by Neil Slaven
Releasing The Helsinki Concert created something of a rod for his back, at least in interviews, since everyone wanted to know if there would be more such releases. Matt Groening seemed to be siding with the bootleggers when he expressed his pleasure at hearing a complete show. "That to me is excruciating," Frank replied, "because when I've listened to those, it's hard for me to imagine one show that had so many good things in it that you'd want to release the whole show."35 The bootleggers and their customers thought otherwise.
ONCE UPON A TIME
As well as documenting a 25-year career on record, Frank was also preparing The Real Frank Zappa Book for publication in May 1989, an idiosyncratic combination of selective autobiography and polemical discourse. In this he was helped by Peter Occhiogrosso, who taped their conversations and then transcribed and edited them onto floppy disc. These were then re-edited by Frank and the resulting manuscript was sent to Ann Patty of Poseidon Press in New York. "If you're gonna do a biography of a rock star, you probably can't get one more interesting than this one," she said. "It's a good mission in life."36
The book's autobiographical sections were somewhat reticent and quickly over; thereafter, Frank's thoughts ranged far and wide on subjects that exercised his interest, exemplified by chapter headings such as 'All About Schmucks', 'Marriage (As A Dada Concept)', 'Porn Wars' and 'Church & State'. With typically mordant humour, the penultimate chapter was titled 'Failure' and listed some Zappa projects, including the Night School television show, that had come to nothing. In it, Frank was pragmatic about the inevitability of failure. "I would say that my entire life has been one massive failure," he'd said two years earlier. "I live with failure everyday because I can't do the things that I really want to do ... I enjoy sitting down here [in the studio] all by myself typing on the Synclavier. I can do twelve hours and love it. And I know that ultimately it doesn't mean a thing that I did it. It's useless. That's OK; it makes me feel good."37
In dedicating the book to "Gail, the kids, Stephen Hawking and Ko-Ko," he recorded that the manuscript was finished in the early morning of August 23. In Chapter 19, 'The Last Word', he noted that he finished reading the first galley proofs on the even earlier morning of Christmas Day, generating "an eye-popping headache" in the process. In winding up, he couldn't resist a few last barbs against Ted Turner's CNN network, Surgeon General Koop and Ronald Reagan. 'Would a Kind And Loving God let an asshole like that (and all his fabulous appointees) escape unpunished after eight years of Constitutional desecration?"38 You betcha.
The December 24 edition of Billboard had a video supplement in which Honker advertised their forthcoming videos, Uncle Meat and The True Story of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels, to be released on January 31, 1989. The advert, parodying E.T., bore the headline, "The Story That Touched The Weird". Frank was shown in a chunky pink sweater, scratching his ear with the prehensile thumb of a silver lurex glove. Along with Does Humor Belong In Music?, there were now five Zappa videos on the market.
In February Gail's brainchild, Joe's Garage, opened. The threeroom rehearsal facility was created in the warehouse that for 15 years Frank had used to store band equipment. It was run by Marque Coy, Frank's monitor engineer since 1981. The name was his idea, too. "The Zappas didn't know what they were going to call it," he told Don Menn. "I said, 'Well, you own the name.' They said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'The line in the song goes: "You can jam at Joe's Garage . . ." Let's call it "Joe's Garage".'"39 Acts 1 and 2 were the large and small rehearsal rooms, while Act 3 housed a 24-track studio linked for audio and video with the other rooms.
The new year saw Frank working as hard as ever. "Even though I've got a busy schedule editing albums and doing all the mechanical stuff to stay in that part of the record business, I still manage 30 hours a week on the Synclavier," he told William Ruhlmann.40 But by his own admission, Frank spent "virtually 100 per cent" of his time until November 1989 mixing and editing the 1988 tour tapes. This amounted to approximately 1,970 takes of 120 titles. "Out of that, somebody has to decide which parts of which song are the best version available from any given city, remember it, tell the engineer to mix this city to match that city and then glue it together to make the album. You don't farm that out to anyone else, so that's what I've been doing here."41
"The only time I took time off was for four trips to Russia and one trip to Czechoslovakia," he told Gary Steel. "After the Czech trip, I was side-tracked into some foreign trade stuff that I'm doing with my Why Not? company. It's a Delaware corporation chartered to licensing, consulting and social engineering . . . When I went over there, I met all these very interesting people who wanted to do a wide range of business things with people from the West, and there was no way for them to get in touch . . . kind of like a dating service. Find out what somebody wants over there and try to find 'em a partner over here."42
His initial February visit came about after Dennis Berardi, owner of Kramer Guitars, told him he was thinking of opening a factory in what was then the Soviet Union. "I told him he was crazy," Frank told Neil Cohen. "I knew exactly what everybody else in the United States of America knew at the time about the Soviet Union nothing. You can't know anything unless you go over there and look at it. IT'S ANOTHER PLANET." There were further visits in March, April and May. "I was not prepared for the amount of data I was receiving. I was given an education in [the] politics, sociology, and anthropology of the Soviet Union that you couldn't buy anyplace else."43
Part of that education, and something that may have dampened his relish for the new-found role of entrepreneur, was that Russian businessmen had an altogether different approach to negotiation, honed in the thriving black market that formed such a vital but debilitating part of the Soviet economy. Frank met the director of the Luzhniky Sports Complex in Moscow, who told him he wanted to add a hotel, casino and shops to the site. Frank put him in touch with Wesray Capital, a New Jersey-based investment firm. But when Wesray indicated its interest, the Luzhniky director doubled his price.
"Until there is an increase in knowledge as far as how the deals work and the idea that WESTERN CAPITAL IS NOT A PRESENT THAT COMES FROM HEAVEN AND LANDS ON YOUR DOORSTEP AND SUDDENLY WONDERFUL THINGS HAPPEN, nobody is going to invest a nickel in there unless they're going to get a profit out of it," Frank said. "And profit is another word they don't understand."44 Other schemes faltered in similar ways, initial enthusiasm worn down by mistrust, misunderstanding and the dread weight of Russian bureaucracy. One small success was a San Fernando Valley jewellery maker who was put in touch with several suppliers of amber. "It would be frustrating if this was the only thing I did for a living," Frank admitted. "I probably would be crazy if by every Friday I had to post a deal someplace. But since I do have another source of income, I don't have to worry."45
The most surprising aspect of Frank's visits was the realisation of how much he was appreciated in a country where none of his records had been officially released. While being shown around the Stosnomic (or Stass Namin) Centre in Gorky Park, he was introduced to a Siberian R&B band. "I walked in and I thought the guy was going to have a heart attack; he couldn't speak for spluttering.
Through an interpreter, he says, 'Look at this,' and opens his wallet, shows me a photo of his house in Siberia. He's got all of my records on the rack, posters of me on the wall... You never know who's listening or why they're listening."46
On November 12, at the end of his mammoth mixing session, a crowd estimated by the press at 20,000 but Frank thought was five times larger listened to him at a pro-choice rally at Rancho Park in Los Angeles. The choice was for abortion, but Frank reckoned that more than women's rights were at issue. "It should be clear from recent events that the enemy that America must face is not the Communists over there. It is those deranged right-wing lunatics right here in America. Make no mistake about this. Those people you see on the freeway with the fish on the back of the car that's the enemy . . . You can't let these lunatics change the way things work around here."
He then led th
e crowd in a typically acerbic prayer: "Dear sweet Jesus, don't listen to those other guys. They are not Christians, they are practising voodoo. Not long ago they prayed to you and demanded the death of a Supreme Court Justice. What's that got to do with Christianity, huh?"
"Well, I think they needed to have that [humour]," he said later, "because the proceeding was pretty fucking serious up to that point . .. the kind of character I am, I can get up there and get away with that. I think that somebody else doing it woulda been perceived as out of place, but I thought it was the right thing to do, and so, I did it."47
Those that didn't attend the rally could listen to You Can't Do That On Stage Volume 3, which was largely devoted to the 1984 band. It included Dweezil and his father on-stage at the tour's final LA gig for a version of 'Sharleena', 'Ghana In De Bushwop', co-written by Diva and her father, and a medley of 'Bobby Brown' and 'Keep It Greasey' during which Ike Willis' repeated chant of 'Hi-ho Silver!' reduced Frank to a giggling jelly. As he wrote in the booklet notes, "Just a Little more proof that touring can make you crazy."
With the mixing of the 1988 tapes complete, the UMRK mixing desk was set up to do Synclavier mixes. Frank had been commissioned to write the music to accompany Jacques Cousteau's television film about the Exxon Valdez Alaskan oil disaster, Outrage At Valdez. The writing incorporated a small disaster of its own. It was a last-minute request which meant that Frank had to write without any reference to pictorial content. "I knew kind of what the scenes were gonna be, so I started sketching the stuff out before I even got the videotape."48 He cued his music to the coded videotape he then received, only to discover that this wasn't the final "drop frame code", necessitating two days frantic remixing.
Cousteau would be in Russia when Frank travelled to Moscow once more on January 15, 1990. He would be accompanied by a camera crew from the Financial News Network, who'd hired him to host three Focus programmes on Soviet business opportunities when he returned. "I'm going to get video coverage of all the weird stuff that I've seen in Moscow," he told Eric Buxton, "and even if I never get any of it on television, it'll certainly make an interesting Honker product, because I'll show people a view of the Soviet Union they never dreamed of before."49
The most significant part of this trip was his first visit to Czechoslovakia. In January 1989, he'd been visited at home by Michael Kocab, a Czech composer and musician who offered to have one of Frank's orchestral scores played by the country's Philharmonic Orchestra. "He was part of the student protest movement, one of the people who was speaking out against the government, and he invited me to Prague."50 The country's Velvet Revolution took place in November 1989 and the Civic Forum took over. When Frank landed at Prague's Ruzyne Airport on January 21, Vaclav Havel was president and Michael Kocab was a member of the Czech parliament, in charge of overseeing the departure of the Soviet military.
Over the course of his visit, Frank was feted by musicians, fans and the president, who expressed his admiration for Bongo Fury. He met 'underground' artists at the Krivan Hotel, visited Havel at Hradcany Castle, attended a party at which he sang with the Plastic People Of The Universe, one of the bands present. He appeared on a television programme, Kontakt, during which Minister of Culture Milan Lukes announced that Frank had been appointed to represent the government for trade, tourism and culture.
Unfortunately, over lunch Havel mentioned that Vice-President Dan Quayle was to visit the country. 'I expressed the opinion that I thought it was unfortunate that a person such as President Havel should have to bear the company of somebody as stupid as Dan Quayle for even a few moments of his life. The next thing I know, Quayle doesn't come. Instead, (Secretary of State) James Baker III (husband of Susan, co-founder of the PMRC) re-routes his trip to Moscow so that he can come blasting into Prague and literally lay down the law to the Czech government. He says, "You can either do business with the United States or you can do business with Zappa. What'll it be?"51 Within six weeks, Frank had been reduced to an unofficial emissary for culture.
"I'll tell you what the circumstances were," Frank said to me, "because there have been two people that have told me that they saw the meeting and they heard what he said. One of them almost did a television interview. I went out and got a camera crew. From the day that the guy told me what had happened to the next day when I got the crew, somebody had gotten hold of him and he refused to talk when the camera crew was in there. He absolutely verified that pressure was applied to the Czech government for them not to do business with me."
On February 26, Frank hosted his first programme on FNN, Frank Zappa's Wild Wild East, analysing real estate opportunities in Moscow with a senior Russian economist and conducting a phone-in discussion about Soviet agriculture with a Carolina tractor-maker. Others featured included the heads of the Luzhniky Sports Complex and the Soviet Director's Guild, a senior administrator at the TASS news agency, and Mikhail Afanasiev, a director of Moscow's Imemo Institute. One New York banker who'd had meetings with Frank reckoned, "He's a perfect Adam-Smithian capitalist. He knows that in the end self-interest [Frank would receive five per cent of any completed deals] is a lot better in pursuing things than altruism. But his biggest motivation behind all this is really to help these people; it isn't to make a buck."52
21:
THE TORTURE NEVER STOPS
Something far more unpleasant than a petulant government official with an insulted wife came to light in the spring of 1990. "I'd been feeling sick for a number of years," Frank told David Sheff, "but nobody diagnosed it. Then I got really ill and had to go to the hospital in an emergency. While I was in there, they did some tests and found out it had been there for anywhere from eight to ten years, growing undetected by any of my previous doctors. By the time they found it, it was inoperable."1
'It' was a tumour in Frank's prostate, the gland surrounding the neck of the bladder whose function is to release the fluid that carries the semen. At the time, deaths in America from cancer of the prostate were over 30,000 a year; in Britain, where the figure was 9,000, doctors identified it as the second biggest cancer killer among British men. Prostate cancer is hormone dependent and if the level of male hormones is reduced by either physical or medical castration, the malignant tissue will shrink. Although Frank's tumour initially responded to treatment, it soon developed beyond hormonal control.
"When I went into the hospital, the cancer had grown to where I could no longer take a piss. In order for me just to survive, they had to poke a hole in my bladder. I spent more than a year with a hose coming out of my bladder and a bag tied to my leg. That'll keep you from travelling. I went through radiation and that fucked me up pretty good. They were supposed to give me twelve shots of that, but I got to number eleven and I was so sick that I said I couldn't go back. The result of the radiation was that the tumour was shrunken to the point where I could get rid of the bag and could piss again, but there were bad side effects."2
The immediate cancellation of all Frank's public activities set off rumours about his health. It would have been a busy summer. In June he'd been scheduled to attend a contemporary music festival, Meeting Of The World in Finland, while in September he was to be in France, where a concert of his works was being staged in Lyon. He'd also been invited to Prague in June for Czechoslovakia's first presidential election. Frank sent his regrets for not attending. "I really support Havel's idea of establishing a government that has an aesthetic, as well as an economic, ethic. But right now the best thing I can do is to stay away."3 Few knew it was the only thing he could do.
Events were lending macabre significance to You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore. What came about through financial strictures and a sea-change in Frank's musical career had become a physical reality. A further irony was that this was his 25th year in the music business. In their May 19 issue, Billboard celebrated the fact with a 16-page supplement. Largely written by Drew Wheeler and designed by Cal Schenkel, it contained an interview and articles on his career, his family and his business.
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Rykodisc took the centre spread to advertise the last batch of releases from Frank's back catalogue, including Fillmore East, You Are What You Is and Sheik Yerbouti. An entire pressing run of Sheik Yerbouti had to be destroyed when it was discovered that 'Yo' Mama' had lost some ten minutes of its original 12 minutes 38 seconds running time. YCDTOSA 4, slated for November 4 release, was postponed. It had been announced in the September ICE (International CD Exchange) as well as a 4-CD set from the 1988 tour, entitled The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life. Other projects included The Lost Episodes, comprising studio out-takes from the early years; Lumpy Gravy, Phase 3, later known as Civilization, Phaze III; and Ahead Of Their Time, the Mothers' Royal Festival Hall gig from October 28, 1968: "I think there's a market for this, since it's probably the most interesting of all the archival tapes."4
Asked whether the Zappa vault was a bottomless pit, Frank replied: "I'm trying to bring that phase of my release schedule to an end as soon as possible, to get the best of the archival stuff into some kind of release form and move on to concentrating on the new stuff I'm working on today. Also, because I don't have any plans to tour again, I'd like to bring an end to this whole phase of live band tapes ... At the same time that I'm putting these together, I'm still composing new pieces; there's all kinds of different work in progress."5
The fourth Biennale de la Danse was held in Lyon between September 13 and October 6; 'Dancing Zappa' was presented by the Orchestre de l'Opera de Lyon and the Lyon Opera Ballet at the Maurice Ravel Auditorium for five nights, beginning September 20. Robert Hughes conducted 'The Perfect Stranger' and 'Bogus Pomp'. There were four pre-recorded songs, 'Trouble Comin' Every Day', 'Plastic People', 'I'm The Slime' and 'Why Don'tcha Do Me Right', and Kent Nagano took up the baton to conduct 'Strictly Genteel'.
