Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  I’d known Frank for almost five years, and on some level I understood that there was a single fact which could not be overlooked, rationalized, or otherwise swept under the carpet: Nobody owned him, and nobody ever could. In a way, I was glad I wasn’t married to him. His life was his work, and vice versa. He never socialized; when he was at home, as I’d seen, he crawled into the basement until such time as he needed to sleep, which he did for ten or twelve hours — then, back to the old workbench. Why, it was almost medieval. Then, after a few months of this creatively edifying but sociopathic basement-hunkering, it was Out on the Road, with all that that implied. Yessir — this is your life, Frank Zappa. In my more cynical moments I wondered how he’d wound up with two (later four) kids on that sort of schedule.

  Still, even though I knew the truth, accepting it was another matter entirely. Late one afternoon I stopped by a rehearsal, my first in a long while. Frank seemed glad to see me, and afterward we sat on the stage talking. The band had packed up and gone home, and as we chatted about this and that, the crew was busy shutting off the lights and sound equipment. Finally the last technician called “Good night", rolled down the door, and locked it behind him, leaving us alone in the empty rehearsal hall with a single worklight glowing dimly overhead.

  I began to be vaguely uneasy. Frank wasn’t making any move to get going, which wasn’t his usual order of business. I wondered if, or when, someone was supposed to pick him up. “Do you need a ride up the hill?” I asked. “Nope” he said, without elaboration. I noticed that his guitar case and briefcase were sitting next to his chair, ready to go.

  At this point it had been quite a while since we’d had a physical relationship, but with my guard down a little, I was ashamed to realize I was still an open circuit for his peculiar electricity; just sitting there hearing his voice was enough to make me keyed up and a little dangerous. He gave me a sideways glance, and there was a hint of that old twinkle in his eyes. I shivered a little, although outside the temperature was close to eighty.

  He didn’t say anything further. There was a bathroom to the right of the stage, in the corner near the front entrance. It took maybe 15 seconds to get down off the stage riser, walk to the bathroom, and lock the door. I think he went first; at least I hope so.

  I did stop seeing him not long after that, not because I wanted to, but because of, as they say, circumstances beyond my control.

  I had been doing more freelance writing for magazines and newspapers, and almost making a living at it. It was amusing telling people that I’d gotten fed up with being a poverty stricken musician and had decided to go into writing for a living instead.

  My livelihood put me in an awkward position with Frank. As he had become more and more well known, his mistrust of journalists had increased exponentially. Even though having the potential to write and sell articles on Frank Zappa was a lot like having money in the bans that I couldn’t touch, I didn’t want to do it, broke as I was. Nothing I had to say on the subject seemed important enough for me to contradict my indignant self-defense to Frank back in the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street — “this stuff is private, and it’s going to remain that way!”

  Then an editor I knew gave me an assignment to write a magazine piece; I can’t even remember what the subject was anymore. I was supposed to get brief humorous quotes from people of my choice about whatever-it-was. Obliviously, not thinking about the ramifications, I called Frank, told him what I was writing, and asked if he d like to comment on whatever-it-was. Maybe I was unconsciously trying to break loose from him. If so, I succeeded.

  He was in a foul mood that night. Not only did he insult me for daring to think I had the right to call him up and ask him a trivial and annoying question for publication in an idiotic article in a worthless magazine, but he launched into a rant in which he accused me of attempting to extort information out of him, put words in his mouth, and somehow subvert the American Way of free speech.

  All I could say was, “OK, Frank,” and hang up. I sat there shaking my head and wondering, “Why am I doing this to myself?” It felt even worse than it should have, because I suspected I should never have done it in the first place.

  The next day I wrote him a letter in which I told him I was sorry our friendship, or whatever it was, had to end this way, but he had made me feel worse than anyone had ever made me feel in my life before, and since I wouldn’t be able to trust him after that, it was pointless to keep up the pretense. I said I guess he didn’t care anymore, but he had been the most inspiring person I’d ever known, and that was why it hurt so much to see him diminish himself as well as me.

  I sent the letter by registered mail. Somewhere deep down inside I hoped we would reconcile, but deeper yet, I knew things had changed too much for that to be possible. I also knew he wasn’t likely to forgive me for what he would probably perceive as my treachery. I didn’t expect him to write me back an answer. I wondered vagtely if he might call, but I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t.

  In a week I got the return receipt back, signed. It was ironic but somehow absurdly appropriate that our relationship, which had begun with a letter from him to me, was now ending with a letter from me to him.

  My time with Frank Zappa was clearly over. He was wrong; rime wasn’t a constant, it was a one-shot deal: horribly compressed and foreshortened. Ironically, the more time that went by without my seeing him, the more I realized how true that was.

  Several months later I received a promotional copy of Frank’s new album, “One Size Fits All. “The cover featured a painting of the maroon sofa from the basement, floating in the heavens. On the back cover was an elaborate star map, full of in-jokes and private references to people Frank knew. I noticed that I was included, and I assumed that the artwork for the album had probably been done back before Frank and I went our separate ways, and he just hadn’t bothered to change it.

  I put the record on the turntable and gave it a spin. It was all familiar material, with the exception of a song called “Andy” on side two. That cut gave me a peculiar feeling the first time I played it -- its relentless rhythms made me a bit antsy. I went back and played it again while reading the lyrics, and I suddenly realized that the song was about me. The lyrics -- full of references to our relationship, sexual and emotional -- were Frank’s answer to my letter. Well, I reasoned, if he could use his composition “RDNZL” to titillate me, then why couldn’t he utilize this tune to castigate me? As fed up as I was with Frank, I couldn’t help noticing that there was a bitter sadness in the song, a sense of loss and anger. It was truly ironic: neither of us had ever been able to communicate our true feelings to one another, but this was probably the closest Frank ever got to telling me what he actually felt. Unfortunately, the old unanswered question “Something... anything?”, which had haunted our relationship right to the end, was likely to be the last word for us both.

  Goodnight,

  Boys and Girls

  After our final rift, I had to teach myself not to think about Frank. It was a discipline, and for what seemed like an eternity, it required a superhuman effort; I hadn’t realized just how much he had permeated my life and thinking until I had to make a clean break. I tried to be ruthlessly thorough — I threw away letters, tour itineraries, photos, anything with any sentimental value that might trigger a relapse. I even went so far as to unload my collection of albums, including the German copy of “Absolutely Free” Frank had brought back from a European tour for me, and refs and acetates for “The Grand Wazoo” and “Over-Nite Sensation.”

  Eventually, I kicked the habit. I no longer looked at situations the way he would have, or made little asides in his tone of voice (for a long while after my time with him I actually sounded like him — our voices and speech patterns were strangely similar to begin with, and when I was around him on a daily basis it didn’t take me long to lose my vocal identity entirely. I wasn’t the only one — practically everybody who worked for him sooner or later started imitating him). In short,
I grew up, moved on, and left that whole phase of my life where it belonged — in the past. In the immortal words of Guitar Slim — “well, I done got over it".

  It never occurred to me that all there had to be an outlet for all the intense emotions that had built up during my time with Frank. He had been such a powerful, all-pervasive influence on me that there wasn’t a single area of my life he hadn’t affected. You don’t amputate a vast part of your soul without having an emotional hemorrhage. For me, the fallout wouldn’t occur until Frank’s death some l5 years later, but that unfinished business would nearly finish me emotionally.

  In 1985 Lionel and I were working for the B’nai B’rith Messenger, Los Angeles’s oldest Jewish newspaper (hey, a job’s a job, right?), and one day a very intense young lady showed up at the office. She turned out to be a writer for a heavy metal magazine, and she also claimed to be a good pal of Frank’s. Frank had just testified before Congress about Tipper Gore and the Parents’ Music Resource Committee’s attempt to censor rock ‘n’ roll records with obligatory warning stickers, and this girl was apparently doing ‘deep background’ research work to help him fight the PMRC. She had dug up some rather incriminating xeroxes of position papers from a PMRC auxiliary group, stating that the Star of David was a Satanic symbol, and she figured the Messenger might be interested in an article showing that the PMRC’s policies weren’t just dangerous to headbangers and Joe Six-Pack, but to Jews as well.

  Lionel has always been resoundingly indifferent to rock ‘n’ roll (in fact, Frank had liked Lionel better than Lionel liked him, which I found both amusing and a little sad), but he decided to publish the PMRC/Menace to Judaism article anyway. He also spoke to Frank by phone to get a few quotes for a sidebar. Frank was quite friendly, and he extended an informal invitation that could have been construed to mean, “stop by and say hi sometime if you’re in the neighborhood.” I was glad that he didn’t seem to have held a grudge, but at that point, the last time I’d been in the vicinity of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland had been more than ten years ago...

  Around this time I saw Frank on CNN, testifying before Congress about the PMRC. He looked older, more crotchety and perverse than ever, and was dressed like an upscale cucina nuovo restauranteur: slick Armani suit and silk tie, sideburns starting to go gray, the old mad mane replaced by a short haircut, and his formerly dark, square goatee now speckled with silver and neatly manicured. However, when he started fulminating against the “Washington Wives,” I stood solemnly in front of the tube and gave him the Sicilian fist-up Va’Fanculo salute. The world was such an absurd place, and America the capital of all absurdity; in a cosmos based on poetic irrationality, he would have been President for Life, and the lyrics to our National Anthem would have been unprintable. He wouldn’t have had to wear that monkey suit anymore, either — although, knowing how contrary Citizen Honker could be, he probably liked it.

  In 1990 I was having dinner with a couple of friends, and they happened to mention that they’d heard Frank bad been diagnosed with prostate cancer. This news came as a shock to me, but it felt bit remote, like I was hearing about a distant acquaintance or a relative I hadn’t seen in years. Very few of my friends, even the closest ones, knew much about my relationship with Frank; it was so far back in my past that it wasn’t something I thought about anymore.

  During the next three years, I kept hearing reports about Frank’s health. Sometime in 1992, my friend Phil Stern, a photographer I’ve known for a long time, was called to do a photo shoot at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. A commercial was being filmed for an ecologically-minded utility company, and the spokesman they had selected was none other than Frank Zappa, that staunch friend of the environment. Phil’s a tough cookie; sometimes he gives the impression he never left Anzio beachhead (he was a member of the Darby’s Rangers unit during World War Il, and was famous for the countless photos he sent to Life magazine from the European front), and he’s been around Hollywood long enough not to be impressed by anyone or anything. A lifelong jazz fan, — he’s known for his trademark shots of Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, Joe Turner, and Ella Fitzgerald, among numerous others — Phil didn’t know anything about Frank Zappa, and was entirely prepared to leave it that way, but during a break in the shooting, Frank walked right up to him, put his hand out, and observed: “You’re the only guy on this set who knows what the fuck he’s doing.” Then he proceeded to compliment Phil on some of his photographs, with which he seemed to be familiar, Phil, needless to say, was charmed.

  When I looked at the photos of Frank which Phil took that day, they spoke eloquently of how his illness had taken its toll; his shoulder-length, formerly jet-black hair was more than half silver, and his face was crossed by delicate lines. His old earthiness was still apparent, but now it seemed tempered with a depth and complexity reminiscent of a portrait of a Renaissance philosopher: Dr. Zurkon had merged into Fulcanelli.

  Near the end of 1991, I read in the paper that Frank hadn’t been able to attend a four-day tribute concert of his music in New York on account of his failing health. At the event his daughter Moon had read a prepared statement to the press admitting that he had prostate cancer. Finally, on December 5, 1993, a fiend called to say she’d been listening to Howard Stern’s radio show, and Stern had announced that Frank had died the day before. He hadn’t quite made it to his fifty-third birthday, which would have been on the 21st.

  At first I couldn’t believe Frank was... dead. Maybe, like Mark Twain, his demise had been greatly exaggerated. How could this stalwart crank, who had survived false imprisonment, near-fatal assault and battery, and more than 25 years of ‘mystery meals’ in Holiday Inns around the globe, have been tripped up in the end by a mutinous gaggle of his own cells?

  The pain of his loss was so intense it was physical. Every confused, contradictory, unresolved emotion I’d ever felt toward him came welling up in me, until I felt I would choke to death. But the good things I remembered about Frank were infinitely more painful — the teasing warmth of his voice, the strange weather in his eyes, the way he’d looked that afternoon conducting “RDNZL” for an audience of one... I couldn’t bear to lose him twice like this.

  One bright, windy morning a couple of days later, I got on the freeway and drove sixty miles into the Mojave Desert, to Palmdale. Frank had spent his high school days a few miles farther north in Lancaster. I turned off Pearblossom Highway onto a dirt road, where there were no houses, and got out of the car. For half an hour or maybe longer, I stood there screaming until I was hoarse. It didn’t make me feel any better, but I had lost all sense of control. I couldn’t stop myself.

  Eventually I came to the realization that these emotions were primal enough to kill me, and I fumbled to find a constructive outlet for them. Not knowing what else to do, I began hesitantly writing about Frank Zappa the way I remembered him, as if that could somehow make him re-corporate. For me he’d often been as much an idea as a flesh-and-blood human being; maybe I could make him exist again through the written word, just as, conversely, his music had always seemed so physical to me.

  Here, some eight months later, is the result of my experiment. I don’t know if I have managed to capture that elusive “when”, but if I have brought back to life the Frank Zappa I knew fought with, learned from, and loved — and recaptured my time with him — then maybe Time is really just a construct after all.

  Selected Discography and Notes

  Watching Frank work in the studio could be painful; he’d start with a live recording that was breathtaking, then he’d begin to pick it apart and piddle with it and over-dub this and take out that, and before you knew it, he wound up with a result that was considerably less than the sum of its parts. Details were always his Achilles’ heel (The “Over-Nite Sensation” and “Apostrophe”’ albums are prime examples of this.) And yet (sez I), he still made some of the greatest records of all time, when he was able to stay out of his own way. In the following discography I have listed several listening suggest
ions for each chapter, with the more optional choices marked with an asterisk (*). All titles in this discography are in print on CD as of this writing, unless otherwise indicated.

  Chapter 1: Meet Mr. Honker

  FREAK OUT!

  “You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here”: This song really stuck with me for some reason, even though at the time the album was released (1966) I was eleven years old and had no idea about the Sunset Strip scene being satirized in the song. It’s still a great universally scathing condemnation of diehard hipsterism, even if some of the references are dated.

  “Trouble Comin’ Every Day”: Frank’s view of the Watts riots of 1965 is worth listening to today. If the 1965 references were updated slightly, the entire song could be about the Los Angeles riots of 1992. As he did with much of his material, he re-arranged and re-recorded this number more than once, but I still prefer the original version for its urban electric blues sound. When Frank says “Blow your harmonica, son” near the end, it’s positively surreal.

  * “Help, I’m a Rock”: Here’s the mumbling, fulminating, and percussion. Frank got better at this sort of thing as he went on, but it still has some funny moments, especially if you imagine scowling, eleven-year-old me in front of my record player, listening to this cut with the volume cranked and my bedroom door open. I’m sure Frank wrote “Help, I’m a Rock” with people like my mother in mind; he had a similar experience with his own mother the first time he ever listened to Varèse’s Ionisation on the family phonograph.

  HOT RATS

  Play the whole thing, and turn it all the way up. I still think “Hot Rats” is the best thing Frank ever recorded for several reasons, the most important being that he wasn’t working with an existing band; this was strictly a studio project, which enabled him to start with a blank canvas and create a sort of virtual audio reality, The droll, warm, pseudo-symphonic humor of “Peaches en Regalia” is a perfect musical reflection of a mood I saw Frank exhibit more than once, but which he never came close to capturing on any of his other recordings. (There’s a little of that same feeling in spots on the much later MAKE A JAZZ NOISE HERE CD, but enough of that.) “It Must Be a Camel” has breathtaking, sui generis harmonies and sections where the lead instruments (sax, electric violin, and guitar) are braided together so tightly that you literally can’t tell which is which. “Hot Rats” changed the way I thought about music forever, and it might very well do the same for you, if you’ve never heard it before. (If any of this fascinates you, try to get hold of the old vinyl version and listen to that as well; it’s considerably different than the CD, which was digitally ‘refurbished’ and has chunks edited out of each selection; the CD has also been entirely re-mixed, not always to its benefit.)