Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  About midway through my London exile, Frank and the band came through to play the Wembley Pool. I called him at the hotel to say hello. He sounded extremely grumpy and short, but he did agree (gee thanks, Frank ) to let me ride to that night’s gig on the band bus. He sulked all night in a wonderfully autistic fashion. I think he wished I was back in L.A. where he could get at me whenever he felt like it, even if all he might feet like doing was ignoring me.

  Before the show I sat with Jean-Luc Ponty in the Wembley Pool canteen, drinking Bird’s Instant Coffee Powder in lukewarm water and discussing classical violin repertory. Frank stomped by on his way backstage, saw us debating the respective merits of Menuhin vs. Heifetz, and snorted. There was a gal following determinedly right behind him. I don’t remember if she was a redhead or not. He barely said goodnight to me when I got off the bus at the end of the night.

  When I’d finally had my fill of broadening experiences — like the cholera epidemic in Naples (the joke was “See Naples and die”), the curious mental state that derived from the knowledge that as long I was in Europe I’d have to use wax paper instead of Charmin, and the sybaritic pleasures of existence in damp, uninsulated buildings with no heating in freezing weather — I ceased drifting about the Continent and returned to the land of cheeseburgers, central air, and long lines at the gas pumps. Once back in L.A., I found a job in Encino as a live-in companion to a well-to-do woman with Menière’s disease (the one where your inner ear messes up your sense of balance and you spend a lot of time falling over). My duties consisted of driving her to and from her office near downtown L.A. and keeping her company. In exchange, I had my own room, grub, cigarette money, and a deceptively nondescript-looking 1966 Mustang convertible with a racing engine (a relic of my boss’ former marriage; her ex had been a ‘weekend warrior’). I had lots of time to work on my music and writing, freed for once from the pressures of ’objectionable reality.’

  Since the album project was basically a dead issue, I wanted to keep from being sucked back into Frank’s force field. I attended a couple of rehearsals, trying to remain on genial terms with him, but out of his grip. I hadn’t been up to the Purple Empire since our last album project meeting, and I quit calling up and inviting myself over there. Hoping I could focus on my own work, I lay low.

  Forget it. Somehow I wound up being sucked back into the whirlpool. Sometimes Ruth needed a ride, sometimes there was a guitar emergency, other times I just happened to be in the vicinity of the rehearsal hall, so I might as well stop by... I suppose I could have quit the whole scene cold turkey, but my best friend (Ruth) and whatever Frank was, were too important to me.

  Frank was still limping by without an ‘official’ lead vocalist at this point, but he was thinking about staging a lengthy piece called “Hunchentoot,” an essay in the world of cheesy sci-fi he so dearly loved, and he needed vocalists to handle the lead parts, especially the title role of Drakma, Queen of the Universe. Ruth wanted me to try out for the part. I had my doubts; I was getting to the point where I didn’t want to be close to Frank. Often it seemed to me that he just wasn’t the same person I’d met in 1970. The Rainbow Theater incident had left a permanent impression on his character, and now he was sarcastic and cynical a considerable part of the time.

  Not long before this, Frank had met Jennifer Lois Brown, a bubbly music journalist (three guesses what color hair she had) during a tour of Australia. Everybody in the band was amazed when, after the tour, he’d flown her to Los Angeles, put her up at an undisclosed location, and continued to carry on with her, hot and heavy. It didn’t go on for more than a couple of weeks, but since I was hanging around rehearsals, I had a front-row seat for the proceedings, and I had to admit it hurt like hell. I’d never stopped loving Frank’s music, and to a certain extent, I still loved him; I didn’t realize how much of a problem I still had until I saw him in the flesh, oozing all over his buxom paramour from Down Under. Although I felt a catty sort of satisfaction when Nellie Bly was unceremoniously packed off to the bush again after Frank grew bored with her massive charms, the whole experience was a painful reminder that I had no desire to go on tour with him and see the Miss Moviola scenario re-enacted over and over again, Thanks but no thanks...

  But Ruth kept insisting, and finally she persuaded me to call him and set up an audition: She marched me into the bedroom, put the phone in my hand, and dialed his number. When he answered, I hemmed and hawed and finally blurted out that I’d heard he was looking for a vocalist. In his perverse way, he assured me he wasn’t, and I got the feeling he was concerned that the nature of our relationship might make him less than objective about my merits as a singer. Fair enough; I understood that. I told him that I’d be willing to audition for him just like anyone else. After a bunch of palavering, he finally agreed that I could have an audition the following week when the band rehearsed.

  On the day of the audition, I showed up early at the rehearsal. Frank and the band were jamming with an exotic-looking gent in flowing white robes and shaved head, playing an extremely custom fretted instrument that looked like an eight-stringed electric aluminum frying pan. He played it very well and it sounded quite groovy, as I recall. I don’t know what he was doing there; I never saw him again.

  Then Frank motioned me up on the stage with the band. As I stepped up onto the riser, I caught the sole of my shoe on the top step and nearly tripped. Frank grabbed my hand and pulled me up just in time. He wasn’t in a good mood that day, and his whole body reflected his attitude. You had to give him high marks for honesty, if nothing else; if his head happened to be up his ass, he left it there without apology.

  “Mistake number one,” he commented nastily.

  He handed me the libretto to “Hunchentoot,” opened to the lyrics of a song called “Flambay.” I asked if there was a lead sheet; he shook his head. Great, I thought, I’ve got to learn this by ear in 15 seconds or less.

  Unfortunately for me, “Flambay” was in the key of C, with most of the melody falling in my upper register, which meant that if I tried to follow the original registration, at least half of the time I’d be screeching around in my ‘break’. To avoid this, I had to sing the melody an octave lower, but because the song had been written for a higher voice, the timbre Frank wanted was therefore absent. Far worse, though, was the fact that I had nothing in common with the character of Drakma. Bette Midler would probably have been a shoo-in for the role... Well, whatever my shortcomings, at least I’ve never been an actress. I was forced to treat the tune as if it were a guitar part, and approach it from a strictly melodic standpoint. At least the melody was nice — irregular and haunting.

  I must have gotten carried away by the song, because suddenly it was over. I opened my eyes and looked to Frank for his reaction. Not good. His lips were tight, and he was looking down intently at his guitar. Something was eating him.

  “How’d I do?” I asked.

  “You were getting the intervals wrong,” was all he said.

  “Do I get the part?” I asked, half-seriously.

  “No,” he said flatly, and turned his back to me.

  Figuring that he probably hadn’t wanted to discuss business in front of the band, I called him that night and asked him to give me an objective evaluation of my performance and tell me why I hadn’t passed the audition. I was surprised when he didn’t comment on my singing, but instead launched into a speech about how if I’d been hired for the road band, I’d have had to be able to hang out with the other musicians. I think he might have hired me if I’d been anybody else, but he obviously didn’t want a repeat of what had happened on the earlier tour.

  Frank auditioned a vast quantity of singers for “Hunchentoot", but so many of the women trying out for Drakma’s part expressed strong objections about the ‘misogynism’ of the material that he decided to scrap the whole project.

  One day I met Ray Collins at the rehearsal facility. He had been one of the co-founders of the original Mothers, a bartender/vocalist Frank had
salvaged from the netherworld of Inland Empire R & B bar bands back in the early ‘60s. His Irish whisky tenor crooning “Duke of Prunes,” “America Drinks & Goes Homer,” “Oh No,” and many another of Frank’s more melodic compositions, was one of my most indelible adolescent memories. Evidently, though, his days of glory were behind him; when he had a little money, he stayed at the St. Moritz Hotel, a fleabag next to the rehearsal hall, and when he was broke (most of the time), he floated. Frank, I noticed, treated him quite indifferently, not paying much attention to him.

  Ray had a band, of sorts, which rehearsed in Beverly Hills at the house of the bass player’s father. I attended one of their rehearsals. It consisted of six cases of beer and four hours of the band members arguing about how to arrange Ray’s song “Mr. Nixon, I Want Your Job” — one chord and two phrases of lyrics. Another night we stopped by the Whisky a Go Go in the heart of the swingin’ Sunset Strip, to see some band Ray knew. It was quite a nostalgic evening; there were a number of people in attendance who had hung out with the Mothers, Vito, Carl Franzoni, and that whole ‘freak’ crowd on the Strip, and after the show, when everybody sat down on the wooden benches up in the back, the tall tales were flying. As I listened, I had the feeling that musty history was coming to life right before my eyes — until I remembered that 1965 was only nine years ago. Funny how some gray hair, a few missing teeth, and rapidly changing popular culture can make a not quite middle-aged bohemian seem like Rip van Winkle.

  I let Ray, who was flat broke again, spend a couple of weeks on the sofa at my place so he wouldn’t have to sleep on a park bench somewhere. While he was there, he got a windfall — a check from Frank Zappa Music, Inc. (BMI). The check was for $35.03 — total quarterly royalty residuals for all the songs he’d written or co-written on the early Mothers albums. (Later Frank would sue MGM/Verve Records for massive mishandling of the band’s royalty proceeds over a period of more than a decade.) I cashed it for him, and he squandered the proceeds on Wonder Bread, Velveeta, Oscar Mayer bologna, Miracle Whip, and Coors.

  Ray didn’t look much different than he had in the ‘60s, but nobody seemed to recognize him, even people who should have. I knew a fey little lesbian singer/songwriter, an acquaintance of Frank’s, who claimed to be a total early Mothers fanatic. One morning I happened to stop by her house on an errand, with Ray in tow. He chatted pleasantly with her for an hour, in the very same voice that had imprinted “Call Any Vegetable” on a budding generation of mutant minds. She hadn’t the vaguest idea who she was talking to.

  When I asked Frank why he was so indifferent to Ray’s plight, he looked at me like I was a cretin and snorted, “Too much acid.” There had apparently been a fair amount of bad blood between them, off and on, since the old days. Ray told me some amusing stories about those bygone years, like the time Frank got into a donnybrook with a heckler when the Soul Giants were playing in a redneck sports bar in Pomona, and Ray had had to dive in and rescue him from the slaughter while there was still some of him left to save for musical posterity. A 135-pound, blues-guitar-playing Sicilian-American conceptualist is no match for a corn-fed Inland Empire football fan in a John Deere cap, regardless of how incensed the former might be about regarding slights on his masculinity. But there were tranquil moments as well — Ray recalled sitting around on the front porch one afternoon in Ontario with Frank and the first Mrs. Zappa, a bubbly blonde who worked for a local bank. The summer breeze was blowing the smog back toward Los Angeles, the bees were droning in the honeysuckle... And then who should come meandering up the garden path but a young, buxom redhead, who settled comfortably into a chair and began pleasantly explaining how Frank had recently met her in a Hollywood coffeehouse and told her if she’d come to the great Inland Empire, he’d make her the next big thing in low budget movies... Cut to a Cucamonga storefront that has been converted into a recording studio and living quarters, of sorts. Prominently displayed on the studio wall are the divorce papers Frank’s now-ex-wife has served on him, and sharing the premises with the new bachelor is none other than Big Red, queen of the “Z” film and future star of that soon-to-be-a-regional-hit X-rated tape; Detective Willis of the San Berdoo vice squad can be glimpsed lurking on the periphery, about to pounce. There is no indoor plumbing to speak of. Idyllic.

  Back in the early days of the Mothers, Ray had opined in a band meeting that what Frank needed to become a real human being was “to go to Big Sur and take acid with someone who believes in God.” For some reason this suggestion was not followed up on.

  Not long after Ray’s grocery binge, Frank asked me to tell him that he wanted to use him as a backup vocalist on the new album he was recording, which turned out to be “Apostrophe’". I guess he didn’t feel comfortable calling the front desk of the St. Moritz and leaving his old colleague a message.

  I don’t know what ultimately happened to Ray. For a while I’d see him around town, walking down Sunset Boulevard, sometimes driving a cab. When my first book on Mark Twain was published, he got my number from Frank and called me to say he liked it. And then one day I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen him or thought about him in years. But I still think “Oh No” and “America Drinks & Goes Home” are two of the greatest songs ever recorded.

  In 1975 Frank worked briefly with Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), who did a U.S. tour with him, singing and playing harmonica. Don was a phenomenal blues singer, an interesting poet, an erratic but intriguing painter and sculptor, and above all, an incredible conversationalist. He had been one of my (other) favorite people since 1970, when I’d met him, entirely coincidentally, through a distant acquaintance who had interviewed him for a magazine article. Over a period of a few days we sat talking around the clock while he drew in his sketchbook and I played the guitar. I’d also sat in with him and some of the members of his Magic Band, and Don had gone on to suggest that he should produce an album by me and a drummer friend of mine. A deal was struck, but a week before recording was supposed to start, he suddenly decided to move from the L.A. area to Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I went up there to find out what was going on, wondering what sort of flake he was, only to discover that he had simply shifted gears and entirely forgotten about it. Turned out he was always doing things like that. I learned not to hold it against him. We stayed on good terms, and we usually got together to chew the rag when he visited southern California to visit his widowed mother in Lancaster.

  Me and Captain Beefheart

  One of Captain Beefheart’s portraits of me

  Frank had been unaware of the nature of my relationship with Don until I ran into Don during a rehearsal and we went across the street to a coffee shop to chat. Evidently I’d stumbled into a very old and convoluted rivalry; when we came back after the break, Frank was glowering at me, bristling the way he had on tour when he thought I was being overly friendly with one of the guys in the band. It amazed me that his radar was still armed and pulling in things like that.

  During the time he was rehearsing with Frank for the upcoming tour, Don was staying with his mother Sue in her trailer — uh, prefabricated home — in Lancaster. He apparently got bored one night watching TV, and called me at about two in the morning. The whole situation was made infinitely more complicated by the fact that I was newly married (to Lionel Rolfe, a fellow writer). Don, not knowing I was now a respectable (?) married woman, invited me to come out for a visit. (Logistics was never his forte.) I explained that I had a husband now, and politely asked if I could bring him along. Don griped and grumbled, but finally assented. We agreed to meet at the Denny’s (ALWAYS OPEN) at the Sand Canyon offramp of the Antelope Valley Freeway. Back in the ‘50s he and Frank had whiled away the wee small hours at that selfsame Denny’s; as Frank once observed, “There wasn’t anything else to do in Lancaster.” Some things never change. I personally felt rather honored to be part of this high desert intellectual tradition.

  The three of us hit it off splendidly and spent ten hours, to the abject dismay of the management, dri
nking coffee (?) and chewing the rag. Don had his sketchbook at his elbow the whole time, doodling copiously; he showed us several sketches he had recently made of Frank with his guitar, which were easily the best drawings of Zappa I’d ever seen.

  At daybreak, we walked out to the parking lot where Don’s new Volvo sedan and our 1965 Citroen ID station wagon were parked side by side, the only vehicles in the enormous Denny’s parking lot. Squinting into the dusty Antelope Valley sunrise, we gazed at the forest of bristling Nike missile spikes on top of the nearest mountain peak. Suddenly, without a word, Don opened the trunk of the Volvo and extracted a pair of plaster-of-Paris wings with harness straps attached. “Frank gave these to me yesterday,” he explained. They were the wings he had worn in Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People, the no-budget movie on which he and Frank had collaborated in Cucamonga in 1964.

  Somehow word got back to Frank that I’d been out hobnobbing with Don in the desert. The next time I saw him, he gave me a peeved sort of look and razzed me about how I’d been “blowing Van Vliet’s harmonica.” I wondered just what deep, dark teenage tortures that flippant statement was hiding.

  Captain Beefheart and me

  Use a Typewriter,

  Go to Prison

  I don’t remember actually sitting down and deciding I never wanted to see Frank again. Our relationship had certainly changed over the years, and I no longer entertained any illusions that I would either be involved in playing his music, or that our personal situation would resume on its old scale, but even as the end drew near, I still hadn’t reached the point where I felt that I’d be better off not having anything to do with him.