Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  'Regyptian Strut' retains the original band personnel on a slow tune that is all exposition apart from Bruce Fowler's eccentric trombone flourishes. Later in the piece his multiple overdubs confirm Frank's high assessment of his talent. 'Filthy Habits' is a seven-minute exercise in controlled feedback; multiple guitar overdubs, some recorded backwards, howl and whine behind Frank's solo, which itself operates on the verge of constant distortion. Towards the end, Frank adds bursts of keyboard overlays that are reminiscent of the work of pioneer minimalist, Terry Riley.

  The last track on the album is also the longest; at 13 minutes, 'The Ocean Is The Only Solution' is a trio improvisation that scurries through a series of complex rhythmic patterns before settling into a fuzz guitar solo over a fast, tumbling riff that probably provided more entertainment for the musicians than for the listener. "What actually happened," Terry Bozzio told Andy Greenaway, "was that Frank, Dave Parlato and I jammed at the Record Plant for about 35 minutes and filled up two reels of tape. Zappa, out of all that material, edited down to about 13 minutes. He played it on a real interesting Fender 12-string that had a pick-up in the neck. He had this glass-shattering 12-string sound — it was really unique."26 Parlato's bass track was then replaced by Patrick O'Hearn.

  Graced with another cartoon cover by Gary Panter but, like Studio Tan, devoid of any recording information, Sleep Dirt sounds (as was later proved) unfinished. If the tapes were delivered as put together here, then Frank must have been fulfilling his contract quota. It makes more sense to believe that they were intended as part of an album set like Lather, where individual tunes would be contrasted with vocal performances and perhaps gain from the comparison. Lumped together in this arbitrary fashion, the merit of a particular performance, such as 'Filthy Habits', is challenged by the similarity of tempos elsewhere and an absence of the inner logic that the listener expects from a Zappa compilation.

  The recording of L. Shankar's debut solo album had been switched to London from California since none of the facilities that Frank normally used was available. Backing tracks were recorded at Advision Studios, which Frank found 'primitive', with a British band consisting of keyboard player James Lascelles, guitarist Phil Palmer, Dave Marquee on bass and drummer Simon Phillips. Overdubs were done at the 'New York standard' AIR Studios and the album was mixed at The Townhouse.

  'Touch Me There' explored the microtonal variations of L. Shankar's acoustic and amplified violin work, although the latter more often resembled a bumble bee on Valium. The overall tone of the album, exemplified by 'Windy Morning' and 'Love Gone Away', was reflective and curiously unengaging, only igniting on 'Little Stinker' and 'No More Mr Nice Girl'. The latter was one of four collaborations with Frank, including the title track, 'Knee Deep In Heaters', its lyrics rendered almost incomprehensible by Shankar's schoolboy falsetto, and 'Dead Girls Of London'. This last was originally intended to feature Van Morrison's lead vocal, but Warner Brothers vetoed his appearance. His performance was replaced by Frank and Ike Willis harmonising as 'Stucco Homes'. Other, more ethereal vocal embellishment was provided by Vicky Blumenthal and Jenny Lautrec.

  These days, rehearsals were supervised by the Clonemeister, the new alias for bassist Arthur Barrow. "Frank would always show up for the last four hours of rehearsal, and I would tape that part. He'd say to various band members, 'OK, now you do this here, and you make the fart noise there, and you do that there.' So, after the rehearsal I'd sit down with a notebook and make notes about who was supposed to make what fart noises and stuff. It was like being a drill sergeant, kind of.

  "When Frank was there at the rehearsal and inspired, he would write with the band the way someone else might write at the piano, or with a piece of score paper, or at a computer. It was really amazing how quickly he could get stuff together, and get really good players to interpret it and make it sound like Frank Zappa music. Frank's just about the only guy who did not compromise his music at all, and still make a living at it."27

  "He rehearsed us to death," Peter Wolf averred. "I've never rehearsed that way in my life, before or since. First, he would lay all this music on you, which was a conglomerate of styles: 'Fifties rock'n'roll, punk rock, new wave, jazz, Bela Bartok, Greek folk music, and weird 12-tone stuff. You had to put on all these different hats, and be quick and spontaneous about it.'28

  "Frank loved to test the band members," Tommy Mars remembered. "I'll never forget one tour. We were getting ready to go to England. Then, three days before we went out, Frank came to rehearsal and said, 'I want every piece in this show to be done reggae. I don't care if we stay here until the tour starts, that's what we're gonna do.' So we burned out that night, we burned out the next day. Then, the day before the tour, he comes back all happy and says, 'We're not gonna do that reggae anymore.' I mean, he put us right in front of the muzzle of the gun, man!

  "He was extremely difficult sometimes. He knew exactly what button to push. I saw people who revered him so much, who were very dropsy but who didn't have exactly what he needed, absolutely cremated on the spot by him, in rehearsals, in auditions, on-stage. He pushed every boundary personally, sociologically, politically, comedically, and tragically. He couldn't be happy until it was ready to break."29

  "Well, I'm a hard taskmaster all the time," Frank told Nigel Leigh. "For whatever I do. I don't have any control over the way they perceive me but this is a situation where they get a pay cheque and they either do the job or they don't do the job. I don't hire them to be my buddies."30

  In another interview, he admitted, "I'm the worst person you could work for and the best. Yes, there is tyranny and personal abuse. It produces the desired effect."31

  15:

  SHEIK YERBOUTI

  A year to the day since the release of Zappa In New York, the Zappa visage, swathed in an Arab burnous, peered from the cover of the first album of new material since Zoot Allures, released back in October 1976. The contrast between Sheik Yerbouti and the albums Warner Brothers were foisting on the public was great. Although the new album contained a number of songs that had been 'toured' for a while, their sometimes scabrous, always scathing lyric content ranged over a number of controversial subjects guaranteed to offend anyone unaccustomed to Frank's withering wit. With the exception of the instrumental features, there was an absence of the complex tempo changes that characterised so much of Frank's music. This time, his messages were delivered hard and straight.

  A stately version of 'I Have Been In You' opened Side One, devoid of its explicit on-stage prologue. Thereafter, the incompetence of US service industries, anal sex, rapacious women, punk rockers, gender-bending record pluggers, drug addicts, dancing fools and Jewish princesses came under review. Was Frank going for the easy options? Nick Kent thought so. Flourishing his credentials, he stigmatised Sheik Yerbouti as "the same old slop, whether it be the 'serious' orchestral flotsam he can flaunt to justify his noxious condescending broadside wildly directed at the poor saps who still think he's some bona-fide genius, or the gross-out whacko 'yucks for the bucks' flimflam."

  Barely pausing for a stimulant he went on, "this is wall-to-wall four-sided dreck that may even actually represent a new look for Zappa's swindling artistic returns so far . . . here is a man obsessed with peddling cheap laughs that, beyond the odd witty couplet or two, aren't worth even a gratuitous smirk most of the time." Only bad typesetting blunted his scorn: "Buy this album and you can check you {sic) arsehole-rating."1

  After such a review, what better consequence than that people with secure fundaments bought Sheik Yerbouti in sufficient quantities for it to reach number 21 in the US album charts and make it Frank's best-selling album, selling more than 1.6 million units worldwide. "The reason for that was 'Bobby Brown'," he said in 1991. "If it weren't for some twist of fate where somebody in Norway decided that they liked that song very much and kept playing it in discos, that's where the whole thing started from.

  "Picture a disco in Norway with people dancing to 'Bobby Brown'. College students got
cassettes of it and hooked up speakers in their cars and drove through town blaring this song. It was unreal. And then it went from Scandinavia, a year later, to be a hit in Germany. Not quite with the same rabidity. And you could never even play the record on the air in the United States."2

  The explicit story of a record plugger who realigns his sexual preferences after an encounter with a lesbian could never have been a hit in any English-speaking country. The gay community, still in the first flush of its liberation and largely unaware of the harsh fate in store for many of its number, was not amused. Replying to the inevitable accusations of being sexist, misogynistic and homophobic, Frank said, "Some people miss the joke. In general, I was a convenient enemy and they could get exposure for their causes by coming after me. But I'm not anti-gay . . . I'm a journalist of a sort. I have a right to say what I want to say about any topic. If you don't have a sense of humour, then tough titties."3

  "If you looked at the number of songs that I've written and how many characters in the songs are men," he pointed out to Charles Shaar Murray, "most of the songs are about men. No men's group ever said, 'Hey, how come you're sayin' we're stoopid?' Women are sensitive if you say they're stupid. I like women: women are fine. But men do bad stuff, women do bad stuff. Who's the worst? You guys arm-wrestle over it. I'm not gonna tell ya."4

  Nor was he anti-Semitic, but that didn't deter the AntiDefamation League of the B'nai B'rith from filing a complaint when 'Jewish Princess', a lubricious catalogue of sexual attributes expected from one of her persuasion, received heavy airplay on California's radio stations. "They wanted to convince the world that there's no such thing as a Jewish princess, but, I'm sorry, the facts speak for themselves. They asked me to apologise and I refused . . . Well, I didn't make up the idea of a Jewish princess. They exist, so I wrote a song about them. If they don't like it, so what? Italians have princesses, too."5 To that end, he announced that his next album would contain the song, 'Catholic Girls'.

  He expanded on the subject in conversation with Nigel Leigh: "I'm making comments about society, and the society that I was commenting on was engaged in what they loved to describe as the sexual revolution — a world of sexual incompetents encountering each other under disco circumstances. Now can't you do songs about that?" But those songs always associated sex with human stupidity. "Well, have you ever looked at people fucking? Oooo. I mean that's a silly looking thing to begin with. It's silly looking. Let's face it, it looks silly. Why not say so? And from that you could develop a number of theories about it, whether or not it should be celebrated. I mean, so what if it feels good? It's still silly."6

  Did he think that he was the cultural enemy of the many pressure groups? "No. I'm sure they might have had a different viewpoint because anybody who would write the kind of material that I write was a pretty convenient target. I mean, it's pretty easy to hate me for whatever you choose to hate me for. Because I'm virtually unrepentant, and I just don't care." Did he accept the criticism that he'd dealt insensitively with the subject of female sexuality and female rights? "I hope that in those instances where I have dealt with that topic that I have been as insensitive to them as I've been to everybody else. I think that my insensitivity is pretty evenly spread around."7 Perhaps it was also the case that his records didn't sell in sufficient quantities to warrant a law suit by those he offended.

  It was a fact, though, that Frank's sense of humour was becoming increasingly sour, perhaps as a result of the real and perceived slights and injuries that seemed to dog his career during the Seventies. George Duke had noticed a change during his tenure with the Mothers. "The only change I saw in Frank over those years was that he went from being funny/sarcastic to being almost serious/sarcastic. The latter part of the time I was in the band, his sense of humour became kind of vindictive."8

  David Sheff asked Frank if there was rhyme or reason behind the subjects he chose to attack. "Whatever I'm mad at at the time," he replied. "I like things that work. If something doesn't, the first question you have to ask is, 'Why?' If it's not working and you know why, then you have to ask, 'Why isn't somebody doing something about it?' ... I like carrying things to their most ridiculous extreme, because out there on the fringe is where my type of entertainment lies."9

  Mark Ellen, reviewing the first of three Hammersmith gigs on February 17/19, thought that Frank "walks the line between the ageing tackiness of his sagas and the sheer complexity of his music . . . it's clear that his lyrics have never veered much from the gross and narrow." Ellen offered a potted version of Frank's career and the observation that, "The shock/horror mystique has long since been replaced by 'total control'."

  The control slipped towards the end of the three-hour show when a member of the audience passed Frank a book. "He looks delighted. It's passed around the whole band, who all crack up in hysterics. We're treated to an extract a clinical aid to the canine birth process, advising the use of sterilised scissors."10 What Ellen didn't tell NME readers was the title of the book and thus its particular significance Breeding From Your Poodle by Margaret Rothery Sheldon and Barbara Lockwood. For once, conceptual continuity had been contrived, but there it was, nonetheless.

  The Rolling Stones Mobile was parked outside the theatre and all three nights were recorded. Two new songs, 'For The Young Sophisticate' and 'Bamboozled By Love', and fresh arrangements of 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It' and 'Peaches III', were issued in 1981 on Tinsel Town Rebellion. Several songs from February 18 were later included on separate volumes of You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, including a version of 'Don't Eat The Yellow Snow' with bizarre poetic contributions from a distraught young bard in the audience. His second piece, 'Broadmoor', delineated his desire for a 'garden' as bleak and colourless as his diction. As he declaimed, 'I want to water that garden with my tears,' Denny Walley retorted, 'Oh, you want kindergarten.' The event was recalled three years later at the same venue, with Frank referring to the unfortunate poetaster as "that asshole". When he inserted the sequence in a mutant-edit version of 'King Kong' on YCDTOSA 3, Frank also included Walley's original comment.

  It was events like this that prompted Frank's observation to Nigel Leigh: "After a certain amount of touring, especially in Europe, the people who would come to the shows understood what the game was. You knew that things could change on the spot, right there on stage. It's not like you would rehearse in the afternoon and say, 'Tonight's surprise will be . . .' You try and work with musicians who have the flexibility and the kind of spontaneity that if a musical situation arises, or a social situation arises with somebody in the audience, that they can play off of it and develop it into something else. So those were the kinds of surprises that were being delivered. Things that were unique just to that audience. Just for that concert. At one time only."11

  The principal use that Frank made of the Hammersmith tapes was in the compilation of Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, three albums of guitar solos first made available in 1981 by mail order only. Half of the 20 tracks came from the Hammersmith recordings; no less than four were solos taken from performances of 'Inca Roads'. One track, 'Pink Napkins', came from a February 1977 performance by the Eddie Jobson/Ray White band, another, 'Ship Ahoy', from the 1976 Japanese tour. The balance would come from the 1980 American tour.

  The Spring 1979 European tour was the most extensive Frank had ever undertaken, stretching from February 10 through to April 1, with only ten days off. "The tours keep getting longer and longer," he said. "And I need them more and more and more." He refused to do a television broadcast on February 20, in between gigs in Brussels and Paris. "If you don't start having your days off when you come over on these things, your health just starts falling apart."12 After finishing in Zurich, the band flew on to Japan for more gigs, before returning to California in mid-April.

  Talking about his popularity in Europe, Frank said, "1 think the reason why we're better known there is because of all the US groups that could tour in Europe, we probably did it more frequently, on a regular basis thr
oughout the years, than most of the other US groups. We played regional dates. We took the music right there and stuck it in their face, French provincial dates and lots of small dates in Germany. We played towns outside of London. The big groups would come over and just do the one big show in one town. We went out and played for everybody. One of our best British dates was in Newcastle. If I had to choose one place in England to play, I'd say Newcastle would be my favourite British audience."

  JOE'S GARAGE

  The last of the three disputed Warner Brothers albums, Orchestral Favorites, was released on May 4,1979, with the most inappropriate cover art of them all. Gary Panter's cartoon depicted a head with piano keys for teeth, a guitar fretboard for a nose and a stubbled cleft chin in the Desperate Dan mould. Nothing could have better revealed the record company's purpose. It was plain that they had no interest in, nor respect for, the serious side of their former artist's music.

  The poster for the original September 1975 concert at UCLA's Royce Hall had promised premiere performances of 'Pedro's Dowry' and 'Bogus Pomp' and both were included here, along with 'Strictly Genteel' (the finale of 200 Motels), 'Naval Aviation In Art?' and an orchestral arrangement of 'Duke Of Prunes'. The Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Orchestra consisted of 37 musicians, along with Frank on guitar, bassist Dave Parlato, Terry Bozzio on drums and Emil Richards on percussion. The majority of the hired help consisted of brass and woodwind players, with only four string players. The murky sound of the original vinyl issue was cleaned up for its CD reissue, thus enhancing the enthusiasm with which the ensemble approached their unconventional task.