Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  Brambell had trouble with lines like, "Zappa's fucked". "Finally, on the last day of rehearsal, he just went screaming down the yellow halls at Pinewood Studios yelling, 'Aaugh . . . this is crazy.' We started shooting the next day and we were just fucking panic-struck. Then Frank said, 'Look, the next person who walks in is it — what the fuck.' The next guy who walked through the door was Ringo's chauffeur, Martin Lickert, a pretty-boy type of about 21 with a psychedelic Chelsea shirt on, and everybody went, 'Hmmm'. He read the lines in a cute Liverpudlian accent, and not only that but Ringo said that he could play bass."10

  Miss Pamela was recruited for the part of the reporter, while Miss Lucy Offerall and Janet Ferguson were groupies. The GTOs had moved into history and Pamela Miller had gone through such luminaries as Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger before ending up in London with Duncan (Sandy) Sanderson of the Pink Fairies. Jimmy Carl Black was Bertram Redneck, Motorhead was the hare-lipped newt rancher and Dick Barber was the embodiment of an impassioned industrial vacuum cleaner.

  Keith Moon seems to have been another last-minute recruit. "I was at the Speakeasy with Pete [Townshend]," he told Jerry Hopkins, "and Frank happened to be at the next table. He overheard some of our conversation and leaned over and said, 'How'd you guys like to be in a film?' We said, 'OK, Frank.' And he said, 'OK, be at the Kensington Palace Hotel at seven o'clock tomorrow morning.' I was the one who turned up. Pete was writing and sent his apologies, and I was given the part Mick Dagger was to play that of a nun. Mick didn't want to do it."11

  There's a desperate sense of mix and match about the finished film. Groundbreaking it may be in its use of video techniques, now long superseded, but what was already an elliptical flight of the imagination was rendered incomprehensible by the compromised nature of the final edit. "I want to get 'em out there and make 'em know that they went someplace and then get 'em back again," Frank had told Miles the previous November. "And that ain't easy to do."12 In the end, it proved impossible.

  Years later, Frank released a Honker Home Video, The True Story Of 200 Motels.

  THE LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN ARCHES

  The same forces that had struggled through the previous week arrived at the stage door of the Albert Hall on Monday, February 8, 1971, for a lunchtime rehearsal of that evening's concert. They found the doors locked against them and the gig cancelled. It must have been a surprise to Herb and Frank but they weren't unaware of the management's caution over what had been scheduled to happen within their hallowed portals.

  On January 18, Marion Herrod, secretary and lettings manager, had requested a copy of what The Times termed the 'libretto'. But despite further requests, samples of the lyrics didn't turn up until Friday, February 5. "We read it, decided that many people would be offended, and because time was so short asked for a revised version by the next morning," Miss Herrod was quoted. "This was not forthcoming, so we had no alternative but to cancel the concert." She declined to specify what they'd found objectionable but said, "There were words I did not want to be spoken in the Albert Hall."13

  The Daily Telegraph quoted Sir Louis Gluckstein, president of the Royal Albert Hall, who reckoned that the Mothers had used the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra as "a cover for the undiluted filth" they planned to perform that night. "If people were going to produce a lot of filth, as appeared likely according to the unamended script, our officials were perfectly right to cancel the concert," he thundered.14 A few days later, he wrote a rallying cry for the paper's letters page: "It is time that a stand was taken against the production of what many regard as dreary and inartistic filth for money."15 That's an awful lot of filth.

  A spokesman for the RPO said that they'd accepted the film and concert deal, worth £20,000, purely to play the music. If the orchestra had been required to do anything obscene, they wouldn't have taken part. Trumpeters John Wilbraham and Ray Allen didn't take part anyway; they withdrew their services at the first rehearsal. "The whole thing revolted me," Wilbraham told The Times. "I am a person pretty much in the public eye and I did not think I could play a trumpet concerto one night and do this the next."16

  More than 4,000 tickets had been sold and the event had cost £5,000 to mount. Herb Cohen told the press that he intended to take legal action to recover the money. Not to be outdone, promoter Harold Davison took out a High Court writ against him, seeking damages for the cancellation and claiming that he was liable to indemnify Davison's company against all claims by the Albert Hall.

  Many of the ticket-holders turned up and were given their money back. They also received personal apologies from Frank and the group who turned up for the purpose. "It's ridiculous," Frank said. "We are all very upset. It was all right for us to appear at the Albert Hall in 1968, when the place was black and dirty. Now they've had the place cleaned up, they don't want to know us."17

  Most of the band went straight back to California, Frank stayed on to edit his footage and Aynsley spent some time at his Essex home. The NME asked for his thoughts on recent events. "The Albert Hall is behind the times," he said. "The woman who decided to ban us is a very weird person, she picked out words that are in everyday use and said we couldn't use them there." He had fulsome praise for his employer: "You just have to put Frank out on his own. He is helping people to listen to other aspects of music they've never heard. Frank's just taken the plunge. If people don't appreciate it, they don't, so he'll keep on doing it until they do."18

  Frank worked on the music tapes for the United Artists soundtrack double album back at Whitney Studios in Glendale during April and early May. George Duke went off to work with Cannonball Adderley, so Bob Harris came in on keyboards with Ian Underwood and another ex-Turtle, Jim Pons, came in on bass for a tour which started at Bridges Auditorium, Pomona College, Claremont on May 18. This tour saw the premiere of another magnum opus, 'Billy The Mountain'. It moved east during the rest of the month, including Chicago, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio. They were booked into the Fillmore East on June 4/5 as part of the venue's closing series of gigs.

  Bill Graham, tired of coast-to-coast commuting, had decided that the Fillmore East was no longer the white man's Apollo Theater. So between May 20 and June 27, he put on ten separate shows that began with Leon Russell and Taj Mahal, included Humble Pie, Laura Nyro, Alice Cooper, B.B. King and Johnny Winter before finishing with the J. Geils Band and the Allman Brothers. Support for the Mothers' gigs was provided by Head Over Heels.

  SCUMBAG

  Saturday night's two performances were recorded for a live album. Fillmore East, June 1971, released just two months later, had a deliberately rushed air about it, prompted by Cal Schenkel's scrawled artwork (referred to by the band as 'the pencil front cover') with its bracketed caveat, 'he made me do it'. Its contents juxtaposed recognised favourites such as 'Little House I Used To Live In', 'Willie The Pimp' and 'Peaches En Regalia' with the 'groupie' routines that had evolved from band members' encounters.

  "The reason we were performing that is because it was a true story," Frank told Martin Perlich. "It actually happened to Howard Kaylan. It was just a process of commemorating a piece of folklore that was peculiar to the group. I think that other groups that ignore the folklore that happens to the members of that group are missing a good shot for preserving a little history. Because I also take the position that contemporary history is going to be retained on records more accurately than it's going to be within history books."19

  'What Kind Of Girl Do You Think We Are?', 'Bwana Dik' (adapted from the opening theme from Lumpy Gravy), 'Latex Solar Beef' and 'Do You Like My New Car?' (the latter dialogue taking place in the Tinsel Cock Car was never filmed for 200 Motels) were tightly structured but also called for a high degree of spontaneity from Flo & Eddie. There were other aspects of their 'vaudeville' act whose visual elements precluded their inclusion. 'The Sanzini Brothers' was eventually included on Playground Psychotic, its sodomy trick lost on those that never witnessed it. Likewise 'Little Carl', the subject of 'Penguin In Bondage', an inflatable penguin th
at was launched through 'a hoopla real fire', consisting of a pair of coat-hangers wrapped in burning toilet paper.

  At the end of the second show, which ran into the small hours of Sunday, an extended encore brought John Lennon and Yoko Ono on stage to a rapturous greeting from the crowd. They had met the Mothers earlier in the day after Howard Smith, whose 'Scenes' column appeared in The Village Voice, had told Lennon he was interviewing Frank that afternoon. Smith reckoned that Lennon acted deferentially at their meeting, while Yoko Ono asserted herself to all those present. Smith was also the one to propose that the Lennons join the Mothers on stage that night.

  Lennon launched into a song he remembered from his days at the Liverpool Cavern, 'Well (Baby Please Don't Go)', which without his wife's caterwauling would have been moderately successful. After that, things got out of hand. 'King Kong' degenerated into a duel between the band and Yoko Ono's tonsils before Frank led them through a series of falsetto punctuations of her noises. By the audience's laughter, someone should have felt foolish, but then, true art must expect ridicule. 'Scumbag' was a fast vamp over which Lennon and Flo & Eddie chanted the title. Mid-way, Frank broke in to inform the audience that they should join in: "Right on, brothers and sisters! Let's hear it for the Scumbag!" As interest in the puerile goings-on waned on stage, a bag was dropped over Yoko Ono's head. Lennon set his guitar to feedback and everyone else left the stage while the bag-lady evoked the sodomisation of birds and small animals. By their applause, the audience was plainly enthralled.

  Over lunch the following day, it was decided that the Lennons would be given copies of the 16-track masters for their own use. The possibility of further live concerts was discussed but neither party pursued the idea. "It may have been a lot of pleasant thoughts in an Italian restaurant," Frank said in an interview six months later.20

  "We wanted to make the Mothers Fillmore East album a double one," Howard Kaylan told Rolling Stone, "shove 'Billy The Mountain' on one side and put the Lennon stuff on the other. Unfortunately Allen Klein (Lennon's manager) doesn't move as fast as Lennon does."21 The Lennons released their version of the tapes on June 12, 1972, as part of a bonus album released with Some Time In New York City that also contained their 'War Is Over' gig at London's Lyceum Theatre on December 15, 1969. This was the epitome of their revolutionary phase, combining paeans to Angela Davis and John Sinclair with Ono's 'Woman Is The Nigger Of The World' and Lennon's 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'. Despite Frank's injunction that everything should be properly credited and paid for, 'King Kong' was renamed 'Jamrag'. No doubt Lennon expected the British slang word for a tampon to go unnoticed in the land he was trying to make his home.

  Frank's version of the tapes eventually surfaced in 1992. His sequence on 'Playground Psychotics' was shorter than the Lennons' but better mixed. They had overdubbed Klaus Voorman's bass on 'Well (Baby Please Don't Go)', edited out band solos and swamped everything in cavernous sub-Spector echo. The band tracks were poorly balanced and Flo & Eddies improvised humour in 'Scumbag' was missing. Frank restored the edits (but deleted 'King Kong'), redressed the balance and also nailed the final soliloquy by naming it 'A Small Eternity With Yoko Ono'.

  Fillmore East didn't get a good press. Frank's year-long obsession with 200 Motels and its depiction of life on the road had crafted a piece of theatre that was self-referential and full of in-jokes. Other rock musicians got the point but the attitudes displayed in the 'groupie' routines offended many who would never be 'jooked by a baby octopus' or 'spewed upon with cream corn'. Rolling Stone gave the lead: "It may seem a quaint notion now, but there actually was a time when Frank Zappa was considered one of the prime geniuses of rock." With swipes at his "arrogance" and the "steady downward curve in quality" of his albums, Fillmore East apparently represented "a real nadir. The sometime ribaldry of the early albums has finally been allowed to bloom like a Clearasil jackoff fantasy, resulting in two sides mostly filled with a lot of inanity about groupies and exotic fuck-props."22

  Don Preston had joined the Mothers on the Fillmore stage for 'Lonesome Electric Turkey', an encore excerpt from 'King Kong'. He now returned to the band after Bob Harris' brief tenure as another gig was recorded for future issue. The return to UCLA's Pauley Pavilion on Saturday, August 7 included another stab at 'Billy The Mountain', which occupied Side One of Just Another Band From L.A., when Zubin Mehta's name was substituted for Felix Pappalardi in the New York version. Cal Schenkel's poster for the show contained a thumb-nail sketch of said mountain and his wife Ethel, "a tree growing off of his shoulder"; more than 20 years later, he plagiarised his own work to make it the cover art of Playground Psychotics. It had already been lifted for the cover of Safe Muffinz, a bootleg issue of the band's appearance at El Monte Legion Stadium that summer.

  Like most of Frank's film scripts, Billy The Mountain went through several changes; the central plot devices remained the same while the incidental details changed. As he revealed to Roy Carr, "In the opening part, God decides to make a home movie with a sofa, a short girl and a squat magic pig. Then he gives the film to winged holy children who take it to a lab where they don't ask any questions. While he's waiting for his dailies to come back from the lab he lays down on the sofa, crashes out and he dreameth a great dream."23 This dream involves Old Zircon, a "phased-out Byzantine Devil", whose dancing cloven hooves strike sparks and smoke which congeal into a number of lumpy mountains, one of which can talk.

  As recorded in New York and Los Angeles, Billy gets a royalty cheque for all the postcards he'd posed for and decides to take Ethel on a walking holiday across America. Since Edwards Air Force Base gets destroyed on the first day's journey, informed sources in Washington call in special agent Studebaker Hoch to put a stop to the devastation by serving Billy with his induction papers for the Army. To locate Billy, Hoch has a unique mode of transport involving Aunt Jemima Syrup, sundry flies and a phone booth. The performance ended with Hoch being destroyed in the avalanche caused by Billy's laughter. Later episodes from the script involving a Government agent called Little Emil, who is later revealed to be the head of the Electric Mafia, don't seem to have been performed.

  "What a lot of people wouldn't realise," said Dick Barber, "is that each night they did that show, Mark and Howard and sometimes Jim Pons would alter the lyrics slightly to tie them in more with the local area . . . They'd just doctor the lyrics up, and change 'em around, partly to amuse themselves, and also to amuse Frank, because if Frank was in a good mood, it made it easier for everybody."24 It also got them taken to jail in Virginia Beach, after they forgot that the local chief of police had warned them not to say 'fuck' on stage.

  The rest of Just Another Band contained up-to-the-minute retreads of 'Call Any Vegetable' and 'Dog Breath', 'Eddie, Are You Kidding?', a Kaylan/Volman/Zappa collaboration about tailoring double-knits for the portly, and 'Magdalena', a tale of prospective incest conceived by Howard and Frank. This gig was also the last time that Jimmy Carl Black appeared on a Mothers' stage. His guest appearance on 'Lonesome Cowboy Burt' later appeared on YCDTOSA 6, in a 'mutant blend' of this and a performance from Genoa during Frank's final 1988 tour, at which the song became 'Lonesome Cowboy Nando'.

  Howard Kaylan talked about being a Mother in the September 16 edition of Rolling Stone. "Zappa has the last word don't get me wrong, it's definitely Frank's group. I don't believe it's any more oppressive than working in (John) Mayall's group, or anybody else's band. Except for the last musical say and how the thing is brought to the stage, it's fairly open. It's a well-known fact that if anybody brought a song to the group, and if it fit in with what we were doing, we'd do it. It's hard to do that though." Was there a contrast between being a Turtle and being a Mother? "If you think it takes some heavy acid flash or a change in intelligence to go from singing 'Happy Together' to a song like 'Mudshark', you're wrong. Outside of the fact that this is Frank's group, the road's the road, getting high has always been neat, money's good when it's here, groupies are fantastic. It's all the same."25 The road
rat's charter had never been put so succinctly.

  STRICTLY GENTEEL

  200 Motels, as a film and a double album, was released in October 1971. The film began an exclusive run at the Doheny Plaza in Beverley Hills on Friday, October 29. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Robert Hilburn found it "a stunning achievement". "It is at its best when it seems off-balance," he continued, "giving a glimpse of the way time, space, sanity, get confused during a long rock tour . . . Some of the film's best sequences are those which show all the energy devoted by musicians and the groupies to getting together." Despite its evident flaws, Hilburn thought that the film had "a sense of vitality and excitement akin to some of the feelings generated by the early rock records" and that, in the final analysis, "Zappa has come up with a minor classic."26

  It opened at New York's Plaza Theater on November 10. The following day in the New York Times, Vincent Canby thought that it was "not all bad" but "a movie with so many things going on simultaneously, it becomes too quickly exhausting — in actual effect, soporific." There were "several dozen potentially funny ideas that are never developed, since the movie has the attention span of a speed freak." Ultimately, though, 200 Motels was "an anthology of poor jokes and spectacular audio-visual effects, a few of which might expand the mind, but which, taken together, are like an overdose of Novocain."27

  Over in England, the 'celebrated' film director Tony Palmer was busy dissociating himself from his work. He told the NME that in his estimation, 200 Motels was the worst film in the history of Western cinema. "I've been trying to get my name removed from the credits for months," he expostulated. "The story behind the film is horrific, but the picture itself is a complete abuse of technique and ideas and, in my opinion, is a total waste of half-amillion dollars."28