Being Frank (8 page)

A
lthough I didn't get to perform that night, I was on the stage for the entire show — sitting on a folding chair just a few feet from Frank but hidden from the audience by the tops of the amp cabinets. He was in an extremely jovial mood, ripping off brilliant solos and dancing around the stage like a maniac, conducting the band with such velocity I half expected his right arm to pop out of its socket. From time to time he'd shoot me a wicked look and throw a one-liner into the ongoing dialogue, a little in-joke that probably didn't carry any farther than my corner of the stage, but I was satisfied: I was a key proton in tonight's atom of the Big Note.

Needless to say, I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to the material I should have been memorizing for the next show. I was vaguely aware of the structure of the songs and how they segued into one another, but usually about the time I'd force myself to focus enough to make a mental note, Frank would raise the devilish old eyebrow at me. “Where can
I
go to get some Beef Wellington? Where can
I
go to get my
sock washed
?” That one made me blush mightily, and Frank broke into a wicked grin. I noticed a couple of the guys in the band smirking at this byplay, and it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks that
there is no such thing as private life when you're on tour with a band
. A valuable if somewhat disturbing realization.

When the show was over, the band piled into two station wagons for the trip back to the motel. Frank and I rode with Dick Barber again, this time letting him chauffeur while we sprawled out in the back seat; the rest of the band went in the other car, which had an additional seat in the cargo space and could accommodate everyone comfortably.

The good feeling from the concert hung over us in a pleasant haze, like decent brandy. Frank was leaning back against the seat with his shirt unbuttoned nearly all the way down, making little jokes and asides. The Northern California night had turned nippy, so I'd borrowed his old tweed blazer, which fit me surprisingly well. It was a
men's
jacket, with a nearly empty pack of cigarettes in one of the pockets and a (probably empty) lighter in the other; it exuded an elusive, musky scent of tobacco and leather, As I wondered idly why guys my own age didn't have interesting jackets like Frank's, he reached over, pulled me close to him, and put his arm around me.

I snuggled next to him, enjoying the feeling of quiet, steady warmth flowing out of him into me. I was little surprised that being there with him was so relaxed and easy, and I found myself wishing the moment would go on forever.

Suddenly I heard Dick up front swearing, “
Shit
...” He had apparently made a wrong turn; we were headed away from University Avenue, toward the waterfront.

“Hey, Foon — think Simmons is hanging out there someplace?” said Frank, peering at the grim vista of ancient brick buildings and bleary streetlights. (Jeff Simmons, a former bass player in the band, had written a song called “Wino Man", alias “Wonderful Wino,” about Skid Road in his hometown of Seattle. This tune had become part of the band mythology.)

Dick chuckled. Right then I felt the zipper on my jeans slide slowly and silently down, and an exploring hand steadily began to navigate its way around Cape Horn. “I think that's your right turn coming up,” said Frank; from his tone of voice, he could have been reading the Christian Science Monitor. Nothing seemed to embarrass him.

By the time we finally got back to the motel I was limp, but Frank wasn't. We emerged from the car and passed through the lobby like a whirlwind. Fortunately the elevator was open and waiting. We emerged into the hall to find quite a little crowd gathered before the door of No. 303: assorted band members and other folks, including a highly miscellaneous
collection of women. Everyone was in a rowdy mood' laughing and carrying on so loudly that I wondered why the motel management hadn't called the cops on us. It was already after one in the morning, but no one seemed to care. No wonder they called Berkeley “Berserkeley” in those days.

I glanced at Frank. He grinned. “Feel like doing some
entertaining
?” he asked. I didn't, but it wasn't
my
room, The party roared inside and piled onto the beds and chairs. There was considerable discussion of that night's show among the band members. The girls, exotic creatures dressed in fanciful costumes, laughed constantly, but said very little.

In the midst of the circus Frank, resting against the headboard of the unmade, windswept bed, maintained a genial but distant attitude. He should have been wearing a lab coat and making clinical notes on the proceedings. As a matter of fact, I would discover during the tour that he almost always had his portable tape recorder running, capturing conversations, situations, rehearsals, and scenes in motel rooms alike. He felt that anything that transpired on tire road was part of the larger composition, so to speak, and just as valid as any other part of the composition. Some of the band members were inclined to regard this as snooping, stealing, or worse, especially when they subsequently found their own words handed back to them in the form of song lyrics or stage routines, but it didn't seem to bother Frank.

Frank seemed immersed in his observations, so I strolled down the hall to check out the scene in the room of one of the other guys in the band. The door was open and I found him sitting on the shag-carpeted floor sharing a sociable reefer with a dark-skinned, handsome girl wearing a patchwork velvet skirt and not much on top. They offered me a hit, but I smiled and politely explained that I didn't smoke dope. “You're kidding!” the girl exclaimed. “I don't know
anyone
who doesn't smoke. That's, like, the weirdest!” I was about to mention that Frank didn't, either, but the two of them had gone off into peals of hysterical laughter.

Just then the room phone rang. It was Frank, inquiring if I happened to be on the premises. I got on the phone and he made it plain that he thought I should be back in 303. When I hung up, the girl was looking at me with awe. “Are you with Zappa?” she asked incredulously. I nodded. “
Wow
,” she breathed reverently. On my way down the hall to Frank's room I mulled over the curious notoriety that seemed to be attached to being “with” a rock star. It didn't particularly bother me, but I did feel it was kind of cheap. After all, I was a musician in my own right — maybe
not famous like Frank, but at least original. Wasn't
that
more impressive than being “with” Zappa?

In 303, the party had evaporated. Frank was still propped up against the headboard of the bed; a statuesque brunette was perched on the edge of the mattress. I glanced warily at her — what sort of scene was this?

“This is Ramona,” Frank said blandly. “She's a stripper, and she just mentioned that she's always had a fantasy about watching me, uh, receive oral gratification.”

B
efore I was really aware of what was happening, it was too late: I had become inextricably involved with my guitar-wranging boss. It wasn't as though he was on a campaign to convince me that he was Mr. Wonderful, but although I tried to keep a semblance of objectivity about the situation, there was just something addictive about being around him. Frank not only couldn't leave ‘reality' alone, he was constantly
inspecting and customizing
it. In the afternoon of my third day on the road, as we were pulling into the parking lot of the motel prior to checking in, he was looking out of the car window at the landscape in his characteristic fashion, half intent, half relaxed, the ever-present cigarette in his hand. Suddenly he turned around and made a comment about how the place looked. I don't remember exactly the way he put it, but it was so succinct and at the same time so surreal and humorous that he sounded like the test tube offspring of Salvador Dali and some B-movie mad scientist. I had never before known anyone whose offhanded observations leaped right out of the confines of ordinary perception and into the fifth dimension like that. I had assumed that his anarchistic posturings and droll pronouncements were strictly theatrical, but now I realized that Frank's imagination didn't get packed away in a suitcase when he wasn't onstage or in the recording studio;
he thought that way all the time
. He was truly eccentric, much stranger and more interesting than I would have thought. I found myself
wanting to inhabit his universe the way I needed to play his music.

It wasn't a one-way cosmos; Dr. Zurkon seemed to be delighted to have me around the lab. As a kid, he told me, his favorite form of recreation had been
blowing things up
, and he hadn't changed a bit in the intervening twenty or so years -- he'd just expanded his experiments into the human area. And here, suddenly, I was -- just in time to have my molecules thoroughly rearranged.

That afternoon, we had time to kill between the sound check and the gig. Once we had our suitcases stashed in our room, Frank, in a playful mood, asked me what I felt like doing. “Got a pair of trunks? “I inquired straightfacedly, looking out of the window at the chilly turquoise surface of the pool rippling in the stiff breeze two stories below.

“Nope,” said my degenerate roommate with finality. To him, strolling from the car to the motel lobby was the equivalent of a backpack expedition to the summit of Mt. Whitney.

Forced to invent other amusements, I flushed and mumbled, unable to specify what I had in mind, so the Grand Inquisitor commenced on me, Under his seemingly indifferent but actually concerted questioning, I finally confessed something that I'd first observed during our first encounter at Bizarre Records — the fact that I found the timbre of his voice almost painfully erotic. This seemed to delight him, and he immediately set about attempting, in his droll way,
to quantify my physical responses to his vocal apparatus.
Clipboard. Pen. Lab coat
. Now, then: Did his voice by itself elicit an intense reaction? What if he changed the pitch? Well, how about changing the pitch and applying
this much
manual stimulation? OK, what happened when he
increased
the manual stimulation? Now let's introduce that
sock
I apparently was so fond of the other day...had it right there in the suitcase, hadn't rinsed it off yet, figured he'd need it again before too long. Vaseline? Nope, I was obviously a purist. So what happened when he
pressed his face against my solar plexus
? ... Hmm — would it
damage the beauty of this experience
if he asked me to attenuate the volume just a little, by any chance, say five or ten db? Security had their office on
this
floor.