Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  Even so, the apparent ultimate purpose of the break-in didn't come to light until much later. "Cointelpro was what they were trying to hide with Watergate," Frank told Don Menn. "It wasn't just breaking into the Democratic headquarters. What they're trying to cover up is the fact that Nixon had decided to create a secret police. There was no legal authority to spy on US citizens. He felt he had enemies everywhere, so he created a programme called Cointelpro. It was all the domestic spying on political groups, people he perceived as enemies. And since it couldn't exist under law, it had to be financed by a slush fund."20

  "The money to finance the dirty tricks and the spying on US citizens was coming from tangential sources," Frank told me. "From the minute that there was such a thing as a youth culture in the United States, when long hair first started appearing in Los Angeles, the people who were doing the spying were part of a special LAPD secret police unit. And then Cointelpro would be the national version of that. When Cointelpro was revealed, that it existed, everybody said, 'Oh, we won't do it again.' Nobody proved it was ever dismantled.

  "All you gotta do is look at the way people were treated during the Reagan administration who supported Nicaragua, who didn't like the idea of the Contras going in there and having a private war. The same kind of break-ins occurred in their homes and their offices. And whether it was being done by the FBI, an offshoot of the FBI, the Cointelpro leftovers or something, there is a secret police in the United States that's got a name someplace and somebody tells them what to do. And they still work and they're still out there and they have better equipment than the KGB ever did."

  The shifty-eyed 'asshole' was still almost nine months from his resignation when this version of the song, released on YCDTOSA 3, was taped. Frank hadn't been this blunt for some time, first calling him 'a cocksucker by proxy' and noting 'the man in the White House has got a conscience black as sin'. It's little wonder that no performance of the song was made available until 1988's Broadway The Hard Way, but the Roxy recording benefits from its currency with unfolding events. Only a few days before, Nixon had announced on national television, "I am not a crook," and Frank intoned those words during 'Son Of Orange County', one track that did get released.

  There were favourable reviews of the gigs in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and even Variety. Ruth Underwood came in for particular praise; the Times thought her "deft", but Robert A. Kemnitz in the Herald-Examiner wrote that she "kept up with the band's frenetic pace without missing a single swat of the gong, and she was incredible."21 Variety was unequivocal: "Highlight of the evening was the Ruth Underwood, Frank Zappa duo on vibes with double drum sets beating perfect rhythms while the other musicians supported. Underwood's striking performance was phenomenal as she rushed about the percussion section playing the various instruments."22

  EXCENTRIFUGAL FORZ

  Recording sessions during the first two months of 1974 put the finishing touches to Frank's next solo album, Apostrophe ('), and material that appeared on Bongo Fury the following year. Apostrophe (') combined recent recordings with the current Mothers and others that went back to the Hot Rats sessions, involving past collaborators such as drummers John Guerin and Aynsley Dunbar, violinists Sugarcane Harris and Jean-Luc Ponty and a final contribution from Ray Collins. The title track was a studio jam recorded the previous September in New York's Electric Lady studios between Frank, Jack Bruce and Jim Gordon, with Tony Duran on rhythm guitar.

  "I found it very difficult to play with him," Frank said in 1977, "he's too busy. He doesn't really want to play the bass in terms of root functions; I think he has other things on his mind. But that's the way jam sessions go."23 As it went, it was atypical of the rest of the album, which combined humour and instrumental dexterity in equal measure. If there were serious subtexts, such as seal culling, mysticism ('Cosmik Debris') and black protest ('Uncle Remus'), they were viewed through the distorting prism of Frank's laconic wit. The marriage was particularly evident in the sequence of 'Don't Eat The Yellow Snow', 'Nanook Rubs It', 'St Alfonso's Pancake Breakfast' and 'Father O'Blivion', which quickly vaulted into the surreal to the well-nigh impossible accompaniment of Ruth Underwood's dazzling mallets.

  The lyrics of 'Excentrifugal Forz' were obscure beyond analysis but the title's image could have represented Frank himself, drawing influences and events into his creative vortex to emit them recast as original compositions.

  Well, maybe. A case in point was 'Uncle Remus', which George Duke helped to compose and would also include, in a more gospel-based arrangement, on The Aura Will Prevail. The lyrics dealt with black fashion and styling ('can't wait 'til my 'fro is full-grown') before ending with the random destruction of jockey statues on rich peoples' lawns at the crack of dawn — your average association of ideas.

  'Stink-Foot' made an equally bizarre shift, inspired by a Mermen foot spray commercial, from the subject of smelly feet to thoughts on conceptual continuity addressed to its master by a poodle puppy. In this case, appropriately enough, the crux of the biscuit was the apostrophe. Was this the puppy (first identified as Frenchie in 'Dirty Love') that grew into the giant Frunobulax who menaces the Power Plant in 'Cheepnis'? And to which breed did 'Evelyn, A Modified Dog' belong? Was there any significance to the fact that a poodle-faker was defined as someone who cultivated female society? The legend would grow and books would be written to plumb the mystery.

  Apostrophe (') was released on April 22, 1974, and was an instant success. It was no doubt helped by the 'Tenth Anniversary' tour that began two days later and continued until mid-August. In that time, the album had gone gold and climbed the album charts, peaking after 11 weeks at number 10 in the week ending June 29. Belatedly realising the need to climb on the bandwagon, Rolling Stone reviewed it seven weeks after its release and found it "Truly a mother of an album".24

  In a dramatically positive move, Warner Brothers sanctioned some television advertising; Frank and Cal Schenkel put together a 30-second commercial which they placed during the transmission of monster movies, figuring that their target audience would be watching. Frank was so pleased with the outcome that he ordered a celebration, described in Rolling Stone: "Frank Zappa, happy that his Apostrophe (') album is in the Top 10, hired a 50-piece marching band to thank Warner Brothers Records. They tooted past headquarters led by a sign-bearer with the message: 'Anyone who can get Frank Zappa even to the bottom of the Top 10 is OK in my booklet'."25

  Frank thought he knew why the album had been a success. "That was an accident," he told William Ruhlmann, "because a radio station in Pittsburgh took 'Don't Eat The Yellow Snow', cut it down ... to three minutes and put it on the station. The guy who did it heard the song, perceived it as a modern-day novelty record and put it on right alongside of 'Teeny Weeny Bikini' and it became a hit. But it was nothing that Warner Brothers ever foresaw, it was nothing that I could have foreseen as a guy at DiscReet Records, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary. Who knew? The credit goes to the DJ."26

  Reception in England was mixed. Melody Maker thought it showed "a touch of genius" but NME had reviewed an advance copy in their April 6 issue, under the headline, "The unsightly debris of Francis Vincent Zappa". Ian MacDonald had a 'Z' in his bonnet; the last "remotely listenable" album had been Fillmore East and subsequent releases were "more or less grotesquely indulgent on the musical level and lyrically ... despicably irresponsible." This time, Frank had "retreated into his studio with a bunch of faceless yes-men virtuosi and squandered two years of his life producing some of the most carefully constructed redundant dreck ever to find its way into the record-racks of the Western world." He saved his broadside for a direct remark: "With Apostrophe ('), you've blotted your escrutcheon but permanently."27 Pity about the spelling.

  MOTHERLY LOVE

  There was much to celebrate in the summer of 1974. The seventh gig of the Anniversary tour was at Chicago's Auditorium Theater on May 11. At midnight, Frank announced to the sell-out crowd that it was now Mother's Day, t
he exact anniversary of the naming of the Mothers of Invention, and talked about the early days of the band. Then, with typical sentiment, he said, "You're gonna hear Freak Out! 'til it's coming out of your ass," and led the present Mothers through a 40-minute medley of songs from his first album. The resulting bootleg of the event, Unmitigated Audacity, was later included in Beat The Boots, Box 1. The most notable element in the proceedings was Frank's impromptu first verse of 'More Trouble Every Day' as feedback interrupted the opening words, which he instantly changed to, 'Well, I'm about to get sick of listening to this monitor system.'

  "What I'm going to do is play twenty of those things in a row," he told Barbara Charone before the gig, "and I think the audience will love it. Those songs are all so easy compared to what we've been doing recently. In rehearsal we learned two and three of them in a day which is sickening, because when we first put out Freak Out! it took weeks just to get one little song right. Today (it) sounds like a bunch of demos to me." Charone's piece included a timely quote from the soon-to-be-ex-President: "There is no undertaking more challenging, no responsibility more awesome than being a Mother."28

  Four days later, a new Zappa entered the world. Frank and Gail's second son was named Ahmet Rodan. His first name was that of an imaginary person "we always had hanging around back when we had no one on our payroll," Gail told Victoria Balfour. "We'd snap our fingers and say, 'Ahmet? Dishes. Coffee, please.' "29 He was also named after a giant pterodactyl that would have ravaged the world if the Japanese film director Ishiro Honda hadn't destroyed it in 1957. The proud parents could have carried on using names from the same source, Majin, Mothra, Gamera, Barugon and Ghidorah among them, but fortunately their next child was a daughter.

  Frank stayed at home during June, overdubbing and mixing Roxy & Elsewhere (elsewhere being the May 8 gig at Edinboro, Pennsylvania and the Chicago Mother's Day bash), appreciating his new son and editing a film by Seattle animator, Bruce Bickford. Barry Hansen interviewed him during the process: "As I was about to compliment Zappa on composing music that so perfectly fit the Hadesian mood of the film, he told me that the music had not been written for the film at all, but had been extracted from live recordings of Mothers concerts which took place before Frank had ever seen the movie.

  "I got the work print," Frank explained, "and edited that without sound. Then, just last night... I put the (Mothers) tracks on, and it worked. It's so unbelievable . . . when you think what it would take to actually score a film like that, and last night I put on this music, which was something constructed for completely different purposes, spontaneously at another location and another time, and I put them together and they worked perfectly."30

  This was yet another opportunity for 'conceptual continuity' to be explained. Hansen thought that the chance matching of Mothers music, deliberately chosen, to Bickford's film was a rather more subtle manifestation of a haphazard phenomenon, and perhaps the product of Frank's single-minded dedication. "Zappa is so absorbed in his work that he appears to need no other pleasures.

  " 'When I'm home, I have a work schedule that goes like this. If I'm not rehearsing, I spend about 16, 18 hours a day down here (in the workroom) writing music, typing, working on film . . . and if I'm not here, I usually do about 10, 14 hours in the studio, seven days a week, until rehearsal schedule starts. The only thing I would see as a worthwhile interruption would be 100 per cent concentration on a feature film.' "31

  Hansen commented that few people were as thoroughly committed to their work, nor enjoyed it as much. In hindsight, Frank's reply supplied food for thought: "What else you gonna do, work in a gas station?"32 Instead, he went back on the road with a stripped-down sextet of himself, Brock, Duke, Underwood, Fowler and Thompson for July gigs in Arkansas, Florida, Arizona and California. The band spent two days in Culver City Studios, recording a television special. The following day, August 8, they were back in Hollywood for a gig at the Shrine Auditorium. There was more than just an anniversary to celebrate that night; Richard Nixon had resigned earlier in the day. His step, as he boarded his Presidential helicopter for the last time, was firmer than his successor Gerald Ford, whose ability to take prat-falls could have earned him a lifetime achievement award.

  During the rest of the month there were rehearsals for the next European tour by a new, streamlined Mothers. The intensity of their workload reflected the intensity of the tour itself, 23 dates in 29 days, travelling through Italy, Sicily, Austria, Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, France, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain. But not to England.

  An angry Frank held a press conference in the Sandringham Suite of Kensington's Royal Garden Hotel on September 5, the day before the tour's opening gig in Rome. "Ordinarily, we come to England to play concerts, to promote an album," he said. "This time I have the unfortunate duty to announce that we can't play in this country. The reason for this is something that dates back to the case we have against the Albert Hall."33 The August 26 Daily Telegraph had announced that Bizarre Productions had taken out a High Court action over the concert ban three years earlier and were claiming damages for conspiracy against Marion Herrod, the lettings manager, and Frank Munday, the general manager, even though he'd died the previous February. There was also an action against the Rainbow, too.

  Fred Bannister, the promoter of the proposed UK tour which would have covered September 21-26, had met with 'unusual discrimination' in his dealings with controllers of the London halls.

  "Certain halls were available," Bannister explained, "but they would not rent to me because of the Albert Hall thing. Two actually said that. We talked about getting the Drury Lane Theatre and the Palladium with a Mr Verner (of Moss Empires), and he told us that the halls were free but that he wouldn't be happy to let us use either of them in the light of the Albert Hall lawsuit. We then spoke to a Mr Fishman, on behalf of the New Victoria Theatre, the Odeon Hammersmith and the Kilburn State Theatre (all controlled by the Rank Organisation), who said much the same thing but in a more roundabout way."

  "We had to give a big concert in London to make our performances in the provinces financially viable," Frank said. Herb Cohen reckoned that the cost of keeping the 21-piece entourage on the road for a day, including seven and a half tons of hired ELP p.a. (costing around £18,000 for the European tour), exceeded the estimated gross from the proposed Birmingham concert. A measure of Frank's desperation was evident in the dramatic offer he made at the end of the press conference. "I would like to announce that I will pay for Ms Herrod to fly anywhere in Europe for any length of time to attend any of the concerts ... I will even take her on the whole tour, myself, personally, just to show what a nice clean wholesome group we are and I guarantee she'll have the best time of her life . . ,"34 Ms Herrod was not available for comment. A less convinced conspiracy-theorist than Frank would have found it hard not to feel victimised.

  These were still the days when the British bulldog occasionally emitted a rheumy gruff at the influx of all things American, and it was Frank's turn in the barrel. Any doubt was dispelled when John Blake wrote his pop piece for the Evening News, after he'd travelled to Paris on September 27 to see the show and interview the aggrieved party. Under the headline, "Zappa is it goodbye for ever?", he described how Frank "fixed me with a baleful stare and spelt out the news that will bring gloom to his fans — and cheer to everyone else. 'It is possible I may never perform in London again,' he said."35

  Smug antipathy suffused Blake's piece. "I have two or three bad memories of London," Frank told him. "We have played there about six times and I haven't enjoyed myself most of the time. And I don't like the attitude London's pop Press have. The journalists are virtually unconcerned with what I am doing musically." Blake thought his music "a pain in the ear", having found the Grand Wazoo Oval concert "spectacularly dreary". His final thrust quoted an ex-Mother: "It's so easy to convince yourself that he is the genius he thinks he is. But really he just bewilders the audience so much that some of them walk away believing that anyone that bad and t
hat popular must be great beyond their comprehension." The quote went unattributed, of course.

  In fact, the music press gave ample space to this same Paris gig, at the Palais de Sport, and the 30,000 party (paid for by Warner Brothers) afterwards at the Alcazar nightclub. It was, in Charles Shaar Murray's words, "a kind of acrobatic-musical-sexual-satirical cabaret with a cast of thousands."36 Melody Maker's Allan Jones was also present: "The climax is a real bazooka. Cecil B. De Mille meets Fellini in a head-on crash at a hundred miles an hour, with choreography by Busby Berkeley, out of his brain on bad acid."37

  The evening started badly when the gear, delayed by customs and a ferry, failed to arrive in time for the afternoon sound check. The previous gig, in Gothenburg on September 25, had been the second of two that replaced the British dates. And the first? What sort of conceptual continuity was it that caused Frank to choose the almost-complete September 22 Helsinki gig as Volume Two in the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series? It can only have been the long arm of coincidence that a concert that wouldn't have taken place without the cancelled British gigs was chosen.