Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  "Another thing . . . the interior of the Freak Out! album made me vomit. The exterior packaging was pretty much under our control. That was all carefully planned merchandising there. At the time the packaging was being completed on that record I was in Hawaii. I didn't give it to an expert. The result was a really ugly piece of graphic art. Some of the worst reproduction work I have ever seen. The picture in the lower right-hand corner — it is a great panorama of all those people. They shrank it down and stuck it in a corner. I screamed all over the place."43

  As he railed against his record company, an auspicious gig was arranged at The Trip which underlined disparities within the youth movements of the East and West coasts. The Mothers, self-styled darlings of the LA 'freak' community, were to appear alongside Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured the Velvet Underground and Nico, darlings of the New York scene and yet another of Tom Wilson's MGM/Verve signings.

  The projected month-long engagement, beginning on May 3, brought together two of rock's great sneerers, Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. While Frank was able to confine his principal emotion to disdain, Reed appears to have broken out in full-blown hatred. He was quoted as saying that Zappa was the single most untalented person he'd ever met in his life. Apparently, their limited acquaintance convinced Reed that Frank was two-bit, pretentious and academic (now there's a put-down!). He was also incapable of playing rock'n'roll because he was a loser and that was why he dressed funny. Of course, the Velvets didn't dress funny and appearing all in black could in no way be construed as a posture. Frank barely strained a brain-cell with his reply from the stage: "These guys really suck."

  The Sheriff's Office closed the club after three days, helping to exacerbate the tension between young people and officialdom. But neither band was to escape, for they were jointly booked to appear on May 27-29 at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium. This would be the Mothers' first gig at the Fillmore but they'd played the city's Longshoreman's Hall the previous November on a gig promoted by the Family Dog.

  The first gigs at the Fillmore had been benefit nights for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who'd been busted in Lafayette Park for performing without a permit. The first benefit took place on November 6, 1965, the same night that the Mothers played the Longshoreman's Hall, at the Troupe's loft on Fifth and Howard. Such was the response that a larger venue had to be found. The Fillmore was located on Fillmore and Geary and in its time had seen artists like Duke Ellington, James Brown, Bobby Bland and the Temptations on its stage. Further benefits were held at the Fillmore on December 10 and January 14, 1966, with Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society and the Grateful Dead performing. The first gigs took place on the weekend of February 4—6, with Jefferson Airplane topping the bill. Thereafter, gigs took place every weekend; apart from two appearances by the Butterfield Blues Band, the Mothers and the Velvets were the first out-of-towners to perform there.

  The Velvets fell foul of promoter Bill Graham. "When we went to Frisco," Reed told Bruce Pollock, "Bill Graham was doing his Fillmore, and he had a light show, right? So we walked in and we saw a slide of the Buddha and we said, 'That's gotta go!' He hated us, said we were the lowest trash ever to hit Frisco."44 Graham exacted his revenge. Without warning, guitarist Sterling Morrison was ejected from the building. "So I'm freezing my ass off on the kerb feeling sorry for myself," he told Mat Snow, "and all these cars come sweeping up: it's Andy and all his creeps who'd been to some glamorous cocktail party to which they'd somehow neglected to invite Bill Graham." Nor did it stop there. "Right before we went on, [Graham] looks at us and says, 'You motherfuckers, I hope you bomb.'"45

  The Mothers returned to the Fillmore on June 24/25, sharing the bill with Lenny Bruce, one of Brace's last gigs. Peter Berg, a member of the Mime Troupe, was present: "I remember the horrified look on Graham's face when Lenny Bruce did that last pathetic performance, incredibly whacked out on amphetamine."46

  "It was the living death of a genius," Graham said in his autobiography, Bill Graham Presents. "Really, the Mothers saved the shows. It was really sad. He was a beaten soul and he was naked on stage. About six weeks later [August 3, 1966], he was dead."47

  In his 'On The Town' column for the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason was a little less melodramatic: "It was something of a tribute to him since the hall is not really the best site for his performances. He could not work effectively with the noisy rock dancers waiting for the music and his own fans were uncomfortable from the heat and the chairs." But then he turned on the music makers, dismissing their show with some perception. "The Mothers, the rock band which followed Bruce, and played for dancing, are Hollywood hippies full of contrivance, tricks and packaging; a kind of Sunset Boulevard version of the Fugs. They are really indoor Muscle Beach habitues whose idea of a hip lyric is to mention 'LSD' or 'pot' three times in eight bars."48

  4:

  FREAK OUT!

  Freak Out! was released at the beginning of July 1966. Reaction was understandably mixed, little of it uncommitted to an extreme point of view. Only Cash Box hedged its bets: "A powerful rock outing on which the Mothers of Invention live up to their name by using such instruments as finger cymbals, bobby pins & tweezers and guitarron . . . The album is colourfully packaged and contains extensive liner notes. 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy', 'Who Are The Brain Police?' and 'Motherly Love' are among the better tracks."1

  Others had more scope for invective: "A new 'singing group', the Mothers of Invention, have recently released their first album, entitled Friek Out." Was the misspelling deliberate? "They needn't have bothered," the outraged scribe continued. "With voices that should put an alley cat on a fence at midnight to shame, these 'mothers' have wasted two records and an album cover of indescribably (sic) poor taste recording 80 minutes of pure trash." There was more in the same vein before an anti-climactic conclusion: "This horror is obviously a satire of today's long-mopped singing groups, but it has failed. It is in a class by itself if it can be classified."2

  In the Los Angeles Times, Pete Johnson tempered his disdain with humour: "The Mothers of Invention, a talented but warped quintet, have fathered an album poetically titled Freak Out!, which could be the greatest stimulus to the aspirin industry since the income tax." Johnson concluded, "There are a few tunes which sound as if they might be semi-serious rock'n'roll, 'I Ain't Got No Heart' and 'How Could I Be Such A Fool?', for instance, but most of the tunes are very experimental and are hard on the eardrums and the patience."3

  Bob Levinson in the Herald Examiner wrote under the headline, 'Mothers Invent Sounds Worse Than Music'. He interviewed Frank, whom he likened to "an emaciated John Carradine", at a pavement table at Canters. "Our whole bag is outrage," Frank intoned. He'd tried to make the album as gross as possible: "Even when it's supposedly serious, the whole thing is a satire. It satirises all those groups that cut stuff that oozes. It's satirising every puker rock'n'roll group and all that teenage nonsense with oversimplified lyrics, ooh-wah, falsetto and mumbling business." Explaining how to 'freak out', Levinson concluded, "The Mothers do it on their records and, one infers, the delicatessen delegation on their rye bread. Those who obtain the album may do it by discarding the records and playing the cover."4

  Not only were reviewers dismissing Frank's sardonic humour, they were ignoring the intention it masked. "If you were to graphically analyse the different types of directions of all the songs in the Freak Out! album," he told Frank Kofksy, "there's a little something in there for everybody. At least one piece of material is slanted for every type of social orientation within our consumer group, which happens to be six to eighty. That whole Freak Out! album is to be as accessible as possible to the people who (want) to take the time to make it accessible."5

  More in keeping with the spirit of its creator's intentions was Lorraine Alterman's piece in the Los Angeles Free Press. The Freep had started life on May 23, 1964 as the Faire Free Press, when ex-New Yorker Art Kunkin sold his eight-page broadsheet at a Renaissance Pleasure Faire. Cannily,
he also included a Los Angeles Free Press logo so that he could turn the paper inside out after the fair was over. He'd worked on various Leftist and radical newspapers before setting up his own publication along the lines of New York's Village Voice. Some attributed the origins of the underground press to that organ but Underground Press Syndicate coordinator Tom Forcade averred, "That history began with the founding of the Los Angeles Free Press in 1964."6

  "I wanted a paper that would draw together all the diverse elements in the community," Kunkin said, "and that would be not only political, but cultural as well."7

  Two years later, Lorraine Alterman was the Freep 'Teen Writer', from her photograph a conventional soul but with a wry sense of humour, as her opening sentences in the July 15 edition show. "Mothers and fathers, you thought The Beatles were bad. You got up in arms about The Rolling Stones. Sonny & Cher made you cringe. Well, as the man said, you ain't seen nothing yet.

  "The Mothers of Invention are here with an album called Freak Out! (someone suggested it should have been called Flake Out). They come from Hollywood. Their clothes are dreadful and I dig mod clothes." She went on to mention the band's July 12 appearance on Robin Seymour's Swingin' Time: the show's talent coordinator, Art Cervi, confessed, "We've never had anyone on the show that brought anything near the controversy they caused. The switchboard was flooded with viewers either saying the Mothers were great or awful."8 Any readers who'd missed the band's appearance could watch the following week's edition of Dave Prince's Club 1270 on Saturday, July 23.

  The Alterman column also devoted several paragraphs to Frank's pronouncements. "We play the new free music," he declaimed, "music as absolutely free (another resonant phrase), unencumbered by American cultural suppression. We are systematically trying to do away with the creative roadblocks that our helpful American educational system has installed to make sure nothing creative leaks through to mass audiences."9 Unfortunately, the Freep didn't reach a mass audience either. Even so, large campaigns start with small battles and Frank made extensive use of the paper's pages in later issues, devoting whole sections to mostly negative critical reaction to the band, advertising upcoming gigs and vilifying their detractors.

  Immediately after appearing on Swingin' Time, the band went on a brief promotional tour set up by MGM/Verve. The first date was in Washington, DC, where they appeared on the Kerby Scott Dance Party on WDCA and went on to make a surprise appearance at Georgetown's Roundtable nightclub. Frank was interviewed by Ronnie Oberman of the Washington Star. After explaining how to 'freak out', the social make-up of Sunset Strip youth and their tribal dances, Frank made one of his earliest denouncements of drugs, already prevalent among the 'freak' fraternity. "I don't use any and I've never encouraged it," he said. "The same state of psychedelic happiness can be induced through dancing, listening to music, holding your breath and spinning around, and any number of the old, easy to perform and 100 per cent legal means all of which I endorse."10 He was far more pithy years later when asked by Kurt Loder what he thought of the groups that got stoned and claimed to play far-out music: "Well, basically, I saw assholes in action."11

  Next stop was Detroit and another television show, where the Mothers were expected to lip-sync their 'hit'. Frank used the opportunity to deliver what he later called, "Detroit's first whiff of home-made prime-time Dada."12 He also spoke to Reb Foster of the Detroit Free Press: "We consider ourselves therapeutic workers massaging the brains of people dancing to our music with the lyrics to our songs." The Mothers regarded most people as 'Plastics', people with no soul. "We get so tired of playing for these phoney people in blue Velour shirts and Poor Boy sweaters."13 Only a short time previously, the Mothers would have welcomed an audience of any kind. But the ponies didn't know that.

  The final stop was Dallas where they played live on yet another television teenage dance show. Frank's lasting memory of the occasion was the look on the innocent children's faces as they watched the contortions of the band's 'go-go boy' Carl Franzoni's awesome testicles struggling in the confinement of his ballet tights.

  BARKING PUMPKIN (1)

  Before he left Dallas, Frank rang Pamela and asked her to pick him up from the airport. She took a new friend along with her. While finishing off her schooling, Pamela worked evenings and weekends at the Whisky and had got to know one of the secretaries there. Adelaide Gail Sloatman had been born on the first day of 1945. Her father, a Navy scientist and nuclear physicist, was posted to London in 1959. Gail was placed in 'a severely Catholic all-girls school', which she left to work as a secretary at the Office of Naval Research and Development. It was the height of the Beatles era and she spent her nights clubbing. Her father was transferred back to America in 1965 and Gail lost her work permit. Returning to New York, she briefly attended the Fashion Institute of Technology before hitch-hiking to Los Angeles with her former London flatmate, Anya Buder.

  Once there, her previous lifestyle meant that she naturally gravitated towards the 'freak' community. "Anya and I didn't even bring a brassiere with us to California," she told Victoria Balfour. "I don't remember if we were the first, but I certainly remember bothering a lot of people."14 Joining the crowd that followed Vito and Carl Franzoni around, Gail became by her own admission, something of a groupie. "It was almost religious with the girls. They were the worshippers and those guys were like priests on the altar."15

  Nevertheless, that experience in no way prepared her for Frank Zappa. He and Pamela led something of a communal lifestyle at the Kirkwood apartment, where most things were shared amongst a floating population of musicians and groupies, including social diseases. At the time, Frank was playing host to a thriving crab colony. "He was infested, and so was his hair. He hadn't taken a bath for months. Or combed his hair. I think it was not so much rock'n'roll and not so much the road as it is that nobody was taking care of him."16

  The attraction when they first met at the airport was clearly mutual and immediate with reservations on Gail's part. "I thought he was probably one of the grubbiest creatures I'd ever seen," she told Drew Wheeler, "but he was compelling. He had a compelling glare. He had major magnetic charm, I would say."17

  In his autobiography, Frank refers to her as "a fascinating little vixen"; and from the photograph which is reproduced three times at the head of the page, Gail had eyes to die for. It's easy to believe it didn't take her long to find the 'real' Frank Zappa. In a short space of time, a deep bond was forged between the two, one that survived everything that they and the world outside could throw at it. In 1989, Frank had to admit, "It took a couple of minutes, but I fell (don't laugh) in love."18

  This reticence to reveal feelings and emotions was noticed by others. Ian Whitcomb, the English singer who had a 1965 hit with 'You Turn Me On', met Zappa the following year and found him "heavily intellectual, rather withdrawn, and curiously ambivalent about his family memories. He showed us some slides of suburban housewives in curlers with their pot-bellied men, which we were all supposed to laugh at. But then, accidentally, he threw some shots of his family taken in the Fifties onto the screen and he fell into a loving, nostalgic silence."19 Within a year, the Mothers would record 'Mom & Dad', asking the question, 'Ever take a minute just to show a real emotion?'

  The Kirkwood apartment had now become the centre of Frank's own troupe of followers. He'd moved in when the Mothers returned from their November San Francisco gig and almost immediately surrounded himself with band members and sundry visitors such as the members of Them and the Animals. The latter were in Los Angeles at the beginning of July 1966 to make their next album with Tom Wilson. Wilson invited Frank to participate but the group's enthusiastic drug consumption earned his displeasure.

  "I found out that not only were they not particularly original," he said later, "but were hung up in that R&B bag, which is deadening when you get little white boys trying to be little black boys, screaming the blues and being funky and all — that's shitty."20 No mention of the Soul Giants/Mothers stock-in-trade before their
recording contract, perhaps because it had only been a means to an end — or was it a case of "don't do as I do, do as I say"?

  Eric Burdon got his own back the following year; "Frank Zappa the Hider of song, says Eric" was the eye-catching title to a Record Mirror piece that detailed his reactions to America. The erstwhile gun collector reckoned he wanted to spread peace through music but Frank "excites violence as a reaction from the audience".21 In the end, Frank wrote the arrangements for 'All Night Long' and 'The Other Side Of This Life', for the Animals' American album, Animalism. Around this time, he also recorded a single with actor Burt Ward, who played Robin to Adam West's Batman in the television series; Frank wrote 'Boy Wonder I Love You' and arranged the B-side, 'Orange Colored Sky'.

  With Gail's arrival, things began to change. One consequence was an inevitable rift between Frank and Pamela Zarubica, even though theirs was not a sexual relationship. Her biggest grievance seems to have been the loss of intimate contact with a man she regarded as something of a guru. But Frank could be ruthlessly self-oriented and dealt summarily with anything or anyone that diverted him from his intended course. In 1974, he referred to the girl who had befriended and housed him in these terms: "So I procured the services of another girl named Pamela Zarubica who was hired to be the Suzy Creamcheese of the European tour. And so she maintained the reputation of being Suzy Creamcheese after 1967."22

  GUAMBO

  In Issue 105 of the Los Angeles Free Press the "Great Underground Arts Masked Ball and Orgy" (Guambo for short), given to celebrate the paper's second birthday, was advertised. It was set to take place between 9 pm and 2 am on Saturday, July 23 at the Aerospace Hall, 7660 Beverly Boulevard. Groups scheduled to appear were the Sound Machine, the Factory and the Mothers. Filmmakers were exhorted "Bring your own film and show it yourself."