The Boy Who Cried Freebird

by Mitch Myers

  Zappa’s intrepid experimentalism and countercultural satire led to the band’s landmark recording, We’re Only in It for the Money. After that, Frank put out the ambitious double LP Uncle Meat, which featured his classical-rock-jazz opus, “King Kong.” Both collections were unique concept albums that helped redefine the boundaries of underground rock and instrumental music in the 1960s.

  Adding more band members, like classically trained percussionist Art Tripp, reed/keyboard whiz Ian Underwood, and untrained sax maniac Jim “Motorhead” Sherwood, the Mothers of Invention reached full flower blending greasy ethnic bar band machismo with progressive jazz chops, classical structures, rhythmic workouts, and free-form freak-outs.

  The Mothers even jammed with the blind jazz saxophonist Roland Kirk. Albums like Weasels Ripped My Flesh showed a wide-ranging sense of adventure—with scorching pachuco blues and snarling rock guitar set alongside more atonal sound experiments.

  In spite of Zappa’s references to jazzman Eric Dolphy and classical composers like Debussy and Stravinsky, the Mothers were rarely perceived as a serious group. Guitarist Mike Keneally played with Zappa’s band in 1988. He commented on the chronic underassessment of Frank’s progressive side.

  “Frank never got as many props for that stuff because he would turn around and do a moronic pop song or three minutes of noise,” Keneally said. “He didn’t see anything wrong with moving from area to area very rapidly. A lot of people got the idea that he was a dilettante but that wasn’t it. Frank just wanted to hear all this music.”

  Besides their creative struggles, the Mothers of Invention suffered through typical group dilemmas, mostly centering on money. Faced with the incompatible chores of recording, touring, and composing new material, Frank made a tough decision to close up shop, and abruptly dismissed the entire group. The original Mothers were very unhappy with Zappa at the time, but many of them ended up playing with Frank again as the years went on.

  After disbanding the original Mothers of Invention, Frank released a solo album, Hot Rats, which showcased his guitar playing and Ian Underwood’s many musical talents. Mostly an instrumental album, the one vocal track on Hot Rats was “Willie the Pimp,” an avant-blues tune sung by Frank’s infamous high school buddy, Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet).

  An iconoclast in his own right, Beefheart collaborated with Zappa on several different occasions. For a time, they were empathic musical comrades, but Don and Frank had a stormy personal relationship and the longtime friends were often estranged.

  In 1970, Frank assembled a band of interim Mothers to appear with conductor Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Symphony. The concert was his first live orchestral performance, and it was expensive to produce and somewhat rushed. These types of problems would inevitably occur with Zappa’s symphonic efforts. Lacking adequate rehearsal time and faced with disinterested, bureaucratic orchestras, Frank’s perfectionist tendencies were perpetually frustrated. Later recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Ensemble Modern (performing “The Yellow Shark”) chart his steady progress in the classical realm.

  Frank’s rock bands were more easily modified to suit his performance needs. Conducting the ribald stage theatrics of yet another version of the Mothers—with singers Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan and drummer Aynsley Dunbar—Zappa showcased his newest group in the surrealistic road-tour documentary, 200 Motels. This humorous edition of the Mothers met a premature end when a crazed concertgoer pushed Zappa offstage in London where he fell fifteen feet, breaking several bones and crushing his larynx.

  During his convalescence, Zappa returned to the safety of the studio and organized a big band, recording two horn-heavy/quirk-jazz albums, Waka Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo. A large touring ensemble emerged, one that included trombonist Bruce Fowler. A veteran of several Zappa groups, Fowler recalled Frank’s more personal side. “Part of the reason Frank hired different guys or kept someone in the band was because of their sense of humor and their ability to mesh with his concepts on a personality basis.”

  Zappa soon learned that instrumental big bands didn’t have much appeal to the concertgoing masses. A smaller group coalesced around the recording of Over-Nite Sensation, however, and signaled yet another shift in his touring organization. Emphasizing more precision playing and music reading ability—as well as a sense of the absurd—players like keyboardist-singer George Duke, percussionist Ruth Underwood, and violinist Jean-Luc Ponty formed the nucleus of a killer road group.

  The strength of his band’s chops worked to Zappa’s advantage when enlisting new members. Singer/saxophonist Napoleon Murphy Brock was performing in a Hawaiian nightclub when Frank asked him to join up—using the reputation of his other musicians as bait. “I came to the audition because Frank told me that George Duke and Jean-Luc Ponty were in his band; that set the standard right there,” Brock said. “Those were the only two people whose names I recognized because when I first met Frank I hadn’t even heard of him.”

  The Mothers had evolved from outrageous rock philistines to technique-oriented virtuosos. Showcasing riotous onstage camaraderie, stellar musicianship, and complex-yet-comical compositions, Zappa’s proto-rock-jazz-theater resulted in a musical flashpoint, as exhibited on the 1973 live album, Roxy & Elsewhere. “It was jazz-fusion,” George Duke said. “But Frank would never admit it. He was always focused on presenting challenging, entertaining music that was funny and diverse. The technical aspect was important because he wanted to amaze people.”

  Bassist Tom Fowler was in his early twenties when he joined the Mothers amid changing lineups and endless rehearsals. “It was an era of discovery,” Fowler remembered. “We did a tour with the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Frank started thinking in odd meters a lot more after that. We would rehearse and perfect it and memorize as much as we could—it was amazing and he kept you on your toes. Frank was extremely critical but he could control his anger. He never yelled; he just made the appropriate punishment.”

  George Duke recalled Zappa’s strict nature onstage. “Once I screwed up something on ‘Approximate,’ which had a strange melodic deviation,” said Duke. “Frank stopped everything and announced, ‘George made a mistake.’ Then he says, ‘OK, George, now do it by yourself.’ I played the thing by myself and I was OK, but I’ll tell you what: I never did it again, I made sure I rehearsed and practiced my part.”

  Drummer Chester Thompson was hired, extending the band’s unbroken string of drum masters. He played Zappa’s complex time signatures along with Ruth Underwood and drummer Ralph Humphrey. Chester eventually left to join Weather Report, a move made easier thanks to his tenure with Zappa.

  “Playing with Frank’s band gave you credibility at a way higher level,” Thompson explained. “It said a lot as far as gaining respect from other musicians. Everybody in L.A. was well aware of what Frank was doing. You know how cynical musicians can be, but Frank earned the respect of everyone that crossed his path.”

  A role in Zappa’s band was a prize, and his auditions could accommodate dozens of would-be players. Guitarist Denny Walley knew Frank growing up in Lancaster but didn’t work with him until the ’70s. “Playing with Frank, it carried a cachet,” Walley recalled. “Some of his cattle-call auditions were wide open. It was almost like Star Search, people were just desperate and they wouldn’t last thirty seconds. Frank would cut them quick, he didn’t waste any time and there was no doubt about it. ‘Nope. OK. Thank you.’ A lot of those auditions were brutal.”

  Playing with Zappa wasn’t just an artistic accomplishment; it led to professional recognition. Frank gave numerous musicians their careers, plucking them from obscurity and legitimizing their talents on a worldwide level.

  “Nobody would know me if it weren’t for Frank,” said Terry Bozzio. “I was a decent drummer around San Francisco. He took me and in a month I was internationally known. I had credibility because with Zappa, you’ve got to be really good and able to play anything.”

  Frank first saw guitarist/singer Adrian
Belew playing cover tunes with a bar band in Nashville. Although Adrian couldn’t read music, Zappa hired him anyway. Belew stayed with Frank for just one year before leaving to join David Bowie.

  “It’s truly amazing how many great musicians passed through the school of Frank,” Belew said. “He was dedicated to seeking out and encouraging other musicians. I owe everything to Frank in that sense—he gave me my initial start and put me on the international stage.”

  Frank launched the careers of musicians as disparate as Belew, singer/guitarist Lowell George (of Little Feat), and fret-shredder Steve Vai, who first contacted Zappa while still a student at Berklee College of Music. Vai submitted a detailed transcription of Frank’s notoriously difficult composition “The Black Page,” and was soon drafted into the group full-time. Dubbed “stunt guitarist,” Vai added his dazzling needlepoint to the fabric of Zappa’s formidable guitar sound.

  A new phase of proficient rock ensembles satisfied Zappa’s requirements and younger musicians were now joining the band. Bassist Patrick O’Hearn was playing with saxophonist Joe Henderson when he first hooked up with Zappa. He remembered Frank as a flexible bandleader inspired by the skills of his sidemen.

  “One thing that struck me about Frank was that he was one of the last composers that operated in a fashion similar to Duke Ellington,” O’Hearn said. “A lot of his compositions were adjustable; he’d bring in the charts but we were free to embellish. Frank worked our band like a palette and he wrote for the band.”

  Meanwhile, the years of independent business practice had finally begun to pay off. Frank’s later groups enjoyed superior equipment, huge rehearsal spaces, knowledgeable tour managers, experienced soundmen, and the privacy of his home studio. They played festivals and large arenas, drawing thousands of fans on the strength of Zappa’s name.

  Perpetually energized by drummers like Terry Bozzio, Vinnie Colaiuta, or Chad Wackerman, Frank’s concerts showcased his skills as a guitarist, using swooping dynamics on tunes like “Black Napkins” and “The Torture Never Stops.” Zappa’s multidisc collection, Shut Up ’N Play Yer Guitar, recontextualized his guitar solos, smartly reframing them as spontaneous compositions.

  By the late ’70s, Zappa needed greater assistance in preparing his band for their massive concert tours. The standard had become three months of full-time training before hitting the road. Daily rehearsals were still eight to ten hours long, but Zappa was so busy that he would only show up for the second half of each day’s rehearsal.

  Bassist Arthur Barrow served for a time as Zappa’s “clonemeister”—a surrogate musical director in charge of rehearsals when the maestro was absent. “The intensity was ten times more than I expected it to be,” said Barrow. “The feeling after his rehearsals—especially when Frank was writing new stuff and throwing ideas at you—was this constant mental exercise. I remember driving home and it felt as if my brain was a muscle physically contorting in my head, it was moving all around.”

  Besides hiring talented musicians, Zappa made sure to feature expressive vocalists in his group. In the beginning there was the twisted crooning of Ray Collins and Roy Estrada and then the mock-rock ravings of Mark Volman and Howie Kaylan. Zappa had a recognizable voice of his own, but he surrounded himself with singers rooted in black vocal traditions. “It’s interesting, his association with soul and R&B,” George Duke observed. “Frank liked dichotomy and he would force different things together to see what would happen.”

  “Frank was inspired by great vocals and he was a big fan of doo-wop and early rhythm and blues,” recalled Adrian Belew. “His was one of the few bands that had many good vocalists come through. In any one band there’d be two or three good singers and great harmonies of all types.” Over the years, Zappa incorporated the soul-driven vocals of George Duke, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Ray White, Bobby Martin, and Ike Willis.

  Singer Bob Harris (“the boy soprano”) felt Zappa had made a special place for him just to have those great harmonies. “Instrumentally, I was nowhere near the level of players like Tommy Mars,” Harris said. “I ended up playing little keyboard parts but my gig was the falsetto guy. The chemistry of Ike Willis, Ray White, and I was really something special.”

  Zappa’s bands were so well rehearsed that they intuitively knew what to do on stage. Throughout the decades, Frank would spontaneously jump up in the air and the players had to know what song to go into when he landed. Some on-the-spot changes were directed by mental communication, while other adjustments were commanded via little hand signals.

  Singer/guitarist Ike Willis was in college when he first met Zappa, and he ended up playing on albums like Joe’s Garage. While Frank’s music had evolved over time, Willis’s onstage responsibilities were very much the same as those followed by the Mothers of Invention years earlier.

  “The rules are, keep at least one eye on Frank at all times,” Willis said. “Because at any time, anywhere, for any reason or no reason at all, he might decide to change the song or go someplace else, or stop the song, or whatever. Those are your instructions, keep one eye on Frank and watch the finger.”

  Although his early albums were studio creations with occasional live tracks, Frank came to prefer live performances. During the final era of his commercial output, albums like Tinseltown Rebellion, Baby Snakes, and the basic tracks of Sheik Yerbouti were all recorded in concert.

  On his series of live anthologies, You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, Zappa juxtaposed old performances by the original Mothers alongside music by his later groups. Using concert recordings like building blocks, he edited discrete performances from different eras together, forming new idealized versions of his classic tunes. Those nonlinear productions illustrated Frank’s theory regarding the conceptual continuity of his lifework, a systematic view that he called “project/object.”

  Drummer Vinnie Colaiuta spent a few years playing with Zappa and he strongly related to the metaphysical nature of Frank’s concepts. “Frank loved the idea of being able to manipulate things, bending space and time in the studio,” Colaiuta said. “But live performance was the most intriguing thing to him. Who’s to say that [those] performances from different time periods aren’t supposed to connect with one another in some quantum environment that we don’t know about?”

  Zappa’s final touring band was impressive, boasting a five-man horn section and the percussion team of Ed Mann and Chad Wackerman. Their 1988 performances were documented on several live collections, including Make a Jazz Noise Here, Broadway the Hard Way, and The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life.

  Chad Wackerman was an important part of that 1988 ensemble, and he marveled at the band’s stylistic depth. “We had 120 tunes rehearsed so it was completely different every night,” said Wackerman. “Frank would change up styles constantly. People might know a tune as reggae, but he might decide to do it as heavy metal. He was very spontaneous but really organized. We rehearsed so much that Frank could change anything and the band could do it with confidence.”

  From his first group to the last, Frank made sure that the music was imbued with his distinctive personality. There was always humor, politics, sex, satire, social commentary, great musicianship, and a lot of hard work.

  Frank’s widow, Gail Zappa, commented on the consistency within her husband’s many ensembles. “I don’t think the quality with which the music was delivered ever really changed,” said Gail. “There was always a standard that was maintained—it just comes from a different experience. Frank worked with a lot of musicians and there were very few people who weren’t capable and couldn’t deliver.”

  And you still can’t do that on stage anymore.

  —MM

  Give Frank’s Drummers Some

  JIMMY CARL BLACK (THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION: 1964 1969)

  “Frank was originally a drummer before he was a guitar player. He was a big fan of Edgard Varèse who also wrote a lot of percussion pieces. Frank used percussion better than anybody else has ever used it in a ‘rock’ b
and, if that’s what we were. I didn’t read drum music that well, not like Artie Tripp did. We played good together, I played the rhythm and Artie could do whatever he had to. Frank had a way of writing my parts out for me—he knew my limitations.”

  AYNSLEY DUNBAR (FRANK ZAPPA/THE MOTHERS: 1969 1972)

  “His mind must have been preprogrammed to percussion because his ideas flowed with a drummer’s ideas. He liked the drums to get excited behind him and play with his riffs. He wrote music from drums, especially percussion, and knew what it should sound like. I started to feel it wasn’t necessary to be in the band anymore because everything was starting to get written out. The only room was behind solos. I’m not one of those guys who like to play the same prearranged thing note-for-note every day.”

  CHESTER THOMPSON (FRANK ZAPPA/THE MOTHERS: 1973 1974)

  “Frank had great effect on me as far as being able to play with precision. I learned a lot about odd time signatures from Ralph Humphrey and that was great because I had so much to absorb coming into the band. When I joined, it was two drummers and my job to supply a funk side to what was going on. I still had to learn the book, but between Ralph’s way of breaking down time signatures and Frank’s understanding of what could and should happen, it was a great education.”

  TERRY BOZZIO (FRANK ZAPPA: 1975 1978)

  “It was a special connection because Frank understood what drummers were doing and he dug it. [As Frank’s drummer] you’re in this unique position of being a guy who really has to go all ways. You had to be able to improvise your ass off and you needed to be able to hear and interact with Frank in terms of improvisation to accompany him. Then you had to be able to read because the drummer was always expected to play the classical stuff and all of the more intricate music as well.”

  VINNIE COLAIUTA (FRANK ZAPPA: 1978 1980)

  “‘The Black Page’ is a great piece of music on its own and it did a huge service in terms of legitimizing the role of the drum set in ways that people didn’t realize. Frank treated drums like a legitimate instrument. Rhythmically, he wrote structured music for the drum kit that was never done before. ‘The Black Page’ stands all on its own compositionally—that’s what it represents as a piece of music and that’s what it did for the drum set as an instrument.”