Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  There were others like him who inhabited the periphery of the 'scene' and Pamela Zarubica was one of them. Drawn to the Strip from her home in Inglewood, she hung out at The Trip, trying to convince Phil Spector, already with most of his hits behind him, of her love. Disabused of her dreams in that direction, she befriended Frank at a time when he still had to pay admission to the club when he wasn't playing there.

  She first saw Frank at The Trip when he sat in one night with the Grass Roots, who would soon change their name to Love in order not to clash with the pop singles band created by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri. Pam nicknamed him Omar, since Frank was wearing a fur coat making him resemble Omar Sharif's character in the recently released film Doctor Zhiuago. She was also present at the Mothers' first gigs at the club. "They played 'Help I'm A Rock' for 20 minutes and everyone went 'Ugh'," she told David Walley. "I loved it."24

  With their similar views on the world, a friendship struck up between them. There was a practical side to their alliance as well. For a nominal fee, Pamela agreed to clean his wretched apartment, in return for which Frank became her mentor and moral guardian while using her Kirkwood Drive apartment as a staging post for his forays onto the Strip. They would sit in Canter's together: "I would stare at Phil Spector and he would look at all the girls but none of them would have anything to do with him 'cos he just wasn't getting any action."25

  That wasn't the action he was looking for. What he wanted most was a recording contract. That would legitimise his music, give him some standing amongst his peers but, more importantly, would open up a work circuit at present denied to the band, and put up their price. Herb Cohen justified his 15 per cent by dragging record producer Tom Wilson along to see them.

  The Mothers had recorded some demos at Original Sound Studios which had been sent to a number of record companies. Everyone turned them down; Clive Davis, then head of Columbia Records, declared that the band "had no commercial potential", a resonant phrase that went straight into the Zappa artillery. MGM didn't turn them down, they just never replied. But Herb Cohen read the music press and knew that Wilson had been hired by the company and was the man to impress.

  Wilson was a Harvard graduate with a degree in economics. As a producer at Columbia, he made Simon & Garfunkel's first album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, as well as Bob Dylan's Another Side Of Bob Dylan and Bringing It All Back Home. In June 1965, he produced the ground-breaking six-minute single, 'Like A Rolling Stone'. In November he accepted the post of East Coast Director of A&R with MGM/Verve and took the first opportunity to travel west to check out the developing music scene.

  HUNGRY FREAKS, DADDY

  Cohen tracked Wilson down at The Trip on an evening when the Mothers were filling in at the Whisky. By whatever means, he convinced the producer to walk the four blocks to see his band. "It was under duress," Frank said to me. "Herb Cohen dragged him away from a girl he had sitting on his lap." They arrived while the Mothers were giving 'The Watts Riot Song' an extended boogie workout with Henry Vestine on guitar. "He only stayed for a few minutes after which he came backstage, slapped me on the back and said, 'Wonderful — we're gonna make a record of you . . . goodbye.'"26

  "He must have walked away saying, 'Hey, a white rhythm and blues band,'" Frank told Jim Smith in 1974. '"We've got the Righteous Brothers, now we're getting the Mothers.' "27

  By this time, he and Henry Vestine had moved into a 'gingerbread' cottage on Formosa Avenue, just south of Sunset. It was one in a complex of four that fronted onto a central courtyard. Another was occupied by singer Victoria Winston, who'd attended the same high school as Phil Spector and dated fellow Teddy Bear Marshall Lieb. "At the time, the area was filled with musicians. Members of Steppenwolf lived across the street and there were country players down the block."28

  Winston befriended her new neighbour and found him "seriousminded, intelligent and focused. He knew where he wanted to go with his music. We spoke about composers like Edgar Varese, who we both idolised. He told me, 'Someday I'll get there. I'll be producing, writing and performing this sort of music'" In the few months that he lived there, Frank wrote several songs for Winston and her partner Curt Boettcher, who as Simon's Children had a contract with Columbia Records. "I liked what he was writing, I wanted to do something that had a political message or statement in it. But our producer didn't like the material, so we didn't record it."29

  It took another four months, until March 1966, for the Mothers' contract to be drawn up and the band to be paid a $2,500 advance. Henry Vestine left: "As our music got progressively stranger, Henry found he couldn't identify with what we were doing."30 Steve Mann and James Guercio (later producer of Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago) were temporary replacements who made way for Elliott Ingber. The band rehearsed on a Hollywood sound stage on Seward Street with an Akai tape recorder running. In his Mystery Disc notes accompanying 'Original Mothers Rehearsal', Frank reveals, "We were completely broke and the (Laurentide) finance company was coming after Jimmy Carl Black's drum set." The building was occupied by Tim Sullivan, the producer of Run Home Slow, who loaned the stage to Frank in lieu of the money still owed on the film score.

  Eventually, the day of the first session, at TT&G Studios on the corner of Sunset and Highland, arrived. As always, the band was starving and Frank had to hit on Jesse Kaye, MGM's tight-fisted accounts director, for ten dollars. Kaye was present to ensure that the 3-hour session didn't overrun. There were strict Musicians Union rules about session fees, which went to an overtime rate if the session exceeded its limit, and the number of songs that could be laid down in any one session. Having ingested ten dollars' worth of calories, the Mothers set about 'Anyway The Wind Blows'.

  Over the years, Zappa mythologised this day, implying that Tom Wilson knew nothing about the Mothers' music until they set about their second song, 'Who Are The Brain Police?'. He painted a picture of a disconcerted Wilson phoning New York in something of a panic. But in 1968 his memory was clearer: "He came back to town just before we were going to do our first recording session. We had a little chat in his room and that was when he first discovered that R&B wasn't all we played. Things started to change: we decided not to make a single, but an album instead."31

  Wilson and Frank entered into some sort of collusion; Frank talked of orchestrations, so Wilson was aware of his intentions and may only have been surprised by their scale. Far from panicking after two songs, Wilson "was so impressed that he got on the phone to New York — and as a result, I got more or less (an) unlimited budget to do this monstrosity."32 David Walley quotes Wilson: "Somehow I suggested we should do something big."33

  "The next day," Frank went on, "I had whipped up the arrangements for a 22-piece orchestra not just a straight orchestra but the Mothers plus 17 pieces . . . we all worked together. The editing took a long time, which really ran the cost up and Wilson was really sticking his neck out... he laid his job on the line by producing a whole double album."34

  The second disc of what became Freak Out! was devoted to longer, more impressionistic pieces than two-minute satires of teenage angst like 'Anyway The Wind Blows', 'Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder', 'I Ain't Got No Heart' or 'How Could I Be Such A Fool?' The budget became $21,000, a considerable investment in an unknown group, even when a proven hit producer like Tom Wilson says, "Trust me." MGM/Verve executives must have felt that trust usurped when they heard 'Trouble Comin' Every Day' (a reading of 'The Watts Riot Song'), 'Help I'm A Rock' and 'The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet', their confidence already undermined by the subversion of the first disc's 11 tracks.

  "All the songs on it were about something," Frank wrote in his 'real' book. "It wasn't as if we had a hit single and we needed to build some filler around it. Each tune had a function within an overall satirical concept."35 Many, like 'Any Way The Wind Blows', 'I Ain't Got No Heart' and 'I'm Not Satisfied', sprang from his own experiences and hovered between cynicism, anger and self-pity. There were evocations of doo-wop in 'Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulde
r', leering sleaze in 'Motherly Love' and bubblegum in 'Wowie Zowie', all delivered in vocal timbres that conveyed an imminent threat to the 'Great Society' that Frank was satirising. 'Wowie Zowie' was one of Pamela Zarubica's mordant pronouncements and she was credited as the inspiration for 'You Didn't Try To Call Me'.

  Frank threw down the 'freak' gauntlet with the first disc's opening track, 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy', written for Carl Franzoni but criticising the inadequate education system as well as 'the left-behinds of the Great Society', 'Who Are The Brain Police?', his first heavily coded attack on institutionalised religion, and 'You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here'. Unlike the songs that parodied lyrics and melodies of established pop fodder, music that in Frank's opinion conditioned and anaesthetised young record buyers, these three plus 'Trouble Comin' Every Day' (its full title only appearing on the record label) commented directly upon what he saw as the debased quality of life in contemporary America.

  If the MGM executives were expecting Frank's 'protest' song to contain the poetic imagery of Bob Dylan's stock-in-trade, 'Trouble Comin' Every Day' disabused them of the fantasy. The Watts riot is captured in stark images that evoke the violence committed by both the police and the mob. Then he turned his basilisk stare on the news media, 'Take your TV tube and eat it,' questioning the voyeurism of filming as 'another woman driver gets machinegunned from her seat' and concluding, 'Our country isn't free.' Nor was he afraid to bite the hand that was feeding him: "I shopped (the song) briefly all over Hollywood but no one would touch it," he wrote in the album notes, "... everybody worries so much about not getting any air play. My, my."

  'Help I'm A Rock' was in three movements; the first entitled 'Okay To Tap Dance', established the title chant; in the second, 'In Memoriam, Edgar Varese', Frank developed a monologue which began 'It's a drag being a rock', and progressed to 'Maybe if I passed my driving test, I could get a gig driving a bus and pick up some freaks in front of Ben Frank's' before a sudden butt-edit into the third movement, 'It Can't Happen Here', a disjointed a cappella chant enumerating 'freak outs' in various parts of America. At its end, Suzy Creamcheese is addressed; Frank's comment, 'We've been very interested in your (pause for lubricious swallow) development,' is countered with a firm 'Ferget it' delivered by Jeannie Vassoir.

  For the climax of the project, Frank asked for $500 worth of percussion equipment, 'all the freaks from Sunset Boulevard' and sundry name guests like Les McCann, Paul Butterfield and Kim Fowley for the late-night session booked at the end of a week's recording. Victoria Winston reckoned, "It was wall-to-wall people in there. From what I could see from the control room, it was a well-orchestrated freak-out. I was there for the whole album recording, day after day, and Frank was always organised. He always appeared to be in control."36 Kim Fowley was Featured on hypophone on the album sleeve, a double-edged comment that acknowledged Fowley's self-promotion and signalled disapproval. Decades later, Fowley returned the compliment: noting Frank's dry humour, he called him "a snob" and "vicious". "For all his alleged humanity, there was a 'chitlin'' streak in him. He liked to 'keep the niggers down' — other white jerks, screwballs he could exploit. Like people who contributed to the first Mothers album."37

  In its final state, 'The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet', while a notable achievement for its time, palled on repeated listening. Deliberately provocative in its formlessness, it allowed Vito's troupe, already parodied in 'Help I'm A Rock', to 'freak out' in the recording studio. At the time, the result had a decided effect on some of his contemporaries. As his contribution to Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing At Baxter's, drummer Spencer Dryden came up with an instrumental, 'A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly'. He admitted his debt to Frank Zappa: "Frank said that he hopes other bands will use his work as a point of departure to kill Ugly Radio. So do I."38

  Thirty years later, 'Magnet' sounds leaden; there's little impression of a hoard of celebrants cavorting in a confined space. And that may well have been down to Tom Wilson. In conversation with Frank in 1991, I commented that Wilson seemed to have been rather a passive element in the production. "On the contrary," he replied, "he was enthusiastic to the point that on the night that we recorded 'It Can't Happen Here' and Side Four, with all the screaming and waning and yowling and carrying on, he'd taken acid so that he could 'get into it' more. So, if you can imagine your producer on LSD, sitting in the control room giving the engineer instructions on what to turn up and turn down ... In mitigation," he added, "but we have to be appreciative of Tom. He's passed away now [after a heart attack in 1978] but he was visionary. He signed the Velvet Underground, he signed a number of other really obscure groups at that time. And we were just another of his obscure groups that he was producing."

  For his part, Wilson appreciated Frank's evident talent and regretted the inadequate means of portraying it: "Zappa's a painstaking craftsman, and in some ways it's a pity that the art of recording is not developed to the extent where you can really hear completely all the things he's doing because sometimes one guitar part is buried and he might have three different-sounding guitars overdubbed, all playing the same thing."39

  In all, the Mothers' first album took three weeks to complete at a time when most albums were made in three days if not in one. Faced with a huge production bill, MGM/Verve were expected to invest a significant amount in promotion. Fat chance.

  Two weeks after the Freak Out! tapes were finally edited and sequenced, Herb Cohen sent the band to work in Hawaii for most of April, where they could starve in more exotic climes. Subsisting on cigarettes and coffee, Frank devoted his time to writing. 'Call Any Vegetable' was one of the songs completed there in preparation for the next album.

  Returning to the mainland, they discovered that there was a problem with their name at MGM/Verve. "Some pinhead there had decided that this was a bad name for a group and that no radio station would ever play our records because the name was too risque." And, so the deathless cliche goes, of necessity they became the Mothers of Invention. "But naturally, the radio stations didn't play the music anyway, because it wasn't about the name of the band. It was what we were singing and the way the music sounded."40

  Pretentious or not, Freak Out! was intended as a statement. As rock music's first double album, it was bound to be regarded as significant or preposterous, depending on the age and outlook of the listener. The colour photographs on the outer sleeve used a 'solarisation' process to emphasise the implied threat of the band's name and the album title. Elliott Ingber looked almost cherubic alongside Frank's shaggy mane, moustache and 'imperial' beard that Pamela Zarubica likened to an inverted anchor. He also wore his 'Omar Sharif fur coat; the Egyptian actor would've had to be severely traumatised to look like Frank Zappa, 1966. Roy Estrada, Ray Collins and Jimmy Carl Black resembled lapsed beatniks rather than freaks.

  The photographs were taken in the courtyard of the 'gingerbread' cottages on Formosa and Victoria Winston assisted photographer Ray Leong. "We were dressing them for the shoot and we said, 'Oh, it would be nice if they were wearing necklaces.' Because they were all deciding what they were going to wear for the album cover. So I brought out a bunch of my necklaces and Ray Collins and Roy Estrada chose the ones they wanted to wear."41

  The world was introduced to Suzy Creamcheese on the back cover. Her letter, written by Frank, was composed of sentences designed to attract the album's potential 'freak' audience and repulse symbols of authority. "These Mothers is crazy," it began. More than the dadaist concept of Suzy Creamcheese herself, the letter seemed to have a profound impact on lonely 'individualists' in hick-towns and red-neck fortresses across America, who sent fan mail to the band. "We're getting letters from very strange places," Frank told Frank Kofsky. "These are really the cream of the weirdos of each town, and they're coming from all over. Some of them think just in terms of like, 'I feel funny because people think I'm strange.' And, 'Say that you like me, please, Mothers of Invention, so that I'll keep being strange and I'll stay alive in my small
town.'"42

  In contrast to the outer design's simplicity, the inner surfaces were packed with information; there were 179 names of people who had "contributed materially in many ways to make our music what it is", with Pamela Zarubica at the head of the list; Frank's sardonic notes to the individual tracks; 'biographical trivia' on the members of the band; sundry relevant quotes and a mini-manifesto, "What is 'Freaking Out'?", ending with an invitation to join the "United Mutations", a fan club in all but name.

  The manifesto encouraged like-minded 'freaks' to band together, giving them status by labelling those who disapproved as 'less perceptive individuals'. "The participants, already emancipated from our national social slavery, dressed in their most inspired apparel, realise as a group whatever potential they possess (or free expression." Rather than releasing them from the tyranny of being told what to think and how to behave, Zappa was merely issuing fresh instructions without delineating their consequences. He plainly doubted that they could apply the same intellectual rigour to their lives as he already did to his own. For several years during the Seventies, there was a graffito on a wall in London's Earls Court: "Do you do as you're told? Revolt!"

  The problems with MGM/Verve didn't end with their name. "They figured we were odd-ball," he told Jerry Hopkins. "One shot novelty a-go-go. But we weren't. We had to show them ways that they could make money on the product. From the beginning it was hard to convince them of what we were talking about.