Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  Interviewed for the 'Groupies' issue of Rolling Stone, the girls reckoned they'd approached 150 to 200 groups, although most times the band had chickened out, to be enthusiastically replaced by their roadies. The girls wore logo-ed T-shirts and toted their equipment around in a similarly emblazoned suitcase. "Eventually, I'd like to get other types of people," Cynthia told the magazine. "You know, have a whole museum of casts. Wouldn't that be nice? A whole room of pedestals and these things on them! I'd like to get a common labourer. I'd love to get the President. Maybe a Zulu chief, too."2

  This was the sort of social phenomenon that Frank loved. "It was the most fantastic thing I ever heard," he told R.S. "I appreciate what they're doing, both artistically and sociologically. I want to make one thing clear. The girls don't think this is the least bit creepy and neither do I. Pop stars are idolised the same way General Grant was. People put up statues to honour war heroes. The Plaster Casters do the same thing for pop stars. What they're doing is making statues of the essential part of the stars. It's the same motivation as making statues of Grant."3

  He encouraged Cynthia and Pamela to correspond and eventually Pamela flew to spend two weeks in Chicago, during which they compared notes on Noel Redding, who had flunked his cast but passed his 'fuction' test with Pam. Frank asked Cynthia to join the GTOs but she was fundamentally shy and preferred building alginate mountains (and foothills) in the privacy of hotel rooms to making records and cavorting on stage.

  The Mothers took off on another European tour during September and October. Frank flew into London on September 24 for a press conference. The Evening News thought him "the scruffiest pop singer around — blue jeans, brown shoes, long black hair knotted into a gipsy pony tail behind his head," clearly offended that he didn't sound as stupid as they thought he looked. The Evening Standard plainly wanted a fashion review: "First impressions of a close-up of Mr Zappa are brain-curdling. He's an amazingly thin man and when I saw him, he appeared to be wearing a kind of buttonless, cream liberty bodice, with long black sleeves, half-mast black bell-bottoms, pea-green wool socks and brilliantly shiny cow-brown brogues — a sort of out-of-office-hours look."4 Hidden within the piece was the news that the Mothers would be at the Festival Hall on October 25.

  His best coverage was in the Guardian, where Stacy Waddy gave Frank three columns to express his views on flower power, protest, and pop music. "I feel bad about the words sometimes. I enjoy writing the music more. Unfortunately, the level on which an artist communicates with the audience is still pretty much limited to the verbal. Instrumental music is a coming thing in pop, but for years if you didn't sing a song, you didn't make a record. I'm forced to write words to put on a piece of music in order to make it accessible for an audience. I'm not going to deny anything I've said in my songs, but my main interest is in composing music. If I wanted to be a lyricist, I'd write books."5

  Starting in Germany, the tour progressed through Denmark, Holland, France and Austria before finishing in London. The summer of 1968 had seen near-revolution in Paris and the students at the Berlin Sportpalast on October 16 pined for the barricades. Their leaders demanded Frank should show support for their cause by inciting the audience to set fire to a nearby Allied fuel dump. What followed was reported with Germanic precision in Der Abend the next day by Helmut Kopetzky, under the headline, "The Toys Are All Broken".

  "The first missile, something green, buzzed through the air at 20.40; for the moment unconcerned, the Mothers carried on removing sundry toys from a hatbox and symbolically destroying them. Then the first (rotten?) egg smashed to pieces on Zappa's yellow (Les Paul) guitar. The Mother Superior opined, 'You people act like pigs!' Battle lines were drawn: 'Evolution versus Revolution'.

  "At 12 minutes past nine the stage hangings were in tatters; 'Evolution' left the stage. There was a feeling of helplessness everywhere. Mothers manager (Dick) Barber, only outwardly calm himself, groaned, 'No, no this can't be happening.'

  "The forces of 'revolution' created havoc on stage and made it plain that worse would happen if the band didn't return. After telling the crowd that the band was there to play music, Frank said, 'Your situation in Berlin has got to be desperate for you to behave like this. You're behaving like Americans.'"

  Kopetzky continued, "The band, with damaged equipment, hammered out the 'Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh' chant of the stage occupiers, making it sound like the martial rhythm of a Nazi parade. Organiser (Fritz) Rau threw himself forlornly between the two camps, hoarse from imploring, 'Friends, let's talk.' But nothing came of it. The police, who up until then had stayed discreetly in the background, gave both friend and foe ten minutes to leave the battlefield. The evacuation took place without any clashes. Frank Zappa pondered: 'It was a very enlightening experience.' "6

  Footage of the gig appears in the Uncle Meat film; even without sound, the sense of menace is evident. Nevertheless, 'conceptual continuity' was observed; 'Holiday In Berlin' became Frank's ironic response. And he gave everyone in the band a medal, 'The Berlin Survival Award, 1968'.

  The Mothers arrived in London three days before their Festival Hall gig. For almost two months, Frank had spent his daylight hours in various hotel rooms, writing music. He'd had an idea for a playlet that would take up the first half of the London concert requiring the services of 14 members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It would be recorded for a possible "European Album" and filmed for inclusion in the ongoing Uncle Meat chronicles. In the event, just two excerpts found their way onto record; 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask' (which cocked a snook at Debussy's faun) and part of 'The Orange County Lumber Truck' appeared on 1970's Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Twenty sundry minutes made up the first side of the Mystery Disc in The Old Masters Box II; but it wasn't until the 1993 release of Ahead Of Their Time that those of us present could relive the evening.

  Frank's original title for what he'd written was 'Music For The Queen's Circus'. The initial piece for piano, clarinet and percussion would become 'This Town Is A Sealed Tuna Sandwich' in 200 Motels and ultimately a component of 'Bogus Pomp'. The play, directed through a bull-horn by Frank in plus fours, outsize jacket, dark glasses and beret, depicted the clash between the 'talented' members of the 'rocking teenage combo' (Ian, Bunk and Art) and Don Preston, who advocated macrobiotic food and the death of diatonic music.

  The subsequent mayhem included the BBC Symphony Orchestra members joining the 'talented' boys' 'band with a lot of discipline'; Jimmy Carl Black donning Hendrix fright-wig and Regency jacket to score some 'pussy' in the audience; and Roy Estrada as the Mexican Pope, in chain-mail, metal tits and bishop's mitre, distributing 'birth pills' from a bucket. We laughed a lot but Frank told Dick Lawson a year later that we'd "missed the whole point of it". Our lack of apparent appreciation was somehow connected with the fact that "that show cost us $5,000 just to get those musicians to record it, film it, get the costumes, make arrangements with the Hall itself to put on that kind of show. But I thought it was worth it."7

  The Daily Sketch didn't. "Having watched them at the Festival Hall the only 'invention' they seem to have developed is how to make boredom a paying proposition. The most extraordinary thing about their performance was that they were allowed to get away with it. Their leader, Frank Zappa, publicises himself as guitarist by appointment to the world. I'd put Eric Clapton against him any day."8 For what purpose?

  The band stayed on to appear on BBC2's Colour Me Pop, taking over the 25-minute show to play 'In The Sky' and an extended 'King Kong'. While the band played, the director and his cameramen played their usual game of 'spot-the-soloist', made harder for them by Frank keeping his back to the cameras as they improvised with solarisation and fast zooms. In a brief interview, Frank was his usual scathing self. "We're involved in a low-key war against apathy. I don't know how you're doin' on apathy over (here) but we got a lot of it, boys and girls. A lot of what we do is designed to annoy people to the point where they might just for a second question enough of their environment
to do something about it. As long as they don't feel their environment, they don't worry about it, they're not going to do anything to change it. And something's got to be done before America scarfs up the world and shits on it."

  THE STRING QUARTET

  Cruisin' With Ruben & The Jets, the last album for MGM/Verve was released in November. Cal Schenkel's cartoon cover of dog-faced Mothers set an appropriate tone. "When we were still in New York," he said, "I started working on the Ruben & The Jets story, which is connected with the Uncle Meat story in which this old guy turns this teenage band into these dog-snout people. That came out of my love for comics and anthropomorphic animals."9

  Billboard thought it, "One of the great put-on records of our time"; Record World called Frank, "more a parodist than anything else," but redeemed itself by rating it, "One of the highpoints of the rock'n'roll revival." Early copies of the album included leaflets with helpful diagrams on 'How To Comb & Set A Jellyroll' and how to dance the 'Bop'. Despite a speech-bubble on the front cover "Is this the Mothers of Invention recording under a different name in a last-ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio?" — potential customers were put off by the concept, which required an interest in original doo-wop, and the music, which subverted it, so it only reached number 110 in the album charts.

  Back at the Log Cabin, Frank perused the GTOs lyrics, found them 'inspiring' and suggested that the newest Mother help them with their melodies. This was Lowell George, the late Factory hand who'd spent time with the Standells and helped the Fraternity of Man to make their second album, Get It On. He'd been hired as a replacement for Ray Collins, but he spent most of his time in the Mothers playing rhythm guitar, making pronouncements in a stereotyped German accent and singing pachuco falsetto harmonies with Roy Estrada.

  Preparations were also made for a pair of gigs at the Shrine Exposition Hall in Santa Monica on December 6/7. As well as the Mothers, the GTOs and Wild Man Fischer, the bill promised two other bands, Easy Chair and Alice Cooper. Easy Chair had supported the Mothers at the Sky River Rock Festival in August and moved to Los Angeles after Frank offered them an audition. While they waited to go into the studio, they changed their name to Ethiopia but split up before they'd recorded a note. Their bass player, Jeff Simmons, stayed on to work on soundtrack music for a biker film, Naked Angels.

  The story was that Alice Cooper was a 17th-century witch who'd been reincarnated in the body of Vincent Furnier, the group's lead singer. He was from Detroit but had formed the band, called at various times the Earwigs, the Spiders and the Nazz, in Phoenix, Arizona. They'd come to California earlier that year and had established a reputation as being the worst band on the LA bar circuit. Frank can't have thought so, because Alice Cooper had opened for the Mothers (and Wild Man Fischer) on November 8 at Cal State in Fullerton. Miss Christine was smitten with Vince but that had no bearing on the band being signed to Bizarre Productions.

  Before the Shrine gigs, the Mothers went north to play two nights at the Berkeley Community Center on November 30/ December 1. San Francisco had taken to the band, helped by Ralph Gleason's review of their previous appearance. "Those Mothers Can Really Play" headed his 'On The Town' column. In it, he called them "brilliant satirists and absolutely unique and first rate musically as well". Gleason also appreciated Frank's audience control. "He explained his hand signals for the orchestra's vocal effects and then directed the audience to stand and make the indicated vocal sounds while the two side sections waved their arms and the centre section grasped its crotch. And it did!

  " 'Don't we look foolish with the lights on?' he remarked and then told the people they were an audience again and would respond en masse to 'hootenannies, politicians' promises and Madison Avenue, as well as instructions like this.' A more devastating demonstration of his point could not have been made."10

  Another time, as reported by Larry Kart, an audience was offered the chance to hear the band play 'Caravan' with a drum solo, an offer they declined. Frank then instructed the band to play 'Wipeout', which they did in three tempos at once. "The mindless riff of 'Wipeout' melts like plastic."11

  Warner Brothers' money was now supporting Frank's extended family of musicians; even the GTOs were receiving $35 a week. Mercy Fontenot, a migrant from San Francisco, had joined the girls and she in turn introduced Cinderella as the last and, at 17, the youngest GTO. One of the songs they rehearsed for the Shrine Christmas concert was 'The Captain's Fat Theresa Shoes', about an outsize pair of women's shoes worn by Captain Beefheart. Another was 'I'm In Love With The Ooo Ooo Man', Miss Pamela's paean of love for Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf. Don Preston was brought in to help them with arrangements for their recording debut. As Miss Pamela noted, "We had serious trouble harmonising, so we all sang together like a grade-school choir, which didn't faze Frank he thought of us as a living, breathing documentary."12

  The Mothers rhythm section provided backing tracks for the GTOs album, which got its title, Permanent Damage, from Miss Mercy's physical status. She and Miss Christine and Miss Cinderella had taken up residence at the Landmark Hotel and were shooting heroin in Room 229. When Frank found out, he put their album on indefinite hold. The girls featured in the centre spread of the February 15 Rolling Stone - "The Groupies" issue. "The act they debuted at the Shrine Exposition Hall here a few weeks ago was beautifully choreographed," the article ended, "and so what if one of the Mothers thinks they're astonishingly flat, can't carry a tune in a bucket."13

  Elsewhere in the issue, Frank gave his assessment of road ladies: "New York groupies are basically New York chicks. They're snobbish and uptight — they think they're big. San Francisco groupies are OK, but they think there's nothing happening outside San Francisco. LA groupies are without doubt the best — the most aggressive and the best fucks, and the only drawback is the incredibly high rate of venereal disease." Bands travelled with the necessary preventive medicines. "It's sort of take your choice," Frank instructed. "Cuprex burns something awful; it'll take the skin right off. But A-200 smells something fierce."14

  The magazine noted that Frank had presented The Groupie Papers to Stein & Day. "They asked me to write a political book," he said. "I couldn't get into that, and I had a January 1 deadline. So I did the groupie book. I wonder what their first impression was." He also expressed the opinion that pop music had done more for oral intercourse than anything else that had ever happened, "and vice versa".15

  RIGHT THERE

  The Mothers put that proposition to the test in February, with an East Coast tour from The Ark in Boston down to Thee Image in Miami and recording sessions at Miami's Criteria Studios and A&R Studios in New York. 'My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama' was cut at both locations and 'Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue', later released on Weasels Ripped My Flesh, came from the New York session.

  On the road, sets contained staples such as 'Trouble Every Day', 'Let's Make The Water Turn Black', 'Oh No', and 'Plastic People', as well as 'Charles Ives' (of which more anon) and themes from Frank's score for Run Home Slow. Lowell George got to sing oldies like 'Here Lies Love' — "a minor-key blues on which we did basically the same arrangement as the record." The original by Mr Undertaker was one side of the Music City single that featured 'WPLJ' by the Four Deuces. Sometimes Frank would leap on a drumkit to do battle with Art Tripp while Jimmy Carl Black kept time.

  Every night, he'd conduct spontaneous improvisations, sometimes, as on 'Right There', to the accompanying gasps of one of Bunk Gardner's night partners. Years later, with titles such as 'You Call That Music', 'Proto-Minimalism', 'Chocolate Halvah' and 'Underground Freak-Out Music', these would turn up on various volumes of You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, a prophetic title whose significance only became clear when the series was almost over. Then again, a concert might start with what Frank called "a chamber piece for electric piano and drums" like that on YCDTOSA 5, based on a 'module' of 'Bogus Pomp'. Or Ian Underwood might sit down to play Mozart's Piano Sonata in B-flat.

  Relatively little of
releaseable quality exists from this period. "There wasn't that much recording going on at that time," Frank told me. "Today, you take it for granted that you can take a little pocket cassette machine with you and bootleg yourself anyplace. But portable recording gear at that time didn't exist. So, if you were going to make a recording someplace, you really had to make some special arrangements to do it."

  All this was abstruse fare for the Mothers' audiences, whacked out and weaned on Cream, Hendrix and Vanilla Fudge. Although band members appeared to be cranking up for standard rock emotion overload, their playing never succumbed to Pied Piper simplicity. Larry Kart witnessed the phenomenon: "Zappa would stomp off a number that had 'Watch Out! Explosion Ahead!' written all over it, and the people around me would murmur, 'Yeah', and a blank look of anticipated ecstasy would settle on their faces. By the end of the piece no explosion had occurred and they looked vaguely bewildered, although they applauded, of course. l0

  Uncle Meat was issued in April 1969 in a lavish package, including a 12-page booklet with Cal Schenkel cartoons on the front and back covers. On the front, a cherry-flavoured jelly in the shape of a roadster was chasing the Mothers, while on the back in a rear-view, the roadster, incorporating the Mt Rushmore monument, was attacking the Vatican. Inside was a scenario for an Uncle Meat film that never got made, lead scores for 'Uncle Meat' and 'King Kong', and story-boards of government troops opening fire on a mutant monster vegetable. There was a diagram of a "Doll Foot As Young Rifle Showing Mu Meson Voluptuizer" and of its application to the rear end of a startled giraffe while it was singing lines from Captain Beefheart's 'Moonlight On Vermont'. Two photographs portrayed the same utensil deputising for a vibrator, nuzzling the chin of an appreciative female. A speech bubble introduced the immortal words, "torch stroking Fast N' Bulbous".