Being Frank (7 page)

As I staggered out of the Oakland terminal, I was downright dangerous. The objects around me — buildings, vehicles, billboards, even the grass and trees — had the aspect of a comic book illustration just on the verge of disintegrating around the edges. Back in those trippy times everybody in the universe under 30 was loading themself up with acid, hashish, peyote — but here I was, straight as a die yet swimming through a hallucinogenic universe at high noon.
When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake,
said Plato, or Pliny the Elder, or one of those guys.

I found a cab and directed it to the edge of the Berkeley campus, where the auditorium for tonight's concert was located. It was I p.m.; the sound check was supposed to start at 2. Just as the cab was pulling up in front of the building, an enormous galvanized loading door in the back swung open, and a bobtail truck backed in beside it. Popular music, I reflected, was just like any other industry, The saleable commodities had to be trucked across the country to the point of sale. It reminded me of working for my father Oh well, whenever I got back from
this
little expedition, I probably wasn't going to have to worry about working for my father anymore.

I lingered across the street, watching, suddenly uneasy about barging right in. A sweet-faced young mother with blonde hair hanging to her waist walked near me, holding her toddler son by the hand. “Look, sweetie, look at the musicians,” she said, pointing to the amplifier
cabinets being hoisted up onto the loading platform. Everything seemed hyperrealistic and garish. I had no idea what to expect.
Anything could happen
.

When I couldn't stand to wait around any longer, I crossed the street and climbed up the steps that led into the auditorium. The equipment truck's back door came clanging down as I walked past. Inside, I nearly stumbled in the dark; sunlit trails still glared in front of my eyes. I could smell the warm dimness of an old auditorium, the moldering wool upholstery of the seats, the forgotten butts of a million and one cigarettes that had been hurled into the void for the past 75 years.

Some of the band members were already on the stage, tuning up, There was no sign of Frank, I was in the process of hesitantly introducing myself, meanwhile keeping a sharp lookout for the telltale signs of substance abuse, when all of a sudden I felt a pair of arms, surprisingly strong, grab me from behind. I turned around, and there he was: wild-haired, grinning like a buccaneer in the red light district, his eyes like exploding nebulae as he hugged me with mock ferocity. His mustache brushed teasingly against my cheek. “Heyyy!” he exclaimed, Then, feigning solemnity: “How do you like the
ever-sospiritual Berkeley ambiance?
”

He had to do an interview before the sound check, and in his businesslike fashion he made sure I accompanied him when he went to sit down with the interviewer in seats several rows back in the auditorium. It was a technical discussion for Guitar Player magazine, and I listened carefully, hoping he'd reveal the true source of inspiration for his personal musical universe. He didn't, but if I'd been paying more attention to detail I could have undoubtedly duplicated his guitar style — he described it minutely, right down to his preferred string gauges, pickup configurations, amp EQ settings, favorite effects devices, the size and shape of pick he used, and a lengthy explanation of how he'd just discovered a perverse and thrilling “cream-puff effect” in the studio by pumping his guitar signal directly into the board. I wondered whether he was spouting techno-babble at least partly for effect; I'd never heard anyone sound so thoroughly immersed in the arcana of audio before. (By the time I left the tour two and a half months later, he had taken both of the pickups off my old Gibson 335, messed with the wiring, replaced them, fixed a longstanding string buzz, and changed the strings to a much lighter gauge — all in odd moments during sound
checks or before shows, After he got done with ‘my baby' I barely recognized it, so I let him keep it for the rest of the tour. But by then I understood that for him, ‘tech' wasn't just a nifty way to get girls, it was his life's breath:
I putter, therefore I am
.)

After the interview, he got up, looked around for the errant band members, put two fingers in his mouth, and whistled shrilly. They all appeared from various nooks and crannies where they'd been stealing a hit or a snort, no doubt, and he herded them onto the stage like a football coach mustering the offense. Before I could ask him if I should join them, he had given the downbeat and kicked off a song. I sat down in the front row, feeling slightly crushed. They ran through the number, then Frank cut them off with a perfunctory but emphatic gesture. Evidently the sound was satisfactory. “See you back at the motel later,” he told them, and jumped down off the stage.

He came over to where I was sitting. “Let's go,” he said. At the exit we picked up a pleasant-faced fellow in his early 30s, I guessed (anyone over 30 seemed chronologically challenged to me — even, I'm sorry to say, Frank), who was standing around there as if he had nothing else to do. This was Dick Barber, the band's road manager, a down-to-earth sort of guy whose tonsorial style — balding on top, little ponytail in back — pre-dated by more than two decades the future Male Hollywood Showbiz Exec Look (minus the ‘90s regulation single earring).

The three of us walked out of the auditorium to a station wagon parked near the loading area. Dick climbed behind the wheel, I squeezed in next to him, and Frank rode on the outside; luckily the front seat was fairly wide, because two of us had
wider ones
.

We pulled out into the tree-lined Berkeley streets, dappled with light and shadow. In the distance the Oakland Bridge's massive gray exoskeleton, and the delicate rust-red spans of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, fluttered in the air like mirages. Farther off yet, the scrubbed white buildings on the San Francisco hills seemed to defy gravity, exploding into space from all directions, more light than matter. The breeze was cool, but I felt a thousand tiny flames licking my cheek.

I got up my nerve and asked Frank if I'd be playing with the band at the concert that night. He cleared his throat and shuffled his feet. “Most of it's going to be material you don't know,” he answered. “I think it would be a good idea for you to listen to the show tonight and get an idea of the unfamrliar songs.” That sounded reasonable
enough. It was true — I didn't know a lot of the material, I hadn't had a chance to attend a full band rehearsal in L.A. before the tour started.

After a short drive down Shattuck Avenue during which I found myself staring intently at the billboards we were passing, the station wagon turned into the parking lot of the Berkeley House motel, I glanced sideways at Frank, who caught me looking at him. His eyes still had that mischief in them, although the playfulness had deepened into something a little more serious. Dick pulled up at the motel entrance, and fast as lightning Frank popped the door open and climbed out, I followed, with a sweaty feeling of anticipation.

We walked through glass doors into the lobby. There it was — that
unmistakable motel smell
of Lysol and naugahyde. The Muzak was pumping out a bassless, drumless, rhythmless rendition of “Light My Fire.” We joined a gaggle of tourists waiting for the elevator. There were some sideways glances at Frank, a pronounced nervous drifting away from us as Mr. and Mrs. America sensed the menace lurking inside that brown tweed disguise.

Just then a couple of lads who looked like they were playing hooky from Cal came strolling down the hall on their way to the swimming pool. They spied Frank and immediately began gaping. The elevator, meanwhile, seemed to be hung up in the attic somewhere. Finally one of the boys summoned his courage: “Are — are you Frank Zappa?”

Frank nodded.

“Is it really true that you ate shit on stage?” asked the other guy with a nervous smirk. (This was a persistent canard that had been plaguing Frank at least since the late 1960s, but at the time I had never heard it before.)

Frank stared him down. “
That's a vicious rumor
,” he answered in his sardonic drawl. “
The closest thing to shit I ever ate was the Beef Wellington from the buffet at a Holiday Inn in Newark, New Jersey.
”

The elevator door swung open just then, and as we piled in, we were confronted head on by the major disgust of Mr. and Mrs. America. Our middle-aged lady actually pressed herself flat against the side of the elevator as she entered, trying to avoid any possibility of contamination by this vile coprophage; her husband looked daggers at us from the other side of the elevator. Frank and I were suffused with smothered laughter and by the time we were out of the elevator and into the upstairs hall, neither of us could hold it back. In front of the door to
room 303, we both collapsed, falling all over each other I thought he was going to
die laughing
, right there in the hall of the third floor at the Berkeley House motel. Somebody get me a Steadi-Cam!
FRANK ZAPPA DIES LAUGHING!
Film at 11!

Finally Frank caught his breath and, snaking the room key on its plastic paddle out of his jacket pocket, he ceremoniously opened the door and gestured regally inside.

There were two queen size beds, both made up. A suitcase lay, open, across one of them. Frank flipped on the overhead light, then shuddered and flipped it back off. “A little moody lighting,” he said, sitting down on the empty bed and switching the bedside lamp on low. Still in the doorway, I glanced around the room. The heavy curtains were drawn, letting in only the narrowest crack of light. Two dubious oil paintings of ships and lighthouses hung over the beds. A TV set stared out at us with its glass eye. There was music paper stacked neatly on top of the bureau beside the big black briefcase, a portable reel-to- reel tape recorder, and a pile of shrink-wrapped albums. A little leather shaving kit stood unzipped on the corner washstand, bulging with what I presumed was shampoo, razors, and whatnot. (I would soon have a
more accurate idea
of the nature of the paraphernalia in there.) On top of the neatly-folded things in the suitcase was a most unusual cap, a Martian extrapolation of yarmulke, porkpie hat, and jester's motley, with a star and a crescent moon suspended on top from a long fuzzy shank. The green-feathered monstrosity from our first meeting flashed ludicrously across my mind, and I found myself picturing Frank's
nice Italian Aunt Mary
, who must have gone in for surreal headgear during innocent little Frankie's most impressionable years, thereby turning him into a
millinery pervert
forever, before he even had a chance to know what was going on...

I turned my eyes around to Frank, still sitting on the bed, his shoes off but his socks on, calmly peeling off his orange “Jolly Gents” T-shirt, I wondered if he ever got tired out from his grueling schedule. Maybe he wanted to take a nap.

“Shut the door,” he instructed me in a quiet voice.

I came in, closing the door behind me.

“You wanna come over here?” he asked nonchalantly, leaning back against the headboard. He was now attired in just his skintight Levi's and, evidently, no underwear.

I looked at him, almost too overcome to do it but still compelled to. I had never felt so vulnerable, embarrassed, and confused before. The ironic, detached, yet somehow lubricious timbre of his voice, the way he looked up at me, seeming to understand everything and to be thoroughly amused about it, made me quiver all over. How could he know my feelings so much better than I did myself? I wished I knew what
he
was feeling, so I could figure out how to respond.

But as I stood there struggling with myself, I knew I had to own up to the real source of my discomfort. For me, Frank Zappa had gone from being a voice on the record player, a face on an album cover, an inspiring influence — to a very real, entirely corporeal 30-year-old guy who seemed to be about to casually seduce me in this crushingly ordinary motel room in Berkeley. I couldn't just put the disc into its jacket and stick it safely back on the shelf; I was being directly confronted by my hero, much larger than life and exuding a matter-of-fact sexuality that I found strangely embarrassing. Moreover, I could sense that it was this conflict of mine that was causing his own flame to flare up. If I'd simply been madly in love with him, he would probably have been bored to death. He needed to draw out and then conquer something in me; he must have relished the clash, or he wouldn't have created it in the first place.

I slowly walked over to the bed. I looked down at him, the crumpled pillows stuck behind his head, one arm tucked back under the pillows, all six feet of him radiating an attitude of sensual arrogance undercut by a marked awareness. He looked back at me coolly and levelly, both daring me and shrugging it off. Was he a human male, or an
idée fixe
? I wanted to know him more than I'd ever wanted anything in my life, but I was terrified of what I might learn.

When I got down on the bed next to him, he put his arms around me, gravely, non-threateningly. Shaking all over, I plunged my face into the black hole that was his hair. It was so soft and thick I practically got lost in it. Before I could, Frank gently disengaged me, held me at arm's length, and gave me a searching look, not entirely without empathy or even sadness. “You sure you want to do this? I don't want to
coerce you against your will
,” he said, with exaggerated irony. I should have known he'd give me an argument. A peculiar combination of libertine and moralist, he wanted me to be aware of the consequences of this act; his tone of voice left no doubt that his intention was to be as thorough about
this as he was about everything he did, so I'd better be sure
that
was really what I wanted.

Still shaking, I nodded and tried to smile.

He reached across me and clicked off the light with a firm, decisive gesture. In the darkness of the room, the central air conditioning rattled the register in manic polyrhythms.