Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  The Downbeat reviewer found it "quite literally indescribable" before making a brave attempt to do so. He thought the Mothers "make the East Village look like a Brooks Brothers showroom" but he acknowledged that they could play . . . "and then pandemonium broke out as Kirk wandered out and jammed with them for the rest of the night. All stops were out; Kirk wailed, the Mothers dug it and responded with uncanny support . . . Kirk sounding as raspy and earthy as he ever has. Zappa instantly picking up Kirk's concepts and playing telepathic guitar counterpoint . . . the audience was close to berserk. Wein had to close the curtains, turn up the house lights and beg them to leave, which they ultimately, happy-sadly did." He concluded, "That particular set is lost forever, but Kirk and Zappa are crazy if they don't make a record together."3

  Wein put together a short East Coast tour, teaming Kirk and the Mothers with Gary Burton and Duke Ellington. Frank thought they were there "as bait to get the teenaged audience". But, on a sultry day in July in Charlotte, North Carolina, the most significant nail was driven into the Mothers' coffin. "We went into a 30,000 capacity auditorium with a 30-watt public address system. It was 95 degrees and 200 per cent humidity, with a thunderstorm threatening."4 Worse still, Frank witnessed a pathetic vignette. There was still bitterness in his voice when Frank recounted the story to me more than 20 years later. "Here's Duke Ellington, after all these years in the business, on the same tour with us, begging the road manager of the tour for a $10 advance. And the guy wouldn't give it to him. That's like a glimpse into your future." After that, there was a band meeting where he told them of his attitude towards "grinding it out on the road".

  On his return to LA, he went back to working on a solo album with Ian Underwood and sessionmen John Guerin, Paul Humphrey and Max Bennett. Working with musicians who were undaunted by elaborate arrangements and could improvise creatively in any time signature reminded him yet again of the shortcomings of his own group. I asked him if this had been in part an opportunity to jam in the studio. "I don't like playing in the studio. I hate it. The real reason for Hot Rats was to do the overdubbing. Because I don't think there'd been anything outside the early experiments of Les Paul where there was that much over-dubbage applied to a piece of tape. We were using a primitive, maybe even a prototype 16-track recorder for that. So it was the first time we could really pile on tracks. I think that that album is more about overdubbing than it is about anything else."

  Interviewed in November 1969, Frank was a little more frivolous. "It's surprisingly easy to listen to. Some people have even been known to tap their feet to it. The emphasis is split between the composing, arranging and playing. I play guitar and Ian Underwood plays all the reeds and all the keyboards on it including a real pipe organ [referred to on the sleeve as 'organus maximus'], with a lot of special effects like percussion sounds and tin whistles, which were in the studio."5

  The result was a masterful combination of tautly conceived and arranged themes and extensive improvisation. Ian Underwood built up whole saxophone sections and multiple keyboard parts. 'Peaches En Regalia', the album's enduring opening track, and 'Little Umbrellas' (the latter basically an Underwood feature) were short and accessible to ears unaccustomed to Frank's music; 'Son Of Mr Green Genes' and 'It Must Be A Camel', though still intricately scored, gave more scope for soloing; while Willie The Pimp and The Gumbo Variations were vamps for extended improvisation, the first for Frank's guitar, the latter for Ian Underwood's sax and Sugarcane Harris' violin.

  Don Harris, one half of the Fifties rock duo, Don & Dewey, was one of two violinists of widely divergent styles featured. He played amplified alley fiddle, its whining discordant wail the perfect foil for Frank's effect-laden guitar. He played a backing role on 'Willie The Pimp', which also featured Captain Beefheart's appropriately salacious vocal, and took his fair share of 'The Gumbo Variations'. Years later, when compiling the Mystery Disc for the second Old Masters box, Frank included 'The Story Of Willie The Pimp', a short interview with Annie Zannas and Cynthia Dobson from Coney Island, talking about one girl's father and referring to him as Willie the Pimp, from the Lido Hotel. "You can see where the song came from," Frank told Rick Davies.6

  The other violinist, present on 'It Must Be A Camel', was Jean-Luc Ponty, a French classical musician who had made the transition to jazz during the early Sixties. Ponty had already recorded two albums for World Pacific Jazz. His producer, Richard Bock, had played an acetate of Jean-Luc's music to Frank, bringing about the violinist's inclusion in the Hot Rats cast list. Their interest in each other's music led in September to Ponty recording an album of Frank's compositions, and his own How Would You Like To Have A Head Like That. The album took its title from a succinct reading of 'King Kong', one of three vintage Zappa tunes, the others being 'Idiot Bastard Son' and 'America Drinks And Goes Home'. 'Twenty Small Cigars' had been part of the Hot Rats sessions but that version was issued later on Chunga's Revenge.

  The principal focus of the album was an extended orchestral piece Frank had developed, incorporating 'The Duke Of Prunes' and 'A Pound For A Brown On The Bus'. Frank asked for a 97-piece orchestra but the budget could only stretch to 11 musicians, explaining its eventual title, 'Music For Electric Violin & Low-Budget Orchestra'. Sleevewriter Leonard Feather waxed eloquent in its description: "It emerges not as a segmented series of ideas arbitrarily linked together, but as a securely integrated whole that moves with almost subliminal subtlety from one tempo, metre, mood or idiom to another, and from reading to blowing; from the opening bassoon figure to the demonic closing violin passages in 7/8, it sustains this validity throughout its multi-textured duration."

  Ian Underwood conducted the 19-minute piece and played tenor sax on 'King Kong'; both tracks also featured Art Tripp, the only other Mother involved. The other significant musician present was pianist George Duke, then working with Ponty after a stint with trumpeter Don Ellis' big band. Before that, he had worked in the house band at San Francisco's Half Note jazz club, while still studying at the city's Conservatory of Music. He combined formidable technique with a sense of humour that erupted in 'America Drinks'; Feather quoted Frank's assessment, "I'm only surprised that he didn't happen sooner." Frank confined himself to writing arrangements, only getting his guitar out for a short solo on Ponty's composition.

  Hot Rats (a pithy phrase first seen in an advert for a Mothers gig with the Doors and Tim Buckley at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, September 10, 1967) was released on Friday, October 10, 1969 and failed almost immediately, barely entering the album charts. Lester Bang's Rolling Stone review was enthusiastic but misguided: "The new Zappa has dumped both his Frankensteinian classicism and his pachuco-rock. He's into the new jazz heavily .. . and applying all his technical savvy until the music sounds a far and purposely ragged cry from the self-indulgence of the current crop of young white John Coltranes." While he thought the "mostly little-known talents" came up with some interesting ideas, Bangs concluded the album was "a good stepping stone to folks like (Albert) Ayler, Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor the real titans these cats learned it from."7

  When the album was released in Europe in February 1970, it was a hit in both Britain and Holland. Its British success, Frank told me, was "partly because it was useful to many British shopowners." He was in England during the Spring "and every boutique that you'd go into on Kings Road was playing Hot Rats in the background. It was like the muzak of Boutique Row at the time." He told Nigel Leigh, "Compared to other things that were being done at the time, I don't think that it sounds like a commercial record at all."8

  Concurrent with the album's American release the end of the Mothers of Invention, "infamous & repulsive rocking teen combo", was announced. Setting aside any personal differences, Frank also dispensed with modesty. "The Mothers set new standards for performance," he wrote. "In terms of pure musicianship, theatrical presentation, formal concept and sheer absurdity, this one ugly band demonstrated to the music industry that it was indeed possible to make the performance of electric mus
ic a valid artistic expression . . . The Mothers managed to perform in alien time signatures and bizarre harmonic climates with a subtle ease that led many to believe it was all happening in 4/4 with a teenage back-beat."

  In the October 18 Rolling Stone, he gave Jerry Hopkins his reasons for the break-up, citing the North Carolina gig as the principal instigation. "The last live Mothers performance was in Montreal. The last 'otherwise' performance was a television show in Ottawa the following night August 18 and 19.... I got tired of playing for people who clap for the wrong reasons," he said. "I thought it time to give the people a chance to figure out what we've done already before we do any more."

  While in print he held out the vague chance that the group might reform, in reality he'd put a definite end to this stage of his career. For their part, band members felt exploited. "Frank borrow(ed) a lot of music from a lot of players that are in the group," Lowell George, who played uncredited on Hot Rats but had left before the band's dissolution, told David Walley. "Don Preston has been ripped off all along. A lot of chord passages are Donny's concepts that Frank borrowed. Frank's attitude is, 'The guy plays in my band. I pay him $250 a week, sure I can borrow anything from him.' "9

  Art Tripp and Don Vliet made similar comments. "If he does make some money, I hope he does look back at some of those people like Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada," the Captain said, "and slips them a parcel of loot under their doors, because he's used those people to get as far as he got."10

  For his part, Frank was unrepentant. Had he felt that the band wasn't able to perform his music effectively, I asked him. "They could barely perform it at all. Not only that, when they did perform it, they didn't want to perform it." Later he added, "Musicians left to their own devices are incredibly lazy. Outside of sea slugs, I don't think there's any species less oriented toward punctuality." But bitter reactions from both sides didn't hide the fact that lack of money was the fundamental reason for the band's demise. "I'd done everything that I could but there's no logical way you can expect any employer to just keep shovelling out money for no services rendered."11

  For years thereafter, Frank had to counteract nostalgia for the 'original' Mothers. "I don't share the enthusiasm," he told me. "I think that, in an ideal way, the nostalgia for that band is for the concept of the band and also for the fact that such a thing could exist as a touring musical entity in spite of everything that was going on. You really have to put your mind back to what else was on the road at that period of time. It's quite unbelievable that a band like that could get work anywhere for a period of years. I think that what it represented to a lot of people was the idea that there's a certain type of freedom that's involved in doing weird stuff just because you feel like it, and getting paid to do it."

  In the Rolling Stone article, Hopkins enumerated projects upon which Frank was engaged. These included the GTOs, Beefheart and Ponty albums; the resurrection of Captain Beefheart vs The Grunt People, now a 92-page shooting script with parts for the members of the Magic Band, Bob Guy, Motorhead Sherwood, Grace Slick and Howlin' Wolf, which had offers from three major film studios (never taken up); and a weekly television show for which a deal was imminent (which again never transpired). He also announced that he was talking to Playboy magazine about the creation of a Mothers of Invention Record Club, which would release 12 albums of material recorded live and in various studios over the group's five-year lifespan. These even had titles: Before The Beginning, The Cucamonga Era, Show And Tell, What Does It All Mean, Rustic Protrusion, Several Boogie, The Merely Entertaining Mothers of Invention Record, The Heavy Business Record, Soup And Old Clothes, Hotel Dixie, The Orange County Lumber Truck and The Weasel Music.

  There was one other project that would occupy Frank's time during October 1969, a European tour by Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band, which he would accompany in the role of road manager.

  DAMP ANKLES

  Most noteworthy of the gigs the Magic Band and their roadie played in Europe was the Paris Actuel Music Festival. By the time it took place at the end of October, the site had been changed a number of times, ending up in a large marquee in a turnip field near Amougies, just across the border in Belgium. It was an ambitious three-day event, involving a unique blend of musicians from America and Europe, including Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, proto-minimalist Terry Riley and a host of British bands of every kidney, from Soft Machine, Colosseum, the Nice and Pink Floyd to Caravan, East of Eden, Aynsley Dunbar's Retaliation and Black Cat Bones.

  I was present as a representative of The Decca Record Company's A&R department; Caravan and Black Cat Bones were on the label and I and fellow producer David Hitchcock were there to try to convince Soft Machine to join the Decca subsidiary label. The whole weekend was a nightmare, our hotel was in Lille, multi-kilometres away, and each night's drive was a voyage of discovery through freezing fog that never seemed to dissipate. Once there, unlike the audience that resembled a peasant army on winter manoeuvres, we could at least stand close to the industrial heaters that failed to warm the backstage area. Several times, Frank's path and mine crossed. As I told him later, I very much wanted to speak with him but his basilisk stare warned me off. I apparently did the right thing.

  In the course of the weekend, he acted as MC and stood up with a surprising mixture of bands, with Archie Shepp, Retaliation, Pink Floyd, Caravan and Black Cat Bones as well as the Magic Band. "What else was I going to do? You had your choice at Amougies: you could either watch the green weenies bobbing up and down in the tank; you could eat the Belgian waffle wrapped in cellophane; you could freeze to death out in the secondary tent; or you could go in the main tent and freeze to death if you didn't stand next to the jet-blast furnace that they had backstage. It was that horrible. You remember?"

  We both remembered the Art Ensemble's attention-grabbing ploy. "Everybody was in the big tent in their sleeping bags and they were asleep. Here comes the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the guy lights a highway flare, they start playing and he throws it into the middle of these sleeping people. And a few of them woke up because their things were on fire." I said I didn't know if that was dumb or creative. "Both." Frank hesitated and then added, "I think that the real reason that I ended up going there in a cosmic sense was to finally wind up with Aynsley Dunbar in the band."

  Aynsley remembered the circumstances of their meeting later. "He was compering, linking the groups, but it was so cold that he wanted to do something. He wanted to sit in with (the band) and we did about two numbers together. We chatted about a few things in the beer tent later when we left for another gig."12

  Highlight of my weekend was probably standing right behind the Magic Band for their set. Since Trout Mask Replica had yet to arrive in Europe, the glorious cacophony sounded more akin to avant-garde jazz than anything else. There was a ramshackle genius to it all, epitomised by Drumbo's bass drum skin, which had a large hole in it, held together with gaffer tape. The ensemble were all dressed in the costumes they wore for the Trout Mask sleeve photographs. Earlier that afternoon, I'd had a brief word with the Captain, along with East of Eden's alto player, Ron Gaines. Ron introduced himself and announced with a total absence of humility that his band sort of played the same type of music, which from the look on his face Beefheart doubted absolutely. The Magic Band were standing about 30 feet away, in their sundry capes, kaftans and twin sets. We looked in their direction. "What's it like being on the road with those guys?" Ron asked. We all looked again. "What do you think?" the Captain replied.

  When interviewed in London the following week, Frank had recovered sufficiently to pass judgement on the event. "I guess it was more of a political than a musical success. The festival was moved around so much that it was a triumph to get it on at all. It was so disorganised that when all the lights and amplification worked on the first night, the organisers looked at each other in amazement. They couldn't believe that it was really going to happen. But I was there. Six to 12 hours a night, I was there." He was asked if any gro
ups impressed him. "Yeah, I really liked the Nice. They were good musically and they've got a very exciting stage act, too. And I dug Colosseum particularly Dick (Heckstall-Smith), the guy who plays tenor and soprano. Does he do sessions in London? He ought to he's really a bitch."13

  In the meantime, the various Mothers had instigated projects of their own. Jimmy Carl Black and Bunk Gardner formed Geronimo Black, named after Jimmy's youngest son and featuring Denny Walley on guitar. Don Preston went to New York to work with Meredith Monk's multi-media musical theatre. For a while, Ian Underwood contemplated forming his own jazz group with wife Ruth (nee Komanoff) on drums but continued to work with Frank on various recording projects. Roy Estrada joined Lowell George's band, Little Feat, which took its name from Jimmy Carl Black's remark about the size of Lowell's pedal extremities. Negotiations for the band to sign with Straight fell through, which may in turn have sharpened George's opinions of Frank and Herb Cohen, and they went with Warner Brothers instead.

  Two months after their demise, the Mothers' latest album, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, was released. More tightly organised than Uncle Meat, it took the previous album's emphasis on instrumental music to a formal extreme while offering fresh interpretations of older themes. The album was topped and tailed by straight renditions of two doo-wop gems, 'WPLJ' by The Four Deuces and 'Valarie' by Jackie & The Starlites. In between was a rich filling which again benefited from Ian Underwood's versatility. 'Holiday In Berlin', its theme less turbulent than the event it referred to, had been developed from 'Run Home Slow', and the extended version of 'Little House I Used To Live In', featuring solos by Sugarcane Harris on violin, Don Preston on piano and Frank on organ, had grown out of a 'module' that had been previously known as 'The Return Of The Hunch-Back Duke'. 'Theme From Burnt Weeny Sandwich' was a random skirmish between a wah-wah guitar solo and invading war-parties of percussion. 'Igor's Boogie', a piece for formal and informal wind instruments, existed in two brief 'phases'.