Being Frank (24 page)

As far as the actual album was concerned, I intended some of the songs to have guest vocalists; one of the vocals, called “Ruin,” was a mutant blues number designed to be apocalyptically howled by Captain Beefheart, if we could somehow lure him down from the hippie hamlet of Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he was living in colorful poverty; and another was a duet for myself and Frank, sort of a surreal doo-wop tune with pseudo-Stravinsky vocal harmonies. Of course, I had no intention of playing any of the guitar solos on this little biscuit. That would have been schlepping anthracite to Newcastle, under the circumstances. On one of the instrumentals, I'd planned to sucker Frank into actually playing Western swing without him being aware of it; I'd
taken the structure of “Steel Guitar Rag” (which itself was based on standard blues changes anyway) and perverted the voicings until Leon McAuliffe's mother wouldn't have recognized them, thrown in some ‘tuplet sforzandos on the offbeats (always lots of fun when you're in cut time), and voila!
Mutant guitar strangler's delight!
(The title of the opus was “Chicken Fried Sex".) Frank wouldn't know what hit him. Hell, if he could take ‘50s doo-wop and subject it to Dr. Ztrkon's Secret Formula on “Ruben and the Jets,” I could do the same thing with ‘40s hayseed-hipster music on
my
record.

As soon as Frank was back from Europe and had had a few days to decompress, I called him and let him know the demo was ready. He sounded somewhat grouchy, but he told me to bring it over. Within a half hour of our phone conversation, I was sitting in the basement with him. He put on my tape and gave it his usual intent listen. Then he turned to me, folded his arms, and declaimed:

“This stuff is so
off the wall
nobody's going to get it in a million years. You'd be lucky if you sold ten copies of the thing.”

I bowed my head humbly and thanked him, adding that, coming from him, I took it as a compliment.

Next we started quibbling and wrangling with logistics and, worse, numbers. I wanted to get right to work on the album; in fact I immediately put in a call to Cal Schenkel, the artist who had done most of Frank's album art, and asked him to start working on a design for my album cover. But Frank took the wind right out of my sails. “You've got things ass backward,” he grumbled. “I haven't even figured out if I'm going to be able to produce if yet, and you're thinking about the cover.” He then asked if I had any idea of what the budget for this vinyl extravaganza was likely to be. I told him I didn't — wasn't that his department?

Poor Frank. Sighing and adjusting the visor of his imaginary green eyeshade, he proceeded to explain the facts of life to me: Albums cost money to produce — more than I probably realized. Even an El Cheapo production would run between fifteen and twenty thousand by the time you figured in the engineer's salary, the cost of raw tape (at 30 i.p.s., it took a lot of tape to
make a 40-or-so-minute album, what with all the, er, false starts and uh, worthless takes there were likely to be in, um, this case), incidental musicians, recording and mixdown time, payments to Schenkel for artwork, mastering and refs, pressing costs, etc., etc,. Now if my hypothetical album (I noticed he stressed the modifier ‘hypothetical' very pointedly) were to sell, say, 5,000 copies ("I'm feeling very
expansive
tonight, ahem") at the profitability level of 75 cents apiece, it didn't take Dr. Einstein to comprehend the
algebra ad absurdum
here;

“You're going to wind up owing the record company money,” he concluded.

“But
you're
the record company,” I said.

Frank gave me a long-suffering look. “Glad you picked up on that,” he said wearily.

Frank actually had some other things to do besides work on my big hit album. He had assembled a new band, and was starting to rehearse with it. Both Ruth and lan were in it — so much for the “
He Who Shall Remain Nameless
” stuff. It even had Jean-Luc Ponty playing violin, and George Duke on keyboards. I didn't want to get sucked into the old black hole of living at rehearsals again, but gravity was my enemy. Ruth, who was an ex-New Yorker, didn't drive. Since I had a car of sorts, and — let's be honest about this, folks — time on my hands, I somehow got elected transportation captain. The new rehearsal facility was on Sunset Boulevard near Bronson Avenue in Hollywood, and on the way over the hill from the Valley, we'd stop off in Laurel Canyon and pick up Jeff Simmons. He had moved back to L.A. from Seattle and was playing bass in the group. Wed go chugging down Laurel Canyon Boulevard in my battered black ‘62 Fairlane (which was mostly held together with little orange decals that said “Wazoo,” and of course my “Captain Beefheart for President” bumper sticker). Ruth's road case full of cymbals, gongs, hand percussion, and miscellaneous paraphernalia, crammed in beside her in the back seat and totally blocking my view out of the rear window, was so heavy it made the wobbly suspension sag even further; while up front Simmons, in shades, five o'clock shadow, and knitted cap, would be riding shotgun with his coffin case between his knees, occasionally rousing himself from his personal twilight to hurl highly random epithets out the window: “Hey, Itchy Dean!” , “Feature your hurt, or
punt
!”. Other motorists gave us a very wide berth, for some reason.

The rehearsal space was a lot like a blimp hangar. It had probably started life as a sound stage 20 or 30 years earlier, but at some point in recent history it had been rehabilitated, and now it provided a reasonable facsimile of the performing conditions in a large nightclub or a small hall, minus only the kid on reds puking on your shoes from the first row. (The drinks were supplied by the liquor store a few doors down.) There was a long stage with a full complement of lighting and sound reinforcement gear, two-story-high, sliding load-in doors, and the best central air conditioning in town. In front was a warren of offices, the headquarters of Frank's new record company, DiscReet. (Alarmed about his evidently declining morals, I had a little talk with him: first he'd been Bizarre, then Straight, and now he was downright DiscReet. Had he no shame? “Whaddaya think I am — some kind of dinosaur?” was his growled rejoinder.)

Despite my strong misgivings, I soon had my work cut out for me. It was like the Grand Wazoo, only more so. When Frank wanted Ruth to pick up, say, a parade drum or a couple dozen pairs of Good Vibes mallets in time for the next rehearsal, off we'd go to Professional Drums on Vine Street — in my car. A steady procession of amps and anvil cases soon reduced my back seat to a puree of ravaged vinyl. Because I was a guitar player and familiar with Frank's equipment, so to speak, there were courtesy trips to Guitar Center, or to the independent technicians who worked on his instruments. Once or twice I even got dragooned into going to the Players Motel, next to Local 47 of the Musicians' Union on Vine, to pick up or deliver out-of-town musicians who were trying out for the band.

Frank was collaborating on effects devices with a fellow named Bob Easton, an electronics wizard who ran a secret lab near Rampart and Temple. Easton, with the backing of people like Frank, had been attempting to put into production a number of intriguing ‘black boxes', most of which went beyond the merely quixotic into the realm of the
truly sonically demented.
At rehearsal one day, I was promised a demonstration of the Electro-Wagnerian Emancipator, which theoretically was supposed to take a single note and transform it into a chord, the harmonic structure and timbre of which could be as complex and bewildering as the operator wished. Easton carried in a nondescript, medium-sized black crate with a row of knobs on the front, Frank plugged his guitar into it, there was 45 minutes worth of studious tweaking and twiddling — then horrid noises, frowns, and hushed conference back and forth — and the experiment was finally determined to be a failure. Frank eventually socked
$40,000 into R&D on the Emancipator, but the appliance was never deemed publicly operable.

Frank had been composing and accumulating a great deal of music, and when he had rehearsed the band sufficiently, he started recording them. I decided to keep him under close surveillance so that my big album project wouldn't get shoved too far toward that dreaded ‘back burner' from whence there was no return.

Frank didn't seem to have any objection to my sitting near his elbow in the control room, even if I was there as long as he was. There was bound to come a time when the last cigarette in the pack was gone, or when the mundane but vital subject of pizza, or cheeseburgers, reared its ugly head. Once in awhile he'd shoot me a look, as if to ask “Don't you have anything better to be doing?.” The truth was, I couldn't think of anything more exciting than being there watching him make an album. Since I'd never seen him operate in the studio, I found the experience immensely edifying, well worth the ‘tuition' of all those trips to the liquor store or the fast-food emporium. In the recording studio, he really
was
Dr. Zurkon in his lab in Happy Valley, distilling the essence of that sound, mixing it with this other sound over here, spending eight or ten hours to capture 60 seconds of audio exactly the way he wanted it. His recording m.o. was identical with his sexual philosophy — obsessiveness, situationism, attention to detail, pushing the envelope until it mutated into — anything he felt like.

In recording the album that was eventually called “Over-Nite Sensation,” he used several facilities- One of them, Whitney Studios, was in Glendale. By this time I was living in Silver Lake, in a one-bedroom flat in a crumbling, turn-of-the-century house. It was a 15-minute drive from Silver Lake to Glendale, and there was a Mexican take-out stand right at the midpoint of the trip. They served the greasiest
carnitas
burritos this side of heaven. Now if they could just remember to leave out the fucking onions...

At Whitney there was a fairly decent pipe organ. The studio was owned by the Mormon church, and maybe they were hoping that someday they d be able to rent it to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Instead, they got distinctly unholy clients like Frank Zappa. Frank had lots of fun with that organ. Once or twice I got on the thing and demonstrated some of its more amusing tricks to him. He wound up having George
Duke record a frenetic solo on it during the song “Fifty-Fifty". As I may have stated earlier, Frank wasn't much of a keyboard player. He looked upon two-handed pianists with a kind of incredulous awe. But no one was better equipped to appreciate the textural and symbolic properties of a big organ, no matter how many hands were on it.