Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  After 15 days, Mr Justice Mocatta reserved judgement in the case, which would be delivered on June 10. Frank gave his impression of the case to Robin Denselow: "It was like a ritual oriental drama. They'd never believe it in LA. I tried to buy a wig as a souvenir."22

  Mocatta's decision when it came can hardly have been unexpected, but its ramifications were. Losing the claim for £8,000 was bad enough; paying the costs of the trial, estimated at £20,000, was the real blow. As reported in The Times, Mocatta "made no ruling on allegations that Mr Zappa's songs were 'obscene, objectionable or indecent', but based his decision on the fact that under the contract the Albert Hall management could cancel if it thought the concert was open to 'reasonable objection'."23 The Daily Mirror carried a further quote: "What might be open to reasonable objection at a performance at the Albert Hall might not be open to such objection at a performance at, say, the Round House."24

  "Yeah, that was pretty weird," Frank said to me years later. "Expensive, too. But it's not every day that a guy like me gets to go to the High Court. Justice Mocatta was a unique individual. I'm sure the Crown was proud of him for what he did. He agreed that the contract had been breached. He agreed that the show was not obscene. But basically, they were royal and I wasn't and there was no way I was gonna win a lawsuit, so go fuck yourself."

  Would an American court of the time have been any better, I asked. "I think so. One of the reasons I say that is that there's more of a tradition for awarding damages here. For one thing, in the United States it would have been a jury trial. And for another thing, the whole rules of evidence are different in court here. And I think that it's demonstrably ludicrous that this spinster closed the door on us because of words like 'brassiere'. And I think that, as long as you can point out to a jury that this is a breach of contract suit, not an obscenity trial, did she or did she not breach the contract?"

  I thought that the trial showed hypocrisy on a grand scale.

  "On a royal scale."

  BONGO FURY

  The Spring 1975 tour continued after Frank's return from England. A curiously subdued Captain Beefheart was interviewed at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, explaining the reconciliation between him and Frank. "I said some silly things because I'm a spoiled brat and I don't understand business to the degree that Frank does. I probably felt neglected. I'll admit it... and I told him so. I said, 'I'm sorry Frank and I don't mean that for an excuse.' We shook hands and that was that."25 It was uncharacteristic behaviour, perhaps a measure of the bad situation in which he'd found himself before the tour started.

  Maybe it was also because Beefheart wasn't used to being merely a band member. He got to do 'Willie The Pimp' and some of his own compositions like 'Orange Claw Hammer', 'Sam With The Showing Scalp Flat Top' and 'Man With The Woman Head', as well as things that Frank had written for him, such as 'Debra Kadabra', 'Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead' and 'Why Doesn't Someone Get Him A Pepsi?' When he wasn't singing, which was quite often, he'd sit on the side of the stage, jostling his song sheets.

  Frank wanted him "to relax to the point where he can improvise words. He can do really funny stuff when he's sitting around in a room. But he hasn't really gotten comfortable enough yet." For his part, Beefheart was having "an extreme amount of fun on this tour. They move awfully fast. I've never travelled this fast. With the Magic Band — turtles all the way down." And he had a compliment for his leader: "Frank is probably the most creative person on this planet. He writes things for instruments that haven't even been invented. He's another Harry Partch only he hasn't dried up yet. Get it?"26

  Years later, Frank told Nigel Leigh, 'Don is absent-minded and it was a great challenge for the road manager on this tour to try and keep him integrated with the rest of what was going on. All the other musicians in the band were well seasoned road rats. They knew how to pack up and get out of a motel; they knew how to show up at the sound check on time; they knew how to live that life on the road. They knew how to do it. Don carried his possessions in a shopping bag, including his soprano sax which stuck out the shopping bag, and was forever leaving it in hallways and not knowing where he was or what he was doing.

  "He would forget the lyrics to the songs, requiring that large sheets of cardboard had to be provided that were lying on the stage, so that he could follow his own lyrics. He was always complaining about the monitor system never being loud enough for him to hear his own voice." Beefheart sang so loud that the pressure caused his ears to close down. "So the harder he sang, the more he would have to turn up the monitor system to the point where anybody in the vicinity with their clothes (on) would catch fire."27

  The tour schedule was fairly intense, with only nine days off between April 18 and the final two-day stint at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas on May 20/21. These gigs were recorded by the LA Record Plant's remote facilities for the requisite album release, augmented by '200 Years Old', 'Cucamonga' and the introductory passages of 'Muffin Man' from the Record Plant sessions.

  There's a formlessness about Bongo Fury which is engendered by the clash between Frank's precision and Beefheart's spontaneous effusion. Their only real collaboration is in Frank's 'Debra Kadabra', written about his and Don's love of third-rate Mexican horror films and isolated incidents from Don's colourful past. The complicated arrangement over which Beefheart hollers is not particularly well played. The band's involvement in 'Sam With The Showing Scalp Flat Top' is minimal, confined to a recap of 'Louie Louie' behind Don's chanting of 'Bongo Fury!'; 'Man With The Woman Head' is pure Beefheart recitative.

  Frank's own material divides most of its attention between sex and the coming bicentennial, which he satirised in 'the cowboy song', 'Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead'. He prefaced its performance with a warning: "This is a song that warns you in advance that next year everybody is going to try and sell you things that maybe you shouldn't ought to buy." The suggestion being that the political agenda behind the patriotism was just as tawdry as the merchandise with which the country would be regaled.

  Beefheart sang '200 Years Old' after Franks' opening monologue about life on the road, but any relevance to forthcoming events is obscured by the Captain's diction. Cucamonga was a fragment that referred back to Studio Z days, while 'Muffin Man' contained the first reference to the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Accompanied by George Duke's piano, even Frank himself couldn't recite the bizarre scenario without laughing: "Arrogantly twisting the sterile canvas snoot of a fully charged icing-anointment utensil, he poots forth a quarter-ounce green rosette near the summit of a dense but radiant muffin of his own design." After that, any song would be an anticlimax and this was. Even so, it became a concert favourite because of its simple repetitive melody line and the humorous put-down in the lyrics. Or, as Frank put it, "The bigger the venue, the more need there is for 'Muffin Man'."28

  'Advance Romance', with a lead vocal by Napoleon Murphy Brock, was the longest track on the album, allowing extended solos by Denny Walley, Beefheart and Frank. The coda re-introduced a character first encountered in 'San Ber'Dino'; 'Potato-headed Bobby was a friend of mine . . .'. This potato fetish would culminate in Thing-Fish, where 'Sister Potato-Head Bobby Brown' would become a Mammy Nun and have a 'head like a potato . . . Ups like a duck.' By that time, the tuber-pated Bobby Brown had also been a gender-bending record plugger with a hit in Scandinavia.

  One significant song in the repertoire didn't make it onto the album. 'Why Doesn't Someone Get Him A Pepsi?' referred to high school days: "When I used to go over to Vliet's house . . . the only thing you would ever hear him say was, 'Sue! Get me a Pepsi!' He was always yelling at his mother to get him a Pepsi, and sometimes the Pepsi wouldn't arrive, so it was like, 'Please! Somebody get him a Pepsi!'"29 Sung by Beefheart over a metronomic riff played by Denny Walley that echoed Howlin' Wolf's 'Smokestack Lightning', a radically altered arrangement of the song appeared on Frank's next album, Zoot Allures, as 'The Torture Never Stops'. The original version was eventually r
eleased on YCDTOSA 4.

  When the British press announced Mr Justice Mocatta's tortuously reasoned decision on June 11, most indicated that there would be an appeal. The August 29 edition of the Evening Standard noted that one had been lodged by Bizarre Productions Inc., but this was subsequently withdrawn. During the same month, Frank's company also entered a $2 million suit against MGM-Verve, through which he hoped to regain possession of his master tapes.

  One Size Fits All was released on June 25, to rather indifferent reviews. In Melody Maker, Michael Watts referred to the Felt Forum gig, at which a "disappointingly inconsequential" Frank had acted "like a snotty sixth former with a large IQ". Proving that he knew what that meant, Watts noted that Frank's lyrics had "an irrelevancy that's dadaist and a detachment that's Bufiuelian". Consequently, the album was "daft but interesting and recognisably Frankie the Zee"30 but broke no new ground.

  Writing a week later in NME, Charles Shaar Murray managed to sit on the fence while at the same time voice his disapproval. Frank had "consciously withdrawn something of himself from his music"; his guitar playing was merely "consistently adequate" and there were only two acceptable songs ('Can't Afford No Shoes' and 'San Ber'Dino'). But, perched on his picket, Shaar Murray conceded, "the thing is that these days Zappa has Commercial Potential . . . and all those early albums which us Zappa connoisseurs think are so great were commercial lead balloons by comparison, so who's the bozo?"31

  ORCHESTRAL FAVORITES

  During 1975, through circumstances not entirely under Frank's control, the Mothers went through three changes of personnel in which Napoleon Murphy Brock was the only constant. Each change led to fresh arrangements and new material. While that was the sort of challenge to which Frank could readily respond, it confounded the expectations of audiences. When unspecified contractual difficulties held up the release of One Size Fits All until after the 'Bongo Fury' tour, the Commercial Potential that Shaar Murray identified was damaged and the album did not do as well as its predecessors.

  Public perception of what Frank was doing was inevitably guided by his concerts and albums. Critics like Shaar Murray plainly cherished their own idea of what his work represented; by trying to identify a logical progression in a career remoulded as much by arbitrary necessity as choice, their observations were based on false criteria. The assumption that what was presented live or on record was the sum total of Frank's creativity fell fir short of the reality, which was that it was merely the visible tip of a large floating mass of themes and variations undergoing constant change.

  "The putting out of material is not the desired end result," he told Tom Mulhern. "I really don't care whether it comes out; I like to hear it. But I do it for my own amusement. The fact that it comes out is just something that has to do with the business world, rather than the artistic world. The composing actually takes up the smallest amount of my time. I've already written so much that hasn't gone through all those in-between steps before it turns into music on tape, or music in the air, or whatever, that I could sit still for five years and have tons of stuff coming out."32

  For all his compulsion to write music, Frank still fought shy of being regarded as a composer. "I don't think a composer has any function in society at all," he said in 1986, "especially in an industrial society, unless it is to write movie scores, advertising jingles, or stuff that is consumed by industry. If you walk down the street and ask anybody if a composer is of any use to any society, what kind of answer do you think you would get? I mean, nobody gives a shit. If you decide to become a composer, you seriously run the risk of becoming less than a human being. Who the fuck needs you?"33

  There was little awareness of the flow of compositions and scores that Frank wrote while on the road, notwithstanding the fact that 200 Motels was known to have been produced in this manner. The opportunity to stage an orchestral concert presented itself very rarely. The Albert Hall debacle had frustrated his attempts to do so in England, but Frank now turned his attention to a pair of orchestral concerts, conducted by Michael Zearott, to be given at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus on September 17/18. For them, he assembled a 37-piece band, including Terry Bozzio, Dave Parlato, Emil Richards and others from Grand Wazoo days, which was christened the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Orchestra.

  The repertoire combined old and new and rearranged material: 'Duke Of Prunes', 'Dog Breath' and 'Uncle Meat' mutated afresh, as did 'Strictly Genteel', 'Rollo' (part of 'Farther O'Blivion'), 'Black Napkins' (first played at LA's Shrine Auditorium in August 1974) and 'Revised Music For Guitar & Low-Budget Orchestra', while 'Pedro's Dowry', 'Naval Aviation In Art?' and 'Bogus Pomp' made their debuts. Parts of these performances, all of which were recorded, were subsequently released under contentious circumstances on Orchestral Favorites.

  Bongo Fury, its artist credit a terse 'Zappa/Beefheart Mothers', its cover a glowering Zappa and a modest Beefheart with downcast head seated at a backstage table, was released in America on October 2, 1975. It ran into trouble in England because of Don Vliet's contractual problems. In 1973, he'd signed a two-album deal with Mercury, while in England the rights were acquired by Richard Branson's Virgin label. The albums, Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans And Moonbeams, were intended to broaden Beefheart's appeal but were poorly conceived and badly received by fans with no taste for the mundane nonsense that they contained. The consequences of this catalogue of disasters produced the morass from which Frank had saved him. Now it seemed that the respite was only temporary.

  Virgin Records, who regarded Beefheart as their exclusive artist, took out an injunction against Warner Brothers issuing Bongo Fury in England. Neither company could agree on a suitable formula for its release and the album would not be officially issued in England until 1989. Meanwhile, Virgin were content to sell it as an expensive import in their record stores. Beefheart was on tour in England in November and protested the situation from the stage of London's New Victoria Theatre: "They have no right to stop the world from hearing Frank and I having fun. Who are they kidding with a name like that? There are no more virgins, we all know that. The dance of the seven veils is over!"34

  FILTHY HABITS

  By this time, Frank had been back out on the road for a month with his third personnel of the year and the last to bear the name Mothers Of Invention, a stripped-down combo consisting of Napoleon Murphy Brock, Andre Lewis, Roy Estrada and Terry Bozzio. When the group played a Halloween concert at New York's Felt Forum, they were augmented on saxophone and vocals by Norma Jean Bell. She'd been suggested by Ralph Armstrong, bassist with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Frank invited her to accompany the tour. But, as Terry Bozzio explained, "By the time we got back to LA at the end of the tour, she had pretty much succumbed to hanging out with the wrong people and doing a lot of drugs. So Frank said, 'Forget this!' "35

  She did, however, get to go to Yugoslavia on a two-concert trip officially sanctioned by the Yugoslav Tourist Board. The gigs took place in Zagreb and Ljubljana: "I recall Zagreb was literally the smokiest gig I've ever played," said Terry Bozzio. "I had never been in a hockey rink with 10,000 people filled with so much smoke in my life. It was probably terribly unhealthy. But the gig went over great."36

  "It's my understanding," Frank said later, "that Yugoslavia was the most liberal of all the East Bloc countries (at that time). But lemme tell ya, if Yugoslavia was the most liberal of the 'workers' paradises' of that era, the other places must have been pure hell."37

  For anything other than the road rats Frank liked to employ, the next three months would have been pure hell, too. Immediately after Christmas 1975, the band played Oakland and San Francisco before returning to LA to play The Forum in Inglewood on New Year's Eve, with Captain Beefheart and Todd Rundgren's Utopia also on the bill. At the end of January 1976, there was a tour of Australia followed by gigs in Japan, from which sundry recordings, including 'Black Napkins', 'Zoot Allures' and 'Ship Ahoy', turned up on later albums. With just a few days' break, the band (including sometime-engineer Da
vey Moire on vocals) continued to Europe for 23 dates that took in every country but Britain.

  By now, Frank was being systematically bootlegged and at least six albums from the European tour were circulated, one three-LP set, Good Evening Vienna, even had individual air-brushed artwork for each of its 500 copies. From these, it can be gathered that the band's repertoire was fairly evenly drawn from most periods of the Mothers' 12-year existence. 'Stink Foot', 'Dinah-Moe Humm', 'Advance Romance' and 'The Torture Never Stops' were already concert favourites, and the nostalgia section included 'How Could I Be Such A Fool?', 'I Ain't Got No Heart' and 'I'm Not Satisfied'. The new material comprised 'Tryin' To Grow A Chin', 'Wind Up Working In A Gas Station', 'Naval Aviation In Art?', 'Honey, Don't You Want A Man Like Me?', 'Black Napkins', 'Filthy Habits' and 'The Illinois Enema Bandit'. Frank told Nigel Leigh how the latter came about: "I actually heard about it on the radio. We were returning from a job in Normal, Illinois and had the radio on in the station wagon. The announcer said, 'The Illinois Enema Bandit' has struck again, and I went, 'What!' Apparently, this guy had been ravaging the area of Southern Illinois for a number of years. He would find a co-ed's apartment with the door unlocked and he would walk in with a ski mask on and I guess a revolver, and force the woman to experience a severe internal rinse at gunpoint."38

  Thirty-year-old Michael Kenyon was finally arrested and pleaded guilty in Urbana, Illinois to six counts of armed robbery and admitted to administering enemas to at least three of his victims. But, as Frank said, "since there is no law against giving anyone an enema, he went to jail because he took money from the ugly ones.