Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  While all these projects were being worked on through the summer, he told SongTalk, "I keep [a guitar] sitting next to my chair in the studio and I occasionally pluck around on it, but I'm only barely getting some calluses back."10 A tour was in the offing. Exploratory rehearsals began in October, with Bobby Martin, Ray White, Ike Willis, Ed Mann, Scott Thunes and Chad Wackerman. Tommy Mars was present for a week, but pulled out. Ominously, one of his reasons was that he was "having a problem with Scott Thunes". Ray White also disappeared early on, summoned away by a phone call. Nothing more was heard from him.

  Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman attended several early rehearsals, but they had an aversion to revisiting the material they'd sung with him more than a decade before. "We had spent 15 years cleaning up ourselves for the public," Volman said. "It took doing a lot of children's projects," Kaylan added. "We wrote for television and we were radio personalities in Los Angeles, and we got very, very mainstream, and by the time Frank came back to us and asked us to rejoin the group, we had finally, finally broken all those negative barriers [of having been Flo & Eddie]."11 Nor did they like Frank's overt political stance and the fact that this would be a 'Zappa' tour and not the Mothers Of Invention. And they'd be giving up a healthy income as the Turtles. Some fans sighed with relief.

  Mike Keneally, a Long Island-born guitarist living in San Diego, heard about the rehearsals and phoned up for an audition. He'd played piano since the age of seven and picked up the guitar four years later. Although he was no sight-reader, his knowledge of Frank's music carried him through the initial audition. At its end, Frank told him, "Come back on Monday so that the rest of the band can witness your particular splendour." After rehearsing for most of the following week, Frank decided not to wait for Ray White and told Keneally the good news.

  TOURING CAN MAKE YOU CRAZY

  In the final weeks of rehearsals, ten hours a day for five days a week, a horn section was added, which consisted of Walt Fowler, trumpet, Bruce Fowler, trombone, Paul Carman on alto, soprano and baritone saxes, Albert Wing, tenor sax, and Kurt McGettrick on baritone and contrabass clarinet. The first leg of the tour was scheduled to begin in Albany, New York on February 2, 1988, taking in 27 locations on the Eastern Seaboard and as far west as Detroit and Chicago, and ending in Uniondale, NY on March 25. Several of the gigs, like those in New York City, Washington, Philadelphia and Detroit, were three-day stints. After a two-week break, the tour continued on to Europe, where 43 dates in France, Germany, England, Scandinavia, Spain and Italy occupied all of April, May and the first ten days of June. There should have been a further ten-week US tour, taking in the South and the West Coast, but the band self-destructed before the final leg could begin.

  Later, with bitter hindsight, Frank would say this was the best band he'd ever taken on the road. "I'd been very happy with that band," he told David Mead, "the audiences really liked it too, and the reviewers thought it was great. It was unique because it combined a very strong five-piece horn section with all kinds of electronic stuff, with effects on the percussion section, on the drums, multiple keyboards — a very interesting blend of this horn harmony and very strange sound effects."12

  The harmony didn't extend to the band's personalities, though. The problem emanated from Scott Thunes' role as 'clonemeister', a role previously performed by Ed Mann and Arthur Barrow. "He's very abrasive," said Mike Keneally. "He's very honest. He's brutal. He's blunt. And when he was in charge of running the rehearsals in Frank's absence, these qualities came to the fore, but it was in service of getting the job done."13

  "If it's not the right energy, it doesn't work, somehow," Ed Mann reckoned. "It's a difficult position for the guy who has to run the band, and Scott, in his defence, was in that position, and he took it very seriously, and everybody else didn't wanna hear it."14

  Mann played down the exact nature of his role in what happened. "The others all decided that they hated Scott's guts," Frank explained. "It was very weird. Basically the ringleader was Ed Mann, and he and Chad Wackerman decided that Scott had to go, and they brought about most of the discontent in the band."15 Perhaps two dictators was one too many. "Scott has a unique personality," Frank told Matt Resnicoff. "He also has unique musical skills. I like the way he plays and I like him as a person, but other people don't. He has a very difficult personality: he refuses to be cordial. He won't do small talk. And he's odd. So what?"16

  Everyone got odd, that's what. On the last German date, promoter John Jackson presented the band with a big cake with all their names on it. One of the ringleaders sneaked off stage and scraped the bass player's name off the cake. Things were obviously going badly awry. Frank polled the band and discovered that no one, apart from Mike Keneally, wanted to work with Thunes. "If you replace anybody in a band that has rehearsed for four months, you've gotta go back into rehearsal. I couldn't replace Scott to assuage everybody in the band who hated him. There's no bass player who could have done that job. The repertoire was so large, the workings of the show so complex, you had to know so much — there was no way. So I had to lose the income of all those dates . . . Everybody on that tour got paid but me; I lost $400,000."17

  It was an expensive show to mount, involving five trucks, two buses, and some 43 people. "And we weren't doing fireworks or anything spectacular out there, it was like a basic touring package: enough lights to see the show, enough PA to hear the music and enough crew to set up the gear. It's not like taking a glamorous entourage out there; it was just not a money-making proposition. In a way, I'm glad I did it, though, just because of some of the musical things that did get recorded."18 But it hadn't been easy. "I just spent the last six weeks of the tour trying to wend my way through this garbage that was going on onstage. On a good night, the ideas I had for guitar solos came out. On a bad night, it was me versus the band. The audience didn't really know, but it was another example of the kind of thing that made me want to put the guitar down in the first place."19

  Several months later, all those that supposedly couldn't bear being on stage with Thunes admitted they'd made a mistake and fell over themselves to apologise to him. No wonder Frank was disgusted. "If that band had stayed together all this time," he said in 1991, "not only would it be the most outrageous touring band on the planet, but I'd still be playing guitar . . . And one of the most egregious things: one of the sax players who'd been complaining that Scott didn't give him enough support on his solos after he heard The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, came over here and said, 'Oh, he sounds good, man.' Stuff like that makes me sick."20

  The pity was that this band's repertoire was the most eclectic and comprehensive he'd ever attempted. There were songs from every era of the Mothers and subsequent bands, and a raft of cover versions, from Lennon & McCartney's 'I Am The Walrus' and Page & Plant's 'Stairway To Heaven' to Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat and Ravel's Bolero. "I always liked Bolero," Frank said. "I think that it's really one of the best melodies ever written."21 The new songs addressed America's current religious/political stew, satirising Nixon, Reagan and Bush, along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Bakker. Michael Jackson, who now owned Northern Songs, the Beatles' publishing company, was the object of ridicule in 'Why Don't You Like Me?', a withering re-write of 'Tell Me You Love Me' from Chunga's Revenge.

  The most fruitful source of derision was Jimmy Swaggart. When Jim Bakker's knowledge of Jessica Hahn was finally revealed in 1987, Swaggart was his loudest and most righteous accuser. His vehemence increased when Bakker was convicted of defrauding his followers of some $158 million and sentenced to 45 years imprisonment by Maximum Bob Potter, the Judge Roy Bean of his generation. Bakker wasn't Swaggart's first prey. In July 1986, he'd denounced fellow Assemblies of God minister Marvin Gorman as an adulterer. The following year, Gorman learned of his denouncer's visits to the Texas Motel in Metairie, across the parish line from New Orleans, for unspecified 'relief'. Gorman hired a private detective, and on October 17 caught Swaggart outside the Trav
el Inn, where he'd just been professionally entertained.

  Another prostitute, Debra Murphree, told WVUE-TV, "He told me to get naked and maybe lay on the bed and pose for him ... To me, I think he's kind of perverted . . . talking about some of the things that we talked about in the rooms, you know, I wouldn't want him around my children."22

  She wasn't alone in that thought. Another minister in Ferriday, Louisiana, hometown of Swaggart and his cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, was forced to leave his parish. Jerry Lee's sister, Frankie Jean, was quoted, "We call it the crime of the century. This poor little Assemblies of God man was arrested over here. They say he raped his two daughters, and they're lookin' at the parakeet."23

  Swaggart spent months avoiding his promised public confession. Eventually Gorman took his evidence, including photographs, to the Assemblies of God headquarters in Springfield, Missouri. Swaggart was banned from preaching, first for three months and then a year. On the first Sunday of Lent, February 21, 1988, he made a tearful, histrionic public confession in front of his wife and a stunned television audience. Vengeance might have been the Lord's, but Frank's was as swift and gleefully condign. In Poughkeepsie, New York, two days later, he debuted 'Swaggart' versions of 'More Trouble Every Day' and 'Penguin In Bondage'. By March 8 in Pittsburgh, there was a 'Swaggart' version of 'Lonesome Cowboy Burt'. Most damaging of all, and regrettably unreleaseable, were adaptations of three classic Beatles songs, which showed up a week later at the Royal Oak Music Hall in Troy, on the outskirts of Detroit; 'Norwegian Wood' became 'Norwegian Jim', 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' was recast as 'Louisiana Hooker With Herpes', while 'Strawberry Fields Forever' masqueraded as the 'Texas Motel'.

  Other songs were written in response to specific news items and performed only once. 'Promiscuous', from the February 26 Detroit gig was about Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, a rather ludicrous figure affecting quasi-military dress who assured the American public that AIDS had started in Africa, when some poor unfortunate had been infected by the blood of 'a little green monkey'. Frank had a nickname for him: "Dr. God! . . . What the fuck is this shit, OK? And besides, he's a Reagan appointee. That's strike number one. Strike number two is the Dr God suit no explanation given. Why does he look like an admiral? Is he the Admiral of Health? And I question any medical advice given by a man who joins the PMRC on-stage during their symposium and talks about anal sex while they talk about backwards masking."24

  YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE

  While the tour pursued its inexorable course, records continued to appear. In April, Barking Pumpkin released Guitar, the double album follow-up to Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, consisting of solos from the 1981/82 and 1984 tours, with two from 1979, one of them the original version of 'Outside Now', which began life as a solo in 'City Of Tiny Lites'. The following month, Rykodisc issued a 2-CD version with an additional 13 tracks. At the same time, Barking Pumpkin released a double-album sampler for the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series which Frank had announced the previous February. Then, it had been on ten albums, now it was to be a 13-hour series of six 2-CD sets.

  "The aesthetic goals of the series," he told William Ruhlmann, "have more to do with the growth of the music and a celebration of the good parts of live performance. There are a lot of good things to be said about playing on the stage in terms of unique events that will happen only for that particular audience and if you've got a tape running and you've captured it, you've got a little miracle on your hands . . . Sometimes the recording quality is not as good as some other version of it, but I want to put as much of the unique stuff in there as possible."25

  YCDTOSA 1 traversed the years from 1969 to 1984 in the course of 28 tracks. Since he'd always been an incisive and creative editor, Frank juxtaposed bands of different eras, in this case sequentially but on later volumes, within the context of a single song. "So that you have the feeling that you're at a concert, but it's an impossible concert. There's no way you could ever see all these people on-stage at the same time, but if you've got a fairly decent imagination, you could especially put the earphones on and be at a show that spans, what, 25 years, with some of the most amazing musicians that were ever put onto a record and there they are, just performing their little hearts out for you."26

  Having lost so much money, Frank had no intention of losing any time; he set about selecting and mixing tracks for Broadway The Hard Way, bringing together the new songs from the tour and some others that hadn't yet appeared in America. In his notes for the YCDTOSA sampler, Frank expressed the hope that it provided "some incentive for the acquisition of a CD player". With Broadway, he reinforced that message by creating two very different packages. The Barking Pumpkin vinyl album released in October contained nine tracks; the Rykodisc CD added a further eight, among them versions of 'Hot Plate Heaven At The Green Hotel' and 'Outside Now', Oliver Nelson's 'Stolen Moments', and Sting singing a hastily contrived arrangement of 'Murder By Numbers' recorded in Chicago on March 3.

  The overtly political nature of much of the material reflected the fact that this was an election year. The "virtually brain dead"27 Reagan had come to the end of his second term and now the Republicans intended to elevate Vice-President George Bush to the Oval Office. The Democrats conspired to ensure his victory by nominating the ineffectual Michael Dukakis, brother of actress Olympia, one of Cher's co-stars in Moonstruck. The Libertarian Party had offered to make Frank its presidential candidate, but he'd refused. "I read the Libertarian platform and I said, 'Basically, you guys are closet anarchists. If you could have your way, there wouldn't be any government at all.' "28

  Instead, he tried to contact Dukakis' advertising people with some 32 ideas for television commercials. "I thought the best way to start reducing the effect of the Republican disinformation campaign was to run a series of spots that called into question who these fucking people think they are. So one of the spots had a guy obviously a Republican — standing on a lawn in front of a mansion, saying, 'I'm a Republican, and I care about the environment.' He points to his house: 'My environment.' "29

  "Bush-Quayle is a scandal waiting to happen," he told Kurt Loder. In October 1980, Bush had met with Iranian representatives in Paris, allegedly to offer a $5 billion arms deal in return for delaying the release of American hostages until after Reagan had defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. If that came to light, Frank thought, it might lead to another impeachment. "And then you'll see the real reason for Dan Quayle being pasted onto the ticket: he's the lowest form of impeachment insurance."30 When as President he was asked about tax rises, Bush said, "Watch my lips," while keeping his mouth shut. By the same token, Quayle only opened his mouth to change feet; sometime later, and on television, he would attempt to correct a child's spelling of 'potato' by adding an 'e' at the end.

  Then there was the 'religious right'. "Come on, let's call a spade a spade here," Frank spat. "These fuckers are fascists. Fascists with a cross.

  "What has happened to the presidency as an institution in the United States is a disaster," he told the Los Angeles Times. "It's not a matter of conservative versus liberal, it's a matter of fascist versus freedom. Because what you've seen for the last eight years is bunting-encrusted fascism waving a flag in one hand and a cross in the other."32

  Broadway The Hard Way attacked what he regarded as an insidious threat to all sorts of freedoms. 'Rhymin' Man' characterised the posturing Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Presidential pretensions. 'When The Lie's So Big' was about another Presidential hopeful, Rev. Pat Robertson, who told his audiences he was on a mission from God to lead the Republican Party. 'Jesus Thinks You're A Jerk' was a nine-minute assault on both Robertson and Jim Bakker. Ike Willis' monologue raided skeletons in Robertson's cupboard, including a 'love-child' and his claim of 'honourable' service in the Korean War, when a phone call to his father, a US Senator, had got him off the troopship.

  Even 'What Kind Of Girl' contained rewritten verses with veiled and overt references to Robertson, Swaggart and E
d Meese, the one-time Attorney General who swung both ways on Irangate. Nelson Riddle's 'The Untouchables' contained another Ike Willis monologue vilifying various Reagan henchmen, including Admiral Poindexter, Oliver North, Michael Deaver and William Casey, all forced to leave high office or White House employ for their nefarious exploits.

  Their leader was further lampooned in the sleeve artwork. Using another shot from the Honker advertising campaign, a quote from Reagan's address to the 1988 Republican Convention was sprayed on Frank's 'office' wall: "Facts are stupid things." His former chief of staff Donald Regan coined the memorable phrase, "The Presidential mind is not cluttered with facts." In Death Of A Salesman, Frances FitzGerald noted that Reagan's mind "contained a number of precepts, each one backed up by a quotient of anecdotes and personal reminiscences some of which had a basis in fact."33 He was indeed the personification of his dictum.

  Broadway The Hard Way was released in October, along with YCDTOSA 2, subtitled The Helsinki Concert. This latter proved Frank's enduring regard for the 1974 band. In the booklet note he wrote, "This band had a lot of skill (and miserable touring equipment — it was always breaking down, and full of hums and buzzes). In spite of this, it has remained one of the audience's favourite ensembles, and so, for those of you who crave what they used to do, we present a full concert with a little bit of everything — including stuff that you can't do on stage anymore." The fact that it contained much the same repertoire as Roxy & Elsewhere didn't matter; "the ultra-fast tempos on the more difficult tunes demonstrate what happens when a band has played the material for a year, and is so comfortable with it they could probably perform it blindfolded."34