Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  As soon as Frank was back from Europe and had had a few days to decompress, I called him and let him know the demo was ready. He sounded somewhat grouchy, but he told me to bring it over. Within a half hour of our phone conversation, I was sitting in the basement with him. He put on my tape and gave it his usual intent listen. Then he turned to me, folded his arms, and declaimed:

  “This stuff is so off the wall nobody’s going to get it in a million years. You’d be lucky if you sold ten copies of the thing.”

  I bowed my head humbly and thanked him, adding that, coming from him, I took it as a compliment.

  Next we started quibbling and wrangling with logistics and, worse, numbers. I wanted to get right to work on the album; in fact I immediately put in a call to Cal Schenkel, the artist who had done most of Frank’s album art, and asked him to start working on a design for my album cover. But Frank took the wind right out of my sails. “You’ve got things ass backward,” he grumbled. “I haven’t even figured out if I’m going to be able to produce if yet, and you’re thinking about the cover.” He then asked if I had any idea of what the budget for this vinyl extravaganza was likely to be. I told him I didn’t — wasn’t that his department?

  Poor Frank. Sighing and adjusting the visor of his imaginary green eyeshade, he proceeded to explain the facts of life to me: Albums cost money to produce — more than I probably realized. Even an El Cheapo production would run between fifteen and twenty thousand by the time you figured in the engineer’s salary, the cost of raw tape (at 30 i.p.s., it took a lot of tape to make a 40-or-so-minute album, what with all the, er, false starts and uh, worthless takes there were likely to be in, um, this case), incidental musicians, recording and mixdown time, payments to Schenkel for artwork, mastering and refs, pressing costs, etc., etc,. Now if my hypothetical album (I noticed he stressed the modifier ‘hypothetical’ very pointedly) were to sell, say, 5,000 copies ("I’m feeling very expansive tonight, ahem") at the profitability level of 75 cents apiece, it didn’t take Dr. Einstein to comprehend the algebra ad absurdum here;

  “You’re going to wind up owing the record company money,” he concluded.

  “But you’re the record company,” I said.

  Frank gave me a long-suffering look. “Glad you picked up on that,” he said wearily.

  Frank actually had some other things to do besides work on my big hit album. He had assembled a new band, and was starting to rehearse with it. Both Ruth and lan were in it — so much for the “He Who Shall Remain Nameless” stuff. It even had Jean-Luc Ponty playing violin, and George Duke on keyboards. I didn’t want to get sucked into the old black hole of living at rehearsals again, but gravity was my enemy. Ruth, who was an ex-New Yorker, didn’t drive. Since I had a car of sorts, and — let’s be honest about this, folks — time on my hands, I somehow got elected transportation captain. The new rehearsal facility was on Sunset Boulevard near Bronson Avenue in Hollywood, and on the way over the hill from the Valley, we’d stop off in Laurel Canyon and pick up Jeff Simmons. He had moved back to L.A. from Seattle and was playing bass in the group. Wed go chugging down Laurel Canyon Boulevard in my battered black ‘62 Fairlane (which was mostly held together with little orange decals that said “Wazoo,” and of course my “Captain Beefheart for President” bumper sticker). Ruth’s road case full of cymbals, gongs, hand percussion, and miscellaneous paraphernalia, crammed in beside her in the back seat and totally blocking my view out of the rear window, was so heavy it made the wobbly suspension sag even further; while up front Simmons, in shades, five o’clock shadow, and knitted cap, would be riding shotgun with his coffin case between his knees, occasionally rousing himself from his personal twilight to hurl highly random epithets out the window: “Hey, Itchy Dean!” , “Feature your hurt, or punt!”. Other motorists gave us a very wide berth, for some reason.

  The rehearsal space was a lot like a blimp hangar. It had probably started life as a sound stage 20 or 30 years earlier, but at some point in recent history it had been rehabilitated, and now it provided a reasonable facsimile of the performing conditions in a large nightclub or a small hall, minus only the kid on reds puking on your shoes from the first row. (The drinks were supplied by the liquor store a few doors down.) There was a long stage with a full complement of lighting and sound reinforcement gear, two-story-high, sliding load-in doors, and the best central air conditioning in town. In front was a warren of offices, the headquarters of Frank’s new record company, DiscReet. (Alarmed about his evidently declining morals, I had a little talk with him: first he’d been Bizarre, then Straight, and now he was downright DiscReet. Had he no shame? “Whaddaya think I am — some kind of dinosaur?” was his growled rejoinder.)

  Despite my strong misgivings, I soon had my work cut out for me. It was like the Grand Wazoo, only more so. When Frank wanted Ruth to pick up, say, a parade drum or a couple dozen pairs of Good Vibes mallets in time for the next rehearsal, off we’d go to Professional Drums on Vine Street — in my car. A steady procession of amps and anvil cases soon reduced my back seat to a puree of ravaged vinyl. Because I was a guitar player and familiar with Frank’s equipment, so to speak, there were courtesy trips to Guitar Center, or to the independent technicians who worked on his instruments. Once or twice I even got dragooned into going to the Players Motel, next to Local 47 of the Musicians’ Union on Vine, to pick up or deliver out-of-town musicians who were trying out for the band.

  Frank was collaborating on effects devices with a fellow named Bob Easton, an electronics wizard who ran a secret lab near Rampart and Temple. Easton, with the backing of people like Frank, had been attempting to put into production a number of intriguing ‘black boxes’, most of which went beyond the merely quixotic into the realm of the truly sonically demented. At rehearsal one day, I was promised a demonstration of the Electro-Wagnerian Emancipator, which theoretically was supposed to take a single note and transform it into a chord, the harmonic structure and timbre of which could be as complex and bewildering as the operator wished. Easton carried in a nondescript, medium-sized black crate with a row of knobs on the front, Frank plugged his guitar into it, there was 45 minutes worth of studious tweaking and twiddling — then horrid noises, frowns, and hushed conference back and forth — and the experiment was finally determined to be a failure. Frank eventually socked $40,000 into R&D on the Emancipator, but the appliance was never deemed publicly operable.

  Frank had been composing and accumulating a great deal of music, and when he had rehearsed the band sufficiently, he started recording them. I decided to keep him under close surveillance so that my big album project wouldn’t get shoved too far toward that dreaded ‘back burner’ from whence there was no return.

  Frank didn’t seem to have any objection to my sitting near his elbow in the control room, even if I was there as long as he was. There was bound to come a time when the last cigarette in the pack was gone, or when the mundane but vital subject of pizza, or cheeseburgers, reared its ugly head. Once in awhile he’d shoot me a look, as if to ask “Don’t you have anything better to be doing?.” The truth was, I couldn’t think of anything more exciting than being there watching him make an album. Since I’d never seen him operate in the studio, I found the experience immensely edifying, well worth the ‘tuition’ of all those trips to the liquor store or the fast-food emporium. In the recording studio, he really was Dr. Zurkon in his lab in Happy Valley, distilling the essence of that sound, mixing it with this other sound over here, spending eight or ten hours to capture 60 seconds of audio exactly the way he wanted it. His recording m.o. was identical with his sexual philosophy — obsessiveness, situationism, attention to detail, pushing the envelope until it mutated into — anything he felt like.

  In recording the album that was eventually called “Over-Nite Sensation,” he used several facilities- One of them, Whitney Studios, was in Glendale. By this time I was living in Silver Lake, in a one-bedroom flat in a crumbling, turn-of-the-century house. It was a 15-minute drive from Silver L
ake to Glendale, and there was a Mexican take-out stand right at the midpoint of the trip. They served the greasiest carnitas burritos this side of heaven. Now if they could just remember to leave out the fucking onions...

  At Whitney there was a fairly decent pipe organ. The studio was owned by the Mormon church, and maybe they were hoping that someday they d be able to rent it to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Instead, they got distinctly unholy clients like Frank Zappa. Frank had lots of fun with that organ. Once or twice I got on the thing and demonstrated some of its more amusing tricks to him. He wound up having George Duke record a frenetic solo on it during the song “Fifty-Fifty". As I may have stated earlier, Frank wasn’t much of a keyboard player. He looked upon two-handed pianists with a kind of incredulous awe. But no one was better equipped to appreciate the textural and symbolic properties of a big organ, no matter how many hands were on it.

  Frank, at the moment, didn’t have any full-time vocalists (he didn’t consider himself a vocalist, just a guy who made “mouth noises,” and low grade ones at that). For the album, he brought in a revolving array of hired lungs to assist him in the vocal department. I’m not sure where he found some of them. One chap was a total dipsomaniac, although Frank didn’t know it until it was apparently too late. I got my first inclination that there might be a problem when I showed up at the studio around one in the afternoon and found this character sharing a bottle of Pouilly Fuisse with Jean-Luc Ponty, the French violinist; Ponty took a few urbane sips from a Drxie cup — whereupon Mr. Dip upended the bottle and chugged the remainder in one swell floop!

  By the time Frank needed Mr. Dip to record his vocal track, there had been numerous surreptitious trips to the liquor store around the comer, and a fair amount of Courvoisier under the bridge. He vanished into the isolation booth, and you never heard such howling in your life. After the 20th and final take took a couple of wavering steps backward, put out an unsteady hand to stop himself, then passed out cold on the floor. Nonetheless, Frank evidently approved of Mr. Dip’s vocal qualities, because he later took Mr. Dip on tour — a very serious mistake, as he discovered. Before too long, Mr. Dip’s liquor tab in the various motel lounges had far exceeded his per diem and was reaching toward the National Deficit. Frank promptly gave him the sack, and not the dry sack, either. Like a lot of drunks, Mr. Dip actually had a certain psychotic charm when he was sober. He heard my demo and, by this time having been excused from Frank’s employ, wanted to put together a band with me. When I mentioned it to Frank, he strongly suggested that I give it serious thought and then just say “no” to Mr. Dip. “He’d end up costing you in the long run,” he said with a bitter little laugh, in the tone of one who knows.

  Another studio Frank used belonged to Ike and Tina Turner. This studio was right on the edge of L.A.’s African-American district, and the scene there was rather circuslike, with individuals in tribal regalia and fascinating hair wandering into the control room, pausing to listen, making picturesque comments, and then drifting back out again.

  Frank was working on a song called “Dirty Love,” a get-down shuffle with a funky clavinet vamp and biting guitar, The lyrics, sung by Frank, represented his sexual and emotional philosophy in, shall we say, the most basic of terms. I thought that what the tune needed was a down home kind of backup chorus — grunts, groans, the sound of sweat dripping down the walls. Almost jokingly, I told him I could work out some background vocal parts. I was a little surprised, but he let me overdub three backup vocal tracks.

  When he played them back with the rest of the song, it was obvious that, although my vocal arrangement was effective, my very white sounding voice just didn’t cut it. I sounded about as black and libidinous as Roberta Flack. As we were falling all over the control room laughing about it, Tina Turner came strolling in. She was short, well built, and good natured, Frank graciously offered her a chair (he was a hardcore R&B fan, and, at least to my eyes, seemed to have more than a superficial rapport with black musicians) and let her sit there and listen to the backup tracks too.

  “Ssshit, man” she pronounced suddenly,” I could do that blindfolded with a broomstick up my ass.” And she began to laugh wildly.

  “I ain’t got a broomstick, but I think there’s a rancid bandana around here someplace,” said Frank with a wink. He helped her out into the studio and put the headphones on her. Then he ran the tape of the song with the lead vocal foremost in the mix so she could get in sync with it.

  It only took her one pass to nail all my vocal harmonies, and another to lay down her first track. The other two followed in short order, grunts, groans, and all, Her three overdubbed parts somehow managed to sound like a whole gospel chorus in the throes of sanctified estrus. ("Pa-raise Jee-zus! Get down on yo’ knees, sister, and testify!”)

  In the control room, I looked over al Frank, grinned, and shrugged. He grinned back, then regained his composure and raced to adjust the furiously slapping VU meters on the board. A few years later, the former Mrs. Turner left her husband, struck out on her own, and became a household name singing Top 40 pop. A feature film was even made about her life and struggles. Whenever I heard her voice on the radio, I was reminded of how she’d recorded my backup vocals on “Dirty Love” — a sterling example of socio-musical incongruity if ever there was one.

  I reminded Frank about my album project so often that he finally agreed to cut a test track. He had finished “Over-Nite Sensation” and had a European tour coming up, so we had to work fast. Right away we ran into ‘creative differences’; he wanted to record a vocal, and I had my heart set on an instrumental, with him playing the guitar. I had written an elaborate instrumental called “Marimba Green,” with a marimba solo for Ruth Underwood, and a very long guitar solo. Since I’d finished it after making my original demo, all I had were the charts for it, nothing in recorded form. I brought the music to a rehearsal one day and gave it to Frank to check out, hoping it would impress him so much that he’d want to get right to work on recording it.

  The first thing he did when he got my charts was frown, pick up a pencil, and start to scribble on them. I had forgotten what a stickler for detail he was. He proofread steadily during the dead spots in the rehearsal, keeping an eagle eye especially out for rhythmic inaccuracies, and by the time rehearsal was over, there were dozens of tiny, precise, annoying corrections throughout my manuscript. Not one of them was superfluous. I still have that pencil-ridden manuscript stashed away, and every ten years or so I take it out, look at it, and wince. It keeps me humble.

  Frank’s choice for the back cover photo of my ‘imaginary album’. It featured a number of ‘secret clues’ and. in-jokes pertaining to our relationship -- I was wearing his socks, playing a Gibson 335 like the one that got burned at Montreux, posing in front of a Studebaker Hawk ("Billy the Mountain"), etc.

  We never did make the album. The more we tried to see eye to eye, the less we agreed. At some point I realized that Frank didn’t want to come right out and say ‘No’ to me, but he really didn’t want to go through with it. In retrospect, I suspect he was right. When Frank assumed the role of producer, he really took over; he didn’t work with something, or someone, as much as he worked on it, or them, and he generally wasn’t satisfied until he’d wrung the last ounce of audio verité out of the situation. For my part, I was idiosyncratic and inflexible — not a good combination. Who knows what mutant offspring our collaboration would have wrought? Maybe this ill-begotten child of Patsy Montana and Anton Webern would have crept up on one or both of us and murdered us in our sleep. I never found out; I decided to let Frank off the hook. Besides, in my fantasy my super-bitchen debut album was far more satisfying than it probably would have ever been on cold, hard vinyl. You especially oughta hear all those imaginary guitar solos!

  No Commercial Potential

  I spent most of 1973 with London as my base of operations, shopping around my demo tape to various British and European record companies. A couple of labels, catching a whiff of the Zappa aroma en
veloping the project, expressed an interest, and I got all excited — until my agent explained what was going on. The world economy was beginning to slump as a result of the Middle East oil embargo. At least one of the record labels in question was just minutes away from going out of business — the idea was for them to run up a big deficit by signing countless eminently unrecordable acts (like me ) with no intent of doing anything with them, and then declare bankruptcy, citing the negative cash flow of ‘unprofitable investments’. My youthful idealism, already a little pitted, was further corroded by this exposure to the Real World of Capitalism. Frank was right, as fucking always — my demo was phenomenally non-commercial. I didn’t write love songs, and I didn’t sing enough to be considered a girl artist by any self-respecting record company in the ‘70s. (Carly Simon was then the industry benchmark for female musical achievement.) Five instrumentals ??! My guitar playing just added insult to injury. It’s so depressing being 20 years ahead of your time.