Being Frank (11 page)

I definitely needed reassuring sometimes. Frank's nature was to blow things up, blast them wide open; and he understood that I, in my closed-off state, was attracted to him because I somehow realized that. But as strange as it may seem, he also had a pronounced sense of responsibility, and I think he felt uneasy at the intensity of my reactions, knowing he'd stirred them up. He knew he shouldn't be playing with that sort of dynamite, however thrilling the explosion was. I had a feeling, too, that he was afraid the situation would force a reaction from him — one that he was entirely unprepared to confront, much less control.

Sex he could handle, because it was exciting and interesting; love, on the other hand, was a different matter. From things he said, or almost said, I gathered that his first marriage and a couple of his other relationships had ended badly because the women in question hadn't understood his need for freedom. Frank could be loyal, but he wasn't cut out for monogamy; it went too much against his essentially polymorphous nature, and besides, it sounded too much like that
other
word, ‘monotony.' In another way, the conventional notion of romance probably seemed absurd and contemptible to him because of its one-dimensionality. Poor Frank. I could never have said it to his face, but he was actually a romantic, if you blast open the standard definition of romanticism and take another look at it as
an unrealistically expansive view of human relationships
. Nobody could live up to that sort of expectation — not even Frank himself.

For him,
love
was a transitive verb, not some flowery adjective.
Lust
was a concept he understood perfectly; its adjunct was
improvisation
, and the desired result was
adventure
, or at least diversion. And yet he was far more giving than selfish. Being instinctively attentive to detail, he generally succeeded admirably in defining the precise point of pleasurability and would then proceed to attack it with a frankly degenerate gusto.

He was such a realist — or a cynic — that he couldn't really comprehend the fact that I appreciated him simply for himself — not because he was a
Guitar Hero
, a
Ticket Out of Oblivion
, or a
Sort of a Father Figure
. Actually, it hadn't taken me long to recognize that although we were of different gender and from different eras and family backgrounds, Frank and I had something profound and not a little ironic in common. We were both eccentrics; for some reason we had wound up being different than everybody else, but our thought patterns and reactions were very similar. Of course most serious Mothers fans were weirdos to a greater or lesser extent, but the more familiar I became with Frank's music, the more I began to understand why it spoke so eloquently to me: It mirrored my own emotions and perceptions on a deep, unconscious level. The only other composer whose music felt that emotionally familiar to me was Erik Satie — another iconoclast and joker who was always conscious of his outsider status.

When I played the music, I had the feeling of being ‘plugged into' something I didn't understand, a level of simultaneous reality Frank hadn't invented himself but had somehow tapped into. I had sensed this amorphous but pervasive atmosphere when I'd first met him, and when later he told me that, like me, he had read his share of books on Zen, it made a lot of sense. Frank seemed to understand the concept of Zen well enough: it was a state you simply lived in — or didn't. Because we were both together so much, I moved more into that state as the tour went on.

Early in the tour I began to have ‘coincidental' experiences with Frank that bordered on being eerie. At one of the shows where I didn't perform, he introduced the world premiere of a new song and explained to the audience that it was extremely difficult to execute. I was standing behind the amps, watching, and I grinned to myself and said under my breath, “Which is no doubt why you're not going to play on it.” At that moment, Frank announced, “Which is why I'm not going to play on it.”

Another time we were trading guitar solos over a vamp in A. I took my allotted solo space, then Frank took his. At the end of his solo we vamped for eight bars, then all of a sudden, without any warning, we
both launched into an identical eight-bar phrase together, in perfect rhythm! It sounded as tight as if we'd rehearsed it. We exchanged a bemused glance across the stage, and Frank frowned a little, like I'd tried to put something over on him. Afterward I asked him if he'd ever played that lick before, thinking maybe I'd heard him toss it off once and had then ‘forgotten' it, but he claimed he hadn't — in fact, he said, it had been rhythmically and harmonically alien to his style, and he'd felt almost peculiar when he played it. I could almost hear the theme from “The Twilight Zone”. We experienced a number of these ‘coincidences' during the time we knew each other.

As little as I actually performed with him, I learned more about guitar playing from Frank in that period than I probably would have learned from 20 years with any other guitarist: his understanding of
when
to play
what
was absolute. He wasn't some athletic guitar god like Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton; in fact, he always looked a little klutzy onstage, one shoulder higher than the other from the weight of his Les Paul or Strat, the eternal burning cigarette stuck under the strings on the pegboard — and so, when he fired off an intricate lead in Hungarian
minor (neatly swiped from the first movement of Bartok's Third Piano Concerto), ornamented with a wreath of perfectly executed hair's-breadth spacings (17 against 13, borrowed from Stravinsky and probably never repaid), it always seemed like a lucky accident. How could this guy, who generally looked like he was
truly hurting
for a square meal and a good night's sleep, come blasting out with something so concise, so humorous, so downright unthinkable? “Do it again, Frank!” I'd yell — and he'd give me a look over his shoulder, wonderfully arrogant, like a little wink: “Of
course
we'll play
Petrouchka
...” And then he'd fling out another solo for nothing — ten, or a thousand, times better than the first one.

Although it sounded like it was a product of the ‘psychedelic' era, Frank's style of guitar playing actually went back much farther than that; it was a strange but effective amalgamation of a blues skeleton fleshed out with harmonies and rhythms from 20th-century orchestral music. No matter how complex his playing was rhythmically and harmonically, in some sense Frank never strayed far from his bluesy roots. When after the tour I got around to hearing some very early, pre-Mothers of Invention tapes of Frank playing in a straightforward blues style, my impression was that the his 1962 guitar persona could have stepped right onstage with the 1971 version, and wouldn't have really sounded any different. As far back as 1962, all the things I associated with the Zappa style — the rhythmic emphasis, his tendency to finger more notes than he picked, the modal quality of his playing, and above all the essential honesty of his playing — were all there. His guitar style was fully formed by the time he was in his early 20s; the only thing that changed over the years was the price of his toys — the instruments themselves and the amplifier and effects technology. He used to amaze impressionable listeners by playing the main themes to
Petrouchka
and
The Rite of Spring
, first individually and then together, in the form of a canon, but what the audience didn't realize was that he'd been doing that musical stunt for years — on one of those early tapes, in fact, was a recording of a blues jam in which he'd shoehorned in the Stravinsky guitar trick after an endless harmonica solo. It didn't really work in that context, but I don't think it was supposed to.

You could always tell when he'd memorized a part and was playing it by rote — he played it precisely, but a little painfully, as though it were an exercise. For instance, he had arranged the first few bars of the trumpet fanfare from Stravinsky's
Agon
and inserted it into his song “Status Back Baby”. He had more trouble fingering that obstinate little tidbit than he wanted to admit. One night back at the motel I did something
that only a callous 17-year-old would have thought was humorous: we were running through some material, and he took a break to go to the bathroom, leaving the door open. Meanwhile, I cheerfully tossed off the break from
Agon
three or four times as if it were the merest trifle, messing with the rhythm and generally showing off. When Frank came back, he gave me such a sour, cranky look that I cracked up.

He didn't say anything, but the next time the song came up at a show, he made a big deal out of stopping right at that point, then grandiosely announced to the audience that I was going to perform the trumpet fanfare from
Agon
on the guitar
unaccompanied
and
totally amaze them
. I was thrown into total confusion; I'd never thought I'd be doing it
in public
. Naturally, I fucked it up. Frank thought it was so hilarious he stood there and made me play it
again
. The second time was even worse than the first. After that I evinced a little more
respect
for his limitations.

Frank had developed a beautiful and highly unusual harmonic sense, both chordally and in the melodic patterns he soloed on, but the most important element in his playing was always rhythm. When he soloed, his rhythms tended to fall into odd patterns — 3s, 5s, 7s, 9s — over the basic 4/4 rock pulse. It reminded me of Indian music, with the lengthy, irregular solo line rolling out over and often against several cycles of structured rhythm. After hearing him, I had trouble listening to other guitarists; most of them tended to sound dull and predictable by comparison, and their rhythmic sense seemed so rudimentary. But it was something else, some elusive quality, that set Frank apart from the ranks of rock guitar abusers. There were other guitarists who could play faster, cleaner more glibly than Frank, but none of them came close to his ‘attitude' — that steamy, palpable sense of immediacy. His guitar playing had both intellectual and visceral qualities, although he probably didn't separate one from the other, any more than he differentiated between Edgard Varèse and Guitar Slim. It was all just part of his composition. For Frank, playing the guitar was never a job, a cut-and-dried activity; it was an adventure and a release, like sex but much better, a brief span of time when he could close his eyes, figuratively speaking, and jump off into the void. He had the power to draw the listener into his musical world and hold them there, expanding and ultimately suspending all sense of time.

When it came to his music, he knew exactly what he wanted, and he wouldn't accept anything less. He assumed the musicians he hired were going to work as hard as he did, and if somebody couldn't or wouldn't
deliver, they were excused without further dithering. He didn't have that trouble with me; but (beyond the confusing aspects of our mutating relationship) there were definite areas where our musical philosophies crashed head-on.

Frank had done too much hard time in bars and lounges in industrial suburbs, playing watered-down versions of Tin Pan Alley banalities with hopeless rhythm sections for the delectation of sodden oafs; so when I'd throw in a flat-five substitution, he'd wince and proceed to fulminate on the banality of musical evil, deriding the sterility of
white people's music
. In the Antelope Valley in the '50s he had been jailed the night before a dance because he had led a racially mixed R&B band; the local Okies thought all niggers were dope fiends and gangsters, Italians were considered pretty alien by the hayseeds in Lancaster, and Frank had suffered miserably in high school at the hands of the second-generation Okie and Arkie students. There was no point in my trying to explain to him that there were plenty of outcasts in places like Texas and Oklahoma, and as much innovation in Spade Cooley as there was in Anton Webern. Frank didn't have many deep prejudices, but the ones he had seemed to have been burned into his soul with an excoriating lash.