Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  Any idiot could see that Frank fought against restraints of any kind with every ounce of his will. Just a hint that someone or something was about to confine or limit him was enough to make him start imploding with outrage. On one level, he rejected boundaries: musical, sexual, or political; more prosaically, he refused to wear a watch, saying, with strange symbolism, that it hampered his guitar playing. He always slept naked, and when he wasn’t going out of the motel room he generally had his shirt off; if it was warm enough, he shucked his pants as well.

  I couldn’t own him, but since I was borrowing him so often, the distinction was pretty well lost on me.

  Situations arose regularly which put me in an awkward position. One afternoon during a lengthy sound check, Frank was making the band go over and over one eight-bar section of a song; the rhythm section was being especially obtuse. I was sitting in a folding chair on one side of the stage when one of the musicians’ girlfriends came up to me and said artlessly, “You know, Nigey, Frank’s guitar is so loud it’s drowning out everybody else, He’ll listen to you — why don’t you go over there and tell him to turn down a little?” I guess they wanted to set me and Frank against each other, hoping to get me kicked off the tour. I didn’t give them the satisfaction. Had I not been involved with Frank, I would probably have been trying to organize the musicians, anarcho-syndicalist that I am, but given the potential for conflict of interest, I tried to stay out of politics.

  On another occasion, there was a party going on in our room after a show. Leaving the revelers to revel, I slipped into the shower. When I got out, I decided I needed a Coke from the hall machine, which was located not more than 20 feet away from the door of the room. It was pretty late, and since I was warm and steamy from the shower, I decided to run out and grab the Coke clad only in a minuscule bath towel, figuring I’d run back into the bathroom and get dressed afterwards, before anybody had a chance to even notice. They were all fairly well preoccupied, it seemed to me.

  I dashed out into the hall and obtained the beverage (the machine was out of everything but ginger ale, but that was OK: for some reason Frank often had a pagan craving for warm, flat Schweppes — “the universal solvent”) , and then I raced back to the door and turned the knob. I’d left it unlocked, but suddenly I heard the deadbolt shoot closed inside. And there I was, locked out, my undignified posterior playing peek-a-boo from under that green logo, in the hallway of a godforsaken Holiday Inn in the wee small hours of oblivion — some pre-anthropoid road rat’s idea of a joke. Of course it had never occurred to me to take the key with me. Har, har, har. I stood there pounding on the door and muttering, incoherent with rage. Anyone who had seen me at that moment would have taken me for a madwoman, with my long dripping hair, extremely casual garb, and demented expression. But at least nobody would see me — all the world was safe in bed at that hour.

  As fate would have it, just then I heard footsteps coming toward me down the hall. I pressed myself flat against the door, wishing I were the Incredible Shrinking Woman, or that I could be instantly turned into a pumpkin. No dice. Here were the young, painfully straight-looking couple from the room next door, trying valiantly not to stare at me in all my glory while thinking, no doubt, that the lurid tales they’d half-heard about traveling rock ‘n’ roll bands were vastly understated. A wild non sequitur raced through my mind: For this I learned to play Stravinsky??!

  At the same instant, the door to the room burst open without warning, and I came close to breaking my neck as I fell inside. Inside, everybody was rolling around on the floor, braying like jackasses. Frank, assuming his role of disciplinarian, feebly attempted to issue a stern rejoinder to the culprits, but even he broke down in the middle and was unable to continue.

  As my understanding of him developed, I began to realize that in a surprising number of ways, Frank Zappa was all about the 19th century, not, as nearly anyone would have thought, the mid-20th-century. (When I was able to take a look around Chez Zappa, I wasn’t at all surprised to find that it had a formal parlor with a bunch of knickknacks on the mantel, Tiffany lamps, quaint chairs, ugly upholstery, and a strong feeling of stuffy propriety despite its psychedelic purple walls.) The battles, sexual and musical, Frank was fighting were Victorian: his musical heroes Stravinsky, Webern, and Varèse had all been born in the 19th century and had struggled to throw off the shackles of 19th-century musical convention, albeit each in a different way. Even Frank’s obsession with technology was Victorian, as was his droll, largely verbal sense of humor. He claimed not to be much of a reader, but his vocabulary was so flexible and precise, not to mention picturesque, that it gave him away as an audodidact, whether he liked it or not. I imagine that, growing up as the first-generation child of immigrant parents, he had absorbed their 19th-century European attitudes. In fact, he was scornful of everything American — beer, sports, Manifest Destiny, you name it.

  When I heard about his first visit to Europe on tour with the band a few years earlier, I gathered it had been something of an epiphany for him to walk through the streets of Vienna and see Webern’s musical scores in shop windows, or to stop by a cafe where people sat around all day doing nothing but reading newspapers and talking politics. As an instinctive intellectual mired in a crass commercial culture, he was struggling like The Fly — “Help me! Help me!” He had been condemned, whether he really knew it or not, to Life in the Wrong Era — he belonged in belle époque Paris, or Berlin in the ‘20s, not “I Like Ike” America. I’d survived high school by immersing myself in the proto-Dadaist writings of French madman Alfred Jarry, and had daydreamed about being the star of literary and musical orgies in fin-du-siécle Paris; while as a 15-year-old exile in the Great American Desert, Frank had similarly fantasized about what it would have been like to pal around with Varèse in Greenwich Village around the time of the Armory Show.

  Although I shared with Frank the eccentricity of being brought up at least nominally in the vicinity of Victorian values, unlike him I didn’t feel smothered by them. What had attracted me to him was the dimly perceived sense that we had those values in common; when it came to our reactions to them, however, we were bound to clash.

  In true Victorian fashion, Frank kept his emotions under tight control, at least most of the time. He seemed to be a private person who had been forced to adapt to life in the limelight by circumstance; as a rugged individual in a conformist world, he had reached the conclusion that his survival hinged on selling the public on his peculiar art by using reverse psychology, exaggerating his ‘unsavory’ qualities. It worked, but it took its toll on him. He would have preferred to stay home and work on his music, but instead here he was on the road, with brain damaged college kids asking him if he’d ever eaten shit on stage and concert promoters coming up with science fiction figures when they ‘counted the house’. He hated interviews and small talk, but on tour his day was made up of almost nothing but both. He was fond of me, I could tell — maybe even more than that — and yet when I looked at the chain of events that led up to my being here with him at this point in time, I had to admit that I was really only a member of that same old public — I just happened to be able to play the guitar. When I thought what it would have been like to have his undivided attention, I began fervently wishing that I was ten years older and that I’d met him in another universe entirely — someplace like the produce section of the Thriftimart in Cucamonga in 1962, when he was still just the village outcast, not yet a highly touted MENACE TO AMERICAN YOUTH. Of course no one person ever received Frank’s undivided attention. That was reserved solely for his work. It didn’t seem to bother him that on the road, sex became an activity squeezed into the ‘window’ between the sound check and the gig, or before the ride to the airport at 5:30 a.m. I tried not to think about how much he could have delivered if just once he turned his whole mind to it -- but that was dangerous ground, and I knew it. I was beginning to understand that I couldn’t surmount the obstacles of a relationship with Frank Zappa, as much as I wi
shed the truth were otherwise.

  Throughout the whole experience I found myself wondering, logically enough, where exactly the boundaries were in our relationship. I’d never suspected (“Who could imagine?”...) that this off-the-wall tour situation would wind up throwing me and Frank together, with the consequences to both of us; although it’s hard to believe Frank hadn’t foreseen what was likely to happen, Initially I had wanted simply — out of morbid, embarrassed adolescent curiosity — to find out what kind of a lover my musical hero was. Now, weeks later, I wasn’t much closer to knowing the answer, but things had gone so far beyond that point that I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to keep experiencing Frank’s universe. There wasn’t any way to describe the way I felt about him; our relationship was intense, volatile, stimulating, contradictory, and exhilarating by turns.

  Since I couldn’t begin to understand my feelings toward him, I was at a loss as to how to behave, so, in typical adolescent fashion, I largely retreated behind a wisecracking, sarcastic facade. Ironically, Frank, although he had no use for hearts ‘n’ flowers niceties, sought emotional honesty in his relationships, or thought he did, and he was bothered because he suspected I was holding out on him. I couldn’t bring myself to treat him like a human being. I knew this, but something was holding me back from trusting him. It was partly because he had been my musical idol long before I’d met him, and partly bound up with my fierce desire to maintain my dignity as a musician; above all else I craved Frank’s respect. Somehow I was afraid to come right out and admit to him what he undoubtedly already knew -- that I was horribly in love with him, as only a 17-year-old can be. The situation would have been difficult enough even if I’d been older and wiser; and for all my strong will and creative precocity, I was a pretty emotionally undeveloped 17-year-old.

  For his own part Frank, who was so accustomed to maintaining control over the situation around him, couldn’t decide what he should do with me: educate me or debauch me. What a choice — frustration or incest. For the time being, the latter won out, but Frank had other concerns. After all, he had a wife and kids to go home to; it wasn’t as if I was going to be moving in with him at the end of the tour. Then there was the pesky point of my being underage. Frank had done his jail time in San Bernardino in 1965 on a set-up morals charge — “conspiracy to commit pornography” was the verdict; as the proprietor of a little recording studio in Cucamonga, he’d made the mistake of producing an X-rated “patty tape” for a guy who turned out to be an undercover vice cop. One of the conditions of his parole had been that he couldn’t fraternize with an underage female unless a “responsible adult” was present. I would have died rather than admit that I was still a minor, but I’m sure that fact was never far from his mind.

  Positively 57th Street

  As Frank had mentioned before I joined the tour, the band had been on the road for the best part of six months by the time I came on board. It didn’t take me long to understand what he meant by “battle fatigue.” For a week or two, it may seem like an adventure to go from city to city playing a concert every night, but after a month every place starts looking the same, and after two months utter psychosis sets in.

  Frank was far from robust physically, and endless touring was probably the worst punishment he could have inflicted on himself. He may have expressed an aversion to drugs, but that didn’t stop him from chain smoking three or four packs a day, guzzling gallons of coffee, and adopting a devil-may-care approach to diet. One of the guys in the band was on a macrobiotic kick, and he carried a rice cooker with him so he could always have brown rice and tamari. Frank thought this was very quaint, almost religious. His own culinary theology revolved around the mantra: “Whatever it is, fry it first and ask questions later”. He constantly suffered with stomach troubles and bouts of diarrhea, and was forced to consume gallons of Kaopectate and Maalox.

  I’d always thought I was quirkier about food than most people — until I had to turn the trophy over to Frank. One day at the airport, with our flight due to leave in fifteen minutes, I left him watching the luggage and ran to grab a couple of sandwiches from the fast-food counter. Up until now I’d never had to actually order anything for him, and I decided to play it safe and stick to turkey and lettuce on rye. When I got back to the waiting area and handed him his sandwich, he opened its sheet of wax paper, took apart the two pieces of bread, and proceeded to poke around minutely in the filling before committing himself to a bite. Suddenly his probing finger encountered a few little slivers of chopped onion, and before my incredulous eyes he was instantly transformed into Superman in a petulant frenzy: what was I trying to do, stuff him with Kryptonite when he wasn’t looking??! I sat there in disbelief, trying nor to laugh, as he chucked the sandwich, wrapper and all, into the nearest garbage can, all the while keeping up a scathing commentary on the villainies of (allegedly) edible bulbs. Frank also actively disproved my long-held theory that people of Mediterranean ancestry had evolved a garlic gene. He had about as much fondness for garlic as he had for onions. In fact, when it came to any sort of Italian-type food (with the lone exception of pizza), he exhibited a pronounced attitude. I once offered him a bite of lasagna in a coffee shop. He looked queasily at the ricotta and sauce dribbling off my fork and said weakly, “Looks authentic.” Now if I’d spiced it with tobacco and coffee grounds first, I could probably have induced him to eat the whole thing. What he really lusted after was peanut butter, with or without anchovies.

  The worst thing about touring was the Day of the Living Dead Syndrome. I had never been a heavy sleeper, but five or six hours a night was my bare minimum. Frank needed closer to ten. We were lucky to average three. After a month or so, I decided that the standard media picture of him as a scowling misanthrope had been shot at 6 a.m. in an airport waiting area when the Kaopectate had run out. I felt sorry for him, but I couldn’t really understand why he spent such a disproportionate chunk of his life suffering like that, especially since there was minimal profit in touring; the only reason he was out there playing hockey rinks in Peoria was because he had to promote his latest album, and now his new movie. It was only much later that I realized why he did it. He sold more records if he kept his profile up, but touring fulfilled another function for him too: it was both a great source of material and it provided a strong contrast to his life at home, which tended to be comfortable but insular — the kiss of death for such a topical composer as Frank was. At home, he virtually never went out, preferring to sequester himself in his own reality, staying up all night working and sleeping during the day. He needed stimulation and inspiration, and touring was the only way for him to meet people and get a feeling for what was going on in the world. (Later in his life, when he no longer had the financial compulsion to tour, and middle age had rendered him physically and emotionally less capable of the exertion, he became addicted to C-SPAN and Cable News Network, but for much the same reason.)

  He had devised ways of making use of the inevitable stretches of dead time. While sitting around a motel room or waiting for a flight at the airport, he’d haul out his orchestra pad and start composing on the spot, staring into space and tapping his foot to private rhythms, his left hand in sync on his knee. I wondered what he could actually hear when he did it, but he had written a fair amount of music that way, including the entire score to 200 Motels (hence the title). As he jerked the pen along the staff, drawing clusters of precisely spaced little dots and linking them with crossbars and ‘tuplet ligatures, he was as happy as I ever saw him — in public, anyway. He had been a commercial artist for awhile, before music had sunk its permanent hooks into him. I wasn’t sure he recognized any boundaries between graphics and music, any more than he made value judgments about Varèse or Stravinsky being “better” than the Penguins or Guitar Slim. It was all part of the ongoing process of his work — his “composition", as he called it.

  Frank wasn’t exactly clumsy, but he tended to be the catalyst for improbable accidents. One bleary morning when we were
driving to the airport, guzzling dubious Holiday Inn coffee in a futile attempt to stay awake, the lid popped off Frank’s styrofoam cup and I was baptized in 12 ounces of scalding tan water. That certainly woke me up. In agony I lurched and writhed across the back seat of the station wagon, howling at the top of my lungs as the hot fluid penetrated my T-shirt. As I writhed, I inadvertently kicked the hell out of Frank’s shin with the toe of one of my cowboy boots. He had been solicitously trying to conduct mop-up operations on my torso, but when I booted him he doubled over in pain, jabbing his elbow into my ribs and upsetting my cup of coffee, the contents of which came rushing out to join the first cup — on my already soaked shirt. I wound up with some awfully nice blisters, and Frank went scowling around with a noticeable limp. (I don’t know what the other band members thought we’d been up to, but their theories about us were always pretty colorful.) Meanwhile, Frank and I conversed in irate grunts during the remainder of the day; each of us was convinced that the whole mishap was solely the fault of the other. Frank grumbled that if I’d been wearing decent, civilized shoes instead of those barbaric poot-stompers, he wouldn’t have been so badly crippled, while I nattered back that only a caffeine junkie with a terminal jones would have been trying to get a fix in a moving car at six in the fucking morning.

  The tour ground on, ebbing and flowing like a perverse river. At that point, in the early ‘70s, Frank Zappa occupied a position in the high middle level of touring rock acts; his arrival in town elicited some fanfare, but the truth (some would say farce) nevertheless remained that bands like Three Dog Night or Ten Years After could far outstrip him in ticket revenues. In several cases, the bands that opened for Frank were better known locally than the Mothers were; after these local fave raves finished their sets, a lot of audience members would listen to the Mothers for a few minutes, decide they didn’t like them, and split, leaving Frank and company staring out at a vast landscape of vacant seats while performing.