Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  It's as if with this record, and Volume 2 released in September 1987, Frank is laying to rest the urge to emulate the techniques of the composers who sparked his youthful interest, and thus their influence. From now on, he would be able to work in a medium that was not available to his musical antecedents; he could create his own compositional language, exploring tonal and rhythmic theories that were inconceivable at the time of Varese's death. The older man had been excited by the possibilities of electronic sound, an alien universe which he strived to embrace. But the embryonic resources at his disposal could provide no more than the crudest of wave forms with few inherent musical qualities. The Synclavier, even in its basic form, let Frank's imagination take flight in an infinity of directions.

  "Every composer has some image in his mind of what he wants his stuff to sound like," he said, "not just the composition, but the overall tonal quality of what he's writing. In my head I have an audio image, not just of the notes, but of the way the notes will sound played in an idealised air space, which is something you can't get in the real world. The closest you can get to it is a digital recording with digital control over imaginary audio ambience.

  "The moment you get your hands on a piece of equipment like this," he added, "where you can modify known instruments in ways that human beings just never do, such as add notes to the top and bottom of the range, or allow a piano to perform pitch-bends or vibrato, even basic things like that will cause you to rethink the existing musical universe. The other thing you get to do is invent sounds from scratch. Of course, that opens up a wide range."12

  It was this potential to explore the unknown that also motivated the eminent composer/conductor Pierre Boulez to create L'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The building of the £9 million music resource centre stemmed from a meeting between Boulez and the French President in 1970, at which Boulez explained his vision of the music of the future. Pompidou was so taken with the idea that he agreed to a continuous subsidy of £2 million a year to maintain the two-and-a-half tier underground complex of offices, laboratories, studios and computer room.

  The Institut opened in 1977; the Italian composer Luciano Berio was made head of the electro-acoustic department, the Yugoslav composer Vinko Globokar researched the potentialities of voices and instruments, and Jean-Claude Risser oversaw the computer section. In 1980, Boulez sacked these and many other employees and took on a younger team better able to make the technology user-friendly for visiting composers. A year later, the resident Italian computer expert, Giuseppe di Giugno, invented the 4X, a digital signal processor capable of 200 million operations per second.

  Frank was said to be 'enthralled' by the 4X, which he used to develop ideas for The Perfect Stranger, before its premiere at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris on January 9, 1984, played by Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain. The 29-strong chamber group also gave performances of Dupree's Paradise and 'Naval Aviation In Art?', as well as works by Carl Ruggles, Elliott Carter and Charles Ives. The three Zappa compositions were then recorded over the next two days at IRCAM. Rumours persisted that there was a falling-out between the conductor and the composer, which served to explain why the resulting album became an amalgam of human and electronic resources. But since only three works were rehearsed and performed, that doesn't seem likely.

  Once again, Frank was not satisfied with their live performance. He thought the Ensemble under-rehearsed and he was most unwilling to take the bow that Boulez forced upon him. "I was sitting on a chair off to the side of the stage during the concert," he wrote in his autobiography, "and I could see the sweat squirting out of the musicians' foreheads." He went on to describe how everyone present at such occasions has to take a chance, with the composer most at risk, subject to inaccurate performance, leadership and the audience's lack of awareness. Not only that, "even though the programme says World Premiere, that usually means Last Performance."13

  Boulez was said to be "attracted by the energy and spontaneity of some pop artists". "They have not the mass of education and repertoire that paralyses many musicians," he said. "They are not afraid to experiment. With scores like Zappa's I have the opportunity of breaking down musical ghettos in a dignified way. That is a good thing."14 Whether Frank was a willing participant in the great man's crusade went unrecorded. But he was able to have a closer relationship with the Ensemble. "First of all," he told Don Menn, "there were fewer of them, so you could actually have memorable conversations with them. And a number of them had asked me to write solos for them. One of the brass players was also the head of a brass quintet that worked within Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain. And he wanted me to write some brass music. And usually percussionists will come up to me and ask me for music. I never did manage to do any of those things, because they all take time."15

  On the album sleeve, Frank wrote a scenario for each of the compositions. The Perfect Stranger depicted a licentious dalliance witnessed by Patricia, a dog sitting in a high chair, between a 'slovenly' housewife, a door-to-door salesman and his 'faithful gypsy-mutant industrial vacuum cleaner'. Their menage a trois is delineated in woodwind and violins, while percussion and muted trombones depict 'the spiritual qualities of chrome, rubber, electricity and household tidiness'. The Ensemble attacks the piece with apparent gusto, as they do Dupree's Paradise. Only 'Naval Aviation In Art?' suffers from a certain staidness in a performance that fails to emulate the ominous qualities of that, a whole minute shorter, on Orchestral Favorites.

  Frank returned to America with the tapes and spent the next three months compiling the Synclavier pieces that would make up the completed album. These were 'The Girl In The Magnesium Dress', 'Outside Now', 'Again', 'Love Story' and 'Jonestown'. The first piece was another example of Frank's perverse and enquiring mind, in that it was composed by using what he referred to as 'digital dust'. This was his name for the normally unseen instruction codes that told the machine how to operate. One set were called "G numbers", which came into use if a guitar was interfaced with the Synclavier. Frank and his engineers found a way to transform these "points in time" into note blanks. "So we converted this dust into something that I could then edit for pitch, and the dust indicated a rhythm. So what I did was take the rhythm of the dust and impose pitch data on the dust and thereby move the inaudible G number into the world of audibility with a pitch name on it."16

  'The Girl In The Magnesium Dress' employed tones akin to the sound of marimbas and glockenspiels which chatter across the stereo. The aural effect was the equivalent of drops of mercury merging and separating over an undulating surface. Similar effects could be heard in both 'Love Story' and 'Jonestown'. The former, just one minute long, Frank described as "an elderly Republican couple attempting sex while break-dancing", the brittle crumbling sounds resembling detuned zithers. Frank called 'Jonestown' "a boring, ugly dance evoking the essential nature of all religions." It referred to the 1978 'Jonestown massacre' perpetrated by a charismatic preacher who styled himself the 'Rev. Jim Jones'. A native of Indiana, he moved to California in 1967 and joined the People's Temple in San Francisco in 1971. Hounded for alleged abuses against his followers, in 1977 Jones took them to Guyana and set up Jonestown in the North West district, close to the Venezuelan border.

  On November 14, 1978, US Representative Leo Ryan of California brought newsmen and relatives to the commune to conduct an unofficial investigation. Four days later, Ryan and 14 defectors were ambushed on Jones' orders at the nearby airstrip. Ryan and four others (three of them newsmen) were killed. Aware that more investigations would now follow, Jones put into effect a plan for mass suicide which he'd rehearsed with his brainwashed followers several times before. Large tubs of Gatorade, laced with cyanide, were prepared; all present drank the lethal preparation, parents dosing their children. In all, 913 misguided people died, 276 of them children. Jones was found shot through the head, in a manner indicating that it wasn't a self-inflicted wound. Unfortunately, it had
n't been done until after last orders.

  'Jonestown' establishes a bleak aural landscape of tremulous sustained chords that imply paranoia. Percussion effects cut through the stereo but the principal elements are raw, gouging metallic sounds that increase during the middle section of the seven-minute piece, accompanied by siren-like ascending notes. The effect is other-worldly and threatening, maintaining an absence of hope that underscores the tragedy of the real event and Frank's own opinion of the perniciousness of all forms of religion.

  FRANCESCO ZAPPA

  Cyanide was still on his mind when he delivered the keynote speech at the 19th Annual Festival Conference of the American Society of University Composers held at Ohio State University in Columbus on April 4-8. After referring to himself as a "buffoon", he proceeded to puncture any complacency in the room, calling their (and his) work "baffling, insipid packages of inconsequential poot". He told them that popular American musical taste was determined by Debbie, the 13-year-old daughter of "Average, God-Fearing American White Folk", unwitting dupes of "the people in the Secret Office Where They Run Everything From". Frank reiterated his belief that serious contemporary composers were superfluous to American society and should remove themselves from the world before it removed them. He suggested that ASUC change its name to "We-Suck" and "get some cyanide and swizzle it into the punch bowl with some of that white wine 'artistic' people really go for, and Bite The Big One."17

  "I was on this little podium," Frank told Den Simms, "and then, on the stage with me, seated in chairs was the music faculty, sitting like a bunch of puppets on-stage, and they didn't know what I was going to say and they did not enjoy it. Actually, there was quite a bit of backlash at the subsequent banquet, where I was forced to sit at a table with some of the composers that had attended. The drunker they got, they started attacking me at the table. It was really quite laughable."18 There were no reports of unrest when 'Naval Aviation In Art?', 'Black Page #2' and 'The Perfect Stranger', were performed later by Relache, the Columbus Symphony and the Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra.

  On May 20, he spoke about 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation' when he was the subject of the 'Speaking Of Music' series held in the sensory museum, the Exploratorium, in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. He played a number of Synclavier pieces, including those to be featured on The Perfect Stranger, as well as tracks from other planned albums. There were also excerpts from another ongoing Synclavier project which focused on the works of the 18th-century Milanese cellist and composer, Francesco Zappa. Frank wrote a brief play, Francesco, The Almost Fictional Life Of An Obscure Italian Composer, which was read by Calvin Ahlgren and later featured in the video, Does Humor Belong In Music?

  Frank's namesake was discovered by Gail while browsing through the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Music scores were provided by Michael Keller from the Music Library at UCLA in Berkeley, which were then typed into the Synclavier by David Ocker. "Then, on the first day, after he typed in Op. 1 and we listened to it, I thought, 'Hey, that's a nice tune. I wonder what the rest of it sounds like?'" Frank said. "[David Ocker] spent about a month typing in a huge amount of these string trios — they were all string trios, by the way. They sounded nice, so I thought, 'Why not make an album out of it?'

  "It was written for two violins and an upright bass not exactly the world's most appealing audio combination. Even if I had suitable synthesiser replicas for those instruments, I'm not sure that would have made the most interesting album. So I just added a little technicolor to it and let the music speak for itself."19

  Frank's own music did more than that when the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano, held 'A Zappa Affair' on June 15/16 in me Zellerbach Auditorium on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Frank's symphonic works were performed as ballets using members of the Oakland Ballet, who wielded large marionettes made by John Gilkerson for the San Francisco Miniature Theater. The programme consisted of 'Bob In Dacron', 'Sad Jane', 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation', 'Sinister Footwear' and 'Pedro's Dowry'. The same programme was repeated four days later at the San Jose Center for Performing Arts.

  During the month, rehearsals began for the 'Twentieth Anniversary World Tour', beginning in Los Angeles with a five-day stint at the Palace Theater on July 18 and continuing with dates in the Midwest and on the Eastern Seaboard. Video cameras recorded the August 25/26 gigs at The Pier in New York City and Does Humor Belong In Music? was released the following year. In the first week of September, a series of European dates took the band through Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, France, Spain, Austria and Italy, before returning to the USA towards the end of October. More dates in America and Canada would culminate on December 23, back in Los Angeles at the Universal Amphitheater.

  Ray White, Bobby Martin, Scott Thunes and Chad Wackerman were retained; Napoleon Murphy Brock and Ike Willis returned but Tommy Mars was replaced by Alan Zavod, late of Jean-Luc Ponty's band. There would be no more 'stunt guitar', since Steve Vai had already begun a successful solo career. Brock lasted only two weeks, his indulgence in chemical enhancement disqualifying him from further employment.

  A typical set contained material from all eras of the various Zappa bands, from 'Trouble Every Day' to 'The Dangerous Kitchen'. Newer compositions like 'What's New In Baltimore?', 'Ride My Face To Chicago', 'Truck Driver Divorce' and 'Hot Plate Heaven At The Green Hotel', and selections from the forthcoming Thing-Fish, were interspersed throughout the average evening. Two of the recent additions that also became concert favourites, one a tune that had gone through numerous identities before becoming known as 'Let's Move To Cleveland', the other the almost invariable set-closer, 'Whipping Post', illustrated in different ways Frank's ability to draw from the totality of his experience.

  The first grew out of a commission he'd received in 1968 from a concert violinist whose name has gone undocumented. "I never completed the piece for violin and piano," Frank told Den Simms, "but there was enough of a group of sketches for the thing, that I could, at the point where I had a band who could actually play it, I could build a stage arrangement. . . The first band that tried to play it was the [1976] band with Roy Estrada, Terry Bozzio, Napoleon and Andre Lewis . . . and at that time, it was called 'Canard Du Jour'."20

  It was also played in the 1980 band with Vinnie Colaiuta on drums. At his insistence, the title changed to 'Young And Mond' and was given its 'world premiere' at the Berkeley Community Theater on April 1, 1980. "A guy who wears a leisure suit with an enormous medallion, that's 'mond', according to Colaiuta," Frank said.21 A rather deliberate performance in Cologne by the 1982 band was included on the bootleg As An Am, which was issued in Beat The Boots, Box 1.

  When it became part of the 1984 repertoire, the title had changed once again, variously spelt as 'Creega Bondolo' or 'Kreegah Bandolo'. This, claimed Ike Willis, was the sort of cod native language to be found in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan books. "And then, 'Bon-do-lay-bof To-bonto' was contributed by Ray White, who asserted that it was a Swahili expression meaning 'white people taste good' or 'white people are good eating' or something," Frank added. One of the best live performances in this guise, performed at the Saratoga Springs Arts Center on September 1, was included on the bootleg Big Mother b Watching You.

  Tiring of that nonsense, the band then sang, 'Let's move to . . .' wherever the gig was taking place, or anything else that sprang to mind. "It could be anything. You get a bunch of syllables that'll fit that part of the song, and you just sing it. That audience in Cleveland was so good, that's the reason we sang it at the end of that performance . . . 'Let's Move To Cleveland'." Zappa played Cleveland twice during the 1984 tour, on August 12 and November 14. Since the tune is identified on several European bootlegs from the tour as 'Kreegah Bandolo', it's safe to assume that the title change took place on the latter date.

  'Whipping Post' also enjoyed a long gestation period. It began at the Mothers gig in Helsinki on September 22, 1974. The moment is captured on YCDTOSA 2, when a member of the a
udience shouts out "Whipping Post!". After some jocular confusion, Frank admits that the band doesn't know it. "Sing me 'Whipping Post'," he suggests, "and then maybe we'll play it with you." After a perfunctory yodel from the hall, he says, "Judging from the way you sang it, it must be a John Cage composition, right?" Then the band play a suitably altered version of 'Montana'.

  "We didn't know it," he said later, "and I felt kind of bad that we couldn't just play it and blow the guy's socks off. So when Bobby Martin joined the band, and I found out that he knew how to sing that song, I said, 'We are definitely going to be prepared for the next time somebody wants 'Whipping Post' in fact we're going to play it before somebody even asks for it.' I've got probably 30 different versions of it on tape from concerts all around the world, and one of them is going to be the 'Whipping Post' the apex 'Whipping Post' of the century."22

  THEM OR US

  Before the end of the 1984 tour, no less than four albums were released. Having spent almost 18 months off the road, Frank had built up a backlog of product, brought about in part by the fact that he'd fallen out with CBS. Once again, a major company had apparently indulged in some 'creative accounting'. The search for a new distributor was further hampered by management troubles. "You see," Gail said, "in about 1984, we'd gotten into a situation where we were really subsidising Frank's manager. He owed us a lot of money, and so in order to keep the business going we were taking care of all his outstanding debts, and I was getting very agitated with that. Things weren't working in an efficient way, Frank was on the road, and the shit hit the fan.