Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  The woman with the British accent turned out to have flaming red hair and was wearing a plum-colored paisley velvet mini-dress. I thought she gave me an arch look as she indicated an overstuffed, tapestry-covered sofa in the reception area, but I was too busy being terrified to care. I had dressed in my hippest clothes — cowboy boots, tight jeans, a gold silk shirt with flowing sleeves, and a paisley scarf tied elaborately around the neck of the shirt. While we waited for Zappa, I tried to calm myself by studying the framed concert posters on the wallpapered walls, but it was no use. I could barely stay on the sofa. I lit a cigarette, but when I nearly set my sleeve on fire I hastily snuffed it out and stuffed it, minus two puffs, into an ashtray.

  Fortunately I didn’t have to suffer long: it probably wasn’t a minute past 3:30 when Frank Zappa strode through the door, greeted Miss Accent, told her to hold his calls, and raised an eyebrow at us. “Hiya” he said. He had my tape box under his arm. I don’t think I ever felt so important in my life — or so fraudulent.

  We traipsed behind him down a short hall into an office, and he shut the door behind us. He brushed against me lightly as I awkwardly turned to sit down, and l looked up at him. He was 29, fourteen years my senior, and he had a stylized face, like an actor playing a medieval Venetian nobleman in a European silent film: square jaw, sharp nose, black mustache and Imperial goatee, thick, squiggly ink-black curls pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes were the most startling thing about him — Large, deep-set burnt-sienna pools, dark-circled, externally and internally reflective. The usual social boundaries didn’t seem to exist for him; when he looked straight into me with those laser eyes, there was no doubt that he was attempting to make a direct connection.

  His manner towards us was reassuring, though — jovial and kindly in a droll sort of way. He seemed to relish playing the comic role of a somewhat demented philosopher-king attempting to explain the facts of life and art to a couple of raw young disciples. The monarch even had a crown — I couldn’t help but notice that he was wearing a green — feathered lady’s hat. (“Junk store item,” he explained, when I remarked on it.) On any other six-foot male with his appearance, that hat would have seemed aberrant, but it lent Zappa a cartoonishly jaunty at that fit him perfectly.

  Looking at him sitting there regarding us solemnly, but with a strange humor, I had an ill-defined, unsettling feeling about him, the sense that although he was quite approachable, he was also rather distant. No matter how long someone might know him, there was no way they could really get into his mind.

  Meanwhile, there he was, patiently waiting for me to speak up and say something coherent, and I couldn’t squeeze out a single word. I was too mesmerized by his proboscis. What a honker! It was narrow at the bridge, but its downslope was so precipitous that it really seemed to defy gravity. Coupled with those glowing, laser-beam eyes, it gave him the look of a hawk that had gone without dinner one night too often.

  Frank couldn’t help noticing that I was gaping like an idiot. He inquired elaborately, “Something the matter?” I managed to stammer out a few incoherent syllables to the effect that I found his nose fascinating.

  Where upon he leaned across the desk toward me and stuck the organ in question right in my face. “Wanna feel it?” I reached out a rather unsteady hand and gave it a feeble tweak. “You OK now?” he asked afterward. I giggled and nodded.

  With this weighty matter duly resolved, Zappa reached into the pocket of his brown tweed blazer and pulled out a piece of paper on which there were copious notes in fine, crabbed script — the deviant linguine again. Then he launched into the first couple of lines of “The Bones Go Down”! I was totally disarmed; between the nose-fondling ritual and now actually hearing him sing my lyrics, he could have knocked me over with his hat.

  He regarded me gravely for a moment, waiting until I regained some semblance of composure, When I didn’t, he cleared his throat and began, “My father said that the road to hell was paved with good intentions.” He gave me a knowing look and continued, “I like some of these songs...”

  “Do you want to produce them?.” I blurted out. Zappa shook his head. “They’re not ready to record yet” he replied. “You’re still just farting around; you need to get serious about what you’re doing.” He spoke precisely and and a little dryly, with ironic emphasis on certain words that made his comments seem extremely humorous or else somewhat threatening, if you happened not to have a sense of humor.

  I felt very confused. I was having trouble concentrating — there was something about his voice that seemed to be tickling me in embarrassing places. I glanced up. He was looking right at me, and his eyes were gentle, droll, and more than a little affectionate. How did he know?

  He wanted to know who had played the guitar on the tape. I told him I had. “In a few more years you might be a good guitarist,” he said, “but you need to practice your scales and arpeggios. You’re trying to play too fast; what you need to do is slow down and think about what you’re playing. It’s better to play a few notes that express something honest than a whole cloud of gnat-notes that don’t say anything.” He was right again — I did tend to play way too fast, hoping nobody would notice anything but my apparent virtuosity.

  Zappa had listened carefully to the tape, and he made comments on all the songs. His perceptions were uncannily accurate; in fact, it struck me that his sizing-up of my entire state of mind bordered on the psychic, maybe even the psychotic. Of course I was only fifteen, and transparent, and he had, after all, made it his business to keep in touch with the mental aberrations of his adolescent fans, but his avuncular commentary hit so close to home that it was frightening me. I argued with him a little about his assessment of the material, and he responded, “I think you’re confusing your need to express yourself with your need to be accepted.” Then he gave a sideways glance at my boyfriend and opined, “You’re basically just horny — you need someone to love you.”

  I was speechless. I fancied myself complex and inscrutable, and he’d only just met me — so how could he be so sure I was sexually frustrated? But despite my internal splutterings, I knew he was right again (jeez, didn’t he get tired of being right all the fucking time??.). I hadn’t really thought about it consciously before, but I was attracted to him. May be it wasn’t quite the same thing as falling for the school football hero or some bleached-blonde ho-dad, but I’d been listening to his voice on those Mothers of Invention albums, and staring at his mug on the album covers, since pre-adolescence. Programming ... He was used to that, I figured. In fact, around the time I discovered “Freak Out!” I’d stumbled onto a tongue-in-cheek interview he’d done for a teenage fanzine in which he described his Dream Girl as “...an attractive pariah, with an IQ well over 228...no interest whatsoever in any way in sports, sunshine, deodorant, lipstick, chewing gum, carbon tetra-chloride, television, ice cream…none of that stuff! In short — a wholesome young underground morsel open to suggestion!... Ps. I might even like her better if she can play Stockhausen on the piano...Klavierstücke XII... .” With his peculiar brand of self- confidence, he probably attracted lots of suggestible morsels. No doubt he stood back with that slightly predatory, ironic expression and let them fall all over him.

  Frank put his feet up on the desk and moved on to other subjects. He asked us where we lived, what did we do every day, what kind of music did we listen to. I didn’t want to come out and admit that I was in high school, so I beat around the bush and said I was “between situations.” I doubt whether I fooled him, but he didn’t let on that I hadn’t.

  We talked about our respective record collections, and he said quite humbly that he had “a fair-sized R&B collection” dating back to his high school days, which he still took great pleasure in listening to. I asked him what it included, and he rattled off a list of names: Guitar Slim, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, T-Bone Walker, Elmore James, Johnny “Guitar”’ Watson. The way he pronounced them just radiated ecstasy. He also regaled us with stories about his recent Eur
opean tour. He’d gone there with Captain Beefheart, acting in the capacity of road manager. The low point of the tour, he explained, had come at a three-day festival in Amougies, Belgium, where both the gig and the sleeping accommodations were in a huge circus tent in a turnip field. Temperatures dropped down around freezing at night, and since Amougies was far from civilization, the only sustenance was in the form of frozen Belgian waffles and moldy wieners. “They kept those weenies in this big tank full of water and you could see that the tips of ’em sticking out of the water were green.”

  I had never had such a good time talking to anyone before. Zappa was a marvelous storyteller, but he was also a good listener. When I or my boyfriend said something, he listened gravely, as if what we had to say was important. He never mentioned himself or his work unless we asked him a specific question — he seemed to prefer listening to us talk about ourselves.

  It came as a shock and a letdown when he finally looked out of the window — the towering neon Mutual of Omaha sign was just blinking on behind him like an ornament on top of his green feathered hat — and, clearing his throat, gently let us know that he had other things to get to. More than two hours had passed in what seemed like ten minutes. As we stood up he gave me one last steady look and said, “When your stuff is ready, you’ll be able to sell it anywhere, not just here.” Seeing my glum expression, he added quickly, “But I’d like to hear it again when it’s finished.” He gravely picked up my tape box from the desk and handed it back to me. Then he reached down with his thumb and forefinger and gently twiddled the tip of my nose, where it turned up. Now his eyes were twinkling with wry affection. In a flustered blur, I stretched a couple of inches and kissed him on the cheek.

  As I descended to the lobby in the elevator, it seemed as if every floor down was one step closer to mundane ‘reality’ — whatever that was. I felt as if I’d been struck broadside by an entire galaxy hurtling directly at me. Certainly nothing on the Miracle Mile was as intense and vivid as Frank Zappa and his strange universe in which we had been immersed for two hours, or maybe two million light years.

  I had every intention of going back to work on the tape and resubmitting it to Zappa. I also restrung my guitar, bought some advanced chord and arpeggio studies, and vowed to spend every waking hour learning to play “honestly”, if I could figure out what that was. But before I had a chance to start putting off all this work, other things intervened. The sporadic troubles I had always had with the authorities at Our Lady of Guacamole became chronic, then acute.

  The campus dress code was rigid — when they made you kneel on the ground, the hem of your skirt had to reach all the way to the black-top, or you were sent home to change into “more appropriate attire”. Evidently the chiefly Catholic administration was convinced that miniskirts were the Devil’s workshop. I thought the whole concept was absurd, and after ransacking the Goodwill store for a 1950s-vintage Catholic-schoolgirl plaid pleated skirt, I wore it to school with a pair of lug-soled Cub Scout hiking boots outgrown by my boyfriend’s younger brother. For a blouse, I hunted up an old army-surplus fatigue shirt and stenciled my student ID number over the pocket. Result: American Icon Hash. At first I thought, much to my disappointment, that this attire was attracting no particular notice from the authorities. I hastened to add my boyfriend’s Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls underneath the skirt, just in case my fashion statement was too subtle. That very day, as I was serenely puffing on a Camel non-filter behind the girls’ gym, Miss Rissé happened to stalk by on a patrol. Like Anton Webern, who was shot to death by American Occupation soldiers when he went out on his porch after curfew one night to sneak a smoke, my career also ended brutally. I was duly apprehended and marched to the principal’s office, where my father was called at work and I was summarily executed. And this wasn’t Occupied Austria at the end of World War II, but Manhattan Beach, California in the good old USA, A.D. 1970. Imagine!

  My parents obviously felt furious, cheated, and more than a little embarrassed that I’d been permanently excused from learning to be a valuable member of society, but they didn’t say anything. No mention was made of my going on to continuation school, junior college, or any other institution. I had always imagined I would be a musician or at least a songwriter. Now it looked like I might have to settle for being a dishwasher — if I was lucky.

  Then my grandmother, with whom I was very close, became ill, and I took the family’s Dodge van (which had been bought on a whim in case my mother ever repented and allowed us to go on a camping trip) and went to Arizona to be with her in her last days. In the process I became involved first in riding and then in rodeo, and I put the idea -of a music career on the back burner, although I continued to write songs whenever I was sitting in the van on a balmy, star-filled night with a fracture or a contusion. I still listened to Zappa’s music as much as ever, too, and I sometimes thought about the things he had said during our meeting, and the way he had said them. I had begun to read books on Zen and Taoism, and I was trying to live in the moment as much as I could, but I suspected that somehow, in the inexplicable chaos of the universe, I’d run into Frank Zappa again.

  The Short Hello

  Coming back to Los Angeles from Arizona was a decompression experience. My grandmother had died, and I felt as if a big chunk of the past was gone. I was a few months shy of my 17th birthday, and all I wanted to do was hide in a small mahogany-paneled and velvet-wallpapered room, draw the velvet drapes over the bay window, and listen to Blue Amberol cylinders on an Edison reproducer. Probably I should have gone to San Francisco. Instead, lacking any wherewithal whatsoever, I sheepishly checked back in at the Parental Hotel in good old quotidian Manhattan Beach. I had some vague notion of trying to study musicology or medicine; my mother felt that I should get a job and contribute to my upkeep.

  This wasn’t a half bad idea, but after three weeks of toting a 30-pound sack of junk mail and rubber-banding circulars onto doorknobs in Watts and Willowbrook, I was relieved when a position opened up in the shipping department of my father’s furniture company. My dad had definite opinions about nepotism: His brothers were partners in the business, and their no-good kids had been given roomfuls of furniture by their doting fathers, for free. He expressed some concern about my reliability as an employee, but in the end he agreed to hire me on for $85 a week — fifteen of which I was to pay at home for room and board.

  The situation turned out to be less than ideal. During my brief rodeo stint I had been knocked over and then kicked by a horse while team roping, causing fractures on several of the ribs nearest my lungs. Even now, more than a year later, I could feel it when I took a deep breath. In the process of schlepping bulky boxes across several hundred feet of slick concrete floor to the shipping dock and then loading them onto waiting trucks, I started to get pretty tired of gasping for air all the time. I didn’t mind doing a man’s work, but at five-eight and 130 pounds, I was built more like an intellectual than a stevedore. It was time for me to get back to more cerebral pursuits before I killed myself.

  One day I was perusing the Los Angeles Times and noticed that Frank Zappa and the reconstituted Mothers (the “of Invention” had been quietly dropped when Frank started his own record label) were appearing locally. I had written a couple of record reviews for a local magazine, Coast, and I managed to schnorr a comp ticket to the show. I thought it would be entertaining to see Zappa again and find out if he remembered me after more than a year. The concert was a blast. I privately felt that the musicianship wasn’t up to the standards of “Hot Rats” or some of Zappa’s efforts with the original Mothers, but the material, as always, was interesting and highly varied — something to offend everyone.

  After the show ended, I made my way to the backstage entrance, A meaty specimen in a rent-a-cop uniform thrust up an arm as big as a Virginia ham and blocked my access. “Sorry, dear, you have to have a pass,” he simpered.

  I feigned annoyed incredulity. “I just went out in the auditorium to watch the show,” I
explained testily. I heard a set of immense, rusty gears give an agonizing jerk and then painfully grind into action somewhere far back in his cranium. Before they could rotate very far, Zappa himself appeared, guitar case in hand. He spotted me and instantly acknowledged me with a “Hey,” raising one black eyebrow and his empty hand simultaneously. I fell in step beside him and was drawn along in his wake to the dressing rooms, leaving the rent-a-cop to find some Rustoleum.

  “So what’s up?” he asked, leaning his guitar case against a chair and putting his foot, in a snazzy caramel-colored Italian oxford, up beside it. He was wearing a blue knit polo shirt with a pattern of ombre stars. Reaching into its skin-tight pocket, he drew out a pack of Winstons, selected one, then offered the pack to me. I’d smoked a couple of cigarettes, chiefly out of nervousness, during our interview at Bizarre Records, and he remembered that fact. Nice memory!

  “Nothing’s up,” I grinned, turning down the proffered smoke, “I enjoyed the show.”

  “Thank you veddy much,” he said mock-courteously, then turned and began to attend to business, stuffing a sheaf of music paper into a big, serious-looking briefcase and snapping it shut. I could see that his eyes had a devilish gleam in them even though his mouth was poker-straight between his thick mustache and manicured goatee.

  “Do you still have a band?” he asked, setting the briefcase beside iris guitar and retrieving a white sheepskin coat that had been flung over a folding chair. “Not now,” I replied. “I’ve been toiling in the family business — not much time for the good life, I’m afraid.”