Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  After hearing the tape, he mentioned that if I felt like whipping up a little something , I could bring it along to the next Grand Wazoo rehearsal and hear what it sounded like. It took me about 24 hours before the bomb dropped, but when I realized what his offer represented, I turned into a tornado. I grabbed my L5 (which I didn’t plug into an amp because I was concerned about making too much noise) and Frank’s big orchestra scratch pad, along with his Range and Transposition Guide, and began scribbling away during the daytime when he was asleep upstairs. I worked feverishly all day, every day, putting the guitar back in its place and hiding my day’s work when Frank came down at night. Finally, a week later, on the night before the next day’s Grand Wazoo rehearsal, I told him I’d jotted down a little piece, and if he’d been serious about his offer...

  “What you got?” he asked.

  Trying not to let my hands shake, I handed him the pages from the orchestra pad. It was a very little piece, maybe a minute and a half long, scored for oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon, trombone, marimba, guitar, bass guitar, and drums. I’d called it “Statement of Earnings.”

  Frank looked at the title and grinned, the humor not lost on him. “’statement of Earnings’ — hmm.” He ran his eye down the score, analyzing it. Without further comment, he said, “You better copy the parts,” and gestured toward a stack of blank charts and a copying pen. I stayed up until seven the next morning, writing out each separate part and transposing the horn charts. Because I hadn’t been able to use the piano to compose on, the harmonic structure was almost medieval, based on the way a suspended chord sounded on the guitar. In my inexperience, I had written passages that made for impossible fingerings on some of the horns, and in my haste I’d copied in a bunch of wrong notes, It represented the very bottom, dumbest level of sub-student work, and Frank obviously recognized that the minute he looked at it, but he also knew that the only way I’d learn anything was if I was directly confronted by my own mistakes

  In the afternoon I waited until Frank had been gone half an hour, then headed down to the Temple of the Grand Wazoo with my precious bundle of charts on the seat beside me. I almost didn’t make it to the rehearsal: I was woolgatheing so bad that I ran a red light as I was making a left turn at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights, only narrowly avoiding intimate involvement with an RTD bus and a couple of BMWs. As I went puttering off down Sunset, I vaguely wondered what all the squealing brakes were about back there.

  I took a seat in the front of the rehearsal hall and waited while Frank ran the band through several numbers. Usually every aspect of the rehearsals was fascinating to me, but not today, for some reason. It seemed like a fucking eternity. Finally, though, Frank motioned me up to the conducting stand. “Pass out the parts,” he said.

  I went out and handed the players the charts. Then I came back and spread my master score across the stand. Immediately, the musicians began to shout questions and complaints at me. “This note is out of my range,” "This run is all little finger,” “Is this an E-flat or an E natural here?” Frank shot me a wry look. “Does this kind of life look interesting to you?” he mugged. I answered as many of the questions as I could, and then Frank mercifully stepped in and explained to them that this was my maiden effort in the orchestral realm, so they wouldn’t keep bugging me.

  Then there was another little problem: I’d written the guitar part for Frank; in fact, the whole piece was based around his most characteristic harmonic element, both as a guitarist and a composer — the suspended chord, a chord with no major or minor third, just modal tones. I started to hand him the chart, but he shook his head and told me to give it to Tony Duran, the Wazoo’s rhythm guitarist. I tried to explain that the piece had been conceived as a little concerto for him and chamber orchestra, but he still wouldn’t play it. Probably because there was a guitar solo in the piece, he didn’t want to have it thrown at him in front of all the hotshots he had working for him. What if he made a complete ass of himself playing something that stupidly simple? (He knew his limitations as a musician, and mine as a composer, I had to admit.) I’d just have to be satisfied with employing him as celebrity page-turner while I conducted.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing me his baton. “Count it off.” And he looked down at my score — my score — and waited.

  I counted off four bars for nothing, then raised the baton. My God — there it was — my opening chord. I felt as if I’d just created the heavens and the earth. No drug could produce an intoxication as powerful as this. There were a million things going on at once, and I couldn’t keep track of them all — I didn’t dare, or there would have been a mass derailment. Right off I noticed that the voicings stuck out and sounded much more eccentric played on the different horns than they had as notes on the guitar. Dimly I began to understand that writing for timbre and texture was a whole art I didn’t have a clue about. Whoops, here we were al the bottom of the first page. Frank flipped it and we went on. The marimba player fluffed the ostinato in bar 38;the oboe hit a series of truly ugly D-sharps (my copying mistake coming home to roost — ouch!);here came the guitar solo, Top of page three, bar 76, drum solo, damn, should’ve made that eight bars instead of four. Christ! why hadn’t I realized that that syncopation was an eighth note, not a sixteenth? Oh boy...it’s the grand finale, every instrument for himself, let ‘er rip! Wow! That’s the wildest-sounding thing I’ve ever heard in my life! And finally the coda, the head again, sounds like the goddamn gates of Heaven are opening and the saints are rolling in! Yes...oh Lord, God, yes!!!

  I cut off the last bar with a flourish and lowered the baton. There was a little applause from a few of the people who hadn’t been playing. Nice folks, I thought, knowing I hadn’t deserved it. I handed the baton back to Frank, who nodded at me gravely and made a little bow, and stumbled to the back of the hall, completely swamped by sensations. It had only taken a minute and a half, but that 90 seconds had unrolled like a scroll into eternity. Now I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I was going to spend it waving a white stick at a bunch of men and women in evening clothes in an empty concert hall while they turned my little dots-on -paper into masses of very dense air.

  People were talking to me, asking me questions, but I didn’t comprehend and couldn’t answer. I mumbled something, went out and got into my car, and drove around for hours, the music still ringing in my ears like the roar of the ocean.

  It was approaching the time when the band was going to leave for Europe. The tour wasn’t along one, just four or five dates, and I got the feeling Frank would have been willing to take me along as music librarian, if I’d asked him. But when I checked with the bureaucrats downtown, I learned that a passport application took nearly a month to process. There wasn’t enough time for that. I cursed their red tape, but there it was.

  On my last night in the basement, I sat around talking to Frank. He was able to foretell the fate of the Grand Wazoo in advance; it was going to break up immediately after the tour. In my case, the future was a considerably lesser-known quantity. Frank was in his paternalistic mood (darn!), sitting back in his chair with his feet up on the control board and frowning at me like some poor plumber forced to face the fact that he has stumbled upon the Eternally Leaking Faucet. Sometimes, when he didn’t think I was looking, I’d caught him regarding me with a mixture of exasperation and pity. He was probably shaking his head over the fact that I reminded him of himself when he was l8 — only I most likely didn’t have his illustrious future in front of me.

  “So what are your plans after this?” he asked. It wasn’t so much a question as a statement.

  All of a sudden I was seized by a bright and desperate idea. I knew that when he got back from the Grand Wazoo Farewell Tour, he was going to have some down time. I also had the feeling that he was about as approachable this minute as he was ever likely to be, for whatever reason.

  “Frank,” I said, swallowing fast, before rationality could take over and spoil my plan, “I
think you should produce my album.”

  He looked as if he wished he could yank on the tap with a spanner and stop the drip for once and for all. “I’m not going to have the timer” he began, but I was ready for that.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ll have the songs all ready to go by the time you get back from Europe. We don’t need to hire the guys from the Grand Wazoo. You and I can play just about everything; all we’d need is a drummer at most. We can record everything in a couple of weeks, on the cheap.”

  Frank smelled a rat, and not a hot one, either. “Why should I want to block out the time to do this?” he asked warily.

  “Because it’s time I made my first record, and I want you to produce it,” I said baldly.

  Most people dislike being cornered; Frank absolutely hated it, because it rarely happened to him, and on the rare occasions when it did, none of his usual tactics worked. He growled, “What makes you think I don’t have other things to do when I get back?”, but I saw the chink in the brick wall and pressed on into the home stretch. “Look, at least let me demo up the songs. You can listen to them when you get back, and see what you think.”

  Of course I had no idea how I was going to accomplish this. In order to make the demos, I first had to compose the songs in question. Oh well — one thing at a rime.

  Frank was starting to get very tired. “We’11 see,” he ventured, and I jumped up and threw my arms around him. “Oh boy! Great!” I yelled. He shook his head and started to put up a warning hand, but I stopped him. “I ought to let you get back to what you’re doing, “I said selflessly, looking heavenward. “I know you’ve got to get packed and everything, and, uh, I guess I ought to be doing the same. “I really was sad to be leaving the basement; Frank must have seen that emotion on my face, because he put his arm around me and let me sit down in his lap. After that, neither of us thought about the album project again for quite a while.

  Statement of Earnings

  I’d been too busy working on “Statement of Earnings” to look for a job or a place to stay, but fortunately Ruth and Ian Underwood (probably with a little nudging from Frank) graciously agreed to let me crash at their place with the usual half-hearted caveat that it was “just until I could find something permanent". Right...

  The scene at their house in North Hollywood (it was across the street from the house where Nathanael West had been living when he and his wife were killed in a car accident in Mexico — on December 21, 1940, Frank’s birthday) was pleasant and, under the circumstances, fairly normal. Ian spent his days fooling with synthesizers; he was getting a leg up in the film and TV scoring world. Ruth was a classically-trained percussionist who had made an appearance on the early Mothers album “Uncle Meat” as well as in 200 Motels. At that point, she was in career limbo, although a year or so later she would be back working with Frank, and would go on to become one of his most well-known sidepersons.

  Ruth and I sometimes sipped Constant Comment (or at least she did; I had my own private stash of Medaglia d’Oro) and talked “girl talk,” a new pastime for me. However, our chats encompassed a rather different universe than the term might suggest — we were more likely to be discussing Harry Breuer or the logistics of constructing a percussion system that operated two timpani, three gongs, and a row of temple blocks with one beater, as we were to be gossiping about how lousy X. looked in a bikini or who was messing around with whom. (We did gossip, of course, but it was a guilty pleasure for both of us; we had to fight off the nagging feeling that we should somehow have been bigger than that.) We were both highly verbal, and for some reason we tended to sound like six or eight people rather than two when we had these little chats; multiple personalities, maybe. We agreed that Frank was mighty lucky he’d never had to cope with having both of us in the band at the same rime; it would have driven him completely around the bend.

  Ruth and I also had something else in common, unfortunately for her — we loved Frank’s music and we both knew it firsthand. At that point, though, both she and Ian were going through a phase of trying to break free of the noxious Zappa influence and get on with their lives. I was probably the worst roommate the two of them could have had right then. I was forbidden to utter That Name in the house; if I had to say it, I was obliged to go out in the backyard, away from the windows, and mumble it under my breath. Eventually I would be able to understand extremely well what they were going through, but that wouldn’t be for a couple more years; as it was, I sadistically enjoyed teasing them by referring to Frank in Lovecraftian terms as “He Who Shall Remain Nameless” and by talking about him in elaborately periphrastic third person. Maybe I wasn’t being a considerate guest, but I couldn’t help it (not that that excused my conduct).

  Ruth and Ian, like many others in that bygone era, were vegetarians. They were also very hospitable hosts, and always set a place for me at the table. My idea of a balanced meal, meanwhile, was (and still is ) a couple of double chili cheeseburgers. (Frank had once drawn a little caricature of me with a burger in each hand: a balanced meal.) One day at breakfast (I didn’t mind breakfast; after all, cercal is cereal, whether it’s Sugar Pops and Golden Creme slightly outdated half and half, or certified Vermont-grown triple organic granola ‘n’ genuine positively non-dairy soy fiber whitener), Ruth announced that for dinner that very night I was going to have the chance of a lifetime to attain nutritive and culinary nirvana (and here I’d always thought those two things were mutually exclusive). She would be spending all day toiling in the kitchen to produce (timpani roll, please) SOYBEAN STEW, and the pleasure of my company was definitely requested at dinner this evening.

  I quietly went out and grabbed a burger and fries for lunch so I could maintain my decorum at the dinner table. But when the grand moment came, I realized I was still going to have to perform. All eyes were on me as the steaming bowl of lumpy brown semisolids was ceremoniously placed before me. Ruth handed me a spoon. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and plunged the spoon into the muck. It resisted slightly, making a muffled sucking sound. I scraped some of the more solid part onto the tip of the spoon, raised it, forced it between my lips, and swallowed it. (You’ve had worse things in your mouth, for Chrissakes, I remonstrated internally.)

  “Well, what do you think?” Ruth demanded.

  “OK, OK!” I spluttered, spraying khaki goo halfway across the table. “I promise I’ll never mention (urp!) That Name again as long as I’m here — honest to God!”

  Soybean stew never again reared its organic head while I was there. That Name was equally conspicuous in its absence from my conversation, even parenthetically.

  Meanwhile, I was taking my demo seriously, whatever opinion Frank might have had of the whole business. I sat down at Ian’s Mason and Hamlin grand and went into mass production. Within a week I had eight songs finished, in the form of chord charts and lyrics. Then I tortuously recorded them on a purloined Akai stereo quarter-track tape recorder at 7 l/2 i.p.s., laying down one instrumental or vocal part at a time and subsequently ‘ping-ponging’ the aggregation of tracks back onto one channel, until I had all the parts accounted for. It didn’t really sound too bad, considering the primitive technology I was forced to utilize.

  Ian and Ruth Underwood

  There were three vocal numbers, and five instrumentals, I performed all the vocals and played most of the instruments, with a couple of exceptions: an improvised synthesizer / musique concrete (screwdriver and metal stool) section by Don Preston on an instrumental called “Moto Guzzi” , and a space-jazz Fender Rhodes piano accompaniment by my old high school sidekick Dave Benoit on a vocal selection called “Heavy Lip Action” (the concept of the song had come to me while witnessing the multiplicity of labial torments stoically endured by Earle Dumler, the Wazoo’s oboe, English horn, and sarrusophone player).

  At this point in his career still a struggling lounge lizard, Dave was trying to compose music for ‘real’ instruments, and when he heard about my religious experience with “Statement of Earnings,�
�� he’d started showing up at Wazoo rehearsals, interrogating the musicians and generally making his presence known. After a couple of these appearances, Frank took me aside and asked me who he was, whereupon Dave waltzed over, stuck out his hand, and intoned, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Zappa — I’m David Benoit, the composer.” Frank looked over at me; I rolled my eyes, as if to say This wasn’t my idea, honest. “Well, let’s hear if, then,” said Frank resignedly. “Pass out the parts.” It turned out to be a “Suite for Electric Piano and Acoustic Orchestra” in three — count ’em, three — movements. Guess who the Horrorwitz in question was? He made me conduct while he walloped the (plastic) ivories; he’d just happened to bring along his own Fender Rhodes piano. Frank woke up about halfway through the middle Larghetto non troppo mortuis in extremis, looked at the clock, and coughed. “Thank you veddy much, Mr. Composer,” he said, warningly. Yes, Dave definitely owed me a favor.

  As far as the actual album was concerned, I intended some of the songs to have guest vocalists; one of the vocals, called “Ruin,” was a mutant blues number designed to be apocalyptically howled by Captain Beefheart, if we could somehow lure him down from the hippie hamlet of Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he was living in colorful poverty; and another was a duet for myself and Frank, sort of a surreal doo-wop tune with pseudo-Stravinsky vocal harmonies. Of course, I had no intention of playing any of the guitar solos on this little biscuit. That would have been schlepping anthracite to Newcastle, under the circumstances. On one of the instrumentals, I’d planned to sucker Frank into actually playing Western swing without him being aware of it; I’d taken the structure of “Steel Guitar Rag” (which itself was based on standard blues changes anyway) and perverted the voicings until Leon McAuliffe’s mother wouldn’t have recognized them, thrown in some ‘tuplet sforzandos on the offbeats (always lots of fun when you’re in cut time), and voila! Mutant guitar strangler’s delight! (The title of the opus was “Chicken Fried Sex".) Frank wouldn’t know what hit him. Hell, if he could take ‘50s doo-wop and subject it to Dr. Ztrkon’s Secret Formula on “Ruben and the Jets,” I could do the same thing with ‘40s hayseed-hipster music on my record.