Being Frank (29 page)

Near the end of 1991, I read in the paper that Frank hadn't been able to attend a four-day tribute concert of his music in New York on account of his failing health. At the event his daughter Moon had read
a prepared statement to the press admitting that he had prostate cancer. Finally, on December 5, 1993, a fiend called to say she'd been listening to Howard Stern's radio show, and Stern had announced that Frank had died the day before. He hadn't quite made it to his fifty-third birthday, which would have been on the 21st.

At first I couldn't believe Frank was... dead. Maybe, like Mark Twain, his demise had been greatly exaggerated. How could this stalwart crank, who had survived false imprisonment, near-fatal assault and battery, and more than 25 years of ‘mystery meals' in Holiday Inns around the globe, have been tripped up in the end by a mutinous gaggle of his own cells?

The pain of his loss was so intense it was physical. Every confused, contradictory, unresolved emotion I'd ever felt toward him came welling up in me, until I felt I would choke to death. But the good things
I remembered about Frank were infinitely more painful — the teasing warmth of his voice, the strange weather in his eyes, the way he'd looked that afternoon conducting “RDNZL” for an audience of one... I couldn't bear to lose him twice like this.

One bright, windy morning a couple of days later, I got on the freeway and drove sixty miles into the Mojave Desert, to Palmdale. Frank had spent his high school days a few miles farther north in Lancaster. I turned off Pearblossom Highway onto a dirt road, where there were no houses, and got out of the car. For half an hour or maybe longer, I stood there screaming until I was hoarse. It didn't make me feel any better, but I had lost all sense of control. I couldn't stop myself.

Eventually I came to the realization that these emotions were primal enough to kill me, and I fumbled to find a constructive outlet for them. Not knowing what else to do, I began hesitantly writing about Frank Zappa the way I remembered him, as if that could somehow make him re-corporate. For me he'd often been as much an idea as a flesh-and-blood human being; maybe I could make him exist again through the written
word, just as, conversely, his music had always seemed so physical to me.

Here, some eight months later, is the result of my experiment. I don't know if I have managed to capture that elusive “when”, but if I have brought back to life the Frank Zappa I knew fought with, learned from, and loved — and recaptured my time with him — then maybe Time is really just a construct after all.

 

 

W
atching Frank work in the studio could be painful; he'd start with a live recording that was breathtaking, then he'd begin to pick it apart and piddle with it and over-dub this and take out that, and before you knew it, he wound up with a result that was considerably less than the sum of its parts. Details were always his Achilles' heel (The “Over-Nite Sensation” and “Apostrophe”' albums are prime examples of this.) And yet (
sez I
), he
still
made some of the greatest records of all time,
when
he was able to stay out of his own way. In the following discography I have listed several listening suggestions for each chapter, with the more optional choices marked with an asterisk (*). All titles in this discography are in print on CD as of this writing, unless otherwise indicated.

FREAK OUT!

“You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here”:
This song really stuck with me for some reason, even though at the time the album was released (1966) I was eleven years old and had no idea about the Sunset Strip scene being satirized in the song. It's still a great universally scathing condemnation of diehard hipsterism, even if some of the references are dated.

“Trouble Comin' Every Day”:
Frank's view of the Watts riots of 1965
is worth listening to today. If the 1965 references were updated slightly, the entire song could be about the Los Angeles riots of 1992. As he did with much of his material, he re-arranged and re-recorded this number more than once, but I still prefer the original version for its urban electric blues sound. When Frank says “Blow your harmonica, son” near the end, it's positively surreal.

* “Help, I'm a Rock”:
Here's the mumbling, fulminating, and percussion. Frank got better at this sort of thing as he went on, but it still has some funny moments, especially if you imagine scowling, eleven-year-old me in front of my record player, listening to this cut with the volume cranked and my bedroom door open. I'm sure Frank wrote “Help, I'm a Rock” with people like my mother in mind; he had a similar experience with his own mother the first time he ever listened to Varèse's
Ionisation
on the family phonograph.

HOT RATS

Play the whole thing, and turn it all the way up. I still think “Hot Rats” is the best thing Frank ever recorded for several reasons, the most important being that he wasn't working with an existing band; this was strictly a studio project, which enabled him to start with a blank canvas and create a sort of virtual audio reality, The droll, warm, pseudo-symphonic humor of “
Peaches en Regalia
” is a perfect musical reflection of a mood I saw Frank exhibit more than once, but which he never came close to capturing on any of his other recordings. (There's a little of that same feeling in spots on the much later
MAKE A JAZZ NOISE HERE
CD, but enough of that.) “
It Must Be a Camel
” has breathtaking,
sui generis
harmonies and sections where the lead instruments (sax, electric violin, and guitar) are braided together so tightly that you literally can't tell which is which. “Hot Rats” changed the way I thought about music forever, and it might very well do the same for you, if you've never heard it before. (If any of this fascinates you, try to get hold of the old vinyl version and listen to that as well; it's considerably different than the CD, which was digitally ‘refurbished' and has chunks edited out of each selection; the CD has also been entirely re-mixed, not always to its benefit.)

* Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band:
TROUT MASK REPLICA

Frank produced this record by his old high school buddy Don Van Vliet in 1969. When I met Don in late 1970, he was going through one of his periodic anti-Zappa phases (something he did with fair regularity). He'd
spend hours chain-smoking evil-smelling Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, to “Trout Mask” over and over again, and bitching about the production, the art direction, the color of the label, etc., etc., etc. I found it really entertaining to watch him sitting there, choking in the Sobranie fog, shaking his fist at the stereo, and calling Frank highly original names — especially since “Trout Mask” is, in my humble opinion, not only Beefheart's finest hour, but one of the best records ever made in
any
genre. My favorite selection on “Trout Mask” is “
The Blimp
”, which consists of a riff borrowed from the Mothers' cut “Didja Get Any Onya” (that section of the track wasn't originally included on the “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” album, but it was restored on the CD release more than 20 years later). Over this riff Don's cousin Victor Haydon, who's calling in to the studio from a phone booth, hysterically recites lyrics like,
“It's the big hit! It's the blimp, Frank! It's the blimp! ”
and
“Tits, tits! The blimp, the blimp!”
There are a lot of other outstanding songs on “Tout Mask” (like
“Moonlight On Vermont”
and
“Pachuco Cadaver”
), but “The Blimp” is the only one where the artist refers so humorously to the producer's, er, deficiencies, real or imagined... (Don's monicker ‘Captain Beefheart', incidentally, was an invention of Frank's, and derived from the fact that Don's uncle, back in the old days in Lancaster, had been in the habit of exposing himself to Don's girlfriend, all the while mumbling superlatives about his member: “Ah— looks like a fine
beef heart
...”)

For more on Zappa and Beefheart, see notes to
BONGO FURY
, below.

YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, Volume I

“
Once Upon a Time
” and “
Sofa # l
” are live recordings of the first two ‘movements' of the “German material.” They were recorded at the disastrous Rainbow Theatre concert in London at which Frank met his Waterloo by being shoved into the orchestra pit. Unfortunately this show came a week after the fire at the Montreux Casino which destroyed all of the band's equipment. The group was limping by with makeshift gear after a hastily retooling, so the instrumentation is somewhat austere. Imagine, if you will, the addition of a concertina, a clarinet, and (ahem), some extra vocal power from yours truly, and you'll get the true flavor of this fine Zappa opus.

Here are some of the compositions with which I was confronted during my initial runthrough with Frank :