Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  When he counted off the first song, my fingers refused to move. I got them around the guitar neck finally, and began to play, although my shaking hand was applying an inadvertent tremelo. The song progressed, and slowly I began to feel a dull amazement: why, I was still alive, and even more amazing, I actually remembered my parts.

  By the end of the number I was almost enjoying myself. After the first show I’d begun to understand the intense decibel level a rock band generated, and I’d quickly picked up some ear plugs, but this wasn’t the same as playing in an auditorium. In fact, performing for 10,000 people in a hockey rink was practically an anonymous act — Frank was right; they couldn’t really see you or hear you. Nor could you see or hear anything yourself. It was like being blind and deaf, with an audience that was also blind and deaf. The relentless pounding of the bass and drums was all that came through, and I felt that in my gut, rather than hearing it through my ears. It was quite strange to realize that when I played a lead, I was the only person in the whole arena who knew whether it was any good or not, Even Frank couldn’t hear clearly enough to tell if I were playing Hindemith or “Louie Louie”. Hey, this was fun. No wonder rock ‘n’ roll musicians swaggered and strutted around on stage — most of them were getting away with murder up there.

  Frank looked out for me in a lot of little ways. There was a quaint, charming quality in the way he fussed over details for my benefit — although I never would have dared to tell him I thought it was quaint and charming. He knew that I had a tendency to lose guitar picks, and he always kept a bunch of them handy for me, pulling them out of his guitar case with an exaggerated flourish, a shake of the head, and an affectionate “Oh man are you ever hopeless.” He observed that I was often too distracted to remember to eat, and cheeseburgers (no mayo, ketchup, or mustard, onions only) would magically appear at my elbow.

  One night I ripped my best shirt half an hour before we had to leave for the show. I began melodramatically howling that now I would have to go onstage naked (actually I could have borrowed one of Frank’s numerous T-shirts — I’d been doing that a lot because I hadn’t brought nearly enough changes of clothes). Frank came over, frowned in his mock-paternal way, and examined the damage. “Gimme that, “ he ordered, and crossing over to his suitcase he pulled out a tiny sewing kit, sat down on the edge of the bed, and squinting under the bedside lamp, proceeded to stitch away on my injured garment’ looking like a mutant version of some old Sicilian immigrant tailor. He handed back my shirt a few minutes later with a smug little gesture. I looked for the torn spot, but in vain. The stitches were so small and neat that the repair was practically invisible; his sewing was more skillfully executed than most women’s. I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did. (Real men don’t sew... ?) Later he explained that he’d learned to sew as a kid when he’d built his own puppet theater and made elaborate costumes for all the characters. He was still putting on puppet shows, only now, like the Puppetmaster in Petrouchka, he was using live marionettes, and sometimes we also needed our stage clothes sewed.

  He was acutely sensitive toward me without being dramatic about it. When he could see that the relentless pace of constant travel on too little sleep, or the steady barrage of sensations, was about to make me blow a fuse, he would put his arm around me and hold me close to him, not belaboring me with further talk or stimulation, his reassurance eloquent in its calm silence. Finally he’d ask simply, “You OK now?” I usually was, Once, when I was feeling miserably homesick and low-spirited, he cut short a phone interview so he could take me out for lunch. This was entirely out of character for him; he was somewhat agoraphobic, and he tried to avoid social situations whenever he could because he loathed the inane chitchat that inevitably accompanied things like eating in restaurants. That particular afternoon, though, he was affectionate, funny in his inimitable way, and altogether comforting. When we got back to our room, he hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, and by showtime that night, the whole concept of homesickness had completely ceased to be relevant.

  I definitely needed reassuring sometimes. Frank’s nature was to blow things up, blast them wide open; and he understood that I, in my closed-off state, was attracted to him because I somehow realized that. But as strange as it may seem, he also had a pronounced sense of responsibility, and I think he felt uneasy at the intensity of my reactions, knowing he’d stirred them up. He knew he shouldn’t be playing with that sort of dynamite, however thrilling the explosion was. I had a feeling, too, that he was afraid the situation would force a reaction from him — one that he was entirely unprepared to confront, much less control.

  Sex he could handle, because it was exciting and interesting; love, on the other hand, was a different matter. From things he said, or almost said, I gathered that his first marriage and a couple of his other relationships had ended badly because the women in question hadn’t understood his need for freedom. Frank could be loyal, but he wasn’t cut out for monogamy; it went too much against his essentially polymorphous nature, and besides, it sounded too much like that other word, ‘monotony.’ In another way, the conventional notion of romance probably seemed absurd and contemptible to him because of its one-dimensionality. Poor Frank. I could never have said it to his face, but he was actually a romantic, if you blast open the standard definition of romanticism and take another look at it as an unrealistically expansive view of human relationships. Nobody could live up to that sort of expectation — not even Frank himself.

  For him, love was a transitive verb, not some flowery adjective. Lust was a concept he understood perfectly; its adjunct was improvisation, and the desired result was adventure, or at least diversion. And yet he was far more giving than selfish. Being instinctively attentive to detail, he generally succeeded admirably in defining the precise point of pleasurability and would then proceed to attack it with a frankly degenerate gusto.

  He was such a realist — or a cynic — that he couldn’t really comprehend the fact that I appreciated him simply for himself — not because he was a Guitar Hero, a Ticket Out of Oblivion, or a Sort of a Father Figure. Actually, it hadn’t taken me long to recognize that although we were of different gender and from different eras and family backgrounds, Frank and I had something profound and not a little ironic in common. We were both eccentrics; for some reason we had wound up being different than everybody else, but our thought patterns and reactions were very similar. Of course most serious Mothers fans were weirdos to a greater or lesser extent, but the more familiar I became with Frank’s music, the more I began to understand why it spoke so eloquently to me: It mirrored my own emotions and perceptions on a deep, unconscious level. The only other composer whose music felt that emotionally familiar to me was Erik Satie — another iconoclast and joker who was always conscious of his outsider status.

  When I played the music, I had the feeling of being ‘plugged into’ something I didn’t understand, a level of simultaneous reality Frank hadn’t invented himself but had somehow tapped into. I had sensed this amorphous but pervasive atmosphere when I’d first met him, and when later he told me that, like me, he had read his share of books on Zen, it made a lot of sense. Frank seemed to understand the concept of Zen well enough: it was a state you simply lived in — or didn’t. Because we were both together so much, I moved more into that state as the tour went on.

  Early in the tour I began to have ‘coincidental’ experiences with Frank that bordered on being eerie. At one of the shows where I didn’t perform, he introduced the world premiere of a new song and explained to the audience that it was extremely difficult to execute. I was standing behind the amps, watching, and I grinned to myself and said under my breath, “Which is no doubt why you’re not going to play on it.” At that moment, Frank announced, “Which is why I’m not going to play on it.”

  Another time we were trading guitar solos over a vamp in A. I took my allotted solo space, then Frank took his. At the end of his solo we vamped for eight bars, then all of a sudden, without any warni
ng, we both launched into an identical eight-bar phrase together, in perfect rhythm! It sounded as tight as if we’d rehearsed it. We exchanged a bemused glance across the stage, and Frank frowned a little, like I’d tried to put something over on him. Afterward I asked him if he’d ever played that lick before, thinking maybe I’d heard him toss it off once and had then ‘forgotten’ it, but he claimed he hadn’t — in fact, he said, it had been rhythmically and harmonically alien to his style, and he’d felt almost peculiar when he played it. I could almost hear the theme from “The Twilight Zone”. We experienced a number of these ‘coincidences’ during the time we knew each other.

  As little as I actually performed with him, I learned more about guitar playing from Frank in that period than I probably would have learned from 20 years with any other guitarist: his understanding of when to play what was absolute. He wasn’t some athletic guitar god like Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton; in fact, he always looked a little klutzy onstage, one shoulder higher than the other from the weight of his Les Paul or Strat, the eternal burning cigarette stuck under the strings on the pegboard — and so, when he fired off an intricate lead in Hungarian minor (neatly swiped from the first movement of Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto), ornamented with a wreath of perfectly executed hair’s-breadth spacings (17 against 13, borrowed from Stravinsky and probably never repaid), it always seemed like a lucky accident. How could this guy, who generally looked like he was truly hurting for a square meal and a good night’s sleep, come blasting out with something so concise, so humorous, so downright unthinkable? “Do it again, Frank!” I’d yell — and he’d give me a look over his shoulder, wonderfully arrogant, like a little wink: “Of course we’ll play Petrouchka...” And then he’d fling out another solo for nothing — ten, or a thousand, times better than the first one.

  Although it sounded like it was a product of the ‘psychedelic’ era, Frank’s style of guitar playing actually went back much farther than that; it was a strange but effective amalgamation of a blues skeleton fleshed out with harmonies and rhythms from 20th-century orchestral music. No matter how complex his playing was rhythmically and harmonically, in some sense Frank never strayed far from his bluesy roots. When after the tour I got around to hearing some very early, pre-Mothers of Invention tapes of Frank playing in a straightforward blues style, my impression was that the his 1962 guitar persona could have stepped right onstage with the 1971 version, and wouldn’t have really sounded any different. As far back as 1962, all the things I associated with the Zappa style — the rhythmic emphasis, his tendency to finger more notes than he picked, the modal quality of his playing, and above all the essential honesty of his playing — were all there. His guitar style was fully formed by the time he was in his early 20s; the only thing that changed over the years was the price of his toys — the instruments themselves and the amplifier and effects technology. He used to amaze impressionable listeners by playing the main themes to Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring, first individually and then together, in the form of a canon, but what the audience didn’t realize was that he’d been doing that musical stunt for years — on one of those early tapes, in fact, was a recording of a blues jam in which he’d shoehorned in the Stravinsky guitar trick after an endless harmonica solo. It didn’t really work in that context, but I don’t think it was supposed to.

  You could always tell when he’d memorized a part and was playing it by rote — he played it precisely, but a little painfully, as though it were an exercise. For instance, he had arranged the first few bars of the trumpet fanfare from Stravinsky’s Agon and inserted it into his song “Status Back Baby”. He had more trouble fingering that obstinate little tidbit than he wanted to admit. One night back at the motel I did something that only a callous 17-year-old would have thought was humorous: we were running through some material, and he took a break to go to the bathroom, leaving the door open. Meanwhile, I cheerfully tossed off the break from Agon three or four times as if it were the merest trifle, messing with the rhythm and generally showing off. When Frank came back, he gave me such a sour, cranky look that I cracked up.

  He didn’t say anything, but the next time the song came up at a show, he made a big deal out of stopping right at that point, then grandiosely announced to the audience that I was going to perform the trumpet fanfare from Agon on the guitar unaccompanied and totally amaze them. I was thrown into total confusion; I’d never thought I’d be doing it in public. Naturally, I fucked it up. Frank thought it was so hilarious he stood there and made me play it again. The second time was even worse than the first. After that I evinced a little more respect for his limitations.

  Frank had developed a beautiful and highly unusual harmonic sense, both chordally and in the melodic patterns he soloed on, but the most important element in his playing was always rhythm. When he soloed, his rhythms tended to fall into odd patterns — 3s, 5s, 7s, 9s — over the basic 4/4 rock pulse. It reminded me of Indian music, with the lengthy, irregular solo line rolling out over and often against several cycles of structured rhythm. After hearing him, I had trouble listening to other guitarists; most of them tended to sound dull and predictable by comparison, and their rhythmic sense seemed so rudimentary. But it was something else, some elusive quality, that set Frank apart from the ranks of rock guitar abusers. There were other guitarists who could play faster, cleaner more glibly than Frank, but none of them came close to his ‘attitude’ — that steamy, palpable sense of immediacy. His guitar playing had both intellectual and visceral qualities, although he probably didn’t separate one from the other, any more than he differentiated between Edgard Varèse and Guitar Slim. It was all just part of his composition. For Frank, playing the guitar was never a job, a cut-and-dried activity; it was an adventure and a release, like sex but much better, a brief span of time when he could close his eyes, figuratively speaking, and jump off into the void. He had the power to draw the listener into his musical world and hold them there, expanding and ultimately suspending all sense of time.

  When it came to his music, he knew exactly what he wanted, and he wouldn’t accept anything less. He assumed the musicians he hired were going to work as hard as he did, and if somebody couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver, they were excused without further dithering. He didn’t have that trouble with me; but (beyond the confusing aspects of our mutating relationship) there were definite areas where our musical philosophies crashed head-on.

  Frank had done too much hard time in bars and lounges in industrial suburbs, playing watered-down versions of Tin Pan Alley banalities with hopeless rhythm sections for the delectation of sodden oafs; so when I’d throw in a flat-five substitution, he’d wince and proceed to fulminate on the banality of musical evil, deriding the sterility of white people’s music. In the Antelope Valley in the ’50s he had been jailed the night before a dance because he had led a racially mixed R&B band; the local Okies thought all niggers were dope fiends and gangsters, Italians were considered pretty alien by the hayseeds in Lancaster, and Frank had suffered miserably in high school at the hands of the second-generation Okie and Arkie students. There was no point in my trying to explain to him that there were plenty of outcasts in places like Texas and Oklahoma, and as much innovation in Spade Cooley as there was in Anton Webern. Frank didn’t have many deep prejudices, but the ones he had seemed to have been burned into his soul with an excoriating lash.

  Gender may have been one of his unconscious prejudices, though he didn’t seem overtly sexist. Even so, his misplaced sense of propriety may have been one of the reasons why our collaboration was so brief. There weren’t many women guitarists in the early ’70s, at least not blatant lead players. Frank had worked with a guitarist named Alice Stuart back in the beginning, but he told me she had been a folky, fingerstyle player; he said he’d fired her because she couldn’t play “Louie Louie". My basic impulses came from years of listening to damn-the-torpedoes Western swing and hot jazz records, which gave my playing a raw, aggressive, unpredictable edge. Frank was intrigued by
it, but he was also a bit put off; he was always trying to get me to play even ‘uglier’, in a distorted-signal, screeching-feedback sense, but when I did, he couldn’t quite handle it — maybe the picture of a young lady beating the shit out of an electric guitar wasn’t really something he wanted to see. Once he asked, “Doesn’t having that thing [i, e., the guitar] strapped on to you hurt your tits?” He was being facetious, in his inimitable way, but I sensed that what he was really saying was, What’s a nice girl like you doing with a thing like that? Hopefully not upstaging him.

  Sometimes he’d just talk about music. He lived and breathed it, and a casual question from me was likely to elicit a flood of stories and free association. I wish I’d made tapes of some of those discussions, like the one where he described how during the 1930s Edgard Varèse had quit composing for almost 25 years, partly because at that point musical technology hadn’t caught up to him yet, but also because he was depressed and discouraged at the way his music was being received. From there the conversation somehow drifted to the subject of underdogs. When he’d spent a brief period in jail in San Bernardino, Frank told me, he had sat there, powerless to do anything but fume over the injustices of the legal system and think about playing the guitar, He said he’d fantasized about playing guitar chords so loud and ugly that they’d tear the rebar right out of the cement-block walls and blast him to freedom. No wonder he’d always been so fond of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s early record “Three Hours Past Midnight” — the one where the guitar solos resembled a barrage of machine-gun fire. In Frank’s lengthy opus “Joe’s Garage,” recorded in the late ’70s, Joe, the guitar-playing protagonist, is jailed because musicians are perceived as a threat to society. There, stuck in his cell, he dreams of playing monstrous lines on the guitar as a form of revenge against his captors. They can’t control his thoughts, and they especially can’t do anything about his imaginary guitar playing.