Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  They practised at Studio Z for about a week before being turfed out by the developers. Armed with their original repertoire and a new name, Captain Glasspack & His Magic Mufflers, they prepared to take on the British Invasion that was then at its height. If you didn't sound like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, you didn't get hired. "We weren't going about it mat way. We'd play something weird and we'd get fired. I'd say, 'Hang on,' and we'd move to another go-go bar — the Red Flame in Pomona, the Shack in Fontana, the Tom Cat in Torrence ... It was a strange time. We even got thrown out of after-hours jam sessions."39

  The problem was a simple one: if a band didn't play recognisable songs, the punters weren't happy; if the punters weren't happy, they didn't drink; if they didn't drink, the bar owners didn't make any money. Even when the band got a gig, Frank wasn't happy. "If you're the kind of musician who thinks it's a good idea to play for beer, it would've been heaven. A lot of these places would calculate your wages based on a certain number of dollars plus all the beer you can drink. Which meant that you were getting a lot of water in your diet, too. It was kind of a humiliating environment."40

  Eventually, they ended up back at the Broadside in Pomona. Frank decided it was time for the band to change its name again. "At the time, if you were a good musician, you were a motherfucker. And 'Mothers' was short for a collection of motherfuckers. And actually, it was kind of presumptuous to name the band that because we weren't that good musicians. But by bar band standards in the area, we were light years ahead of our competition. But in terms of real musicianship, I suppose we were right down there in the swamp."41

  It was May, the time when nuts are gathered and American children remember their mothers. And which day did Frank choose, quite by chance, to rename his musicians?

  3:

  PROJECT/OBJECT

  The symbolism of the date and the name change may not have been arbitrary as Frank has since indicated. "It just happened by sheer accident to be Mothers Day," he said in 1968, "although we weren't aware of it at the time. When you are nearly starving to death, you don't keep track of holidays.'1 Indeed. But, irrespective of his calorific intake, Frank had already begun to lay plans for the future and what decisions the prevailing circumstances allowed him to make were taken knowingly. The resonance of the date and the sleight-of-hand in denying it are typical of how he would later manipulate public perceptions of his career.

  In another 1968 interview, he admitted, "The Mothers project was carefully planned some 18 months before it actually got off the ground. I had been looking for the right people for a long time." While he'd been in advertising, he went on, he'd done some motivational research. He felt he'd identified a niche in the marketplace for a form of music of his own devising. "I composed a composite, gap-filling product to plug most of the gaps between so-called serious music and so-called popular music."2 Is this the man who renamed his band by "sheer accident" on the one day of the year that gave the new name significance?

  Six years later, his master plan was enumerated once again in a press kit. "Perhaps the most unique aspect of the Mothers' work is the conceptual continuity of the group's output macro-structure. The basic blueprints were executed in 1962—63. Preliminary experimentation in early and mid-1964. Construction of the project/object began in late 1964. The project/object contains plans and non-plans, also precisely calculated event-structures designed to accommodate the mechanics of fate and all bonus statistical improbabilities thereto."3

  The project/object was the means by which Zappa incorporated every aspect of his work into an undefined grand design. It meant that every record and performance, every musician and member of the audience, every critical reaction to each gig, record, video and interview was integrated into a unifiable whole. Beneath all this was the continuity of his compositions, which followed consistent themes and experiments that, in turn, were adapted and augmented by the influence of random events and circumstances chosen by him for being either apposite or contradictory.

  The press-kit was itself an event-structure that had as much to reveal about manipulation as it did about a co-ordinated programme of events. If at the start there was calculation, it was Zappa's ability to provoke reaction and turn it to his advantage. "Audiences just couldn't identify with or relate to the music, so we got into the habit of insulting them . . . and we accumulated a big reputation in that way. Nobody came to hear us play, they came in to see how much abuse they could take. We managed to get jobs on that basis but it didn't last very long because we'd eventually end up by abusing the owner of the club."4

  Hindsight jacked up the mythology but the reality of the time was that the Mothers starved for ten months before journeying west to try their luck in Hollywood. Frank took an apartment at 1819 Bellevue Avenue, back in Echo Park, which he described as "a grubby little place on the side of a hill". He got a job as a salesman in the singles department of Wallich's Music City on the corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood.

  Through Don Cerveris he'd met Mark Cheka, a middle-aged artist from New York who lived in West Hollywood at the time with a waitress from the Ash Grove, LA's premier folk club on Melrose Avenue. In the hope that Cheka's 'artistic' temperament might qualify him to become the Mothers' manager, Frank enticed him to the Broadside one night, a journey of some 50 miles, to assess their potential. Cheka was probably nonplussed by the band's appearance: Frank had encouraged the band to modify their attire to reflect their performance. "I felt you couldn't play the sort of music we were playing and look the way some of the guys did — with processed pompadours."5

  The pompadours were in fact a disguise that Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada adopted when they returned to their homes in Santa Ana in Orange County, "which is a bad place to be unless you belong to the John Birch Society".6 As well as intolerance in the suburbs, the British Invasion held sway in Hollywood clubs and bars and if you didn't have long hair, you weren't hired. Frank himself had a problem there too because, as he told Sally Kempton, "due to an unfortunate circumstance, all my hair had been cut off."7 Without long hair and a manager, the Mothers didn't stand much chance.

  TINSEL TOWN REBELLION

  Mark Cheka accepted the challenge but soon discovered that he, too, would need help. He turned to a friend, Herb Cohen, whose tenacity and taste for confrontation were ideal qualities for the task of representing Frank and the Mothers. Cohen had considerable experience in the entertainment business and much else besides. Originally from New York, where he was born in 1933, he joined the Merchant Marine at 17 as a deckhand, fireman and sometime union organiser. During a brief stint of Army service, he was posted to San Francisco, where he met and lived with folk singer Odetta. He got involved in the local folk scene, promoting gigs during the years that Senator McCarthy painted folk singers with a decidedly pink brush.

  At about the time that the Zappa family was moving to Lancaster, Herb Cohen was in Los Angeles, managing a club called the Purple Onion. Over the next two years he turned it into a folk club, thus antagonising the owner who wanted his investment to be a 'classy' collar-and-tie establishment. Borrowing money from Theodore Bikel, one of the singers he'd been booking into the Onion, in 1958 Cohen opened his own coffee-house/folk club, the Unicorn.

  There were a lot of earnest coffee-drinking Los Angeleans who found protest songs an aid to digestion and the folk circuit boomed. Herb Cohen took an interest in several other coffee-houses and also a night club, Cosmo's Alley, which later became Bido Lito's, and helped to launch Arthur Lee's group, Love. In 1959 Cohen was busted on an obscenity charge after booking comedian Lenny Bruce. He'd had frequent run-ins with the Hollywood police department, who were suspicious of 'un-American activities' like drinking alcohol in a coffee house. This time he beat the rap but soon had occasion to take an extended holiday in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

  While he was away, his attorney brother Martin (also known as Mutt) Cohen managed the Unicorn. When Herb returned in 1963, he sold up and moved back briefly to New York, where h
e picked up the management of the Modern Folk Quartet (including the photographer Henry Diltz) and Judy Henske. Before long, he moved his operations back to Los Angeles, where 'folk-rock' was emerging. The new style took its lead from the Byrds, young ex-folkies who'd graduated from groups such as the Limeliters and the New Christy Minstrels. Their first name, the Jet Set, came from leader Roger McGuinn's fascination with aeroplanes. But, taking their lead from The Beatles (as who didn't then?), they metamorphosed into the Byrds.

  They quickly became the group to see on the Sunset Strip, the winding, mile-long stretch of Sunset Boulevard between Doherty Drive in the west and La Cienaga Boulevard in the east. Their appearances at Ciro's, a rundown joint once the hang-out of film stars that now looked, in David Crosby's words, like "a Fifties Las Vegas showroom that had been done cheaply", and their hit version of Bob Dylan's 'Mr Tambourine Man', heralded folk-rock, the new trend in music.

  Accompanying the band to their gigs was a rag-tag army of dancers and 'freaks' led by beat artist Vito Paulekas and his dionysian friend, Carl Franzoni, whose perennial costume was black tights, leopard-skin leotards and a cape with an 'F' emblazoned on its back. Most took it to represent his surname but, as far as he was concerned, it identified him as 'Captain Fuck'. He and Vito indulged that particular pastime whenever possible, even though Vito, in his mid-50s, was married to Sue, an ex-cheerleader more than 30 years his junior. They had a young son named Godot, who died aged three and a half when he fell through a skylight. Sue then produced a daughter called, at least for a while, Groovee Nipple.

  Vito had "long straggly white hair," Zappa told Andy Gill, "used to wear tights all the time and part of a tablecloth taped over his chest. Sue used to wear basically just doily-type tablecloths and sandals." Their entourage he dubbed a "Bohemian bizarro group, and every night they'd go out dancing, and as soon as they arrived, they would make things happen, because they were dancing in a way that nobody had seen before."8

  Los Angeles freaks were different from the hippies congregating in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Hippies preached tolerance and love, fostered a herd instinct when it came to modes of dress and vocabulary, and turned begging (in the name of self-help) into a community service. Down in mercenary LA, where they emphasised the second word of 'show business', freaks were more individualistic and ego-driven, taking 'love' where they found it and equating 'tolerance' with 'every man for himself. Frank had his own ideas about the differences. "Hippies don't really care what they look like," he told Jerry Hopkins, "and the freaks care an awful lot. Their packaging and image construction is a very important part of their lifestyle."9 Expressed in those terms, it was obviously an environment for an entrepreneur like Frank Zappa to thrive — if he ever got the chance.

  TOO UGLY FOR SHOW BUSINESS

  Despite his plans and projects, Frank was starving. If his band had a reputation it was for being unemployable and, through that, it was hard to keep a stable personnel. The first addition to the band was folk singer/guitarist Alice Stuart, "who played guitar very well and she sang well." But — "she couldn't play 'Louie Louie', so I fired her."10 For her part, Stuart claimed that she left after three months because she'd grown tired of Frank "doing his Chicano rap". "I had an idea for combining certain modal influences into our basically country blues sound," he said, "... we were playing a lot of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf-type stuff around that time."11 That suited Stuart's replacement, Henry Vestine.

  Frank continued to write songs, most of which turned up on the Mothers' first three albums. Increasingly, they reflected his antipathy towards both his peers and the authorities opposed to them. Social unrest was rife in Los Angeles in 1965, in both the youth and black communities. In August of that year, racial tension in the Watts district finally provoked a riot that gained worldwide attention. At 1819 Bellevue, Frank wrote 'Trouble Every Day', initially referred to as 'The Watts Riot Song', along with 'Oh No, Bowtie Daddy' and 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy'.

  With his limited resources, he hung out whenever he could at Canter's, a delicatessen on Fairfax Avenue that had become what Frank later termed "The Top Freako Watering Hole and Social HQ." Denny Bruce put it more succinctly: "Canter's was the only place longhairs could go and not get the shit kicked out of them by the suburbanites."12 It was also where Lenny Bruce, Tim Hardin and Phil Spector held their respective courts. Vito's atelier was just three blocks away on North Laurel Avenue, a store/studio where Sue sold bric-a-brac and Vito taught clay sculpture on Tuesday nights and dancing on Thursdays. The Byrds used the basement as a rehearsal room and storage facility.

  It was around this time that Mark Cheka arranged for the Mothers to play at a party where they would be filmed as an example of musical outrage for Mondo Hollywood, an exploitation flick written, produced and directed by Carl Cohen (a coincidence?). Shot in the form of a semi-documentary, it featured Rudi Gernreich, designer of topless dresses, and Richard Alpert, sent down from Harvard for his LSD experiments, among a herd of hippies and wannabes.

  Love guitarist Bryan Maclean attended the party: "I stood near the band in rapture for the entire evening. I couldn't believe my eyes, I thought (Frank) was the greatest."13 Party Scene From Mondo Hollywood, on the Mystery Disc, captures the event at which "freaks and maniacs cavort licentiously". In his notes, Frank went on, "The equipment we are playing on was lent to us by Jim Guercio. Thanks again, Jim. In the background, listening to this spewage, was Herb Cohen."14

  Even though he didn't understand their music, Cohen liked what he heard: "They had enough things going on to make it obvious there was a viable commodity." He and Mark Cheka were acquainted and introductions were made. In subsequent meetings, Frank explained his aims and Cohen was impressed that here was a musician who actually could express himself. "Not only did he know what he was talking about," he said, "but he had a good background and was an excellent musician."15

  Zappa and Cohen may have recognised the manipulator in one another. Neither was distracted by the 'enthusiasm' that was so much a part of the 'freak' scene and both liked to confront authority. Years later, long after artist and management had parted company, the 'real' Frank Zappa noted, "Almost overnight we had jumped from starvation level to poverty level."16 When interviewed for BBC2's Late Show, he was asked how significant Cohen was to the original success of the band; he answered, "I would say that he was of major significance. He helped us get work."17

  One of Cohen's first moves was to get the band an audition at The Action on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was "kind of an entry-level establishment. Their clientele was prostitutes, underworld figures and television actors. There were some movie people too."18 Six months previously they'd been turned down by the management because their hair wasn't long enough. "It still wasn't very long, so we went in wearing purple shirts and black hats," Frank told Jerry Hopkins. "We looked like Mafia undertakers. The management of this establishment responded on a visceral level to this packaging and hired us for a four-week tour of duty."19

  Cohen's next move, to get the Mothers paid for appearing in Mondo Hollywood, was not so successful. Their sequence was deleted from the film. The next practical steps to stardom were bookings at the Whisky A Go Go, on the corner of Sunset and San Vicente, and The Trip, east on Sunset. "All the industrial types would spend their time at The Trip," Frank told me, "because that's where the 'better class of people' were." At The Trip, the Mothers got frequent requests for 'Help I'm A Rock' and 'Memories Of El Monte'; both songs contained talking passages and this encouraged listening rather than dancing. This was acceptable at The Trip but not good policy for playing the Whisky.

  The Whisky was the almost exclusive preserve of Johnny Rivers, whose 1964 debut album, Live At The Whisky A Go Go, yielded his number 2 hit, 'Memphis'. From time to time, Rivers would go off on tour and some lucky group got to fill in. When their turn arrived, Frank was disgusted to discover that their name was not advertised outside the club until they paid for a sign to be made. "The audience wasn't anythi
ng to brag about, they were just a bunch of drunk people in go-go boots. But the money was a lot better than the Broadside, because we were actually making union scale."20

  Elmer Valentine, owner of the Whisky and The Trip, insisted that bands played music for dancing. After all, that's why the 'A Go Go' was there. But Frank had other ideas. On one occasion, the group played a medley of 'Help I'm A Rock' and 'El Monte' for a solid hour and nobody danced. "Immediately after that we were selling pop bottles for cigarettes and bologna."21

  SUZY CREAMCHEESE

  Although Frank held himself somewhat aloof from the 'freak' community, he understood the importance of being associated with the movement. He hadn't failed to notice the 'folk legend' that Vito and his harem/troupe had already become. But wearing floralprint stage clothes, as he and the band began to do (audiences saw the flowers, he saw the irony), and inviting Vito to sanction his gigs was not enough. There must be a Mothers' mythology, a plot and cast of characters for impressionable minds to absorb and identify with.

  He cast his net with analytical skill for what was to be one of the first "bonus statistical improbabilities". The band had to blend in chameleon-like with its surroundings. "Now I didn't tell the guys what to wear; I merely suggested their mode of dress conform to what they were doing."22 They were still in the throes of changing from an R&B bar band into something a whole lot different. "The appearance of a group is linked to the music the same way an album cover is linked to the record. It gives a clue to what's inside. And the better the packaging, the more the person who picked up that package will enjoy it."23