Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  The back cover, showing the scene from behind 'FranXerox', was even more detailed. The location has switched to Palermo at the start of the riot. Tear gas drifts across the crowd as police buckle on their shields. In left foreground, John Smothers is crushing a photographer's head alongside two furtive cocaine sniffers ('Cocaine Decisions' opened the album). To the right, Pope John Paul gestures from a throne carried by Swiss guards. In front of him, a bare-breasted woman holds aloft a rolled copy of Frigidaire in a pose that echoes the Statue of Liberty. Italy had just beaten Germany in the World Cup, so a banner announces '3-1 Vaflanculo'; telling the Germans to 'fuck off must have been a novel experience.

  For some Zappa fans, the cover was more attractive than the contents. Songs like 'Cocaine Decisions' (another broadside aimed at Warner Brothers) and 'Stick Together', which attacked the mob-ruled union movement, were in the Zappa mainstream, as was the medley of two doo-wop songs, 'The Man From Utopia' and 'Mary Lou'. Less listener-friendly were three excursions into sprechstimme, 'The Dangerous Kitchen', 'The Radio Is Broken' and 'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats'. The musical achievement, particularly in the first two numbers, was considerable, but their value as entertainment, even at the first listening, was questionable.

  "We have this thing called meltdown," Frank told Rick Davies, "where, depending on what's in the news that day, or what happened in the audience during the show, I'd start talking in a singsong tone of voice and then Tommy Man would chop changes behind it. Now that's very freeform, kind of like 'The Dangerous Kitchen' or 'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats'; those are both meltdown events. In the case of 'Dangerous Kitchen', it's a fixed set of lyrics that has variable pitches and variable rhythms. In the case of 'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats', it was completely spontaneous, 100 per cent improvised by me and the band. It ended up right on the spot in this concert in Illinois. So that type of rampant behaviour is good as a contrast, but I think that for today's audience you can't go out and do a whole evening of random behaviour. They're not going to tolerate it; they want to see a structured show."36

  The tortuous vocal line in 'The Dangerous Kitchen' was transcribed by Steve Vai, who then overdubbed an acoustic guitar part on the live recording, which featured Vinnie Colaiuta on drums. "It's not 100 per cent accurate, as a matter of fact," Frank pointed out to David Mead, "because if you play the pitches of his transcription without the vocal, there are certain things that just sound a little bit weird. I'd give it 99 per cent, though.

  "When you're transcribing something to publish in a magazine, that's one thing. But when you're transcribing it and you know that within a day or so you're going to be overdubbing on the track, and you're going to be sight-reading your own transcription, and it's got to synch up exactly with what's on the track — that's when you'll really know whether you're a good transcriber or not. But that's how he did it; he wrote it out, he came in, we turned on the tape, he read it and he did it in two or three takes. He even put in a string-scratch for when I laughed! I went, 'Huh, huh, huh,' and he's got that little 'scrape, scrape, scrape' in there. He nailed everything."37

  'The Radio Is Broken' was a studio creation which interspersed a dialogue between Frank and Bobby Martin on the subject of shoddy sci-fi B movies over a complicated rhythm passage that had Scott Thunes1 bass utilising the riff from The Knack's 'My Sharona'. It was the sort of 'audio junk sculpture' with which Frank liked to tease his fans; The Knack had recorded 'My Sharona' at Village Recorders while he was there cutting Joe's Garage. The song's composer, Doug Fieger, claimed Frank as "a big, big influence in my life. I met him one time, and he insulted me. It was at an airport. It was good-natured, but he was ever the iconoclast and the kind of 'grumpy old man' ... I gave him a Knack button, and I said, 'We're gonna be a big band.' And he said, 'So what!' "38

  'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats', again with Colaiuta on drums, is probably the most tasteless song in Frank's whole catalogue. The song concerned the band's visit to Albuquerque, New Mexico and two unnamed band members' attempts to pooch some local college girls. The story of a panty-sniffng session while one of the girls skinny-dipped in the hotel pool gets just a little too graphic ('He told me later the stuff in the bottom was like punching an eclair'). There is no way of telling what Frank's attitude is to the events he recounts, except when he refers to the panty-sniffing fetish as "part of a great American Tradition".

  There were three short instrumentals on The Man From Utopia, none over-arranged. 'We Are Not Alone' was an updated echo of Fifties R&B bands, featuring the massed saxophones of Marty Krystall. Frank referred to 'Moggio' as "a very complicated instrumental for the full ensemble, featuring Steve Vai playing some very hard guitar stuff." The title came courtesy of his daughter: "One day, when Diva was real young," he told Den Simms, "she crawled into bed with us, and I was going to bed, like, seven o'clock in the morning, and she had been sleeping in bed with Gail during the night. As I got into bed, she was just waking up, and she was telling me about this dream that she had, that she had a tiny, little father named 'Moggio' who lived under the pillow . . . and gave me this complete scenario about this character that she was familiar with."39

  Most interesting of all was Tink Walks Amok', a showcase for Arthur Barrow's bass-playing. It was originally a band piece, 'Thirteen', that was renamed when Frank learned Barrow's nickname from Christopher Cross, at a time when neither were peaking. "The band versions of it were much cooler than the album track," was Barrow's modest opinion. "We did it by starting to a click track, then I put down a basic bass track. Then I overdubbed bunches of other tracks, micro bass and some other stuff. We were sitting in the studio with the tape rolling. Frank would say, 'OK, move the whole pattern up to the D-string, get ready, NOW!' All while the tape was rolling. That's the way it is on the record."40

  When the album was digitally remixed for CD, the air of cold calculation in much of the material was accentuated, rendering an already difficult record appreciably harder to enjoy. The original running order was changed and an extra track, 'Luigi & The Wise Guys', an inconsequential a cappella doo-wop parody that accused a crew member of being a dork, was added. Released to mail order at the same time was a picture disc of the Baby Snakes soundtrack, beginning with the original track from Sheik Yerbouti and versions of 'Titties & Beer', 'The Black Page #2', 'Jones Crusher', 'Disco Boy', 'Dinah-Moe Humm' and 'Punky's Whips' from the 1978 Halloween concert. The set was remixed and formally released three years later.

  18:

  SYSTEMS OF EDGES

  Frank may have felt he was at some sort of impasse in the early months of 1983. There was progress with his 'serious' music but also a disheartening failure of nerve and execution by the orchestral forces at his disposal. After recording with the LSO, Frank got an opportunity to conduct an orchestra in public when he was asked by the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Musicians to take part in an Edgard Varese Memorial Concert on February 9. The first half of the evening was conducted by Jean Louis Le Roux; in the second half, Frank conducted Ionisation and Integrates and pieces by Anton Webern.

  "The orchestra is the ultimate instrument," he wrote in The Real Frank Zappa Book, "and conducting one is an unbelievable sensation . . . From the podium (if the orchestra is playing well), the music sounds so good that if you listen to it, you'll fuck up. When I'm conducting, I have to force myself not to listen, and think about what I'm doing with my hand and where the cues go."1

  On the band front, tour schedules had become more extensive and demanding, their costs secured by a never-ending series of bank loans. The 1982 tour had suffered from circumstances beyond his control, making the treadmill that he'd fashioned for himself, of touring to earn revenue to finance UMRK to produce albums that needed to be promoted by another tour, even more burdensome. He was also frustrated by the persistence of bootleggers that made capital from his gigs. He was unwilling to persist in basing each tour on new material, filled out with songs from previous albums. "I stopped doing that because people usually bootlegged i
t, and they'd have it out in the market before I'd even have an album out," he told Rick Davies.2

  Nor would there be a 1983 band tour. "Well, whenever we go off the road, there isn't any band," Frank told Guitar Player. "Everybody is hired for the tour; nobody is on a yearly salary. I used to do it differently years ago: everybody was employed, and they got the same amount of money every week whether they worked or not. And some of the guys said, 'I'd rather get paid more money just for the time I'm on the road.' And I said, 'Fine,' and that's the way it is now. So when they're not on the road with me, they go out and do other work. It's going to be a while before I'm back on the road, so it's good they have other work." As for Frank: "I have a lot of things to do that can't be done while you're on the road. We've got video and movie stuff happening right now, and you can't be a touring musician and still have control over that stuff."3

  He was about to embark on a project, ambitious even by his own standards. After years of legal wrangling with MGM-Verve and Warner Brothers, he'd finally got back all the tapes and masters of the early Mothers albums. He was asked if he still listened to his old albums. "Well," he replied, "I'll be listening to those things a whole lot because we plan to re-release the entire catalogue of my albums next May. We're remixing everything ... I don't know whether we'll be able to pull it off in time because there's an awful lot of work to be done to meet the deadline, but I'm hoping by Mother's Day to have five boxes with seven albums in each of them, covering the entire catalogue. And we'll divide them up so that the first box is like all the early Mothers stuff plus one extra disc of material from that era that's never been released before. And the same goes for the rest of the boxes: each will have one disc of things that were done during that time that never got released.

  "All the stuff is either going to be remastered, as is the case with the things that already have a good mix, or completely remixed. This includes 4-track, early 8-track or early 16-track or anything done when science wasn't there to make it sound right."4 The task was even bigger than he envisaged, and The Old Masters Box I would not be released until April 1985. A contributory factor in the delay was a decision that would prove to be controversial with Zappa enthusiasts. This was the removal of the original bass and drum tracks from both We're Only In It For The Money and Cruisin' With Ruben & The Jets. One reason put forward was that the oxide on the original multi-tracks was crumbling away and affecting the sound quality.

  Arthur Barrow, who played the new bass parts, was the first to express misgivings: "I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, as a musician, I'm always happy to be employed and doing sessions is always fun. But on the other hand, I did try to talk Frank out of it the best I could. I said, 'Are you sure you want to do this?' He said, 'I don't like the old bass and drum tracks.' " Apart from the aural contrast between the original sound and the pristine digital precision of the new recordings, there was the anomaly of Barrow's use of the 'My Sharona' riff during 'Flower Punk', since The Knack's song had not been released until 12 years after We're Only In It For The Money.

  "Actually," Barrow added, "how could the oxide be falling off the tape on one track and not on other tracks? But it's Frank's album. It's his music. He can certainly do what he likes with it. But I think it would be nice for those of us that like the original version, to put that out also ... As for Ruben & The Jets, I kinda think that's bad too. Because one of the coolest things about that album originally was the tape loops for the drums. It sounded like a machine, it was a great sound."5

  The answer to several of Frank's current frustrations was another machine. For years he'd been accustomed to keeping pace with the developments in synthesiser technology. Though not professing to be a keyboard player, he made himself conversant with the potential of each innovation as it became available. But the Synclavier had applications beyond the scope of his other equipment. "You see," Frank told Paul Gilby, "the thing that got me hooked on the Synclavier was the music-printing aspect of it. Before getting that, I would carry manuscript paper around with me in my briefcase and write music on the road, in a hotel or on an airplane. It was a very manual procedure where, having come off the road, I would collate my ideas and then write out the new arrangement and that would go to a copyist, and so on. It was really expensive, very time-consuming, and at the end you really didn't know what you were going to get till you heard it played."6

  In conversation with Rick Davies, he elaborated on the process: "Then the musician takes his part and under the baton of the conductor attempts to interpret what you dreamed up in the first place. And this interpretation is subject to such questions as how much time they have for rehearsal, which is based on how much money they have to lose, and the acoustics of the hall in which the thing is going to be played. So basically your chances, as a composer writing for human beings, of getting your idea accurately performed are really not too good. Not good at all, unless you write very simple music, which I do not."7

  Manufactured by New England Digital, the Synclavier had been developed as a composer's tool, enabling its operator to test melodic structures and the voicing of arrangements. With his enquiring mind, Frank's interest rapidly became an addiction: "When I first got it I probably did the same thing that a lot of people do when they buy a complex piece of equipment — I said, 'Oh my God, do I have to read all those big books?' So I didn't! . . . But on the other hand I did happen to hire people who had read them, and they did all the stuff that I didn't want to do. What I wanted to do right away was write music on it, not learn how to write computer programs. I still don't know how to do that and I will probably never bother to find out, because it took me about two or three months before I could turn round and say, 'I can type music into that!'

  "I remember I had a guy (Steve DiFuria) operating the machine and the way it happened was — and, boy, how this man suffered! I was working on a piece and I had to get the musical information into the computer. Since I didn't know how to type it in, I had to sit next to him and say, 'Make that one a C, make the next one a G, etc' Then one day he said, 'Look, Frank . . . if you would just do this, then I wouldn't have to sit here!' So I said, 'OK, let me try,' and it only took about a day to learn the process. From that point on he couldn't even get into the room to use the machine because I was there day and night!

  "You see, once you learn how to do this stuff, it's dangerously addictive. If you love music, and you desire the ability to write down your music and then push a button and hear it played back to you right away the Synclavier is the instrument for you."8

  For someone obsessively involved in creating music, capable of sustaining 16to 18-hour days of intensive work, the Synclavier was a godsend. "You see," he explained, "when I'm composing, my main idea often starts with various musical theories and I ask myself what happens if I do this or that, and what are the physical limits of what a listener can comprehend in terms of rhythm? How big is the 'data universe' that people can take in and still perceive it as a musical composition? That's the direction I'm going in."9

  The trouble was, once the programing aspects of the machine were mastered, the number of musical problems he could set himself proliferated alarmingly. Ideas flowed onto disc and sometimes waited years to be completed or adapted into other compositions. "For example," he told Don Menn, "when I first bought the Synclavier, it wasn't even a sampling machine, and I started writing things for it that just used the FM synthesis. The main charm with [it] at that time was the power of its sequencer and the fact that you could have multi-tracks and things colliding with each other. So some of the pieces that were started even in the pre-sampling days . . . have gone through permutations over the years and still haven't been released yet."10

  He explained the Synclavier in layman's terms to Nigel Leigh: "It expedites everything. All the different mechanical aspects of putting a piece together — it's like a musical word processor that would read to you. Like if you were writing a novel, for example, on a computer and the word processor helps you to move your
paragraphs around and do all that stuff, and when it was all done, you'd push a button that would read your book to you. That's kind of what the Synclavier does."11

  THE PERFECT STRANGER

  On the conventional front, The London Symphony Orchestral/Zappa Volume 1 was released in America on June 9. Despite Frank's caveat about errors in the performances of 'Sad Jane', 'Pedro's Dowry', 'Envelopes' and 'Me 'n Herb's Vacation', it would be hard for anyone but the composer to notice. What does strike the untutored ear is that there are frequent instances of whole sections of the 100-strong band being unoccupied, and that in general the opportunity to engage the full sonority of such a large aggregation has been missed. The LSO's performance of 'Pedro's Dowry' is more cumbersome than that by a 40-piece band on Orchestral Favorites. Similarly, 'Envelopes' is taken at a more deliberate tempo than the version on Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch, making what was potentially bizarre almost contemplative.

  'Sad Jane', the least bombastic of all Frank's orchestral pieces, based in part on a 1968 guitar solo transcribed by Ian Underwood, is very much in the same vein, even when Chad Wackerman's overloud drumkit provides a more regular pulse. For much of its duration, the piece alternates between passages for strings, woodwind and brass, and rarely uses the LSO's full resources. 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation' is in three movements, the first a feature for David Ocker's clarinet, closely followed by Chad Wackerman's drumkit and supported by woodwinds. Violins lead off the second movement, playing long sliding notes reminiscent of Gyorgy Ligeti. For the first time, the listener becomes aware of the orchestra's fullness. But once again, the sequential nature of the writing doesn't allow the impression to last. The final movement opens with a convulsive flourish before the angular melody line passes around the sections of the orchestra. For much of its 13 minutes, it combines a long series of ominously eventful episodes that finally resolve in a tumbling climax incorporating blasts from a klaxon horn.