by Neil Slaven
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
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, erstwhile 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 dying city. Trouble was, he'd only ever passed through it on a train. The Baltimore of his imagination didn't exist: the townspeople 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 frequently eulogised in the fiction of another native polymath, John Barth, comprehensively in Tidewater Tales and Sabbatical 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 little 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 titled '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 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 environment. 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 following 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 disperse 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.
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 suf
fer 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
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 lightweight 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 something, 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 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 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
The aesthetic pleasure gained from making patterns on manuscript paper didn't mean the results were necessarily playable but a percussion piece entitled '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 secondhand 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 discovered 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
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 percussionists 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.
