Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  Whatever the circumstances, the concert was very good indeed, in spite of Napoleon Murphy Brock having pneumonia and Coy Featherstone, the band's lighting director, being maced in the face by a guard at the Hotel Hesperia the night before. In his booklet notes, Frank pointed out, "The repertoire is basically the same as the Roxy album. However, the ultra-fast tempos on the more difficult tunes demonstrate what happens when a band has played the material for a year, and is so comfortable with it they could probably perform it blindfolded."

  The other manifest quality is the good humour with which the music is performed, even when 'Montana' has to be begun three times before proceeding. As George Duke told Keyboard: "If you didn't get it, Frank would know it. He would look around at you and make you do it again. On stage! He would make us go over one lick until there was no way we could forget it. That was some of the most difficult music I've ever played, partly because he composed a lot of it from the guitar. Frank's music was like organised chaos. That's exactly what it was."38 One listen to 'RDNZL' (during which Frank takes a solo that includes part of the melody of 'Conehead'), 'Echidna's Arf', 'Approximate' (in its three guises) and 'T'Mershi Duween' bears out the truth of Duke's remark.

  He had another reason for the release: 'One of the things that was good about that show was that there was a lot of improvised, funny talking and witty stuff in there. So it's got part of the attitude of the band and I think it's a good record. It's got some good spirit

  12:

  ONE SIZE FITS ALL

  There was more good spirit on display when the Mothers played at New York's Felt Forum on Halloween Night, establishing a precedent for subsequent tours. The stage was Uttered with assorted theatrical props; a female dummy wearing a 'Don't Eat The Yellow Snow' T-shirt; a dangling skeleton; a rubber chicken suspended from an iron beam; and a lifebuoy liberated from a production of HMS Pinafore draped over a microphone. There was much for the audience to enjoy but not for a reviewer anticipating the momentous and encountering the momentary.

  Michael Watts typified the sense of betrayal felt by all his ilk who'd espoused Frank's music when it flattered their sense of their own radicalism. But now Frank was reneging on the contract they'd drawn up by apparently moving in a direction that trivialised their pretensions. Moreover, the spectacle of musicians who could not only play seriously difficult music but had fun doing it was confusing for journalists accustomed to trenchant postures and loaded statements. One critic thought Roxy & Elsewhere "the lowest point in Zappa's career", asserting that too many artists were "simply farting around instead of getting down and producing work of real importance or merit; to see Frank Zappa joining the legions of rock'n'roll suicides and producing dull, trivial work is nothing less than offensive".1

  Watts' review of the Halloween show, headlined "Zany Zappa runs out of ideas . . .", acknowledged "this is not Serious, there is Fun and much In Joking up there onstage." But while he joins in the audience's laughter, he hears "alarm bells" as he watches Ruth Underwood "laughing and waving her arms as if she's partaken of some vile, foamy liquid," aided and abetted by Napoleon Murphy Brock who's "quite, quite daft". He's left wondering "what happened to the Great Satirist when I see the Zee now inflating into tomes one-liners about dental floss and other inconsequential paraphernalia."2

  Much of the current repertoire was recorded in KCET-TV Studios in early December 1974, including an extended version of the 'Room Service' routine, during which Frank referred to "that wretched state of Maryland", from where he, Chester Thompson, Napoleon Murphy Brock and their roadie and dog enthusiast, Marty Perellis, all came. The programme, A Token Of His Extreme, was later used in The Dub Room Special, Frank's video combining live music from 1974 and 1981 with the convoluted clay animation of Bruce Bickford. The basic tracks of two 1974 titles, 'Inca Roads' and 'Florentine Pogen', were used in the next Mothers album, One Size Fits All. Frank spliced an edited version of his 'Inca Roads' guitar solo from the recent Helsinki concert into the finished master.

  Further recording for the album took place during December at Jim Guercio's Caribou studio in Colorado, where basic tracks for songs from Hunchentoot were also laid down. Sessions also took place at the LA Record Plant and Paramount Studios, although some material like 'The Adventures of Greggery Peccary', 'Revised Music For Guitar & Low-Budget Orchestra' and 'RDNZL' would not be released until 1978, and then in less than ideal circumstances. Another song, 'A Little Green Rosetta', didn't appear until a year after that on Joe's Garage Acts II & III. Demoed in Studio D at the Record Plant, it was "just George Duke playing a tack piano and me singing on top of it," according to Frank. "It was just a little stupid song."3

  The same combination also recorded 'Evelyn, A Modified Dog', the latest instance of canine conceptual continuity. "It recurs on each record," Frank said. "It's an abstract concept, much in the way that Rembrandt added brown to all his colours. That's the level."4 Evelyn, her modifications unspecified, is the dog sitting in Apostolic Studios during the Lumpy Gravy sessions, bewildered by sounds emanating from the covered piano as strings resonate to the conversations taking place within.

  Mark Volman's alter ego, the maroon sofa, adorned the cover of One Size Fits All along with other abstruse cosmology; more comfortable than a 2001 monolith, it sped through the heavens with a formica-topped aluminium table and chair as satellites. Its musical manifestation made two appearances on the album, one vocal, one instrumental, George Duke's moog bass adding a touch of funk to the original landler rhythm. 'San Ber'Dino', containing a verse that referred to Frank's brief incarceration in the city jail, featured harmonica by Don Vliet as 'Bloodshot Rollin' Red and the flambi vocals of Frank's first guitar hero, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson. The latter also sang on 'Andy', which was alleged to be a veiled reference to one of Beefheart's erstwhile managers.

  On both 'San Ber'Dino' and 'Can't Afford No Shoes', Frank played a fretless guitar. "At one time Acoustic ... made a prototype and tried to interest people in it," he told Steve Rosen, "but nobody wanted it. So the prototype ended up at Guitar Center. I walked in there one day and asked them if they had anything new, and they said, 'Have we got one for you!' It's different than a regular guitar; you don't push the strings to bend them, you move them back and forth like violin-type vibrato, which is a funny movement to get used to."5

  Work on One Size and the television special carried on in the first months of 1975. At one point, Tom Fowler broke his left hand and James 'Bird Legs' Youmans came in to play bass. Tour dates had been scheduled for this period but they were cancelled, in order for the work to continue. Time was also needed for Frank and Herb Cohen to prepare for their High Court case against the Albert Hall management, which was due to be heard in London during the second week of April.

  During the lull in group activity, George Duke spent time during January making The Aura Will Prevail, his fourth solo album for MPS, at Paramount Studios with regular Zappa engineer Kerry McNabb driving the desk. He was accompanied by Alphonso Johnson on bass and Leon 'Ndugu' Chancler on drums. Both were members of Weather Report, the fusion band formed in 1970 by Miles Davis alumni, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter. In the ensuing weeks, Chancler would leave and be replaced by Chester Thompson. His tenure, including the sessions for Black Market, one of Weather Report's more successful albums, would be brief.

  The drummer's departure brought to an end one of the most highly regarded incarnations of the Mothers. By the end of the year, only Napoleon Murphy Brock would remain in the band, which would be the last to tour as the Mothers. Most of the band had been with Frank for two years, during which shrinking numbers placed increasingly heavy workloads on the eventual sextet. "Frank was the hardest worker I've ever played with, hands-down," said George Duke. "I never saw anyone work harder than he did. From the time he got up to the time he went to bed, he was thinking music."6

  "I've always thought the work ethic was one great thing about him," added Bruce Fowler. "He was completely tireless. In a sense, he never stopped. Also, he
was really open-minded. He wanted to learn."7

  "It was the greatest experience of my life and the most difficult experience of my life," Ruth Underwood averred. "He just devoured music; that was all he thought about. We listened to his music on the bus; we rehearsed it at sound checks; we played it that night; we analysed it the next day. Everything was music."8

  Well, not quite everything. There was a court case looming. But in the meantime, Frank had to put a band together for two months of gigs booked through April and May. First, there had to be auditions for a new drummer. Having listened to Roxy & Elsewhere and Apostrophe (') for 48 hours, Terry Bozzio flew down from San Francisco and found himself in a rehearsal room with a crowd of hopefuls, playing by turns on two drumkits set up for the occasion. The failure rate was so high that he considered applying for the Weather Report job until he found out that Chester Thompson's departure to join them had brought about this audition.

  "The one thing I'd noticed was that a lot of the drummers were sort of flaunting their chops," he told Andy Greenaway. "So I did the best I could: sight-reading a very difficult piece, memorising a very difficult piece, jamming in a very odd time signature like 19/16 and then playing a blues shuffle. At the end of that, Frank said, 'You sound great; I'd like to hear you again after I hear the rest of the guys.' I turned to his road manager, his road manager turned to the 20 or so guys that were hanging around and they're all shaking their heads, and the road manager turned around and said, 'That's it, nobody else wants to play after Terry.' So Frank turned to me and said, 'Looks like you've got the gig if you want it.' "9

  Napoleon Murphy Brock, George Duke and Tom Fowler retained their places in the band and Bruce Fowler returned on trombone. Denny Walley, an ex-member of Geronimo Black, the band that Jimmy Carl Black and Bunk Gardner had formed after the original Mothers had disbanded, came in on slide guitar and vocals. But the most noteworthy addition to the band was Don Vliet, his own career on temporary hold, stalled in a legal logjam.

  "Don had the ability and the inclination to sign any piece of contractual paper shoved under his nose at any time," Frank explained, "without comprehending what these papers said and how they interacted with each other. And so his career fell on evil days, because he had signed papers with companies all over the place that all had conflicting claims on his services. He was in a position where he couldn't tour and he couldn't record. It was at that time that I put him in the band to do the 'Bongo Fury' tour. That was the only way he could make some money because he was just legally tied up all over the place."10

  "He called me up and asked for help," Frank told NME. "I told him that the Mothers were holding auditions on Tuesday and Thursday (just before their Halloween show), and that he should come along."11

  "He flunked," he told Steve Weitzman. "See, he had a problem with rhythm, and we were very rhythm oriented. Things have to happen on the beat. I had him come up on the bandstand at our rehearsal hall and try to sing 'Willie The Pimp' and he couldn't get through it. I figured if he couldn't get through that, I didn't stand much of a chance in teaching him the other stuff."12

  Things went better at the Spring 1975 rehearsals. "Although he still has trouble remembering words and making things happen on the beat, he's better," Frank said. "Just before the tour, I tried him again and he squeaked by."'3 He denied that there was animosity between them, even though the Captain had hardly wasted an opportunity to bad-mouth him over the last few years. "Any idea of a feud between us is quite pointless." But any affection he had for their almost 20-year friendship didn't prevent Frank from a stark assessment of Vliet's unique talents.

  Speaking after the tour's first gig at Bridges Auditorium at Pomona College in Claremont on April 11, he said, "The way he relates to language is unique, the way in which he brings my text to life. Of course, he has problems. His memory causes him trouble. He won't be separated from his sheets of paper that have his words written on. He clings to them for dear life. He also has a literacy problem. He can hardly read. He also has trouble staying on a beat. Captain Beefheart has no natural rhythm. He does have this thing inside him. It's dynamic and he wants to express it. In a voice like Howlin' Wolf."14

  SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE

  Frank had flown to London after the Friday night gig, where he took up residence at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane. His company's law suit against the Albert Hall management began at 10.30 on the morning of Monday, April 14 in Court No. 7 of the Strand Law Courts, presided over by Mr Justice Mocatta. What should have been a straightforward action for breach of contract was guided by Michael Ogden, QC, on behalf of the Albert Hall, into the lurid realms of obscenity, the threat of which was the management's sole justification for cancelling the Mothers gig.

  What transpired over the next three days was pure farce, with no attempt by either side to comprehend the other. The judge was a figure out of caricature, fit to have sat bewigged beside Sir John Willes when Hogarth painted The Bench in 1758. Willes had been a notorious lecher but Mocatta had little knowledge of and no inclination for the pneumatic world of sex that Frank's music delineated. There were other gaps in his experience, too.

  "Is a groupie a girl who is a member of a group?" he asked Frank. "No," Frank replied, "she is a girl who likes members of a rock'n'roll band." Did any of the court staff note the use of the word "member"? Sometime later, Mocatta made an admission: "When I started this case, I knew very little about pop and beat music. I knew it was to do with rhythm, banging, and an infectious atmosphere. I didn't know it was anything to do with sex or drugs."15

  Ogden made sure the veil dropped from his eyes. When Frank took the stand on the second day, Ogden just had to produce the toilet poster for comment and then spent hours dissecting his songs, line by line, trying to find sexual references wherever he could. Even though that wasn't difficult to do with songs like 'Half A Dozen Provocative Squats' or 'Penis Dimension', Frank complained, "You are attempting to direct my lyrics to sexual intercourse and I don't think that is accurate or fair." At another point he protested, "I don't think the reproductive process is to be feared. You are making it sound frightening and horrible."16

  With all the moral rectitude he could summon, Ogden descended through age groups to discover where Frank considered his lyrics to be inappropriate for children. Despite the QC's condescending tone throughout much of the questioning, Frank kept his emotions under control and answered in his customarily articulate manner; but sometimes, he bit back. "Are you sure that 'newts' just means newts? That there is nothing at all suggestive about that?"

  Ogden fearlessly probed. "Anyone who is disturbed by the idea of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous," Frank retorted.

  Alan Campbell, QC for Bizarre Productions, had some of the songs from 200 Motels played in court. The judge held his head in his hands as he listened to 'Lonesome Cowboy Burt', 'She Painted Up Her Face' and 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy'. As 'Penis Dimension' was about to be played, he asked Campbell if he had to listen to it. When Campbell said he didn't, Mocatta intoned, "I do not think I want to hear this objectionable song."17

  It was Frank's contention that he'd offered to rewrite any lyrics that were deemed objectionable or even to perform the concert without vocals. As an example, Campbell got him to rewrite 'Half A Dozen Provocative Squats', which Frank did in just five minutes. The point was made but it had no bearing on a case that was already building to a foregone conclusion. When asked by Campbell to comment on Sir Louis Gluckstein's contention that he wrote "filth for filth's sake", Frank replied, "My only response to that is that if I were in his position, I would not make an irrational statement like that."18

  After a day and a half on the witness stand, Frank flew back to America on Thursday, April 17, to prepare for the next gig on the Mothers tour in New Haven, Connecticut. Herb Cohen took the stand and reckoned that up to 80 per cent of pop music dealt with sex in one way or another. After further questioning, he said that anybody who got erotically stimulated by Frank's music
was in serious need of treatment. Alan Campbell referred the judge to a James Brown concert that took place at the Albert Hall on March 10, 1971, for which Brown was described as 'Superking of Funk'. With a straight face, he informed Mocatta, "Funk does not mean what it meant when we were at school a coward. It means here a mood of idle depression."19 The depression in the Zappa camp got more active by the minute.

  The following day, Tony Palmer spoke up on Frank's behalf. The judge asked him, "Is this stuff about sex a necessary part of pop?" "It is an essential ingredient," Palmer replied, "even if you are talking about music hall or opera. The entire history of pop music is the history of the way we express that sort of thing."20 He told the judge that none of Frank's songs, including 'Penis Dimension' and 'Bwana Dik', could reasonably be objected to as part of a pop concert. He described Frank's lyrics as "feeble" compared to some other 1971 hit songs but didn't feel they would have caused offence at the time.

  After the weekend recess, George Melly gave Frank another glowing character reference on Monday, April 21. The judge asked him to explain about girls "who cannot manage a silicone beef-up". Melly replied, "Girls who feel that their 'mammary glands' or 'titties' are too small can have them injected with silicone to make them larger. It is what is known as vanity surgery and is common in the USA. I personally think it is absurd." Commenting on 'Penis Dimension', he said, "The myth is that pop stars are supermen. To show that a pop star can worry about the size of his penis takes away some of the mythology and can only create reassurance in the minds of the pop public." Frank was turning "the spotlight of his intelligence" on pop's more absurd aspects, Melly thought. "Gilbert & Sullivan satirised the conventions of light opera in the 19th century," he added, "at the same time contributing considerably to the tradition. This applies to Zappa, I would say."21