Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa

           Of course I’d been a devout fan of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention since the first time I’d heard Freak Out in Jerry Kleiner’s apartment in DC back in 1966. I’d been most impressed to learn that John Ware had played with Zappa back in the early 60s, and that Paul Osborne had known him when they’d both been notorious local freaks in the Claremont-Montclair-Cucamonga-Upland-Ontario area. I was impressed when I found out that I was working for him when Herb Cohen hired me to work on the production of that Xmas concert in December 1968. But Zappa didn’t hang around the office, and I didn’t actually meet him.

          It was the first Mothers concert I’d ever seen, and, like most of the Mothers concerts I’ve seen, I saw it from backstage. One thing in particular about Zappa’s performance that evening made a deep impression on me. I think it was right before the band performed ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’. Zappa stepped up to the microphone, and in his deep voice and sardonic Southern-California drawl, said something like, “Now, I want you to help us out on this next piece. When I go like this” (at this point he gave everybody stage right of the central aisle the finger with his right hand), “I want everybody on this side of the auditorium to go ‘eeee!’, and when I go like this” (he repeated the gesture in the other direction with his left hand), I want everybody over here to go ‘awww’.”

          He then proceeded to give each half of his audience the finger alternately several times, and thousands of young people screamed as directed as loudly as they could, each side seemingly trying to outdo the other for volume. Then Zappa stepped back and waited for silence. It didn’t take long, the way he was looking at them. Then he stepped back up to the microphone and softly and slowly spoke directly into it: “And then you wonder how the nazis are able to run your lives!”

          Not long after the concert financial considerations forced me to leave LA and return East to work for my stepfather. Soon after I arrived in Delaware I got a phone call from Herb Cohen at my mother-and-step-father’s house, and he hired me over the phone to help out Dick Barber, Zappa’s road manager, with some stuff at a gig the Mothers were set to play at some dive in Philly.

          I did that job. I remember, among other things, Zappa’s satiric monologue — which was of course brilliant, if vulgar (“How many girls in this room would give Dick Nixon stinkfinger?”) — and walking past the dressing room at intermission and listening to Zappa giving the band hell: “Okay, now, no more fucken mistakes! There’s only one standard and that’s perfection! That’s all I ask for. Is that asking too much? Not here it isn’t,” and so on. Like a Marine Corps drill sergeant.

          When I returned to LA some months later to work for Zappa and Herb Cohen full time (at $100 a week), within a week or so I finally met Zappa. Herbie’d sent me to some recording studio to pick up a couple of amps to take to where the Stone Poneys were rehearsing. I was just standing there, asking this guy where the amps were, when Zappa came striding up forcefully and got right into my face, demanding to know who I was and what the fuck I was doing there.

          Two things here. First, Zappa was a very powerful and charismatic personality. He cultivated a fierce visage — flashing dark Mediterranean eyes, that moustache and little strip goatee going down his chin from the middle of his lower lip, and all that. He had that cuttingly expressive baritone voice. The clear intent, the expectation, was intimidation. Secondly, although I certainly was surprised and set back a pace, I’d long before acquired the habit of turning bland when physically confronted. When things get uncool I basically just automatically shift into neutral.

          So that’s what I did. Cool, bland, neutral — emotionally unresponsive — I answered his questions. I was Richard Selinkoff. Herbie had sent me over to pick up the amps for the Stone Poneys. I’d been moving stuff for them for some time.

          Zappa wanted to make sure: “I thought you were union. You looked like a union guy. You’re not with the musicians’ union?”

          No. I got the job with the Stone Poneys humping drums for John Ware (remembering Ware’s tales of playing with Zappa back in Cucamonga).

          And it worked. Zappa broke out into a big grin. “Johnnie Ware! How’s he doin’?”

          Just great. Playin’ with Linda.

          Of course.

          And off I went after my amps.

          That had been just before lunch. Late that afternoon Herbie gave me an envelope and street directions, and told me to deliver it to Zappa’s house up on a street just off Mulholland Drive near the top of Laurel Canyon. When I got there, I was directed to the backyard pool, next to which Zappa was relaxing on a chaise longue. He took the envelope, apologised for trying to intimidate me, and vented some spleen against the musicians’ union. Then he invited me to pull up a chair and hang out, and let me know that I was welcome pretty much any ole time. I thought about when I’d been lying stoned on the floor of Kleiner’s student pad, freaking out to Freak Out! on the headphones.

          Over the next year or so I hung out some at the Zappa residence. Usually Zappa would be hard at work in his huge basement studio, or out on a tour, and I’d drink coffee with his wife, Gail, and her friends up in the kitchen. Gabby Ferguson, who Gail referred to as Moon Unit’s governess, was usually there. And there was this guy who’d been on the edge of the Mothers, apparently for years, named Kansas. We drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.

          Gail had taught Moon Unit, who was then about two or three, to do a trick. She’d tell her to “make a Herbie face,” and Moon would put on a pained half-smile that was spot-on. It always cracked everybody up.

          Downstairs, Zappa would be drinking obscene amounts of coffee, chain-smoking Winstons, eating peanut-butter sandwiches, and being a workaholic. I suppose it was the Winstons that did him in in the end. Often I’d have to deliver some documents or remastered tapes or suchlike to him. I’d knock on the exterior door to the basement studio three quick knocks, a beat, and then two more knocks, and Zappa would call out, “Who’s that knocking ‘Louie, Louie’ on my door?”, knowing of course that it was me.

          Sometimes when I did this he’d be in the mood for a break. Instead of me going upstairs to have coffee with the gang he and I would have some coffee and chat for a while. Now, if John Ware’s self-assuredness had laid influence on me hot and heavy, Zappa’s personal power overwhelmed me with a tsunami of influence. He had about the clearest, strongest intellect of anyone I have ever met, and I’ve been a university lecturer, in addition to the bizarre sense of humour — which was surprisingly warm one-on-one — for which he was famous. I just about came to the point where I would judge each of my viewpoints and tastes by how closely they resembled Zappa’s — even when we disagreed (I dug the poetry of Bob Dylan’s amphetamine-era lyrics and Zappa didn’t, for instance). He helped me make clear in my mind the distinction between music and entertainment, and I understood why I had laughed when John Ware had told the phone company that he was an entertainer. It was definitely a life-changing experience.

          Unlike most of the people in the Hollywood entertainment industry, Zappa had very little appetite for intoxicants. He told me that he’d tried pot a few times when he’d been younger, but it had just made him sleepy. He’d thought it was weird that, “everybody else’d be getting, y’know, euphoric. The way I was without it.” He had great disdain for LSD and other “products of San Francisco chemical engineering.” He rarely drank alcohol. I only saw him do so once, slowly sipping a whisky-and-soda one time when Alice Cooper came by to visit and tell tales.

          Once I saw Zappa, usually the platonic ideal of coolness and cynicism, visibly excited about something. He got in touch with me to do a rush job moving all his amps to this glitzy-sleazy place in central Hollywood called Thee Club. He’d met this freaky French fiddler named Jean-Luc Ponty who’d just blown into town, and they’d jammed together a bit, and they were going to stretch out on some of Zappa’s tunes for a one-night stand at this dive.

          “I can’t believe it,” Zappa said, “My music isn’t good enough for this guy to be playing it.”

          After I’d known Zappa for about a year, and about a half a year after I’d stopped working for him and Herbie full-time, I was mostly unemployed and staying mostly in the spare bedroom of a friend’s house in Beechwood Canyon. I’d screwed up my courage to the max one day a month or two before and had written a query letter to Esquire magazine about the possibility of doing an interview with Frank Zappa for them. Much to my surprise, I got back a letter telling me to go ahead. I got in touch with Frank, and he was glad to chat with me over a tape recorder. We had the chat, and it was great, and I transcribed it. Frank took a copy of the transcription. So far so good.

          And then I went on a fucking-up binge. I decided to work the interview into a story, rather than submit it in Q&A form. And a wild woman I was involved with at the time gave me some speed to help me to do it. Crystal methedrine, not pills, as had been my experience before then. Several grams of it. I wasn’t used to it and went off into interminable digressions of pointlessly boring detail and pre-computer cutting-and-pasting, and what I had in front of me kept getting worse and worse. With every stroke of the typewriter I progressively turned gold into a pig’s breakfast. I ended up never even sending it in. I don’t know what Zappa thought. He remained friendly, though, right up to the time I left LA.

          I went to see Zappa and the Mothers when they came through San Antonio in 1975, when I was getting by on a subsistence level as a minority partner in a headshop in a working-class neighbourhood. I phoned Herbie in Los Angeles and gotten a free ticket, and talked with Zappa on the phone at his hotel. It was a comfortable chat. I felt foolishly reassured by this evidence that my rapidly fading past was indeed real and not hallucinatory. The concert itself, at San Antonio’s antique Municipal Auditorium, had been predictably brilliant.

          I don’t think Zappa played South Texas again until late ’81 or early ’82, when I was a cab driver-and-freelance writer, etc. Anyway, I heard and saw publicity that he and his band of merry musicos were signed to play a gig at the Superdrum up in Austin, and I phoned around and got ahold of someone at Barking Pumpkin, as his company was called then. I told them who I was and that I thought it’d be a good idea for a story for my newspaper if Frank and I could get together for a chat about how things had changed since the Old Days. Real human-interest stuff, y’know?

          A few days later someone got back to me and told me that Frank was working on some music and wouldn’t be doing any interviews on this tour, but that they would reserve a couple of free passes for me at the door — for the preferred seating, up front.

          Now, this “couple” of free passes presented me with something of a problem, as I was then going through a stretch of unattachedness. I got set up with an Air Force nurse who had read my stories in the Weekender entertainment section of the Express-News and wanted to meet me. She was, I was assured, a real honky-tonk type from Georgia. I phoned her up and we made arrangements for me to drive her up to the Zappa concert.

          She brought a couple or four six-packs of beer with her. While I drove my little Toyota up Interstate 35, she drank beer and entertained me with stories. She started a number of times to tell me about how she and some of her friends got into a Letter-to-Penthouse trip when she’d been based at Homestead AFB in Florida, but she never developed the story to the point of details. Still, things sounded promising. By the time we got to Austin, however, she was already stumbly drunk.

           The concert started out strongly. It was pretty much the group that had been with Frank since Sheik Yerbouti, and they were playing, like all Frank’s bands, incredibly tight and fast, seamlessly segueing between numbers and putting on a hell of a show. But the nurse wasn’t interested in the music or the satire. Or the show. She was too drunk. And she was trying to talk to me over the Zappa-level of volume (we were sitting quite close), which meant that she was shouting in my ear. Even so, I couldn’t make out was she was shouting over the sound of the band. And I couldn’t follow the sound of the band over her shouting. I tried to get her to shut up so I could follow the show, but she seemed incapable of going for more than about a minute, maybe a minute and a half, without shouting in my ear again.

          It was when she started shouting racist crap about the black guy who was singing the high parts and playing rhythm guitar in that version of Frank’s band that I got up and dragged her out of there. I missed the rest of the concert and never saw Frank again. Out in the lobby, I told the nurse why we’d left and what I thought of the way she’d acted, but she seemed unperturbed. Back in the Toyota she seemed relieved to be reunited with her by-this-point warm beer, and on the way back to San Antonio she fell asleep, the remains of her last six-pack cradled in her arms.

          It was the last contact I had with Frank Zappa.

          I didn’t buy many Zappa albums after I stopped getting them for free. I heard them here and there, but have only taken a few home.

          Frank died when I was teaching at the Waikato Polytechnic here in Hamilton, New Zealand in the early 90s. I wrote the following little piece on the subject then:

26 March 1994:

          I'm sorry to say that it has shocked me, reading in the Herald about Frank Zappa dying. I’m embarrassed to say that I feel a strong sense of bereavement. Embarrassed because it’s such an inappropriate feeling, considering how little patience Frank had with sentimentality, and embarrassed because it’s a feeling that speaks so much more loudly about my relationship to myself than it does about any Motherly Love toward a fellow mortal human I once sorta knew.

          I feel as if I should send a letter or something to Gail, as I really spent more time hanging around with her and Gabby than I did with Frank, but part of the problem is that we have long since fallen out of touch — Helena, my first wife, got rid of all my Hollywood addresses more than twenty years ago during one of her all-too-many insanely jealous rages — and I don't know how to get a message through to the House of Zappa now that wouldn't have to pass the test of secretarial screening.

          This isn’t the place for anecdotes of experiences I had in my occupational and social interactions with the Zappa family. What I should be doing here is eulogising the Great Man, utilising insights I may have gained in my conversations and observations at the Zappas’ place, but I don’t know if I can do that, either. It was a long time ago. Frank always sneered at heaviosity, anyway. And, of course, I have to be honest.

          And being honest right now means acknowledging that what presently preys on my mind and spirit is what all this has to do with me, not with Frank.

          He’s dead now, anyway.

          Spending even a little time with him long ago had a serious effect on the way I see things.

          I’d always assumed that Frank and I’d run into each other again some day; now I know that we won’t. Frank’s death, and my distance from it, has been a blunt reminder to me of my own isolation in the world, my isolation from others and my isolation from huge parts of my self. In order to relate at all to the people in my immediate environment I have had to suppress my awareness, my consciousness, of much of my experience. Other people could have no possible idea of the influence that involvement with such a powerful and non-conventional intellectual and aesthetic force has had on the way I perceive and enjoy the world. Involving this experience at all overtly in my daily life would set me up as a tiresome old bore stuck in the past (‘Come back again and visit us in 1969’), but I know that the validity of the viewpoints resulting from that experience is as solid now as it was then.

          So, what is this attitude? Oh, bits and pieces of existential- and various other -isms. It involves things like trying to be the kid who blurts out that the Emperor is buck naked and has a tiny dick, trying never to convince myself that bullshit isn’t bullshit, even when it’s my own bullshit and much beloved, to be open to that which is dissonant, and to recognise mysteries for what they are: mysteries. Part of it is an internalised appreciation of the absurd: enjoying and toying with the ineffable without trying to eff it, except to say f it. This seems to be associated with a deep loathing of the savage, bullying intolerance and assertive superstition of organised religion, which, of course, has no appreciation of absurdity at all.

          When I went out the afternoon I saw the story about Frank dying, I took with me to play in the car a tape I’d made some time before of most of Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar. Later, my wife got into the car with me. The tape was still in. When we’d gone about a kilometre she reached for the stereo controls, visibly irritated even to my peripheral vision, saying, “Richard, I’m sorry but I just can’t stand that!”

          I didn’t doubt her for a minute. I learned long ago that Frank had a highly particular musical voice that, well, maybe most people can’t stand. I can, though.

          Let me tell you, Zappa’s music, whether it’s Hot Rats from 1969 or Jazz From Hell from 1986, never sounds exotic or bizarre to me. It just sounds like Frank. Now, there’s a musical voice for you.