Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  All but one of the musicians were retained from the Grand Wazoo, the exception being trumpeter Gary Barone, who replaced Marquez. Rehearsals by the Petit Wazoo took place during the first weeks of October and the tour, more specifically two groupings of gigs, began in Syracuse, New York on October 28. Although an entirely new repertoire had been promised, there was a judicious sprinkling of old favourites in new apparel. 'America Drinks', 'Duke Of Prunes', 'Chunga's Revenge', 'King Kong' and 'Willie The Pimp' paved the way for tunes such as 'Cosmic Debris' and 'Montana' that would soon turn up on the next couple of albums. There was also a medley of themes identified as 'Father O'Blivion', beginning with an element of Greggery Peccary and containing other parts which would later become 'Cucamonga' and 'Be Bop Tango'. This medley was sometimes confused with the song 'Father O'Blivion', which formed part of a sequence that appeared on Frank's next solo excursion, Apostrophe (').

  The balance of the Petit Wazoo's five appearances ranged from Binghampton, NY to Portland, Oregon and finished on New Year's Eve 1972 at Washington DCs Constitution Hall. The latter was a return date, for they and Tim Buckley had played the hall on Saturday, November 11, when the evening had been reviewed for The Star News by Richard Harrington. He thought the Wazoo possessed "one of the most dazzling, powerful and talented horn sections" he'd seen "in all too long a time". Picking out Bruce Fowler, Dave Parlato and drummer Jim Gordon for particular mention, Harrington saved his fullest praise for Frank: "His guitar breaks reflect the general attitude of his music —jams built around a concrete concept, the development of a statement as opposed to mere technique. Zappa played long and well and, like a magician, left everyone filled, not with questions of how and why, but the knowledge of wonder."3

  Despite such praise, the New Year's Eve concert in Washington put an end for the time being to Frank's experiments with purely instrumental ensembles. Having taken his performance music from one extreme to the other, he now chose to combine instrumental and vocal dexterity. To achieve this, he assembled a group of musicians whose abilities, for the most part, were already known to him and each other.

  Most important was the return of George Duke and Ian and Ruth Underwood, all dependable collaborators in the past, along with trumpeter Sal Marquez. Jean-Luc Ponty's violin added a valuable solo voice, trombonist Bruce Fowler returned and brought along brother Tom on bass and the line-up was completed by drummer Ralph Humphrey. Rehearsals, as usual, were gruelling; "You would go into the studio at noon or one o'clock," said George Duke, "and be there until seven or eight o'clock in the morning."4

  Barry Hansen described a rehearsal that he attended from this period: "(It) was devoted to the meticulous honing of several especially angular and asymmetrical instrumental passages. The musicians worked diligently, oblivious to the light crews who scurried about in their midst, setting up strobe lights and such. Except for the flashing lights, and the scarcity of music stands, the process resembled a symphony rehearsal far more than the usual loose rock session, with nary a beer bottle or joint to be seen. Zappa is a perfectionist, but what may be more remarkable is his prodigious energy level, which enables him to be a prolific writer/composer despite a heavy touring schedule."5

  That continued as the new band travelled to the East Coast for a series of gigs beginning on February 23 in Fayetteville, NC. Continuing through Durham, Adanta and Athens, Georgia and three gigs in Florida, they returned via Arlington, Texas to LA where the now road-tested material was recorded for the next Mothers album.

  After two predominantly instrumental releases, Frank opted for an album of songs where solos were kept to a strict minimum. Having stimulated his fans' heads, he would massage their other parts. It was also an opportunity for him to flex his own vocal chords. "I'm back in the singing business again," he announced to Charles Shaar Murray. "For the kind of lyrics that I write, it's hard to get somebody else to identify with them to the extent that they express 'em properly." He'd made a similar comment in the days immediately before he joined the Soul Agents. "I have a pretty limited range I can't sing very high, so there are certain things that have to be done by other people."6

  In terms of longevity, Overnite Sensation contributed a high proportion of future concert favourites. Whether it was because 'Camarillo Brillo', 'Dinah-Moe Humm' and 'Dirty Love', which Frank referred to as 'glandular epics', conjured up the perfumes and sauces of sexual encounters is debatable. As it was probably intended to do, 'Dinah-Moe' provoked extremes of reaction. Masturbation and 'coming from behind' were topics guaranteed to titillate young audiences and offend self-styled guardians of the nation's morals. In Frank's words, it became "the one that really gets the most mongoloid audience glee-factor. They always demand it."7

  'Dirty Love' was less graphic but how explicit do you need to be when you write a song about a woman receiving oral gratification from a poodle? Frank kept a straight face when he explained, "Poodles serve as a convenient mechanism for conveying certain philosophical ideas that might otherwise be more difficult."8 When did bestiality become a philosophy? On the other hand, Tm The Slime', a warning about the insidious influence of television, and 'Montana', a bizarre fantasy about pygmy ponies and a dental floss farm, though devoid of sexual content, were equally popular. By comparison, 'Zomby Woof and '50-50' made less frequent appearances over the years.

  The album was released two months later, the first to be issued with the DiscReet logo. Bizarre and Straight had been wound up, "partly for economic reasons," Herb Cohen told Sounds. Indeed, there had been no releases on the latter label for at least two years. 'Reet' was an important component in the 'vout' language invented by multi-instrumentalist Slim Gaillard during the Forties. By another fortuitous coincidence, the album was also issued in quadrophonic sound which was referred to as a 'discrete' system. It was a typical piece of Zappa opportunism, a label identity with more than one layer of meaning.

  Critical opinion varied widely. Arthur Schmidt toed the usual Rolling Stone line; Frank Zappa was a spent force descending into obscene self-parody. He was "tempted to compare Zappa to Henry Miller, with whom [he] shares a vision of sex as rancid, dumb and funny. Like Miller getting older, he is less shocking, tape-worming himself [what!] and overwriting." Reserving what praise he could muster for 'Camarillo Brillo' and noting that 'Montana' "could have been a great Mothers ditty,"9 Schmidt quoted a line from '50-50' and concluded that Frank had nothing to say.

  Charles Shaar Murray thought it was "a very relaxed album of slight-but-charming songs . . . decorated with all kinds of musical razzle-dazzle" but "certainly not one of Frank's most outstanding efforts."10 Another reviewer, having expected further tales of the Grand Wazoo, thought that the album needed a smell sachet, because it was "all about Buttons and Zips and the furry, vibrant wonders that lie beneath." Overall, the album was a disappointment; "most of the time we are obviously meant to be paying attention to the various and vile songs about all those lovely, soft, sticky, gooey, salt-smelling, strange-tasting plasms and secretions that the human body is just bursting with."11 Funny what crosses your mind when you listen to music.

  Noe Goldwasser, writing in Crawdaddy, thought that 'DinahMoe Humm' was "a seemingly misogynist work which, upon deeper inspection is just a funny, horny song ... It is above (or below) feminist reproach; its comic tensions embody the textural psychosis of the super-musical vision, as it were." Were it? Goldwasser saw the album as the beginning of a new chapter in Frank's career: "It's as if he's finished having to proselytise and everybody's already been converted so there's nothing left to do but gird the loins, enter the breach and massage the musical clit."12

  Which Frank and the band proceeded to do. After ten American dates during May 1973, the Mothers spent three weeks in Australia, appearing in Brisbane on June 21 and then Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, before returning to Sydney for two more days at the Hordern Pavilion. Frank addressed a press conference in Melbourne, at which he floated the idea of a live album from their Australian gigs. It never happened but
it could have, for he included a Sydney performance of 'Farther O'Blivion' on YCDTOSA 6.

  For some time, he'd been recording most of the various bands' gigs. "Starting in 1969," he told Don Menn, "Dick Kunc . . . built this little James Bond suitcase recording apparatus. He took a couple of Shure mixers, and packed it all in there, and we had a Uher (tape recorder). He accompanied us on part of the US tour that year, and would sit in the corner of the room with earphones on and try to do a mix on whatever we were doing. When we did the Pauley Pavilion recording (Just Another Band From L.A.), I had just bought this Scully four-track, and that was the first of the four-track recordings that we did. We recorded four-track for, I guess, ten years, nine years."13

  The band bade goodbye to Sal Marquez on its return to America. "I felt bad about leaving the group," he said later, "but we were broke. One day I called Frank and tried to get him to give us a per diem. And he got all upset, claiming he never paid his groups that way. 'Not even $15?' And he said, 'No, man, I've never done it and I'm not going to start. You can hand in your music, too.' And that was it. I was shocked. I thought he liked me."14

  RUTHIE RUTHIE

  By the time the Mothers set off to Europe in the middle of August 1973, their evident success on stage and with their audiences had sent Frank's creative muse into overdrive. As the tour progressed and the musicians developed an intuitive empathy, new material was continually added to the set. The individual dexterity of the Underwoods and George Duke made the complexities of 'Dupree's Paradise', 'Echidna's Arf (Of You)' and 'RDNZL' palatable to untrained ears more likely to respond to the 'Father O'Blivion' song cycle. For the first time, Frank had musicians around him who could realise both the humour and the technical brilliance of his writing. In particular, Ruth Underwood's phenomenal skill with vibes, marimba and other percussion brought a pointillistic exactitude to the jagged terrain of Frank's melodies.

  "I was ready to dedicate myself completely to Frank's music," she said later in tribute. "He really knew what buttons to push, emotionally and musically. He was a remarkable referee. He knew how to synthesise people's personalities and talents. That's a very rare gift. He wasn't just a conductor standing there waving his arms; he was playing us as people! I became a perfectionist, I suppose because I had to be."15

  In a two-part interview that began in the August 25 NME, Frank was guardedly pleased with the band's success. "Our audiences are generally larger than they've ever been before, but there's no guarantee that the understanding has increased proportionately." Irrespective of their audiences' comprehension, he was well content with his musicians. "You ought to hear the stuff we're playing now. It's hot sheeit! Lemme tell ya this band is playing the hardest repertoire you ever heard. They got some unbelievable things to do from memory. With the Wazoo they were all playing off sheet music."

  And there was choreography 'of the most absurd variety'. "We're playing songs like the 'Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue' now and it has choreography. We have a new song called 'Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?' which has some very mysterious choreography. You'll have to imagine ... all the sheer hurt and anguish that went into 'Penguin In Bondage'. There is degradation; there's also perversion and hotness."16 Well, it made good copy; but all it proved was that Frank was "a booga of a good talker", which was the gnomic headline of a dwarfish interview in the same week's Record Mirror.

  The European tour was extensive; after dates in Scandinavia, the Mothers played four gigs in Italy and four more in Germany, with Zurich in between. Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris followed before they arrived at Liverpool on Tuesday, September 11. The city's Stadium was the venue for the world premiere of 'T'Mershi Duween', the latest fiendishly complicated module, written the week before in Frankfurt. Two days later, they played Birmingham and the next day, Wembley's Empire Pool.

  Frank was in typical sardonic mood. The NME's Charles Shaar Murray was present: "He prefaced the performance with a short rap to the effect that 'in accordance with our long established policy that "the hits just keep on comin' atcha", we will be presenting material that you have never heard before [loud applause]. However, in the latter half of the programme we will be referring back to the first half. In fact, we'll leitmotif our fuckin' brains out up here' . . . One member of the audience compared the show to being 'bludgeoned into catatonia', while another just thought it was 'horrible'. Me, I dug about half of it."17

  The music papers didn't mention the other member of the Mothers' entourage. "He is Frank's bodyguard," the Sun explained, "a rugged, former Los Angeles policeman who will stick close to Frank on and off the stage. Frank is taking no more chances. He said: 'Sure, that attack still bothers me. A thing like that makes you realise just how careful you have to be in this business. You get a lot of very strange people at any rock concert. And the drugs people use at the moment increase the risk of a crazy, violent attack.'"18

  The Mothers returned to America for a busy autumn schedule that began with Halloween concerts in Chicago. Most of November was spent in New York state, Canada and New England. When the band played two days at Toronto's Massey Hall, Frank was interviewed in bullish mood by Jim Smith for NME. "Nobody has combined music and theatrics the way I have. I'm looking for scope in music. My problem is economics.

  "A lot of people think I'm a millionaire, and I'd just like to say I'm not, nor is there any chance in the near future of me becoming a millionaire. The reason is that the largest percentage of my money has gone back into equipment. Then you have to hire the technical people to move it, plug it in, and repair it. For every person on-stage, there's another person off-stage helping to make it happen."

  It was always difficult, he said, to find musicians with the right ability and character. "There are plenty of people interested in playing with the group and there are good musicians among them. But the ones who are technically skilled don't have a sense of humour. And the ones who have a sense of humour usually don't have the mechanical chops. Whether it's easy or hard to play with me depends on the character of the person involved. Some people like a challenge and other people like it soft. For the second group, it can be a traumatic experience playing with me."19

  On their return to LA, the band took up a week-long residence starting Friday, December 7 at The Roxy, the latest club on the Strip, located alongside The Rainbow Room. Half of the shows were recorded, at least one on video, for future release. The band was augmented on various nights; Jeff Simmons sang and played rhythm guitar, Don Preston drove a synthesiser and Walt Fowler came in on trumpet. Frank reverted to two drummers and brought in Chester Thompson on the second drumkit.

  The most notable addition was the extrovert Napoleon Murphy Brock on tenor sax, flute and vocals. On his way back from Australia, Frank had found Brock leading a Top 40 soul band in a Hawaiian nightclub. Frank watched a set and then asked him to join the Mothers for the August 1973 European tour. Brock turned him down because his group was booked into the club for the next seven weeks, but told him to call after he got back. Which Frank duly did.

  Brock's arrival brought important changes to the context of the group. He had a distinctive and flexible voice and struck up an immediate and overtly warm rapport with George Duke, sharing the broad and quick sense of humour that Frank had drawn out of the keyboard player. Their on-stage badinage, which both celebrated and satirised black consciousness, contrasted with Frank's own studied bizarre humour and there were moments when one sensed that he was happy and relieved to become a sideman in his own group. But these moments were no more than a fleeting relaxation of the rigid control which was the keynote of a Mothers gig. Even though the evenings were recorded on Wally Heider's 16-track remote equipment, the number of musicians crowded onto the Roxy's stage made separation something of a problem.

  The final mixes on Roxy & Elsewhere lack the clarity that Frank would later achieve with digital equipment. Each side of the double album featured a 'Preamble' in which the origin of the following song was explained. Frank wouldn't always provide this se
rvice, thinking perhaps like Gustav Mahler that audiences shouldn't always have a safety net.

  As it was, Frank's introduction to 'Penguin In Bondage' was vague and cryptic: "This song suggests to the suggestible listener that the ordinary procedure that I am circumlocuting at the present time in order to get this text on television is that if you want to do something other than what you thought you were gonna do when you first took your clothes off— and you just happen to have some DEVICES! around, then it's not only OK to get into the Paraphernalia of it all but hey -." The sexual connotations were deliberately mystifying; even the stage antics described in the notes of 1992's Playground Psychotics failed to equate with the events 'way over on the wet side of the bed' with which the song concerned itself.

  Luckily, the introductions to 'Village Of The Sun', 'Cheepnis' and 'Be-Bop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen's Church)' were confined to more literal terms. The tatter's 'Preamble' ended with Frank's instruction: "Not too fast, now, 'cos I want to get the right notes on the tape. This has to be the one . . . and this is a hard one to play." But it was no harder than 'Echidna's Arf', a fiendishly tortuous theme that George Duke would record even faster the following year for his solo album, The Aura Will Prevail. 'Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?' was similarly complex, with the added impediment of a series of staccato interjections between solos by trombone, electric piano, both drumkits and guitar before a marimba cadenza from Ruth Underwood.

  One song performed during these gigs and often during this period was 'Dickie's Such An Asshole', Frank's acerbic commentary on the events that would eventually bring down Richard Nixon, the only American President forced to resign while still in office. It had received its 'world premiere' on October 26, 1973 at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas. The Nixon administration had been collapsing ever since the June 17 break-in at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. The subsequent trial had revealed a world of dirty tricks, slush funds, wiretapping and the clandestine recording of Nixon's Oval Room conversations. Wriggle as he might, Nixon could not avoid public revulsion at the machinations of his advisors, performed under his instruction, or the lengths to which he was prepared to go in order to conceal them.