Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  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 enterprises. 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 Beatles 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 Beatles 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 Beatles effortlessly stole his thunder.

  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 & Dad', with its story of a daughter 'shot by the cops as she quietly 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 dieaway 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 little squirts and explosions, was done by using a box that we built at the studio called the Apostolic Vlorch Injector. It was a little box with three 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 title 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 Little 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 featuring 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 this stuff, and it was just funny to be involved with these 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 original issue, goes on to say, 'I get to work with the Velvet Underground, 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 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 Beatles' name was set out in a neat suburban herbaceous border, the Mothers' was spelt in vegetables. Instead of brightly coloured bandsmen's 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 diffidently 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 containing Gary Kellgren's photograph and half of a United Mutations 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 CONCEIVED & EXECUTED BY FRANK ZAPPA AS A RESULT OF SOME UNPLEASANT PREMONITIONS, AUGUST THROUGH OCTOBER 1967."

  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 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 vibrations 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 interviewed 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 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 thei
r earnings 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 Beatles' business managers, to which Frank replied that business managers were there to be told what to do by their 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 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 September. 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 floorthrough 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.