Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  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 motley 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 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 denominator, 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-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 encompass '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 psychedelic — 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 electronic gear as coloured spotlights swept the stage. The Chief Mother is a gentleman 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 apparently 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 convenience 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 aptly 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 photographs 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 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 themselv
es I've ever witnessed. 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 meaningless noise. I could not have been more wrong. The Mothers produced 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 Amsterdam, 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 Mayall'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, whatever 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 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 vaudeville 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 by Elektra. When Elektra decided to put together this supergroup called Rhinoceros, they went shopping for band members throughout 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 concerts of music by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. His arrival made the recording of what was to be a predominantly instrumental 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 arrangements. "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 carefully 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; 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 mechanisms, 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 k
ids wrote in for a catalogue. " 'We got 14,000 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 businessman 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 Commercial' 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.