Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa
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Frank savaged the notion that religious fanatics of any persuasion could use their book of rules to commit murder for righteousness' sake. The mode of dress might differ, but the call to butchery was the same. Which brought him to his coup de gras. Referring to the Bible's assertion that God made us in his image, logic must dictate that if we were dumb, then God must be dumb and "maybe even a little ugly on the side". Little wonder that Frank told Alex Kershaw he was a devout pagan: "I detest religion for what it has done for the human species . .. The difference between religions and cults is determined by how much real estate is owned . . . Look, how many people died as a result of the Bible compared to the Kama Sutra? There's no competition."12
'Dumb All Over' was placed between 'The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing' and 'Heavenly Bank Account', songs that shone a harsh spotlight on the likes of Jim and Tammy Bakker, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart, televangelists who blurred the distinction between 'pray' and 'prey'. The Bakkers headed a conglomerate called the PTL Club, which stood for Praise The Lord or Pass The Loot, depending on the quality of your faith. Bakker had prayed with President Carter on Air Force One and knew the new president, Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, in 1980 he also 'knew' Jessica Hahn, a 21-year-old church secretary. At the same time, Tammy Faye was allegedly having knowledge of Gary Paxton, producer of her solo album and of 'Monster Mash'. The scandal didn't break until 1987, after Bakker had paid $265,000 hush money to Hahn, her surname pronounced as in 'enhanced', which is what happened to her breasts before she posed nude for Playboy.
'The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing' pointed out that the religious right, hand-in-glove with an administration that relied upon its financial support, was devoted to the pursuit of self-interest. 'Heavenly Bank Account' pilloried Jerry Falwell, creator of the Moral Majority (later renamed Liberty Federation for tax reasons). To make sure the message got through, Frank intoned after the first verse, 'Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over'. When performing the song live, he would state unequivocally, 'TAX THE CHURCHES' and 'TAX THE BUSINESSES OWNED BY THE CHURCHES'. "I think the Moral Majority is weird," he said. "I think television religious fanaticism and 'send me your money' is weird. I think the people who send the money are weird. I think the people who broadcast the shows are sick. And I think the people who do the shows are the worst."13
This segued into 'Suicide Chump', suicide being 'the sport of chumps' in Frank's mind, sung over a generic boogie shuffle with slide guitar by Denny Walley. 'Jumbo, Go Away' dealt harshly with the unwanted attentions of an unattractive groupie. 'If Only She Woulda' used a wicked imitation of a Doors vamp, complete with lurching Farfisa organ solo, as an introduction to 'Drafted Again', a reworking of the recent single with Ahmet and Moon singing separate verses.
'Society Pages' and its satire of the complacent matrons who ran small town American society, began a sequence that relentlessly savaged their empty lifestyle, their dumb but attractive offspring and their masochistic willingness to endure anything in the name of 'beauty', leading to 'Charlie's Enormous Mouth', another stark denunciation of drug addiction. 'Any Downers?' evinced another addiction with which the weak-willed avoided the pain of real life, while 'Conehead', drawing some inspiration from the regular Saturday Night Live sketches, underlined the banality of the average American couch-potato's humdrum existence.
The album's opening sequence of four songs, starting with 'Teen-age Wind', were not segued. 'Harder Than Your Husband', a song that subverted C&W conventions, was a solo feature for Jimmy Carl Black in his guise as 'Lonesome Cowboy Burt'. Ray White sang lead vocals on 'Doreen', a doo-wop song for the Eighties with staccato backing from Frank's guitar. The mix that would have appeared on Crush All Boxes faded at the beginning of Frank's blistering guitar solo, which here continued to the backing track's end. 'Goblin Girl' ensured that oral sex would not be forgotten but as it progressed the song became the pretext for a dazzling array of harmonised vocal overdubs which reprised 'Doreen' and ended with a soliloquy for lighting man Coy Featherstone.
While there were guitar solos spread throughout the album's 19 songs, there was just one instrumental, 'Theme From The 3rd Movement Of Sinister Footwear'. Strictly speaking, this wasn't a product of xenochrony; the basis of the piece was the opening instrumental interlude from the late show at New York's Palladium on October 27, 1978, which was to have been released on Warts And All as 'Persona Non Grata'. Frank's solo was then transcribed and played again by percussionist Ed Mann and on bass clarinet by David Ocker, who'd also worked on Sheik Yerbouti. Careful listening to the stereo reveals another guitar doubling the original improvised melody. This was played by Steve Vai, credited on the album for 'Strat Abuse'.
Vai was a native of Long Island who took guitar lessons from Joe Satriani at high school before studying jazz and classical music at the Berklee College in Boston. Having listened to Frank's music since the age of 13, he set himself the task of transcribing 'The Black Page' and sent the result to Frank, along with a demo tape of his guitar playing. Frank was impressed enough to invite him for an audition. "I told him that I was 18. He said, 'You're what?' clearly too young to be involved with a high-energy operation like a Frank Zappa tour. Shortly after that Zappa changed his phone number and I thought I'd been unlucky."14 But contact was re-established and Frank asked him to transcribe the guitar solos from Joe's Garage. The following year, Vai moved to Los Angeles and Frank got him to add rhythm guitar parts to songs that would end up on You Are What You Is and ultimately made him a band member.
"Steve Vai got the job," he told Tom Mulhern, "because ... I could tell that he had a superior musical intelligence and very great guitar chops. And this showed me that there was a possibility to write things that were even harder for that instrument than what had already been used in the band."15
The care and meticulous preparation that went into the creation of 'Sinister Footwear' was typical of the attention paid to every aspect of the project. The power of the messages Frank wanted to convey was matched by a technical excellence not previously available to him. Songs were not only textually inter-related, but linking material ensured that attention was not lost in the transition between tracks. For the first time, the complexity of the music was matched by the layering of vocal overdubs on the extended codas of songs like 'Doreen', 'Goblin Girl' and 'You Are What You Is'. The work of engineers Mark Pinske and Alan Sides was an achievement in itself, but the vision was Frank's.
He was justly proud of UMRK's first project. "That's a really good album," he said in 1991. "The production values on that album are unbelievable. I had just opened the studio and so I had more control over the production elements than I had ever had in the past. Because, before that, if you're going to make an album with a lot of overdubs and if you're renting commercial space from another studio, you either have to block book it and spend a fortune or go in and out on every other day or something like that. And every day that you're not there, somebody is using it and you have to reset the board and relocate the microphones and it's very difficult to keep a continuity of audio texture. So this album was not only recorded there, it was mixed there."
I remarked that, despite Sheik Yerbouti's success, I thought You Are What You Is was the better album. Frank nodded, "I think so, too."
BARKING PUMPKIN (2)
With Mercury-Phonogram becoming difficult, Frank elected to wait out the end of his distribution contract, even though he'd wanted to release Crush All Boxes before the end of the year. Once again there was a significant backlog of material waiting to be issued. It was time to create another label identity. Since Columbia were already handling his product outside America, it made sense to propose that the deal became worldwide. The new label would be called Barking Pumpkin. "Gail used to smoke," Frank explained to Don Menn. "She quit. But she used to smoke Marlboros, and she coughed all the time. And so I had always referred to her as my pumpkin, and so at that point she was a barking pumpkin."'6 The logo depict
ed a Halloween pumpkin barking 'arf!' at a suitably startled cat under the company's banner headline.
In the meantime, the Zappa band played almost 40 dates during October and November 1981, crossing America from west to east and taking in three Canadian gigs, before finishing with dates in Berkeley and Santa Monica at the beginning of December. Both the California gigs provided material for Tinsel Town Rebellion, slated to be the first Barking Pumpkin release. Vinnie Colaiuta had returned on drums, Bob Harris came in on keyboards, trumpet and 'high vocals', and Steve Vai took along his 'stunt guitar'.
"We toured the US for three months," Vai said, "and it was one of the most tiring experiences of my life. I grew up pretty fast. Zappa doesn't tour like the average rock band. He works long, he works hard. I like that. I wasn't used to it, of course, but I really learnt the tour life."17 At a price. "I was a nervous wreck," he said on another occasion. "I wasn't eating right, I was sick, I was fooling around all the time. I was 19 years old and I was out there and I got no respect from anybody on the crew. I was under a lot of pressure because the music was so hard to play and I didn't want to make any mistakes. I did — it was inevitable — but the music was extremely hard and I had to keep practising all the time. But it was all really just nerves. I thought Frank was going to send me home. Why he didn't, I don't know."18
Frank posed a rhetorical question to Matt Resnicoff. "What is Steve Vai going to do? As a young musician, how do you get to be unique, when a record company doesn't want to sign unique people? The easiest gig for a unique person is a format where uniqueness is acceptable ... I always saw him as a thoroughly professional, on-the-case, totally talented, fabulous musician, and you couldn't ask for a better guy to be in your band."19 Few other ex-band members received such a glowing endorsement from their employer.
But then, few other band members could transcribe guitar solos the way that Steve Vai could. "It was a lot of fun," Vai said, "because it was like an art project ... I had an opportunity to explore these twisted notational rhythms. I really got my ears together because I transcribed for four years and it came to the point where I didn't use a guitar anymore or any instrument. My relative pitch got really good. Frank started sending me all sorts of things from lead sheets to orchestra scores where he had orchestrated certain sections, like 'Greggary Peccary'. Other sections weren't orchestrated, they were just put together by Frank and he wanted to have the score for it."20
There was a practical reason for his work as a transcriber. As well as producing albums to be distributed by Columbia, Frank also compiled three albums of guitar solos, which were to be made available through mail order. As Gail explained to Don Menn, "We were involved in litigation with a major record company. We were virtually prevented from having an income by them. They froze us out. We were an insignificant entity facing this huge corporation. They had Frank's earnings tied up in order to prevent us from fighting them, and on top of that we were fighting old managers. I realised we were going to be in a position where we weren't going to have a lot of money because the legal fees at that point were just phenomenal. Plus we had a lot of money tied up with the current management. So I started a mail-order company."21
Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar Some More and Return of The Son of Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar consisted mainly of solos drawn from live recordings from the 1979 and 1980 tours. Nine of the 20 tracks involved came from the three-day residency at London's Hammersmith Odeon. Six 1980 solos were from gigs in New York City, Dallas, Tulsa, Berkeley and Santa Monica. 'Pink Napkins', a variation on the usual coloured napery, also came from the Hammersmith Odeon, but this was the 1977 five-piece band with Eddie Jobson on keyboards. Even older was 'Ship Ahoy', from a February 1976 gig in Osaka, originally scheduled to appear on Lather under the title, 'Duck Duck Goose'. The remaining oddments were 'While You Were Out' and 'Stucco Homes', recorded at UMRK, and 'Canard du jour', a duet between Jean-Luc Ponty on baritone violin and Frank playing a bouzouki.
The first months of 1981 were spent in mixing these tapes and those for Tinsel Town Rebellion; all four were to be released during May. The latter double album used tracks from 1979 first scheduled for Warts And All, one studio track, 'Fine Girl', that would have been on Crush All Boxes, and several taken from the last tour, predominantly from the December 5 gig at Berkeley's Community Theater. As had become usual, sections of songs and solos were seamlessly intercut from other performances.
'Easy Meat' was taken from the April 29 gig at Philadelphia's Tower Theater. It had been mixed, with "massive over-dubbage of keyboards on the classical section (all done by Tommy Mars)", as Frank's sleevenote revealed, and sequenced into Crush All Boxes. But where that version (later included in the bootleg, Demo's) used Frank's original feedback-enhanced guitar solo, the final released track edited from the 'classical' extravaganza into his solo from the December 11 gig at Santa Monica, which, dispensing with feedback, was a more pointillistic and rhythmically diverse performance inspired by Vinnie Colaiuta's hyperactive drumming. Typically, both solos were excellent in their own right.
Tinsel Town's 15 tracks were a confusing combination of the known and the new. There were rehashes of 'Love Of My Life', 'Tell Me You Love Me' and 'I Ain't Got No Heart' recorded at Berkeley, and 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It' and 'Peaches En Regalia' (renamed 'Peaches III' for its radical reorganisation) from the Hammersmith Odeon. Perhaps his new young audience weren't familiar with them, but did they need to be enshrined in vinyl? A more puzzling inclusion was 'Dance Contest', which did little for the listener except to note that the participants unzipped their brains before climbing on-stage. "I'm makin' it up as I go along," Frank told Den Simms, "so I think that the people from the audience who come up there, they want that. I don't think that they wanna come on-stage and know that I've planned something for them, 'cause then they would feel like a victim. If they come up there, and I'll just cook something up on the spot, I'm gonna invent it based on what I think they can handle, and if I guess wrong, then it's my fault."22
Critics chose to condemn 'Panty Rap' for its perceived chauvinism and bad taste; it was apparently not funny to refer to female body secretions as 'voodoo butter', and as for drawing olfactory gratification from warm undergarments . . . Frank explained the history of panty-gathering: "A few years ago, in Philadelphia, a girl approached the stage and pitched up this little pair of blue panties. I knew the drummer and one of the other guys in the band liked to sniff girls' underpants, so as soon as she pitched them up, I made the drummer get off the stand and come down and sniff them. He did and immediately pretended to gag and faint and rolled all over the stage. The audience loved it. The girl, however, was somewhat chagrined, but I have it on good authority that the panties were semi-lethal."23
Bad taste, undeniably, but Lyons, Colorado resident Emily James was making a quilt out of the burgeoning stock of donations. She'd specifically asked for them not to be washed, "thereby maintaining some exquisite sort of organic miasma in the vicinity of the finished work of art," as Frank put it. The fate of the mulch-laden artefact is lost to history. "At the point where I handed her these garbage cans full of underpants, and she went to work to commit her artistic deed, I didn't speak to her after that," Frank said in 1991.24 Lyons had been flattened by a tornado the year before, but there were no reported sightings of migrating underwear. If indeed the quilt was ever finished, its fabric was so uniquely biodegradable that little can now remain.
The two most significant compositions appeared in sequence. First was 'The Blue Light', the most original song on the album and an indication of Frank's will to experiment. The tune was complex, incorporating many changes of tempo; parts of the lyric followed Vinnie Colaiuta's intricate drum fills, others followed speech patterns over more regular accompaniment. Frank's deadpan delivery was punctuated at dramatic intervals by band harmonies emphasising certain phrases.
He used a vocal technique variously identified as sprechstimme (speaking voice) or sprechgesang (speechsong). Its f
irst notable use was in Humperdinck's 1897 work, Konigskinder, Schoenberg used the technique in Gurrelieder (1900-11) and Pierrot Lunaire (1912), as did Alban Berg in Wozzeck (1917-22). Frank's adoption of the technique may have been inspired by one of Tommy Mars' quirky habits: "This is a guy that you could hold a conversation (with) and Tommy could harmonise it while you were talking. You would just follow dialogue with chords."25
'The Blue Light' was a devastating put-down on the hopelessness and amorousness of a generation that spent its time huddling in groups at fast food joints and in squalid clubs. Nor did the psychedelic generation escape. Mention of Donovan and Atlantis moved on to 'the giant underwater pyramid'; at which point Frank extrapolated, 'Excuse me, Todd.' After recording the RA album, on which they were pictured in Egyptian dress, Todd Rundgren's band, Utopia, had toured extensively with a stage set that made prominent use of a pyramid.
Frank reiterated his theme towards the end of the song and, as if as an afterthought, spoke-sang, 'You can't even speak your own fucking language.' It was a clear reference back to 'Panty Rap', also recorded at Berkeley, during which a piece of paper had been handed to him, asking him to wear the person's hat. Frank was incredulous: "How about this, this is a college community, right? 'How about wearing', w-e-r-e-i-n-g, never mind." Unfortunately, the force of his message was dispelled by the musical hoops through which he made it jump. Nor did the audience catch his ominous prediction, 'Death Valley Days straight ahead'.