Being Frank (2 page)

You know, sometimes the best people are there when you least expect them. In May 2001, I went to my first concert by The Ed Palermo Big Band in which Ed played Frank Zappa music at The Bottom Line in New York City. After both shows, the inevitable Zappa-related small talk ensued with people that were falling to convince me that they were really into Zappa, After the second of two shows was performed, Ed Palermo introduced me to Nigey Lennon and her inseparable partner in crime, Eric Weaver. A strong positive connection was made immediately. This was not two Zappa book authors in preparation for a battle; this was a mutual appreciation of the work done by two people whose interest in Frank Zappa's music has driven them to further exploration of Frank's entire output. How did he play that? When was this done? How does this all make sense? We found that we wondered about Frank Zappa's music in much the same way we wondered about things as children.

Of course, Nigey was a lot closer to the crux of the biscuit, and her perceptions are just as valid today as when her book was originally published in 1995. We also discovered that our Frank Zappa books were really given the once-over by the Zappa intelligentsia before they were grudgingly accepted into the realm of “respected” books on Frank Zappa. I wish there was another way to do it, but you really have to piss people off in order for a book on Zappa to be recognized! I applaud Nigey Lennon for her braveness in encapsulating her first-hand Zappa experience in book form and emerging from the whole experience with her chin up and clothes intact! Thanks to Nigey's
Being Frank
, I had the guts to make the final decision on releasing my own book on Zappa.

This edition is a reaffirmation of Being Frank's validity as a “must read” book, and hell, even a “must re-read” book! Just like Frank's music, the deeper you get into this book, the more you will get out of it. Dive into it right now!

— Greg Russo
    Author of
Cosmik Debris: The Collected History & Improvisations of Frank Zappa

I
n 1966, as an eleven-year-old eccentric in Manhattan Beach, California, I underwent a religious experience at the Unimart department store.

It was a lazy afternoon, and I had rather aimlessly hiked a mile or so uphill from my parents' house to the crossroads of the world — the corner of Sepulveda and Manhattan Beach boulevards. From the traffic signal at the northwest corner of the intersection I could see an endless stream of Ford Rancheros, metal-flake pickup trucks, Big Daddy Roth-customized surf wagons, and convertibles, all full of blonde people headed for the beach. I disliked the beach — not so much the sand and waves, but the rancid, oily smell of Coppertone and the horselaughs from the naugahyde-skinned adolescents who clogged the shoreline, boards in hand, praying for a tsunami.

The coolly-lit interior of the Unimart store was more anonymous, and for a few minutes, as I prowled the aisles, now fingering a set of brightly-colored acrylic yarn pot holders knitted in Taiwan, now crossing over to the hardware section and gingerly hefting a socket set that seemed to be made from cast iron, I could envision myself doing anything: living in a cottage in a Kansas cornfield, with frilly curtains at the windows, and salvaging scraps of the past to sew beautiful quilts from; or laboring long into the night to construct an immensely complex machine, a vast network of galleries and pulleys and billowing steam towering
hundreds of stories high and requiring endless adjustments which only I could make. I imagined myself accepting the Nobel prize wearing greasy coveralls, wrench in hand, having just saved the world from imminent disaster by the turn of a single screw.

In the record department, The Troggs were whining “Wild Thing”. Adenoidal Brits had become a
real problem
lately, clogging the airwaves with dreary, drippy exudations all too evocative of their dismal little island. I hated rock ‘n' roll (although I kind of liked the ocarina solo in the break of “Wild Thing”) — my personal hot pick at the moment was a 78, probably recorded some time during the 1920s, that I had scrounged from a pile of rejects at the Salvation Army. On the “B” side was a lilting waltz called “In Blossom Time” with a lovely contralto vocal by an entirely unknown singer, Mary West, and Full Orchestral Accompaniment by, I think, Harry Golden. On the “A” side, Harry and his orchestra performed without Mary, a hot jazz number which I only listened to once. It was on the
Conqueror
label, and listed on the wrinkly brown paper sleeve were many other Conqueror discs, available for fifteen cents. I spent a great deal of time poring over the titles and artists and wishing I could still buy the records at places like Unimart. I liked everything about 78s — the big round labels with the exotic lettering, the thick weight of the shellac, the stylized vocals of the singers, the ticks and pops accenting the music, the way the needle raced like crazy across the wide, shiny grooves, finally running out of space and slapping furiously against the little ridge that separated the playing surface from the label. In sharp contrast to this
thrilling shellac universe
, rock music came on thin plastic 33 1/3 r.p.m. stereo discs with tiny grooves and dull, mass-produced looking, non-hand-lettered labels — light in weight and in content. The whole idea of it bored me.

I drifted down the bins of albums, looking at the covers. There weren't all that many records; this was about five years before the
profitability level
of rock ‘n' roll was discovered by multinational conglomerates. The paltry stock was segregated by plastic dividers with black block letters announcing TEEN FAVORITES, EASY LISTENING, DIXIELAND, GOSPEL…

In the TEEN FAVORITES ghetto I flipped through Bob Dylan's
“Highway 61 Revisited,” the Rolling Stones' latest release, a couple of collected-hits packages, and altogether too much Sonny & Cher. Cher was no Mary West, and Sonny certainly no Harry Golden. (Tiny Tim and his ukulele weren't yet a cloud on the pop music horizon.) Suddenly I stopped cold. A black-and-fuchsia-and-blue album had literally and figuratively jumped out at me! I had never seen anything remotely like it in my life. From the cover glared the menacing faces of savages with long, matted hair and beads, the photo crudely colored over with what looked like a smeary crayola. They bore no resemblance whatsoever to the simpering, Prince Valiant-coifed rock groups on every other album cover — these guys looked like they'd steal your dog and eat it alive and kicking, if they got the chance. On the back cover was a typewritten note with a hand-printed signature by one Suzy Creamcheese, describing how these degenerates had been hired to play at her high school prom and had ruined it. The band was called The Mothers of Invention, and the album entitled “Freak Out!”. Without knowing why, I felt I had to own it.

“Freak Out!” was a double album, two discs in a foldout cover, price $7.98. I checked inside my little green vinyl coin purse and found a quarter and a dime (I'd skipped lunch at school that day). Back home I had four dollars and some change stashed in a jewelry box, my life savings. I sighed and hiked back down the hill.

My mother was in the living room, watching “Dark Shadows” on TV and shortening a secondhand dress, turning it into a blouse. She made all her own clothes, not from patterns but by creating new things from old ones. At the time I thought this was extremely tacky and wished she would use patterns like anybody else. Later I would come to realize that the motivation for her idiosyncratic tailoring was a strange and complex convolution of childhood poverty (even though we were staunchly middle class and she could have afforded new clothes if she'd wanted them), her own inherent creativity, and a fierce defiance I never fully understood.

I told her there was a new record I wanted to buy, but that I was about a dollar and a half short. She looked up from the sewing machine with faint irritation. “You've got lots of records” was all she said, and went back to her work.

For the next two weeks I went without lunch. This wasn't much of a hardship — the food in the school cafeteria was famous up and down the state for being the worst in California, perhaps in the nation, at least in my humble opinion, and there was always the solace of cookies
or bread and cheese when I got home from school, to tide me over until dinnertime.

Finally, one Wednesday afternoon, I toiled back up the hill to Unimart and went straight to the record department. I paged through the selections in front of the TEEN FAVORITES divider until I got to the plastic card itself. Nothing, No “Freak Out!”. Somebody richer had beat me to the punch.

I survived the disappointment somehow, and Unimart eventually restocked. The first time I played my very own copy of “Freak Out!”, I didn't know quite what to think. The dog-killer image was certainly appropriate, but there was also a strong intellectual context. As for the music, it wasn't quite rock ‘n' roll, or I wouldn't have listened to it more than once, but it definitely wasn't “In Blossom Time,” either. There was too much shouting, mumbling, and fulminating, for one thing, not to mention a
lot
of percussion, and a xylophone on some of the songs. I was used to xylophones; I had a little three-octave student model, received one year as a Christmas present (I still don't know why), and on which I had been attempting to play the xylophone theme from “Danse Macabre” for at least three or four years. (I never could get past the place near the beginning, where the sixteenth notes started, without getting tangled up and dropping at least one of the mallets.)

Then there were endless liner notes in very small type on the inside of the album; I read them studiously, over and over, trying to understand what they meant By the time I had them memorized, I was beginning to get a vague idea that “The Mothers of Invention” wasn't really a bunch of savages. “They” seemed to be extensions of one person, a fellow exotically named Frank Zappa (I wondered if it was a psychedelic
nom-de-guerre
). His presence permeated the entire record, but he was only visible in an underexposed photo on the left hand side of the inner spread as a very large nose, a striped pullover, and a hand holding a drumstick. A dialogue balloon issued from his invisible mouth:
“Freak Out!”
in Cooper Black, flopped so it read backwards. The note beside this image stated:
“Frank Zappa
is the leader and musical director of
THE MOTHERS of Invention
. His performances in person with the group are rare. His personality is so repellent that it's best he stay away… for the sake of impressionable young minds who might not be prepared to cope with him. When he does show up he performs on the guitar. Sometimes he sings. Sometimes he talks to the audience”.... And the zinger, at the end: “Sometimes there is trouble.”
Yeah!

There was an additional bunch of quotes from people who, in my
innocence, I assumed to be very important (although I'd never heard of a single one of them), warning how dangerous and crazy this Zappa character and his semi-musical concept were. Zappa had also listed his own influences: “These People Have Contributed in Many Ways to Make Our Music What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them.” Among the culprits were Charles Ives, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Maurice Ravel, Eberhard Kronhausen, Ravi Shankar, and dozens of blues and R&B musicians. I was too young to get the in-jokes, but I recognized some of the classical composers.

I played the two discs endlessly, trying to absorb the multitude of musical styles and attitudes. This was nearly two years before “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” “introduced” the
Concept Album
to surf music-benumbed American teens, and even though I was used to extracting all the information from recordings, from the data on the label to the graphic design to the details of the music itself, “Freak Out!” was far over my eleven-year-old head. All I knew was that it sounded entirely different from anything I had ever heard before, and that it was hypnotically engrossing. Somehow I couldn't help playing it over and over and over.