Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  I was rather surprised by the abject nondescriptness of 150 North La Brea. The two-storefront-wide, windowless rehearsal facility, on the east side of the street, north of Wilshire Boulevard, was wedged between a synagogue ladies’ auxiliary second-hand shop and a liquor store. From the sidewalk, it could have been anything — a temple of Gnosticism or a sweatshop, take your pick. On the other side of La Brea was an Orthodox Jewish synagogue and religious school. There was a furniture upholsterer up the block, and a Cadillac dealer on the corner. Not a very likely place to go looking for a thrill, I mused as I parked the Mazda right out front and fruitlessly probed my person for parking change.

  After half an hour or so, musicians began pulling up in the tiny (two spaces) parking area in the rear. They’d unload their gear from their cars, drag it into the rehearsal hall through the rear door, then rush back out to move their cars. There were lots of musicians — this seemed to be an enormous band. Dozens of guys were hauling in what looked like saxes and brass instruments, including a French horn, a euphonium, and a tuba, and there was one woman schlepping a bassoon case. For a second I wondered if I’d gotten the address wrong and was about to crash a Philharmonic rehearsal.

  Then I saw one of the guys from the road band unloading his equipment. He acknowledged me with a sociable leer and we exchanged a few pleasantries. When he reached into an anvil case for some hardware, I spotted a fading Polaroid photo that had been taken at one of the shows on the tour — Frank, with a dementedly didactic expression, holding the microphone toward me while I used it to demonstrate obscure Tibetan marital arts to the audience. Seeing it conjured up a flood — actually a puddle — of memories.

  When the cars started to pile up more than two or three deep in the back, the musicians had to resort to the curb out front, which was a No Stopping zone, and bring their equipment in the front way. The problem was the enterprising meter maid lurking just out of sight, waiting for each hapless blower or strummer to stumble into her web. I never saw so many parking tickets handed out in such a short time. If it had been Las Vegas instead of Los Angeles, that meter maid would have probably been the next mayor or something.

  Apprehensively, I drifted in through the back door, stood toward the rear, out of harm’s way, and “sussed it out". It was plain where Frank had acquired his “awreet” jive from — the small room was crammed full of jazz-looking guys in metal chairs — guys with goatees, guys in berets, guys sucking on their reeds, blowing saliva out of their spit valves, and sliding their pistons back and forth. It looked like he’d conducted his auditions at the Old Beboppers’ Home.

  The noise level was worse than earsplitting. Suddenly, without warning, I felt almost dizzy, and my ears began to ring. “Hey!” Virtually compelled to turn around, I felt rather than saw Frank looking at me from across the room, and I slowly walked over to him.

  He was sitting awkwardly, his left leg stuck out stiffly and painfully. The minute I got up close to him I could feel that his energy level was low. Everything about him seemed out of synch, stunned, diminished. As he looked up at me, I saw that there were deep, blue-black shadows under his eyes, and his expression radiated a sort of cosmic incredulity. He was still trying to come to terms with a world where somebody could do that to him; the brutal fact of assault, of violation, had left him devastated and bewildered.

  Not entirely voluntarily, I half knelt down and put my arms around him. He hugged me back, even hung on to me for a moment, and suddenly I caught a flash of his old energy again. With a wicked grin he thrust forward his broken leg, showing me that it was held together with a mean-looking steel brace and pins, and the foot encased in a prosthetic shoe. “How’s that for a shoe? “he smirked — a private joke which brought back all-too-vivid memories of the tour. “Thank you for the floral tribute, “he added, indicating his uninjured right foot, which was shod in a more conventional manner. He was wearing the purple sock I’d wrapped around his bouquet.

  He leaned over slowly and opened his briefcase, took out a business size envelope, and handed it over to me. “It’s all there, but if you wanna count it, go ahead.” I unstuck the flap and drew out another ‘wad’ — four stiff, new-smelling C-notes — and tucked them into my wallet.

  Meanwhile, some of the musicians were eyeing us curiously. Frank promptly added to their prurient interest. “I have here something that oughta curl up your toes a little bit,” he told me, and went groping in the briefcase amidst the music paper and finished charts. “Aha!” he declared, and triumphantly hauled out a lollipop in the shape of a bare foot. It had a little card hanging off it with a poem about sucking on toes and feet taking their licks. Jeez, I hoped I wasn’t blushing in front of all these jaded jazzbos; my face was burning. Frank presented this demented trophy to me with a flourish and a little bow — not an easy gesture for somebody who basically can’t move from the waist down. Maybe you couldn’t murder a case-hardened absurdist that easily after all.

  I thanked him, squatted down in front of him, and read the card out loud. He guffawed with me, raised that old eyebrow, and — here we go again, boys and girls, from the top: one, two, three. What could he still want with me, after all we’d been through? Shit — what was left? Worse, why had my own judgment and will power just fizzled out and delivered me right back into his clutches without even a whimper of doubt or warning, when I knew that the minute I started seeing him again there was no way I could stand back on the sidelines and maintain my cool? Didn’t I remember all the pain and suffering I’d been undergoing these last few months? Did I, hell — at that precise moment, when I should have been heading straight home, do not pass Go, do not forget your four hundred dollars — can you guess what I was thinking?

  Oh gosh, I wonder if his wedding tackle was affected by the accident! (It wasn’t.)

  He showed me the music he’d been writing for this new group. It was fully scored, not merely chord charts to songs but full-blown chamber orchestra parts, horn transpositions and all.

  “When did you write these?” I wanted to know.

  “I finished this one this morning,” he said, rolling his eyes heavenward. “I haven’t had a chance to copy the parts yet,”

  This struck me as heroic work, under the circumstances. He would have earned the right, after nearly being killed by some lunatic, just to lie around and groan, but instead he’d forced himself back to work, had composed this mutant chamber music, and now was going to forge ahead and play it. That put a new spin on the word “character,” I reflected.

  I took a seat near him so I could peer over his shoulder at the scores. As usual, he was being very serious about the appurtenances of the job — the completed parts had all been ozalid-reproduced at Cameo Music, and were tucked inside an imposing black folder with THE GRAND WAZOO, the name of the group, on the front in gold lettering. Frank had even obtained a regulation baton. It looked like he was about to break it in, although in my experience, I had never heard of anybody but me who had actually worn one out.

  When all the musicians were warmed up, Frank (seated by necessity, but stalwartly leading nonetheless raised an authoritative hand and asked them to play an A. Some of the players raised wry eyebrows, but hey, they were drawing scale... so out it came, that familiar 440 pitch in all those different timbres. It sounded remarkably like an orchestra. I got the goosepimply feeling I’d first experienced as a four-year-old when my parents had taken me to a Leonard Bernstein “Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra” concert at the Hollywood Bowl; when the entire massed strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion had frenziedly thrown themselves into a huge writhing pile on the first triple forte section in Stravinsky’s Firebird, I had gotten up and stood there frozen, with my eyes and tongue hanging out, until my mortified mother finally dragged me back to my seat. An orchestra was, I’d just realized in my kiddie way, a wonderfully dangerous machine. You could blow things to kingdom come with it.

  Frank seemed satisfied that the parts of his machine were all in working order, so
he raised his baton, counted off a couple of bars for nothing, gave the downbeat, and there it was: that old feeling of exhilarated hyper-consciousness I remembered so well. I looked down at the master score he was conducting from. It was all right there on paper in the form of all those familiar little dots and crossbars, no mystery about it, so how could it make me I feel like every barricade in my mind had just been exploded clear into the Great Beyond? I glanced toward the musicians, all huffing and puffing and moving the air molecules around like longshoremen. They were too busy trying to nail the pesky notes and tricky rhythms to care about metaphysics. This was really interesting. I was going to have to ask Frank some very deep questions sooner or later.

  Home, Home and Deranged

  I began spending every waking hour at Grand Wazoo rehearsals. I felt that I had vast lessons to learn; all I wanted to do was stand next to Frank, reading over his shoulder while he conducted or played his guitar, and watching how the score was transformed from notes on paper into audio by the musicians. Until now my exposure to the creation and production of orchestral music had been minimal; I knew from my embryonic studies that music was written by composers in the form of notes on paper and that when the notes were played by musicians, they were transformed into very dense air, but this was my first opportunity to watch the whole process from little dots-on-paper all the way through audible molecules.

  After a few rehearsals I realized that at every rehearsal there was an extra chair placed next to Frank’s conducting stand. Never too fast on the uptake, it finally occurred to me that it was my chair. No one else ever sat in it; it was my place in the band. (I had thought about asking Frank if I could audition for the group, either on guitar or keyboards, but this new material was far more demanding than the stuff the road band had been playing. It required orchestral level sight-reading skills, for one thing. Knowing I’d never pass the audition, now or later I finally settled into my chair and forced myself to quit being so obsessed with the impossible. I didn’t want to wind up like Frank, did I??)

  Frank was completely focused on the business at hand: composing music for this particular group, and hearing them play it. I watched him going through the process, which seemed much more formal than all the shenanigans associated with road life, and wondered how he reconciled these distinctly different aspects of whatever it was he did. Naturally my motivations for being at rehearsals weren’t entirely pure; I was curious whether our business might resume at the old stand, of course. A few rehearsals passed without occurrence; then one afternoon Frank brought in a new piece, entitled “RDNZL". I helped him pass out all the parts and sat back to listen while he put the players through their paces. Most of the Grand Wazoo material was like riding the Cyclone Racer coaster at the Long Beach Pike — full of turns and twists and dynamics and thrilling climaxes. But the instant I heard the first statement in “RDNZL” — arranged for the horns, rhythm section, and percussion in massed unison, and tossed off so fast I could only catch half the notes and about a quarter of the inner rhythms — as played by that incarnation of musicians, in the distinctly non-climate-controlled Temple of Wazoodom on a fiercely smoggy afternoon, with traffic groaning and screeching past outside on La Brea, I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I wanted to lie down on the floor.

  Out of a misplaced sense of decorum, I stayed in my seat, but I looked over at Frank, who was only a few feet away from me. He was awkwardly standing up, conducting from the master score on his music stand. Generally, when he introduced the group to a new piece, he ran all the way through it once without stopping, clinkers and breakdowns and all, both to give the musicians an idea of the shape of the composition and to hear for himself how it had turned out. The players were nearly all ‘first call’ pros from orchestral and studio backgrounds, and they were more than capable of a clean reading the first time through. Today they happened to be flawless. I caught Frank’s eye; he looked back at me for a second and saw that I was (as he observed later) “about to reach nirvana, or apoplexy, or something”, and he smiled at me’ that old familiar rancid socks & hemiolas smile I remembered from the road when he’d really liked something I’d just done. As he cued a bass clarinet entrance, I began to have the strange sensation that he was employing the group the way he’d formerly utilized some of those other random objects, to get me off. When he looked at me again with an expression of utter amusement and doubled the already inhuman tempo, it was obvious what he was up to. I’m sure the musicians were entirely oblivious to the situation; if they’d known what was going on, they’d probably have demanded triple performance scale. To this day “RDNZL’ remains my single favorite Frank Zappa composition. My only regret was that the whole performance wasn’t somehow recordable for posterity.

  Due to my perfect attendance record at the rehearsals, it wasn’t long before I was nearly as familiar with the music as Frank was, and since I usually showed up at rehearsals about the same time as he did, and he was still pretty immobilized, he started handing me his briefcase and letting me pass out the parts. i felt a bit embarrassed because I was so obviously spending my entire life at those rehearsals, and I was glad to be able to earn my keep any way I could. Frank, of course, was well aware of my embarrassment and was trying to make me feel a little less ridiculous while at the same time making his life easier. Maybe he was reminded of his own days of adolescent orchestral klutziness. I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated being able to hear this stuff on a firsthand basis, how from my point of view it was the equivalent of, say, him being able to stand at Varèise’s elbow and watch him working on “Dèsérts” or something. But once or twice, when the chance to say something presented itself, I’d open my mouth and nothing would come out. It wasn’t the first time.

  My parents finally reached the end of their respective ropes with me. One night my father came home from work and sat down in his easy chair with a grim look on his face. He and my mother had obviously been conferring. I didn’t wait for the verdict; I went upstairs, packed all of my clothes in an old suitcase and some brown paper bags, then went down and stuck the stuff in the trunk of my 1962 Ford Fairlane, which I’d recently bought with $150 of the insurance check. Next I got my guitar, amp, and music supplies, and loaded them into the back seat. Finally I came back into the house, went into the den, and told my parents goodbye. My mother turned away without speaking. My father looked as if there was something on his mind, but if there was, he didn’t say it. I walked out, feeling like the world was ending but not caring if it did because it was such a shitty place.

  I spent the night at a friend’s, and the next day dragged into the Temple of the Grand Wazoo feeling disembodied and unreal. Frank kept a watchful eye on me during the rehearsal, and at the end, when I brought back all the parts as usual, he put his hand on my shoulder and observed, “You look like you definitely need to ‘feature your hurt. “’

  I told him how I’d been kicked out of my folks’ house, not explaining that it was because I was too busy attending Wazoo U to get a job — or a life, for that matter.

  Frank grimaced and shook his head as if he was trying to clear out a few unpleasant memories of his own. “Well” he said, adopting the motherly/fatherly stance he had always used when lecturing me on the facts o’ life, “maybe we can find you a cubbyhole.”

  Puzzled, I asked him where. He said that if I’d give him my solemn promise to leave him alone when he was working, I could stay at his place until I found permanent lodgings elsewhere, There was a specific deadline: the band was heading for a short tour of Europe in less than a month, and I’d have to be out of there by then.

  That night I moved — lock, stock, and dirty Levi’s — into The Basement. I parked around the corner on a side street, oozed furtively up to the house, and crept through the gate, which was open. The door to the Purple Empire stood open as well. I slunk in. Frank — for whom this was the circadian equivalent of about 9 a.m. — had his elbows propped up on his work table, coffee cup and a sausage, cheese, and p
ineapple pizza within easy reach, going over a new score. He glanced up. “Shut the door,” he said. “Have some pizza.” Then he went back to work as if I wasn’t there.

  In the Purple Empire the time passed as if it didn’t exist, and truly, it didn’t. Frank slept by day and worked by night, and since the windows were covered with heavy shutters, I never was sure what time it was out in the ‘real’ world. Sometimes musicians came and rehearsed, and once a very sweet young German fellow arrived to interview Frank for some existential Euro-journal, but mostly it was just Frank, the dog, and me. I had everything in there I needed to live and be happy: Frank, his music, even a bathroom — what reason was there to leave that helioutropia and go out where people shot and stabbed each other, where Dick Nixon was about to become President, where you were constantly being menaced by Helen Reddy’s giant pulsing uvula...

  I noticed that the basement hadn’t changed much, if at all, since my audition there a year earlier. It was still so dim that I stumbled whenever I came in from the daylight. There was all the same gear, in essentially the same locations — the Scully four-track tape deck, a mixing board, mikes, amps, an arsenal of guitars, endless shelves full of tapes, Frank’s intimidating record collection (which ran to about 10,000 items and was duly filed, headed, sub-headed, cross-referenced, and alphabetized), the Coffee Works right next to Frank’s work area, and the Bosendorfer eight-foot concert grand. I never got to play it, since when Frank was down there he was working and I couldn’t disturb him, and when he was upstairs I always felt a bit diffident about sitting down and launching into, say, George Antheil, or Frank Zappa, although I will admit I contemplated it. (Frank had once described a very modern composition he’d read about someplace: the performance requirements were one grand piano, one not so grand pianist, and a chainsaw with which the ivories were to be tickled. “Not on my piano, you don’t! “)