Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  Varese had written Ionisation in 1931 as the culmination of his attempts to rid his music of everything but rhythm and intensity. Born in Paris in 1883, he studied music under D'Indy and Widor and became a protege of Debussy and Richard Strauss. In 1915, he moved to New York where he set about expunging the diatonic music system from his writing, along with melody and harmony. In July 1921, he founded the International Composers' Guild. Part of its manifesto stated, "Dying is the privilege of the weary. The present-day composers refuse to die. They have realised the necessity of banding together and fighting for the right of the individual to secure a fair and free presentation of his work."

  In a burst of creative exploration, Varese wrote Offrandes (1921), Hyperprism (1922), Octandre (1923) and Integrates (1924). All of these works were scored for wind instruments and percussion, in line with his search for 'pure' notes played without the vibrato that could be applied to strings. Integrates, also on the album that Frank wanted to hear, used 14 musicians, of whom four were percussionists. From some of the 'events' within the score, it was to some extent a run-through for his next composition. Arcana was written between 1925 and 1927 and required a massive orchestra of 120 musicians, including 70 strings and eight percussionists playing 40 instruments.

  By contrast, Density 21.5 (1936), was written for solo flute; not just any flute but one made from platinum, a metal whose atomic density gave the work its title. This and Integrates were his last published compositions before Varese suffered a creative impasse that lasted 15 years. Because of his obsession with pure sound, Varese had taken an interest in such early electronic devices as the Theremin (featured on many Fifties science fiction film soundtracks and on the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations'), the Dynaphone and the Ondes Martenot (an integral part of Oliver Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony). But it wasn't until the development of taped electronic music in the early Fifties that Varese discerned the way out of his dilemma. He was emerging from this long period of stalled creativity when the young Frank Zappa took an interest in his music.

  As Frank tells it, he was staying at his friend Dave Franken's house in La Mesa, a San Diego suburb, when the pair decided to check out a sale of R&B singles at the local hi-fi store. On his way to pay for a couple of Joe Houston records, he glanced in an LP bin and saw what looked like a mad scientist with a shock of frizzy grey hair on an album cover. Closer inspection identified it as the very record for which he'd been searching, The Complete Works Of Edgard Varese, Volume 1. His pocket money came up well short of the $5.95 price tag but some impassioned bargaining and the fact that it had already been used as a demonstration record for the store's hi-fi equipment closed the deal.

  This was a pivotal moment, for the album was an important catalyst in his musical development. In Varese's music, percussion played an integral part in each composition and dissonance held sway. "The way I perceived the dissonance was, these chords are really mean. I like these chords. And the drums are playing loud in this music and you can hear the drums often in this music, which is something that you could not experience in other types of classical music.

  His parents had recently bought a Decca record player in a sale at Smokey Rogers' Music Store in El Cajon, along with two or three free 78s, one of which, 'The Little Shoemaker', became Mrs Zappa's favourite accompaniment to her ironing. "It had little triangular legs on the bottom, so that it would be raised off the table and the speaker was in the bottom and it had one of those five-pound arms. It was really an ugly piece of audio gear."20

  It had never run at 33VS rpm before the Varese album arrived in the household and it didn't take many plays for his parents to forbid him to play it in the living room. Thereafter, the machine vanished into his bedroom, where Ionisation was played several times a day. He gleaned what musical knowledge he could from the sleevenotes and tested friendship's fortitude by playing it to his high school classmates. "What I used to do," he told Paul Zollo, "was play them parts of the Varese album and then play them Lightnin' Slim things like 'My Starter Won't Work' or 'Have Your Way' or I'd play them some Howlin' Wolf. .. usually that would get rid of the girls and the ignorant boys and what was left over was somebody you could have a conversation with."21

  Rigorous as ever in pursuit of a subject that interested him, Frank set about understanding the mechanics of music. There were books to be read, such as H.A. Clarke's Counterpoint: Strict And Free. But with no formal training, he exercised his habitual scepticism over the rules of counterpoint and harmony. "I never studied counterpoint," he told Don Menn. "I could never understand it. I hated anything with rules, except for 12-tone, because it was so simple-minded. It was as simple-minded as the idea of getting a pen and some paper and some Higgins ink and just drawing some music."22

  One practical test was to find out what it was that made certain R.&B records appeal more than others. Playing the Jewels' 'Angel In My Life' to Mr Kavelman, the Mission Bay band instructor, he was told that its particular charm rested in the use of parallel fourths. Mr Kavelman also told him about 12-tone music, which led to Frank's subsequent interest in the composer Webern.

  For his fifteenth birthday, his mother proposed to give him $5 but Frank decided he'd rather call Varese long-distance in New York. He got through to the apartment at 118 Sullivan Street, only to be told by Varese's wife, Louise, that the great man was in Brussels working on what became Pokme Electronique. In The Real Frank Zappa Book, he noted that when he eventually spoke to Varese, the composer told him that he was working on a piece to be called Deserts. He wrote, "When you're 15 and living in the Mojave Desert, and you find out that the World's Greatest Composer (who also looks like a mad scientist) is working in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory on a song about your hometown (so to speak), you can get pretty excited."23

  In the interim, his interest in things that go bang! if you make them had not been entirely superseded, and it had gone out in a literal blaze of glory. He and a like-minded friend had filled a large glass jar with a combination of zinc, sulphur and stink-bomb powder. With the aid of a supply of paper cups and more willing hands, he proceeded to disrupt an Open House Night with a series of foul-smelling fires. The following day, he was summoned to the principal's office for a terse lecture from the fire officer and an ultimatum: two weeks suspension or a 2,000-word essay. So he took two weeks off and returned with a list of his R&B records by song title, artist and label and those that he expected to buy in the foreseeable future. "I laughed at them."24

  Further retribution was prevented when Mrs Zappa informed the probation officer (who just happened to be an Italian) that Mr Zappa was about to be transferred to Lancaster. This was a sprawling community at the northernmost limit of Los Angeles County, beyond the San Gabriel Mountains and alongside Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.

  VILLAGE OF THE SUN

  Lancaster was in Antelope Valley, dubbed in typical early Fifties hyperbole the 'New Empire of Urban and Industrial Progress in the Southland'. Before the arrival of the aerospace industry, Lancaster had been a small town principally devoted to the cultivation of alfalfa. As the town grew, its streets were laid out on a geometric grid, with the odd bend to keep drunk drivers alert. To this day, many outlying roads only exist as 'Avenue F-10' or 'G-14'. Downtown hides amongst the endless rows of anonymous streets. Dust from the Mojave makes Lancaster an arid, shabby town of pastel colours.

  It may have been a boomtown, as men like Francis came to work on data reduction for the missile projects at Edwards, but enervation was the local pastime. The Zappa family moved in at 45438 Third Street East, alongside the Antelope Valley Fair Grounds. A hundred yards further, the street petered out into scrubland. "I lived on a tract of little stucco houses," as Frank put it. "Okies dying in their yards. You know how you always have to pull up a Chevrolet and let it croak on your lawn."25

  "In a way I hated it while I was there, and in other ways I thought it was a really great place to be. It's not a glamorous desert, like Arizona. It's just desert, but that
's nice. It's kind of ascetic, which is not something you would imagine a 15or 16-year-old kid would be interested in."26

  He was enrolled at Antelope Valley Union High School, which occupied the north-east quadrant of the junction of Division Street and Lancaster Boulevard. "It was a pretty strange place. It was not a homogenised high school environment like you would see in movies of high school life of the time."27 There were 2,500 students, made up of the children of the alfalfa farmers and those from the Air Force base. "Anyone who came there to work on defence was an outcast. We felt like squatters."28

  As before, Frank only did well in subjects that interested him. Consequently identified as a 'problem' student, he was put into an art class where he created a 10-minute film with classical music soundtrack for which he hand-painted every frame. But opportunities for such self-expression were rare in a system that valued conformity at any price. For Frank, nonconformity was the price of lunch.

  "I used to look forward to lunchtime because there was a place down the street from the school that had really exceptional chilli," he told Nigel Leigh, "which was my favourite thing in the world to eat. I would have a bowl of chilli with crackers, a large bottle of RC cola and listen to the jukebox. That was my main interest in school. The couple that owned the chilli place, Opal and Chester, agreed to ask the man who serviced the jukebox to put in some of the song titles that I liked. Because I promised that I would dutifully keep pumping quarters into this thing so I could listen to them. So I had the opportunity to eat good chilli and listen to 'Three Hours Past Midnight' by Johnny 'Guitar' Watson for most of my junior and senior years."29

  "That's probably one of the most important musical statements I ever heard in my life," he said in 1988. "What Watson was doing was not just pentatonic scales," he told David Mead. "One of the things I admired about him was his tone, this wiry, kind of nasty, aggressive and penetrating tone, and another was the fact that the things that he would play would often come out as rhythmic outbursts over the constant beat of the accompaniment."30 This latter facet also recommended itself in the work of Eddie 'Guitar Slim' Jones, composer of 'The Things I Used To Do'.

  The day that I was due to talk to Frank, I'd bought a CD of that track and 25 of Jones' other Specialty recordings. It prompted me to ask, what it was about Slim that interested him. "Mostly the attitude but a little bit of the notes, too. Because the few solos that I heard on those Specialty recordings, it just seemed like he grabbed it, he got mad at it and he said, 'So there!' 'The Story Of My Life', it'd be nice to hear it without the scratches because, let me tell you, I played that song so many times, it was just dust by the time I stopped listening."

  When I showed him the CD, Frank's eyes lit up for the first time in our conversation. I left the house several hours later but the Guitar Slim CD stayed in its new home.

  Despite his 'difficult' status, Frank continued to grace the pages of the local press. "Versatile AVHS Student Is Winner Of State Competition" headlined the story of his success in a painting competition, sponsored by the California Federation of Women's Clubs, on the theme 'Symphony Of Living' with an abstract painting, Family Room. The article went on, "He is presently engaged in writing a book but his reply to a query as to whether painting or literature would be his chosen career was, 'Music'."31

  Ernest Tossi, vice-principal in charge of discipline, felt the need to build an uneasy alliance with the single-minded newcomer. "Frank was the forerunner of student militancy and the beatniks because he was wearing sideburns and a moustache," he said later, his words more simplistic than the hindsight that prompted them. "Frank was an independent thinker who couldn't accept the Establishment's set of rules." But, he added, "To make progress you've got to be creative. In my mind, if Frank chose to go academic to a university and get a PhD, he could. I saw his test scores and I know Frank has the talent of a genius."32

  Frank referred to Ernest Tossi as "my favourite confrontation with authority". They treated one another with wary respect, the schoolteacher urging the teenager to obey the rules, the teenager seeking to interpret them to his own advantage. He also listened to Mr Ballard, Antelope's music instructor and band director. William Ballard indulged Frank's experimental mind by letting him write music which the school band would attempt to play. "A high school orchestra in those days tuned up to a box which put out a tone," he told Andy Gill. "The B flat was used for tuning up the marching band and the orchestra tuned to the A. So I took the first violins and tuned them to the A, and took the second violins and tuned them to B flat, guaranteeing that whatever they played would be dissonant, no matter what was on the page."33

  Frank remained grateful to Ballard: "He saved me a lot of effort in later life just by letting me hear things like that. Of course, the other people in the orchestra thought I was out of my fucking mind."34 Back at home, the Zappa family couldn't afford a piano so Frank wrote with the aid of a xylarimba.

  "I had no outlet in music then to express my discontent. So my aggravation with the way things were festered throughout my high-school years," he told Dan Ouellette. "The only reason I got training as a musician was because the school needed a marching band at its football games." But cigarettes had already become part of his lifelong diet. "We had to sit in the freezing cold and wear these dorky maroon-and-grey uniforms and play every time our team scored a touchdown. So, during a break, I went under the bleachers for a smoke. I got caught and I was out of there. Not just for smoking but for smoking in uniform."35 Even so, Ballard and Tossi's names appear in the acknowledgements to Freak Out!, along with Frank's English teacher, Don Cerveris, of whom more later.

  Because of his 'unruly' status, Frank was given permission to take harmony classes in the neighbouring junior college. His teacher was Mr Russell, a jazz trumpeter in his spare time, who gave him Piston's Harmony to study. "I don't think he enjoyed harmony very much either, but that's what he was teaching."36 Walter Piston, who died in 1976, wrote a number of symphonies and books on musical theory and taught musicians such as Leonard Bernstein and Elliott Carter. All of which counted for Little with Frank.

  "I went through some of the exercises in there. And I was wondering why a person would really want to devote a lifetime to doing this, because after you complete it you'll sound like everybody else who used the same rules. So I learned enough of the basic stuff so I got the concept of what harmony was supposed to do, what voice leading was supposed to do, how melody was supposed to function in a harmonic climate, what rhythm was supposed to do. I learned all of that and then chucked the rest of it."37

  He was more intrigued by the work of Moravian composer Aloys Haba, one of the first to experiment with quarter tone intervals. Haba studied at the Universities of Prague, Vienna and Berlin, where his interest in birdsong and his country's folk music led him to write microtonal music for string quartets and small orchestras. Instruments, including harmonium, piano and trumpet, were made for him and he wrote a book propounding the use of third, fifth and twelfth tones. His most famous work was a microtonal opera, The Mother, last performed in Florence, Italy in 1964.

  Frank's constant flouting of the school authorities created friction at home. "I was also hearing it from my father who had a security clearance and he was saying, 'You must behave, otherwise I'll lose my clearance and therefore my job.' "38 Despite that, when Frank was put on suspension (which happened frequently), Francis would fight the school himself. "I got so goddamn sick and tired of going to see these guys," he said later, "that I in turn gave them hell and I talked the language which was very vernacular, so they could really understand what I was saying, so that they didn't care too much for Frank."39

  It's hard to think of Frank Zappa as a representative of any faction but to school authorities he was just another troublesome adolescent who regarded rebellion as a way of life. America was still reeling from 'reds under the bed' and the House Un-American Activities Committee; it was the era of The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without A Cause, of rock'n'roll and 'juvenile del
inquency'. As individuals and in gangs, teenagers fought authority and each other to find a different conformity from that which Senator McCarthy had pressed on their parents. "The impact of this poor, mentally ill, alcoholic son of a bitch and what he did to the United States, that naughty old Joe McCarthy ... I could never forgive that guy."40

  At high schools like Antelope Valley, there was social cachet to delinquency which accorded with Frank's own highly developed sense of nonconformity. While not exactly a loner, his varied interests and the single-minded way in which he pursued them, had already marked him out as something of an outsider with Little inclination for the gang mentality. The only group activity he wished to indulge in was playing music and that was just a part of his ongoing self-education. The second album he bought was a budget version of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring by The World-Wide Symphony Orchestra. To his way of thinking, there was no difference between Varese and Stravinsky and Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Slim, the Crows or the Robins. "To me it was all good music," he wrote later.41

  To feed his need for R&B, Frank worked lunchtimes and after school in the local record store, becoming the buyer and thereby upping the valley's awareness of groups like the Dells and the Rocking Brothers, as well as Guitar Slim, Little Richard and Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown. He also discovered that Gilbert's Dime Store sold used jukebox records for a few cents apiece and "it was just crawling with Excello releases".

  His interest in Varese still undiminished, Frank wrote to the composer while spending the summer of 1957 with his Aunt Mary in Baltimore, hoping for the opportunity of travelling to New York to visit him. A handwritten reply, dated July 12, 1957, read:

  Dear Mr Zappa,

  I am sorry not to be able to grant you your request. I am leaving for Europe next week and will begone until next spring. I am hoping however to see you on my return.