Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  I told her there was a new record I wanted to buy, but that I was about a dollar and a half short. She looked up from the sewing machine with faint irritation. “You’ve got lots of records” was all she said, and went back to her work.

  For the next two weeks I went without lunch. This wasn’t much of a hardship — the food in the school cafeteria was famous up and down the state for being the worst in California, perhaps in the nation, at least in my humble opinion, and there was always the solace of cookies or bread and cheese when I got home from school, to tide me over until dinnertime.

  Finally, one Wednesday afternoon, I toiled back up the hill to Unimart and went straight to the record department. I paged through the selections in front of the TEEN FAVORITES divider until I got to the plastic card itself. Nothing, No “Freak Out!”. Somebody richer had beat me to the punch.

  I survived the disappointment somehow, and Unimart eventually restocked. The first time I played my very own copy of “Freak Out!”, I didn’t know quite what to think. The dog-killer image was certainly appropriate, but there was also a strong intellectual context. As for the music, it wasn’t quite rock ‘n’ roll, or I wouldn’t have listened to it more than once, but it definitely wasn’t “In Blossom Time,” either. There was too much shouting, mumbling, and fulminating, for one thing, not to mention a lot of percussion, and a xylophone on some of the songs. I was used to xylophones; I had a little three-octave student model, received one year as a Christmas present (I still don’t know why), and on which I had been attempting to play the xylophone theme from “Danse Macabre” for at least three or four years. (I never could get past the place near the beginning, where the sixteenth notes started, without getting tangled up and dropping at least one of the mallets.)

  Then there were endless liner notes in very small type on the inside of the album; I read them studiously, over and over, trying to understand what they meant By the time I had them memorized, I was beginning to get a vague idea that “The Mothers of Invention” wasn’t really a bunch of savages. “They” seemed to be extensions of one person, a fellow exotically named Frank Zappa (I wondered if it was a psychedelic nom-de-guerre). His presence permeated the entire record, but he was only visible in an underexposed photo on the left hand side of the inner spread as a very large nose, a striped pullover, and a hand holding a drumstick. A dialogue balloon issued from his invisible mouth: “Freak Out!” in Cooper Black, flopped so it read backwards. The note beside this image stated: “Frank Zappa is the leader and musical director of THE MOTHERS of Invention. His performances in person with the group are rare. His personality is so repellent that it’s best he stay away… for the sake of impressionable young minds who might not be prepared to cope with him. When he does show up he performs on the guitar. Sometimes he sings. Sometimes he talks to the audience”.... And the zinger, at the end: “Sometimes there is trouble.” Yeah!

  There was an additional bunch of quotes from people who, in my innocence, I assumed to be very important (although I’d never heard of a single one of them), warning how dangerous and crazy this Zappa character and his semi-musical concept were. Zappa had also listed his own influences: “These People Have Contributed in Many Ways to Make Our Music What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them.” Among the culprits were Charles Ives, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Maurice Ravel, Eberhard Kronhausen, Ravi Shankar, and dozens of blues and R&B musicians. I was too young to get the in-jokes, but I recognized some of the classical composers.

  I played the two discs endlessly, trying to absorb the multitude of musical styles and attitudes. This was nearly two years before “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” “introduced” the Concept Album to surf music-benumbed American teens, and even though I was used to extracting all the information from recordings, from the data on the label to the graphic design to the details of the music itself, “Freak Out!” was far over my eleven-year-old head. All I knew was that it sounded entirely different from anything I had ever heard before, and that it was hypnotically engrossing. Somehow I couldn’t help playing it over and over and over.

  “Freak Out!” was Frank Zappa’s first album. I had no idea of its genesis, or that Zappa had been steadily crawling upward from the socio-musical garbage dump of Antelope Valley rhythm & blues bands and Inland Empire lounge shows, working truly horrifying day jobs and scoring no-budget movies, until he finally got his big break, I wasn’t old enough to understand that “Freak Out!” ’s target audience was the groovy Sunset Strip crowd, guys in tight white Levi’s and girls with flowing blonde hair, both sexes coolly regarding the world from behind Ray-Ban sunglasses. None of it had very much to do with me, and yet as I listened to songs like “You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here,” I could imagine the surfing culture around me, and draw my own conclusions.

  A few weeks after buying “Freak Out!”, I found myself sitting with my acoustic guitar, trying to work out chords I could hear plainly in my head but lacked the knowledge and technique to wring from the instrument. It was frustrating, but I could feel that something was changing in the way I thought about music. Plain old open G sounded really stupid all of a sudden; I desperately needed a whole new musical vocabulary.

  I went to the Gene Lees Guitar Studio on Sepulveda, and after hovering nervously near the sheet music for nearly an hour, finally got up the nerve to ask a clerk for a “good guitar chord book.” The kid was one of seven Catholic boys from an otherwise upright family; he and his brothers all played in various local bands and rarely spoke to mere mortals. Without looking at me he gestured vaguely in the direction of the Mel Bay and Mickey Baker folios in a distant corner, meanwhile continuing to mutter seductively to his girlfriend on the telephone. Mortified, I shuffled over and fumbled through the merchandise. The cheapest thing was a Guitar Chord Finder, printed on a clear plastic wheel that turned to transpose various voicings into different keys. It went into the pick compartment of my guitar case, where it remained, unmolested, until I finally sold the guitar a few years later so I could buy my first electric guitar.

  But stumbling onto “Freak Out!” marked the end of my childhood, musical and otherwise. Although I never lost my fondness for lilting waltzes or slow drags, or any of the other pleasures of hard-core shellac, I developed into a rabid Frank Zappa fan. After several years and a few more Mothers of Invention albums, I began to understand the in-jokes, and I started buying albums of music by some of the composers Zappa had listed on “Freak Out!” — Stravinsky, Varèse, Webern. He turned out to be right: it was interesting music, much more interesting than rock ‘n’ roll.

  Around this time, I wandered into the band room at school one day and there I saw, unwatched, a timpani, a gong, and some orchestra bells. I’d been taking piano lessons off and on for a couple of years, and I had my little xylophone at home, but in the back of my mind was this lurking question: What was it like to bang on something really loud?, Well, I answered that question in short order. My research was so thorough and so satisfying that South Bay Unified sent my parents a bill for the damage. After popping my percussion cherry, as it were, I began to regard George Antheil and Harry Partch as sex gods. I even had a moody-looking mezzotint of Quasimodo taped to the inside of my locker.

  My songwriting, meanwhile, rapidly metamorphosed into a long catalogue of psychotic ditties which, if my parents had ever heard me perform them, would undoubtedly have landed me in some behavioral psychologist’s bunker. None of the boys I went to school with were capable of writing such demented songs — much less the girls, most of whom had long stringy hair and liked to sit around under trees at lunch period looking soulful and warbling “Blowin’ in the Wind” to out-of-tune nylon-string guitars. There was something “blowin’ in the wind” in my case, all right, but it sure didn’t smell like teen spirit. If I could have grown a mustache or tattooed a scale model of my menacing hero on my chest, just for the shock value, you bet I would have.
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  My troubles escalated when I entered high school. I should probably explain that during this time the South Bay, where I lived, had a sizable Catholic population, and those families who couldn’t afford parochial school sent their kids to the “gentile” public schools. I used to refer to Mira Costa High School, my alma mater, as “Our Lady of Guacamole.” Since nearly everybody who was on the South Bay Unified school board in the 1960s has gone on to better things, I can at last reveal the truth about the December Plot of 1969.

  It had been the custom in Manhattan Beach, ever since the time of Columbus no doubt, to install a nativity scene on the front lawn of City Hall during the Christmas season. This holiday device consisted of a plywood edifice with a fake thatched roof, beneath which papier-mache statues of Joseph and Mary and the Three Wise Men flanked a particle-board manger containing a bundle of rags that was supposed to represent the newborn Baby JC.

  On Christmas morning, I969, the townspeople of Manhattan Beach awoke to find that a few shifts had been made in the paradigm: in place of the manger there was an American Standard toilet on which was enthroned a life-size, naked dummy of Frank Zappa with his pants down around his ankles. (This was at a time when every frat house in the country had at least one copy of Zappa’s notorious “Phi Zappa Krappa” poster prominently displayed.) The blasphemy, when discovered, was hastily whisked away, although the manger couldn’t be found, which left a gaping hole between Mary and Joseph and made some wags ask, “Is He risen?” (meaning Zappa from the throne). The culprit was never publicly determined, but the folks at American Martyrs Church would have added me to their list of sainted sufferers if they had gone around to the back of my boyfriend’s garage, where the purloined holy fodder-trough had been gleefully dismantled and stashed.

  That year I was a sophomore at Our Lady of Guacamole, and in and out of several bands when I wasn’t in detention or explaining my latest misdeed to Miss Rissé, the girls’ vice principal. Other people who were in high school during the late 1960s may have been merrily trafficking in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, but at my high school all the history teachers were John Birchers and the really cool thing to do after school was paint curbs for De Molay. Weekend surf gremmies were considered wickedly avant-garde. Why me, Lord??

  To compensate for my misery, I had moved on to electric guitar, and still under the Zappa influence, I was composing dismally ambitious works with titles like “Adolf Hitler’s Bunker and the Young Porsche” and “The Sun City Fertility Rites.” (One of my fellow musical miscreants was another Our Lady of Guacamole student, David Benoit, a descendant of William Jennings Bryan, Dave, who suffered from dermatitis, played piano in several of my anarcho-musical outfits, but he fortunately somehow survived my bad influence and went on to considerable financial glory in the twilight musical world where Henry Mancini meets Bill Evans and scores a total K.O.) I was also the first chair percussionist in the South Bay youth orchestra, where I spent my time snoring through Haydn and languishing for an opportunity to whomp the dust off my mallets with some Stravinsky or Bartòk. (I was relieved of this position after launching into a very loud jazz shuffle rhythm on the adjacent timpani during an otherwise quiet stretch in the annual Handel “Messiah” extravaganza.)

  During summer vacation my boyfriend and I began recording some of my songs on my father’s Viking stereo reel-to-reel tape deck. I played guitar, percussion (including an incredible four-octave toy piano I had found thrown out on trash collection day — both its black and its white keys were functional, and when operated with both hands it sounded like a cymbalom recorded on a wire recorder and played back too fast), a cheap little electric chord organ I had bought at Woolworth’s, and ocarina (may be that ocarina solo on “Wild Thing” had left a subconscious residue). My boyfriend played cello, harmonica, and jew’s-harp, and we both sang. The songs included a ditty inspired by a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, “The Bones Go Down (The Tar Pits Need Deodorant),” sort of a deconstructed “Them Bones Them Bones Them Dry Bones,” and a mutant jug band number, “Moonlight on the Iceplant.”

  By now Frank Zappa, still my musical idol, had dissolved his old band, the Mothers, and had released “Hot Rats,” a mostly instrumental album and my absolute favorite so far. How many gloomy, ocean-sticky nights had been illuminated for me as I dragged the phonograph tone arm back over and over, hogging out the near-the-end groove in “It Must Be a Camel” where the guitar, the sax, and the electric violin all played that incredible melody over those amazing chords during the final restatement of the theme? I’d gone through three copies of the album trying to dope out the voicings. Zappa was also producing albums by other musicians, most notably Captain Beefheart’s “Trout Mask Replica,” which, after Zappa’s music, was the most interesting record I’d ever heard. I noticed in the fine print that both “Hot Rats” and “Trout Mask Replica” were released through Bizarre/Straight Records — the address was in Los Angeles. I began daydreaming about being produced by Zappa. It seemed logical enough to me: everybody said I was weird, so I was probably some sort of genius. If anyone in the music world could appreciate my unique talents, it would have to be Frank Zappa.

  Right before school started, when my boyfriend had left for a vacation in Oregon with his family, I carefully wrapped up the reel of tape (there was only one; I never thought of making a dub rather than entrusting my lone copy to the Fates), wrote a brief note to Zappa explaining what the tape was, along with my address and phone number, and crammed everything into a big envelope, which I mailed off to him.

  I figured I’d hear from him within a week. I stopped going anywhere I absolutely didn’t have to go, so I could keep tabs on the phone and the mail. A week went by — no word; then another, and another. School began again, and I had to abandon my vigil by the phone. Our mailman regained his former geniality. But I hadn’t lost faith; I knew Id be hearing from Zappa. He was, after all, a busy guy.

  In the end, it was nearly four months before the afternoon when I came home from school and found a lime green envelope, addressed to me, on the dining table. The minute I recognized the Bizarre Records logo, with its broken, angular letters, my heart began to pound. I sank into a chair, ripped open the envelope, and pulled out the sheet of lime green paper inside. It was only a few typewritten lines:

  January 6, 1970.

  Dear Nigey:

  I am sorry not to have responded sooner. I am about to leave for a European tour but would like to discuss your tape when I return.

  The written signature looked like a sexually deviant strand of linguine.

  I carefully returned the letter to its envelope and put them both in my school notebook. The next day I pulled the note out and read it so many times that it started to look like dirty money from Tangier. I showed it to a select group of people, mostly other musicians at school who had been known to sneer at me before because I was so weird. I’m sorry to say that I instantly ascended to the topmost pinnacle of that segment of school society, solely on account of the cheap celebrity generated by my receiving a letter from Frank Zappa. Evidently my weirdness wasn’t so weird after all, if the chief weirdo of all time had expressed an interested in my music.

  But as the month crept by, my apprehension began to mount. What exactly was I going to say to Zappa when I saw him? It was one thing to fantasize about being produced by my musical idol, but I had no idea, beyond whatever impressions I could gather from his records, what he was actually like. I had yet to attend one of his concerts; I’d just started to learn to drive. I hadn’t mentioned my age in my letter. Maybe he’d laugh me out of the office when he saw that I hadn’t even turned sixteen.

  Around the time I thought Zappa would probably be back from Europe, I called Bizarre Records at the phone number on the letter. Trying to sound mature and somewhat supercilious, I asked the woman who answered if I could speak to Mr. Zappa. She had a cultured British accent and was admirably evasive, so I tried reading her the letter. It was obvious that she thought I was making it all
up, but I did manage to get her to take my name and number; Mr. Zappa was due to stop by the office at the end of next week, she said distantly.

  The next afternoon the phone was ringing as I came through the door after school. I got to it around the eleventh ring, and much to my amazement there was the cultured British accent. She said that Mr. Zappa had received my message and wanted to know if next Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. would be acceptable. Here was an immediate obstacle: my last period at school didn’t end until 2:30, and the address on the letter said that Bizarre Records was located on Wilshire Boulevard. To get from Manhattan Beach to the Miracle Mile in an hour was possible, but not on the bus. I hadn’t yet obtained my driver’s license. In those innocent days suburban teenagers didn’t routinely cut class or drive without a license, and neither could I.

  I quickly said that 3:30 p.m. would be fine, and asked for the cross street, since I had only been on the Miracle Mile a few times in my life (one of those times being the trip to the La Brea Tar Pits). Then I ambushed my father when he came home from work and proceeded to bludgeon him with histrionics. If he didn’t give me a ride next Wednesday afternoon, I assured him, I’d never have a music career and I’d be a total stumblebum and disgrace him in his old age. (At least I’ve made one or two accurate predictions in my time.) He grumbled considerably, but it was worth rt. At 2:33 p.m. the following Wednesday, my boyfriend and I jumped into my dad’s I’m-over-40-to-hell-with-it-I’m-getting-a muscle-car Buick Riviera in the Our Lady of Guacamole parking lot, and at 3:21 we were in the elevator of the nondescript skyscraper where Bizarre Records had its offices.