Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa
Page 36
By way of consolation, he was well on his way to having a hit by the time he returned to California. "With 'Valley Girl'," he told Charles Shaar Murray, "my daughter did a radio interview and brought along an acetate of the song. They played it on the air, and the phones went crazy. The station held on to the acetate and kept playing it, and the thing was such an instant grassroots hit that other stations were taping it off the air and playing it. It didn't sell a lot maybe 350,000 copies and the album Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch maybe did 125,000 units; but sociologically it was the most important record of 1982 in the United States."11
What began as a satirical gibe at a generation of teenage girls whose chosen habitat was the shopping mall, and who spoke a form of English that foresaw the advent of Loyd Grossman, had been taken at face value as a celebration of a dystopian way of life. "I'm not too thrilled about the (San Fernando) Valley as an aesthetic concept," Frank admitted, "to me, [it] represents a number of very evil things."12 Moon revealed the origin of her bizarre dialogue: "I would go to bar mitzvahs and come back speaking Valley lingo that everyone at the bar mitzvah was speaking and the song came out of that."13
Her father was slightly bemused by the song's success: "Who would have thought in their wildest dreams that a record like that would drive people crazy?"14 But he was reluctantly goodhumoured about it: "First, it's not my fault," he told Tom Mulhern, "they didn't buy that record because it had my name on it. They bought it because they liked Moon's voice. It's got nothing to do with the song or the performance. It has everything to do with the American public wanting to have some new syndrome to identify with. And they got it . . . you wouldn't believe what kinds of things will be coming out with the words 'Valley Girl' on them. You name it, everything from lunch boxes to cosmetics, including a talking Valley Girl doll in February."15
No doubt it said 'Bag your face' and 'Gag me with a spoon' or some of the other totally bitchen expressions that drawled from the lips of Encino cheerleaders. Nicholas Slonimsky used another, 'Grody to the max', as the name of his mischievous cat. The 14-year-old Moon suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fame. "The people at my school are pretty supportive," she said. "But the ones I never was very friendly with and the ones I didn't like are really negative. They finally have a chance to categorise me. They call me a soc or a snob God knows what."16
"We've had calls from Universal, United Artists, even Norman Lear asking to do a film on 'Valley Girl'," her father added. "If we do [it] as a movie, she'll be in it, so she'll have to miss some school. But she'll have a tutor. I refuse to let her just walk away from school."17 In the event, Valley Girl the film starred Nicholas Cage and Deborah Foreman in a tale of forbidden romance between a Val and the typecast Cage as a Hollywood punk.
Meanwhile, the guitar albums continued to sell well. Because of the way the deal with Columbia was structured, the company had the right to release them commercially as a three-record set outside America. "That did really well in Europe," Frank said, "and suddenly they started importing them into the United States." All those who'd bought the albums mail-order got upset, to the extent that Frank had to release them as a box-set himself.
"They pressed 5,000 sets to begin with, and they went immediately. So, they ordered another 7,000. It's kind of an unusual item since it is fairly expensive, it's in a box, it's hard to rack, and you wouldn't think there'd be much demand for it because it is instrumental music by some guy who is not normally recognised as being a musician. People think of me as some kind of deranged comedian. So CBS was kind of surprised that there were that many orders coming in."18 They were happier about 'Valley Girl', which eventually reached number 32 in the singles chart; and although it contained some demanding music, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch climbed to number 23 in the Billboard album charts.
Despite putting out albums that demonstrated his guitar playing, when he came off the road Frank hardly touched one at all. "The only time I play my guitar is when I know I'm going to tour," he said. "I practise a little bit before we go into rehearsal, to get the calluses built up again. Then I play during rehearsals, and when we get out on the road, I usually practise an hour a day before each show. Once the tour is over, I don't touch it."19
"I really like the instrument and I really like to play," he added, "but when the responsibility for running the business rests on my shoulders, there isn't any time to practise." Nor did he feel the need to wear it on-stage all the time. "I'm not a very good singer and I don't have very good breath control. And the weight of the guitar on your shoulder pushes down on your lungs. I find it easier to sing in tune with the other guys on-stage if I don't have that weight on my body . . . Why dirty up the arrangement, which is planned to be concise and accurate, by randomly whacking a couple of chords or a couple of extra tweezy notes just because that's what everybody else would do? The music isn't designed that way. That's not the reason why I have the thing out there. It's something to make music on. And I really don't care what I look like out there as long as I can get my work done."20
BOGUS POMP
In the second half of 1982, Frank concerned himself with a number of orchestral projects. Sinister Footwear was to receive its world premiere in the spring of 1984 with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and the Oakland Ballet Company. The Perfect Stranger was a commission from Pierre Boulez, to be premiered in Paris on January 9,1984, with his Ensemble InterContemporain, with some other Zappa compositions. "Right now, we don't have any guarantee that even if he conducts the premiere that it will get recorded," Frank said in 1982. "And I'm interested in getting it recorded so that I can hear it. It's never enough just to hear it played once live in a hall. You may be able to listen to the stuff carefully so that you can go further and advance your craftsmanship, but it's just a little bit hard to do that by hearing it only once, so I do want to get it recorded."21
First, there was the preparation of scores for his collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra. It would entail a performance in London's Barbican Hall on January 11,1983, followed by three days of recording of 'Envelopes', 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation', 'Bob In Dacron', 'Sad Jane', 'Pedro's Dowry', 'Bogus Pomp' and 'Strictly Genteel'. The orchestra and the location were both reluctant compromises. The concert was originally scheduled to take place at New York's Lincoln Center with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, "but they decided to hose me by doubling the price in a couple of days," Frank told Robin Denselow, when the reporter visited his home. His next choice had been the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but they were unavailable. "It will be exciting to hear them for the first time, if they are played right," Frank added. He admitted to Denselow that the scores were very difficult and that the LSO had a chance to make musical history, because what was required from them in the score was "quite unusual".22
Frank took Ed Mann, Chad Wackerman and clarinettist David Ocker, the featured soloist in 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation', with him. The entourage was completed by engineer Mark Pinske, who had recorded the 1982 tour. "The entire orchestral thing is on my own budget," Frank said. "I've had requests from orchestras all over the world asking to play music, but basically it comes down to one thing they want me to pay for it . . . What I'm hoping to do is have [the LSO] rehearse it for about a week, and it may turn into something that they will keep in their repertoire, and it will continue to be played especially after the record comes out because then it will be something that will sell tickets for them."23
But then, no British institution was going to grant Frank's dreams, least of all the tabloid press. "Zappa takes the dance out of ballet," announced the Daily Express on January 7, 1983. "The 42-year-old musician said of his ballets without dancers: 'The scenarios and plot-line will be described in the programme. When the music has been heard, a choreographer can come forward.'" That wouldn't happen on the Barbican stage, as Frank discovered when he first entered the hall. A row with the organisers ensued; "It is tiny and pitifully inappropriate," Frank told them.24 At a later press confere
nce, he added, "Well, having seen the stage I'd rather get k over with as quickly as possible and do the recording. The sort of audience that will go to see classical music concerts and even rock groups in England are just trying to be cool anyway."25
Frank enlisted Kent Nagano, conductor of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, to realise his scores. Nagano had been aware of him since 1967 but hadn't realised there was more to Frank than the Mothers until he visited some friends at Pierre Boulez's L'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. There he noticed some of Frank's compositions in a list of future works and learned of the Perfect Stranger project. Back in the States, the two met backstage at a Zappa concert and Frank showed him some scores. "I looked at them and realised they were far too complicated for me to comprehend just sitting there," Nagano said.
"These kinds of musical syntaxes usually take a master's degree to even grapple with, and even then, most composers with degrees don't necessarily have the inspiration to go along with their knowledge," he added. Nagano asked if he could perform Frank's music with the Berkeley Symphony, but Frank had another purpose in mind. Four months after their initial meeting, Nagano got a phone call asking if he'd be interested in conducting some of Frank's music with the LSO. "It was much more than, 'Would I be interested?'" he told Andy Greenaway. "I considered it a real privilege, a real honour to be able to work with someone like Frank. We did some initial rehearsals together at his home in Los Angeles, and there I realised it was indeed going to be an extremely exciting project. From my knowledge of his music and his incredible musicianship, I knew that for him it was just as important to have music performed as close to perfection as possible as it was for me."26
Nagano compared what Frank was doing to the work of Pierre Boulez, but Frank didn't agree. "Boulez writes complex rhythms," he told Denselow, "but they are mathematically derived, while the rhythms I have are derived from speech patterns . . . they should have the same sort of flow that a conversation would have, but when you notate that in terms of rhythmic values, sometimes it looks extremely terrifying on paper." His orchestral works contained a "purely original system for balancing the tension zones and relaxing zones".27
"The evening of the performance, I had butterflies in my stomach," Nagano admitted, "but it was more a combination of anxiety and enthusiasm than actual fear. There was definitely a feeling that something enormous was about to happen. The reception was pretty predictably unpredictable in that the hall was half-filled with normal LSO concertgoers and half-filled with Frank Zappa enthusiasts, some of whom had never seen a symphony orchestra before. Because of that mix of listeners, there was an electric tension in the air, since people had no idea what to expect. But the London Symphony was 100 per cent behind the concert and behind Frank, and they played extremely well."28
The Daily Mail reviewer evidently didn't notice. Under the headline, "Zappa keeps the hippies hushed", he fluted, "Many feared a riot as the American premiered his two new ballets without dancers with a concert by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre. Instead, there was a cathedral-like reverence from the 2,000 capacity crowd as long-haired denim clad hippies from the Sixties mingled with dinner jacketed classics lovers... his loyal fans seemed happy — even though it was hard to tell the difference between the orchestra tuning up and the cacophany [51c] that followed."29
In The Times, Richard Williams showed considerably more awareness. He began his review, "Frank Zappa was the first rock musician to saturate his work with irony, setting a fashion so widely copied that the music has practically drowned in self-awareness. It also makes his music interesting to deal with in critical terms, since it is often difficult to guess his intention and thereby assess his achievement." He thought that Frank's music was never wholly serious nor totally given up to satire, parody and ridicule. "To maintain such ambiguity is an achievement of its own, although some may feel that it closes off the opportunity for emotional expression. Perhaps that was never his aim.
"The first half ('Envelopes' and 'Mo 'n Herb's Vacation')," he thought, "was hugely depressing." There were echoes of Charles Ives, Bartok and Varese, Williams gauged, but none of the 'new harmonic technique' promised in the programme. "The remainder of the programme was less ambitious, less diffuse, and not surprisingly, more enjoyable." 'Bogus Pomp' "began with broad parodies of Hollywood movie music and ended, to the merriment of the orchestra, with visual and musical slapstick. The safest music had fared best, always an unsatisfying conclusion."30
Afterwards, Frank said, "I'm glad people liked it but it wasn't a very accurate performance of the music. There were a lot of wrong notes in the show and the acoustics of the place were really shitty. If they liked it then the record will kill them because only on the record will you hear what the things are really supposed to be." He was grudgingly appreciative of the orchestra: "The LSO has an air of professionalism above and beyond most other orchestras, which is not a lot, but I've been associated with a few. I like the attitude of the LSO and whatever the liabilities might be from some of the individual performers, or the attitude of some guys in the orchestra, the net result of working with them was really positive."31
The following day, the massed forces of the LSO made their way to Twickenham Film Studio. "Frank was right there next to me," Kent Nagano remembered. "He demonstrated that he had impeccable ears and absolute command of the scores... I include Frank in the category of composers who are keenly in tune with their own work, how it's being rehearsed, how it's developing, and who can participate and help correct the wrong notes, make suggestions, and change phrasing on the spot in ways that might be easier or more musical to play."32
There was some 90 minutes of music to be recorded over the course of three days. Under normal circumstances, for musicians of the LSO's supposed standard, that would have been within the bounds of accomplishment. But not for Frank's music. In his note for Volume One of the recordings, he wrote: "as with every performance of new music, errors will occur. Every effort has been made to remove these, but without a much larger budget for rehearsal and recording time, the possibility of perfection in a premiere situation such as this is somewhat remote."
Four years later, when the second volume was issued, he was brutally honest about the circumstances of the last piece to be recorded, 'Strictly Genteel'. "The performance included here was recorded in the last hour of the last session of the last night. .. with no possibility of overtime (at any price) to correct mistakes. During the final 'rest period' just before the big push to get a good take, the entire trumpet section decided to visit a pub across the street. They returned 15 minutes late. No recording could be done without them. The orchestra refused to spend another 15 minutes at the end of the session to make up for their glowing brass section neighbours. I have done as much as possible to enhance this fine British 'craftsmanship' (at least 50 edits in 6.53), but to no avail . . . the 'human element' remains intact."
Nagano was diplomatic: "Costs make Frank's works very difficult for a traditional institution to mount. They call for huge orchestras much larger than normal, and the scores are expensive to produce. They're difficult from a technical standpoint, and that requires much more rehearsal time than a standard repertoire piece."33 Fewer visits to the pub and a professional observation of working hours, especially when the composer is footing the bill, would also have been appreciated.
INFIDELS
Before Christmas, Frank had given Robin Denselow a list of his projects: "There's a new album, The Man From Utopia, due out in two weeks, then I've just finished three film treatments and a treatment for a Broadway show. I've made a deal for an animated TV show on 'Valley Girl'. I've finished an 88-minute film, , involving live concert footage and animation, there are two other 90-minute videos . . . I've waded through 300 of the 400 reels of tape from our last tour and there's enough for five albums there . . "
He also told of a late-night visitor one recent December: "I get a lot of weird calls [at home], and some
one suddenly called up saying, 'This is Bob Dylan, I want to play you my new songs.' Now, I've never met him and I don't know his voice, but I looked at the video screen to see who was at the gate, and there, in the freezing cold, was a figure with no coat and an open shirt. I sent someone down to check to make sure it was not a Charles Manson, but it was him."
Dylan was led down to the studio, where he sat at the piano and played 11 songs and then asked Frank to produce his next album. "It could be funny," Frank grinned. "It's so ridiculous and off the wall that I feel I should do it. He doesn't have much of a sense of humour, but his new sounds are nice, so I'd like to produce them, though it would be a bit of an adjustment. I said he should sub-contract out the songs to Giorgio Moroder. I said he should do a complete synthesiser track and Dylan should play guitar and harmonica over the top."35
For Dylan, that would have been over the top. He later maintained that the project foundered because Frank asked for too much money and wanted to use his own musicians. In any event, Frank didn't hear from him again and the new album, Infidels, was recorded with co-producer Mark Knopfler and Mick Taylor on guitars, and Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar provided the propulsion.
By then, there were two new Zappa albums on the market. The Man From Utopia, as good a description of the position Frank found himself in as any, was released in March 1983. Its cover painting, by Gaetano Liberatore, depicted a massively muscled and snarling Frank as a clone of 'RanXerox', the robotic hero of a political comic strip 'Tanino' drawn for the Italian magazine, Frigidaire. His left hand has crushed the neck of his Stratocaster, while with the right he tries to swat the mosquitoes that beset the band at the Parco Redecesio in Milan. Behind him, a signpost indicates some of the other Italian towns the band played in.