Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa Read online

  Electric Don Quixote

  ■■■ the definitive story of ■ ■■■■

  Frank Zappa

  Neil Slaven

  O

  OMNIBUS PRESS

  London/New York/Paris/Sydney/Copenhagen/Madrid/Tokyo

  For my parents, Agnes and John, who never stand in the way and always pick up the pieces. And for Robynne, the wild little lion cub.

  '. . . we of these times enjoy the agreeable entertainment, not only of his true and delightful adventures; but also the intervening episodes, which are no less real, artful and delicious, than the main history itself, the heisted, reeled and ravelled thread of which is continued thus.'

  Don Quixote, Book Four, Chapter One

  Miguel de Cervantes

  (translated by Tobias Smollett, 1755)

  There's only one reason to write: because you consider yourself to be a writer, and you want people to pay attention to what you wrote. It's the bane of your existence that you must write about somebody else doing something that you can't do.

  Frank Zappa, Zappa!

  No bane, no gain.

  Neil Slaven

  FOREWORD

  It seems like years since I commissioned this book. That was back in the days when I was a juggler and naively thought I could write, edit and produce the Guinness Encyclopedia Of Popular Music and simultaneously be a publisher, commissioning editor and radio broadcaster.

  Neil Slaven first came to my notice as a name on the back of the famous Beano album by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers featuring Eric Clapton. His name would appear on dozens more Decca and Deram albums as a (credible) record producer. The UK blues boom of the late Sixties was an incredibly fertile time, and Slaven carved a niche for himself producing many albums by the Savoy Brown Blues Band, Chicken Shack and (very dear to my heart) the excellent Keef Hartley Band. In those days blues, folk rock, heavy rock and prog rock were feted by the same audience — much the same that would have worn out imported copies of the Mothers Of Invention's Freak Out! or Absolutely Free. This was back in the days of US imports and Brace's record shop in Edinburgh and One Stop in London. They were the days when John Peel spoke in monotone, when everything, including Savoy Brown, Hartley and Zappa were reeeerly amyyyyzzzing. Zappa was really amazing, although most of us didn't understand why. Slaven was one of the very few who did he understood and appreciated Zappa then as he does now. The closest I got to Zappa was outside the Rainbow Theatre in London. Together with thousands of confused fans I waited for the chalk board to appear: SHOW CANCELLED. I have never forgiven FZ for getting thrown into the orchestra pit on the first show instead of the second.

  In the intervening years Neil Slaven has become one of the leading authorities on the blues. He regularly compiles and writes album sleevenotes and reviews records for a number of magazines and journals. With the late Mike Leadbitter he wrote Nothing But The Blues and the indispensable Blues Records: A Selected Discography 1943-1966. He has also been an important contributor to the Guinness Encyclopedia Of Popular Music and the Guinness Who's Who Of Blues. And there lies the problem; typecasting. Just as Fred Astaire was made to dance, Neil Slaven was made to tell the blues.

  Until now.

  He was one of the earliest people to know that Zappa's cancer had returned and that it would be only a matter of time. He acted as a consultant for BBC television's documentary and got to meet a sick FZ in his home fortress. A number of books appeared shortly after his death and Slaven was hopelessly late with his. Mostly it was a case of overwriting the more he wrote the more he realised just how much he knew and felt about FZ and how similar they were in oh so many ways. The book that takes it's time is the one worth waiting for. I refused to pressure the author because he could have lost confidence or stamped his feet and thrown in the towel. I have dealt with a few Rumpelstiltskins in my time.

  Frank Zappa's often brilliant combination of irreverent humour and 'serious' music has and will continue to baffle many. This musical bisexuality has made him misunderstood and hard to market. Why does somebody who has the gift of satire and comedy waste his time composing orchestral pieces? Why does a highly literate composer and brilliant musician choose to trivialise his work with pornographic humour? Because he is Frank Zappa.

  At some stage, maybe not in Slaven's or my lifetime, FZ will be widely seen as a musical genius and one of the greatest contributors to music of the 20th century.

  Electric Don Quixote is the best book that has ever been or is likely to be written on the phenomenon that was Frank Zappa. I would say that, wouldn't I, even though I have a strong belief that in years to come, when FZ is finally recognised, the adage, 'pass me a copy of Slaven's Zappa', will be a reality?

  My thanks to Andy Childs, Bob Wise and Chris Charlesworth for helping this masterpiece on its way.

  COLIN LARKIN, March 1996

  INTRODUCTION

  When it happened, I was having a drink with friends at The Mondrian, a hotel on Sunset down the street from the Comedy Store, which 30 years before had been Ciro's. I'd been in town for ten days, researching in the basement of the new Los Angeles Library, a monolithic building that inside looks like Fort Knox in a Slide Area, and junking in second-hand bookshops and memorabilia stores for obscure interviews and press reports.

  From a number of sources, I knew that Zappa's health was failing but people were still going up to the house. All week, I'd agonised about ringing to ask if I could pay my respects. But in the war between two principal character traits, timidity and arrogance, timorousness prevailed. After all, I wasn't exactly a close friend of the family.

  Sunday morning was spent at the Pasadena Swap Meet, where I found a few magazines and resisted buying all the bootlegs on offer. The evening was quiet until around eight, when the radio announced that what we all knew had to happen but please God, not yet had taken place.

  Frank Zappa was dead. And buried. Gone on his final tour.

  He'd left just before 6 pm on Saturday, December 4, 1993, with Gail and Moon and Dweezil and Ahmet and Diva there to see him off. The other ceremony, unheralded, took place on Sunday morning, with family and close friends present. The rest of us would have to wait for the opportunity to indulge in sentiments that he always professed to be an inappropriate use of valuable time.

  Well, Frank, I was upset anyway, OK? I'd only met you once and that had taken 24 years to achieve. The occasion had been less than momentous for you. Despite my advancing years, I'd been overawed and the lines of communication between my brain and my mouth had hung by a thread. Even so, you granted me several hours of your precious time as, for the umpteenth time, you ran through a long and productive career that needed days rather than hours to detail adequately. Then you introduced me to your family and showed me round the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. You even set up the Synclavier and played some of 'N-Lite', explaining its operation to my uncomprehending ears.

  Despite my being English and a journalist, you were tolerant and polite even though you were obviously in some pain, and let me gauge when my visit was over. Like many others before and since, I was leaving with the impression that I'd made a friend, even if that friend didn't have the time to indulge the need for further contact that was already coursing through my veins. We stood in the dark on the steps outside your house and shook hands. I looked into your eyes and said, "Good luck." It was a lame thing to say; we both knew that luck was not a factor in the inevitability to come. I drove away wondering, "Why did I end up being so trite when I wanted to be profound?"

  But what do you say to a man whose music you've lived with for half your life? Who'd probably
helped to shape your view of the world and your aspirations, even though the dedication and perseverance that he showed weren't yours to command? (We'd talked about my still-unrealised ambition to compile a film history of man's inhumanity to man, using Varese's Arcana as a soundtrack.) Who relentlessly pursued every one of his objectives while others wandered from indecision to self-indulgence? Whose thirst for knowledge and grasp of detail over a wide range of subjects continued unabated, in parallel with his musical explorations?

  Right from the release of Freak Out!, Frank gathered people like myself, figuratively speaking, around him. In 1966, he chose to term himself and them freaks. Needless to say, they treated as a destination what he saw only as a point of departure. I never thought of myself as a freak, except insofar as liking the Mothers of Invention seemed to qualify me as one to friends who could only manage the stylistic leap from the Shadows to The Rolling Stones. As far as I was concerned, they took the easy option. I liked challenging music, so I'd heard Varese, Stravinsky and Penderecki. I didn't read music, I didn't understand what was happening. But I responded to the result, as I did to the drums of Burundi, the gongs of a Balinese gamelan orchestra or Moondog's eerie and unique percussion instruments recorded on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue. (We talked of him, too.) Even so, it was still hard to like Frank's music at first hearing. It was demanding, densely layered, sardonic and satirical. But once in a while there was a bluesy turn of phrase from the guitar which connected the Mothers with another of my musical interests.

  Through all the subsequent (apparent) changes of direction and personnel, I remained doggedly loyal, buying every album, even if some got played less often than others. It wasn't possible to like every one equally but then it was inconceivable that the faith would be broken. I didn't get to see every tour but bootlegs and tape exchanges took care of that omission.

  As the years passed, I became aware of a deeper purpose in the music. It was no great achievement on my part, for Frank made it plain in his sleevenotes and his interviews that there were situations in the world and especially the USA that needed to be brought to people's attention. It was equally evident that he was appalled by the blind patriotism that kept most of his countrymen wilfully ignorant of the inequities around them and the injustices committed in their name. During the Eighties, he enlarged upon his mordant view of the alliances between State and Church, the military and business cartels.

  Frank was no people's champion, his Mr Smith was disinclined to go to Washington; but in the end, he went anyway. Like some modern Don Quixote he entered the lists, his lances tipped with verbal venom, to defend the notion of individual freedom supposedly enshrined in the American Constitution. Cervantes' original was a deluded old man, his senses addled by tales of knighterrantry, who tilted at windmills which he elected to view as giants "with vast extended arms". But as the story progressed, his character, initially both the object and instrument of satire and ridicule, became broader and more complex. Instead of ignoring reality, Cervantes forced his creation to justify his existence in the real world.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky thought the knight suffered from "the nostalgia of realism". Frank Zappa abjured nostalgia and tilted at more substantial windmills, convinced of a pernicious disparity between the aims of government and organisations who invoked 'the American Way' and the reality behind them. Many of the targets he engaged 'in fierce and unequal combat' were all too real, all too fallible and all too devious to be caught in the spotlight. Some were more fanciful than others but his arguments were always supported by rigorous logic. He admitted, "I tend to view the whole thing as a conspiracy."1

  So, was the prevalence of LSD among Californian hippie communes in the Sixties an experiment conducted in public with the connivance of the CIA and the government of the day? Was AIDS a military germ warfare research project that escaped from the laboratory? Was there an unnamed secret police network whose task it was to investigate and infiltrate whatever might be perceived as a threat to America's stability? Were the leaders of the religious Right intent upon suppressing the right of free speech and dissent by any means necessary? Whatever the truth of these things, Frank was ready with a list of analogous events and circumstances that lent a statistical probability to what he proposed. Further examples will crop up in the pages that follow.

  It's all too easy to label these accusations 'paranoia', the fantasies of a man who expunged from his life anything he deemed a waste of time or outside the scope of his enquiring mind. In order to pursue those things, almost all related to music, that interested him, Frank Zappa exercised inflexible control over his daily routine. Some commentators portrayed him as arrogant and cold, but the warmth, honesty and normality of his family life proved this to be a misconception. His was a personality that had to be judged by its own criteria. The prodigious work rate was the product of a mind rarely at rest. That he made time to protest publicly about the erosion of personal and artistic freedom was a reflection of how seriously he perceived the threat.

  Much to the surprise of his detractors, who still thought of him as an exhibitionist and a freak, Frank proved a very eloquent and humorously acute adversary of organisations like the Parents' Music Resource Center. For someone who claimed never to read books, he was extremely well-informed, able to cut through the emotional cant in which self-appointed protectors of the nation's morals cloaked their restrictive intentions. "I'm really quite wild and outrageous but in ways that people wouldn't understand," he maintained. "Today, if you actually work 18 hours a day and you like it, that's pretty outrageous. And if you don't compromise and don't put up with a bunch of bullshit and you punch your way through life, which I kind of manage to do on the budget available to me, that's out-fucking-rageous."2

  It was his insistence on using such terminology and his lack of reverence for established institutions that incensed authorities in America and Britain. While others ran like prisoners in an exercise yard to stand in line at the sound of the warden's whistle, Frank defended his freedom of expression as a musician and businessman, and also that of groups for whose music he had little respect. For, long before it became enshrined in Joe's Garage, he'd always maintained that "Music is the BEST".

  Above all else, there is the music. Tens of albums, hundreds of songs and fiendishly convoluted instrumental themes. His orchestral compositions adhered to Varesian principles, with unrelated themes following in a free succession of contrast and surprise. Audiences relished songtexts that told of enema bandits and sexual deviants, as well as scathing critiques of public figures, their peccadilloes laid bare. His guitar solos he regarded as compositions in themselves, expositions of a unique playing style that matched form and content with a bravura control of effects and amplification. No one since Jimi Hendrix used feedback as creatively as Frank Zappa did. But beneath all the harsh, angular phrasing was a gift for creating starkly beautiful melodies that remain in the mind long after their conclusion.

  'Watermelon In Easter Hay' says more about Frank Zappa than these words can. Play it now and when you finish the book.

  This biography is an assemblage of facts and quotations that hopefully illustrate some of the character traits which shaped his music. It's just one interpretation of a mass of material sufficient to write the same story again using wholly different examples. Where possible, I've used Frank's own words to illustrate the point at issue. Like his music, which doesn't sound the same when he isn't there to direct its intricacies, his beliefs and motivations are best expressed in his own terms. Rather than attempt the impossible by preparing a laboriously detailed explanation of a complex mind, I've tried to provide the reader with the means to arrive at their own interpretation of a unique and irreplaceable personality.

  What merit this manuscript contains would not have been possible without constant application to two magazines dedicated to the documentation and appraisal of Frank Zappa's words and deeds. Society Pages, edited by Rob Samler and Den Simms, and T'Mershi Duween, overseen by Fred Tomsett, are both essen
tial to anyone with an obsessional tendency where Frank is concerned. Just as important to the comprehensiveness of the text was the permission granted by the British Broadcasting Corporation to use material from the complete transcript of the BBC2 Late Show interview conducted by Nigel Leigh, obtained through the kind efforts of the programme's director, Elaine Shepherd, who also located the programme schedule for Juke Box Jury. My gratitude is here insufficiently acknowledged.

  I received significant help from a number of people who still remain friends and deserve thanks: Mary Katherine Aldin, for acting as temporary landlady and patient guide around the obscure backwaters of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley in search of tempting morsels of information, and for maintaining her exclusive cuttings agency; Ted Berkowitz, who witnessed at first hand Frank's diligence as a chaperone; Tony Burke, for filling a multitude of gaps with donations of magazines and tapes that facilitated accurate dating of important gigs and the musical developments that took place at them; Roy Carr for pulling the strings that set up the interview, and IPC for access to their file of reviews, news reports and articles covering Frank's war dance with the British press; Norman Darwen, for his German being better than mine; Roger Dopson, for climbing into his attic and manhandling boxes of yellowing music papers down to ground level, and Jacky, for overlooking the damage to the living room carpet; Andy Fletcher, for sterling chauffeur work on trips to Pacific Grove and Lancaster and for 'percussive maintenance'; Phil Holmes for the olive oil, the grappa and the hoe; John O'Toole, for rummaging for nuggets in his own store of magazines; Howard Thompson, for his encouragement, being a provider and eyewitness to a climactic moment in Frank's life; Alan and Pat Warner for sharing memories and keeping me abreast of the tributes; Phil Wight for delving in his Doumbeat's; Victoria Winston, for casting her mind back to Frank's freak days.