by Nigey Lennon
Zappa took a puff on his Winston and sat down on the table, facing me, his hawk like features wreathed in smoke. “We’re doing a show in Berkeley in a couple of weeks,” he said offhandedly. “If you came up there then, I’d be delighted.”
“What do you have in mind?.” Things around here were getting interesting fast. “How’s your rhythm guitar playing?” he asked, sidestepping my question. “Fair-to-middling. I’m more of a lead player. Mostly what I’ve been playing recently is slide.” “Blues?” His eyebrows bumped into each other across the bridge of his nose. “Western swing” I said. “I’ve been trying to get a lap steel sound in open tunings.”
He grimaced. Evidently the Cowboy Way wasn’t very high on his list. “Come up to the house next week and we’ll run you through the stuff, see what you can do,” he said, grinding out his cigarette on the floor. “Then we’ll see.”
“W-what’s the address?” I asked, fumbling in my bag for paper and pen. My rooting around was fruitless; finally Zappa thrust a big black fountain pen at me, the type used to copy musical scores. I noisily scratched down the address he gave me, at the top of Laurel Canyon; how I’d get there was anybody’s guess. I couldn’t afford a car of my own on $70 a week.
“I’ve got to kick you out now,” said Zappa matter-of-factly. “See you next week.” He picked up his guitar, briefcase, and coat, then leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek. Somewhere down the cavernous hall I heard echoing voices and the sound of female laughter. Then without being able to remember how I got there, I was outside, behind the auditorium, blinking dumbly in the warm, late-summer night. Something was clenched in my hand. It was Zappa’s Speedball.
Chez Zappa turned out to be a rambling, ranch-style split level at the apex of Laurel Canyon, near Mulholland Drive. I pulled the trusty Dodge van (wheedled out of my dad at the last minute, which saved me from having to hitchhike up Laurel Canyon Boulevard dragging my guitar case) into a wide driveway next to a new Mercedes sedan, hauled out my guitar, and walked up to what appeared to be the entrance gate, set in a tall wooden fence. I tried opening the gate; it wouldn’t budge. “Hello?” I called tentatively, feeling intrusive. No answer. “Hello!” I reiterated. High above me the curtains parted in a tinted plate glass window. Then a female voice, a low alto, came crackling through a small speaker set in the fence to the left of the gate, “Push on the gate,” it said. I did. There was an ominous electronic buzzing, and the gate clicked open to admit me, then slammed hard when I’d got through. To the citadel...
Looking ahead, I saw a sloping, freshly-mown lawn. A movie theater exit door stood open to the right. Suddenly a vivid and shocking guitar arpeggio burst through the door, ringing like a bell but piercing like a buzz saw. Hypnotized, l followed it through the doorway into an entirely purple room. It was like being inside a purple explosion: The walls, the ceiling, the doors were all painted the same deep and pleasing shade of heliotrope. In one corner was an eight-foot concert grand; in another, a tangle of blinking lights and tangled wires was joined umbilically to a four-track tape deck. A maroon Victorian sofa was piled with stacks of music and a tiny pair of child’s saddle shoes. And in the center of it all sat Zappa, huddled in a big leather executive desk chair behind a Gibson Les Paul. He let loose another incredible chord and reached over and pulled his lit cigarette from the pegboard of the guitar where it had been stuck under the strings, billowing smoke like a grenade.
“Hey,” he said, gesturing to an empty chair next to him. I sank into it, wondering why he was so terse with his greetings and farewells.
“I had a little trouble finding the place,” I ventured as I opened my guitar case and took out my well-worn Gibson L5. Frank ignored this pleasantry and frowned at my guitar, a pre-World War II hollow-body with a De Armond pick-up. I had another, more modern instrument, a Gibson 335, but I had left it at home because the L5, my pride and joy, had such a full, warm tone.
“That’s going to feed back like hel1,” he opined.
“No it’s not. I’ve played it through lots of different amps. You can crank it pretty much all the way up.”
“Not at the volume we play at. Here, you better use this.” He handed me a little red Gibson SG, a rock ‘n’ roll axe. I gingerly touched the strings. They were the lightest gauge I’d ever seen, and the neck had been planed down until it was wafer-thin. The whole setup was completely alien to me; I was used to playing in a different era. Zappa, paying no attention to my discomfiture, unwound a guitar cord and gestured toward an amplifier. “Plug in over there. You want some coffee?” I nodded, and he reached for a tall thermos and poured a steaming stream of black brew more solid than liquid into a stoneware mug. No mention was made of milk or sugar. Reeking with bravado, I took a hearty slurp. Suddenly everything went black before my eyes, and I gasped. I silently blessed the old aluminum espresso maker that had lived on the back burner of my parents’ stove, exuding gallons of granular, inky sludge for as long as I could remember. Today the fact that I’d been swilling 60-weight from infancy had saved me from a most ignominious end: this stuff was industrial-grade.
When I finally had my throat cleared, the guitar plugged in, and the volume adjusted, Frank whipped out the first chord chart. It swam under my eyes, a work of art copied precisely and delicately in calligraphy that was so clean it was almost prissy. While I was still peering at it, Frank picked up his guitar and counted off. Unprepared, I stumbled badly in the first bar, before he had a chance to begin his lead. “I-I don’t think I know the fingering on this chord,” I stammered, feeling my face flush.
Zappa didn’t need to look at the chart. “That’s A suspended fourth,” he said. Hmmm... He demonstrated the fingering on his own guitar. “Try it again.” We got a little farther along in the song, and then I tripped over another Walter Piston voicing. Frank enlightened me, and we went on. Actually, despite my screw-ups, I soon relaxed. I could feel that we had an intuitive mutual sense of rhythm and timing. Just as I had reveled in our first conversation, I rapidly lost myself in our musical dialogue. The chords and melody flowed effortlessly, and when I suddenly got carried away at one point and slipped into the lead, Frank shifted smoothly to rhythm. After letting me play through the head, he nudged me back into my accompanist’s role by resuming with an extremely florid solo. His chord changes were considerably more complex and fluent than mine, but he made it plain that he had no desire to ‘comp’ behind anybody, least of all me. We ended the song together, neatly, and I looked up. My face felt like it was on fire. “Whoo-ha!” I exclaimed. “What a song!” Frank nodded, a slight smile visible beneath his mustache. “Make your eyebrows go up and down?” he asked. I chuckled at this picturesque figure of speech. “My foot too.”
We worked our way through charts until my fingers were raw. After a couple of hours, Frank let me take a break. I was about ready to drop anyway. “Looks like you’re working for Air, Moisture and Pain,” he cracked, making a joke about my blistered digits and Blood, Sweat and Tears. He stuck out his left hand and showed me his own incipient calluses. “I ain’t been so diligent myself lately ‘bout practicing,” he observed in a caricature of some raspy, mumbling blues singer. I found myself staring at his thumb the way I’d earlier ogled his schnozz. My hero was turning out to be a veritable prodigy of alien physiology, The Beast With Ten Fingers… His fingers were long and supple, but he had wonderfully flat, utilitarian thumbnails. Why, he could have been a bricklayer and really made something of himself. I was suddenly seized with an urge to stick his thumb in my mouth and suck on it. The impulse, which seemed to leap into my mind unbidden, made me blush, and I quickly looked down at the music in front of me; although he wasn’t being crass about it, I suspected that if this were something other than a business-type situation, Frank would have been offering me any digit I happened to be interested in, and suggesting utilities for same.
When we resumed, I continued to have my share of trouble with unfamiliar chords, and a couple of times I could tell that Frank was a bit impatient with
me. I didn’t care, though. I had thought I liked his music before, when I was just a passive listener; but now that I’d actually gotten my hands on it, I felt like I’d received a reprieve from reality. It was as if I had slipped the dismal bonds of my mundane existence and emerged into a fiery realm where everything was exalted and not a little peculiar. By the time Frank finally called a halt to the runthrough, I was feverish, exhilarated, incoherent. I liked this new state of existence so much that the thought of leaving it was unbearable.
When we finally put down the guitars, Frank looked at me with an appraising expression. “Glad you enjoyed this little piece of the Project/Object,” he said.
“The Project...?”
“The Big Note. Everything I do, and anyone involved in any part of it — it’s all part of a larger composition. You could call it conceptual continuity.” He said this with an immense gravity, as though he were explaining quantum mechanics, or the reproductive modalities of slime molds. But there was a glint of self parody in those resonant eyes; he obviously wasn’t entirely serious.
Then Frank began to explain the situation with his road band. The group had been touring steadily during the past six months, and now, after a short break, they were about to embark on a very long U.S. and European tour with no time off at all. The main reason for this new tour was to promote Frank’s newly-completed first feature film, 200 Motels, and its soundtrack album. The tour would coincide with the opening of the movie in a number of test markets across the country, presumably reinforcing Frank’s name recognition and expanding his consumer base. He handed me a very official looking press kit with the sort of marketing data, demographics studies, flow charts, and promotion strategies that are so dear to the hearts of executive types. I looked up from its bewildering mass of socioeconomic obscurantism, and there was Frank puffing away on a Winston, a veritable hipster Mephistopheles with his tangled mop of shoulder-length black curls, well-worn T-shirt, and faded Levi’s with one of the fly buttons undone. Funny, he sure didn’t look like a businessman.
The problem was, he went on, he was getting a little bit concerned about the mental and physical capacities of couple of the guys in the group. “Battle fatigue,” he explained. “They’re always on the verge of a Lost Weekend out there, and if they go mentally AWOL fifteen minutes before showtime, it can throw everything into total chaos.” He put his index finger to his temple, indicating the mental state in question, and puffed on his cigarette, blowing out a little nebula of blue ectoplasm.
“Drugs?” I inquired.
Frank nodded but didn’t elaborate. “It’s not only the problem of selective amnesia brought on by recreational chemicals. We got a lot of dates on this tour with two shows a night. Laryngitis is always a lurking menace. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it” — he peered at me through his smoke cloud, with one eye half closed — “is to know all the material and be prepared to leap in at the first sign of an emergency, so that the people out there who come to see the show get their money’s worth. Think you’re up to it?”
He was asking me to be a ringer for the druggies in his band, huh? Sure, I could handle it. I felt a little like a detective in a pulp noir novel who, when faced with the classic impossible assignment, shrugs existentially and leaps into the unknown, possibly the fatal, without giving it a second thought. Hell, baby, why not? I got nothing to lose.
Before I could answer, there was a sound of footsteps and the creak of a door opening, and light flooded the dim top of the staircase that led down into the room. “Frank? You want some dinner?” In the background I could hear the small, crystalline voice of a child threatening to shatter into a tantrum. “You can bring your guest up too — there’s plenty.”
Frank stood up, For a microsecond he hesitated, then began to walk toward the exit door, away from the stairs. I picked up my guitar case and followed him. He stood framed in the doorway, waves of purple light behind him. “See you in Berkeley,” he said, and closed the door between us.
I guess that meant I’d passed the audition.
The Unbearable
Lightness
of Berkeley
Things grew odder and odder as the day of my departure approached. A couple of nights before I was to join the tour, I was in the kitchen rinsing off the dinner dishes when I heard the phone ring in the living room, and my mother’s voice : “Hello? Yes?” There was a pause, then “You know, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, writing garbage like that...” By this time I’d figured out who it was and hightailed it into the living room to snatch the phone out of her hand before she could cause any more damage". My mother had been doing a slow burn for five years about this pervert’s slimy influence over her only daughter; you couldn’t blame her for seizing the day and giving him a piece of what passed as her mind.
When I tried to apologize, though, Frank just chuckled. It probably wasn’t the first time he’d been attacked by outraged motherhood. “We seem to have a demographic gap here someplace,” he intoned with pseudo-gravity, brushing aside my apology. He’d called to fill me in on some last-minute tour logistics. Needless to say, I did not embark on the tour with anything resembling my parents’ blessings; if we’d had a cellar, they’d have clapped me in chains and locked me up in it.
Maybe they had a point, By the time I flew up to Berkeley for the show, I was in a trance, wandering around in a fractal cosmos made up of the atoms of an endlessly sustained eleventh chord. I had sneaked a surreptitious, very lo-fi recording of the recent L.A. concert on my portable cassette (Frank would probably have burned me at the stake if he’d known I’d done it; he seemed to feel it was grand larceny if somebody bootlegged a live show, even on a piece of junk like my $15 recorder. The first time he caught me making a tape of a show on the road, he seized hold of my little machine as if with the Hand of God, solemnly removed the tape, handed it back to me, and intoned, “Turn this machine off, and may I never see you turn it on again while you’re in this band.” I respected his wishes, and made sure he never saw me turn it on again — after that, whenever I used it I hid it under my jacket or somewhere else where it wasn’t visible.) Luckily my tape was up to consistent pitch, more or less, and I’d been playing along with it, over and over, every day before leaving for the gig, so intent on it that I was stripped down to a raw, vibrating core.
As I staggered out of the Oakland terminal, I was downright dangerous. The objects around me — buildings, vehicles, billboards, even the grass and trees — had the aspect of a comic book illustration just on the verge of disintegrating around the edges. Back in those trippy times everybody in the universe under 30 was loading themself up with acid, hashish, peyote — but here I was, straight as a die yet swimming through a hallucinogenic universe at high noon. When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake, said Plato, or Pliny the Elder, or one of those guys.
I found a cab and directed it to the edge of the Berkeley campus, where the auditorium for tonight’s concert was located. It was I p.m.; the sound check was supposed to start at 2. Just as the cab was pulling up in front of the building, an enormous galvanized loading door in the back swung open, and a bobtail truck backed in beside it. Popular music, I reflected, was just like any other industry, The saleable commodities had to be trucked across the country to the point of sale. It reminded me of working for my father Oh well, whenever I got back from this little expedition, I probably wasn’t going to have to worry about working for my father anymore.
I lingered across the street, watching, suddenly uneasy about barging right in. A sweet-faced young mother with blonde hair hanging to her waist walked near me, holding her toddler son by the hand. “Look, sweetie, look at the musicians,” she said, pointing to the amplifier cabinets being hoisted up onto the loading platform. Everything seemed hyperrealistic and garish. I had no idea what to expect. Anything could happen.
When I couldn’t stand to wait around any longer, I crossed the street and climbed up the steps that led into the auditor
ium. The equipment truck’s back door came clanging down as I walked past. Inside, I nearly stumbled in the dark; sunlit trails still glared in front of my eyes. I could smell the warm dimness of an old auditorium, the moldering wool upholstery of the seats, the forgotten butts of a million and one cigarettes that had been hurled into the void for the past 75 years.
Some of the band members were already on the stage, tuning up, There was no sign of Frank, I was in the process of hesitantly introducing myself, meanwhile keeping a sharp lookout for the telltale signs of substance abuse, when all of a sudden I felt a pair of arms, surprisingly strong, grab me from behind. I turned around, and there he was: wild-haired, grinning like a buccaneer in the red light district, his eyes like exploding nebulae as he hugged me with mock ferocity. His mustache brushed teasingly against my cheek. “Heyyy!” he exclaimed, Then, feigning solemnity: “How do you like the ever-sospiritual Berkeley ambiance?”
He had to do an interview before the sound check, and in his businesslike fashion he made sure I accompanied him when he went to sit down with the interviewer in seats several rows back in the auditorium. It was a technical discussion for Guitar Player magazine, and I listened carefully, hoping he’d reveal the true source of inspiration for his personal musical universe. He didn’t, but if I’d been paying more attention to detail I could have undoubtedly duplicated his guitar style — he described it minutely, right down to his preferred string gauges, pickup configurations, amp EQ settings, favorite effects devices, the size and shape of pick he used, and a lengthy explanation of how he’d just discovered a perverse and thrilling “cream-puff effect” in the studio by pumping his guitar signal directly into the board. I wondered whether he was spouting techno-babble at least partly for effect; I’d never heard anyone sound so thoroughly immersed in the arcana of audio before. (By the time I left the tour two and a half months later, he had taken both of the pickups off my old Gibson 335, messed with the wiring, replaced them, fixed a longstanding string buzz, and changed the strings to a much lighter gauge — all in odd moments during sound checks or before shows, After he got done with ‘my baby’ I barely recognized it, so I let him keep it for the rest of the tour. But by then I understood that for him, ‘tech’ wasn’t just a nifty way to get girls, it was his life’s breath: I putter, therefore I am.)