Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  No compromise could be reached on Frank's intention to include a libretto of the album's lyrics. On that, MGM were not to be moved; customers could listen to the 'naughty' words but they couldn't see them in print. 'Brown Shoes' in particular posed them many problems: in a bizarre list of suggested changes, 'I'd like to make her do her nasty on the White House lawn' would have become 'I'd like to make her do the crossword puzzle on the back of TV Guide'. To paraphrase the well-known saw: 'when truth and euphemism exist, print the euphemism'.

  In the end, Frank Zappa Music printed the libretto and the inner sleeve directed those interested in receiving one to send their money to 'The Mothers Idea Fund'.

  Nigel Leigh asked Frank, "Did the record company by that time have any idea of re-packaging you into something more commercial?"

  "Oh, I don't think they ever thought for a minute that that could be successfully accomplished. I think that their attitude was that they were involved in a contract which had a certain number of years to run and they were obliged to put out a certain amount of product. And they were just going to hold their noses and go through with it."7

  Nor was the meddling at an end. On March 1, 1967, Freak Out! was issued in England as a single album. Curiously enough, the tracks omitted were not the extended strangeness of the second album but three of the pastiche pop songs, 'How Could I Be Such A Fool?', 'Any Way The Wind Blows' and 'Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder'. A press release was issued by EMI the day before, with the impenetrable headline, "The Mothers' Mind-Manifesting Music". The single page began, "A lot of interest has been aroused lately over the 'Freak Out' form of music" and went on to quote Frank's definition of 'freaking out'. It concluded, "Their musical style is a mixture of solid rock'n'roll and weird noises except the last two tracks on side two, 'Help I'm A Rock' and 'The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet' which have paved the way for a whole new concept in popular music."

  The press release was written by Nick Massey, who went on to become an independent publicist with clients that included Tom Jones, Rod Stewart, the Moody Blues, Bucks Fizz and Bill Wyman. Twenty-three years later, having adopted the expensive lifestyle of the people he represented, he committed suicide in a hired Daimler while facing investigation for embezzling KA Publicity, the PR company he shared with Keith Altham. "I was thrilled to bits for him when he died," his first wife said. "In the end he got what he wanted. If one of his artists had got so much publicity, it would have been unbelievable."8

  PIGS AND REPUGNANT

  In the Mothers' absence, the LA authorities had clamped down on the clubs on the Strip and discouraged owners of larger venues from staging 'freak' events, be they 'in', 'on' or 'out'. Work had temporarily dried up for many bands and the Mothers had never averaged more than a couple of gigs a week. Apart from the Lindy Opera House, their only other notable gigs were two weekends at the Fillmore, February 17-19, with Blues Project and Canned Heat, and March 3-5, with Otis Rush and Morning Glory. "We were never that popular in Los Angeles," Frank told Nigel Leigh. "In fact, if we hadn't left, we never would have gone anywhere. We would have just evaporated after the first album."9

  Lucky then that the success of their Balloon Farm residency led to an Easter weekend booking at the Garrick Theater, a 300-seater on Bleecker Street in New York's Greenwich Village. The weather was terrible, freezing cold and driving snow, but there were queues around the block for their two shows a night. "We thought: 'Oh, this is it, this is the big one'," Frank told Kurt Loder. "We're in New York City, and there's lines around the block."10 As soon as their audiences went back to school, there were as few as three to five people attending each night.

  Even so, the theatre management were sufficiently encouraged by Easter's business to book the band for six nights a week for the rest of the summer. Their five-month tenure grossed $103,000, which, after deductions for overheads, left each man with about $200 a week. Not a lot, when you have to live in New York. When they first arrived, Frank and a pregnant Gail lived at the Hotel Van Rensslaer on Eleventh Street. "It was dreadful," Gail told Drew Wheeler. "We were living in a horrible hotel, sharing it with very large cockroaches. I think I lived off grapefruit and Frank lived off peanut butter. And coffee — we made coffee from the bathtub because the water that came into the bathtub was so hot you could really scorch yourself. You did not need to boil it. It was frightening, instant coffee."11 After a while, they were able to rent a $200-a-month apartment at 180 Thompson Street, conveniently close to the Garrick.

  The engagement began on Wednesday, May 24, and was reviewed the following day in the New York Times by Dan Sullivan. "Their music is . . . more often than not, frankly hostile both in its headachy volume and in those lyrics that you can make out amid the roar ... As pure sound, though, some of this approaches genius. From an electrified kitchen [would that be a dangerous kitchen?] of percussion, saxes, guitars, flutes, etc., they produce a thick black sound shot through with odd treble sunbursts and pinwheels the exact aural equivalent of the nervous, ever-changing abstract projections flashing on the screen behind them."

  "The Mothers of Invention are seven young men of saturnine, malevolent and hairy aspect," wrote Jerry Tallmer in his 'Across The Footlights' column in the New York Post. "They . . . put on an air of having as much nonchalant contempt for their audiences as for society in general." He went on about "defecatory and expectorant humour, animus toward Ronald Reagan", "the chewing of turnips" and "an interestingly profane romance between a plastic doll and a common tropical fruit", but the music remained "brilliant verging on great".

  Diane Fisher wrote her review for The Village Voice, finding herself liking the music and noting that the band's "scandalously unrespectable appearance" couldn't disguise the fact that they were a generation older than their audience: "Their attitude hasn't much to do with age. It might be called surrealistic enlightened."

  Eric Clapton, in town with Cream to record Disraeli Gears, was an enthusiastic visitor: "The Mothers were at the Garrick Theater and there would be nobody in the audience — nobody! They were experimenting every night . . . Frank would come off and sit in the audience and talk to someone while the band played. It was madness! He took me home one night to his house and he made me play into a Revox and told me to play all the licks I knew . . . He was very manipulative and knew how to appeal to my ego and my vanity and I put everything on this tape. I think he just had files and files of tapes of people and I was in there somewhere."12

  Regular work, the first that the Mothers had had, improved their proficiency at playing Frank's progressively complicated songs. As Absolutely Free showed, he was developing material that reflected the quirkiness of speech patterns and their rhythms. Writing in Downbeat, Larry Kart noted, "In the pieces with lyrics the often elaborate rhythmic and melodic patterns are tied directly to the words (one beat and one note to each syllable, with few large melodic intervals). This effect carries over into the instrumental pieces, where the tight rhythmic-melodic motifs expand and contract as if they had a life of their own."13

  Speaking at the end of their first Garrick run, Frank explained, "The spoken word is differentiated from the sung word, in its rhythmic sense, as in poetry. But even normal speech patterns are beautiful in themselves. Because the way people talk, it doesn't make a shit what they're saying; in fact, most of the time what they're saying is really ugly. But when you think about the rhythm, or the way certain gas-station attendants might speak, you know, what they're saying is useless; but if you listen to it as a piece of music ... I like to simulate things like that."14

  Many things were simulated on the Garrick stage that summer. Many times, the shows were not concerts but events. At least two marriages were performed on stage. Members of the audience were co-opted into taking part in the mayhem, to perform songs with the group or take over their instruments, subject themselves to ritual humiliation with varieties of foodstuffs, both solid and liquid, or assist in whatever spontaneous or planned 'dada' happenings that evolved. "You could do any
thing," Frank admitted. "And because they were New Yorkers, they would at least consider it. You couldn't do that in Hollywood."15

  Doon Arbus and Valerie Wilmer reported on their visits to the Garrick. Arbus described the band: "Frank Zappa ambles on stage. He is wearing a purple, high-school cardigan, knit pants, and butterscotch-coloured shoes with pointy, turned-up toes. His face is made of planes and angles, like a house of cards, and is framed by a mantle of squiggly, black curls. He is like a wild, woodsy hermit, either very benign or very ferocious."16 The other Mothers each resembled a distinct character: Billy Mundi, "a baker from the French Revolution"; Roy Estrada looked "perplexed and determined, like a Polish anarchist"; Don Preston, "well-intentioned and vague, a Don Quixote before the windmill encounter"; Bunk Gardner exuded "the unruffled elegance of a riverboat gambler"; Jimmy Carl Black, "a Mexican bandido"; and Ray Collins, "a high-browed Viking".

  Zappa ignores the audience as he tunes his guitar and adjusts the amplifier controls. "His nonchalance is, of itself, a kind of frenzy.

  Finally he approaches the centre microphone and peers past the lights, scanning rows like a surveyor.

  " 'Hello, pigs.' A few people giggle briefly."17

  Wilmer described how the show began with a medley of classic, tacky pop songs such as 'My Boyfriend's Back' ("a rock'n'roll song which some of you may have gotten pregnant to"), 'Hanky Panky' and '96 Tears'. "'Soft and shitty, soft and shitty,' whispers Zappa into the mike, sobbing gently as he falls down on to one knee. 'Give it to 'em soft and shitty because Young America wants it that way and Young America doesn't know any better.' "18

  At that time, it didn't. "When we moved to New York," Frank later reminisced, "there was virtually no scene at all. There was no long-haired anything there. People looked at us like we were from Venus."19

  "Our market was middle-class Jewish boys from Long Island with hair that was just growing out. That's where the line (in 'Who Needs The Peace Corps') came from: 'Oh, my hair's getting good in the back'. You used to hear these kids coming in from Long Island with Little rags around their heads; that's an actual quote from one of them."20

  "In the middle of the show," Arbus went on, "Zappa introduces 'this strange little person in her mod clothes', who is called Uncle Meat. She is a very young, expressionless girl with silky hair, who sings, sometimes in duet with Ray. They stand with their arms around each other rubbing chests and looking tender and mournful. They even dance with each other, separated by a century of style. Uncle Meat also gazes through a kaleidoscope or rattles a hypnotic rhythm on the tambourine or parries Ray's carrot swordplay using a lettuce leaf for a shield."21

  Uncle Meat was actually the folk singer Essra Mohawk, who'd had a single released on Liberty, 'The Boy With The Way', under the name Jamie Carter. Just for good measure, her real name was Sandra Hurvitz, born on Long Island and a student at Philadelphia Community College before arriving in New York via California. As well as opening the act and becoming an auxiliary Mother, Mohawk performed with flautist Jeremy Steig & The Satyrs, who also opened at the Garrick for part of the Mothers' stay.

  "After a couple of months of it," Sandra told Bruce Pollock, "I said, 'Hey, I really don't want to be Uncle Meat,' and Frank said, 'I'm sorry, but I must insist you are.' And I said, 'Well, excuse me. Here I thought you were Frank Zappa, the wonderful musician, and now I find out you're God and you're going to tell me who I am.' So a few days went by and he said, 'OK, you don't have to be Uncle Meat. If you don't want to make money out of the name, I will.'"22 Despite that, she was the first artist to record for Frank's Bizarre Productions and her album, Sandy's Album Is Here At Last, was released on Verve the following year.

  Amongst the Mothers' more pointed satires were ragged versions of songs like 'Big Leg Emma', 'Call Any Vegetable', 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It', 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy', 'Status Back Baby' and 'America Drinks And Goes Home' and then the band would stretch out on an extended version of 'King Kong'. "The only part of the show that's planned is the building blocks," Frank told Jerry Hopkins, "certain items, the noises, the songs, the cues for the songs and noises. The sequence is the most important part of the show and it will tell you how to listen to the music. It's all controlled by signals."23

  The band would rehearse during the afternoons and that led to one of the most bizarre evenings of the whole engagement, the story of which Frank told many times but most fully to Frank Kofsky in August 1967. "A Marine was killed in the Village, remember? And there was a rumour that every Marine within shooting distance was coming down to beat up everybody they found with long hair. The week following that rumour, we're rehearsing in the theatre and in walk three full-dress Marines. So I said, 'Oh, hello there, why don't you come in and sit down.' I just went on with our rehearsal; we didn't pay any attention to them. When we were done, they said, 'We just bought your album and we really like it.' These kids, nineteen years old, stationed on the carrier Wasp at shore here, clean, you know? I said, 'Well I'm glad you do. Hey, listen, how would you guys like to work with us tonight?' They were really turned on. I said, 'Can you sing?' They said, 'Yeah.' 'What do you know?' 'Well, I know "Everybody Must Get Stoned" (Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 & 35') and "House Of The Rising Sun".' So we went across the street to have dinner; I ate and they practised their songs. Come back, we do this number. I said, 'Now look, there's one little thing I want you to do. When I give you the signal, I want all three of you guys to lunge for the microphone and start screaming, "Kill!"' So we played like that 'Archie' [Shepp] weirdness, with the dissonant chords and all that, and on cue they ran right to the mikes, started screaming 'Kill!' The audience just went they couldn't handle it. Then when it was over, they clapped. So I said to the audience, 'Thank you'; and then Ray says to the audience, 'Thank you'; and then when I pointed to the Marines to have them say, 'Thank you', the first one walks up to the mike and says: 'Eat the apple, fuck the corps.' And everybody went, 'Whew!' (The second man repeats the phrase.) Point to the third one; he goes up, he says, 'Hey, you know, I feel the same way as my other two buddies: eat the apple, fuck the corps. Some of us love our mothers more.'

  "Court-martial city, all right? So then, we took an intermission and they stuck around. I said, 'Do you guys know . . . ?' 'I don't care, man. They can only get you once.' All right, [we] go back on. I told Gail to get the doll. This is the first time we ever used the doll. We had this doll that somebody gave us, it was really shitty — big plastic doll. Bring it down and I say, 'Hey, ladies an' gennlemen, the guys are, uh, gonna sing 'Everybody Must Get Stoned'.' They go through all that shit and I says, 'Now, we're gonna have basic training. Uh, ladies an' gennlemen, this is a gook baby; and the Marines are going to mutilate it before your very eyes. Kill it!' Tossed it to them, they ripped the arms off, beat it up, stomped on it, and just completely tore it apart. After they're all done, the music got real quiet, the lights went down, and I held it by the hair and showed the audience all the damaged parts of the doll's body, pretending . . . There was one guy in the front row, a Negro cat just come back from Vietnam, was crying. It was awful and I ended the show there."24

  The conflict of emotions can be sensed, both that night and in the recounting; satisfaction at proving the inhumanity of war, the men who perpetrate it and those who train them; and the discomfort of realising that, for the sake of satire, a line has been overstepped, that the shock tactics have rebounded on their instigator, that the surreal and the real have somehow merged and engulfed everyone present. That, in the end, the portrayal was as savage and implacable as the deed. As Frank admitted, "It was an atrocity . . ."25 He'd evidently forgotten the strength of feeling evoked that night when he said later, "Music always is a commentary on society, and certainly the atrocities on stage are quite mild compared to those conducted on our behalf by our government."26

  Not every night produced such dramatic results but, after that, dolls and toy animals became an integral part of the act. "We had a system rigged with a wire running from the light booth at the bac
k of the theatre to the stage and the lighting guy would send stuff down the wire. First, maybe a spreadeagled doll. . . followed by a salami, that would ram the baby doll in the ass. Our big attraction was the soft giraffe. We had this big stuffed giraffe on stage, with a hose running up to a spot between the rear legs. Ray Collins would go up to the giraffe and massage it with a frog hand puppet. . . and then the giraffe's tail would stiffen and the first three rows of the audience would get sprayed with whipped cream shooting out of the hose. All with musical accompaniment, of course. It was the most popular feature of our show. People would request it all the time."27

  Because of this interest, Frank wanted to do some live recording. "We had a deal with Wally Heider who at that time had a recording truck in New York City," he told William Ruhlmann. "He had all this gear in a van and he needed a place to park his van. And I wanted to make a deal with him that we'd give him parking space for the van outside of (the Garrick). All he had to do was just turn the tape on every night. And we could have had it. Verve wouldn't do it."28

  FLOWER POWER SUCKS!

  When the band weren't rehearsing or performing, Frank was writing material for the next album. His first intention, as he told Frank Kofsky during August, was for the album to combine his songs with tapes of a Lenny Bruce performance and be called Our Man In Nirvana. "We have some material that's going into the next album about the concentration camps in California — you're seeing this before the world even knows what the tune is because I turned these out the other day."29