Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa

by Neil Slaven

  The bill was proposed by Delegate Judith Toth, who along with Delegate Joseph Owens demonstrated a rabid variant of the PMRC's sanctimonious moral guardianship of the nation's young. Toth called her bill "constitutional"; "And stop worrying about [children's] 'civil rights'. Start worrying about their mental health and the health of our society." Owens declared that rock music was "mass child abuse", while Toth maintained that "these records" advocated "incest", "rape" and "sexual violence". "You've got to read this stuff to know just how dirty it is," she chided.

  In his testimony, Frank pointed out that to refer to rock music as "mass child abuse" was "sky-high rhetoric". Once again, he prompted general laughter as he pilloried the bill's proposed banning of anything that depicted 'illicit sex'. In Maryland, that apparently included human (but not animal) masturbation, "sexual intercourse or sodomy", the "fondling or other erotic touching of human genitals" and the female nipple. "Now, I like nipples," he averred, "I think they look nice." So did babies, who got to have that "nozzle" right in front of their faces. "You grow up with it, so to speak and then you grow up to live in the state of Maryland and they won't let you see that little brown nozzle anymore."

  With this and other testimony, the bill was rejected. The April 9 edition of the Evening Standard called it "A Win For Zappa". On the phone from Los Angeles, Frank was quoted, "I get asked all the time to run for President. If I ever decided to go into politics, I would jump right in." The zealous Toth was undeterred; she'd reintroduce the bill and "bring the record industry to its knees". But she'd have to reckon with Frank. "I've got a personal stake in all this," he told Josef Woodard. "I'm a record company owner, I'm a composer, I'm a publisher, I'm an artist, and these people are fucking with my business ... I went there speaking as a private individual on my own behalf, not on behalf of the industry, not on behalf of any other artists, just me as a businessman. In a true conservative attitude, I want the federal government off my back."22

  ELECTRIC HOEDOWN

  Back at UMRK, he and engineer Bob Stone were producing Dweezil's first album, Havin' A Bad Day, which was released by Barking Pumpkin in August. Apart from adorning several of his father's gigs, Dweezil had made his recording debut four years earlier in 1982. With assistance from Steve Vai and his sister, Moon, he'd recorded a single, 'My Mother Is A Space Cadet' and 'Crunchy Water'. Now he was backed by Scott Thunes and Chad Wackerman on an album of bludgeoning guitar rock defined by the influences whom he acknowledged on the sleeve, Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, David Lee Roth and Steven Tyler. Moon sang 'You Can't Ruin Me' and 'Let's Talk About It', but like Dweezil's own vocals, these were rather drowned in the mix.

  Most intriguing were two instrumentals, 'The Pirate Song' and 'Electric Hoedown', the latter inspired by Eddie Van Halen's solo from 'Cathedral', that hinted at the sort of original thought expected of a Zappa. "I wanted the first record to sound like a digital garage band," Dweezil told Guitar World. "I wanted it to be straight-ahead honest, with no slick production."23 That could be heard on Miami Vice actor Don Johnson's solo album, Heartbeat, Dweezil contributed some feedback frenzy to 'The Last Sound Love Makes'.

  Frank divided the rest of his time between preparing The Old Masters Box II for release in October and an album of new Synclavier material. The second anthology of re-mastered albums covered the period from Uncle Meat to Just Another Band From L.A., and included another Mystery Disc. The first side was made up of some 20 minutes from the Mothers' Royal Festival Hall appearance on October 28, 1968, while the second featured studio out-takes like 'Agency Man' from 1967 and 'Wedding Dress Song'/'Handsome Cabin Boy' from the Uncle Meat sessions, sundry live excerpts and oddities like 'The Story Of Willie The Pimp'.

  Synclavier technology had improved significantly since Frank had acquired the basic system in 1983. For him, the most important development was the sampling unit that allowed him to stockpile recordings of musical instruments, which he could then recombine and modulate in whichever ways his enquiring mind fancied. Grasping that the Synclavier divided sound up into segments or 'frames', affecting pitch variations in the same way that film recorded movement, Frank realised that he could create sounds that were beyond human contrivance.

  The process was laborious. First the samples were recorded in digital stereo on a Sony 1610 machine, then Frank's assistant, Bob Rice, entered them in the Synclavier, one side at a time. Then the stereo sides had to be matched up, the sample trimmed and catalogued. Interviewed for Keyboard in December, Frank admitted that Race was probably eight months behind on sample trimming. "As the samples get trimmed and organised, I build them into various types of patches, according to what composition I'm working on. We have things called pintos, which are mix-and-match patches. Instead of having a patch that is just a saxophone, for example, you can have a patch that is a few notes of the sax, a few of a clarinet, a few of an oboe, a few of a trombone, all different instruments, appearing on different notes, all of them on the keyboard."24

  In addition, up to four harmony parts which moved in different directions but eventually resolved could be assembled in each patch. These were called "evolvers" or "resolvers". " 'Evolvers' are timbres that start with one kind of sound in re-synthesis," Frank explained, "and you take a certain number of frames from that, and they cross-fade into another timbre. For example, a horn could fade into a clarinet and then into a string section over a predetermined time. "Resolvers" are a classification of sound which has some sort of melody line built into it, but all under control of one key on the keyboard."25

  What he hadn't done was to sample his own guitar playing, although Dweezil had done an exhaustive session. "A guitar player I may be, but when I first went to one of those music equipment conventions in New York City and saw the Synclavier system, I tried out the guitar interface and it wasn't really for me ... I haven't been satisfied with it, generally because of the way I play, known as I am for being incredibly slovenly with my technique of rubbing fingers all over everything!"26

  Given the amount of work required just to formulate the sounds from which its tunes could be assembled, it's hardly surprising that it took eight months to complete Jazz From Hell. Frank had an analogy for the process: "Sculpture is a subtractive medium, and you start off with more than you wind up with. So the analogy here is that the raw material that I'm working with is whatever is in my imagination versus what samples are at my disposal. And building the mountain is building your collection of samples.

  It was expensive keeping pace with the flow of software. "Before you can make (a Synclavier) do what you hear on Jazz From Hell," he told Keyboard, "you've got to spend a quarter of a million dollars."28 He took pride in the fact that he'd not applied for any foundation grant money to finance his operation. It was solely financed from record sales. "But as the record sales go down, so does the amount of money that I can turn around and re-invest into the hardware which has a price that's steadily rising and it squeezes me into a weird kind of position, because it keeps me constantly in debt to the bank to pay off loans in advance to buy the equipment."29

  Jazz From Hell consisted of seven Synclavier pieces and one guitar solo, 'St Etienne', recorded in that city on May 28, 1982. The solo, played while Frank sat cross-legged on a stool, was captured on video by Thomas Nordegg and included in Video From Hell. The rest of the album showed the phenomenal progress Frank had made in his enhancement of the Synclavier's resources. 'Night School' represented the ideal transition from the old music to the new. Beginning with a complete but sonically fragmented drumkit and sustained by a three-note bass pulse, lush piano chords echoed by synthesised strings provided a floating backdrop for a 'solo' that in previous years would have been played on a guitar but here was a combination of grand piano and trumpet, complete with pitchbends.

  Similar innovatory skill was evident throughout, leavened by the humour to be expected on a Zappa record. The frenetic attack of 'G-Spot Tornado' simultaneously mocked the expected consequence of caressing that erogenous area of the vag
ina and the 'scratch' techniques of disco DJs, with a melody that resembled a tap-dancer on acid. 'The Beltway Bandits' had a scurrying mechanical melody line that for Frank symbolised the Washington pressure groups and 'think tanks' that preyed on the Reagan administration. 'While You Were Art II' rearranged 'While You Were Out', a guitar solo from Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar. The complex arrangement used a technique Frank called 'hocketing' (also known as klangfarbenmelodie), whereby the melody is broken down into segments each played by a different instrument or sound. He'd first used it in 'Zolar Czakl' on Uncle Meat, and also used it here on 'Damp Ankles', where it was complimented by ambient sound and 'industrial' samples.

  The title track parodies what Frank referred to as 'noodling', his term for the formless wandering which some jazz musicians characterised as improvisation. Asked if Jazz From Hell was an ironic reference to the PMRC's assertion that rock music contained satanic messages, Frank replied, "No. You know the expression: if there's somebody in show business and he's an asshole, he can be referred to as an Entertainer from Hell. It arrived from that type of concept. This is it. If this is jazz, then it's Jazz From Hell"30

  The album excited a lot of media interest and Frank made the front cover of the February 1987 editions of Keyboard, Music Technology and Sound On Sound. The latter magazine talked to Frank in November at the 1986 AES Convention in Los Angeles, at which he played tracks from the album. "The sequences that I will be demonstrating on the Synclavier at today's show are very tame by my standards," he told Paul Gilby. "They've been chosen because they are the most accessible of the pieces I'm working on. The rest of my stuff is mathematical and very strange and it's definitely not foot-tapping stuff!"31

  In Music Technology, he gave some idea of his prodigious workload. "There's tons of stuff planned for future recordings. You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore is a ten-record box, a live collection that I've been working on for the last 22 years. I have a huge collection of tapes and stuff, and I've been going through the final examples of strange stuff that happened on stage with all the different bands. And there is the sequel to Lumpy Gravy, which is done. That's an amazing piece. It's all the missing dialogue that will help you understand it. If there is anything to understand about Lumpy Gravy, this is all the missing components . . . Then there's another guitar box coming out, there's a three-record box called the Helsinki Concert, which was done in 1974 with George Duke. The London Symphony Orchestra Volume 2 will be out shortly . . . I've got three albums of Synclavier chamber music. It's done, it's just sitting there."32

  As usual with Frank's scheduling, things didn't quite work out the way he envisaged them that day. But what it did prove was that he wasn't "just sitting there". He was too shrewd not to realise the value of his massive archives. The best way to generate the income he needed to finance his Synclavier habit was to make some small part of that available to the legion of fans who made up the Barking Pumpkin and Barfko-Swill mailing lists and others around the world whose reaction to a new Frank Zappa album could out-pant Pavlov's dog.

  20:

  ONCE AGAIN, WITHOUT THE NET

  What held good for records also went for video. During the first six months of 1987, Frank prepared the first releases from his own company, Honker Home Video. The idea came from Waleed Ali, head of MPI Home Video; his company had stepped into the breach in 1984, when Sony Video had refused to release Does Humor Belong In Music? without a warning sticker. "For obvious political reasons, the whole idea of stickering original home video product was something that rubbed me the wrong way," said Ali. "What was interesting about Frank's idea for a label — and we shared it with him was the idea of really exploiting home video for everything that it stood for, which was the last bastion of the ability to deliver truth and points of view."1

  The last bastion? Let's hear it again for sky-high rhetoric. Frank didn't want his profile added to Mount Rushmore, he meant to make money. His first releases would be the three-hour version of Baby Snakes and Video From Hell, a sampler of intended Honker product, including Uncle Meat, An American Dissident and You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore. Only Uncle Meat would appear before his death. "I think that it's a mistake to assume that everybody in the US who watches television likes what they watch," he said. "There's a substantial portion of the American public that watches broadcast TV and wishes they were getting a little bit more bang for their buck or a little bit more content."2

  More content was a by-product of the April 1987 interview in Guitar World. Editor Noe Goldwasser had visited UMRK to plan a 34-minute cassette called The Guitar World According To Frank Zappa, to be offered with their July edition. In the course of the interview, Frank induced journalistic trauma by admitting that he hadn't touched a guitar for two years. "The problem is, most of the best stuff that I will physically be able to do on the guitar is already on tape. You just haven't heard it yet. I mean, I don't have much incentive to play it."3

  He went into more detail while talking with Paul Zollo: "I didn't think there was any great demand in the marketplace for what I do on the guitar. I mean, why should I bust my chops, so to speak? There's plenty of people who play faster than I do, there's plenty of people who dance around more than I do, and there was nobody doing what I was doing on Synclavier. Rather than stand in line and be just another redundant guitar player plying his trade in the music business, I thought I'd better come up with something new."4

  Another new endeavour was a projected television show. In mid-March, he met with ABC network representatives to discuss Night School, his concept for a weekday late-night programme. The aim was to show raw, uncut news footage, point out what had been deleted or ignored and speculate on the reasons for each omission. A live band would be in the studio, the musicians doubling as actors in 'pre-enactments' of the 'possible social consequences' of specific news items. There would also be an opportunity to purchase a degree for a Psychology Course dealing in sexually related topics for $100, students could graduate cum laude. The show would carry the warning: "This programme deals with reality, using easy to understand colloquial American Language. If you fear (or have difficulty accepting) either of the above, feel free to change the channel."5

  Frank had enlisted the participation of Daniel Schorr, a senior newscaster/journalist with CBS and National Public Radio. Schorr, as 'Professor Of Recent History', would be in a Washington studio, while Frank and the band would be in Los Angeles. He'd first contacted Schorr's Washington office in August 1986. "Why me," Schorr wrote later, "a senior citizen totally alien to the rock culture? Ah, because the 'kids' didn't trust their contemporaries and saw in me an incorruptible maverick like him."6

  Given the nature of what Frank intended, it's little wonder that neither ABC nor any other television network would touch his idea. The wonder was that they saw him at all, and he probably had the PMRC and the Maryland Senate to thank for that. His appearances before the various Committees had made good (if dangerous) television and those who knew of him as a 'wild man of rock' were surprised by his eloquence. He soon found himself on the celebrity quote list. "Every time somebody wants an opposing point of view, they call me up," he told Rick Davies. "Unfortunately, they do call to get an opposing point of view, because before I started doing it, there was no opposition ... I do at least one interview a week on the PMRC, and some weeks five."7

  He'd found a different way to deal with another bite noire, the religious Right. Papers were filed in Montgomery, Alabama for the incorporation of a new religion, the Church of American Secular Humanism, or CASH for short. It was Frank's response to a judgement handed down in the state by Judge Brevard Hand, that Alabama schools were riddled with Secular Humanism, thereby violating the civil rights of decent Christian folks who wanted their children to grow up book-burning, beer-swilling, gun-toting, God-fearing Commie-haters in their image. Frank countered that since it hadn't been officially recognised as a religion, it was about time it was. He parodied the judge's ruling in his "Tenets of Faith", and paraphrased the o
dious Oliver North (the bungling patriotic mastermind of Irangate, the 'arms for hostages' scandal during which the Gipper showed he couldn't remember the lies he'd been programmed to tell) by stating that his "religion" would be "an off-the-shelf, stand-alone, self-financing organisation, capable of worldwide covert action".8

  Barking Pumpkin re-released Joe's Garage as a box-set in June, and The London Symphony Orchestra Volume 2 in September. The Old Masters Box III was prepared for release in December. Baby Snakes and Video From Hell also appeared that month and were advertised in Billboard. Frank was pictured in garish jacket and bow-tie, his hair tweezed vertically in Eraserhead mode, wearing a pair of 'No-D' glasses. These were explained: "HONKER NO-D GLASSES provide opaque cardboard protection for viewers who fear exposure to unexpectedly mind-boggling theoretical concepts. They are reversible for protection against heavy-metal video radiation, and, by poking out the convenient perforations, little peek-a-boo flaps can be created, accommodating the young sophisticate.

  "HONKER believes that WHAT YOU WATCH and WHEN YOU WATCH IT should be a matter of personal choice, and such decisions are not appropriately made by third parties or organised pressure groups. Nonetheless, for the deranged few who feel that censorship is a good idea, HONKER provides NO-D GLASSES so they can do it to themselves."9