Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  With the New Year, Frank took a break from public performance. He concentrated on his writing and finding the finance to finish the film of Uncle Meat. As would happen again, the original script had gone by the board. Frank had several hours of film that documented real and staged craziness by members of the band and scenes of the reluctant mutant Dom De Wild, personated by Don Preston, drinking from foaming cloudy beakers and turning into the hunch-back duke. Preston clawed at the camera over a hunched shoulder while squinting and sticking his tongue in his cheek, which was an appropriate place for it.

  Frank had secured the services of cameraman Haskell Wexler, who donated a week of his time. They had already collaborated on Wexler's directorial debut, Medium Cool, which used the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as the backdrop for a story about a dispassionate TV newsreel cameraman's discovery of political and personal awareness. Wexler filmed his principals, Robert Foster and Verna Bloom, wandering through the crowds as they were set upon by Mayor Daley's goon squad and the National Guard. Frank's 'Oh No', heard for the first time with lyrics, played over these scenes and 'Who Needs The Peace Corps' turned up in another sequence.

  It was a far cry from that to be filming Don Preston and Phyllis Altenhaus (once Tom Wilson's assistant and now Uncle Meat's film editor) standing in a shower rubbing raw hamburger on each other. The vagaries of scenes like this and Cal Schenkel (as 'Zolar Czakl') and Motorhead attempting music in the Hollywood Ranch Market, and the refusal of the original Mothers to be interviewed on film, led to what financing that Frank could find being withdrawn. He was left with 40 minutes of edited film that would not be completed until the mid-Eighties.

  HOT RATS

  Meanwhile, there were unpublicised screenings of Burnt Weeny Sandwich. Kathy Orloff from the Hollywood Reporter attended a showing in the second week of January at San Fernando Valley State College. The film had to be screened five times for the 2,000 students that turned up in pouring rain when only 200 had been expected. In the following question-and-answer session, Frank stressed that the film would "hold relevance for anyone who is concerned with social change as it applies to the period in which we now find ourselves."

  Orloff ended, "With narration by Zappa, the film just may unlock some of the mysteries which have been plaguing Motherophiles and pop culture historians ever since a doll's foot and a giraffe first came together at the Garrick Theater."14

  There was no such aberrant behaviour at two gigs performed with the Hot Rats line-up, including Ian Underwood, Sugarcane Harris, Max Bennett and Aynsley Dunbar. "I wanted not just to play more guitar," Frank told Richard Green, "but play it in the context of a stronger rhythmic feeling, 'cos if there was one weak point of the old Mothers it was the rhythm section because it was too static. In order to synchronise both drummers they had to be limited in the types of things they could play so that the beat stayed pretty monotonous."15

  He'd been impressed by Aynsley when they jammed at Amougies; he reckoned his own playing "took off within a couple of bars".16 When Frank had been in London around Christmastime, he'd tried to make contact with Aynsley, leaving messages for him at the Speakeasy. "When I rang him up, he offered me the job of playing with him," Aynsley said. "I turned it down because I had just formed Blue Whale but I thought about it and a week later accepted. It was only after very careful consideration and thought that I decided to join."17

  Frank was considering a follow-up album to Hot Rats and he needed a drummer that would do for him at live gigs what Ralph Humphrey and John Guerin had done in the studio. "The first day he arrived," said Frank, "we got to work in my basement studio. Aynsley has a rhythmic concept that none of my other drummers have had. If I get it off then he's with me and the others just stand there."18 The gigs at San Diego's Sports Arena (February 28, 1970) and LA's Olympic Auditorium (March 7) confirmed the viability of Frank's fresh approach. Inevitably, a bootlegger was present at the latter venue and an album containing 'Sharleena', 'Twinkle Tits', 'Directly From My Heart To You' and 'Chunga's Revenge' was soon available. But using studio musicians already in demand restricted the possibility of gigs further afield. So in April, Bennett was replaced by Jeff Simmons, who joined Ray Collins, Billy Mundi, George Duke and Aynsley Dunbar for a short US tour which ended at the Fillmore on April 19. After that, Frank disbanded them.

  The following month, Frank was able to realise something he'd wanted for almost 15 years, to have an established symphony orchestra play his music. The opportunity had come about through talking with KPFK's David Raksin earlier in the year. Frank had been bemoaning the difficulty of getting his scores played and Raksin invited him to sit in on an interview with Zubin Mehta, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. After the interview, Mehta informally commissioned him to write a piece for the LAPO's 1971 season. Frank said he already had something written and negotiations were eventually concluded for 200 Motels to be performed on May 15 at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion. However, "they wouldn't play my music unless there was a rock group on the bill called the Mothers of Invention," he told Richard Green.19

  The Pauley Pavilion was a vast basketball dome with horrendous acoustics. Two of the six rehearsals were taken up with attempts to balance the sound. The evening, part of Mehta's Contempo '70 series of concerts, was also scheduled to include Mel Powell's Imtnobiks 1-4 and Frank's interpretation of Varese's Integrates. Powell, dean of the California Institute of the Arts' School of Music, disapproved of the attempted fusion of rock'n'roll and symphonic music. He chose to demonstrate his antipathy by withdrawing his composition while the concert was in progress.

  Frank sounded almost awed when he addressed the 11,000strong audience about what the Los Angeles Philharmonic was going to "crank off". He described 200 Motels as "a collection of sketches that was orchestrated recently, the sketches having been written over a period of years when I thought it would be fun to be a composer. And then, during the last week, I got to hear 'em playing this stuff at rehearsals and I saw all the horrible errors that I'd made. Too late to change 'em. You get to hear all the mistakes, too! It's not really a great piece of music but we might be able to get off a couple of times in it. All right, Zubin, hit it!"

  Zubin and the boys didn't hit anything until some way through 'A Pound For A Brown On The Bus', which then segued into a version of 'Bogus Pomp'. The suite continued with 'Holiday In Berlin', 'Duke Of Prunes', 'Who Needs The Peace Corps?' and a convoluted piece that bootlegs have identified as the 'Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue'. The rest of the evening became increasingly anarchic as Frank subjected orchestra members to his spontaneous whims. During the encore of 'King Kong', clarinettist Michele Zurkovski had a toy giraffe, minus the doll's foot, inserted under her dress. Her reaction went undocumented.

  There was implicit sympathy for the orchestra in Time magazine's report on the evening, but, it indicated, this was balanced by the box office takings of $33,000. It noted that Mehta had excised Part Two from the four-part score, which Frank had completed during the last three months of 1969. Rolling Stone looked down its nose at rock/symphonic collaborations in general, dismissing Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra as a "pompous bit of crap". But David Felton obviously revelled in what he saw as the LAPO's humiliation. "It took Zappa to break fresh wind among those suffocating old toads." Felton continued: "Mehta and the Philharmonic were simply new lab toys for his mad genius and they became better people for it."20

  Once again, Frank had cause to regret his own pretension. He'd had to hastily reconvene an ersatz Mothers, including Collins, Mundi and Motorhead, in preparation for the concert. The band toured briefly, playing two nights at the Fillmore East in New York and Philadelphia's Academy of Music to get ready. He'd paid a team of copyists some $7,000 to prepare the orchestral parts. "I'll guarantee you I didn't make anything like that from the concert," he told Don Menn.21 And he'd fought the local Musicians Union, who refused to allow him to tape the resulting performance, even when he assured them it was for
his sole use as a composer. "They told me that if I turned the tape on, I would have to pay the whole orchestra Musicians' Union scale."22 In the event, the bootleggers did what Frank couldn't and none of the musicians benefited.

  FLO & EDDIE

  In the audience that evening were Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, until very recently lead singers of the Turtles. Along with Al Nichol, the pair had formed the group, originally called the Crossfires, soon after leaving Westchester High School. By 1965, they were working a weekend residency at the Revelaire Club in Redondo Beach. They were on the point of breaking up when they were signed up by White Whale Records on the recommendation of the club's owner, who quickly became the Turtles' manager, ex-DJ Reb Foster.

  As the Turtles, their debut single, Dylan's 'It Ain't Me Babe', became a hit, to be followed in the next year by no less than four others, 'Let Me Be', 'You Baby', 'Grim Reaper Of Love' and 'Can I Get To Know You Better'. As a prime instance of Frank's conceptual continuity, Foster's comment that "I'd like to clean you boys up a bit and mould you. I believe I could make you as big as the Turtles," had been a 'relevant quote' on the inside sleeve of Freak Out!

  1967's 'Happy Together' was their biggest hit, ending up as the eighth bestselling song of the year. The same issue of Melody Maker (May 17) that announced the Mothers' first Albert Hall gig had also carried details of the Turtles' UK tour in June, during which they also appeared on UK television and radio, notably Saturday Club, Dee Time, Easy Beat and Top Of The Pops. Their success put paid to the break-up of the band that was imminent even then, and two other hits followed that year, 'She'd Rather Be With Me' and 'You Know What I Mean'.

  Internal divisions within the band, which operated on a notional co-operative basis, led to bizarre gigs and publicity, including a naked photo session with strategically placed fig-leaves that adorned a November 1968 NME article. Ann Moses' piece was a preview of the band's latest album, Battle Of The Bands, in which each track was meant to sound like a different group. Among the names they used were the Crossfires, the Fabulous Dawgs and the Atomic Enchilada. But what was intended as versatility merely emphasised the chameleon-like character of a band that had no discernable identity.

  Dissension intensified through 1969, despite moderate hits like 'You Showed Me' and an album, Turtle Soup, produced by Ray Davies of the Kinks. In May, they played alongside The Temptations at a White House party for Tricia, daughter of Richard Nixon, during which cocaine was hoovered up from Abraham Lincoln's desk. "We weren't having any fun anymore," Howard told Rolling Stone, "and one evening everybody came to my house and we said, 'Fuck it,' and we broke up."23

  Howard, Mark and Frank were not unknown to one another. They'd worked at the Whisky and the Trip, they'd gone to the Garrick Theater shows and visited Frank's Thompson Street apartment at a time when Joni Mitchell was sleeping on his floor — with or without Cal Schenkel. Howard Keyless was a distant cousin of Herb Cohen's and he and Mark went to see him for advice. Herb gave them tickets for the McCauley gig and may well have told Frank of their circumstances. After the concert, they went backstage to congratulate him and Frank told them of an upcoming European tour, including an open-air festival in England, a Dutch television special and the filming of 200 Motels, and asked if they were interested. Two days later, they went to Frank's house and auditioned, proving that their prowess on saxophones didn't match their tonsils.

  "It seemed like a good idea," Frank said to me years later. "We'd worked some gig with them when they'd been the opening act as The Turtles. We had a lot of laughs backstage, so it wasn't inconceivable that I could imagine going on the road with them. They had the 'road rat' mentality. In order to tour, you really have to have a special mentality. No matter how good a player is, if he doesn't have that 'road rat' sense, he'll die out there. I've learned the hard way about a few guys that I thought could play the parts but they just weren't 'readable'. They couldn't stand the pressure and the isolation and they cracked up and I had to send them home."

  Since the Turtles were being sued, individually and collectively, by their record company, Howard and Mark were unable to work under their own names, so Frank's offer represented a very acceptable compromise. Even so, they weren't exactly prepared for the difficulty of the task they took on. Both were more or less pitch-perfect singers but they weren't accustomed to the precision required by Frank's arrangements. "Frank demanded something of us that we had never really experienced in rock'n'roll," Mark told Co de Kloet, "which was fitting ourselves into a band, not just as singers, but as musicians using our voices as musical instruments.

  "This was a process that took hours and hours and hours of rehearsal time, and that was something that Frank never had any problem with ... it demanded learning notes, and singing those exact notes, or they wouldn't fit with single notes being hit by a piano, a saxophone, a guitar and a bass . . . Those were notes that we had to sing out of our mouths the same way every time or it would sound wrong, because of what everybody else was playing."24

  The intensively rehearsed group flew to Europe and recorded the Dutch TV documentary on Thursday, June 18. Two days later, they arrived in London and played what Friends magazine described as "a late and somewhat unsatisfactory set" at the Speakeasy. For what Frank must have regarded as a public rehearsal, George Duke and Aynsley Dunbar had to use the equipment of the band booked that night, Aquila. The reporter was impressed by Aynsley's dramatic improvement as a drummer. "His work is more fluid and he is to a large extent the sweaty driving force of the band, while Zappa is the delicate finger-tipped dictator.

  "The set began with what is basically the Rats, without Sugarcane Harris' lunatic violin . . . and later they were joined by the two ex-Turtles. Instead of getting lighter the music became more intense and strained as they searched for the right combinations."25 Some of these were obviously found, for the band spent most of the following week recording in Trident Studios with engineer Roy Thomas Baker. From these sessions and others at The Record Plant in Hollywood came six of the ten tracks that made up Chunga's Revenge.

  The Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music was held at the Bath & West Showground in Shepton Mallet. Eleven acts, including Fairport Convention, Colosseum, Johnny Winter, Steppenwolf, John Mayall, Canned Heat and Pink Floyd, were to perform during 12 hours of Saturday, June 27, with a further ten, the Mothers, the Moody Blues, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, Santana and the Byrds among them, on Sunday. One of the acts I was producing, The Keef Hartley Band, played early on the first day and I took up position in the stockade built behind the stage.

  Things rapidly got out of hand. There was a carnival atmosphere in the stockade that sunny Saturday afternoon; the members of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green with flowing beard and floor-length kaftan, processed across the greensward and "an awful lot of dope" was smoked. On stage, road crews struggled to break down and build each group's gear and the timetable was abandoned sometime after dark. I woke from a cramped sleep in my hired station wagon to hear Canned Heat performing at four o'clock in the morning. The Mothers were scheduled to play at 6.40 pm on Sunday but appeared somewhat earlier. My chemically jostled brain took in little of their set, beyond recognising 'Holiday In Berlin' in its vocal version and being unaccustomed to the air of vaudeville that clung to many of the songs. This was a new Zappa for whom most of us were unprepared.

  "When we played the Bath Festival the group had been together about 20 days," Frank said six months later, "ten days of which was rehearsal, and the group hadn't really got together psychologically and the personalities still hadn't meshed in."26

  Even so, Peter Cole of the Evening News thought the Mothers were "one of the few bands which really brought (the Festival) to life. The reformed Mothers, which include the British drummer Aynsley Dunbar, have a more direct sound now. It is still very complex in structure but its appeal must be wider because of its more commercial sound." Cole asked Frank about his work producing other artists. "In general I've had really horrible personal experiences
producing other acts," he said. "You try to do the best thing you can in a very difficult situation. If the artist has his own creative talent, the best thing you can do is stay right out of his way and let his music get on to the record the way he wants it to be.

  "In which case, the artist takes 100 per cent responsibility for the success or failure of his music. So it's distressing when they come back to you saying, 'WHY didn't I make $200 million from that record? You produced it.' "27

  The unnamed subject of this statement was Captain Beefheart, as became clear in the conversation he then had with Richard Green and Allan McDougall. "I'm now Beefheart's biggest enemy, it seems. He just don't talk to me anymore . . . (He) asked me to assemble a bluesy, commercial album because he wanted to earn some money. So, I got a whole set together for him, and the next thing I know he hates me for selling-out to commerciality or something ... I think Don is fantastic but he's un-marketable." He was in better humour when asked about 200 Motels and Zubin Mehta: "Oh, that went along just fine, but Zubin is really the publicity-seeking, would-be playboy image. Wants to be a big star with all the kids."28