic (or Stass Namin) Centre in Gorky Park, he was intro-
duced to a Siberian R&B band. "I walked in and I thought the guy
was going to have a heart attack; he couldn't speak for spluttering.
369

Frank Zappa
Through an interpreter, he says, 'Look at this,' and opens his
wallet, shows me a photo of his house in Siberia. He's got all of my
records on the rack, posters of me on the wall... You never know
who's listening or why they're listening."46
On November 12, at the end of his mammoth mixing session, a
crowd estimated by the press at 20,000 but Frank thought was five
times larger listened to him at a pro-choice rally at Rancho Park in
Los Angeles. The choice was for abortion, but Frank reckoned that
more than women's rights were at issue. "It should be clear from
recent events that the enemy that America must face is not the
Communists over there. It is those deranged right-wing lunatics
right here in America. Make no mistake about this. Those people
you see on the freeway with the fish on the back of the car - that's
the enemy . . . You can't let these lunatics change the way things
work around here."
He then led the crowd in a typically acerbic prayer: "Dear sweet
Jesus, don't listen to those other guys. They are not Christians, they
are practising voodoo. Not long ago they prayed to you and
demanded the death of a Supreme Court Justice. What's that got to
do with Christianity, huh?"
"Well, I think they needed to have that [humour]," he said later,
"because the proceeding was pretty fucking serious up to that point
. .. the kind of character I am, I can get up there and get away with
that. I think that somebody else doing it woulda been perceived
as out of place, but I thought it was the right thing to do, and so, I
did it."47
Those that didn't attend the rally could listen to You Can't Do
That On Stage Volume 3, which was largely devoted to the 1984
band. It included Dweezil and his father on-stage at the tour's final
LA gig for a version of 'Sharleena', 'Ghana In De Bushwop',
co-written by Diva and her father, and a medley of'Bobby Brown'
and 'Keep It Greasey' during which Ike Willis' repeated chant of
'Hi-ho Silver!' reduced Frank to a giggling jelly. As he wrote in the
booklet notes, "Just a httle more proof that touring can make you
crazy."
With the mixing of the 1988 tapes complete, the UMRK
mixing desk was set up to do Synclavier mixes. Frank had been
commissioned to write the music to accompany Jacques Cousteau's
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Once Again, Without The Net
television film about the Exxon Valdez Alaskan oil disaster, Outrage
At Valdez. The writing incorporated a small disaster of its own. It
was a last-minute request which meant that Frank had to write
without any reference to pictorial content. "I knew kind of what
the scenes were gonna be, so I started sketching the stuff out before
I even got the videotape."48 He cued his music to the coded video-
tape he then received, only to discover that this wasn't the final
"drop frame code", necessitating two days frantic remixing.
Cousteau would be in Russia when Frank travelled to Moscow
once more on January 15, 1990. He would be accompanied by a
camera crew from the Financial News Network, who'd hired him
to host three Focus programmes on Soviet business opportunities
when he returned. "I'm going to get video coverage of all the
weird stuff that I've seen in Moscow," he told Eric Buxton, "and
even if I never get any of it on television, it'll certainly make an
interesting Honker product, because I'll show people a view of the
Soviet Union they never dreamed of before."49
The most significant part of this trip was his first visit to Czecho-
slovakia. In January 1989, he'd been visited at home by Michael
Kocab, a Czech composer and musician who offered to have one
of Frank's orchestral scores played by the country's Philharmonic
Orchestra. "He was part of the student protest movement, one of
the people who was speaking out against the government, and he
invited me to Prague."50 The country's Velvet Revolution took
place in November 1989 and the Civic Forum took over. When
Frank landed at Prague's Ruzyne Airport on January 21, Vaclav
Havel was president and Michael Kocab was a member of the
Czech parliament, in charge of overseeing the departure of the
Soviet military.
Over the course of his visit, Frank was feted by musicians, fans
and the president, who expressed his admiration for Bongo Fury. He
met 'underground' artists at the Krivan Hotel, visited Havel at
Hradcany Castle, attended a party at which he sang with the Plastic
People Of The Universe, one of the bands present. He appeared on
a television programme, Kontakt, during which Minister of Culture
Milan Lukes announced that Frank had been appointed to repre-
sent the government for trade, tourism and culture.
Unfortunately, over lunch Havel mentioned that Vice-President
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Frank Zappa
Dan Quayle was to visit the country. 'I expressed the opinion that I
thought it was unfortunate that a person such as President Havel
should have to bear the company of somebody as stupid as Dan
Quayle for even a few moments of his life. The next thing I
know, Quayle doesn't come. Instead, (Secretary of State) James
Baker III (husband of Susan, co-founder of the PMRC) re-routes
his trip to Moscow so that he can come blasting into Prague and
literally lay down the law to the Czech government. He says, "You
can either do business with the United States or you can do busi-
ness with Zappa. What'll it be?"51 Within six weeks, Frank had
been reduced to an unofficial emissary for culture.
"I'll tell you what the circumstances were," Frank said to me,
"because there have been two people that have told me that they
saw the meeting and they heard what he said. One of them almost
did a television interview. I went out and got a camera crew. From
the day that the guy told me what had happened to the next day
when I got the crew, somebody had gotten hold of him and he
refused to talk when the camera crew was in there. He absolutely
verified that pressure was applied to the Czech government for
them not to do business with me."
On February 26, Frank hosted his first programme on FNN,
Frank Zappa's Wild Wild East, analysing real estate opportunities in
Moscow with a senior Russian economist and conducting a
phone-in discussion about Soviet agriculture with a Carolina
tractor-maker. Others featured included the heads of the Luzhniky
Sports Complex and the Soviet Director's Guild, a senior adminis-
trator at the TASS news agency, and Mikhail Afanasiev, a director
of Moscow's Imemo Institute. One New York banker who'd had
meetings with Frank reckoned, "He's a perfect Adam-Smithian
capitalist. He knows that in the end self-interest [Frank would
receive five per cent of any completed deals] is a lot better in pur-
suing things than altruism. But his biggest motivation behind all
this is really to help these people; it isn't to make a buck."52
372

21
THE TORTURE NEVER STOPS
Something far more unpleasant than a petulant government official
with an insulted wife came to light in the spring of 1990. "I'd been
feeling sick for a number of years," Frank told David Sheff, "but
nobody diagnosed it. Then I got really ill and had to go to the
hospital in an emergency. While I was in there, they did some tests
and found out it had been there for anywhere from eight to ten
years, growing undetected by any of my previous doctors. By the
time they found it, it was inoperable."1
'It' was a tumour in Frank's prostate, the gland surrounding the
neck of the bladder whose function is to release the fluid that
carries die semen. At the time, deaths in America from cancer of
the prostate were over 30,000 a year; in Britain, where the figure
was 9,000, doctors identified it as the second biggest cancer killer
among British men. Prostate cancer is hormone dependent and if
the level of male hormones is reduced by either physical or medical
castration, the malignant tissue will shrink. Although Frank's
tumour initially responded to treatment, it soon developed beyond
hormonal control.
"When I went into the hospital, the cancer had grown to where
I could no longer take a piss. In order for me just to survive, they
had to poke a hole in my bladder. I spent more than a year with a
hose coming out of my bladder and a bag tied to my leg. That'll
keep you from travelling. I went through radiation and that fucked
me up pretty good. They were supposed to give me twelve shots of
that, but I got to number eleven and I was so sick that I said I
couldn't go back. The result of the radiation was that the tumour
was shrunken to the point where I could get rid of the bag and
could piss again, but there were bad side effects."2
The immediate cancellation of all Frank's public activities set off
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Frank Zappa
rumours about his health. It would have been a busy summer. In
June he'd been scheduled to attend a contemporary music festival,
Meeting Of The World in Finland, while in September he was to be
in France, where a concert of his works was being staged in Lyon.
He'd also been invited to Prague in June for Czechoslovakia's first
presidential election. Frank sent his regrets for not attending. "I
really support Havel's idea of establishing a government that has an
aesthetic, as well as an economic, ethic. But right now the best
thing I can do is to stay away."3 Few knew it was the only thing he
could do.
Events were lending macabre significance to You Can't Do That
On Stage Anymore. What came about through financial strictures
and a sea-change in Frank's musical career had become a physical
reality. A further irony was that this was his 25th year in the music
business. In their May 19 issue, Billboard celebrated the fact with a
16-page supplement. Largely written by Drew Wheeler and
designed by Cal Schenkel, it contained an interview and articles on
his career, his family and his business.
Rykodisc took the centre spread to advertise the last batch of
releases from Frank's back catalogue, including Fillmore East, You
Are What You Is and Sheik Yerbouti. An entire pressing run of Sheik
Yerbouti had to be destroyed when it was discovered that 'Yo'
Mama' had lost some ten minutes of its original 12 minutes
38 seconds running time. YCDTOSA 4, slated for November 4
release, was postponed. It had been announced in the September
ICE (International CD Exchange) as well as a 4-CD set from the
1988 tour, entided The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life.
Other projects included The Lost Episodes, comprising studio
out-takes from the early years; Lumpy Gravy, Phase 3, later known
as Civilization, Phaze III; and Ahead Of Their Time, the Mothers'
Royal Festival Hall gig from October 28, 1968: "I think there's a
market for this, since it's probably the most interesting of all the
archival tapes."4
Asked whether the Zappa vault was a bottomless pit, Frank
replied: "I'm trying to bring that phase of my release schedule to an
end as soon as possible, to get the best of the archival stuff into
some kind of release form and move on to concentrating on the
new stuff I'm working on today. Also, because I don't have any
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The Torture Never Stops
plans to tour again, I'd like to bring an end to this whole phase
of live band tapes ... At the same time that I'm putting these
together, I'm still composing new pieces; there's all kinds of differ-
ent work in progress."5
The fourth Biennale de la Danse was held in Lyon between
September 13 and October 6; 'Dancing Zappa' was presented by
the Orchestre de l'Opera de Lyon and the Lyon Opera Ballet at the
Maurice Ravel Auditorium for five nights, beginning September
20. Robert Hughes conducted 'The Perfect Stranger' and 'Bogus
Pomp'. There were four pre-recorded songs, 'Trouble Comin'
Every Day', 'Plastic People', 'I'm The Slime' and 'Why Don'tcha
Do Me Right', and Kent Nagano took up the baton to conduct
'Strictly Genteel'.
Back in Los Angeles, Frank worked as hard as his health per-
mitted. "The minute somebody tells you you have cancer, your life
changes dramatically, whether you beat it or you don't," he said.
"It's like you have a fucking brand put on you. As far as the Ameri-
can medical profession goes, you're just meat. It complicates your
life because you have to fight for your life every single day, besides
doing your shit. To do the music is complicated enough, but to
think of doing things that involve travel and other kinds of physical
stress is too much. Whatever medication you take fucks you
up, too."6
On October 26/27, he was interviewed by Co de Kloet for a
four-hour radio programme, Supplement, to be transmitted by
Dutch NOS radio on December 21, Frank's 50th birthday. When
asked what music he listened to, Frank replied, "I'm making music,
not listening to it. The only time I have to listen to it is when I'm
not watching the news. So, given the choice between listening to
music and watching the news, I usually watch the news these
days."7
The main reason for watching the news was the developing
situation in the Middle East. Throughout the Eighties, Iran and
Iraq had been at war, and America had pumped billions of dollars
into Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's war effort. By 1988 the conflict
abated, with both sides exhausted. To generate finance, Hussein
demanded that OPEC countries cut their oil production, increas-
ing the price  and thus  Iraq's  income.  Led by Saudi Arabia
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Frank Zappa
and Kuwait, his Arab brothers refused. He then demanded from
Kuwait the return of certain oilfields and strategic islands lost to
Iraq when the existing boundaries between the countries were
established in 1922.
Hussein's warlike intentions were no secret; the US Ambassador
to Iraq told him that America 'had no opinion' on what it saw as a
boundary dispute. Hussein's forces seized Kuwait on August 2,
taking control of one-fifth of the world's oil reserves. Given
America's proprietary attitude towards Middle East oil, the Bush
administration could no longer just send lawyers, guns and money.
Troops arrived in Saudi Arabia and ultimatums were issued. Frank
saw through his country's motives. "They're not going there to
protect democracy, because Kuwait is not a democracy and neither
is Saudi Arabia. Both of these countries have very, very strict
regimes, and to listen to speeches giving any other reason for this
force in the Gulf other than protecting US oil interests is totally
fake."8
Interviewed by Trevor Lofts and Steven Homan four days
before his birthday, he warmed to his theme: "... when they start
talking about, 'Well, it's just about aggression. You know, the very
idea that somebody would just go charging into somebody else's
country.' Wait a minute! Yesterday was the first annivenary of
'Operation Just Cause', when we went blasting into Panama to
arrest their president [Manuel Noriega]! For what? So we can stick
him in jail and tape his conversations?"9 The resulting conflict,
named Desert Storm, was brief, environmentally catastrophic and
ultimately inconclusive.
WHEN NO ONE WAS NO ONE
Frank was also feeling contained. Dweezil had been on tour in
Australia, accompanied by Ahmet; at the same time, Gail, with
Diva in tow, was having meetings with Festival Records. "We
were seriously discussing the possibility of moving my business
down there, and I told Gail to look for some property." He visited
the Australian consulate in Los Angeles to see what incentives their
government might offer to move his business to Australia. He also
wanted to discuss a project he'd had in mind for some time, of
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The Torture Never Stops
setting up a modern-day Bauhaus where artists of all types could
meet and co-operate. "After I'd explained to [this man] all the
things I was interested in, he began with his lecture about Austra-
lian unions. He basically made it very clear that nothing that I ever
wanted to do in life could ever be done in Australia because of [the]
union situation."10
Birthdays were going to be important events from now on, and
for his fiftieth Frank bought himself a brand new Synclavier 9600.
"It's twice as big, in terms of storage," he told Den Simms, "and it
also has a direct to disc system, so it can do a lot more than the old
one."11 However, it was going to necessitate getting a new mixing
console, in order to accommodate the increase in sound quality.
That, in turn, was going to put back the mixing of any Synclavier
material until it was installed.
On the record front, Frank announced The Best Band You Never
Heard In Your Life had been reduced to a 2-CD set, but the remain-
ing material would become another 2-CD set, Make A Jazz Noise
Here. The one piece of bad news was that Ahead OfTheir Time was
on indefinite hold, largely due to the settlement of the lawsuit with
the original Mothers, which had been ongoing since February
1985. In it, the Mothers had staked their claim to 'unpaid royalties'
earned from the reissue of the albums which featured them. "All I
want," Jimmy Carl Black told the Austin Chronicle, "is what's
coming to me, and that could be a lot of money. I don't want any
of Frank's, I just want what's coming to me. I think that's only
fair."12 That was only a part of the $16.4 million mentioned in the
lawsuit.
Details of the settlement were not made public, but Frank
picked up the tab for the legal fees and Ahead Of Their Time went
into turnaround. "I'm not sure I want to spend my life trying to
make those guys any more famous than they already are," he said.
"I just think that it was such a stupid thing to begin with, and even
though it's all over, as far as I'm concerned, there's plenty of hard
feelings on my side."13 Eventually, he relented and Ahead OfTheir
Time was issued in April 1993.
The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life was also issued in
April. Its 28 tracks combined "concert favourites and obscure
album cuts, along with deranged versions of cover tunes and a few
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Frank Zappa
premiere recordings." Frank's note continued, "In a world where
most of the 'big groups' go on stage and pretend to sing and play,
we proudly present this quaint little audio artefact. Yes, once upon
a time, live musicians actually sang and played this."
The musicianship was indeed dazzling, as those who'd witnessed
the shows already knew. The versatility and skill of his musicians
was matched by the breadth of their repertoire. The 'cover tunes'
included Johnny Cash's 'Ring Of Fire', 'I Left My Heart In San
Francisco', Ravel's Bolero, 'When Irish Eyes Are Smiling' and the
themes from The Godfather and Bonanza. There was also Ike Willis'
Thing-Fish medley of'Purple Haze' and 'Sunshine Of Your Love'
(the latter with Mike Keneally's bizarre 'Johnny Cash' for good
measure), from a sound check in Linz, and Led Zeppelin's
'Stairway To Heaven', with the brass section playing Jimmy Page's
original guitar solo note for note.
Towards the end of the second CD, there were 'Swaggart'
versions of'Lonesome Cowboy Burt', 'More Trouble Every Day'
and 'Penguin In Bondage', during which Frank provoked as much
laughter on stage as there was in the audience by incorporating
various details of Swaggart's disgrace into the lyrics. 'A Few
Moments With Brother A. West' was a cod 'sermon' from the man
who'd illustrated The Real Frank Zappa Book. Frank announced
later in the show that the 'sermon' was in fact a satire on the
spurious moral hysteria of the religious Right.
On Monday, April 15, Frank appeared on Berkeley's Radio
KPFA for a combined interview and phone-in with Charles
Amirkhanian, the inventor of a musical form he called 'text-
sound', during which he revealed that he might enter the following
year's Presidential race. "I don't want to be connected with any
party. In fact, I think that the condition of politics in the United
States right now is so drastic that any thinking individual who still
says he belongs to a party is just kidding himself, because neither
party is doing anything for anybody except their buddies."14
Thereafter, for several months there was talk of a feasibility study,
which fell victim to the weight of work and Frank's uncertain
health.
During a second appearance on Amirkhanian's programme on
Monday, May 20, there was mention of what was to be the last
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The Torture Never Stops
major event in Frank's musical life. "On Thursday, there's a group
of people who are coming to visit me from Germany, and they've
invited me to write a major piece for the Frankfurt Festival for
1992."15 At the meeting with Dr Dieter Rexroth, in charge of
the Festival, film-maker Henning Lohner and Andreas Molich-
Zebhauser, manager of the Ensemble Modern, it was agreed that
instead of one large orchestral work, Frank would prepare a set of
compositions, some of which would receive their premiere. The
18-strong Ensemble would come to Los Angeles for two weeks in
July, so that both parties could assess the potential of their
collaboration.
Another project nearing fruition was a stage presentation of
Broadway The Hard Way, already postponed twice from October
1990 and March 1991. It was the brainchild of conductor Joel
Thome, with whom Frank had collaborated ten years previously
on a tribute to Varese. By May, the project had broadened.
"Almost two years have gone by [since the original idea]," Mike
Keneally explained, "and so it makes more sense to do a lot more
music from a lot more phases of Frank's career."16
"This is a wonderful opportunity to pay tribute to Frank," said
Thome. "He's such an important force in music with such a
passionate vision, so it's our way of saying, 'Thank you'."17 By
September, the show had been redded Zappa's Universe and
Zappanauts would be attending The Ritz in New York City for
four days beginning on Thursday, November 7.
Make A Jazz Noise Here, released in June, concentrated on
instrumentals, including 'Big Swifty', 'King Kong', 'Dupree's
Paradise' and 'Stricdy Genteel', which gave individual members of
me band generous solo space. 'When Yuppies Go To Hell' was an
outstanding representation of the group improvisation that took
place every night. The almost 15-minute collage began with a
dieme written during the tour which Frank entided 'Desiccated',
while later parts were taken from performances of'A Pound For A
Brown On The Bus'. Scott Thunes contributed arrangements of
die Royal March from Stravinsky's L'Histoire Du Soldat and the
dieme from Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 3. Unfortunately, copyright
problems with these and Ravel's Bolero on Best Band subsequendy
led to public apologies and a temporary withdrawal of stock.
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Frank Zappa
As Make A Jazz Noise Here was released, Jimmy Swaggart was
caught with another prostitute. "It comes out on the market," Frank
said to me, "and they catch him again. Some things never change."
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore 4 was issued at the same time.
Its time-frame ran from 1969 to 1988, with almost half the tracks
taken from 1984 performances. Of particular interest were the
original 1976 version of 'The Torture Never Stops' with Captain
Beefheart's vocal, a guest appearance by saxophonist Archie Shepp
on 'Let's Move To Cleveland', and the marathon guitar duel with
Steve Vai on a Rome recording of'Stevie's Spanking'.
On June 20, Frank flew to Russia once more, and four days later
arrived in Prague to join the celebrations marking the departure of
Soviet armed forces from Czechoslovakia. Later, at a concert
headed by Michael Kocab's group, The Prague Selection, he
strapped on a Fender Strat for the first time in three years, soloing
on a reggae instrumental. Before playing, he told the audience,
"I'm sure you already know it, but this is just the beginning of your
new future in this country, and as you confront the new changes
that will take place, please try to keep your country unique. Don't
change into something else. Keep it unique."18 At the next elec-
tion, the country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
A few days later, he journeyed on to Hungary, where the mayor
of Budapest, Gabor Demszky, repaid the courtesy he'd received
when he'd been a guest at Frank's house earlier in the year. Once
again, he took up his guitar to perform with a local band at the
Tabanban, near Budapest. Photographs taken during the visit hint
at the toll the cancer treatment was taking on Frank, overweight
and with a haunted look in his eyes when not in the public gaze.
While his hair was as luxuriant and unruly as ever, his sideburns
were white, his moustache grey-flecked. It was as if the ageing
process was accelerating.
Frank returned via France and London, where on July 3 he
appeared on BBC Radio 4's Midweek with guests including the
Chieftains. Presenter Libby Purves asked about his Presidential
aspirations and Frank replied he was still doing "a feasibility study".
Nine days later, in a recorded interview for Radio l's News 91, he
commented, "We had kind of a chimpmaster turned President for
eight years, and now we have a spymaster turned President . . .
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The Torture Never Stops
We've seen the results in the US of a world invented for us by a
former used car salesman, and you can see the result of that. So,
how can a person from the world of culture make it any worse than
it already is?"19
By then, he and the Ensemble Modern were ensconced in Joe's
Garage, rehearsing and improvising. During a two-week stay, the
musicians were also 'sampled' at UMRK, so that Frank's eventual
compositions, developed in the Synclavier, would reflect their
individual capabilities. At the same time, the Ensemble's copyist,
Ali Askin, was recruited to prepare arrangements of previous Zappa
work for inclusion in the 90-minute programme. Frank responded
to the musicians' enthusiasm with some bizarre experimentation.
"There are two people in this group who play didgeridoos," he
told Don Menn. "One of them is the woman from Australia who is
also the oboe player [Catherine Milliken] ... I imagined this awful
sound that could be created if one were to take a didgeridoo and
play it into a partially filled coffee pot. And I asked her whether she
would do it. She said, 'Yes', and let me say, it is truly nauseating. I
was laughing so much I had to leave the room."20
Zappa fans didn't laugh when a set of Zappa boodegs was
released in October. Rhino had announced in March that they'd
teamed up with Frank on a separate deal for a 10-LP box-set
entided Beat The Boots! Release on the Foo-eee label had first been
scheduled for June. Frank had his reasons: "The only real answer to
boodegging is the use of tactical nuclear weapons but short of that,
the Foo-eee project is the most humane solution. In a 25-year
career, I've experienced the phenomenon of vast quantities of
boots being recorded, really bad recordings that pissed me off. . .
That's a pretty strong motivation to get back at these guys, and
that's where I got the idea to boodeg the boots."21
The final selection, made by the Zappa office from albums
supplied by Rhino employee Tom Brown, comprised, As An Am
(New York, 1981), Live At The Ark (Boston, 1968), Freaks &
Motherfuckers (New York, 1971), Unmitigated Audacity (Indiana,
1974), Any Way The Wind Blows (Paris, 1979), 'Tis The Season To
Be Jelly (Stockholm, 1967), Saarbrucken 1978 and Piquantique
(Stockholm/Sydney, 1973). The vinyl and cassette versions came
in a cardboard box with a T-shirt and button, the eight CDs in just
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Frank Zappa
their jewel-cases. "I haven't heard them myself, nor do I intend
to," said Frank. "I make no claim that any of the material contained
on these records is of any musical value whatsoever. Besides, if you
want crap, now you can get fully authorised affordable crap, and
maybe put some sleazebag out of business."22
In November, Zappa's Universe brought together the Orchestra
Of Our Time, conducted by Joel Thome, vocal groups The
Persuasions and Rockapella, and a band consisting of Mike
Keneally, Scott Thunes, keyboardists Mats Oberg and Marc
Ziegenhagen, drummer Morgan Agren and percussionist Jonathan
Haas. Guests included Steve Vai, Denny Walley, Dale Bozzio,
Lorin Hollander, and Moon, Diva and Dweezil. Each show,
featuring some 30 of Frank's compositions, began with a per-
formance of Erik Satie's Socrate, a work Thome thought appro-
priate. "In Satie, all the works add up to a single, powerful,
evolving idea. A similar thing happens with Zappa. Taken together,
Frank's works add up to one extraordinary opera."23
The first concert was filmed for video release, and both this and
the second night were recorded for CD release by Verve. Both
packages were issued in 1993, and as usual with Zappa releases,
their contents were sufficiently dissimilar to make it necessary for
fans to buy both. Drew Wheeler thought, "Thome's orchestrations
had the right Zappaesque flair,"24 taking particular notice of'Nite
School', 'Waka-Jawaka' and 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It'. Richard
Gehr picked out the same three numbers in his review, reckoning
that the first sounded "like a skittering skateboarder hanging ten on
an ice floe".25
Frank had been expected to attend, but mechanical problems
with his plane and the onset of flu kept him in California. Even so,
Moon and Dweezil had a more serious task when they called a
press conference at The Ritz on the afternoon of the first perform-
ance. "We're here to make a statement on behalf of our family,"
Moon began. "Although Frank was looking forward to being here
and really intended to be here, unfortunately he's not here. As
many of you know he's been diagnosed by journalists as having
cancer. We'd like you to know his doctors have diagnosed prostate
cancer which he's been fighting successfully and he has been
feeling well and working too hard and planned to attend. Up until
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The Torture Never Stops
the last minute we were still hoping he would feel well enough to
get on a plane and come here. There are occasional periods where
he's not feeling as well and it's really unfortunate it happened to
coincide with this event."26
So the news was finally out. Newspaper reports had Frank at
death's door with weeks to live. The truth, though serious, was less
alarming. "Although a bad day rolls around every couple of weeks,
it hasn't interrupted his work schedule, which is feverish to say the
least," said Frank's publicist, Sean Mahoney. "The stories of him
being in the hospital in critical condition are totally exaggerated.
He's in the studio most of the day, and when he's not, he's glued to
C-SPAN or CNN."27
Apart from preparing the final volumes of You Can't Do That
On Stage Anymore, Frank was hard at work on the scores for the
Frankfurt Festival. I talked with him during the afternoon of
November 30. For the first three hours, we talked about his career,
and then our conversation moved on to wider topics, including
what he saw as the "plague" of "affirmative action" and the break-
down of an education system which produced school-leavers who
were "ignorant with style". "It's 52 per cent illiteracy here in the
United States by the latest estimate. When you figure that that
number is arrived at by averaging things out, that means that in
some places the literacy is 99 per cent, in other places it's 9 per cent
or 2 per cent. Hollywood is probably at the lower end of the scale."
Why did no one pursue excellence anymore? "They don't dare.
Excellence costs money and not everybody can do it. There is no
governmental mandate that every manufacturer should have a
certain number of people that are excellent. You must have a
certain number of people of a certain colour and a certain sex but
none of them must be excellent. In fact, if they are, you're in big
trouble.
"How can you compete with countries that make products
which are in fact excellent, when you have a non-excellent
workforce, with non-excellent designers and non-excellent man-
agers making non-excellent decisions to steer the path into a
non-excellent future? You got it, we got it. It's because Thatcher
and Reagan took all those rides in that fucking golf-cart together. I
just want to know which one had their hand on the little steering
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Frank Zappa
stick." A bit later, he added, "The damage has been done to this
country since Reagan took office - actually, the shit hit the fan
with Richard Nixon, the first major imperial presidency. And then
Reagan and now Bush, this pitiful, ignorant . . .," he let out an
anguished sigh, "it just makes my flesh crawl to think of what he's
doing in there."
As 1992 began, there was talk of a second Beat The Boots! set to
be released in May, comprising Disconnected Synapses (Paris, 1970),
Tengo Na Minchia Tanta (New York, 1970), Electric Aunt Jemima
Penver, 1968), At The Circus (Munich, 1978), Swiss Cheese/Fire!
(Montreux, 1971), Our Man In Nirvana (Fullerton, 1968) and Con-
ceptual Continuity (Detroit, 1976). Since its release, the first vinyl set
had gone through three pressing runs totalling 20,000 units. Geoff
Gans, art director of the project, had been nominated for a
Grammy in the 'best album art' category. Despite the sales, Frank's
opinion had not improved: "Let's say you had a turd. If you took
the turd and buffed it, you'd still have a turd. And that's what you
have with these releases — a digital replication of a buffed turd."28
During the same interview, he anticipated the September con-
certs: "This is a special thing for me. The Frankfurt Festival is
investing an enormous amount of money to do an entire week of
my music ... I think the project in Frankfurt is going to open the
door for a lot more work in the classical music field. You know, if
you're my age, that's not a bad age to be a classical composer. But
it's a terrible age to be a rock'n'roll musician."29
The Ensemble Modern concerts were now set for September
17-19 at Frankfurt's Alte Oper, September 22/23 in Berlin's
Philharmonie, and September 26-28 in Vienna's Konzerthaus. In
addition, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie would perform 'Bogus
Pomp' at the Alte Oper on September 20. With some reluctance,
Frank had acquiesced in naming the concerts The Yellow Shark. On
seeing the yellow fibreglass fish in Frank's listening room, Andreas
Molich-Zebhauser had taken it as an appropriate symbol for the
event, even if its sailfin identified it as a marlin. He took its humor-
ous representation of a predator to be a metaphor for some of
Frank's own character traits. Made from a surfboard, it had been
created in 1986 by Mark Beam and left in the Zappas' driveway as
an anonymous Christmas present.
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The Torture Never Stops
On July 13, Frank, accompanied by Gail and Moon, flew
to Frankfurt for two weeks of preliminary rehearsals with the
Ensemble. Eight days later, he held a press conference at the Hotel
Frankfurter Hof, telling reporters that each concert would be "an
evening of entertainment, with a lot of different aspects to it." All
of the shows in the concert series would be recorded live, and with
improvisation taking place every night. "We think that by the time
that all of the material is collected, it will be enough for two CDs."
Asked if this was the end of his career as a rock'n'roll musician, he
laughed and replied, "God, I hope so. At 51,1 better be looking for
another job."30
The final volumes of You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore were
released in August. 5,000 copies of YCDTOSA 5 & 6 came in a
pink storage box that could house all six double-CDs. Fans with
less money could buy YCDTOSA 5 straight away but had to
wait until November to get YCDTOSA 6 as a separate item.
YCDTOSA 5 devoted one disc to the 1982 band with Steve Vai.
For the other disc, he showcased the 1969 band, adding a 1965
Fillmore West recording by the original band with Elliot Ingber.
Noting the sound was not exactly 'hi-fi', he'd compiled the tracks
"for the amusement of those collectors who still believe that the
only 'good' material was performed by those early line-ups".31 Disc
One of YCDTOSA 6 featured songs "dealing generally with the
topic of sex (safe and otherwise)", including 'The M.O.I. Anti-
Smut Loyalty Oath', 'The Madison Panty-Sniffing Festival', 'Make
A Sex Noise' and 'I Have Been In You'. There was an aroma of
Halloween to Disc Two, with six of its 15 tracks recorded over
several such nights at New York's Palladium. The monumental
series bowed out with a 1981 Halloween version of 'Stricdy
Genteel'.
Frank returned to Frankfurt early in September for final re-
hearsals with the Ensemble Modern. Marten were complicated by
the use of a six-channel playback system which surrounded the
audience for which each musician was miked up and channelled to
a particular speaker. A further refinement was 'the hoop', a ring of
six microphones which could be lowered over a musician's head,
so that the house mixer could cross-fade from the entire Ensemble
down to one instrument. There was also the Canadian dance
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Frank Zappa
troupe, La La La Human Steps, three male and three female dancers
who Frank had seen on video and requested their involvement.
The final programme fully repaid the effort put in by everyone
involved. Many compositions received their world premieres:
'Amnerika', 'Beat The Reaper' (for Synclavier and dancers), 'Food
Gathering In Post-Industrial America', 'Get Whitey', 'N-Lite' (for
Synclavier), 'Pentagon Afternoon', 'Ruth Is Sleeping' (for two
pianos), and 'Welcome To The United States'. There were also
new arrangements of 'Dog/Meat', 'Be-Bop Tango', 'G-Spot
Tornado', 'The Girl In The Magnesium Dress', 'None Of The
Above' (for string quartet), 'Outrage At Valdez', 'A Pound For A
Brown On The Bus' and 'Times Beach' (for wind quintet).
On the opening night, Frank conducted the improvised Overture
and later, 'Food Gathering' and 'Welcome To The United States'.
Otherwise, Peter Rundel, the Ensemble's usual conductor, led the
proceedings. The evening's climax was a manic performance of
'G-Spot Tornado' with dancers and an even faster encore of the
same piece minus the dance troupe. An ailing Frank received a
standing ovation from the audience. The news that he wouldn't
attend the second night came as no surprise, although the rest of
the Zappa family were present, as they were for each concert. "If I
hadn't been sick," he said later, "the experience would have been
exhilarating. Unfortunately, I felt so excruciatingly shitty that it
was hard to walk, to just get up onto the stage, to sit, to stand up.
You can't enjoy yourself when you're sick, no matter how enthusi-
astic the audience."32 He was able to attend the final Frankfurt
performance, but then had to return home on September 22,
missing the performances in Berlin and Vienna.
The first night was videotaped and broadcast live on Premiere,
Germany's pay television channel. Peefeeyatko, Henning Lohner's
film about Frank, was shown in the foyer of the Alte Oper each
evening. In the run-up to the shows, German television showed a
pair of documentaries, Anything, Any Place, Any Time, For No
Reason At All and Kulturplus, covering the preparations for The
Yellow Shark. The final section of Anything contained an unreleased
1988 guitar solo accompanying footage of the LA riots incited by
the police beating of Rodney King. "We had television sets in the
bar during intermission showing the finest of American cultural
386

The Torture Never Stops
entertainment. On one set, nonstop riot. On another, nonstop
televangelists. On another, C-SPAN. On another, Desert Storm.
You got to have your light beer and watch the American media at
its finest."33
Health had become the determining factor in his work rate.
"Some days you can do more than others. Part of the problem is
that it hurts to sit some days, and this work is done sitting at a com-
puter terminal. I used to be able to work 16, 18 hours a day and just
get up from my chair and go to sleep and go back to work, and it
was fine. But some days I can't work at all. Some days I can work
two hours. Some days I can work ten."34
Before leaving for Frankfurt, he'd prepared Playground Psychotics
for release in October, a double-CD combining 1971 gigs by the
Flo & Eddie band at the Fillmore East, UCLA's Pauley Pavilion
and the ill-fated Rainbow Theater, with on-the-road dialogue
recorded by Frank and Mark Volman and sections of soundtrack
from The True Story Of 200 Motels video. Taking its tide from a
chance remark by Jeff Simmons, the collection's highlights were a
30-minute version of'Billy The Mountain' and Frank's mix of the
jam session with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. As Frank noted, the
latter was "substantially different" from what had appeared on Some
Time In New York City.
ZAPPA!
Throughout the previous spring, as preparations for the Frankfurt
Festival went ahead, Frank had also been interviewed for a special
magazine to be joindy published by Guitar Player and Keyboard.
Beginning in April, editor Don Menn conducted a series of talks
with Frank, culminating in a week of interviews during June. From
being a tribute to Frank's career, the project grew to encompass the
whole of his enterprises. As well as interviews with every member
of the Zappa family, all his technical staff at UMPvK and Joe's
Garage explained their functions. Nicholas Slonimsky, Kent Nagano
and Andreas Molich-Zebhauser lent their weight to Frank's status
as a leading American composer, while Warren De Martini and
Aynsley Dunbar reinforced his rock credentials. In all, Menn
recorded between 40 and 60 hours of material, some with assistance
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Frank Zappa
from The Simpsons cartoonist Matt Groening, from which the
100-page Zappa! was culled.
As public awareness of his condition increased, he had to
contend with the attentions of the world's press. He told David
Sheffhe'd become "very time-budget conscious. Certain things are
very time-consuming and the time spent doing them is productive.
Other things are time-consuming and it's like being hijacked. I
have a low tolerance for wasting time. I try not to be irritable about
it, but it's my main concern. I'm trying to live my life the same way
that I lived it before."35
At the time of the interview, he was 40 pounds overweight, "a
walking balloon", from medication that filled him up with water.
"The week before last I found myself in the hospital for three days
riddled with morphine. That was definitely an experience I don't
want to repeat. When I got out, it took almost ten days to get the
residue of all the drugs they'd given me out of my body." Worst
of all was the effect that drugs had on his ability to make decisions
of any kind. "If you can't trust your own judgement, that's really
hard. When you're writing music, every note you put down is a
judgement call."36
In February 1993, an impromptu recording soiree was arranged,
bringing together the disparate forces of The Chieftains, L. Shankar,
Terry Bozzio, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson and a trio of Tuvan throat
singers, brought along by Matt Groening. The session was video-
taped by a BBC crew for inclusion in a BBC2 Late Show tribute
that was broadcast on Thursday, March 11. The 40-minute
programme combined archive film and video footage and inter-
views with Groening, Jim 'Motorhead' Sherwood, Ruth Under-
wood, Steve Vai, Dweezil and Ahmet. For his own interview,
Frank appeared wan and bloated but his tongue was as sharp as
ever, even if his humour was now more waspish than cynical.
It was increasingly apparent that only so many projects would be
completed before his health deteriorated completely. "I used to be
a night owl, but now I'm usually in bed by six or seven in the
evening. It's hard for me to work a real long day anymore. I'm up
at 6.30 in the morning. If I can do a 12-hour shift, then I feel I'm
really doing something."37 Critical judgement was hard to sustain.
"During one period, I was working on some pieces that I let go
388

The Torture Never Stops
before their time. Since they hadn't been released yet, as I gradually
felt better, I went back and worked on them to make sure that the
level of competence was maintained."38 Projects included the
ongoing Civilization: Phaze III, The Lost Episodes and Dance Me
This, an album of Synclavier music designed for modern dance
groups. The first had become an 'Opera Pantomime' which Frank
hoped would be performed in May 1994 as part of the Vienna
Festival.
Other plans included further collaboration with the Ensemble
Modern. Andreas Molich-Zebhauser discussed the possibility of
Frank preparing a 22-minute video for a concert the group would
play in Cologne in May, and there was talk of the Ensemble
playing an evening of Zappa 'theatrical works' such as 'Billy The
Mountain' and 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It' in May 1995. In July,
he and the Ensemble recorded The Rage And The Fury: The Music
Of Edgard Varhe. "Frank didn't want to call it a tribute," said
engineer Spencer Chrislu. "He felt Varese is completely misunder-
stood, and he didn't think the music had ever been performed
properly. At one point," Chrislu added, "Frank told the Ensemble,
'You're all wonderful, technical musicians. But now it's time to
put some eyebrows on it.' He wanted them to feel the music and
get in touch with the emotions waiting to come out of it."39
As spring became summer, his face adorned the covers of a
number of magazines, among them Rock CD, Guitarist, Cutting
Edge and the weekend supplement of The Guardian. For the cover
of Pulse!, photographer Aldo Mauro managed to get a fully bearded
Frank to smile, but the sombre portrait inside caught a more
haunted and pained expression. He also submitted to a Playboy
interview but didn't make the cover. Inevitably, interviewers
brought up the subject of his health, with varying degrees of tact.
Asked by Joe Jackson if his condition was terminal, Frank replied,
"Everything is terminal. But as to the question of whether it is in
the short term, the only thing I can say is that I hope not. It all
depends. That's why, right now, I've got to leave you and go into
my bedroom and have a blood transfusion."40
Alex Kershaw eschewed a direct question but portrayed the
reality of Frank's condition: "The real Frank Zappa finally stands
up, simply a man racked with pain, awash with drugs, and slowly
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Frank Zappa
climbs up stone steps leading to the kitchen, his fingers gripping the
brick wall as if he were clinging to life itself."41 Earlier in their con-
versation, Frank had disparaged the recent election that had put a
Democrat, Bill Clinton, into the White House. One outcome had
been the resignation of Tipper Gore from the PMRC, now that
husband Al was Vice-President. "The media likes to give the
illusion that [she] and I are mortal enemies. That's not a fact. She
sent me a sweet letter when she heard I was sick, and I appreciate
that."42
As 1993 drew towards its close, so did Frank's life. "Even when
he couldn't get out of bed much, I would go up and see him," said
Chrislu, "and he would want a full report of what was being done
in the studio. He definitely wanted to be part of it."43 The Yellow
Shark was issued to critical acclaim on November 2: Frank Zappa
the American composer had finally found a group of musicians
who were capable of accurately interpreting some of his most diffi-
cult music. When he became bedridden, friends from the old days
would gather at his bedside and listen with him to the doo-wop
records that had been his early inspiration and an enduring
pleasure.
On Monday, December 6, the Zappa family issued a statement:
"Composer Frank Zappa left for his final tour just before 6 pm on
Saturday, December 4, 1993, and was buried Sunday, December 5,
1993, during a private ceremony attended by the family. He was
with his wife Gail and four children, Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet and
Diva at home in Los Angeles at the time of his death."
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22
OUTRO
Here lies a cavalier of fame,
Whose dauntless courage soar'd so high,
That death, which can the boldest tame,
He scom'd to flatter, or to fly.
A constant bugbear to the bad,
His might the world in arms defy'd,
And in his life though counted mad,
He in his perfect senses dy'd.
Don Quixote, Book Four, Chapter 21
Miguel de Cervantes
(Translated by Tobias Smollett, 1755)
Both the Los Angeles Times and the Daily News put Frank's death on
the front pages of their December 6 editions. To one, he was
the "Iconoclast of Rock", to the other, an "Offbeat musician-
composer". Both quoted friend and journalist Rip Rense, "As a
musician, as a composer he was absolutely driven. The man lived to
create art. If he loved anything better than art, it was his life, it was
his family." The announcement came too late for the British daily
press, but Monday's Evening Standard ran a piece that paraphrased
quotes from the Daily News.
The following day, the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times
carried an appreciation by Daniel Schorr, senior news analyst for
National Public Radio. In a piece that had been commissioned
some months in advance, he described how he and Frank had
become friends. "It took me a long time to realise that behind
the angry dirty words about conspiratorial government and the
mediocrity of the world around him was hidden a true musical
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Frank Zappa
genius who cared a lot about young people. Like a Pied Piper, he
wanted to use music to lead young people to an interest in politics."
Schorr went on: "Frank also liked being contrary. If you talked
about his success, he said he was a failure. If you noted his popular-
ity, he said he was lonely. Maybe he was. The world around him
contained too much crassness, too much mediocrity, too much
homogenisation. It could not offer enough scope for his enormous
creativity and individuality. So he denounced it with dirty words.
But, I imagine that the quickest thing about Frank Zappa to fade
from memory will be all the windmills at which he tilted. What
will be remembered is his restless search for new forms, his open
mind for new musical meanings. And his dedication to 'kids', his
own and the world's."1
A penchant for "dirty words" and mythologised dirty deeds were
an inescapable ingredient in British press obituaries, which varied
from sound-bite trivia in The Sun to comprehensive coverage in
The Times, with an obituary (which called him "an obstreperous
and delightfully barking mad spirit"), a perceptive appreciation by
music journalist David Toop and an article on prostate cancer.
Every journal struggled to make a coherent whole of Frank's many
disparate achievements. Typically, the Daily Mail called him
"America's sonic satirist", "brilliandy avant garde, he never out-
grew a fondness for smut".
In the Daily Mirror, The Guardian, The Independent and the
following weekend's Sunday Times, Frank was the "father of
invention'; for Today, he was the "rock perfectionist who didn't
care how he was remembered." All referred to his fight against
censorship and his defiant political stance. The Daily Express
repeated a 1988 quote from LA's Daily News: "I was asked, 'Don't
you think you should be more subde in your approach?' With
reading and listening comprehension where they are in the United
States, it is time to get out the baseball bat."
While several papers mentioned it, the Daily Telegraph repro-
duced the 'Phi Zappa Krappa' poster alongside Charles Shaar
Murray's appreciation. Robin Denselow quoted Frank on the
subject in The Guardian: "I'm very famous, but the number of
people who know my music as opposed to seeing a poster of me
sitting on the toilet is very disproportionate." In the same edition,
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Outro
Adam Sweeting thought "Zappa was too inquisitive and provoca-
tive to be easily pigeonholed, and it will take years for his achieve-
ments to be fully appreciated."
Back in Los Angeles, Jack Skelley began his LA Reader obituary:
"Frank Zappa was the strange uncle in the family of late-20th-
century music. Misunderstood by most of the relatives but held in
awe by those too young or tolerant to be put off, he was never
given his proper seat at the table." People managed to extract a suit-
able coffee-table cliche from Alice Cooper: "Everybody that was
considered a genius, from The Beatles to Brian Wilson, looked to
Zappa as the genius."
Further afield, the December 20 New Yorker had two tributes:
Matt Groening reckoned, "What kept me and so many other
people percolating to Zappa's music for the past 27 years was the
thrill of hitching a ride with a critical mind that was always pushing
into uncharted territory." Vaclav Havel evinced Frank's stature in
the Czech underground and his sincere interest in the country's
future as a democratic state. "I thought of Frank Zappa as a friend.
Meeting him was like entering a different world from the one I live
in as President. Whenever I feel like escaping from that world - in
my mind, at least -1 think of him."
The February Musician carried tributes from ex-bandmembers
Mark Volman, Ruth Underwood, Bruce Fowler, Adrian Belew,
Chad Wackerman and Mike Keneally, as well as (Miss) Pamela Des
Barres, Cal Schenkel, Matt Groening and Daniel Schorr. Pierre
Boulez called Frank "an exceptional figure" in both the pop and
classical worlds. "His musicianship was very extensive. He did not
say much but he knew much more than one could have thought."
Mike Keneally was infuriated that Frank had been misunderstood:
"He was always fond of saying that his life was a series of failures.
Every artist has a lot of projects that never quite get off the ground.
But when you see what he did accomplish and how many people it
reached, I'd say that his career was a massive success." Joel Thome
was succinct: "The silence of Frank's voice is deafening; the sound
of his music will live forever."
Considering the abrasive nature of his relationship with Rolling
Stone, the magazine's five-page tribute in RS 674, written by
David Fricke, was generous. Or perhaps it was compensation for
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Frank Zappa
the fact that, though a nominee for the 1994 awards, they'd
neglected to induct him into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame while
he was still alive. After all, his opinion of such events was scathing:
"Taste is reinforced by what gets broadcast, and it's reinforced by
who receives those stupid awards on those horrible award shows
that keep coming up over and over and over again."2 When the
likelihood of him boycotting or disparaging the event was gone, he
was inducted into the hallowed portals on January 12, 1995, with
Moon accepting on her father's behalf. By an exquisite irony, the
inductor was Lou Reed, who called Frank "a force for reason and
honesty in a business deficient in these areas." Downbeat critics had
elected him with less ceremony into their own Hall of Fame in
September 1994.
A more celestial honour had been bestowed in July, when
Minor Planet 3834 was designated Zappafrank. Dr John Scialli, a
psychiatrist from Phoenix, Arizona, had intended to attach Frank's
name to one of the three known planets to orbit another star, a
pulsar in the Virgo constellation. However, a radio contest opted
for naming them after the Three Stooges. In the end, an asteroid
discovered in May 1980 by L. Brozek at Klet Observatory in
Czechoslovakia was donated, in recognition of the fact that Frank
had been regarded as 'a symbol of democracy and freedom' during
the Soviet occupation of the country.
Another albeit transient memorial arrived on American tele-
vision screens on March 5, 1994, when a new cartoon series
debuted on the USA Network. Duckman, his tubular head topped
off with an extended quiff of orange hair, his eyes set in spectacles
halfway down his beak, was a 'Private Dick/Family Man'. That
family consisted of Aunt Bernice, twin sister of his dead (by his
own hand) wife Beatrice, children Ajax, Charles and Mambo,
'three sons in two bodies', and the comatose Grandmama, whose
only utterances were skirt-fluttering farts.
Created by the animators of The Simpsons, the first episode, I,
Duckman, had Frank Zappa all over it. The opening sequence
featured Senator Paula Hawkins' 'fire and chains' soliloquy from
'Porn Wars' as well as 'Let's Make The Water Turn Black', and the
soundtrack ended with Louis Cuneo's maniacal laughter. It was
'Dedicated with fond memories to Frank Zappa'. Frank's music
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Outro
was used 'by appointment to Her Majesty The Scarlet Pimpernel',
while original music was provided by Scott Wilk and Todd Yvega.
Dweezil supplied the voice of Ajax, a polite but mentally chal-
lenged teenager who couldn't always remember not to knock on
his own bedroom door.
IT JUST MIGHT BE A ONE SHOT DEAL
In the relatively short period since his death it's not possible to
quantify Frank Zappa's achievements or what impact his composi-
tions, of all kinds, will have on the history of music. Throughout
his career, he maintained diat he wrote music in order to hear what
it sounded like. We bought his records to see whether we liked
them. That was the contract. The pragmatism of his methods of
composition indicated that the results shouldn't bear the weight of
anything other than musical analysis.
Those who dip their hand in the bran-tub of philosophical
reasoning to bring forth a gaudy package of deeper meaning in
Frank's music should bear in mind the words of Robert De Niro's
character Michael in The Deer Hunter, as he gesticulates with a
bullet: "This is this. It ain't somethin' else. This is this." Frank told
his last interviewer the colour purple was just the combination of
red and blue. It had no other significance, and liking its hue
revealed nothing about an individual's character. Similarly, Frank's
significance is how he lived and the music he wrote. Any attempt
to force that through a distorting prism of supposition and specula-
tion is unlikely to bear consumable fruit.
Frank's 'serious' orchestral music was written under the influ-
ence of Varese, Stravinsky, Webern and others. Nicholas Slonimsky
found "the configuration of notes and contrapuntal combinations"
of his scores "remarkably Varesian".3 As such they weren't innova-
tive, but whether Frank was an original or a pasticheur ultimately
doesn't matter. Where he was innovative is in the way he applied
his compositional skills to explore the Synclavier's potential, its
capacity to create new sound textures and bizarre melodies, above
all its capacity to create complex rhythms beyond human execu-
tion. One interviewer noted, "He exults in the heady freedom that
his instrument confers."
395

Frank Zappa
"I've done dungs like 88 tuplets: 88 notes in the space of diree
quarter notes as a regular feature, played versus 35 notes. Thirty-five
over 88!"
What does that do to you? he was asked. "What does it do ? It
makes me want to dance!4
"Machines like this have made it possible for me to hear things I
never dreamed I would hear in terms of air molecules in life," he
added. As the available software became more sophisticated, so his
ideas and explorations proliferated. Civilization, Phaze III, his last
major original work and one it had taken him more than a decade
to complete, was released a year after his death. In it, he tied up the
loose ends that Lumpy Gravy had left dangling 26 years previously
and provided a chilling soundscape to underline his contention that
society's evils had worsened in the interim. "I think it's very much
about finishing his life," Gail told the Los Angeles Times. "He said
that after he finished this, he had nothing more to do. I asked him,
'Is there anything else you want to tell me about?' He said, 'No.
I've done everything that I can.' "5
Each disc of the 2-CD set contains a major composition, 'Beat
The Reaper' and 'N-Lite', the latter a continuous 18-minute work
in six parts. To scotch speculation about its tide, he explained, "It
was put together out of two unrelated sequences. There's a group
of notes in front of this one sequence that just happens to sound
like 'In The Navy' from that Village People song. You don't realise
it until it's gone by, and then - that's 'In The Navy'! So that's the
'N' and the 'Lite' part is this sequence that was basically a bunch of
very fast and short synthesiser pockets that had the computer tide,
'Thousand Points Of Light'."6
Phaze III is the proof that, before he died, Frank had stepped
across the threshold of a new musical vocabulary, which hopefully
won't have died with him. "There is nothing else in contemporary
music like it," Matt Groening asserted. "It's very thick and dense
and overpowering. Even if you think you know Frank Zappa's
music, I don't think anybody could be sufficiendy prepared for the
powerhouse that this thing represents."7
"I think [it] has a lot to do with Frank knowing that he wasn't
going to be able to realise a lot of the things that he wanted to,"
Gail said. "I don't think he was in a hurry, as much as he was
396

Outro
pragmatic and said, 'I can do this.' I see it as a big-time 'Thanks for
the Memories' in some ways."8
There was no such sentiment on Frank's behalf for the world
that he was leaving. It had long since lost any power to impress or
surprise him. During his BBC2 interview, he'd held up a glossy
magazine, Future Sex, and said, "Look, here it is the Nineties,
here's where we are. Shouldn't somebody say something about
people who will buy $1,000 dildo things that they plug into their
computer to do stuff to them with 3-D goggles attached to it?"
Then he used the situation to deliver a warning: "I think that if you
need a $1,000 dildo with a helmet, you'd better get it. Get it now.
Wear it to work. Stay happy. Because the Nineties are not going to
be a happy time. This may be your last chance."9
He'd made a more serious observation three years before: "I
think that what is being lost during this tail end of the 20th century
is the will on the part of the average American to be an individual.
The people seem to be too willing to just conform and be moulded
into some bland, obedient nothingness."10 Despite his pessimism
about the future, he'd made sure that his family would be provided
for. On October 7, 1994, Rykodisc announced it had purchased
the entire Zappa catalogue of more than 60 albums from the Zappa
Family Trust. The price was undisclosed but in order to gain sole
ownership, Rykodisc had to undergo a $44 million corporate
restructuring. Billboard reported the purchase in its October 29
edition, during which it mentioned that Frank had re-mastered the
albums for a second time, including an original two-track master of
We're Only In It For The Money to replace the overdubbed version.
The deal also covered a number of then unissued projects, includ-
ing The Lost Episodes and Have I Offended Anyone?
By her own admission, Gail had evinced little interest in selling
the catalogue, but Frank had been adamant. "He said, 'I want you
out of this business. I want you to relax and have a good time,'"
she told Drew Wheeler. "I very much appreciate that he was so
forceful about establishing how he wanted it sold."11
How has America fared since he left on his last tour? In one of
his last interviews, Frank anathematised its politics: "Hypocrisy is
not the special province of any one party or movement. It seems
to  be  rampant  everywhere.   The  Republicans  represent pure
397

Frank Zappa
unbridled evil and the Democrats wish they were Republicans. Up
until this [1992] election, they hadn't proved they had the mechan-
ical skills to execute the kind of trickery that makes the Republi-
cans what they are."12
On April 22, 1994, 14 days after Kurt Cobain achieved nirvana
with the aid of a 20-gauge shotgun, Richard Nixon made a slightly
more dignified exit. His funeral was an over-emotional orgy of
tributes to a dignified statesman of unimpeachable character, rather
than that of the only president forced to resign office to avoid
impeachment. Hunter S. Thompson redressed the balance in
Rolling Stone: "He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a
president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help
him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal.
He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been
burned in a trash bin."13 'Dickie's Such An Asshole' wasn't part of
the funerary music.
"There's been an incredible rise in racist and fascist attitudes
here," Frank told Dan Ouellette, "most of them being helped
along by the Republican Party. That Republican National Party
Convention last summer [1992] was just unbelievable. Even the set
decor looked like a Nuremberg rally. Hatemongers like Pat
Buchanan and Pat Robertson and the rest of the featured speakers
were convinced they were going to win again."14
When Bill Clinton proved to be as unfortunate a President as
Jimmy Carter, the previous Democratic incumbent, the Republi-
cans took their revenge in the 1994 mid-term elections, gaining
possession of the Senate and the House of Representatives. In
a landslide victory on November 8, Newt Gingrich deposed
Democrat Tom Foley to become the fint Republican Speaker of
the House for several decades. He immediately announced his
'Contract With America', a programme of reforms that prompted
his identification by one political commentator as "a talented
reactionary in the vengeful tradition of Gov. George Wallace and
Sen. Joseph McCarthy."15
One of the few Republican aspirants to fail was Oliver North,
the man who'd avoided punishment for lying to Congress over the
Iran-Contra scandal on a legal technicality. He and Democrat
Charles Robb turned the Virginia election into a slanging match.
398

Outro
North couldn't even be gracious in defeat, neglecting to wish his
opponent well as tradition demanded. Perhaps his disappointment
stemmed from the fact that he thought he'd had God on his side, or
at least His earthly manifestation in the person of Pat Robertson,
failed presidential candidate in 1988 and the dubious hero of
'When The Lie's So Big' and 'Jesus Thinks You're A Jerk'.
Robertson regrouped after his failure and formed the Christian
Coalition in 1989, dedicated to 'reclaiming America' for the
religious right. Its executive director, Ralph Reed, announced
after the election that 44 of 52 new Republican House members
had been elected with its support. The 'fascists with a cross' are still
on the march and they mean to keep their cash from the undeserv-
ing poor. But this time around, Frank Zappa won't be there to add
his weight to the drive to neuter Gingrich and his self-serving
crusaders.
That wasn't the only proof that gullibility and blind allegiance
are still mainstays of the American psyche. In the summer of 1994,
a film starring Tom Hanks, 'a half-wit's version of the American
Dream'16, took an initial $240 million at the American box office.
The book by Winston Groom on which it was based satirised the
very things that its audience scarfed up as readily and unquestion-
ingly as they did their Diet Coke and popcorn. And when Oscar
time came around, Hanks clutched the trophy that confirmed that
acting stupid brought rich rewards.
It was 'Valley Girl' gone nationwide. And it begged the
question:
Whatever would Frank Zappa have made of Forrest Gump?
399

Notes
INTRODUCTION
 1.	The Wire, 34/5, 1986, "The All American Composer", interview by Steve Lyons and
Batya Friedman.
 2.	Playboy, 1982, "20 Questions Frank and Moon Unit Zappa", interview by David and
Victoria Sheff.
CHAPTER 1    WHAT'S NEW IN BALTIMORE?
 1.	No Commercial Potential, David Walley (Dutton, 1972).
 2.	Spin, July 1991, "Signs OfThe Times", interview by Bob Guccione, Jr.
 3.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 4.	Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 30, 1988, "Democracy's Pitchman", interview by
Joe Morgenstern.
 5.	ibid.
 6.	See Note 1.
 7.	See Note 2.
 8.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 9.	Society Pages, 6, "Ode To Gravity".

 10.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 11.	Playboy, April 1993, "The Playboy Interview", by David Sheff.
 12.	ibid.
 13.	Bat Chain Pulley, "Rock & Roll In The Age Of Celebrity" (St Martin's Press, 1990),
1988 interview by Kurt Loder.
 14.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 15.	Beat The Boots! Vol. 2 (Foo-eee Records) Scrapbook.
 16.	Playboy, April 1993, interview by David Sheff.
 17.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 18.	Guitarist, June 1993, "Unholy Mother", interview by David Mead.
 19.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 20.	ibid.
 21.	Song Talk, Vol. 4, Issue 1, "The Song Talk Interview", by Paul Zollo.
 22.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 23.	The Real Frank Zappa Book, by Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso (Poseidon Press,
1989). This is actually adapted from "Edgard Varese, Idol Of My Youth", which Frank
wrote for the June 1971 issue of Stereo Review.
 24.	See Note 21.
 25.	Frank Zappa In His Own Words, edited by Miles (Omnibus Press, 1993), unattributed
1970 interview.
 26.	Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 30, 1988, "Democracy's Pitchman", by Joe
Morgenstern.
 27.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 28.	See Note 25.
 29.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 30.	See Note 17.
401

Frank Zappa
 31.	See Note 14.
 32.	No Commercial Potential, David Walley Putton, 1972).
 33.	Q, December 1989, "Frank's Wild Years", by Andy Gill.
 34.	ibid.
 35.	Pulse! August 1993, "A Rare Interview With Pop's Philosopher-King", interview by
Dan OueDette.
 36.	See Note 21.
 37.	ibid.
 38.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 39.	See Note 31.
 40.	Society Pages, 8, quote from TV interview, "Class Of The 20th Century", (A&E
Network).
 41.	See Note 22.
 42.	Rolling Stone, July 20,1968, "The Rolling Stone Interview", by Jerry Hopkins.
 43.	See Note 14.
CHAPTER 2    CRUISE*' FOR BURGERS
 1.	NME, August 9, 1986, "Go Van Go!", interview by Kristine McKenna.
 2.	Interview, "Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart", interview by John Yau.
 3.	Rotting Stone, 38, May 14, 1970, "The Odyssey Of Captain Beefheart", by Langdon
Winner.
 4.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 5.	ibid.
 6.	Guitarist, June 1993, "Unholy Mother", interview by David Mead.
 7.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 8.	Rolling Stone, July 20,1968, "The Rolling Stone Interview", by Jerry Hopkins.
 9.	See Note 6.

 10.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 11.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 12.	TMershi Duween
 13.	Society Pages, 10, "Corrections and Clarifications".
 14.	See Note 11.
 15.	Beat The Boots! Vol. 2 (Foo-eee Records) Scrapbook
 16.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 17.	ibid.
 18.	See Note 15.
 19.	See Note 11.
 20.	Colimine, January 27, 1989, "Moving On To Phase Three", interview by William
Ruhlmann.
 21.	ibid.
 22.	ibid.
 23.	See Note 15.
 24.	ibid.
 25.	See Note 20.
 26.	TMershi Duween.
 27.	Puke? August  1993,  "A Rare  Interview With Pop's Philosopher-King", by Dan
Ouellette.
 28.	Society Pages, 10, "Corrections and Clarifications", quote from a November 27, 1968
interview by Les Carter on KPPC radio.
 29.	No Commercial Potential, by David Walley (Dutton, 1972).
402

Notes
 30.	ibid.
 31.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 32.	ibid.
 33.	ibid.
 34.	ibid.
 35.	ibid.
 36.	ibid.
 37.	See Note 29.
 38.	ZigZag, 53, "The Earliest Days Of The Mothers: Just Another Band From L.A."
Unattributed interview in Pete Frame Family Tree.
 39.	Rolling Stone, July 20,1968, "The Rolling Stone Interview", by Jerry Hopkins.
 40.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 41.	ibid.
CHAPTER 3    PROJECT/OBJECT
 1.	Rolling Stone, July 20, 1968, "The Rolling Stone Interview", by Jerry Hopkins.
 2.	ZigZag, 53, "The Earliest Days Of The Mothers: Just Another Band From L.A."
Unattributed interview in Pete Frame Family Tree.
 3.	Beat The Boots! Vol. 2, Scrapbook.
 4.	See Note 2.
 5.	See Note 1.
 6.	See Note 2.
 7.	The Age Of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan Eisen,
"Zappa And The Mothers: Ugly Can Be Beautiful", by Sally Kempton. Reprinted from
Village Voice.
 8.	Q, December 1989, "Frank's Wild Yean", interview by Andy Gill.
 9.	See Note 1.

 10.	See Note 2.
 11.	ibid.
 12.	No Commercial Potential, by David Walley Putton, 1972).
 13.	Psychedelic Psounds, written and compiled by Allan Vorda (Borderline Productions,
1994), Bryan Maclean interview February 22-24,1993, by Neal Skok.
 14.	Society Pages, 1, "Corrections and Clarifications", quoted from booklet notes to 77k Old
Masters Box I.
 15.	Melody Maker interview.
 16.	77ie Real Frank Zappa Book, by Frank Zappa with Peter Ochiogrosso (Poseidon Press,
1989).
 17.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 18.	ibid.
 19.	See Note 10.
 20.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 21.	See Note 1.
 22.	ibid.
 23.	ibid.
 24.	ibid.
 25.	ibid.
 26.	See Note 2
 27.	NME, January 26,1974, "Kicks In The Ear: Zappa On His Musical Motivation", inter-
view by Jim Smith.
 28.	Victoria Winston interview, November 1994.
403

Frank Zappa
 29.	ibid.
 30.	See Note 2.
 31.	ibid.
 32.	ibid.
 33.	See Note 1.
 34.	See Note 2.
 35.	See Note 16.
 36.	Victoria Winston interview, November 1994.
 37.	Goldmine, November 26,1993, "Living and Dying in LA", by Steve Roeser.
 38.	The Rock Giants, edited by Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin (World, 1970), "Jefferson
Airplane", by Frank Kofsky, originally published January 1968.
 39.	See Note 1.
 40.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 41.	Victoria Winston interview, November 1994.
 42.	Rock Giants, edited by Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin (World Publishing, 1970),
"Frank Zappa: The Mothers Of Invention", interview by Frank Kofsky, September
1967.
 43.	See Note 2.
 44.	When The Music Mattered: Rock in the 1960s, by Bruce Pollock (Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1983).
 45.	Q, July 1993, "Party On, Dudes!", interview by Mat Snow.
 46.	Bill Graham Presents My Life Inside Rack And Out, by Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield
(Delta, 1992).
 47.	ibid.
 48.	Los Angeles Free Press, 114, September 16, 1966, original review quoted in Mothers
advertisement.
CHAPTER 4    FREAK OUT!
 1.	Beat The Boots! Vol. 2, Scrapbook.
 2.	ibid.
 3.	Los Angeles Times Calendar, August 7, 1966, "Popular Records: Pass Aspirin, Please",
record review by Pete Johnson.
 4.	Los Angeles Free Press, 114, September 16, 1966, original review quoted in Mothers
advertisement.
 5.	The Rock Giants, edited by Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin, "Frank Zappa: The
Mothers Of Invention", interview by Frank Kofsky, September 1967.
 6.	Uncovering The Sixties: The Life & Times Of The Underground Press, by Abe Peck (Pantheon,
1985).
 7.	ibid.
 8.	See Note 1.
 9.	ibid.

 10.	Los Angeles Free Press, 114, September 16, 1966, Washington Post, undated, "Top
Tunes", interview by Ronnie Oberman, quoted in Mothers advertisement.
 11.	Bat Chain Puller Rock & Roll In The Age Of Celebrity, by Kurt Loder (St Martin's Press,
1990), interview in Philadelphia, February 1988.
 12.	Detroit Free Press, July 15,1966, "Look Out Plastic People The Mothers Have Arrived",
interview by Reb Foster.
 13.	ibid.
 14.	Rock Wives, by Victoria Balfour (Beach Tree Books, 1986).
 15.	ibid.
404

Notes
 16.	ibid.
 17.	Billboard 25th Anniversary Supplement, May 19, 1990, "Just Plain Folks", by Drew
Wheeler.
 18.	The Real Frank Zappa Book, by Frank Zappa with Peter Ochiogrosso (Poseidon, 1989).
 19.	Rock Odyssey: A Chronicle Of The Sixties, by Ian Whitcomb Polphin, 1983).
 20.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 21.	Record Mirror, December 16,1967, "Frank Zappa - the Hitler of song, says Eric".
 22.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 23.	Los Angeles Free Press, 106, Jury 29, 1966, "Guambo Is An Act Of Love - Mothers,
Happenings, Dancing", by Jerry Hopkins.
 24.	ibid.
 25.	Los Angeles Free Press, 110, August 26, 1966.
 26.	Los Angeles Free Press, review quoted in Mothers advertisement.
 27.	ZigZag, "Huge Stars, Big Hearts And Little Feat, The Exploits Of Lowell George",
interview by Andy Childs.
 28.	Los Angeles Free Press, 113, September 9, 1966.
 29.	Los Angeles Free Press, 117, October 14, 1966, "Tinsel Town", by Sean McGregor.
 30.	Los Angeles Free Press, 119, October 28, 1966, "M.O.I. Literary Review: Mothers
Mourn McGregor's Cop Out".
 31.	Los Angeles Free Press, 130, January 13, 1967, "Why Kids Have Taken Protest Into
Streets", interview by Raymond Gruenther.
 32.	Los Angeles Free Press, 128, December 30, 1966, "Zappa Zaps The Big Lie", interview
by Lisa Williams.
 33.	ibid.
 34.	ZigZag, 53, "The Earliest Days Of The Mothers: Just Another Band From L.A.",
unattributed interview in Pete Frame Family Tree.
 35.	ibid.
 36.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 37.	See Note 5.
 38.	Let It Rock, June 1975, "What Did You Do In The Revolution, Dada?", by Karl Dallas,
quote from 1967 International Times article.
 39.	See Note 5.
 40.	Leatherette, 1972 radio interview with Martin Perlich.
 41.	77k Lives & Times Of Zappa & The Mothers (Babylon Books).
 42.	ibid.
 43.	ibid.
CHAPTER 5    LUMPY GRAVY
 1.	Playboy, April 1993, "The Playboy Interview", by David Sheff.
 2.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 3.	Los Angeles Free Press, 134, February 10, 1967, "Zappa Freakers Return", concert
review by Nat Freedland.
 4.	Rolling Stone, April 27, 1968, "Mothers' Lament: They Called Us Entertainment", by
Sue C. Clark.
 5.	ibid.
 6.	Broken Record: The Inside Story Of The Grammy Awards by Henry Schipper (Birch Lane
Press, 1992). The back of the dust jacket contains an alphabetical list of significant
winners, including Alabama, Debby Boone (you remember), The Chipmunks and B.J.
Thomas. The list ends with Yes and Pinchas Zukerman. Henry, shame on you.
 7.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
405

Frank Zappa
 8.	The Independent On Sunday, July 7, 1991, "Blinded By The Hype", by Simon Garfield.
 9.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.

 10.	Bat Chain Roller: Rock & Roll In The Age Of Celebrity, by Kurt Loder (St. Martin's Press,
1990).
 11.	Billboard 25th Anniversary Supplement, May 19, 1990, "Just Plain Folks", by Drew
Wheeler.
 12.	Guitarist, June 1994, "The Cuitarist Interview", by David Mead.
 13.	Downbeat, October 30,1969, "Frank Zappa: The Mother of Us All", interview by Larry
Kart.
 14.	The Rock Giants, edited by Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin (World, 1970), "Frank
Zappa: The Mothers Of Invention", interview by Frank Kofiky, September 1967.
 15.	The Wire, 34/5, "The All American Composer", interview by Steve Lyons and Batya
Friedman.
 16.	The Age Of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan Eisen
(Vintage, 1969), "In Person: The Mothers Of Invention", by Doon Arbus. Reprinted
from an issue of Cheetah,
 17.	ibid.
 18.	Music Maker, October 1967, "Speaking Of Mothers, Meet Frank", by Valerie Wilmer.
 19.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 20.	ibid.
 21.	See Note 15.
 22.	When The Music Mattered: Rock In The 1960s, by Bruce Pollock (Holt, Rinehart Winston,
1983).
 23.	Rolling Stone, July 20, 1968, "The Rolling Stone Interview", by Jerry Hopkins.
 24.	See Note 13.
 25.	ibid.
 26.	See Note 22.
 27.	ibid.
 28.	Goldmine, January 27, 1989, "Moving On To Phase Three", interview by William
Ruhlmann.
 29.	See Note 13.
 30.	See Note 27.
 31.	Music Technology, February 1987, "Father Of Invention", interview by Rick Davies.
 32.	See Note 9.
 33.	See Note 11.
CHAPTER 6    DEAD GIRLS IN LONDON
 1.	Melody Maker, June 24, 1967, "Mothers Here In October".
 2.	Melody Maker, August 26, 1967, "Meet the Boss Mother sussing out Britain", by Nick
Jones.
 3.	Melody Maker, September 2, 1967, "Zappa Must Be Joking!"
 4.	ibid., "The Raver".
 5.	Daily Sketch, August 22, 1967, "My World of Pop", by Ann Nightingale. "Why this
bearded Mother isn't flower powered".

 6.	77k Observer Review, August 20, 1967, "Advertising is beautiful".
 7.	Intro, September 23,1967, "In It For The Money".
 8.	Record Mirror, September 2,1967, "Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention - the Hard
Guy who doesn't radiate love .. .", interview by David Griffiths.
 9.	Melody Maker, August 26, 1967, "Meet A Mother!"
10. Daily Sketch, September 19, 1967, "Musically It's A Freak-Out".
406

Notes
 11.	The Sun, September 18, 1967, "Wild".
 12.	Evening News, September 19, 1967, " 'Mother' Frank settles it - Yes, his hair is real".
 13.	Sunday Mirror, September 24, 1967, "Mothers Stun 'Em", concert review by Bernard
McElwaine.
 14.	Melody Maker, September 30, 1967, "Mothers - Almost A Freak Out, Not A Love In,
Definitely A Send Up!", concert review by Nick Jones.
 15.	NME, September 30, 1967, "Mothers Woo In-Crowd", concert review by 'J.W.'
 16.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 17.	ibid.
 18.	VMershi Duween, 38, "Miles Of Zappa: Interview 30.5.69, Part One", interview by
Miles.
 19.	The Age Of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan Eisen,
"Ugly Can Be Beautiful", by Sally Kempton. Reprinted from Village Voice.
 20.	ibid.
 21.	Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1968, "Does This Mother Know Best?", by W.H.
Manville.
 22.	Musician, February 1994, "Frank Zappa", interviews by Scott Isler, Jim Macnie, Kristine
McKenna, Mark Rowland, Roy Trakin and Josef Woodard.
 23.	Late Show Special, BBC2, March 11,1993.
 24.	Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1968, "More Polemics From Pop Satirist", record review
by Pete Johnson.
 25.	Melody Maker, June 15, 1968, "Zappa masterminds a Mothers' masterpiece", record
review by Bob Houston.
 26.	The Rock Giants, edited by Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin (World, 1970), "My
Brother Is An Italian Mother", by C.R. Zappa, originally published August 1968.
 27.	ibid.
 28.	Newsweek, June 3, 1968, "Zapping With Zappa".
 29.	Rolling Stone, June 22, 1968, record review by Jim Miller.
 30.	Rolling Stone, July 20, 1968, "The Rolling Stone Interview", by Jerry Hopkins.
 31.	Beat The Boots! Vol. 2, Scrapbook.
CHAPTER 7    OUR BIZARRE RELATIONSHIP
 1.	Melody Maker, October 5, 1968, "Reviled, revered Mother Superior", interview by
Chris Welch.
 2.	Rolling Stone, February 15,1969, "The Plaster Casters".
 3.	ibid.
 4.	Evening Standard, September 24,1968.
 5.	The Guardian, October 14, 1968, "Chief Mother of Invention", by Stacy Waddy.
 6.	Der Abend, October 17, 1968, "The Toys Are All Broken", by Helmut Kopetzky.
Translated by Norman Darwen.
 7.	ZigZag, 3, "Zigzag Unzips Frank Zappa", interviewed by Dick Lawson at the Royal
Albert Hall.
 8.	Daily Sketch, November 5, 1968. The review continued, "Or the Incredible String
Band — two musicians incredible indeed, from Scotland. They're knocking everyone
out here and in America."
 9.	Mojo, March 1994, "The Grand Wazoo", interview by Miles.

 10.	Beat The Boots! Vol. 2, Scrapbook.
 11.	Downbeat, October 30,1969, "Frank Zappa: The Mother Of Us All", by Larry Kart.
 12.	I'm With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie, by Pamela Des Barres (William Morrow,
1987).
407

Frank Zappa
 13.	See Note 2.
 14.	ibid.
 15.	ibid.
 16.	See Note 11.
 17.	ZigZag, "The answer is blowing in the wind: I think they're going to have to get more
kites", interview by Ben Edmunds.
 18.	ibid.
 19.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 20.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 21.	Unactributed interview, November 8, 1969.
 22.	See Note 7.
 23.	See Note 17.
 24.	See Note 9.
 25.	Days In The Life: Voices From the English Underground 1961-1911, by Jonathon Green
(William Heinemann, 1988).
 26.	Daily Sketch, May 28, 1969, "Mr. Zappa didn't have the LSE tolling in the aisles, just
Julie Felix sitting there." The opportunistic Miss Felix was a folk singer who claimed to
be an old friend of Frank's. "I wanted to keep out of the limelight so I sat on the floor,"
she said.
 27.	Daily Mirror, June 7, 1969.
 28.	Daily Mail, June 5, 1969, "ZAPPA. Your mother couldn't be more wrong about him",
by Virginia Ironside.
 29.	Beat Instrumental, July 1969, "Frank Zappa: Father Of The Mothers", interview by
'M.H.'.
 30.	ibid.
 31.	See Note 11.
 32.	See Note 7.
 33.	See Note 30.
 34.	See Note 7.
 35.	See Note 30.
 36.	See Note 11.
 37.	NME, December 5, 1970, "Metamorphosis Of Frank Zappa", interview by Richard
Green.
 38.	Goldmine, January 27, 1989, "Moving On To Phase Three", interview by William
Ruhlmann.
CHAPTER 8    SHUT UP 'N PLAY YER GUITAR
 1.	NME, February 1, 1975, "This here's LOWELL GEORGE", "excited gibbering", by
Pete Erskine.
 2.	ZigZag, 3, "Zigzag Unzips Zappa", interview by Dick Lawson.
 3.	Downbeat, May 1, 1969, "Caught In The Act", concert review by Alan Heineman.
 4.	Rolling Stone, October 18, 1969, "Mothers' Day Has Finally Come", by Jerry Hopkins.
 5.	Unattributed interview, published November 8, 1969.
 6.	Music Technology, February 1987, "Father Of Invention", interview by Rick Davies.
 7.	Rolling Stone, March 7, 1970, review of Hot Rats by Lester Bangs.
 8.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 9.	No Commercial Potential (E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1972).

 10.	ibid.
 11.	Goldmine, January 27, 1989, "Moving On To Phase Three", interview by William
Ruhlmann.
408

Notes
 12.	NME, February 27, 1970, "You Don't Always Eat If You Only Play For Fun", inter-
view by Richard Green.
 13.	Unattributed interview, published November 8,1969.
 14.	Tke Hollywood Reporter, January 21, 1970, "Sound Track", by Kathy Orloff.
 15.	NME, December 5, 1970, "Metamorphosis Of Frank Zappa", interview by Richard
Green.
 16.	Friends,]uiy 10, 1970, "Hot Waxx!"
 17.	See Note 10.
 18.	See Note 14.
 19.	See Note 13.
 20.	Rolling Stone, July 9, 1970, "What Zappa Did To Zubin Mehta", concert review by
David Felton.
 21.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 22.	ibid.
 23.	Rolling Stone, September 16, 1971, "Kaylan: Mother Was A Turtle", interview by
Harold Bronson.
 24.	Society Pages, 10, "Happy Together, Part Two", interview by Co de Kloet.
 25.	Friends, July 10,1970, "Hot Waxx!"
 26.	See Note 13.
 27.	Evening News, July 1,1970, "Peter Cole's Beat".
 28.	NME, July 4, 1970, "Shrewd, But With A Lot Of Heart", interview by Richard Green
and Allan McDougall.
 29.	Musician, November 1991, "Poetic Justice - Frank Zappa Puts Us In Our Place", inter-
view by Matt Resnicoff.
CHAPTER 9   WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH
 1.	Rolling Stone, November 14,1991, "100 Classic Album Covers".
 2.	Disc, November 28, 1970.
 3.	NME, December 5, 1970, "Metamorphosis Of Frank Zappa", interview by Richard
Green.
 4.	NME, December 5, 1970, "Zappa at his bizarre best", concert review by Roy Carr.
 5.	See Note 3.
 6.	Sunday Mirror, January 10, 1971, "Let It Zip, Says Zappa".
 7.	NME, January 16, 1971, "Establishment Versus The Underground", report by Richard
Green.
 8.	Bom Under A Bad Sign, by Tony Palmer (William Kimber, 1970).
 9.	The Observer, March 28, 1971, "Frank Zappa, The Royal Philharmonic And Me . . .",
Tony Palmer "reports on 10 apocalyptic days in which (200 Motels) was made".

 10.	Rolling Stone, September 16, 1971, "Kaylan: Mother Was A Turtle", interview by
Harold Bronson.
 11.	Rotting Stone, December 21, 1972, "Keith Moon: One-Man Wrecking Crew", inter-
view by Jerry Hopkins.
 12.	T'Mershi Duween, 37, "Miles Of Zappa", interview conducted November 14, 1970 by
Miles.
 13.	The Times, February 9, 1971, "Obscenity in banned pop show is denied", by Peter
Waymark.
 14.	The Daily Telegraph, February 10, 1971, "Orchestra used by pop group 'as cover for
filth' ", by James Wightman.
 15.	ibid.
 16.	See Note 13.
409

Frank Zappa
 17.	Daily Express, February 9, 1971, " 'Too dirty' pop group banned at Albert Hall", by
David Wigg and Norman Luck.
 18.	NME, February 27, 1971, "You Don't Always Eat If You Only Play For Fun", inter-
view by Richard Green.
 19.	Leatherette, bootleg album, including radio interview by Martin Perlich.
 20.	NME, November 27,1971, "Frank Talking", interview by Roy Carr.
 21.	See Note 10.
 22.	Railing Stone, September 30, 1971, record review by Lester Bangs.
 23.	NME, December 4, 1971, "Frank talking about his next film", interview by Roy Carr.
 24.	Society Pages, 4, "A walk down memory lane with Dick Barber", interview by Bruce
Burnett.
 25.	See Note 10.
 26.	Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1971, "200 Motels-, a Rock'n'Roll Tour on Film",
review by Robert Hilburn.
 27.	New York Times, November 11,1971, "Frank Zappa's Surrealist 200 Motels", review by
Vincent Canby.
 28.	NME, November 6, 1971, "He directed it but. . . Tony Palmer Slams Zappa Motels
Film".
 29.	See Note 20.
 30.	ibid.
 31.	See Note 28.
CHAPTER 10    SMOKE ON THE WATER
 1.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 2.	Society Pages, 11, "Happy Together, Part Three", interview by Co de Kloet.
 3.	Q, December 1989, "Duh duh durh, duh duh iu durrhl", article by Mat Snow.
 4.	ibid.
 5.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 6.	Society Pages, 4, "A walk down memory lane with Dick Barber", interview by Bruce
Burnett.
 7.	Musician, February 1994, "Frank Zappa 1940-1993", interviews by Scott Isler, Jim
Macnie, Kristdne McKenna, Mark Rowland, Roy Trakin and Josef Woodard.
 8.	Interview with Howard Thompson, 1993.
 9.	Musician, February 1994, "Frank Zappa 1940-1993", interviews by Scott Isler, Jim
Macnie, Kristine McKenna, Mark Rowland, Roy Trakin and Josef Woodard.

 10.	Daily Express, December 11,  1971, "Pop star k.o.'d in attack", by Express Staff
Reporter.
 11.	Daily Mirror, December 14, 1971, "Injured pop star is out for a month".
 12.	Society Pages, 11, "Happy Together, Part Three", interview by Co de Kloet.
 13.	Musician, February 1994, "Frank Zappa 1940-1993".
 14.	Daily Mail, January 7, 1972, "Forced rest".
 15.	NME, February 5,1972, "Forget the leg a while. It's ZAPPA on rock, porn and blues",
interview by Keith Altham.
 16.	NME, February 12, 1972, "Zappa on Death, Rock Writers, Money", interview by
Keith Altham.
 17.	NME, February 12,1972, "Svengali Zappa and a horrible freak called Beerheart", inter-
view by Roy Carr.
 18.	ibid.
 19.	Daily Telegraph, March 20, 1972, "Zappa sues over theatre attack".
410

Notes
 20.	NME, November 30, 1974, "How to complete the subbing and layout of a very long
Frank Zappa Lookin' Back", "An atonal extravagonzo" by Charles Shaar Murray.
 21.	Leatherette, bootleg album including radio interview by Martin Perlich.
 22.	Internet transcript of October 22, 1988 interview by Bob Marshall.
 23.	See Note 12.
 24.	NME, June 3, 1972, "Turning Turtle Zappa's men branch out", interview by Roy
Carr.
 25.	NME, September 1, 1973, "Penguins in bondage and other perversions", interview by
Charles Shaar Murray.
 26.	Disc, September 2, 1972, "Zappa - Mother of 20", interview by Caroline Boucher.
 27.	NME, September 2, 1972, "Mother's Day Fearless Frank tells what he'll lay on you at
the Oval concert", interview by Danny Holloway.
 28.	See Note 26.
 29.	See Note 27.
 30.	NME, September 2, 1972, "Everything you always wanted to know about the Mothers
. .. but were afraid to ask." Article by Ian McDonald.
 31.	Evening News, September 14,1972, "Susan says sorry to Frank".
 32.	The Road Goes On Forever (Elm Tree Books/Hamish Hamilton, 1982), "The Foulk
Brothers: Pop Promoting Blues", by Philip Norman.
 33.	ibid.
 34.	Vtva! Zappa (Omnibus Press, 1985), text quoted by Dominique Chevalier.
 35.	ibid.
CHAPTER 11    OVERNITE SENSATION
 1.	NME, September 1, 1973, "Penguins in bondage and other perversions", interview by
Charles Shaar Murray.
 2.	NME, April 17, 1976, "At last the truth can be told: FRANK ZAPPA has no under-
wear", interview by 'Cherry Ripe'.
 3.	Washington Star News, November 11, 1972, "Zappa Genius on Horn", concert review
by Richard Harrington.
 4.	Keyboard, April 1994, "The Zappa Legacy", interview by Robert L. Doerschuk.
 5.	Rotting Stone, July 4, 1974, "Zappa: Continuity Is The Mothers' Modier", interview by
Barry Hansen.
 6.	NME, August 25, 1973, "Godmother", interview by Charles Shaar Murray.
 7.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 8.	See Note 2.
 9.	Rolling Stone, December 20, 1973, record review by Arthur Schmidt.

 10.	NME, September 1, 1973, record review by Charles Shaar Murray.
 11.	The Lives & Times Of Zappa & The Mothers (Babylon Books), "Dirty Frank", reviewed
by 'CR'.
 12.	Crawdaddy, December 1973, record review by Noe Goldwasser.
 13.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 14.	Musician, February 1994, "Frank Zappa 1940-1993".
 15.	ibid.
 16.	NME, August 25, 1973, "Godmother", and NME, September 1, 1973, "Penguins in
bondage and other perversions", interview by Charles Shaar Murray.
 17.	NME, September 22, 1973, concert review by Charles Shaar Murray.
 18.	The Sun, August 20, 1973, "Zapped!"
 19.	NME, January 26, 1974, "Kicks in the ear", interview by Jim Smith.
 20.	See Note 13.
411

Frank Zappa
 21.	Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, December 11, 1973, "Zappa's rock for 'True Freaks'",
concert review by Robert A. Kemnitz.
 22.	Variety, December 11,1973.
 23.	Guitar Pkyer, January 1977, "One Size Fits AU", interview by Steve Rosen.
 24.	Rolling Stone, June 6,1974, record review by Gordon Fletcher.
 25.	Rolling Stone, August 1,1974, Random Note.
 26.	Goldmine, January 27, 1989, "Moving On To Phase Three", interview by William
Ruhlmann.
 27.	NME, April 6, 1974, "The unsightly debris of Francis Vincent Zappa", record review
by Ian McDonald.
 28.	NME, May 25, 1974, "Mothers' Day memories", interview by Barbara Charone.
 29.	Rack Wives (Beech Tree Books, 1986), by Victoria Balfour.
 30.	See Note 5.
 31.	ibid.
 32.	ibid.
 33.	NME, September 14,1974, "The Great Brassiere Conspiracy".
 34.	ibid.
 35.	Evening News, October 2,1974, "Zappa - is it goodbye for ever?", Pop column by John
Blake.
 36.	NME, October 5, 1974, "Relax, Frank. We ain't no liggers. A few of us just came to
join in . . . And to help you finish up any leftover wine an' stuff", article by Charles
Shaar Murray.
 37.	Melody Maker, October 5,1974, "Monsieur Zappa's rock circus", article by Allan Jones.
 38.	See Note 4.
 39.	See Note 26.
CHAPTER 12    ONE SIZE FITS ALL
 1.	NME, November 30, 1974, "How to complete the subbing and layout of a very long
Frank Zappa Lookin' Back", by Charles Shaar Murray.
 2.	Melody Maker, November 9,1974, "Caught in me Act".
 3.	Society Pages, 7, "He's A Human Being. He Has Emotions, Just Like Us", Pt. 2, inter-
view by Den Simms and Rob Samler.
 4.	NME, April 26, 1975, " 'What is a groupie?'   asked his Lordship", report by Mick
Farren.
 5.	Guitar Player, January 1977. "One Size Fits AU", interview by Steve Rosen.
 6.	Keyboard, April 1994, "The Zappa Legacy", by Robert L. Doerschuk.
 7.	Musician, February 1994, "Frank Zappa 1940-1993", interviews conducted by Scott Isler,
Jim Macnie, Kristine McKenna, Mark Rowland, Roy Trakin and Josef Woodward.
 8.	ibid.
 9.	VMershi Duween, 28,  "One  More  Time  For The World",  interview by Andy
Greenaway.

 10.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 11.	See Note 4.
 12.	Rolling Stone, July 3,1975, "Zappa and me Captain Cook".
 13.	ibid.
 14.	See Note 4.
 15.	ibid.
 16.	Evening Standard, April 16,1975, "Rock star Zappa defends his lyrics".
 17.	Evening New, April 16, 1975, " 'I won't hear Zappa record,' says Judge".
412

Notes
 18.	Let It Rock, June 1975, "The Truth - The Whole Truth - And Nothing But The
Cheeseburger", court report by Michael Gray.
 19.	Evening Standard, April 17, 1975, "Zappa case: 'Pop is 80% sex'", by Gordon Corner.
 20.	Daily Mirror, April 19,1975, "Pop, Sex ... And That Man Zappa".
 21.	Daily Mirror, April 22, 1975, "The Zany World of Zappa".
 22.	The Guardian, April 30, 1975.
 23.	The Times, June 11,1975, "No damages for pop star over cancelled show".
 24.	Daily Mirror, June 11, 1975, ",£20,000 shocker for a rocker".
 25.	Rolling Stone, July 3, 1975, "Zappa and the Captain Cook", by Steve Weitzman.
 26.	ibid.
 27.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 28.	ibid.
 29.	See Note 3.
 30.	Melody Maker, July 12,1975, "One Size fits some".
 31.	NME, July 19, 1975, ".. . but Frank - you made the pants too long".
 32.	Guitar Player, February 1983, "Not Exacdy Duane Altaian", interview by Tom
Mulhern.
 33.	The Wire, 34/5, "The All American Composer", interview by Steve Lyons and Batya
Friedman.
 34.	NME, November 22,1975, "Frank & The Captain: The Legal Pitfalls Of Having Fun",
by Miles.
 35.	T'Mershi Duween, 28, "One More Time For The World", interview by Andy
Greenaway.
 36.	ibid.
 37.	See Note 3.
 38.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 39.	ibid.
 40.	T'Mershi Duween, 43, "Zapparap Number 29 - The Songs 3", compiled by Andy
Greenaway.
 41.	NME, April 17, 1976, "At Last The Truth Can Be Told: FRANK ZAPPA Has No
Underwear", by Cherry Ripe. Congratulations, honey.
 42.	ibid.
 43.	NME, April 26, 1975, " 'What is a groupie?' asked his Lordship", report by Mick
Farren.
 44.	See Note 42.
CHAPTER 13    ZOOT ALLURES
 1.	Guitar Player, January 1977, "One Size Fits All".
 2.	ibid.
 3.	Downbeat, May 18, 1978, "Garni Dujour, Lizard King Poetry And Slime," interview by
Tim (call me cravat) Schneckloth.
 4.	Daily Mirror, February 14, 1977, "Sheer Torture but Zappa has it all taped".
 5.	NME, March 5,1977, "OK Frank - Let It Roll. .. The Frank Zzzzzzzappa Snore-In",
interview (of sorts) by Chris Salewicz.
 6.	ibid.
 7.	Guitar Player, January 1977, "One Size Fits All", interview by Steve Rosen.
 8.	ibid.
 9.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
10. NME, December 4, 1976, "Any Resemblance Is Purely Conceptual", interview by
Miles.
413

Frank Zappa
 11.	NME, November 20, 1976, "Beefheart Discovers 'World's Greatest Band' Sensation",
interview by Miles.
 12.	See Note 10.
 13.	Keyboard, April 1994, "The Zappa Legacy", interview by Robert L. Doerschuk.
 14.	ibid.
 15.	NME, August 21,1976, "The Boy With The Lobotomy", interview by Chris Salewicz.
 16.	T'Mershi Duween, 28, "One More Time For The World", interview by Andy Greenaway.
 17.	See Note 10.
 18.	ibid.
 19.	Sounds, September 9, 1978, "I hate playing in England", interview by Hugh Fielder.
 20.	ibid.
 21.	Downbeat, May 18,1978, "Garni Dujour, Lizard King Poetry And Slime", interview by
Tim Schneckloth.
 22.	See Note 13.
 23.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 24.	NME, December 4, 1976, "Any Resemblance Is Purely Conceptual", interview by
Miles.
 25.	See Note 24.
 26.	The Times, February 11, 1977, concert review by Clive Bennett.
 27.	NME, February 19, 1977, "Torture Mama & The Open Brain", concert review by
Miles.
 28.	ibid.
 29.	See Note 25.
 30.	NME, May 7,1977, "Zappa sues previous licensees of Rainbow".
 31.	Guitar, February 1994, "Frank's Garage, Close encounters with five guitarists of the
Zappa kind", interview by H.P. Newquist.
 32.	Keyboard, June 1980, "Little Band We Used To Play In", interview by Michael Davis.
 33.	ibid.
 34.	ibid.
 35.	See Note 13.
 36.	See Note 21.
CHAPTER 14   LATHER
 1.	Society Pages, 2, "They're Doing The Interview Of The Century", by Eric Buxton, Rob
Samler and Den Simms.
 2.	NME, January 28, 1978, "Stern Words In Knightsbridge", interview by Paul Rarnbah.
 3.	ibid.
 4.	Nuggets, April/May 1977, "Zappa On Air", interview by Jim Ladd.
 5.	See Note 2.
 6.	Sunday Express, January 29, 1978, "Zappa Group In Hotel Uproar".
 7.	NME, September 23,1978, "Stones' Harpist Located Down Paris Subway", interview
by Phillipe Manoeuvre.
 8.	Sounds, September 9,1978, "I hate playing in England", interview by Hugh Fielder.
 9.	NME, April 22, 1978, advert for Zappa In New York.

 10.	Keyboard, June 1980, "Little Band We Used To Play In", interview by Michael Davis.
 11.	ibid.
 12.	Guitar, January 1994, "Brothers Of Invention", Steve Vai as interviewed by Adrian
Belew.
 13.	T'Mershi Duween,  28,  "One  More Time  For The World",  interview by Andy
Greenaway.
414

Notes
 14.	See Note 10.
 15.	Frank Zappa interview by Christopher Cathman.
 16.	NME, July 22,1978, "The Monk On Zappa's Back", interview by Wayne Manor.
 17.	See Note 8.
 18.	ibid.
 19.	Downbeat, Mzy 18, 1978, "Garni Du Jour, Lizard King Poetry And Slime", interview by
Tim Schneckloth.
 20.	See Note 8.
 21.	NME, September 30,1978, "Aunt Meat?", record review by Ian Penman.
 22.	Guitar, February 1994, "Frank's Garage, Close encounters with five guitarists of the
Zappa kind", interview by H.P. Newquist.
 23.	ibid.
 24.	See Note 19.
 25.	TMershi Duween, 28, "One More Time For The Wodd", interview by Andy Greenaway.
 26.	A Definitive Tribute To Frank Zappa (Miller Freeman, Inc., 1994), "The Clonemeister
Speaks", interview by Ernie Rideout.
 27.	Keyboard, April 1994, "The Zappa Legacy", interview by Robert L. Doerschuk.
 28.	ibid.
 29.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 30.	Evening Standard, January 24, 1978, "Zap, zap, Zappa is back in town!", interview by
James Johnson.
CHAPTER 15    SHEIK YERBOUTI
 1.	NME, February 1979, "Overly sub-standard", record review by Nick Kent.
 2.	77k Wire, 34/5, "The All American Composer", interview by Steve Lyons and Batya
Friedman.
 3.	Playboy, April 1993, "The Playboy Interview", by David Sheff.
 4.	The Observer, September 3,1979, "Frankly a freak", interview by Charles Shaar Murray.
 5.	See Note 3.
 6.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 7.	ibid.
 8.	Keyboard, April 1994, "The Zappa Legacy", interview by Robert L. Doerschuk.
 9.	See Note 3.

 10.	NME, February 24, 1979, "A tasty change from so-so soup", concert review by Mark
Ellen.
 11.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 12.	ibid.
 13.	Bam, October 5, 1979, "Frank Zappa Vs. The World!", interview by Michael Branton.
 14.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 15.	Guitarist, June 1993, "Unholy Mother", interview by David Mead.
 16.	Keyboard, June 1980, "Litde Band We Used To Play In", interview by Michael Davis.
 17.	Rock Wives (Beech Tree Books, 1986) by Victoria Balfour.
 18.	Village Voice, January 7,1980, "Zapped Again", film review by Tom Carson. Reprinted
in Society Pages, 4.
 19.	Society Pages, 4, "A walk down memory lane with Dick Barber", interview by Bruce
Burnett.
 20.	See Note 16.
 21.	ibid.
415

Frank Zappa
CHAPTER 16   UTILITY MUFFIN RESEARCH KITCHEN
 1.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 2.	Guitar Player, January 1977, "One Sue Fits All", interview by Steve Rosen.
 3.	ibid.
 4.	Keyboard, June 1980, "Little Band We Used To Play In", interview by Michael Davis.
 5.	Keyboard, February 1987, "Sample This!" by Jim Aikin & Bob Doerschuk.
 6.	Downbeat, January 13,1977, "Electronic Projections", compiled by Arnold Jay Smith/
Bob Henschen.
 7.	Downbeat, May 18,1978, "Garni Du Jour, Lizard King Poetry And Slime", interview by
Tim Schneckloth.
 8.	ibid.
 9.	T'Mershi Duween, 20, "A Mars A Day . . .", interview by Axel Wunsch and Aad
Hoogesteger.

 10.	T'Mershi Duween, 28, "Tink Walks Amok: The Arthur Barrow Interview", by Slev
Uunofski, Tom Brown and Tom Troccoli.
 11.	Puke! August 1993, "A Rare Interview With Pop's Philosopher-King", by Dan
Ouellette.
 12.	77k Guardian Weekend, May 15, 1993, "FRANK, Fearless and still fighting", interview
by Alex Kershaw.
 13.	Creem, November 1982, "Only In It For The Money? Frank & Moon Zappa Go AM",
interview by Michael Goldberg.
 14.	Metal Hammer, Vol. 5, No. 24, Nov. 19-Dec. 2, 1990, "History Of A Hero", interview
by Robert 'Arie' Heeg.
 15.	Guitar Player, February 1983, "Not Exactly Duane AUman", interview by Tom
Mulhern.
 16.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 17.	See Note 14.
 18.	Guitar, February 1994, "Frank's Garage, Close encounters with five guitarists of the
Zappa kind", interview by H.P. Newquist.
 19.	Musician, November 1991, "Poetic Justice: Frank Zappa Puts Us In Our Place", inter-
view by Matt Resnicoff.
 20.	Guitar, January 1994, "Brothers Of Invention Steve Vai as interviewed by Adrian
Belew".
 21.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "How It All Works: Gail Zappa", interview by Don
Menn.
 22.	Society Pages, 7, "He's A Human Being. He Has Emotions, Just Like Us Part 2", inter-
view by Den Simms and Rob Samler.
 23.	Playboy, November 1982, "20 Questions: Frank and Moon Unit Zappa", interview by
David and Victoria Sheff.
 24.	Society Pages, 6,  "Ode To Gravity", radio interview April  15,  1991  by Charles
Amirkhanian.
 25.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 26.	See Note 16.
 27.	See Note 15.
CHAPTER 17    DROWNING WITCH
 1.	MOJO, 4, March 1994, "The Addams Family", interview by Dave Dimartino.
 2.	Perfect Pitch: A Life Story, by Nicholas Slonimsky (Oxford University Press, 1988).
416

Notes
 3.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), interview by Don Menn.
 4.	See Note 2.
 5.	Society Pages, 3, "They're Doing The Interview Of The Century", by Den Simms, Rob
Samler and Eric Buxton.
 6.	Society Pages, 4, "Didja Know. . .?", interview with 'Charlie', Goteburg, Sweden, May
10, 1982.
 7.	Guitar Player, February 1983, "Not Exacdy Duane Allman", interview by Tom
Mulhem.
 8.	ibid.
 9.	Society Pages, 9, "Interview From Iceland (Where They Love The Grand Wazoo)",
radio interview March 23, 1992 by Jon Benediktsson and Kolbeinn Amason.

 10.	See Note 7.
 11.	The Observer, September 3,1989, "Frankly a freak", interview by Charles Shaar Murray.
 12.	Creem, November 1982, "Only In It For The Money? Frank & Moon Zappa Go AM",
interview by Michael Goldberg.
 13.	ibid.
 14.	ibid.
 15.	See Note 7.
 16.	Playboy, November 1982, "20 Questions: Frank and Moon Unit Zappa", interview by
David and Victoria Sheff.
 17.	ibid.
 18.	See Note 7.
 19.	ibid.
 20.	ibid.
 21.	ibid.
 22.	The Guardian, January 11,  1983, "The father of invention", interview by Robin
Denselow.
 23.	See Note 7.
 24.	Daily Express, January 7,1983, "Zappa takes the dance out of ballet".
 25.	NME, January 15, 1983, "Frank goes straight", interview by Gavin Martin.
 26.	T'Mershi Duween, 16, "He's conducting the interview of... a lunchtime?!", interview
by Andy Greenaway.
 27.	See Note 22.
 28.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), Kent Nagano, interviewed by Don Menn.
 29.	Daily Mail, January 12, 1983, "Zappa keeps the hippies hushed".
 30.	The Times, January 12, 1983, "In search of the composer", concert review by Richard
Williams.
 31.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 32.	See Note 28.
 33.	ibid.
 34.	See Note 22.
 35.	ibid.
 36.	Music Technology, February 1987, "Father Of Invention", interview by Rick Davies.
 37.	Guitarist, June 1993, "Unholy Mother", interview by David Mead.
 38.	Discoveries, 82, March 1995, "The Knack", interview by Paul Gabriel.
 39.	Society Pages, 2, "They're Doing The Interview Of The Century Part 2", interview by
Den Simms, Rob Samler and Eric Buxton.
 40.	T'Mershi Duween, 28, "Tink Walks Amok: The Arthur Barrow Interview", by Slev
Uunofski, Tom Brown and Tom Troccoli.
417

Frank Zappa
CHAPTER 18    SYSTEMS OF EDGES
 1.	The Real Frank Zappa Book, by Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso (Poseidon Press,
1989).
 2.	Music Technology, February 1987, "Father Of Invention", interview by Rick Davies.
 3.	Guitar Player, February 1983, "Not Exactly Duane AUman", interview by Tom
Mulhem.
 4.	ibid.
 5.	TMershi Duween, 28, "Tink Walks Amok - The Arthur Barrow Interview", by Slev
Uunofski, Tom Brown and Tom Troccoli.
 6.	Sound On Sound, February 1987, "Frank Zappa: Jazz From Hell", interview by Paul
Gilby.
 7.	See Note 2.
 8.	See Note 6.
 9.	ibid.

 10.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 11.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 12.	Keyboard, February 1987, "Sample This!", by Jim Aikin & Bob Doerschuk.
 13.	See Note 1.
 14.	Sunday Times Magazine, February 1985, "Boulez And The Well Tempered 4X", by
Norman Lebrecht.
 15.	See Note 10.
 16.	ibid.
 17.	See Note 1.
 18.	Society Pages, 2, "They're Doing The Interview Of The Century", by Den Simms, Rob
Samler and Eric Buxton.
 19.	See Note 12.
 20.	See Note 18.
 21.	ibid.
 22.	Guitar Player, February 1983,  "Not Exactly Duane Allman", interview by Tom
Mulhern.
 23.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "How It All Works: Gail Zappa", by Don Menn.
 24.	See Note 1.
CHAPTER 19   THING-FISH
 1.	The Times Saturday Review, August 8, 1992, "Victims Of A Diseased Society", by
Charlie Smith.
 2.	ibid.
 3.	Today, January 9, 1987, "Listen With Mother: How Zappa swapped freaking out for
speaking out", by Jonathan Ashby and David Thornton.
 4.	Society Pages, 4, "Speak Up, Ike, An' 'Spress Yourself", interview by Matthew Galaher.
 5.	Keyboard, February 1987, "Sample This!", by Jim Aikin and Bob Doerschuk.
 6.	The Guardian, April 20, 1988, "Don't wait for the cuckoo", interview by Ed Vulliamy.
 7.	Rolling Stone, September 12, 1985, "Furore over rock lyrics intensifies", by Robert
Love.
 8.	Society Pages, 3, "Zappa On Censorship", radio interview June 21,  1990 by J.B.
Peterson for station KPFK.
 9.	See Note 6.
10.  The Real Frank Zappa Book, by Frank Zappa with Peter Ochiogrosso (Poseidon Press,
1989).
418

Notes
 11.	ibid.
 12.	See Note 9.
 13.	See Note 7.
 14.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 15.	Musician, November 1991, "Poetic Justice: Frank Zappa Puts Us In Our Place",
interview by Matt Resnicoff.
 16.	See Note 14.
 17.	Playboy, April 1993, "The Playboy Interview", by David Sheff.
 18.	Society Pages, 11, "The Yellow Shark: History In The Making".
 19.	Billboard, May 19, 1990, "25th Anniversary Supplement", "Zappa: Leading the way in
digital & CD technologies", by Jim Bessman.
 20.	ibid.
 21.	ibid.
 22.	Relix, Vol. 21, No. 2, "Forever Frank", by Roger Len Smith.
 23.	Guitar World, July 1987, "The Importance Of Being Dweezil", by Bud Scoppa.
 24.	See Note 5.
 25.	Sound On Sound, February 1987, "Frank Zappa Jazz From Hell", by Paul Gilby.
 26.	ibid.
 27.	See Note 14.
 28.	See Note 5.
 29.	See Note 14.
 30.	Music Technology, February 1987, "Father Of Invention", interview by Rick Davies.
 31.	See Note 23.
 32.	See Note 28.
CHAPTER 20    ONCE AGAIN, WITHOUT THE NET
 1.	Billboard 25th Anniversary Supplement, May 19, 1990, "We Are What We Watch", by
Drew Wheeler.
 2.	ibid.
 3.	Guitar World, April 1987, "Zappa's Infemo", by Noe Goldwasser.
 4.	Song Talk, Vol. 4, Issue 1, "The Song Talk Interview", by Paul Zollo.
 5.	The Real Frank Zappa Book, by Frank Zappa with Peter Ochiogrosso (Poseidon Press,
1989).
 6.	Los Angeles Times, Calendar, December 7, 1993, "Frank Zappa: A Maverick Pied
Piper", by Daniel Schorr.
 7.	Musk Technology, February 1987, "Father Of Invention", interview by Rick Davies.
 8.	See Note 5.
 9.	Billboard, December 19, 1987, advertisement "We Are What We Watch".

 10.	See Note 4.
 11.	Society Pages, 11, "Happy Together Part Three", interview by Co de Kloet.
 12.	Guitarist, June 1993, "Unholy Mother", interview by David Mead.
 13.	Society Pages, 6, "Would You Like Some Fries With That Interview?", by Martin De
Jong, Piet Doelder, Aad Hoogesteger, Uli Mrosek and Axel Wunsh.
 14.	Society Pages, 6, "Ed Mann In Germany", interview by Aad Hoogesteger and Axel
Wunsh.
 15.	See Note 12.
 16.	Musician, November 1991, "Poetic Justice: Frank Zappa Puts Us In Our Place", by
Matt Resnicoff.
 17.	ibid.
419

Frank Zappa
 18.	Musician, September 1988, "Hey Frank, Where You Goin' With That Guitar In Your
Hand?", by Alan di Perna.
 19.	ibid.
 20.	See Note 16.
 21.	Society Pages, 6, "Ode To Gravity", radio interview April 15,  1991 by Charles
Amirkhanian.
 22.	Ratting Stone, July 14-28, 1988, "False Messiah", by Lawrence Wright.
 23.	ibid.
 24.	Bat Chain Putter: Rock & Roll In The Age of Celebrity, by Kurt Loder (St Martin's Press,
1990). Original interview, Philadelphia, February 1988.
 25.	Goldmine, January 27, 1989, "Moving On To Phase Three", interview by William
Ruhlmann.
 26.	ibid.
 27.	Rotting Stone, February 25, 1988, "Death Of A Salesman: How Reagan Failed", by
Frances Fitzgerald.
 28.	See Note 24.
 29.	ibid.
 30.	ibid.
 31.	ibid.
 32.	Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 30, 1988, "Democracy's Pitchman", by Joe
Morgenstem.
 33.	See Note 27.
 34.	You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, Vol. 2, "The Helsinki Concert".
 35.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 36.	Society Pages, Poseidon Press, Ann Patty quote: "It's a good mission in life."
 37.	The Wire, 34/5, "The All American Composer", interview by Steve Lyons and Batya
Friedman.
 38.	See Note 5.
 39.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "Marque Coy, Patron Saint At Joe's Garage", by Don
Menn.
 40.	See Note 27.
 41.	Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 30, 1988, "Democracy's Pitchman", by Joe
Morgenstem.
 42.	T'Mershi Duween, 20, "Way Down In New Zealand: FZ Talks To Gary Steel 5.12.90".
 43.	Continental Profiles, May 1990, "Wanna Do A Deal?", interview by Neil Cohen, repro-
duced in Society Pages, 3.
 44.	ibid.
 45.	ibid.
 46.	See Note 42.
 47.	Society Pages, 3, "They're Doing The Interview Of The Century, Part 3", interview by
Den Simms and Rob Samler.
 48.	Society Pages, 7, "He's A Human Being. He Has Emotions, Just Like Us", interview by
Den Simms and Rob Samler.
 49.	Society Pages, 2, "They're Doing The Interview Of The Century, Part 2", by Den
Simms, Rob Samler and Eric Buxton.
 50.	ibid.
 51.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 52.	Sunday Times Business World, November 4, 1990, "Zappa Transformed", by Richard
Guilliatt.
420

Notes
CHAPTER 21    THE TORTURE NEVER STOPS
 1.	Playboy, April 1993, "The Playboy Interview", by David Sheff.
 2.	ibid.
 3.	Society Pages, 3, "Zappa Zapped As Trade Rep", by Lawrence E. Joseph, reprinted from
New York Times Business World, July 10, 1990.
 4.	ICE (International CD Exchange), September 1990, quoted in Society Pages, 3.
 5.	ibid.
 6.	See Note 1.
 7.	71k Supplement Tape, SPZ10, c. 1990, Siesta Productions.
 8.	Society Pages, 5, "More Wit And Wisdom From Frank Zappa", interview by Co de
Kloet, October 26, 1990.
 9.	Society Pages, 5, "Movin' To Australia Soon?", interview by Trevor Lofts and Steven
Homan.

 10.	ibid.
 11.	Society Pages, 6, "He's A Human Being. He Has Emotions, Just Like Us", interview by
Den Simms and Rob Samler.
 12.	Goldmine, January 16, 1987, "Hi, boys and girls, I'm Jimmy Carl Black and I'm the
Indian of the group - Interview with a Mother", by Jack Ortman, reprinted from the
Austin Chronicle.
 13.	See Note 11.
 14.	Society Pages, 6, "Ode To Gravity", radio interview April 15, 1991 by Charles
Amirkhanian.
 15.	ibid.
 16.	Society Pages, 6, "Would You Like Some Fries With That Interview?", by Martin De
Jong, Piet Dodder, Aad Hoogesteger, Uli Mrosek and Axel Wunsh.
 17.	Society Pages, 7, "Hot Poop! News & Spooz!", interview with Joel Thome by Rob
Samler.
 18.	Society Pages, 7, "Hot Poop! News & Spooz!"
 19.	TMershi Duween, 20, "Zapparap: For Real!", transcribed by Darren Prosser.
 20.	Zappa! (Miller Freeman, 1992), "The Mother Of All Interviews".
 21.	Society Pages, 5, "Frank Sez Foo-eee To Boots!", by Tom Troccoli, Cynthia Littlejohn
and Den Simms.
 22.	ibid.
 23.	Keyboard, February 1992, "Happy Birthday, Frank!", by Robert L. Doerschuk.
 24.	Billboard, December 7, 1991, "Zappa's Universe", concert review by Drew Wheeler.

 25.	Ullage Voice, review.
 26.	Society Pages, 8, "Hot Poop! News & Spooz!"
 27.	Rolling Stone, January 9,1992, "Frank Zappa Stricken With Cancer", by Kim Neeh/.
 28.	Society Pages, 9, "Hot Poop! News & Spooz!", original quote in Music Express.
 29.	ibid.
 30.	Society Pages, 10, "The Yellow Shark: A Preview", Research: Thomas 'Leppo' Oppel.
 31.	Pube! August 1993, "A Rare Interview With Pop's Philosopher-King", by Dan
Ouellette.
 32.	See Note 1.
 33.	ibid.
 34.	ibid.
 35.	ibid.
 36.	ibid.
 37.	See Note 31.
 38.	See Note 1.
421

Frank Zappa
 39.	LA Times.
 40.	Rock CD, 12, "Frank's Wild Years", interview by Joe Jackson.
 41.	The Guardian Weekend, May 15, 1993, "Frank Fearless and still fighting", interview by
Alex Kershaw.
 42.	ibid.
 43.	LA Times.
CHAPTER 22    OUTRO
 1.	Los Angeles Times Calendar, December 7,1993, "Frank Zappa: A Maverick Pied Piper",
by Daniel Schorr.
 2.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.
 3.	Perfect Pitch: A Life Story, by Nicholas Slonimsky (Oxford University Press, 1988).
 4.	Los Angeles  Times Magazine,  October 30,  1988,  "Democracy's Pitchman", Joe
Morgenstem.
 5.	Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1994, " 'Civilization' a la Zappa", by Rip Rense.
 6.	ibid.
 7.	ibid.
 8.	ibid.
 9.	BBC-TV interview by Nigel Leigh.

 10.	Society Pages, 5, "More Wit And Wisdom From Frank Zappa", radio interview with
National Radio of Sweden, December 20, 1990.
 11.	Billboard.
 12.	Th« Guardian Weekend, May 15, 1993, "Frank Fearless and still fighting", interview by
Alex Kershaw.
 13.	Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994, "He Was A Crook", by Hunter S. Thompson.
 14.	Pulse! August 1993, "A Rare Interview Widi Pop's Philosopher-King", by Dan
Ouellette.
 15.	William Grieder quote re: Gingrich talented reactionary.
 16.	Empire quote re: Forrest Gump.
422

Discography: Original Albums

Freak Out!
LP: Verve V(6) 5005 CD
Absolutely Free
LP: Verve V(6) 5013 CD
We're Only In It For The Money
LP: Verve V(6) 5045 CD
Lumpy Gravy
LP: Verve V(6) 8741 CD
CroisiV With Ruben & The jets
LP: Verve V6 5055 CD
Uncle Meat
LP: Bizarre MS 2024 CD
Mothermania
LP: Verve V6 5068
77k Worst Of The Mothers
LP: MGM SE 4754
The **** Of The Mothers
LP: Verve V6 5074
The Mothers Of Invention
LP: MGM GAS 112
Pregnant
LP: Verve 235 6049
Hot Rats
LP: Bizarre RS 6356 CD
Burnt Weeny Sandwich
LP: Bizarre RS 6370 CD
Weasels Ripped My Flesh
LP: Bizarre RS 2028 CD
Chunga's Revenge
LP: Bizarre MS 2030 CD
Fillmore East-June 1971
LP: Bizarre MS 2042 CD
200 Motels
LP: United Artists UAS 9956
Just Another Band From L.A.
LP: Bizarre MS 2075 CD
Waka/Jawaka
LP: Bizarre MS 2094 CD
The Grand Wazoo
LP: Bizarre MS 2093 CD
Over-Nite Sensation
LP: DiscReet MS 2149 CD
Apostrophe (')
LP: DiscReet DS 2175 CD
Roxy & Elsewhere
LP: DiscReet DS 2202 CD
One Size Fits All
LP: DiscReet DS 2216 CD
Bongo Fury
LP: DiscReet DS 2234 CD
Zoot Allures
LP: Warner Bros DS 2970 CD
Zappa In New York
LP: DiscReet DS 2290 CD
Studio Tart
LP: DiscReet DS 2291 CD
Sleep Dirt
LP: DiscReet DS 2292 CD
Sheik Yerbouti
LP: Zappa SRZ 21501 CD
Orchestral Favorites
LP: DiscReet DS 2294 CD
Joe's Garage Act I
LP: Zappa SRZ 11603
Joe's Garage Acts II & m
LP: Zappa SRZ 11502
Tinsel Town Rebellion
LP: Barking Pumpkin PW 237336 CD
Shut Up 'NPlay Yer Guitar
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 1111
Shirt Up 'N Play Yer Guitar Some More
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 1112
Return Of The Son Of Shut Up 'NPlay Yer
Guitar
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 1113
You Are What You h
LP: Barking Pumpkin PW 237537 CD
Shut Up 'NPlay Yer Guitar (31p Box)
LP: Barking Pumpkin W3X 38289 CD
Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning
Witch
LP: Barking Pumpkin FW 38066 CD
The Man From Utopia
LP: Barking Pumpkin FW 38404 CD

423

Frank Zappa

Baby Snakes
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 1115 CD
The London Symphony Orchestra Volume 1
LP: Barking Pumpkin FW 38820
The Perfect Stranger
LP: Angel 38170 CD
Them Or Us
LP: Barking Pumpkin SVB 074200 CD
Francesco Zappa
LP: Barking Pumpkin ST 74202 CD
Thing-Fish
LP: Barking Pumpkin SKC 074201 CD
The Old Masters Box 1
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 7777
Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention
LP: Barking Pumpkin ST 74203 CD
Does Humor Belong In Music?
CD: EMI CDP 7461882
77k Old Masters Box II
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 8888
Jazz Front Hell
LP: Barking Pumpkin ST 74205 CD
The London Symphony Orchestra Volume 2
LP: Barking Pumpkin SJ 74207
Joe's Garage Acts I, II & III
LP: Barking Pumpkin SWCL 74206 CD
77k Guitar World According To Frank Zappa
Cass: Barking Pumpkin GW 002
The Old Masters Box III
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 9999
Guitar
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 74212 CD
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Sampler
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPRD 174213
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore
Volume 1
CD: Rykodisc
Broadway The Hard Way
LP: Barking Pumpkin D 174218 CD
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore
Volume 2
LP: Barking Pumpkin BPR 74217 CD
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore
Volume 1
CD: Rykodisc
The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life
CD: Rykodisc
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore
Volume 4
CD: Rykodisc
Make A Jazz Noise Here
CD: Rykodisc
Beat The Boots, Box i
LP: Foo-eee RI 70907
As An Am
The Ark
Freaks & Motherfuckers
Unmitigated Audacity
Anyway The Wind Blows
'Tis The Season To Be Jelly
Saarbrucken '78
Piquantique
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore
Volume 5
CD: Rykodisc
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore
Volume 6
CD: Rykodisc
Beat The Boots, Box 2
LP: Foo-eee RI 70372
Disconnected Synapses
Tengo Na Minchia Tanta
Electric Aunt Jemima
At The Circus
Swiss Cheese/Fire!
Our Man In Nirvana
Conceptual Continuity
Playground Psychotic
CD: Rykodisc
77k Yellow Shark
CD: Rykodisc
Civilization, Phaze III
CD: Barking Pumpkin
Strictly Commercial
LP: Rykodisc
CD: Rykodisc
In 1995 the entire catalogue was expertly
redesigned, repackaged and reissued on CD
by Rykodisc. No corners were cut and
Ryko have to be congratulated for this
sympathetic and ambitious reissue
programme. The complete catalogue
number listing is standard for both USA and
the UK.

424

Discography: Original Albums

Freak Out!
RCD/RAC 10501
Absolutely Free
RCD/RAC 10502
We're Only In It For The Money
RCD/RAC/RALP 10503
Lumpy Gravy
RCD 10504
Cruisin' With Ruben & The Jets
RCD 10505
Uncle Meat
RCD/RAC 10506/7
Hot Rats
RCD/RAC 10508
Burnt Weeny Sandwich
RCD 10509
Weasels Ripped My Flesh
RCD/RAC 10510
Chunga's Revenge
RCD 10511
Fillmore East, June 1971
RCD/RAC 10512
200 Motels
RCD 10513/14
Just Another Band From L.A.
RCD 10515
Waka/Jawaka
RCD 10516
77k Grand Wazoo
RCD 10517
Over-Nite Sensation
RCD/RAC 10518
Apostrophe (')
RCD/RAC 10519
Apostrophe (') Audio-Phile series
RCD 80519
Roxy & Elsewhere
RCD/RAC 10520
One Size Fits All
RCD/RAC 10521
One Size Fits All Audio-Phile series
RCD 80521
Bongo Fury
RCD/RAC 10522
Zoot Allures
RCD/RAC 10523
Zappa In New York
RCD 10524/25
Studio Tan
RCD 10526
Sleep Dirt
RCD 10527
Sheik Yerbouti
RCD/RAC 10528
Orchestral Favorites
RCD 10529
Joe's Garage Acts I, II & III
RCD/RAC 10530/31
Tinsel Town Rebellion
RCD 10532
Shut Up 'NPlay Yer Guitar
RCD 10533/34/35
You Are What You Is
RCD 10536
Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning
Witch
RCD 10537
77k Man From Utopia
RCD 10538
Baby Snakes
RCD/RAC 10539
TTie London Symphony Orchestra Volumes 1
&2
RCD 10540/41
Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger
RCD 10542
Them Or Us
RCD 10543
Thing-Fish
RCD 10544/45
Francesco Zappa
RCD 10546
Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention
RCD 10547
Does Humor Belong In Music?
RCD 10548
Jazz From Hell
RCD 10549
Guitar
RCD 10550/51
Broadway The Hard Way
RCD 10552
The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life
RCD 10653/54
Make A Jazz Noise Here
RCD 10555/56
Playground Psychotic
RCD 10557/58
Ahead Of Their Time
RCD 10559

425

Frank Zappa

The Yellow Shark	You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6	
RCD/RAC 40560	RCD 10571/72	
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 1	Strictly Commercial (The Best Of Frank Zappa)	
RCD 10561/62	RCD/RAC 40600	
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 2	The Lost Episodes	
RCD 10563/64	RCD 40573	
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3	Lather	
RCD 10565/66	RCD 10574/76	
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 4	Have I Offended Someone?	
RCD 10567/68	RCD 10577	
You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 5	Strictly Genteel: A Classical Introduction To	
RCD 10569/70	Frank Zappa	
	RCD 10578	
426

Bibliography
Frank Zappa Fanzines and reference works:
Society Pages, The Magazine of The International Frank Zappa Society, Rob Samler
and Den Simms, P.O. Box 395, Deer Park, NY 11729-0395, USA.
T'Mershi Duween, Zappa Fanzine, Fred Tomsett, P.O. Box 86, Sheffield Sll 8XN,
England.
The Torture Never Stops, Vols. 1 to 4, The Torture Team Germany, 1991/2.
Books
The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy At Home And Abroad: 1750 To The Present,
Second Edition, Walter LaFeber (Norton, 1994).
American Heartbeat: Travels from Woodstock to San Jose by Song Title, Mick Brown
(Michael Joseph, 1993).
The Age Of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan
Eisen (Vintage Books, 1969).
Bat Chain Putter: Rock & Roll In The Age Of Celebrity, Kurt Loder (St Martin's
Press, 1990).
Bom Under A Bad Sign: Illustrations/Ralph Steadman, Tony Palmer (William
Kimber, 1970).
Broken Record: The Inside Story Of The Grammy Awards, Henry Schipper (Birch
Lane Press, 1992).
Captain Beefheart: The Man And His Music: Second Revised Edition, CD. Webb
(Kosher Pig Publications, 1989).
Days In The Life: Voices From The English Underground 1961-1971, Jonathon
Green (Heinemann, 1988).
Experimental Pop: Frontiers Of The Rock Era, Billy Bergman and Richard Horn
(Blandford Press, 1985).
Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock'n'Roll in the Movies, Marshall Crenshaw (Plexus,
1994).
I'm With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie, Pamela Des Barres (Jove, 1988).
The Lives & Times of Zappa & The Mothers (Babylon Books).
Mother! The Frank Zappa Story, Michael Gray (Plexus, 1993).
No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention,
David Walley (Dutton, 1972).
Perfect Pitch: A Life Story, Nicholas Slonimsky (Oxford, 1988).
The Real Frank Zappa Book, Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso (Poseidon
Press, 1989).
The Road Goes On Forever: The Foulk Brothers: Pop Promoting Blues, Philip Norman
(Elm Tree/Hamish Hamilton, 1982).
427

Frank Zappa
Rock Day By Day, Steve Smith & The Diagram Group (Guinness Publishing,
1987).
The Rock Giants, Edited by Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin (The World Pub-
lishing Company, 1970).
Rock Odyssey: A Chronicle of the Sixties, Ian Whitcomb (Dolphin, 1983).
Rock Wives: The Hard Lives and Good Times of the Wives, Girlfriends, and Groupies of
Rock And Roll, Victoria Balfour (Beech Tree Books, 1986).
The Rolling Stone Rock'n'RoU Reader, Edited by Ben Fong-Torres (Bantam, 1974).
Science Fiction In The Cinema, John Baxter (The Tantivy Press, 1970).
Shots From The Hip, Charles Shaar Murray (Penguin, 1991).
The Smithsonian Guide To Historic America: Virginia And The Capital Region
(Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989).
Uncovering The Sixties: The Life & Times Of The Underground Press, Abe Peck
(Pantheon, 1985).
Via Zappa! Dominic Chevalier (Omnibus Press, 1985).
When The Music Mattered: Rock In The 1960s, Bruce Pollock (Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1983).
Frank Zappa - A Visual Documentary by Miles (Omnibus Press, 1993).
Frank Zappa In His Own Words Compiled by Miles (Omnibus Press, 1993).
428

Index

Absolutely Free, 1, 32, 34, 78-79, 88,
91,97,98,106,111,115,423,
425
Adler, Larry, 11
Ahead Of Their Time, 123, 126,
374, 377, 425
Alice Cooper, 128,129,132,169,
393
Allen, Steve, 37
Aitham, Keith, 89, 180, 410
Amirkhanian, Charles, 15, 378, 416,
420-421
An Evening With Wild Man Fischer,
122
Angel, 240, 250, 424
Animals, The, 70
Antelope Valley Union High School,
23, 29, 31
Apostrophe(% 193, 202, 204-205,
214, 259, 423, 425
Arbus, Doon, 92, 406
Aspen Wind Quintet, 348
Baby Ray & The Ferns, 35, 37
Baby Snakes, 246, 254, 276-281, 317,
355, 357, 424-425
Baker, Ginger, 104
Baker, James, 341, 372
Baker, Susan, 341
Bakker, Jim & Tammy, 289, 361
Balfour, Victoria, 69, 206, 277, 404,
412, 415, 428
Ballard, William, 25
Baltimore, v, 11, 12-13, 16, 27, 329,
346, 401
Barber, Dick, 37, 101,166,173,
178, 281, 410, 415
Barfko-Swul, 332, 347, 354
Barking Pumpkin, 68, 292-293,
332, 340, 345, 349-350, 354,
357, 363-364, 423-424
Barrow, Arthur, 256, 264, 282, 288,
299, 301, 317, 320, 359, 416-418
Barth,John, 12-13
Beat The Boots, 160, 161, 176, 205,
258, 330, 381, 384, 401-404,
407, 424
Beatles, The, 45, 49, 67-68, 77,
97-98,101,105,108,178,191,
361, 393
Belew, Adrian, 243, 255, 393, 414,
416
Bell, Norma Jean, 225
Berry, Richard, 18, 79, 238
Bickford, Bruce, 206, 212, 246, 277,
280-281
Bikel, Theodore, 48,163
Billy The Mountain, 169, 171-172,
176,183, 246, 259, 387, 389
Bizarre Records, 117
Black Sabbath, 238, 241
Black, Jimmy Carl, 44, 47, 56, 60,
92, 111, 115,127,131,145,148,
166, 173, 215, 290, 377, 421,
Blackouts, The, 27-28, 30-31
Blake, John, 208, 412
Boogie Men, The, 33—34
Bongo Fury, 202, 215, 219, 221,
223-225, 371, 423, 425
Boucher, Caroline, 188, 411

429

Frank Zappa

Boulez, Pierre, 278, 308, 310, 324,
325, 393
Bozzio, Dale, 382
Bozzio, Terry, 214, 224-227, 229,
231-232, 235-236, 240-241,
243,250,253,255,263,271,
330, 388
Broadway The Hard Way, 202,
364-366, 379, 424-425
Brock, Napoleon Murphy,
199-200, 207, 209, 211-212,
214-215, 222-223, 225, 329
Brown, Clarence 'Gatemouth', 27,
30
Bruce, Jack, 104,203
Bruce, Lenny, 48, 51, 63, 72, 74,
96-97,122,136
Buff, Paul, 35-38,100
Buffido Springfield, 77, 78, 98
Burdon, Eric, 70, 99, 101
Burnt Weeny Sandwich, 35, 137-138,
149-150, 423, 425
Burroughs, William, 260-262
Bush, George, 364
Buxton, Eric, 371,414,417-418,420
Byrds, The, 49, 51, 98, 156
Cage, John, 112, 138,331
Campbell, Alan, QC, 217-218
Canters, 66, 77
Capitol Records, 36, 84-85, 87,
248, 340, 349
Captain Beefheart (Don Vliet),
39-41,130,132-135,142,146,
148,157,181,213,216,
219-222,224-226,231,
233-234, 380, 402, 410, 414
Carey, Timothy, 34, 111
Carr, Roy, 8, 160, 172, 175, 187,
409-411
Carson, Tom, 280, 415
Carter, Jimmy, 305, 365, 398
Cervantes, Miguel de, 5, 391
Cerveris, Don, 25, 32, 47
Charone, Barbara, 205, 412
Cheka, Mark, 47-48, 51
Chieftains, The, 380, 388
Chrislu, Spencer, 389
Chunga's Revenge, 143, 151, 156,
159,193, 333, 361, 423, 425
Church of American Secular
Humanism, 357
Ciro's, 3, 49
Civilization, Phaze III, 374, 389, 396,
424
Clapton, Eric, 1, 91, 99,104,123,
127
Clinton, Bill, 390, 398
Cobain, Kurt, 398
Cohen, Herb, 48-49, 51-52, 54-55,
60, 72-73, 76-77, 97,101,
106-107,113-114,122,149,154,
168,179,195, 208, 213, 217,
233-235, 243
Colaiuta, Vinnie, 256, 282, 287, 293,
295-296, 299, 315-316, 330
Collins, Ray, 37, 39-40, 44, 60-61,
92, 96,101,128,151,153, 203
Corman, Roger, 230
Coronado, Dave, 44-45
Creamcheese, Suzy, 53, 58, 61, 71,
74, 79,106,109,115, 345
Cross, Christopher, 288, 317
Cruisin' With Ruben & The Jets, 112,
122,128, 319, 423, 425
Crush All Boxes, 288, 290, 292, 295
Cucurullo, Warren, 246, 260, 274,
280
Cuneo, Louis, 85, 394
Dance Me This, 389
Davies, Rick, 99,143, 315, 318, 320,
357, 406, 408, 417^19
Davis, Michael, 276, 282, 285,
414-416
Davis, 116, 186, 213

430

Index

de Kloet, Co, 155, 375, 409-410,
419, 421
De Martini, Warren, 387
De Niro, Robert, 395
Deep Purple, 152,177
Demszky, Gabor, 380
Denselow, Robin, 218, 309, 311,
313, 392, 417
Dickie's Such An Asshole, 99, 201,
398
DiscReet Records, 204
Doerschuk, Robert L., 235, 245,
411-412,414-415,421
Does Humor Belong In Music,
328-329, 334, 346, 348, 355, 367,
424-425
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5
Duke, George, 143,151, 155,161,
169,185-186,193-194,197, 200,
203, 209-210, 212-215, 221, 243,
260, 268, 274, 334, 354
Dunbar, Aynsley, 146-147,
150-151,155,157, 159,161,176,
185,187, 232, 387
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 338
Dylan, Bob, 49, 54, 58, 153, 280,
313-314
Edgewood Arsenal, 13
Ellen, Mark, 269, 415
Ellington, Duke, 63, 141
Ensemble InterContemporain, 278,
308, 324-325
Ensemble Modem, 379, 381,
384-385, 389
Estrada, Roy, 44, 48, 60, 85, 92,
127-128,145,148,181, 225, 229,
246, 281, 330
Factory, The, 71-74, 76, 114, 128
Falwell, Jerry, 289-290, 338
Fielder, Hugh, 238, 253, 257-258,
414
Fillmore Auditorium, 62-63
Fillmore, Eastjune 1971, 169, 171-
172, 423, 425
Foo-eee Records, 401-402
Fowler, Bruce, 193, 214-215, 232,
237, 243, 259, 262, 359, 393
Fowler, Tom, 213, 215, 243
Fowler, Walt, 199, 237, 359
Fowley, Kim, 58-59,122
Francesco Zappa, 328, 332, 424-425
Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of
Prevention, 12, 344, 424-425
Franzoni, Carl, 49, 57, 68-69,
72-73,118
Freak Out!, v, 1, 4, 25, 57, 60, 62,
65-67,79,82,86,89,114-5,
117,153,205,404,423,425
Freep, 66-67, 71-77, 85-S6,120
Fricke, David, 393
Gardner, Bunk, 79, 92, 113, 116,
131, 148, 215
George, Lowell, 71, 73, 128, 131,
140, 145,148, 405, 408
Gill, Andy, 25, 49, 402-403
Gillan, Ian, 177, 236
Gingrich, Newt, 398-399
Gleason, Ralph, 64, 98, 129
Gluckstein, Sir Louis, 167, 217
Goldwasser, Noe, 196, 355, 411,
419
Gore, Al, 341
Gore, Mary Elizabeth 'Tipper', 341,
344-345, 390
Graham, Bill, 63-64, 169, 404
Grand Funk Railroad, 233
Green, Richard, 139, 150, 152, 157,
408-410
Greenaway, Andy, 214, 263, 310,
412-415, 417
Greening, Matt, 33, 134, 176, 366,
388, 393, 396
Groom, Winston, 399

431

Frank Zappa

GTOs,The, 119,123-124,
128-130,140,146,166
Guercio.Jim, 51, 56, 212, 262
Guitar, 334, 363, 414-^16, 424-
425
Haba, Aloys, 26
Hahn, Jessica, 289, 361
Hammett, Dashiell, 11
Hanks, Tom, 399
Hansen, Barry, 194, 206-207, 411
Harris, Bob, 169,172, 293, 304,
334
Harris, Don 'Sugarcane', 142,
149-150,156,158, 203
Havel, Vaclav, 371, 393
Hayward, Richie, 72, 78
Head, 111
Henderson, Douglas 'Socko', 11
Hendrix, Jimi, 7, 98,101,108,117,
127,132,235, 285,346
Herrod, Marion, 167, 207-208
Hitchcock, David, 147
Holiday, Billie, 11
Holloway, Danny, 188, 411
Homan, Steve, 376, 421
Honker Home Video, 167, 355
Hoover, J. Edgar, 76
Hopkins, Jerry, 50, 52, 62, 71-73,
94,120,144,146,166, 402-403,
405-409
Hot Rats, 142-145,151,159,185,
203,262,408,423,425
Howell, Trevor Charles, 179,181,
189
Howlin' Wolf, 21, 27, 50,146, 216,
222
Hunchentoot, 183, 188, 212, 262,
334
Hurvitz, Sandra, 93,101,107
Hussein, Saddam, 375-376
Ingber, Elliott, 56, 60, 78,181, 385
Jackson, Joe, 389, 422
James, Emily, 296
Jazz From Hell, 346, 352-354,
418-419, 425
Jefferson Airplane, 59,63,98,100,
120,156,404
Jobson, Eddie, 235-237, 270, 294
Joe's Garage, 7,177, 272,274-276,
291, 316, 357,368
Joe's Garage Act I, 279,423-425
Joe's Garage Acts II & III, 212, 275,
279, 423-^25
Jones, Allan, 209, 412
Jones, Eddie 'Guitar Slim', 24, 27,
238
Jones, Rev. Jim, 326
Jones, Nick, 104,109, 406-407
Jones, Spike, 15,139
Juke Box Jury, 8, 83,108
Just Another Band From L.A.,
172-173,183,196, 351, 403, 405,
423, 425
Kafka, Franz, 99
Kart, Larry, 91,129,132,137-138,
406-407
Kaylan, Howard, 153, 166,169,171,
173,179, 187,188, 358
Kellgren, Gary, 97, 99,101
Kempton, Sally, 48,113, 403, 407
Keneally, Mike, 358-360, 378-379,
382, 393
Kent, Nick, 266, 415
Kenyon, Michael, 227
Kershaw, Alex, 289, 389, 416, 422
Key, Francis Scott, 11
Kirk, Roland, 140
Knack, The, 316, 320, 417
Kocab, Michael, 371, 380
Kofsky, Frank, 61, 79, 94, 96, 98,
404,406
Romanoff, Ruth, 116, 148
Kopetzky, Helmut, 125-126, 407

432

Index

Koresh, David, 34
Kronos String Quartet, 347
Kunc, Dick, 97,112,133,196
La La La Human Steps, 386
Laboe, Art, 42
Lancaster, 8, 22-23, 28-31, 48,133
Lather, v, 248-249, 256, 263, 294,
414
Lawson, Dick, 127, 137-138,140,
407-408
Leiber, Mike, 11
Leigh, Nigel, 8, 23, 30, 79, 89-90,
112,134,144, 220, 226, 232, 265,
268, 270, 274, 284, 322, 401-402,
403-408, 410-418, 420, 422
Lennon.John, 119, 163, 170-171,
361, 387
Let's Move To Cleveland, 329-330,
335, 380
Levinson, Barry, 12
Liberatore, Gaetano, 314
Lickert, Martin, 166
Ligeti, Gyorgy, 323
Lightnin' Slim, 21, 27
Loder, Kurt, 16, 68, 90, 99, 364,
401, 404, 406, 420, 427
Lofts, Trevor, 376, 421
Logeman, David, 282
London Symphony Orchestra, 272,
278,309,311,322,354,357,
424-425
Los Angeles Free Press, 66, 71,
404-405
Louie Louie, 44, 50, 79, 109, 221
Lumpy Gravy, v, 84-85, 98, 100,
117,120,170, 212, 345, 354, 374,
396, 405, 423, 425
Make A Jazz Noise Here, 377,
379-380, 424-425
Mann, Ed, 239, 243, 245, 291, 299,
309, 346, 358-360, 419
Manville, W. H., 113-114, 407
Marquez, Sal, 185-187, 192-193,
196
Mars, Tommy, 232, 243-244, 254,
264, 282, 287, 295-296, 299,
303, 315, 329, 345-346, 358
Martin, Bobby, 299, 316, 329, 331,
345, 358
Massey, Nick, 89
McCarthy, Senator Eugene, 26, 48,
342, 398
McCartney, Paul, 98,105,117, 229
McGregor, Sean, 76, 405
McLeod, Pauline, 230
Mead, David, 18, 23, 31, 275, 315,
359, 401-402, 406, 415, 417, 419
Medium Cool, 149
Mehta, Zubin, 151-153,157,172,
409
Melly, George, 218
Mencken, H.L., 11
Mercury/Phonogram, 248—249,
287, 292
MGM, 54-58, 60, 62, 67, 81,
84-85, 87-88, 97,100,117,122,
128,132, 222, 234, 319, 423
Miles (Barry), 167, 233-234, 240-
242, 401, 407, 409, 413-414, 428
Miller, Miss Pamela, 118, 123, 166
Mitchell, Al, 77
Mitchell, Joni, 154, 160
Mocatta, Justice, 216-219, 222
Modeo, Elwood 'Junior', 18
Moire, Davey, 226, 229, 233, 260
Molich—Zebhauser, Andreas, 379,
384, 387, 389
Moon, Keith, 163,166, 346, 409
Moondog, 5
Monterey, Ca., 16, 98
Morrison, Sterling, 63
Mothermania, 122, 132, 348, 423
Mothers of Invention, The, 1, 4,
60-61, 65, 67, 74, 82, 84, 87, 91,

433

Frank Zappa

The Mothers of Invention (contd.)
110,128,144,146,152,161,
175,179,182,185,187-188,
205, 225, 234-235, 358, 404,
406,423,427
Mulhern, Tom, 223, 291, 304, 307,
413, 416-418
Mundi, Billy, 78, 92,102, 111, 151,
153
Murray, Charles Shaar, 184,187,
194-195,198, 209,223, 267,
306, 392, 411^112, 415, 417, 428
Muthers, The, 41
Nagano, Kent, 278, 310-313, 329,
375, 387, 417
Neon Park (Martin Muller), 158
Newman, Randy, 11—12
Nixon, Richard, 75, 99,154,
201-202, 207, 361, 384, 398
Norman, Philip, 190, 411, 427
North, Oliver, 357, 365, 398
O'Hearn, Patrick, 235-237, 239,
243-244, 255-256, 263,281, 334
Occhiogrosso, Peter, 366, 401, 418,
427
Ocker, David, 291, 309, 323, 328
Odin, Bianca, 235, 237
Ogden, Michael, Q.C., 216-217
Old Masters, The, Box I, 39, 319,
348, 403, 424
Old Masters, The, Box II, 126, 142,
351, 424
Old Masters, The, Box III, 357, 424
One Size Fits All, 5, 211-212,
222-223,412-413,416,423,425
Ono, Yoko, 170-171, 387
Orchestral Favorites, 224, 242, 271,
323, 326,423,425
Otis, Johnny, 118
Ouellette, Dan, 25, 398, 402, 416,
421^22
Ovemite Sensation, v, 192,194, 411
Pacific Grove, Ca., 8, 16-17
Palmer, Tony, 163-164,174, 218,
281, 409-410, 427
Pandora's Box, 77, 81
Pardo, Don, 238-239
Parents' Music Resource Center, 6,
341
Paris Actuel Music Festival, 146
Paulekas, Vito, 49
Paxman, Jeremy, 336
Perlich, Martin, 169,184, 249,405,
410-411
Permanent Damage, 130
Perrino, Joe (& The Mellowtones),
34
Phlorescent Leech & Eddie, 159,187
Plaster Casters, The, 123-124, 407
Playground Psychotic, 170-172, 200,
387, 424-425
Pinske, Mark, 292, 309
Piston, Walter, 25
Poe, Edgar Allan, 11, 82
Ponty, Jean Luc, 143-144,146,161,
193, 203, 259-260, 294, 329
Popeil, Lisa, 303
Preston, Don, 79, 92,109,116,127,
130,138-139,145,148-150,172,
177,185-186,199
Price, Vincent, 230
Prince, 341-342
Purves, Libby, 380
Quayle, Dan, 365, 372
Rambali, Paul, 250-251, 414
Ramblers, The, 18, 28
Reagan, Ronald, 86, 91, 257, 289,
299, 305,342,361,364-367,
383-384
Reed, Lou, 62-63, 394
Reed, Ralph, 399

434

Index

Rense, Rip, 391,422
ResnicoflF, Matt, 157, 293, 360, 409,
416, 419
Robertson, Pat, 289, 361, 365,
398-399
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 190, 394
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 13
Rosen, Steve, 213, 229, 412-413,
416
Roxy & Elsewhere, 40,200, 206,211,
214, 366, 423, 425
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, 161,
163,165,167, 409
Ruhlmann, William, 36, 96-97,139,
204, 363, 368, 402, 406, 408, 412,
420
Run Home Slow, 32, 38, 56,115,131,
149
Rundgren, Todd, 226, 229, 297
Ruth, Babe, 11
Rykodisc, 348, 363-364, 374, 397,
424
Salewicz, Chris, 236, 242, 413-414
Samler, Rob, 8, 412, 414,
416-417-418, 420-421, 427
Schenkel, Cal, 101, 106, 119, 121,
128,132,135,150,154,159,169,
172, 204, 374, 393
Schneckloth, Tim, 239, 245, 258,
261, 286, 413-416
Schorr, Daniel, 356, 391-393, 419,
422
Secunda, Tony, 103,107
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
97
Shankar, L., 260, 262-264, 280, 388
Sheflf, David, 17, 84, 269, 347, 373,
388, 401, 405, 415-417, 419, 421
Sheik Yerbouti, v, 254, 258, 262, 266-
267, 291-292, 317, 374, 423, 425
Shepp, Archie, 86, 95,146-147, 335,
380
Sherman, Kay, 33
Sherwood, Euclid James
'Motorhead', 31, 39-40,100,
146,182, 388
Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A
Drowning Witch, 303, 305-306,
308, 323, 423, 425
Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, v, 140,
270, 279, 294, 298, 334, 353,
363, 423,425
Simmons, Jeff, 129,151, 166,185,
199, 230, 273, 387
Simms, Den, 8,249, 295, 303, 316,
328, 330, 377, 412, 414,
416-418, 420-421, 427
Simpson, Wallis, Duchess of
Windsor, 11,29
Sleep Dirt, 183, 242-243, 262-263,
423, 425
Slick, Grace, 120, 146
Sloatman, Adelaide Gail, see Zappa,
Gail, 68
Slonimsky, Nicholas, 12, 298,
302-303, 307, 387, 395, 416,
422, 427
Smothers, John, 231, 241, 244, 281,
302, 305, 314
Snow, Mat, 63, 404, 410
Soots, The, 38, 133
Soul Agents, The, 44,194
Spector, Phil, 51, 53-55, 74
Spellman, Richard, 11
Sprechstimme, 296-297, 315
Starr, Ringo, 163,181
Steadman, Ralph, 163, 427
Stills, Stephen, 77, 81
Stone, Bob, 350
Stravinsky, Igor, 4, 27, 82, 84, 112,
361, 379, 395
Stuart, Alice, 50
Studio Tan, 242, 259, 263, 425
Studio Z, 39, 44-45,221, 230
Sugar Blue, 252

435

Frank Zappa

Swaggart, Jimmy, 257, 289, 361-
362, 365, 378, 380
Synclavier, 4, 320-323, 326, 328,
340, 344-346, 348, 351-354,
356, 367-368, 370, 377, 381,
386, 389, 395
The Best Band You Never Heard In
Your Life, 361, 374, 377, 424-425
The Grand Wazoo, 182, 186, 187,
188,192,196, 209, 407, 417,
423, 425
The Lost Episodes, 374, 389, 397,
426
The Man From Utopia, 313-314, 315,
316, 423, 425
The Perfect Stranger, 308, 310, 322,
324-325, 328, 332, 375, 424-425
The Rage And The Fury, 389
The Real Frank Zappa, 21, 33, 39,
318, 366, 378, 401, 403, 405,
418-419, 427
The Yellow Shark, 384, 386, 390,
419, 421, 424, 426
Them Or Us, 331-332, 333, 340,
424-^25
Thing-Fish, v, 222, 304, 329, 333,
336, 338-340, 344-345, 378,
418, 424-125
Thome, Joel, 297, 379, 382, 393,
421
Thompson, Chester, 199, 212-214,
243, 262
Thompson, Howard, 8, 178, 410
Thompson, Hunter S., 243, 298,
398, 422
Thunes, Scott, 299, 316, 329, 350,
358-361,379,382
Til, Sonny, 11
Tinsel Town Rebellion, 48, 269, 293-
295, 299, 338, 423, 425
Tiny Tim, 119
Tossi, Ernest, 24—25
Toth, Delegate Judith, 12, 349-350
Tripp, Arthur Dyer, 112, 116,122,
131,143,145,181
Trout Mask Replica, 132,135,148,
231
Turtles, The, 153-156,159, 358
Tuskegee, 336—337
200 Motels, 120, 126,151-152,154,
157,159,160-163,167,170-171,
174,181-182, 217, 224, 271, 281,
367, 387, 409-410, 423, 425
Uncle Meat, 93-94,109,115-116,
121,126,128,132,136,149-150,
188, 224, 259, 346, 351, 353, 355,
367, 423, 425
Underwood, Ian, 101, 113-116,
131,141-143,148-150,169,188,
323
Underwood, Ruth, 116, 188-189,
193,197, 201-203, 211, 214, 229,
231, 239, 243, 388, 393
Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, v,
4, 221, 274, 276, 282, 284-285,
287, 292, 294, 318, 350, 355, 370,
381,	387, 416
Vai, Steve, 255, 291, 293, 299,
315-316, 329, 333, 345, 350, 380,
382,	385, 388, 414, 416
Varese, Edgar, 4, 19, 20-21, 27, 55,
58, 84,152, 238, 297-298, 312,
318, 323, 379, 389, 395, 401
Velvet Underground and Nico, 62
Venet, Nick, 84
Verve, 55, 57, 60, 62, 67, 81, 84-85,
94, 96-97,100,117,122,128,
132, 222, 234, 239, 319, 348, 382,
423
Vestine, Henry, 50, 55-56
VUet, Don, 29, 31, 38-39, 73,133,
145, 213, 215, 222, 225, 229, 231,
402

436

Index

Volman, Mark, 153,173,175,177,
178-180,187,188, 212, 358, 387,
393
Wackerman, Chad, 262, 299, 304,
309, 323, 329, 334, 350, 358, 360,
393
Waddy, Stacy, 125, 407
Waka/Jawaka, 185,186,187, 423,
425
Walley, Denny, 148, 215, 222, 256,
269-270, 290, 382
Warner Bros., 122, 129, 136, 149,
158,183, 204, 209, 225, 228,
233-234, 237, 239, 247, 248-249,
253, 256, 258-259, 262, 264, 266,
271, 273, 288, 315, 319, 423
Warts And All, 279, 287-288, 291,
295
Watson, Johnny 'Guitar', 23, 30-31,
213, 233, 347, 388
Watts, Michael, 211, 222
Webern, Anton, 21, 318, 395
Wein, George, 141,161
Welch, Chris, 123, 407
We're Only In It For The Money, 85,
97-98,106,115,117,122, 319-
320, 397, 406, 416, 417, 423, 425
Weasels Ripped My Flesh, v, 84, 126,
131,158, 409, 423, 425
Wexler, Haskell, 149
Whalley, David, 14
What's New In Baltimore, v, 11-12,
329, 346, 401
Wheeler, Drew, 69, 90, 374, 382,
397, 405-406, 419, 421
Whipping Post, 330-331, 333, 335
Whisky A Go Go, 52,116
Whitcomb, Ian, 69, 405, 428
White, Ray, 235-236, 270, 282,
290, 299, 305, 329-330, 347,
358-359
Williams, Kenny, 100
Williams, Ronnie, 36,100
Willis, Ike, 256, 264, 273, 282, 329,
330, 338, 345-346, 358, 365,
370,378
Willis, Sergeant Jim, 42
Wilmer, Valerie, 92-93, 406
Wilson, Tom, 54-57, 59, 62, 70,
101,107,150
Winston, Victoria, 9, 55, 58, 60,
403-404
Wolf, Peter, 243-244, 256, 264,
276, 282, 283
xenochrony, 231, 255, 291, 333
TTieX Fifes, 336
You Are What You Is, 279, 287-288,
291, 292, 299, 338, 374, 423,
425
You Can't Do That On Stage
Anymore, 131, 209,269, 334,
354-355, 363, 370, 374, 380,
383, 385, 420, 424, 426
YCDTOSA, 131,173,196,202,
222, 231,237, 246,260, 270,
280, 303, 305, 306, 331, 335,
363-364, 366, 374, 385
Youmans, James 'Bird Legs', 213,
262
Zappa, Ahmet, 3, 206, 290, 303,
333, 376, 388, 390
Zappa, Bobby, 14, 30-31,101
Zappa, Candy, 17
Zappa. Carl, 17, 140
Zappa, Diva, 3, 277,316, 370, 376,
382, 390
Zappa, Dweezil, 3,140, 285, 333,
335, 350-352, 370, 376, 382,
388, 390, 395, 419
Zappa, Francis Vincent, 11—17, 22,
26, 204, 250, 412
Zappa, Gail, 3, 416, 418

437

Frank Zappa

Zappa, Moon, 3,106,117,119,
140, 290, 306-307, 382, 385,
390, 394, 401, 416-417
Zappa, Rose Marie, 12
Zappa In New York, 244, 248, 253,
266, 414, 423, 425
Zappa Records, 262
Zarubica, Pamela, 53, 57, 60-61,
70-72,106,119,345
Zavod, Alan, 329, 335
Zollo, Paul, 21, 356, 401, 419
Zoot Allures, v, 222, 226, 229, 231,
233-234, 237, 243, 266, 334, 338,
413, 423, 425

438
9/04 (52342)

I
Electric Don Quixote
HB| the definitive story of ■	___
Frank Zappa

For my parents, Agnes and John, who never stand
in the way and always pick up the pieces.
And for Robynne, the wild little lion cub.

Electric Don Quixote
■■■ the definitive story of ■	■■■■
Frank Zappa
Neil Slaven
O
OMNIBUS PRESS
London/New YorWParis/Sydney/Copenhagen/Madrid/Tokyo

Copyright © 1996 Neil Slaven
This Edition Copyright © 2003 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Book Sales Limited)
Edited and Designed by Colin Larkin for Square One Books Ltd,
assisted by Susan Pipe & Miles Hutchinson.
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ISBN: 0.7119.9436.6
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of the photographs in this book but one or two were unreachable.
We would be grateful if the photographers concerned would contact us.
Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks.
Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD	Page 1
INTRODUCTION	3
 1	WHAT'S NEW IN BALTIMORE?	11
 2	CRUISIN' FOR BURGERS	29
 3	PROJECT/OBJECT	46
 4	FREAK OUT!	65
 5	LUMPY GRAVY	84
 6	DEAD GIRLS IN LONDON	103
 7	OUR BIZARRE RELATIONSHIP	122
 8	SHUT UP 'N PLAY YER GUITAR	140
 9	WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH	158

 10	SMOKE ON THE WATER	176
 11	OVERNITE SENSATION	192
 12	ONE SIZE FITS ALL	211
 13	ZOOT ALLURES	229
 14	LATHER	248
 15	SHEIK YERBOUTI	266
 16	UTILITY MUFFIN RESEARCH KITCHEN	284
 17	DROWNING WITCH	301
 18	SYSTEMS OF EDGES	318
 19	THING-FISH	336
 20	ONCE AGAIN, WITHOUT THE NET	355
 21	THE TORTURE NEVER STOPS	373
 22	OUTRO	391
NOTES	401
DISCOGRAPHY	423
BIBLIOGRAPHY	427
INDEX	429

'. . . we of these times enjoy the
agreeable entertainment, not only
of his true and delightful adventures;
but also the intervening episodes,
which are no less real, artful and
delicious, than the main history
itself, the heisted, reeled and
ravelled thread of which is
continued thus.'
Don Quixote, Book Four, Chapter One
Miguel de Cervantes
(translated by Tobias Smollett, 1755)
There's only one reason to write:
because you consider yourself to be
a writer, and you want people to pay
attention to what you wrote. It's
the bane of your existence that you
must write about somebody else doing
something that you can't do.
Frank Zappa, Zappa!
No bane, no gain.
Neil Slaven