Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  MGM/Verve chose the same month to release Mothermania, the first and only anthology prepared by Frank. Once again, conceptual continuity was served; Schenkel's gruesome dentistry on Meat's cover was echoed by the inside spread of dubious embouchures in Mothermania's gatefold sleeve. The record became collectable since Frank had slipped in an uncensored version of 'Mother People' while no one was listening and 'Idiot Bastard Son' was a radically different mix.

  The first Straight albums also began to appear: Alice Cooper's Pretties For You, its cover a painting by Ed Beardsley; Farewell Aldebaran by Judy Henske and husband Jerry Yester (late of the Modern Folk Quartet); and Trout Mask Replica, the brilliant double album by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. During the album, Don Vliet satisfied those of an analytical bent: 'A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast n' bulbous. Got me?'

  FROWNLAND

  Since collaborating in the Soots and other Cucamonga confections, Beefheart had recorded for A&M, Buddha and Blue Thumb, been hailed as a true original and sold fewer records because of it. General opinion was that his previous album, Strictly Personal, recorded in the last week of April 1968 at Sunset Sound, had been violated by producer Bob Krasnow, who reacted to the Captain's surreal word pictures by twirling every knob on the mixing desk he could reach. Protectors of Beefheart's Grail pronounced it shoddy goods but some liked it. One thing was certain, its creator, away on tour, had had no control over the presentation of his work. The capper came when the money ran out and his band deserted him in the middle of the European leg of the tour.

  Beefheart returned to Lancaster to start again. He and Frank are supposed to have run across one another at a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand soon after Straight's inception. They reached an agreement and Beefheart set about putting together a new Magic Band. "He told me that he would give me complete freedom, as far as freedom goes," Beefheart told Ben Edmunds. "When another man tells me that he'll give me complete freedom, all I can think is that he's in a cage. But since he was in a cage, I thought maybe I could run around the outside and play a little bit."17

  Over the years, legends have left their accretions on the truth of what happened next. Beefheart said that he wrote almost all of Trout Mask's 28 songs in one eight-hour stint with a piano and a tape recorder and it wouldn't have taken that long if he'd been able to play the piano. Then followed some six months while every note of every arrangement was taught to his musicians, Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad), Antennae Jimmy Semens (Jeff Cotton), The Mascara Snake (his cousin, Victor Haydon), Rockette Morton (Mark Boston) and Drumbo (John French).

  In a suspicious echo of their composition, the songs are said to have been recorded in another eight-hour session. "Dick Kunc (the engineer) wasn't happy with the fact that we weren't given enough time," Beefheart said. "He did the majority of the producing and everything. I think that Frank was trying to stay out of my way, actually. The band played straight through on all the cuts in one night. It took them four hours to do the entire album. We didn't use overdubs or anything."18

  Frank's memories of the experience, however long it took, were substantially different. "The original plan for the album was to do it like an ethnic field recording," he told Matt Groening. "He and his group lived in a house out in (San Fernando) Valley, so I wanted to take a portable rig and record the band in the house, and use the different rooms in the house as isolation — very slight. The vocals get done in the bathroom. The drums are set up in the living room. The horn gets played in the garden, all this stuff. And we went over there and set it up, and did tracks that way. I thought they sounded good but suddenly he was of the opinion that I was just trying to be a cheapskate producer, and not do any studio time."19

  When Nigel Leigh asked what he thought he'd brought to the album, Frank's reply was initially succinct: "Tolerance." Pressed for further comment, he continued, "That was difficult to produce because you couldn't explain, from a technical standpoint, anything to Don. You couldn't tell him why things ought to be such and such a way. And it seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the easiest thing for me to do was keep my mouth shut as much as possible, and just let him do whatever he wanted to do, whether I thought it was wrong or not. Like covering the cymbals and drums with cardboard and overdubbing his vocals with no ear phones, hearing only vague leakage through the studio window, rendering him only slightly in sync with the actual track that he's singing on. That's the way he wanted it.

  "I think that if he had been produced by any professional famous producer, that there could have been a number of suicides involved. I remember that I finished editing the album, it was Easter Sunday. I called him up and I said, 'The album's done,' and he made all the guys in the band get dressed up and they came over here early in the morning and sat in this (living) room and listened to it. And loved it."20

  Interviewed in November 1969, Beefheart reckoned that the album had "a natural sound as natural as you can get from amplifiers."21

  Frank saw the roots of Beefheart's music in Delta blues and avant-garde jazz. "You can really hear that influence," he said, "and it's perfectly blended into a new musical language. It's all his. And it bears no resemblance to anything anybody else is doing."22

  Some of the field recordings made it onto the finished tapes, including 'China Pig', 'The Dust Blows Forward 'N The Dust Blows Back' and 'Orange Claw Hammer'. 'The Blimp' was the only track that didn't feature the Magic Band. It was one of the clearest examples of Frank's capacity for spontaneous creation. He was working on some Mothers tapes at Whitney Studios in Glendale when a call came in from Beefheart, eager for the lyrics of his latest composition to be recited over the phone. Before this was done, Zappa lined up a take of 'Charles Ives' and gave Antennae Jimmy Semens his cue to start. The random combination was completely successful, even down to the conversation with Beefheart at the song's end.

  Trout Mask Replica was perhaps the most celebrated Straight release but, of course, it didn't sell. Only critics, fanatics and the terminally curious were prepared to shell out for a double album of such dizzying originality. It didn't take long for the ultra-suspicious Beefheart to fall out with his friend/producer. "I was told by Frank that I would have, if you want to call it, special treatment, that I would not be advertised or promoted with any of the other groups on the label. But somehow, I guess he got hard-pressed for cash, and decided that he'd round me up and sell me as one of the animal crackers. I didn't like the idea of being labelled and put aside as just another freak."23

  Given the costumes that his quaintly named crew adopted, this was a rather disingenuous statement. No one could doubt the seriousness of the endeavour on Beefheart's part but, as Frank obviously realised, audiences reacted to surfaces not contents, and if the music wasn't labelled, they would invent one for themselves. The Magic Band looked like freaks, whatever your interpretation of the word, and the music could hardly be said to sound normal. And then there was the celebrated front cover photograph. "The original concept came from Don's title," Cal Schenkel revealed, "then I decided, 'Well, why don't we get a real fish head?' We went to the farmers' market and got this actual fish head, a real fish and rigged it up for a prop. It was just an amazing session."24

  I'M NOT SATISFIED

  At the end of May, the Mothers set off on another European tour. For the first time, there was a tour of England, with gigs in Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester, Bristol and Portsmouth before a return engagement at the Royal Albert Hall. Needless to say, there was the usual amount of negative publicity. Worst of all was that Pye Records, distributors of Warner Brothers at the time, had refused to issue Uncle Meat and the Lenny Bruce album for their use of what they considered bad language. The baton eventually passed to Transatlantic Records but they didn't put the album out until September, three months after the tour, and their poor distribution didn't help sales.

  Even before the first gig in Birmingham on Friday, May 30, Frank had got himself into the newspapers. On Tuesday, May 27, he tal
ked to students at the London School of Economics. It turned out to be a rerun of the Berlin Sportpalast without the music. The LSE that year was rife with -fists and -isms, the Paris revolt was still fresh in the angry young men's minds and they were eager to import anybody else's social outrage as an excuse to be seen holding a demonstration or sit-in.

  "The bar was a very good place, very political," David Widgery reckoned. "Constant arguments with people always trying to convert each other. Odd Situationists knocking around being rude to everyone, a few proper Anarchists arguing with the Trotskyists, all the Trotskyists would be arguing with each other, and occasionally the Labour Party emerged and everyone howled them down."25

  The Daily Sketch reported on the event, with a photograph of Frank seated on stage with microphone in hand. "The students, who for once put down their protest-daubing paintbrushes and sandwich-boards to crowd into the assembly hall, heard the articulate promoter of 'underground socialism' pronounce on extracurricular subjects. But they didn't like all they heard. Zappa was predictably pro-youth, but anti-drug and, horror of student horrors, he worked in ADVERTISING before making it in pop."26

  The Daily Mirror had an acerbic comment: "America's explosive pop man Frank Zappa lectures on evolution to London School of Economics students. I don't like the Zappa image. I like less the LSE students. They deserve each other."27

  Virginia Ironside's Daily Mail article was more clear-sighted. "Zappa talks sense," she stated, "and in the States, the Mothers, for all their freakishness, are dug by middle-class kids with short hair who rebel against their parents. Here, misled by their appearance and their music which is definitely in the progressive pop bag, they're heroes of the Underground who are fast getting confused where their loyalties lie."28

  Frank, as usual, knew where he stood: "I am a composer but I happen to care enough about politics to talk to people about it."29

  On the day, the students watched 18 minutes of film, which the UK edition of Rolling Stone identified as Intercontinental Absurdities but was in fact Burnt Weeny Sandwich, before Frank took the stage to answer questions. The students expected to hear inflammatory rhetoric and wanted to know about the recent Berkeley campus riots. "I got the feeling from the audience there that they thought of me as a political candidate," he said.30 "I told them that what they were into was just the equivalent of this year's flower power," he told Larry Kart. "It's really depressing to sit in front of a large number of people and have them all be that stupid, all at once. And they're in college."31

  "They are not, as they imagine themselves to be, the spearhead of some fantastic revolution that's going to turn the planet into some kind of Garden of Eden after they're done," he told Dick Lawson. "They're into revolution on a carnival level and they aren't thinking in terms of the best things for the most amount of people."32 He told Beat Instrumental, "The same kids who a year ago were wandering round with beads and all that gear are now yelling, 'Kick out the jams.' They are at the mercy of the establishment when they act like that. The establishment looks at these kids and sees they are not going to do anything, but if a guy comes into the office and acts on his choice to try and change it, they are going to be hard-pressed to stop it."33

  No wonder that Frank reacted as he did at the Albert Hall, with a rejoinder that found its way onto Burnt Weeny Sandwich and into Zappa folklore. When attendants hustled fans invading the stage at the end of the performance back to their seats, bovine voices from the back of the hall shouted, amongst other things, "Get the uniforms off the stage, Frank!" His reply, "Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform and don't kid yourself," drew applause but didn't silence the lowing cattle.

  Talking with Lawson before the gig, Frank defined the band's music as "electric chamber music" and revealed that five of the pieces to be played that night had been written on the plane. "We've been rehearsing them in our hotel with just the bassoon and the flugelhorn and the clarinet." Later, Frank told us that one of these pieces was going to be recorded on stage and that if the band didn't get it right the first time, we'd sit quietly while they played it again. They didn't and we did.

  Now that Frank had moved into more instrumental music, it was difficult for interviewers to identify his intentions. Music without words was one of two things, serious or jazz, and Lawson opted for the latter. "It's foolish, every time you hear someone improvise, to assume that it's jazz," Frank scolded. "One of the main problems we've had all along is making people realise that you can improvise in any given set of themes or chords or basic rules. I mean, is John Cage's music jazz? much of it is improvised."34

  "The kids are going to be confused by what we are moving on to," he told Beat Instrumental, "because people don't know how to listen to music."

  Not only that, he felt that few were actually interested in his music, "which is one of the Mothers' great failings. No one bothers to listen to the music and I rarely get asked about the music. I think it's likely that the Mothers will fail and this year is a crucial point because we are breaking out to music with less commercial potential — concert music."35

  There was more evidence that Frank was dissatisfied with the position he found himself in. Larry Kart noticed divisions within the band. He saw Frank as basically pessimistic and the group as good-naturedly optimistic and illustrated it with a conversation between Frank and Don Preston. Frank didn't think the typical rock fan smart enough to know when he'd been dumped upon. "The best responses we get from an audience are when we do our worst material." Don Preston didn't agree but Frank pressed on. "I think most of the members of the group are very optimistic that everybody hears and adores what they do on stage. I can't take that point of view. I get really bummed out about it. Because I've talked to (audiences) and I know how dumb they are. It's pathetic."36

  The summer of '69 had little to do with love. Frank had choices to make and no room for sentiment. The Mothers in their current form could hardly continue; there were now ten musicians on the payroll, each receiving $250 a week, irrespective of the gig sheet. That money came out of Frank's rapidly diminishing publishing royalties. "We'd been touring such an awful lot and sustaining huge financial losses," he told Richard Green. "One of the other problems, my attitude was getting very sour because we were working in places where it just seemed like I was banging my head against the wall."

  Part of that "wall" was the widening gulf between their audiences' expectations and what he was attempting to achieve with the band. "We had developed the music of the group to a stage where it had really evolved. We would go on stage and we didn't need to play any specific repertoire. I could just conduct the group and we could make up an hour's worth of music that I thought was valid. On the spot it would be spontaneous and new and interesting. It would be creative because the personalities of the people in the group were contributing just as much as their musicianship." But "nobody knew how to take the band, they didn't know if we were Spike Jones with electronic music or whether it was serious or what it was. I just got tired of it."37

  There was also the matter of the band members' attitudes: "Most of the people in the band didn't want to rehearse," he told William Ruhlmann. "It was just a job to them. You couldn't get them to put in extra effort to make the group move forward to do anything spectacular. They didn't have any faith in it, it was their gig."38

  At the beginning of the last tour, Frank took $400 from his bank account to cover his food costs. By its end, he was $10,000 in debt. The end of the Mothers as a working unit was plainly in sight. It wasn't a matter of how, but when.

  8:

  SHUT UP 'N PLAY YER GUITAR

  The discontent within the band was later voiced by Lowell George: "The band at that time was very much like the Lawrence Welk of rock'n'roll. Frank wrote all the charts. Everything was very prescribed. There was no room at all for any emotion. The band felt very hurt and ripped off because Frank was living in a $100,000 house in Beverly Hills and they were all still down in the valley. Frank would write piece after piece afte
r piece and they would all have to play it exact. They were hurt by the fact that he was making more money, but more than that they became more alienated by the fact that he would overwork and become totally inhuman."1

  Frank and Gail had left the Log Cabin, moving further up Laurel Canyon to a large house cut into the hillside on Woodrow Wilson Drive. Their entourage moved with them, including Carl Zappa, Janet Ferguson, who'd taken over as nanny to Moon Unit and her new baby brother, Dweezil (named after one of his mother's toes, his birth certificate read Ian Donald Calvin Euclid), the GTOs, retrieved from limbo to finish their album, and the usual band members and roadies. When he was at home, Frank slept through the day and spent his nights in his still-under-equipped basement studio, editing tapes and writing scores, surrounded by his record collection and the burgeoning tape vault.

  In April 1969 the band took part in the fourth Boston Globe Jazz Festival, a two-day event which also featured Roland Kirk, B.B. King, Nina Simone and Sun Ra. Kirk and the Mothers played on the first night, sandwiched between the Newport All-Stars and the Dave Brubeck Quartet. "I met (Kirk) after he had done his part," Frank told Dick Lawson, "and I said, 'Would you be interested in playing with us?' He said he didn't know. And I said, 'Well, you've never heard the group before you don't know what we do. If you like it come on out on stage and start playing, and we'll back you up.' So we'd played for about five or ten minutes and he came wheeling out there with horns hanging all over him and blew his brains out."2