Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  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 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 Little Richard's 'Directly 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 entitled 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 Lancaster 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.

  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 harmonica at about the same age. He also claimed a harmonica-playing grandfather, Amos Vertenor Warfield, who was second cousin to Wallis 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 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 little 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 motherfucker"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 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 introduce 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 members, they would become the Omens after the Zappa family had moved away from Lancaster.

  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 title 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 Hollywood. 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 production 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 exceptional 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.

  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 photograph 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 convinced 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 the 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 slightly longer than the three-day training period.

  Music was confined to his ongoing and then-unheard experiments 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 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 drumsticks 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 headline, '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 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 little 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 the pieces had this little cheesoid Wollensack tape recorder in the background pumping out through mono speakers."19 Frank had also been experimenting 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 bootlegs of the concert, which included such titles 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 l
ater reaches Cucamonga, where it crosses Archibald Avenue. Just north of the intersection at 8040 North Archibald in 1963 was the Pal Recording Studio, owned by Paul Buff. Buff had learned electronics in the US Marines and on his discharge had rented the three-room premises and set about constructing 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 importantly, he built his own tape machine.

  "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 guitarplayer 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.