Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  The most adventurous piece was 'Pedro's Dowry', which avoided the regular pulses that drove most of the other compositions. 'Naval Aviation In Art?' was little more than a fragment, an eerie minute or so that contrasted staccato violin events with sustained chords from the woodwinds. This was perhaps the most imaginative piece, the more so for ending just when its ominous and threatening atmosphere had been established. 'Duke Of Prunes' was basically a grandiose framework for a guitar solo that made creative use of feedback. 'Bogus Pomp' shed a humorous light on the sort of episodic writing that goes into film soundtrack music. Some of its themes were first performed by members of the BBC Symphony during the Mothers' Royal Festival Hall appearance way back in October 1968. Three of these pieces would be recorded in 1983 by the London Symphony Orchestra with less than satisfactory results.

  Frank was already in the throes of his next multi-album project, Joe's Garage, conceived as a three-record set and released as a single album followed by a double album. The original intention was to record a single of the title song and 'Catholic Girls', his equal opportunity response to 'Jewish Princess'. "It started out to be just a bunch of songs," he said. "Then I figured out a story that would hold 'em together. It's all exercise. It's like doing crossword puzzles. In looking at it I saw that not only did it make a continuous story, but it made a good continuous story."13

  Good for a fully fledged conspiracy theorist, that is. Act I's gatefold sleeve set forth the various hypotheses that drove the narrative. In simple terms, devoid of the individual targets for Frank's invective, a US President just might seek to abolish music by identifying it as a principal cause of the energy crisis and inflation in general, and further, that people just might think it was a good idea. As Frank admitted in his next paragraph, it was a stupid story, done in the manner of a cheap high school play. The sting in the tail was to point out that, in Iran, music was illegal. The sleeve of the concluding double album developed the idea of 'Total Criminalisation', a Kafka-esque concept whereby a system of surreptitiously promulgated laws ensured that everyone was guilty of something, especially if it had to do with music.

  In fact, the story was operating on two levels: overtly, it was working out the above hypotheses; on a more mundane level, some of Frank's perennial bugbears, such as the dumbness of pop music, the bands that played it, the people that watched them, the groupies that serviced them and especially the journalists that wrote about it, lined up to be pilloried one more time.

  In order to get through the reams of exposition that were needed to explain both the supposition and the plot line, Frank became The Central Scrutinizer. His voice EQ'd to sound as if it was issuing from a cheap plastic loud-hailer, he announced it as his responsibility to enforce all the laws that hadn't been passed yet. With a licence to commit mayhem thus granted, the hapless Joe's story unfolded, interrupted by the Scrute's explanations.

  Joe is a guitarist in a garage band that regularly annoys the neighbourhood. His Catholic girlfriend, Mary, becomes a 'Crew Slut' before taking part in 'The Wet T-shirt Contest'. Meanwhile, Joe is seduced by Lucille, who works at a Jack-In-The-Box concession and generously passes on a social disease which makes his balls feel like a pair of maracas, provoking the perennial question, 'Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?' Act 1 ends with a rambling reggae version of 'Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up', the title song of Jeff Simmons' Straight album. So far, so literal. Thereafter, things get a trifle bizarre.

  In Acts II & III, the stricken guitarist pays an exorbitant fee for a consultation with L. Ron Hoover, head of the First Church of Appliantology, who deduces that Joe is a Latent Appliance Fetishist. Visiting The Closet, a club where the sexually damaged can interact with kitchen appliances, Joe dresses up as a housewife and learns to speak German. By these circuitous means, 'Stick It Out', a song from Flo & Eddie days, becomes the explicit serenade through which Joe importunes Sy Borg, an XQJ-37 nuclear powered Pan-Sexual Roto-Plooker and a mutant relative of Chunga, the industrial vacuum-cleaner who had her revenge several albums ago. Ike Willis' mother was responsible for the word 'plonk', which here receives a meaning quite at variance with what Mrs Willis intended.

  Unaware of the (or his) ramifications, Joe plonks Sy to death and is committed to a special prison full of musicians and redundant record executives (from Warner Brothers?) and 'promo personages' (Bobby Brown?) who gang-bang him to the tune of 'Keep It Greasey'. Sorely troubled, Joe lapses into semi-catatonia and dreams of guitar notes. Eventually, he's released into a world without musicians that, in 'Packard Goose', provokes a sort of madness in which his imaginary music is criticised by equally fanciful journalists.

  A vision of his long-lost girlfriend, Mary, comes to him and delivers THE AUTHOR'S MESSAGE: "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth." (OK, so far.) "Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST." Lit from within by this simplistic mantra, Joe consigns all journalists to squat on the Cosmic Utensil and dreams one last imaginary guitar solo, 'Watermelon In Easter Hay', before going to work in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, arrogantly applying his fully charged icing anointment utensil. Festivities are brought to a close with 'A Little Green Rosetta', in which the entire cast gather round their author/director and sing his 'stupid song' in a party atmosphere that deliberately echoes, though less imaginatively, 'America Drinks And Goes Home'.

  Because it operates on a number of levels, Joe's Garage is a hard record to enjoy, even when its achievements are acknowledged. The story is indeed stupid, its targets are easy and ones that had borne the brunt of Frank's wit many times before. As George Duke had noted, his humour, laced with a large shot of cynicism, was taking on an increasingly bitter and sardonic edge. Sex in his songs had become brutal and demeaning, as if he equated it with what he thought record companies and pop journalists had done to him. 'Packard Goose' is particularly paranoid, referring to all journalists as 'the worst kind of sleaze', dubbing them 'the government's whore' and inviting them to buss his buttocks.

  'Catholic Girls' is small beer compared to the explicit 'Jewish Princess', its lyric content subordinated to the plot. To make sure the listener gets the connection, Warren Cucurullo's electric sitar plays part of the latter tune's melody during the fade-out. 'Crew Slut' mentions a group whose name sounds suspiciously like Toto. When remastered for CD, 'Toad-O Line', supposed to emulate one of the group's hits, was blandly retitled 'On The Bus'.

  'The Wet T-shirt Contest' ruffled a few feminist feathers. One of Frank's roles in the unfolding melodrama metamorphoses from Father Riley at the local CYO into Buddy Jones, compere of the contest at 'The Brasserie . . . Home of THE TITS'. Nigel Leigh was questioning Frank's motives when he interrupted, "Think carefully before you laugh or even answer this, that the guy who invented the wet T-shirt contest came up with a bad idea. 'We need some more people coming to this bar. How do we get them in? Oh, I'll give $50 to the girl with the biggest tits who will go on stage and let some dumb fuck dump a bucket of water on her with a white T-shirt on, and then we'll sell more beer. What do you think, Billy?' I mean, surely he would have been a failure if it weren't for the fact that there is a virtual species of women in the United States that would kill each other to enter these contests and prevail for $50 or less. Shouldn't we recognise this fact? As Americans, we have to come to grips with this.

  "It's a wonderful institution. Look at the people in the audience who experience what they really are interested in. Maybe not to the n'th degree, which would be total removal of the T-shirt. Some places, they do that. But you know, the girls get to fight it out for that $50. The bartender sells more beer. The band gets to watch whatever is going on up close, so long as the water doesn't damage some of their equipment. I mean, that's the only real down side to this."14

  Several of the compositions in Acts II & /// had been around for a while and only required minimal adaptation to be shoe-horned into the story. There was little new writing and what there was provided continuity or
formed the framework for Frank's ongoing experimentation. It wasn't until five years later that a chance question revealed that, with the exception of 'Watermelon In Easter Hay', all of the guitar solos heard in Joe's Garage were xenochronous.

  "In the studio, they called it the 'Ampex guitar'," Frank told David Mead. "I had all these quarter-inch tapes of guitar solos that I liked from the '79 tour, and I'd go through my files, see what key a certain solo was in, and just experimentally hit the start button on the playback machine and lay it onto the multi-track." Any tuning variations were adjusted with a Variable Speed Oscillator. "We'd wiggle the pitch around to make sure it sounded like it was in the right key.'n5

  If there is a musical reason for Joe's Garage to exist, it has to be for the random creativity of its instrumental passages. The one exception, 'Watermelon In Easter Hay', is atypical Zappa, a simple soaring melody that belies its creator. When we talked about the album, I told Frank I thought it was the highlight of the entire album. "Well, it is," he replied. "It's the best song on the album. But Downbeat didn't think so. The review in Downbeat was so unfavourable towards Joe's Garage and especially 'Watermelon In Easter Hay'. The jazzbo reviewer of that album just hated that song. It was supposed to be that character's last imaginary guitar solo before he quits the music business. So it's a sad song." Ironic, too, that the so-called "imaginary guitar solo" is the only real one.

  The recording of Joe's Garage was not without its problems. "When we first went into the studio, Peter (Wolf) was back in Vienna and Tommy (Mars) started the album off," Frank told Michael Davis. "With. Tommy, we worked for several days and wound up with two tracks, whereas with Peter, we could do two or three tracks a day. They're equipped differently. Tommy is definitely a creative keyboard player with a good musical mind, but in the discipline department we had some problems. He just can't control himself to sit down and play something simple that's required for a simple song. So Tommy plays on only two songs on all six sides of Joe's Garage; the rest of the keyboard work is Peter.

  "The first few sessions were very chaotic. I hate to have to act like an umpire or referee and go scream at everybody because they're jamming. I don't pay $200 an hour studio time to have guys go in there and jazz out. If you want to practise, do it at home; don't do it in the studio. The studio is the time to make a record."16

  BABY SNAKES

  That was probably foremost in Frank's mind throughout the Joe's Garage sessions, for with any luck this would be the last time he would be reliant on commercial recording facilities. The Zappa basement was being converted into a recording studio, suitably named the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Because of the ongoing construction work and the fact that Gail was due to give birth in August, he cancelled the late summer tour that had been scheduled.

  The press quoted Frank as saying about their fourth child, "If it's a boy we'll call him Burt Reynolds and if she's a girl she'll be called Clint Eastwood." On a Dallas radio interview, he announced, "If it's a girl, her name will be Peru." In the event, their second daughter arrived at the beginning of the month and got to be called Diva for possessing the loudest scream in the hospital. "And it turns out," Gail told Victoria Balfour, "that Diva has this incredible voice and she can knock you over from a distance of 30 feet."17

  Finishing touches had to be put to the latest concert film, Baby Snakes, due to be premiered in New York in December. Once again, Bruce Bickford's clay animation was an integral part of the production. Early in the film, Frank asks the artist how he got into animation; the ensuing conversation shows that, like so many of the people that fascinated Zappa, Bickford has an original but warped mind. "My first animation," he says, "was cars running over the tops of hills. And then I branched out into, well, anything I could do with cars; and the clay people I had in the cars, I started animating."

  Frank then gets caught out in an assumption that trapped many of his own interviewers over the years, the supposition that certain elements when repeated must have meaning. "There's an image that you use quite frequently in these films," he says, putting forward a small clay structure that resembles a viaduct leading to a tunnel. "This image here, would you mind explaining what this image is?"

  Bickford replies, "That was a face originally, but it turned into this bridge, the guy's nose and lips elongated out into this bridge." A piece of animation illustrates the action.

  "Yeah," Frank presses, "but you've done this transformation several times. What's that symbol really mean?"

  "I don't know," Bickford replies, mystified by his own invention. "Noses are easily animatable into something else."

  Another amusing exchange follows. Bickford haltingly describes how one day he accepted "a few tokes" from a passer-by's joint and went to sit on some rocks on a nearby beach. "I felt like I was trapped there ... I was so weak that I couldn't get up and I couldn't walk back to the sand. These rocks had -", he wavers.

  "An unearthly power over you?" Frank prompts.

  "Yeah, the magnetism in them or something They were thrown in there with no regard for their original — well, the original magnetism they'd picked up over the ages as they formed and everything. They were put in contrary to that pattern."

  "How long were you trapped?"

  " 'Bout a half hour."

  "How'd you get away?"

  "I finally well, the effect of the dope wore off."

  Bickford plainly lived his life with the handbrake on. The final sequences of his stop-time animation flash past with such manic energy that the viewer forgets the enormous patience and attention to detail that have gone into their creation. The screen is crowded with mobile clay, each part fastidiously moved a fraction of an inch for each frame. Much of his work deals with the rapid metamorphosis of faces, within themselves or devouring each other, as when one mutates into a hamburger and sucks his neighbour into his bun. At other times, undulating sexual images fill the screen, changing too rapidly to do more than suggest the actions that vault from the viewer's imagination.

  There are also several sequences of Frank playing his guitar; in one, he transforms into a demon, in another, his chording hand suddenly sprouts 20 fingers, in yet another, a fingertip becomes a head which then bites a chunk out of another, only to be punched into submission by a third. There are also narrative sequences of figures stumbling through forests and a red car being pursued by others over increasingly rugged terrain. To paraphrase Frank's on-stage opinion of some pop superstars, "This guy is seriously fucked-up."

  Frank was sufficiently impressed to commission The Amazing Mr Bickford, a 50-minute video compilation released in 1989 and featuring some of the artist's earliest work and sequences from The Dub Room Special and Baby Snakes. The soundtrack consisted of music recorded by Kent Nagano and the London Symphony Orchestra and Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain. Six months after Frank's death, Richard Hanson, a teacher at Mifflinburg High School in Pennsylvania, was suspended without pay for screening the video for students in his 11th-grade English class as part of a study of absurdity in art. Following an anonymous complaint about 'pornographic' content, the school board watched the video and by their action proved yet again that art merely reflected life.

  Joe's Garage Act / was issued on September 17, with a front cover three-quarter profile portrait by Norman Seeff of Frank in blackface make-up, nestling a mop to his cheek. The inside of the gatefold sleeve, designed by John Williams, included a collage of a naked Maya, a sequence from Eadweard Muybridge's photographic explorations of movement, sundry unspecified technical drawings, the Pyramids, fingers on a lute fretboard and a 'Perspective Drawing Of A Garage'. The lyric insert had similar illustrations, but these did have a passing relevance to the songs' content. The photograph of cloth-capped workers wearing gas-masks that adorned the centre-spread didn't need explanation.

  The cover portrait of Acts II & III, issued two months later on November 19, wittily subverts the supposed symbolism of Act I. Frank, this time face-on to the camera, is having the black-
face make-up delicately applied around his eyelids by the make-up girl whose blonde head occupies the lower right quadrant of the sleeve. What is the significance of the fact that she has red nail-polish on the fingers of her left hand but none on those of her right? Or was she caught halfway through the application? Who gives a fuck?

  The inside gatefold similarly deconstructs the previous artwork. Torn elements of the collage surround the head of a man taken from a medical journal; his transparent skin reveals the skull with the sinus cavities highlighted in a clear reference to Frank's childhood asthma and the radium-tipped swab that was used to treat it. Muffins with generous toppings of icing also surround the face and reoccur in the illustrations that skirt the lyric sheet, ending with an Edwardian picture of a muffin-man, his tray on his head, plying his trade on a suitably aproned housewife's doorstep.

  Throughout the autumn, Frank concentrated on the installation of his studio's equipment and the final print of Baby Snakes. He also prepared another triple album, Warts And All, compiled from the 1978 Halloween show at the Palladium, New York and the February 1979 shows at London's Hammersmith Odeon. But it seems the market couldn't stand another three record set just then. Most of the 23 tracks, though not always in the same versions, would appear spread over Tinseltown Rebellion, You Are What You Is and the Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar series, while 'Ancient Armaments' ended up on a single with 'I Don't Want To Get Drafted' during the following year. 'Dead Girls Of London' was set aside yet again, along with 'Magic Fingers', 'Ms X' (Warren Cucurullo's monologue), 'Persona Non Grata' and the return of 'Little House I Used To Live In'. 'Thirteen', featuring L. Shankar on violin, and 'Little Rubber Girl' eventually appeared in the YCDTOSA series.