Being Frank

by Nigey Lennon

  * Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: TROUT MASK REPLICA

  Frank produced this record by his old high school buddy Don Van Vliet in 1969. When I met Don in late 1970, he was going through one of his periodic anti-Zappa phases (something he did with fair regularity). He’d spend hours chain-smoking evil-smelling Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, to “Trout Mask” over and over again, and bitching about the production, the art direction, the color of the label, etc., etc., etc. I found it really entertaining to watch him sitting there, choking in the Sobranie fog, shaking his fist at the stereo, and calling Frank highly original names — especially since “Trout Mask” is, in my humble opinion, not only Beefheart’s finest hour, but one of the best records ever made in any genre. My favorite selection on “Trout Mask” is “The Blimp”, which consists of a riff borrowed from the Mothers’ cut “Didja Get Any Onya” (that section of the track wasn’t originally included on the “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” album, but it was restored on the CD release more than 20 years later). Over this riff Don’s cousin Victor Haydon, who’s calling in to the studio from a phone booth, hysterically recites lyrics like, “It’s the big hit! It’s the blimp, Frank! It’s the blimp! ” and “Tits, tits! The blimp, the blimp!” There are a lot of other outstanding songs on “Tout Mask” (like “Moonlight On Vermont” and “Pachuco Cadaver”), but “The Blimp” is the only one where the artist refers so humorously to the producer’s, er, deficiencies, real or imagined... (Don’s monicker ‘Captain Beefheart’, incidentally, was an invention of Frank’s, and derived from the fact that Don’s uncle, back in the old days in Lancaster, had been in the habit of exposing himself to Don’s girlfriend, all the while mumbling superlatives about his member: “Ah— looks like a fine beef heart ...”)

  For more on Zappa and Beefheart, see notes to BONGO FURY , below.

  Chapter 2: The Short Hello

  YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, Volume I

  “Once Upon a Time” and “Sofa # l” are live recordings of the first two ‘movements’ of the “German material.” They were recorded at the disastrous Rainbow Theatre concert in London at which Frank met his Waterloo by being shoved into the orchestra pit. Unfortunately this show came a week after the fire at the Montreux Casino which destroyed all of the band’s equipment. The group was limping by with makeshift gear after a hastily retooling, so the instrumentation is somewhat austere. Imagine, if you will, the addition of a concertina, a clarinet, and (ahem), some extra vocal power from yours truly, and you’ll get the true flavor of this fine Zappa opus.

  Here are some of the compositions with which I was confronted during my initial runthrough with Frank :

  * “Uncle Meat/Dog Breath” (which appears in various permutations on several different recordings, but the closest, appropriately enough, is on the UNCLE MEAT CD (worth a listen for other reasons; it’s one of Frank’s best). There is no ‘live’ recording on any of Frank’s CD’s which exactly replicates the version I played, and it was not part of the repertoire of that particular touring band).

  Selections (at random) from “Billy the Mountain”, which appears in its entirety on PLAYGROUND PSYCHOTICS, of which more below.

  A medley of “Status Back Baby”, “Concentration Moon”, and “Mom & Dad”. These were all earlier compositions, re-arranged and glued together with shtick and dialogue, as well as quotes from Stravinsky (the ominous Agon fanfare, Petrouchka, and The Rite of Spring). The sequence is featured on PLAYGROUND PSYCHOTICS.

  * “Mystery Roach”, from the 200 MOTELS soundtrack (the CD release of the soundtrack has come and gone).

  Chapter 5: For This I Learned to Play Stravinsky??!

  Examples of Frank’s guitar playing could cover an entire discography by themselves. Here are a few suggestions :

  * “The Village Inn”, “Power Trio Segment from ‘The Saints ‘N’ Sinners”’, “Speed Freak Boogie”, and “The Original Mothers at the Broadside (Pomona)” from THE OLD MASTERS, Box 1 (from the ‘Mystery Disc’). An expensive investment, featured on the final disc of a seven-disc boxed set, released only on vinyl — but highly indicative of Frank’s early guitar style, as he never released any other examples of his pre-Mothers playing. Also includes some early tracks (‘63:-’64) with Captain Beefheart. Just how hardcore are you, anyway? (Some of these tracks were released on the “Last Episodes” CD.)

  On “Status Back Baby” on the PLAYGROUND PSYCHOTICS CD, Frank pulls off a flawless (well, almost) version of the Agon/Petrouchka stunt. (It was recorded at the end of the tour.) Also on PLAYGROUND PSYCHOTICS, there’s a brief example of what he sounded like on a good night: “Brixton Still Life”. Over an essentially non-descript one-chord vamp, he goes from space-jazz, suspended chords to kick-ass funk to convoluted lines — a fine projection of numerous attitudes in three minutes.

  There are two interesting, somewhat uncharacteristic semi-acoustic interludes on WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH: “Toads of the Short Forest” and “Dwarf Nebula Processional March”. “Toads of the Short Forest” was a pre-Mothers composition, dating back to the Studio Z era (‘63-’64); Frank plays the ‘head’ a little stiffly, but the tune is one of the most effective guitar pieces I’ve ever heard by anybody. “Dwarf Nebula Processional March” features the novelty of Frank playing what sounds like a gut-string guitar. It also has a fascinating, graceful-but-obsessive little melody which breaks every harmony-book resolution rule but is steadfastly, strangely beautiful. Frank seemed to be drawn to medieval anything; this piece could be called neo-medieval. Finally, if you’re a hardcore Zappa listener, there’s a truly one-of-a-kind moment in “Get A Little”: the only obvious guitar clinker Frank ever released on a recording. A little past the middle section of the solo, his hand inadvertently slips, resulting in six passing tones that aren’t part of the scale. Non-musicians — most listeners, actually — probably wouldn’t even notice. It’s a safe bet Frank did, however.

  * “Transylvania Boogie”, from CHUNGA’S REVENGE, is worth a listen if you want a sterling example of Frank’s guitar strengths and weaknesses side-by-side. He plays the Hungarian minor introduction as though he’s having his wisdom teeth pulled without Novocaine; each note in the scale is more painfully wrought than the one before it. But when the solo gets rolling and he’s on more comfortable terrain, he grabs hold of that same scale and teaches it a trick or two. In another mood entirely is * “Twenty Small Cigars” (which started life back in the Studio Z days as an insipid vocal that began, “If you say goodbye/I know that I will surely die.”). It’s one of the prettiest guitar melodies that Frank, or anybody, ever wrote.

  “The Grand Wazoo”, from the CD of the same name, kicks off with a striking, highly characteristic minor-eleventh opening chordal passage that still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Those dense harmonies against a shuffle rhythm, tossed off with real authority but sounding like the most casual of afterthoughts — that, folks, could only be Frank Zappa, (For more on THE GRAND WAZOO CD, see below.)

  “Zoot Allures”, from the eponymous CD, is another of Frank’s pieces that takes modern guitar composition into the fifth dimension. This is as about as close as you can get to whatever it was that made Frank, and his music, so powerful, unsettling, and exhilarating.

  Finally, one of Frank’s most effective and exciting guitar solos, live or canned, is captured on the MOTHERS/AHEAD OF THEIR TIME? CD during “The Orange County Lumber Truck”. (This is the complete version of the song, which also appears in truncated form on WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH.) Frank was always fond of downgrading the musicianship of the ‘original’ Mothers, but the spontaneous kick of hearing the entire band becoming audibly excited by Frank’s solo and responding with ever-more-fevered playing, could have served as an object lesson for some of his later, more technically advanced but emotionally withdrawn, groups.

  The * SHUT UP ‘N’ PLAY YER GUITAR and * GUITAR sets, while they may be fascinating to Zappa completists and fanatics (and/or rock guitar players), have an awful lot of the
same thing — long guitar solos over fairly simple chordal backdrops. It should be kept in mind that during most of Frank’s lives performances (with the exception of a few tours in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s), the focus was on the compositions and arrangements rather than his guitar. In the 1971 band, as an example, he averaged five or six solos per show, none of them more than one or two minutes long. He really didn’t need more time than that to drive home his point; with Frank, as with most things, brevity was the soul of wit. It’s my suspicion that he began emphasizing long guitar solos in the late ‘70s because he hoped to attack a younger, primarily rock-oriented, audience as his older listeners began drifting away. He was a fine rock guitarist, but I think he was even better at other things — like composing, arranging, and bandleading, If you want to get into the minutiae of that particular aspect of his work, by all means don’t Let me stop you; but to me these collections come dangerously close to monotony — not a quality I’d otherwise associate with Frank Zappa.

  Note : If you think some of the situations described in this chapter are science fiction, a listen to the earlier-mentioned PLAYGROUND PSYCHOTICS should convince you otherwise. This two-CD set, assembled by Frank in 1992, chronicles the approximate time span I’m describing (although it mostly covers the six months before I joined the tour, and then skips to the tall end, the Rainbow Theater show). Masterfully edited, it consists of ‘field’ recordings of band members in everyday road situations, interspersed with music from the shows. A rare anthropological artifact, and full of (sometimes painful) laughs.

  Chapter 7: My Continuing Education

  * “Igor’s Boogie”, on BURNT WEENY SANDWICH, may or may not have been arranged by my junior college Composition teacher, but it does sound Stravinskyesque. My composition “Opus One”, mentioned in this chapter, was based on the opening piano theme to * “Little House That I Used to Live In”, also on BURNT WEENY SANDWICH.

  Chapter 9: Home, Home and Deranged

  Frank made a fine recording of “RDNZL” during the series of sessions in which he recorded parts of “Over-Nite Sensation” in late 1972. Because the band be had then was considerably smaller, the instrumentation was accordingly reduced from the original Grand Wazoo version, but there was certainly no loss of effect. When he went to mix the song, however, Frank detected the presence of intrusive audio crud which had somehow crept onto the tape, He evidently felt it made that version of “RDNZL” unreleasable. A similar ‘live’ version of “RDNZL” by that same (1972-74) band appears on YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, Vol. 2: The Helsinki Concert. Other versions appear on the original SLEEP DIRT release, YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, Vol. 5, and on “The Last Episodes” (the original version).

  THE GRAND WAZOO

  This recording doesn’t even come close to capturing the grandeur of the Wazoo, but it’s still worth a listen. The title track (also known as “The Grand Wazoo”) has some good guitar playing on it; the “rum-pum-pum” wordless vocal on “Cletus Awreetus-Awritus” has been described by Eric Weaver as sounding like “the high school band conductor singing the parts to the musicians”. (Eric may have been closer to the truth than he realized.) There’s more good guitar playing on “Blessed Relief”. The liner note story about Cletus Awreetus-Awritus, the funky emperor, and his valiant stand against the Mediocrities of Pedestrium, is a little like sitting around drinking cognac with Frank in a jovial mood and listening to him expound on his view of ancient history. Still, I’ll bet a verbatim ‘live’ recording of the Wazoo’s Hollywood Bowl concert (which included “RDNZL”) on September 10,1972 would have been the first record ever to win simultaneous Grammy awards in the Classical, Jazz, and Sarrusophone Solo categories... I’ll bet...

  Chapter 10: Statement of Earnings

  OVER-NITE SENSATION

  Many of the tracks for this CD and APOSTROPHE’ were recorded during the same period; in fact, both albums are combined on the same CD release, although OVER-NITE SENSATION was released nearly a year before APOSTROPHE’. On the back cover of the vinyl version of APOSTROPHE’ is the attribution “Produced, arranged and struggled with [by] Frank Zappa.” Having witnessed these tracks being recorded, I can attest to the struggle. In the end, the music may have gotten away from him. One of the musicians described OVER-NITE SENSATION as being “like looking at the band through the wrong end of a telescope.” Most of the female vocals are by Tina Turner (whose identity should be apparent to most people, although her name isn’t listed anywhere. Well, she’s in good company — neither is mine). “Fifty-Fifty” features the dipsomaniacal vocal and George Duke’s big organ solo described in this chapter. “Dirty Love” has Turner’s gospel-chorus-in-heat backup vocal and a ‘live’-sounding guitar solo that required something in the vicinity of 24 takes. “Montana”, is, in my estimation, the most successful song on the CD, with its low-rent-Copland intro and absurd premise (moving to Montana to raise dental floss).

  Chapter 11: No Commercial Potential

  The song “Flambay” appears on the SLEEP DIRT CD with an overdubbed vocal by Thana Harris.

  Ray Collins was the lead vocalist on the FREAK OUT!, ABSOLUTELY FREE, and CRUISING WITH RUBEN AND THE JETS albums, as well as parts of UNCLE MEAT. His vocal on “Oh No” is featured on WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH.

  BONGO FURY

  The BONGO FURY CD is the only commercially available recording (as opposed to various bootlegs) of a collaboration between Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart (with the exception of the “Willie the Pimp” track on HOT RATS and the early stuff on the last record of the OLD MASTERS, Vol. I boxed set). It’s basically a ‘live’ recording, with some overdubs, and as such it has a rather ‘unfinished’ quality, but its premise is interesting.

  BONGO FURY chronicles Frank and Don’s relationship — more or less. “Debra Kadabra” is full of references to Don’s adolescent fascination with cosmetics (his mother was an Avon Lady), and the no-budget monster movies Frank and Don used to watch (e.g., Brainiac, a low-tech Mexican groaner — the braying brass lick in the background was the movie’s actual leitmotif for its guy-in-the-rubber-suit monster; “Make me grow Brainiac fingers, but with more hair!”) “Cucamonga” is straight autobiography, a semi-nostalgic description of the Studio Z days. So, to a certain extent, is “Advance Romance”, Don describes his surreal youth in “Sam With the Showing Scalp Flat Top”, Finally, Frank paints characteristic scene from his adult life in “Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy”.

  Note: For an interesting example of how Zappa and Beefheart influenced each other’s music, compare Don’s first single, *“Diddy Wah Diddy” (originally released on A&M Records in 1966, available on a 1984 A&M Records vinyl-only reissue, CAPTAIN BEEFHEART: THE LEGENDARY A&M SESSIONS ) and Frank’s 1966 single, * “Why don’t You Do Me Right”, now on the ABSOLUTELY FREE CD. They share the same growling vocal, fuzztone guitar, and harpsichord fills — and both records are based on the same menacing blues riff, copped from “Smokestack Lightnin”’.

  Chapter 12: Use a Typewriter, Go To Prison

  The song “Andy” in which Frank, evidently furious with me over our final ‘disagreement’, asks the burning question “Is there anything good inside of you? If there is, I really wanna know”, appears on the ONE SIZE FITS ALL CD. If you’re curious, my other (specific) appearance in Frank’s catalogue is in “Muffin Man”, on BONGO FURY in which he fulminates about my (largely imagined) relationship with Ray Collins (AKA the “Muffin Man”, which is what Collins was called during the Garrick Theater days). (“Girl, you thought he was a man, but he was a muffin... You hung around ‘til you found that he didn’t know nothin.”’)

  THE YELLOW SHARK

  Frank’s last live (and first posthumous) recording. Faced with declining audiences at his rock shows, coupled with political difficulties in Europe that made touring abroad unfeasible, he spent the last ten or so years of his life composing on the Synclavier (a sophisticated digital composition and playback system) and, on occasion, working with ‘classical’
ensembles in presenting live and/or recorded concerts of his orchestral works. This program incorporates various edits of live performances, a fact which is sometimes noticeable but rarely intrusive. Although THE YELLOW SHARK is marred by cloyingly worshipful, even servile annotation, the music — performed by the German-based Ensemble Modern — speaks pretty loudly for itself. Highlights include “The Girl in the Magnesium Dress” (an updated version of a piece earlier recorded by Pierre Boulez conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain), a densely polyphonic work with more than a nod to the player piano compositions of Conlon Nancarrow, and “G-Spot Tornado” (previously recorded on the Synclavier on the JAZZ FROM HELL CD), which, especially in this orchestral incarnation, is one of the most riveting, rhythm-dominated, inexorable things Frank ever wrote. It’s absurdly appropriate that the final composition on the last recording made before his death is a rousing, humorous paean to sex. That’s probably as it should be. In a more sobering vein, evidence that Frank was becoming increasingly able to communicate his own emotional responses to larger issues is inherent in “Time’s Beach III”, an elegiac movement from a larger work.