by Neil Slaven
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 single, 'Dinner With Drac'. Brian Lord was a San Bernardino DJ who imitated President John F. Kennedy. Vigah! was another of 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 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 exactly 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 entrepreneur. 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 Buff 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 doowop 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.
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 recently 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 Vliet 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 title is clear enough to question how bootleggers 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 equipment. 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 overdub maniac, working in this studio."25 Little 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 participants could be located.
Frank renamed the establishment Studio Z and threw an opening 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 occasional 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 Beefheart 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 Motorhead Sherwood's acoustic guitar and Vic Mortenson on drums. After Captain Beefheart had introduced himself and predicted 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 nonsense 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 scho
ol friends, including 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 themselves "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
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 reluctant 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 Beefheart vs. The Grunt People. A casting call went out for locals to fill the lesser roles, one of whom, Frank subsequently 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 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 'salesman' 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 pornographer. 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.
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 criminal 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 exactly 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-like 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 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 particularly 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 guitarist. 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 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.
