Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  Other songs, like 'Yo' Mama', involved even more work. "On an orchestrated section of (that) song, the actual things that were reinforced happened at different times. On that guitar solo, there are three different sections from three different concerts, and Frank just juxtaposed them. It was an augmentation of what happened at a live performance, but an actual arrangement that evolved in the studio. He'd say, 'Go free, interpret it,' and all these countermelodies evolved out of the arrangement that was there.

  "Frank wrote that song at the very beginning of the '77 European tour, and it has a personal relevance to me. We were doing this rehearsal in London and Frank was getting very tense. I got fined because I hadn't memorised this little piece called 'Little House I Used To Live In'. I hadn't realised he wanted it totally memorised. So this rehearsal ended in a total fiasco. The next day, he came in with these lyrics: 'Maybe you should stay with yo' mama . . .'It was really autobiographic; that's how things evolve with Frank."12

  The majority of the album's 16 tunes would be built up from backing tracks recorded at Hammersmith. Two others, 'Jones Crusher' and 'Jewish Princess', were recorded in similar fashion at the Palladium in New York City, and two instrumentals, 'Rat Tomago' and 'The Sheik Yerbouti Tango' were four-track recordings from the February 15 gig at Berlin's Deutschlandhalle. There were also two typically obtuse spoken interludes, 'What Ever Happened To All The Fun In The World' and 'We've Got To Get Into Something Real', the latter commenting on how the songs were 'two tours old' and incorporating the mention of LEATHER. Finally, there was 'Rubber Shirt', the most perfectly realised example of xenochrony thus far. Frank explained its creation in the sleevenotes and ended with a typically sardonic flourish: "All of the sensitive, interesting interplay between the bass and drums never actually happened ..."

  Frank took most of the lead vocals, but Terry Bozzio and Adrian Belew each had their features. Some of the material, like 'Broken Hearts Are For Assholes' and 'Tryin' To Grow A Chin', was indeed much older than just two tours. The latter song chimed well with the recent upsurge of punk rock, and 'I'm So Cute' was also specifically written for Terry 'Ted' Bozzio to lampoon the trend. Having already guyed the disco craze with 'Disco Boy', Frank came up with an even better synthesis of pastiche and satire, 'Dancin' Fool'. Two other songs, 'Bobby Brown' and 'Jewish Princess', would each contribute in different ways to the eventual success of the album, making it Frank's biggest seller.

  With the sessions completed, auditions and rehearsals began in July for an autumn tour of Europe and America. Both Patrick O'Hearn and Adrian Belew had left, the latter to work with David Bowie. They had met backstage at a German gig, and Bowie had asked Belew to join his band. "It worked out later that Frank was sort of finished with his thing and it was time for me to go and do something else," he said in discussion with Steve Vai. "I remember one night we were playing 'Yo' Mama'. Frank changed the words to, 'I think maybe you should stay with your David.' Apart from that he never gave me any grief about it. He wished me well and it was very generous of him. I often felt like it was an opportunist move on my part and I wish I hadn't done it, but those things happen. I was young and stupid."13

  On the very first day of rehearsals, another major change took place. Terry Bozzio had auditioned with Group 87 before coming to the rehearsal. "I went in; I'd cut my hair, I was wearing different clothes, I'd just played this audition and been offered a deal with a record company (Columbia). We started to rehearse, me and Pat, and Frank could tell I wasn't really into it. He called me into his office, as he would say — actually we stepped behind the stage and he said, 'I think it's time you go off and do your own thing,' just like a good father would."14

  O'Hearn and Bozzio were replaced by Arthur Barrow and Vinnie Colaiuta, while Belew's place was filled by the return of Denny Walley and the introduction of Ike Willis. Peter Wolf said of Barrow, "When he got into the band, he could play everything. He just walked in and knew all the old parts, all the old bass lines. He was actually correcting Frank in some places."15 Willis was a native of St Louis, he'd first seen the Mothers at the city's Ambassador Theater in 1974. Three years later, on October 2, 1977, the Zappa band played a concert at Washington University, where Willis was studying. He met Frank after the sound check and auditioned for him in the dressing room, playing Frank's guitar and singing a new song called 'Bamboozled By Love'. They then harmonised on 'Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy' and Frank had made a note of his phone number. "He just sings his ass off, it's fantastic," Frank told Christopher Kathman. "I told him at that time that when we were having auditions, I'd bring him out."16

  "Nobody's universal," Frank told Wayne Manor in an NME piece, "The Monk On Zappa's Back", that never explained its title. "People have different abilities, and if you're working in a special idiom, you want people who are comfortable in that idiom. There's plenty of stuff for anyone to learn when they come in the band. It's like, I think my band's probably the finest music school in America. It gives you on-the-job training, and if you're lucky enough to get into the school, you get paid while you learn."

  What conversation there was picked over the corpse of Lather and detailed the three albums that were to come from Warner Brothers. In a rare instance of candour, Frank talked of his family. "I've got a brother who sells college textbooks for McGraw-Hill. He spent three years in the Marines. I got another one who's working in an old folks home. ['In the kitchen,' says Gail.] My sister started out by marrying an Okie, and later divorced him and married a former basketball player. She spends her time working in a Photo-Mat."

  There was one prophetic observation, however. "I see that people are drifting toward the Right today, in a very hypocritical way. They're not really right-wing people. But they figure that the more they look right-wing, the more they'll be able to get away with in the closet. The whole right-wing trend is people who want to look upstanding while they go home and do as much weird stuff as they can get away with."17 Was there a scent of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Swaggart in the wind?

  ARE YOU HUNG UP?

  Before spending the autumn touring America, the Zappa band came to Europe for seven dates, five in Germany, one in Sweden and one in England. No less than four were open-air festivals, including that in the grounds of Knebworth House which also featured the Boomtown Rats, Peter Gabriel and the Tubes. After the first gig in Ulm on August 26, Frank had intended to stay in Munich, but his request for a piano in his suite could not be met. So, reluctantly, he came to London and took a four-room suite on the fifth floor of the Hyde Park Hotel. Hugh Fielder went to meet the Anglophobe.

  "I hate playing in England," Frank declared. "I don't mind playing in Europe too much. The audiences on the Continent are pretty good. I can't stand this place, though. It's the people . . . the thing that's always depressed me about the English audience is that they're oriented towards dressing up and queuing up and anything in between that is irrelevant." Fielder pointed out that he'd sold out six shows on his last visit. "God knows why," Frank replied. "I mean, even when they're clapping it doesn't feel right to me. It's like they like you for the wrong reason."18

  In our conversation, Frank's reaction to London audiences proved to be only part of a wider-ranging antagonism. "On each successive visit," he said in 1991, "I saw Britain turning into a Third World country, much like our own here. People being depressed, getting meaner, getting more desperate and things getting more peculiar. Behaviour becoming more peculiar. And that's saying something, because it was plenty peculiar in 1967. Things got meaner and cheaper and dirtier and it started to remind me of the kind of growth decay that happens in large US cities, where things just fall apart. And the main thing that you feel when you arrive in the city is just a big ball of hatred that's not especially directed at anybody or anything, it's just, Hate lives there."

  On a lighter note in his interview with Fielder, he was happy to announce that Warner Brothers would not be getting his new album. "That will be coming out in January and it's probably going to be on Virgin in the UK
and it will be on my own label in the United States and Canada." The British deal wasn't definite, though. "I don't demand very much. Just give me the money to make a record and make sure that it gets into the stores. With them, there's no sweat; they've got the stores. They're a little bit tight on the money, though." Nor was Richard Branson very enthusiastic about the ten-album set, taking the same view as Warner Brothers that it represented one unit rather than ten. "I can't afford that. I've already invested my money in making the thing, so I have to get reimbursed for doing it."19

  The prolificness of Frank's musical output had always been a bone of contention with whichever label he was signed to. He explained to Tim Schneckloth, "record companies, in order to protect their investment, try to avoid putting out more than two albums per year on an artist because they want to milk the sales on each release as thoroughly as possible. I think that's a fantasy in my case because we sell so much in catalogue. Whether the album becomes a hit when it's first released is irrelevant, because the stuff just keeps selling. People hear about it by word of mouth."20

  Another orchestral project, this time with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, had fallen through. Frank showed Fielder a full orchestral score on which he was still working, having so far completed two movements. "It was supposed to be for next May. What I'll probably do is to finish the piece off and hire an orchestra and record it." That would be an expensive proposition, Fielder thought. Frank's reply became one of his most famous aphorisms: "Well, some rock'n'roll musicians make a bunch of money and stick it up their noses. I stick mine in my ear."21

  The set played by the Zappa band in the early evening of Saturday, September 9 at Knebworth was identical with that at Saarbrucken six days earlier. A bootleg double album, Saarbrucken 1978, later became part of Beat The Boots, Box 1. Most of the songs came from Sheik Yerbouti, although 'Easy Meat', 'Keep It Greasy', 'The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing', 'Bamboozled By Love' and 'Conehead' would appear over the course of several albums, often in radically altered form. 'Conehead' had already changed significantly from the instrumental version played by the previous band on New Year's Eve at LA's Pauley Pavilion. It now had lyrics and a repetitive riff similar to that used on 'Muffin Man', but would not appear on record for another three years.

  The following week, Warner Brothers released Studio Tan in a garish cartoon cover, by Raw Comix artist Gary Panter, completely devoid of recording information or personnel details. "They were doing whatever they could to hurt my career," Frank said to me. "You've heard the expression, 'You'll never work in this town again'?" At that time, sales had dropped off since Apostrophe (') and were averaging between 50,000 and 70,000. The shoddy manner in which Studio Tan and the last two albums were dumped on the public seemed to justify Frank's on-stage comments, which centred around the basic mantra, 'Warner Brothers sucks'.

  Critical reaction was mixed, or in Ian Penman's case, confused. "Here the texture and dimension parodies of repression, parodies of techniques to achieve same are intertwined and cross-referenced until one imitates the other and background is foreground, until attack is lull and joke is judgement." Er, yes. "These are repossessions and deftly engineered dry echoes of older and other work. It still bounces. It could be an anonymous soundtrack (there are no credits) for a Stigwood production of Uncle Meat. It's a package, a fun and games machine."22

  Part of the album's problem was that most of the material was at least four years old. 'Greggery Peccary' had been written in 1972; its 20-minute duration encompassed a dazzlingly edited combination of orchestral and small group themes, tied to a rambling story that jostled together several of Frank's abiding antipathies. Unlike 'Billy The Mountain', who also puts in a brief appearance, it lacked spontaneity. Dense orchestral arrangements overlaid with long passages of verbose exposition lacked the humour of the earlier piece, not to mention the manic dimension of Flo's & Eddie's personalities. In fact, most of one speech, by 'the greatest living philosopher' Quentin Robert de Nameland, had been replaced by Bruce Fowler's trombone solo.

  Two of the album's other three tracks featured the 1974 band; 'Revised Music For Guitar & Low-Budget Orchestra' is a selfexplanatory reworking of the piece first featured on Jean-Luc Ponty's King Kong album; 'REDUNZL' (the vowels were later to be omitted) made full use of George Duke's lush piano harmonies before Frank's guitar solo developed into a group improvisation, which after some more staged 'events' became a fleet piano solo. 'Let Me Take You To The Beach' was an incongruous trifle in this company, satirising the vacuous triviality of the Hit Parade. Engineer Davey Moire's falsetto lead vocal conjures up such masterpieces as the Newbeats' 'Bread And Butter'.

  The American section of the tour concentrated on the East Coast for the balance of September and all of October, with the now traditional residency at New York City's Palladium for the four nights up to Halloween. Joining the band on that night for the second time on the tour (the first was in Berlin on September 7) was violinist Lakshmirnarayna Shankar. Originally from Madras, Shankar had been playing violin since the age of five. He came to America in 1969 and studied ethnomusicology at the Wesleyan University. He met John McLaughlin in 1973, during the latter's Sri Chinmoy phase, and two years later the pair formed Shakti, an acoustic quartet which attempted the difficult fusion of classical Indian music and jazz. After three albums, the group had broken up earlier in 1978. Two examples from the Halloween performance, 'Thirteen', in which Frank coaxes the audience to clap in 13/8, and 'Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance', appear on YCDTOSA 6.

  Another participant that night was Warren Cucurullo, a young guitarist who'd spent the last three years attending every one of Frank's East Coast concerts. He befriended soundman Davey Moire and was eventually introduced to Frank, who was impressed that Cucurullo had learned not only his tunes but many of his guitar solos. Celebrating his birthday one night in a New York restaurant, Frank introduced him to William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, seated at the next table: "This is Warren, he's a guitar player."

  "After that," Cucurullo said, "I spent a lot of time just practising in my basement."23

  His contribution to the Halloween show was reciting 'Ms X', a story he'd first told to Frank in Florida six weeks previously. Towards the end of the year, he received a phone call from Frank telling him about the next European tour and asking him if he'd like to audition for the band. "I left for California the next day, and then the next thing I knew I was playing the Hammersmith Odeon plucked right from the basement to the big stage."24

  Denied the means to spend weeks at a time in recording studios, Frank concentrated on touring. Tim Schneckloth asked him if he still found it worthwhile. "It's the greatest thing there is," Frank replied. "As a matter of fact, it is the only thing that makes it worthwhile. Some of the drudgery you have to go through on the road is so boring. And once you get a chance to do that ... I wouldn't even care if there wasn't an audience there. It's just that you've got all the equipment set up, the musicians are there and paid for, it's just the right temperature, the stage is the right colour, it's the right mood. And then you play, and you can create things right there. And fortunately, there are cassettes of it so you have a chance to hear it back later and see if your experiments were successful or what. That's one of the prime reasons for me going out on the road and touring.

  "I like playing in hockey rinks," he added. "The problem about playing hockey rinks is that it's hard to hear the words. If you're word oriented, OK, that's tough. But that air space you have in there is such a great thing to work with it's this huge tonnage of air. And when you go 'wham' and hit a big chord, you've taken all that and spewed it over 15,000 people. It's not just a feeling of power. If you want to play really soft, think how soft one note is diluted in the air space of a 15,000 seat hockey rink. That's really soft. And one note played really loud is really loud. So the dynamic range in a place like that softest note versus the loudest note, the top to bottom of your sculpture — with the right equipment, gives you a chance to do a more interesting
and complicated sound event. Forget about whether it's a song or a drum beat or a scream on the microphone or whatever it is those are sounds that are moving air around. Taken in the purest abstract sense, the opportunities in a large, enclosed, resonant place like that are very interesting."25

  An opportunity of a different kind came at the beginning of December. William Burroughs was the subject of the three-day NOVA Convention at New York's Entermedia Theater, during which Laurie Anderson performed, Patti Smith played the clarinet and the Fugs' Ed Sanders read an account of a fictional rock group called J'Accuse. Allen Ginsberg recited 'Punk Rock You're My Big Cry-baby' and Frank read the 'talking asshole' section from Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Frank and Burroughs were pictured together at the event in Rolling Stone; later, over dinner, they discussed the possibility of making a Broadway musical out of Burrough's book, but the project got no further.

  TOUCH ME THERE

  Frank arrived in London yet again in mid-January 1979 with a full work schedule. The first priority was to record an album with L. Shankar for Zappa Records, his new label to be distributed in America by Polygram. In Britain and the rest of the world, Virgin had disappeared from the frame to be replaced by CBS, with Sheik Yerbouti scheduled for release at the beginning of March. There were also rehearsals for the European tour that would begin on February 10 with nine British dates.

  As Frank finalised arrangements for his first new album in two years, Warner Brothers divested itself of Sleep Dirt. It had originally been titled Hot Rats III and took its new title from an acoustic guitar duet between Frank and James 'Bird Legs' Youmans which ends suddenly with Youmans' muttered, "Damn!" Frank asks, "Getting tired?" "No," replies Youmans, "my fingers got stuck." Three of the tunes come from Frank's science-fiction musical, Hunchentoot; 'Flambay', 'Spider Of Destiny' and 'Time Is Money' were recorded in early 1974 at Blood, Sweat & Tears' producer Jim Guercio's Caribou studio in Colorado. The fact that here they sound like backing tracks was confirmed when Sleep Dirt was reissued on CD in 1991, with vocals by Thana Harris and Chester Thompson's original drum tracks digitally replaced by Chad Wackerman.