Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  His orchestra had its eye on the main chance, too. "About a year after I did that concert with the LA Philharmonic," Frank later told Matt Resnicoff, "they said they would like to have me write a two-piano concerto and they would give it the world premiere. I said, 'Oh, that's really very nice of you.' They said, 'Yeah, but we want you to buy us two grand pianos.' And that was the last thing I had to do with the LA Phil, OK? Why pick on me? 'Cos I'm in rock'n'roll? What, you think I should go out and spend $100,000 to get you a pair of Bosendorfers, so that you'll do two rehearsals and play my two-piano concerto? Go fuck yourself."29

  9:

  WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH

  The original Mothers' swansong, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, was released in August, 1970. This was yet another compilation from the unrealised 12-record set, consisting of both studio and live recordings. Some titles, like 'Oh No' and 'The Orange County Lumber Truck', were familiar, as was the improvised texture of 'Didja Get Any Onya' and 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask'. In this context, the exposed blues roots of 'Directly From My Heart To You', sung and scraped by Sugarcane Harris, portrayed stark simplicity when placed alongside 'Dwarf Nebula Processional March & Dwarf Nebula' and 'Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue'. The album title proved apposite for what was two minutes of glorious undigested feedback from the end of the Mothers' Birmingham gig on May 30, 1969.

  It also gave aural enhancement to a cover illustration that alienated and amused in equal measure. It had been painted by Neon Park (real name, Martin Muller), a poster artist working with the Family Dog in San Francisco. The inspiration came from the cover of the September 1956 edition of Man's Life, which depicted a man naked to the waist and standing in a river, being attacked by a number of small reddish-brown flesh-eating mammals. Frank's challenge was to come up with an even more gruesome picture, for which Park would be paid $250.

  Twenty-one years later, Rolling Stone chose it as number 30 in its special issue devoted to The 100 Greatest Album Covers Of All Time. It seems no one at Warner Brothers liked it, although they were finally convinced that their corporate image wouldn't suffer. But that wasn't the end of it. "The printer was greatly offended," Park revealed. "The girl who worked for him, his assistant, she wouldn't touch the painting. She wouldn't pick it up with her hands." Both he and Frank had no such qualms. "I was greatly amused by the cover, and so was Frank. I mean, we giggled a lot. It was an infamous cover, although I guess by today's standards, it's pretty tame. It's not like eating liver in Milwaukee."1

  The release of an album that for some celebrated the definitive Mothers union didn't help to ease the acceptance of the latest incarnation. Part of the problem was that the new musicians had a considerable amount of material to master and they were being judged by their performance of what audiences saw as others' repertoire. There were gigs in San Rafael in August and at the Hollywood Bowl in September and rehearsals continued through the autumn.

  Chunga's Revenge was issued towards the end of October as a Frank Zappa release. But it wasn't the Hot Rats sequel that was the general expectation. Rather, it was an uneasy amalgam of material drawn from at least three musical aggregations. 'Twenty Small Cigars' was a remnant from the Rats sessions with Max Bennett and John Guerin, while 'Transylvania Boogie' and 'Chunga's Revenge' documented Aynsley Dunbar's arrival. As the sleeve noted, six of the vocal tracks that had been recorded in England represented a preview of 200 Motels. The seventh was 'The Nancy & Mary Music', recorded live at Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater in the summer.

  There was an air of haste about the tracks cut in London; the vocals were buried in the welter of over-dynamic bass and drums that typified English engineering of the period. 'Road Ladies', 'Tell Me You Love Me', 'Would You Go All The Way' and 'Sharleena' were quickly incorporated into the stage show. Because of their legal problems, Howard and Mark became The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie, named after two members of the Turtles' road crew.

  The inside spread of the gatefold sleeve featured a Cal Schenkel cartoon which was explained on the front cover. "A Gypsy mutant industrial vacuum cleaner dances about a mysterious night-time camp fire. Festoons. Dozens of imported castanets, clutched by the horrible suction of its heavy-duty hose, waving with marginal erotic abandon in the midnight autumn air." Chunga had one wheel on a wah-wah pedal and the whole scene was viewed through the control room window of a recording studio.

  In November, the winter tour schedule began with four days at the Fillmore West, followed by two at the Fillmore East with Sha-Na-Na also on the bill. Lisa Mehlman, American correspondent for Disc, typified prevailing opinion with her piece, "Why I'm Sick Of Zappa": "The music was done extremely well but some of the visual excitement is gone. I for one am getting a bit tired of Frank Zappa's cynicism and put-downs of the audience."2

  She evidently wasn't present at the show when the Mothers were joined by Joni Mitchell. "She is very shy and we had to lead her on eventually," Frank told NME, "then I said to her, 'Look, we don't play any of your songs and you don't sing any of ours, so just make up some lyrics and we'll follow you.'" Timid Joni stepped up to the mike and sang, 'Penelope wants to fuck the sea . . .' "When she sang that first line, she blew all the kids' minds. They couldn't believe it was coming from her. She did another song that sounded a bit like 'Duke Of Earl' and we finished up doing that song."3

  Bootlegs from the shows appeared (none featuring Miss Mitchell's contributions) and Freaks & Motherfuckers and Tengo Na Minchia Tanta were eventually included in Frank's two box-sets, Beat The Boots, released through Rhino Records. No reasons were given for why particular bootlegs were chosen for the series, although documentary value came into it. It's intriguing to recognise fixture songs amid certain arrangements; the coda of 'Holiday In Berlin' at this time contained a riff that would become 'Easy Meat', and 'Inca Roads' was in there, too.

  The band arrived in England at the end of the month and there were gigs in Liverpool and Manchester before they played the London Coliseum on November 29. This show began with a stage full of performing dogs, midget tap dancers and jugglers before Frank and the band arrived. 'Call Any Vegetable' now contained a monologue by Frank that was the basis for what would become known as 'The Groupie Routine'. It heralded the arrival of the '200 Motels' suite which combined new songs with adaptations of older material such as 'Little House I Used To Live In', that now became 'Penis Dimension'. Roy Carr thought the evening was "Zappa at his bizarre best", although the music "fluctuated between sheer brilliance and naughty schoolboy pornography."4 He singled out Howard and Mark and Aynsley (called 'The Silver Rivet' by the band for his extra-curricular activities on this night and at every other opportunity) for particular praise.

  Frank was content; "The essential thing I like in a band is now present in this group there's a group spirit that transcends just friendship among the members of the group and there is now a certain devotion to some mythological cause and I think it comes across on stage." He felt that band members knew that they had "their whole musical world within which they can operate and anything they do in there is fine by me as long as they play the songs. They have freedom to express themselves in a number of different ways. . . even the old Mothers of Invention numbers that we play in our repertoire have been re-arranged to the point where it's not even the same song anymore, for instance we do 'Who Are The Brain Police?' but it sounds like Canned Heat."5

  The tour continued into Scandinavia and Europe during December. When they played the Palais Gaumont in Paris on December 15, they were joined on stage by Jean-Luc Ponty, who took control of a half-hour version of 'King Kong' during which he took two extended solos, the latter turning into a free improvisation with George Duke. Aynsley Dunbar also got a chance to batter his kit into submission before Frank announced 'the George Wein variations', which included a manic version of 'Ain't She Sweet' and Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonies. The bootleg that emerged from the evening, Disconnected Synapses, became part of Beat The Boots, Box 2.

  DANCE OF TH
E ROCK 'N' ROLL INTERVIEWERS

  On Monday, January 11, 1971, reporters assembled at Nash House in Carlton House Terrace, London, for the press launch of 200 Motels. Frank was there to explain the film's story and to announce that live excerpts from the film score would be performed at the Royal Albert Hall in four weeks' time, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in attendance. Before the conference could get under way, he had to apologise for the fact that the previous day's Sunday Mirror had already run a feature in which he was quoted extensively on the film and the resources being used to make it.

  After all, this was the first time that a film would be made with video equipment, at that time the sole preserve of television.

  "After nine days' rehearsal, the whole cast go into the studios, where there are four video cameras running all the time," he'd said. "Then we let it all happen and afterwards it's transferred to film. All that hanging around, waiting for a dozen technical prima donnas to do their pieces, is eliminated." That left a shooting schedule of five days. The Mirror noted, "As this is the time it takes for many stars to get their dressing rooms redecorated, it's a schedule that would appear to be little short of a miracle."6

  Given the truculence of Fleet Street's finest in those days, it would've been a miracle if they'd accepted Frank's apology with the same good grace with which it was offered. They didn't and the tone of the meeting was set. At one point, one reporter called Frank "luv". "Don't call me 'luv', buddy boy," came the retort. The Daily Sketch wanted to know if there'd be any nudity and sex. "Well," Frank pondered, "I don't know if you'll be turned on by any of the actual hairs between the legs. I don't know what you like."

  On a more serious note, he explained, "We're working to a basic 180-page script. Improvisation will be limited basically because all the musical material and dialogue is going to be rehearsed in advance, so that when the cameras are pointed at the artists, they are going to perform it just like it was a concert." The budget had been set at $630,000 and 200 Motels would be shot and edited on video before being transferred to 35mm film stock.

  After 40 minutes of sniping and sneering, Frank fired a final broadside: "There's one sequence in the movie where a girl journalist in a stereotyped reporter's outfit . . . comes on to the stage and sits in a chair and begins asking me a series of really banal questions. At one point, I get up and from behind an amplifier place a rubber dummy of myself in the chair. Without looking up, she continues to interview the dummy. After a time, I pick up the dummy and cast it into the screaming mass of dancers who proceed to kick it to death until the stuffing comes out of its head. The reporter jumps down off the stage and begins to play with the rubber hand, still asking questions."7 With that, he left the room.

  200 MOTELS

  This was but a prelude to the actual filming, which proceeded in the first week of February in an atmosphere of chaos not helped by the reluctant co-operation of most of the forces marshalled at Pinewood. The Royal Philharmonic, the Top Score Singers, the Classical Guitar Ensemble supervised by John Williams, Theodore Bikel and Gillian Lynne's dancers had little idea of what 200 Motels was about. How could they? You had to have been on the road with a rock band to respond to the craziness of the real thing or the fantasies that Frank meant to depict. Ringo Starr (as Larry the Dwarf/Frank Zappa) and Keith Moon (as a groupie nun) had no such problems. Why couldn't a newt rancher fall in love with a gypsy mutant industrial vacuum cleaner? How many towns had they been in that resembled a sealed tuna sandwich? And didn't everyone steal the hotel towels?

  Nor did Frank make life easy for himself when he engaged Tony Palmer as assistant director. Palmer had filmed Cream's Albert Hall farewell concert and promotional films for Colosseum and Juicy Lucy. He'd made All My Loving for the BBC, a film combining pop music with (often violent) documentary footage, which had been greeted by the press as 'magnificent', 'brilliant', 'hypnotic' and 'overwhelming'. He'd also written Born Under A Bad Sign, a slim volume with collage illustrations by Ralph Steadman and a foreword by John Lennon. It was Palmer's personal view of pop music in which he included interviews with various music personalities, including Frank. In his preface, Palmer wrote, "I do not know whether pop music is good or bad and I'm not concerned with its musical stature or social significance. Such conclusions as might become evident in the course of the book, therefore, are yours and not mine."8 The description of the "grotesque ugly and grisly" Janis Joplin as "King Kong in drag", therefore, must have been somebody else's.

  Palmer took himself (perhaps too) seriously; his determined clutch on reality may have begun to slip at a script conference where Frank asked Art Director Leo Austin for "a Newt Ranch complete with newts, a rancid boutique, a Cheesy Motel, a bank, a fake nightclub, a Redneck Eats Restaurant, a theatre groupies' room, a liquor store, four houses, Main Street, a concentration camp, a crashed Spitfire, the Ku Klux Klan, a Pan-Am Jumbo and something called a Tinsel Cock Car". Hearing Frank's score, Palmer pronounced, "Some of it was overwritten and over-scored but it had pretty tunes. Occasionally," he added, in a barely tolerant tone, "rock musicians imitate classical music lest they be thought musically illiterate."

  When he discovered that Frank intended to direct his actors from the floor, Palmer offered to leave the premises but was persuaded by producer Jerry Good to stay and supervise the technical side of things. "Maybe this was the role of the electronic director of the fixture," he wrote later, "happy enough to point the electronic cameras in the right direction and push the buttons. I was persuaded that this was a sufficiently complicated job to warrant my staying with the picture and who was I to complain?"

  Miffed at being merely an assistant director, "pushing the buttons proved to be quite as hazardous as trying to direct the actors," he said, "the whole operation threatened to descend into chaos. Still, I needn't have worried nor underestimated the infinite talents of Zappa, because when we finally got to the editing stage, he decided to take over that, too."9 The words, "Do you know who I am?" hovered in the ether.

  Hadn't he seen eye-to-eye with maestro Palmer? I asked Frank. "Well, I'm the one who hired him," he replied. "He had a lot of problems during the making of the film. He was on the verge of a divorce, he had the 'flu and he seemed to be a fairly ill-tempered individual even on a good day. I don't want to be unkind to him but on the production of the film, he did two things which I will always remember. One: at the completion of principal photography, he had demanded of the producer that his name be left off the credits for fear that it would harm his career. And then, once the editing was started on the film, he decided he did want to have his name on the credits. And the other thing was, in a little fit of pique in the middle of production, Gail happened to be walking by and overheard him saying that he was threatening to erase all of the master tapes of the movie if something wasn't done to his satisfaction. So it was not easy working with him.

  "I had a certain amount of control over what got done and actually it would have been quite a different movie if he hadn't decided that he didn't want to have his name on the credits. Because at that point he refused to even go into the editing suite. And I'd never edited video. Now, remember, they did not have computers then. All editing was done by using a felt pen and making a mark on the edge of the tape, reeling it back ten seconds, playing it in, waiting for it to lock and then your edit would roll. And it was all manual and it was unbelievably primitive. And to edit you stood in an ice-cold room for ten hours a day. That's a far cry from today's video editing suites. It was like guerrilla warfare to put this film together."

  And what about the Royal Philharmonic, had they been reluctant? "That would be the nicest way to put it. I think that there's always been, since the invention of rock'n'roll, anytime that somebody from that other musical world walked into their musical world, it would be regarded as an intrusion or an inconvenience." What happened when they discovered that what he'd written was quite demanding? "Well, that's adding insult to injury. It's one thing to say, 'Oh, look at this weird guy and what doe
s he want now? 'Course, he's paying us to do this.' Then suddenly, they get a piece of paper that they can't really play. And then you compound that with the fact that there was never enough rehearsal time to teach them how to play it to make it sound right. So the level of commitment to a proper musical performance simply wasn't there.

  "I know that there are some parts in it that are pretty hilarious. This is musical jokes, the whole thing is a musical joke. They could have gone on shooting for a few more days but they refused to. And at the end of 56 hours, only one third of the shooting script had been shot. So, in order to make any kind of a story out of it at all, I had to invent the thing in the editing room. So what you see on the screen is the result of the people at United Artists saying, 'Well, why did we do this at all? We're not going to spend another penny on this.'

  "There originally was a story and it involved the groupie routine from the Fillmore East album and a whole bunch of other stuff that was really supposed to be about going on the road and how it makes you crazy. But there was no way to tell the story with the chunks at different points of the script that had been shot and all the continuity pieces had not been shot. Jeff Simmons disappeared just before the film was to be shot. His girlfriend convinced him that he should be a blues musician. She told him that he was too heavy to be in this group and he went for it and on the evening of the second script reading at the hotel, he announced that he was resigning from the band. He had the best part in the movie. So, in order to replace him, we went through all kinds of weird shit and we ended up with Martin Lickert, who was Ringo's driver."

  Howard Kaylan took up the story when he spoke with Harold Bronson: "Now we're thinking, not only do we need a bass player who has to learn some complicated shit, but he had to act. The next day, Frank shows up at Pinewood Studios with Wilfrid Brambell. It was gonna be real cute and we'd just have to overdub the bass later we were gonna play with the Philharmonic live, so it was gonna be difficult at that. So he got his lines, rehearsed with us, even hung out with us to get to know us."