Frank Zappa: "People thought the Beatles were god! That's not correct
An outsider with no interest in rock’n’roll, believed in freedom but ran
his band like a dictator, between 1966-1970 Zappa waspromiscuous,
controversial and, just maybe, a musical genius
May 1968: early morning in the sprawling, 18-room log cabin on the
corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Drive where the
famous ‘freak-out’ artist Frank Zappa lives. Outside, finches and
sparrows are chirping and the sun is burning off the first-light smog;
inside, though, the atmosphere is still blinded and dark, the air
choking with cigarette smoke.
As usual, Zappa has been up all night working at the piano and
desk that dominate the enormous main living area, swivelling in his
chair from desk to piano and back again as he composes his masterpieces,
one after the other, while guzzling strong black coffee and
chain-smoking the cigarettes that have been his only drugs since he was
11 years old.
Now Frank is sleeping. As are most of the other people who share the
house with him: his English secretary Pauline Butcher, his
former girlfriend Pamela Zarubica, his recording engineer Dick Kunc,
designer Cal Schenkel, tour manager Dick ‘Snork’ Barber, and Mothers Of
Invention band members Ian Underwood and Jim ‘Motorhead’ Sherwood. Then
there are those non-residents, famous and not-so, sleeping in various
nooks and crannies, or just stretched out in front of the huge
stone fireplace, beneath the 14-candle chandelier.
The only person up at this hour is Zappa’s 23-year-old wife, Gail,
who tiptoes around the bodies with their eight-month-old baby daughter,
Moon Unit, under her arm.
“Life was complete chaos,” she recalls now. “One time I said to
Frank: ‘That guy’s been here for three days and I don’t even know who
he is!’ He said: ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Then you’d run into [teenage
groupie] Miss Mercy with a stick of butter peeled like a banana that
she’d just be eating. Oh, and a rock’n’roll band would arrive in
the middle of the night and just walk in; there were no locks on the
door. It was just insane.”
Going into the kitchen, where there is no floor (“I don’t know what
happened, it just disappeared!”), Gail hunts for whatever food might be
left to make breakfast. The stove is on a platform so high that she has
to reach up to put on the frying pan. The hardest part, though, is that
Gail can’t just drive to the store to buy food. “We didn’t have a car.
If we had to get groceries, I hitchhiked,” she says. “I went right out
the back door with my thumb out and went down to the market. I did the
laundry that way too! I’d have Moon on one hip and laundry on the other…
I mean, it sounds insane, but those things had to be done.”
Nothing must keep Gail’s husband from his work. For he is not just
any rock musician, but a composer. And, as he explains in
his semi‑autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book: “A composer
is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules,
often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.”
Moon Unit, Gail and Frank Zappa at home in 1968 (Getty Images)
Pauline Butcher, Frank’s former secretary, speaking from her home
in Singapore, recalls her boss as a formidable man. “He made it very
clear he shouldn’t be interrupted if he was working. And from the minute
he got up to the minute he went to bed, he would be working. We would
not dare to go near him. He would raise his head from his desk or the
piano and think about what you had said to him, and give you a very
short, swift answer to make it clear that you were not welcome.”
As Zappa told an early interviewer: “The lifestyle that I have is probably neither desirable nor useful to most people.”
Nor, a cynic might add, was the music he composed. But then Frank
Zappa neither lived his life nor made his music to please ‘most people’.
He did so to please himself. And anybody who expected to remain in his
orbit would have to come second to that.
Ask anyone now, nearly 20 years after his death from prostate cancer
in 1993, who Frank Zappa was and they might describe any number of
people. Not just a rock star, but an avant-garde jazz musician, a
classical composer, a filmmaker, a writer, satirist and
university lecturer. Zappa was the guy John Lennon said he’d “always
wanted to meet”; he was the record label entrepreneur who signed Captain
Beefheart and produced his greatest work, Trout Mask Replica; the mentor who Alice Cooper now calls “the original shock rocker”.
And that was just in his late-60s ‘Log Cabin’ period. By the time he
died, at the age of 52, Zappa had also become a pioneer of
computerised electronic music, a campaigner for voter registration, and
the “personal hero” Vaclav Havel wished to designate as Czechoslovakia’s
cultural liaison officer with the USA. Others will simply recall him as
the guy who gave his kids funny names like Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet
Emuukha Rodan and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen; a man who, when asked
once whether he feared giving his children unusual names might cause
problems for them in later life, replied: “It’ll be their last name that
gets them into trouble.”
For me, Frank Zappa was the most intimidating person I ever
interviewed. But that was in 1984, long after his empire had been built,
his rule established. I was there to talk to him – laughably, I now
realise – about rock music, and Frank had never been interested in that.
Pauline Butcher recalls: “He listened to the blues and classical. He
did not play any rock’n’roll whatsoever – none. He loved
Stravinsky, Varèse, Bartok… They were the main ones.”
“I think he was unusual probably from the time he was born,” says
Gail, speaking on the phone from the kitchen of the house she and Frank
lived in for nearly 25 years. “I think that he came pretty much
full-blown the way that he was. I don’t think you can change yourself so
radically. I think he just was a person who was very interested in
freedom. He was a patriot and he was a composer. Just a strange
combination.”
Certainly as a child he was different. Born in Baltimore, Maryland,
four days before Christmas in 1940, Frank Vincent Zappa was the eldest
of four kids to a French- Italian mother, Rose Marie, and a father,
Francis Vincent Senior, a Sicilian immigrant of Italian, Greek and Arab
ancestry. At home, Frank spoke mainly Italian, learned from his
grandparents; at school he spoke Yankee-doodle-dandy.
His father was a mathematician and scientist working for the US
defence industry, so the family moved around. This included a spell in
Florida during Frank’s infant years, before settling back in Baltimore,
where his father’s new job at the Edgewood Arsenal Chemical Warfare
facility meant there were always gas masks around the place, waiting to
be pulled on quickly in the event of ‘accidents’. Mention of germs and
germ warfare would later infiltrate Frank’s music.
He was a sickly child, stricken by bouts of asthma and endless ear,
nose and throat complaints. When the family doctor inserted pellets of
radium into his nostrils to combat sinusitis, it so traumatised him that
nostril references and nasal images would also surface regularly in his
adult work.
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When he was 12 the family left Baltimore for good, moving down to
Southern California, where Frank senior’s work took him to posts in
Monterey, Claremont and El Cajon, before finally settling in San Diego,
where Frank junior attended Mission Bay High School – and where he
joined his first band, The Black-Outs, as a drummer.
Pauline Butcher, who met Zappa in London in September 1967 before
going to work for him, says she thinks “his thing” was affected by going
to so many schools when he was young. “He ended up being with all the
drop-outs and the people that weren’t popular at school. I think that
stayed with him the rest of his life. He related to the underdog and the
people who were outside the mainstream.”
A walking contradiction, he was a serious-minded teenager who
composed his first orchestral work when he was 14, wrote precocious
letters requesting meetings with his heroes Igor Stravinsky, who
lived in California, and Edgard Varèse, who lived in New York. (Varèse
agreed to a meeting, then cancelled.) Yet he spent most of his free time
listening to doo-wop records and watching monster movies, cruising all
night in a car with his only friend, another high-school outsider named
Don Van Vliet, later renamed and mentored by Zappa as Captain
Beefheart (something the Captain, himself a mass of
weird contradictions, never quite forgave him for).
But if the teenage Zappa was nerdish and unpopular, what
hardened and turned him into the unforgiving, controlling personality
that characterised everything about his adult life was an incident that
took place when he was 21. By then Zappa was the proud owner of a little
five-track facility in Cucamonga, which he’d bought with the fee he’d
received for scoring a B-movie cowboy flick called Run Home Slow.
Thus, in a typically oddball way, began Zappa’s career as a
composer and producer. Early success included a doo-wop number for The
Penguins, titled Memories Of El Monte (for which he’d received 75 cents), and Grunion Run, the B-side of a novelty single called Tijuana Surf which went to No.1 in Mexico.
He was awaiting royalties for that when, in 1962, a middle-aged man
offered to pay him $100 to make a “party tape for the guys” – early-60s
code for a porn tape. Hardly high art, but 100 bucks would go some way
to financing his next dreamed-of project, a movie he’d written called Captain Beefheart Vs. The Grunt People.
So the following evening, Frank and a girlfriend recorded themselves
bouncing around on a squeaky mattress, making “Ooh’ and “Aah” sounds and
trying not to laugh. There was nothing funny, though, when the
middle-aged ‘John’ turned out to be one Detective Willis, and Zappa was
sentenced to six months in jail for peddling pornography.
He eventually served only 11 days in jail, with the remainder reduced
to probation, but it gave him enough of a criminal record to not be
eligible to be drafted to Vietnam. The rest was all downhill, according
to those that knew him. He was left with a permanent sense of injustice.
Worse, he was left with a morbid fear of the police, a condition that
led both to his outlawing of drug use in his presence, and his
bitter mistrust of authority figures and institutions.
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“He was so terrified of being arrested,” says Butcher. “If the
police had come and found drugs in the house, then he would have been
thrown into jail as well and he couldn’t have gone through
another experience like that. It’s never been totally explained what
happened to him there, but there are some implications that he was
sexually abused – because he had long hair.”
By the mid-60s, at a time when the clean-cut Beatles were still
regarded as a threat to the nation’s youth, Zappa was every
straight-thinking Middle- American’s nightmare writ large: long hair,
Zapata moustache, thrift-store clothes and an apparent dislike of hot
baths of cold showers. But he knew his days of being the “lone freak”,
as he later put it, of the small town he lived in were numbered. He
just needed a vehicle to transport him to the next level.
No man is an island – not even Frank Zappa. And he would need the
help of other like-minded solitaries to help free him up to do what he
wanted to do. Enter the most talented, misunderstood, repulsively
attired yet aptly named group in the rock’n’roll pantheon: the Mothers
Of Invention. Betraying some of the bitterness that would understandably
come to characterise many of the former Mothers’ memories of their
association with Zappa, their original bassist, Roy Estrada, once put
it: “Frank joined us, we didn’t join him.”
That is true – but only to a point. They were known as the Soul
Giants when Zappa joined as guitarist in 1965, along with vocalist Ray
Collins – Zappa had released a couple of his songs under monikers like
The Heartbreakers and Baby Ray & The Ferns. They were a talented but
unadventurous weekend bar band playing covers at a club called
The Broadside in the downtrodden Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. Zappa,
the Sagittarian fire sign with a brain like a planet, was about the
change all that.
“I suggested we develop our own stuff and try to get a record
contract,” Zappa later recalled. “The leader at that time, a guy called
Davey Coronado, said: ‘No way. Because if you learn original stuff, the
bars won’t hire you.’ So he quit. And he was right. We stayed together,
changed our name to the Mothers, and we did get fired.”
No band was ever gonna be big enough for Frank Zappa to share
leadership in. Fortunately, the mid-60s was a fast-paced musical melting
pot where the music business was already midway through
its transformation from single-oriented pop to album-oriented rock. When
Tom Wilson – producer of Bob Dylan’s earliest albums and original
musical mentor to the Velvet Underground – caught an early Mothers Of
Invention gig on Sunset Strip, he thought he saw a progressive rock and
blues outfit not unlike The Doors and Love, then also making baby steps
into the scene. Signing the Mothers to the MGM-Verve label, he had no
idea what he was in for once Zappa got the band inside a proper
recording studio.
Motherly Love, The Mothers of Invention in 1968 (Getty Images)
Despite being briefly considered as a producer for The Doors,
Zappa viewed fellow Angelino acts like The Doors and Love as glorified
hippies, which he considered “a very conformist group, with
an established uniform, vocabulary and lifestyle”. The Mothers were
something else: they were freaks. Hence the title of their first album: Freak Out!
A double album released at a time (June 1966) when single albums were still mainly comprised of hits and filler, Freak Out! was an anomaly on every level, even in a year that saw the release of game-changers like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and The Beatles’ Revolver.
From its inner gatefold sleeve comprising various boxes of thank-yous
and credits – including names like Carl Franzoni (aka Captain Fuck,
self-styled leader of the LA freak scene), Suzy Creamcheese (a fictional
catch-all groupie that would crop up on several subsequent
Mothers albums), Kim Fowley (‘on hypophone’), even ex-wife Kay (credited
for inspiring Anyway The Wind Blows) – Freak Out! seemed built to confuse all but the already – metaphorically, at least – freaked out.
Tom Wilson was credited with production, but soon handed over control
– as everyone finally did – to Zappa. Wilson got a good inkling of what
he was in for after Eric Burden, who Wilson had hired Zappa to produce a
couple of tracks for, described the experience as “like working with
Hitler”. When Zappa hit the producer up for $500 to bring in as many
freaks as he could find from the Strip to record the free-form musical
malaise that comprised side four, The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet (described by Zappa on the sleeve as Unfinished Ballet In Two Tableaux, the first titled Ritual Dance Of The Child Killer), Wilson simply paid up. Life was too short for this kind of shit.
Not unexpectedly, Freak Out! was not a hit. Yet
its message outstripped sales to such a degree that the names
Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention became synonymous
throughout the album-buying world with a musical mien that belonged not
to the narrow enthusiasms of the chart‑buying public, but to the new
rock cognoscenti; the ones who listened not just to Jimi Hendrix and The
Doors but also to John Coltrane and John Cage, maybe Bartok and
Stockhausen too.
As Melody Maker noted in its belated review of Freak Out!, published in March 1967: 'Throwing
off their social chains, freeing themselves from their national social
slavery and realising whatever potential they possess for free
expression the Mothers Of Invention toss the moral code aside like spare
sugar lumps. That is, they’re sending up American society, advocating
free love, nay, advocating freedom already.'
Sales of the album may not have jumped significantly as a result, but
word of mouth spread like wildfire, and six months later the Mothers
were headlining London’s Royal Albert Hall.
The true musical identity of the Mothers, though, was not really established until their second album, Absolutely Free
– the first to feature keyboard player Don Preston and sax player Bunk
Gardner. “Frank and I both had the same record collection,”
Preston remembers now, from his Hollywood home. “But I’d already been
playing outside music for a few years. We didn’t play jazz or classical,
we improvised to unusual things.”
The Mother of Invention live in London in 1969 (Getty Images)
The most unusual being the bicycle which Preston (who also claims
to have invented the Moog synthesiser) “taught Frank to play”. Joining
Zappa, whom he’d known since the early 60s, Preston was a natural fit.
“I was just overjoyed to be able to do that kind of material and have an
audience listen to it, instead of just doing it in my garage,” he says.
At that point, Preston recalls, there was little separation between
band and band leader. “He was a lot of fun to be around and hang out
with,” he says now.
Recorded in just four days in November 1966 and released four months later in March 1967, and billed as the first and second in A Series Of Underground Oratorios (side one and side two to you and me), Absolutely Free
set the template for everything Zappa would record during what is now
regarded as the classic Mothers period, from 1966 to 1970. Seemingly
free-form jazz-influenced rock – although actually minutely annotated
neoclassical music using mainly electric instruments – was interwoven
with extracts of off-the-wall taped conversations, lewd commentary, and a
sense of the absurd that bordered on sinister.
The Mothers’ musical ethos was best embodied on Zappa’s first real masterpiece, on side two, Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.
Ostensibly a blues-acid-rock-pantomime-groove-laden satire on
suburban America, with Captain Beefheart growling in the background, it
switches suddenly into a third-person narrative about a sleazy
government official fantasising about screwing a 13-year-old girl,
‘rocking and rolling and acting obscene’. None of which really conveys
the dizzy sense of watching a theatrical production crumble before your
eyes, revealing only the actors, naked, learning their lines. And
failing.
For the first six months after Preston and Gardner joined,
the band rehearsed for eight hours a day, seven days a week. There were
strict rules: if you were sick, you could be asked for a doctor’s note
or lose a day’s pay. Preston describes the band as “democratic”,
although it was always clear who was in charge.
Zappa had already begun staying at a different hotel from the rest of
the band. Drummer-cum trumpeter Jimmy Carl Black later recalled:
“The Mothers were into sex, drugs – not heavy drugs – and rock’n’roll.”
Zappa, by contrast, was only into one of those things. He had been
curious enough to watch while Ray Collins dropped acid, and not
impressed enough to try it himself. Zappa’s only known drug
foray, smoking 10 joints in one sitting, just left him with a sore
throat, he said. And he certainly didn’t like rock’n’roll.
But when it came to sex, and taking advantage of the newly announced
‘permissive society’, Frank was right there at the cutting edge. He’d
already been married (to his teenage sweetheart Kay Sherman) and
divorced before the Mothers. Now he revelled in those aspects of the
freak scene that included groupies, fuck buddies and one-night stands.
Even when he was shacked up with Pamela Zarubica, it wasn’t unusual for
her to come home and find Frank in bed with different girls. Because of
their open relationship, outbreaks of crabs were common, as was getting
the clap. Indeed crabs would later inspire several Zappa classics, such
as Toads Of The Short Forest.
Zappa at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969 (Getty Images)
His second wife, Gail – who had spent her formative years in
London, as part of the same social scene as The Beatles and the Stones –
had also for a short time been a groupie. “And an excellent
groupie too,” Frank boasted in interviews. “It didn’t matter to me that
she had slept around with other beat men.”
Yet Pauline Butcher says he had a more traditional outlook on
marriage. “He didn’t think the marriage would last if Gail had outside
sexual partners. He had outside women, but not to the extent that he
would leave Gail or break up his family.”
Gail, a blonde-haired beauty, had met Frank in early 1966. He had the
clap and crabs, the latter venturing as far north as his hair. She
married him a year later, on the heels of his first European tour. Today
she describes Frank as “incredibly stable” at home. “But of course, all
that changes when he’s on the road and, from a wife’s point of view or
from a girlfriend’s point of view, you have all the occupational hazards
that rock’n’roll can present to you. All I can say is that the
secret to not killing yourself over stuff like that is you stay focused
on what it is that you want for yourself in your life.”
Zappa sang about sex endlessly, in every permutation and situation he could conceive of. Sometimes it was puerile (Penis Dimension), sometimes it was profound (America Drinks And Goes Home),
but it was always there somewhere. Proto-feminism at play, perhaps? Or
just a more clever form of male chauvinist pigdom? When Zappa told Rolling Stone
he found the work of knob-modelling groupies Cynthia and Dianne
Plaster Caster “artistically and sociologically… really heavy”, no one
knew if he was joking. Later he hired Cynthia to become a full-time
babysitter for Gail, a role she proved very good at.
Meanwhile, back at the coal face, the divide between the Mothers
and their leader grew even wider when Verve failed to pick up the option
for the band’s next album, and Zappa’s street-smart manager, Herb
Cohen, used the loophole to negotiate a much better deal for Zappa that
included the formation of his own production company, through which he
would control the release not just of all future Mothers Of Invention
albums but also his own solo projects and those of any other artists he
chose to sponsor. Those who were there say that this marked a key
staging point in Zappa’s transformation from band leader to group
dictator.
“Zappa was always the leader, but we all had equal responsibilities,”
says Don Preston. “By the time we reached the Log Cabin, Zappa was the
main guy; he was the man. It felt more isolated.”
The shift became complete with the release of Zappa’s first solo album, Lumpy Gravy, released in August 1967, just five months after Absolutely Free. At this point things got really complicated. And they stayed that way for the rest of his life.
Put as simply as possibly, Lumpy Gravy went from being an orchestral
work performed by a group of session players he named the Abnuceals
Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, to a drastically re-edited strand
in a larger production called No Commercial Potential, which itself comprised a further two albums, both credited to Frank and the Mothers: We’re Only In It For The Money (released in March 1968) and Cruising With Ruben And The Jets (December 1968).
The Mothers of Invention give Frank the thumbs down (Getty Images)
While none of the albums sounded remotely like the others,
according to Zappa it was all one album. He claimed that he could cut
the master tapes into different running orders and it would still
make sense. It was, he explained, part of his “project/object” concept:
each album was a different ‘project’ but all the albums combining to
make a bigger ‘object’.
While one of the ‘related’ albums – Cruising With Ruben And The Jets,
a set of doo-wop songs corralled into a ‘concept’ album about a
fictitious group called Ruben & The Jets – baffled critics to
the point of irritation, the other two remain among the finest works to
bear either the Zappa or Mothers imprimaturs. Indeed Lumpy Gravy
remained one of Zappa’s personal favourites. Working around the clock
in the studio with a full orchestra at his disposal and state-of-the-art
12-track recording facilities, Zappa was in his control-freak element.
“He drove everyone crazy,” says Preston, “making us do 28 takes of the
simplest little bridge.”
But it was the next Mothers album, We’re Only In It For The Money, that really sealed the deal here in the UK. An alternative-universe take on The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper,
complete with hilariously mocking sleeve and a cameo from a stuttering
Eric Clapton, it was one of the most incisive and unforgiving satires on
the whole so-called 60s ‘movement’.
“Everybody else thought they were God!” Zappa said of The Beatles. “I
think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group.”
Perverse to the last, he let it be known he preferred The Monkees.
By now Zappa was living in a small, third-floor apartment in New
York with his new wife, Gail, then pregnant with their first child. It
was at this point that drummer Arthur Dyer Tripp III joined the Mothers.
Tripp had performed solo concerts of the works of John Cage and
Stockhausen – heavyweight stuff, considering the height of
drummer-related sophistication had entailed Ringo Starr singing
_Yellow _Submarine. Tripp had just finished a two-year stint playing with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and he was ready for anything.
“Frank was continuously on the prowl for new ideas and inspirations,”
Tripp says today, speaking from his home in Mississippi, “so just about
anything we discussed was used. To be associated with a guy who
basically favoured ‘anything goes’, but at a high level, was heaven for
me. I shared Frank’s counter-culture, anti-mainstream philosophy, and in
those days we made fun of everything.”
Tripp recalls Zappa being ill at ease in social situations. “He
tended to feel comfortable only when he was in control of the subject
matter, and its direction,” says the drummer.
It was a world away from how Zappa was seen by his fans. When Jimi
Hendrix dropped by the New York apartment to say hi, instead of the
“crazy scene” he had envisaged, he found Gail and Frank making supper.
That didn’t stop him getting up and jamming with the Mothers on stage
that night, though Zappa left him to it, sitting in the stalls to watch
Jimi play. It was also in New York that he appeared in an episode of The Monkees, playing Mike Nesmith, while Nesmith, dressed as Zappa, played him. (He was also in The Monkees’ movie Head, playing Davy Jones’s mentor, while leading a talking bull.)
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“He was a precociously intelligent man in a business which is not
necessarily filled with a lot of intelligent people, and he stood out,”
observes Pauline Butcher. “He worked out he wasn’t a pretty boy like
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he didn’t play their kind of music,
he didn’t even like it, and if he was going to get himself heard he was
going to have to do something radically different. He went out of his
way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one
with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in women’s
clothes. All these things were calculated because he had to get himself
attention.”
By the time the extended Zappa family had moved back to Los Angeles
in 1968, being radically different was hardly a stretch. He and Gail
rented a log cabin in Laurel Canyon once owned by 20s cowboy movie
star Tom Mix for $700 a month. Frank dubbed it “Freak Central”. The
Canyon had been transformed from a rundown, overgrown semi-wilderness by
musicians looking for cheap places to hang out and get high, to play
their music beneath the bird-of-paradise plants, thickets of pepper
trees and pines.
It was here that the Zappa mythology that had begun to build in New
York now rose to a whole new, stupendously far-out level. Visitations by
rock royalty were daily occurrences. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull
turned up, followed later the same night by members of The Who,
followed even later by Captain Beefheart, aka Zappa’s old school
friend Don Van Vliet. They finished the evening jamming in the basement
on Be Bop A Lula. (Beefheart complained that Jagger gave him a
dud mic to prevent him being overpowered vocally.) Eric Clapton stopped
by the next night, but Frank was unimpressed, complaining that “he
wasn’t the jamming type”.
Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick was another visitor. In her autobiography, she describes the Log Cabin as 'like a troll’s kingdom. Fuzzy-haired women
lounged in long antique dresses, and naked children ran to and fro
while Frank sat behind piles of electronic equipment discussing his
latest ideas for orchestrating satirical hippy rock music –
openly [making] fun of the very counter-culture he was helping to
sustain.'
Then there were the wannabes and hopefuls. When Larry Fischer, a
24-year-old escaped mental patient, jailed at 16 for trying to knife his
mother, turned up to sing Frank a song, Zappa signed him to his new
Bizarre label and recorded a double album with him, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer. Zappa
continued to mentor Fischer (described as “something not entirely
musical”) – until he threw a glass jar at Moon, at which point Gail put
her foot down and Fischer was permanently ejected. A more successful
newcomer Zappa signed to Bizarre was the Alice Cooper Band, a group of
reprobates who dressed in women’s clothing and sang songs called Earwigs To Eternity and B.B. On Mars.
“I’d seen Zappa play at Thee Experience club in LA,” Alice recalls
now. “One night it was Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix, all
jamming. Then Frank gets up and does an imitation of each one of them!
Then he takes off and starts playing his own riffs, and those other guys
just stood there, like, ‘What?!’ Cos this guy was doing stuff that they
had never seen before. Even Jimi Hendrix. Frank gave Hendrix his first
wah-wah pedal and showed him what it was.”
Frank and Moon Unit Zappa, Laurel Canyon, 1968 (Getty Images)
When one of the Log Cabin regulars told Frank of this band that
every record label in LA had turned down, he asked to see them. The
following morning, at seven o’clock, they were on his front lawn,
bashing out their strangely unlovely set.
“We got our times wrong. We’d heard he wanted us there at seven, we
figured he meant seven in the morning,” says Alice. “But we played five
songs that were two minutes long and had, like, 25 changes in them, and
he sat there and he listened. Then he looked at me and said: ‘I don’t
get it. I don’t get what you just did.’ And then we played another one
for him that did the same thing. And then another, and another.
They were like if you took an ELP prog piece and condensed it to two
minutes. And he just kept going: ‘I… don’t… get… this!’ I said: ‘Is that
bad?’ He said: ‘No. The fact I don’t get it is why I’m signing you.’”
Arguably the most infamous of all were The GTOs, the group of teenage
groupies that Zappa took under his wing. They originally called
themselves the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, until the night they turned
up at the Cabin naked except for bibs and giant nappies, their hair up
in pigtails and all sucking lollipops. A delighted Frank insisted they
dance on stage with the Mothers that night. And that they change their
name to The GTOs.
GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously, Girls
Together Only, Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Often, and
any number of similar acronyms. “The GTOs would get dressed up every
night to go dancing, cos there was safety in numbers,” says Gail
Zappa. “They wore these wild outfits [and], they would also get in the
Whisky free so they could dance. Cos for a while they were the
entertainment.”
In the GTOs there was Miss Cinderella, Miss Christine, Miss
Pamela, Miss Mercy and Miss Lucy (plus, at different intervals, Miss
Sandra and/or Sparky). Having proved themselves by appearing on stage
at several Mothers Of Invention shows as dancers and/or backing
vocalists, in November 1968 Zappa put them on a weekly retainer of $35
each. “People just got off on them,” recalls Alice Cooper. “They were a
trip.”
When Zappa produced their sole album, Permanent Damage, in 1969, he got Rod Stewart to sing on the track The Ghost Chained To The Past, Present, And Future (Shock Treatment). Jeff Beck and Nicky Hopkins also appeared on the record, conducted by Frank.
And did Zappa enjoy any extra ‘perks’ from the job? Pauline Butcher
is emphatic that he did not. “He wasn’t interested in The GTOs on a
groupie level,” she says. “He wasn’t a sexual predator at all. He didn’t
lunge after anyone. He didn’t come across as a dirty old man-type of
thing. He was not like that. He was far too laid-back.”
Why should he, when he and the Mothers were thronged by groupies at
every gig they played? Again, Butcher is defensive on the subject. “He
only had these women on the road because he was highly sexually charged,
I suppose, and he just needed an outlet for his sex.” But the fact is,
Zappa wrote more songs about groupies and sex in general – including
taped conversations with groupies discussing their various conquests –
than any other artist before or since.
Hello ladies, Frank tries out his winning smile (Getty Images)
One time when Zappa went back to play in London, Pauline, who had
stayed behind in LA, got tickets for the show for a friend of hers.
“She went to the club afterwards where he was,” she recalls. “And Frank
said to her: ‘I’m looking for a fuck. Are you available?’ She said: ‘No,
I’m married.’ He said: ‘Well, does that make any difference?’ He would
get very grumpy if he didn’t get any groupies. And then Gail would have
to fly out and sort him out.”
Nevertheless, both Gail Zappa and Pauline Butcher insist he was a
different man at home. When it came to personal and professional
relationships with women, Zappa could be nurturing, inspiring even.
“The main thing was, he listened to what I had to say,” says Butcher.
“This, in 1967, ’68, was revolutionary to me. It was just so unusual
for me, [for him] to listen and take seriously what a woman had to say.
He treated me like an equal. Which was extraordinary.”
If so, she was the exception. From here on in, Zappa rarely, if ever,
treated anyone like an equal. By the time he came to record what was
officially his second solo album, Hot Rats, in the summer of
1969, the transformation was complete. Frank Zappa was the Mothers, and
the Mothers were whatever Frank Zappa wanted them to be. In this case,
that meant a collection of jazz-leaning orchestral rock with an extra
twist of post-psychedelic savagery.
Opening track Peaches En Regalia, despite its compositionally complex parameters, would become the most instantly recognisable Zappa track of his career – the All Right Now of the freak generation. Willie The Pimp
featured typical Zappa outsiders like Captain Beefheart on vocals and
Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris – recently bailed by Zappa from jail after his
latest drug bust – on violin. Willie would also become – an
unlikely term in this context, but nonetheless true – a real crowd
pleaser. Violinist Jean Luc Ponty plays on It Must Be A Camel, and a young, uncredited Lowell George also features.
Although the album didn’t even break the US Top 100, it became
Zappa’s only Top 10 hit in the UK and would go on to become one of his
biggest-selling album worldwide. Not that Frank gave a shit. Or at
least he said he didn’t. Within weeks of its release, he had officially
broken the Mothers up.
Pauline Butcher says that the first night she arrived at the Log
Cabin, in May 1968, “he told me that he wanted to break up the Mothers.
All the way through the band, he said this. There was another crisis
about a month later, and he was gonna break up the band then. And then
Ian Underwood said he would rehearse the band, and that started the
lifelong habit of Frank always having someone else in the band rehearse
the band, and learn the parts before he joined them, because he hadn’t
got the patience.”
Zappa himself put it more bluntly: “How long can you be enthusiastic
about music as an art form, never mind music as a business, when it
involves other people that you have to rely on, and they piss on
your shoe?” he said. “Why do you have to put up with that? The more I
can rely on myself, the better I like it.”
Whatever one’s views on Frank Zappa – his music, his
personal politics, his attitude to women and fellow band members – by
the end of the 1960s he had become as significant a figure in rock
culture as almost anyone else one might wish to make similar claims for.
He would re-form the Mothers Of Invention in the summer of 1970,
when the expediency of filling venues on a lengthy tour demanded. He
would even record more music with them. But as Don Preston says: “By
then we were just hired musicians.” And he made a film featuring some of
them: 200 Motels; as dreary, incoherent and interminably tedious as any of the other truly awful ‘wacky’ movies of the period – only more so.
Getty Images
Mostly, though, Frank Zappa would go on to become… Frank Zappa.
Which meant many, many more great albums – though none, it has to be
said, ever quite so daring, seemingly impromptu and alive with the
gung-ho spirit of the times as the ones he made with The Mothers Of
Invention.
In 1969, the Zappas finally moved out of the Log Cabin and into a
more conventional home, still in Laurel Canyon but this time with doors
that had locks. They would live there together for the rest of Frank’s
life. On the door leading to the basement where he worked was a
sign: ‘Dr Zircon’s Secret Lab In Happy Valley’. What came out of that
lab over the next near quarter of a century will likely be argued over
for centuries to come. There were 62 albums – live, studio, rock, jazz,
orchestral, singles, doubles, trebles – released during his lifetime, a
further 35 original works released posthumously, plus 13 compilations
and box sets at last count, and god knows how many bootlegs.
“He was driven by the stimuli around him,” says Gail. “Everybody
else, if you were in a rock’n’roll band you were typically sitting
around getting stoned and bumping into each other while you write their
songs. Frank was clearly a band leader and didn’t tolerate that kind of
behaviour in a working environment. So I don’t think he was suffering in
any major way, other than not being able to get any exposure on the
radio or television or anything like that.”
She says she recalls Frank once complaining of a boring life,
because all he did was work. “He just wrote dots on paper, but he used
to talk about connecting the dots – which really speaks to what he did
in terms of music and what he did in terms of social commentary.” You
know what she means, even if you don’t. Just like her husband’s music.
The term ‘musical genius’ is so overused as to be obsolete. Yet it’s
difficult not to draw on it when it comes to the story of Frank Zappa.
“I would say yes, he was – as long as you put the word ‘musical’
there,” says Don Preston. “If he was a genius he’d still have the first
band together and we’d all have been making millions of dollars, like
the Grateful Dead. But a musical genius? Yes, absolutely."
