This was an exceptionally long article, and it may be THE longest described yet on this blog. Still, it is a nice read going through a little back-story of Zappa and his escapades until the time of writing. I will freely admit that I laughed hard a couple of times reading through it. Humour really does belong in music!
Read on!
It can´t happen here
A long look back at F Vincent Zappa and his very special bands from LA (and other places)
By Mick Brown
FIRST the character references: “Frank is not a person. He is a cynic; totally destructive… He doesn’t care about anything, like love, for God’s sake. His contempt for things never stops. You think he parodies commercial America. He parodies everything, and nothing — however deep — is safe. You will never peel away the layers of contempt, not all of them, because you never get to the bottom of them.”
Ruth Underwood, erstwhile percussionist with the Mothers of Invention talking to Nova magazine.
“There is no undertaking more challenging, no responsibility more awesome than being a Mother.”
Richard M. Nixon, erstwhile President of the U.S.A.
“I was always a freak. Never a hippie — but always a freak.”
Frank Zappa, father of the Mothers of Invention.
FRANK ZAPPA has always maintained that the most unique aspect of the Mothers of Invention’s work is the conceptual continuity of the group’s output macrostructure. According to Zappa, there is and always has been a conscious control of the thematic and structural elements flowing through each album, live performance, even each interview. The basic blueprint of the output macrostructure were executed in 1962/3, and preliminary experimentation in early and mid 1964. Construction of the project/object began in late 1964.
Work is still in progress.
Do you follow so far?
In 1962 the Beatles released ‘Love Me Do’. Jet Harris left the Shadows. America blockaded Cuba. The Beach Boys released their first ever record, ‘Surfing’, on their own label. Grass was still something you played football on.
Francis Vincent Zappa was 22. A self-taught guitarist and composer Zappa had been involved in various musical projects around the Ontario district of Southern California, playing with bar bands, writing commercials and movie scores and even appearing on a local TV show playing a bicycle concerto for two with the show’s host, Steve Allen. Zappa’s principal interest were ‘serious’ composition of the modern school and ’50s doo-wop vocal groups. Over the next couple of years he scuffed around local studios, writing, playing and at one time producing a vocal group the Penguins, before ending up as boss of his own five-track recording facility.
One of Zappa’s first commissions was producing a ‘stag’ tape for a cop posing as a used-car salesman. Zappa spent 10 days in jail as a result, a conviction that would subsequently aid his avoidance of the war draft. If that skirmish was not enough to turn the young and impressionable Zappa against ‘the establishment’, the numerous rejection slips he was winning from music publishers and record companies at the time undoubtedly was. Among them was one from the CBS Repertoire workshop, turning down the world’s first rock and roll operetta, written by Zappa and a high-school buddy Don Van Vliet (a.k.a. Capt. Beefheart), entitled ‘I Was A Teenage Maltshop’.
So it came to pass that the stifled genius put together a group called The Muthers — drawn from the vestiges of a white R&B band called the Soul Giants — comprising Ray Collins (vocals), Jimmy Carl Black (drums), Roy Estrada (bass), Elliott Ingber (guitar). The Muthers were thrown out of every bar and dance-spot in the Los Angeles metropolitan region (because, owners explained, patrons couldn’t do the bop, shimmy or the boogaloo to their music) before eventually securing a manager — an enterprising character named Herb Cohen — a residency at the Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Strip and a recording contract with Verve Records, in short order.
At the time, Verve were a subsidiary of MGM, apparently seeking to enlarge their roster, then comprised almost entirely of ‘respectable’ jazz and folk artists, with some ‘hot white blues groups’. It’s hard to see how the Mothers (the name had been changed by now in the interests of propriety) fitted that particular bill. Nonetheless, they were signed, on exactly the same day as it happens, that M.G.M.’s New York office signed the Velvet Underground.
It was nine months before the first Velvets’ album was to see the light of day (it was allegedly held up by some political manouevering on the part of Herb Cohen, wanting a clear run for his own proteges). The Mothers, on the other hand, were in the studio almost before the ink had dried on the contract.
11 YEARS ON, it’s difficult to envisage the effect that first album must have had on the peaceful burghers of America when it was released in June of 1966. Entitled ‘Freak Out’ it had been recorded in double-quick time by a band apparently on the threshold of starvation, assisted at odd times by every freak, misfit and social outcast within hailing distance of the studio. Members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra sat in too.
It was rock music’s first double album (promoted as a two-for-one ‘introductory package’ — like introducing Snow White to deSade…), a hotch-potch of apparently normal teenage ballads, smog-infested rock and roll, a capella war cries, squawks, honks, tuneless vocals, volatile instrumentation, heresies, blasphemies and banalities — and lots of propoganda. The intention was clearly not just iconoclastic but downright subversive. “This is to suck the 12-year-old listener into our camp”, the cover notes explained of an innocuous sounding piece of candy-floss called ‘Wowie Zowie’. And when the 12-year-old listener was within the gates, what then? ‘Who Are The Brain Police’, of course… All’s fair in love and war, and the latter is what the Mothers appeared to be declaring.
‘You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here’ may have sounded like Gary Lewis and the Playboys, but it tore apart with a cynical vengeance the plasticity of American teenage existence which Lewis and bands of that ilk symbolised. By comparison, ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’ and ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ sounded like bad omens for the older generation; the latter an ugly, discordant a capella drone about the complacency of middle-America indifferent to the rank, verminous threat who were even now gnawing away at the very vitals of their smug, self-satisfied world. ‘You’re safe, mama’, intoned Zappa, ‘You’re safe, baby. You just cook your dinner. It can’t happen here…’
Oh no? Zappa and the Mothers were ensuring it would. The ‘Summer Of Love’ was still a year away, but already Zappa was declaring he wanted nothing to do with it. These Mothers were aggressive, ugly, uncompromising; they looked and sounded like hell — and the medium was the message. But Zappa insisted it was ultimately therapautic. “We’re here to help them”, he told one interviewer. “Them being the non-thinking plastic robot targets of Madison Avenue nonsense, poverty programmes and all that red, white and blue rigamarole.”
“Mothers and fathers”, warned a ‘teen-magazine’ of the day. “You got up in arms about the Rolling Stones. Sonny and Cher made you cringe. Well you ain’t seen nothing yet…”
And it can’t happen here?
BY THE TIME of their second album, ‘Absolutely Free’, released early in 1967 the Mothers of Invention had expanded to include a keyboards player (Don Preston) and brass and woodwinds players (Bunk Gardner and Jim ‘Motorhead’ Sherwood). The expanded line-up gave Zappa more leeway to experiment in a small group context with arrangements built around the principles of modern ‘classical’ and jazz composition, most notably on songs like ‘Duke Of Prunes’ and ‘Call Any Vegetable’.
Critics were already picking up on Zappa’s reference to composers like Edgar Varese and Stravinsky, but Zappa was not just remodelling extant concepts, he was redefining them; his approach was thoroughly original, breaking up the continuity of his compositions with snippets of speech, white noise, assorted sound-effects, heavy on parody of course. “This is the exciting bit”, says Zappa, interrupting ‘Duke Of Prunes’. “It’s like the Supremes — see the way it builds up?”
Lyrically he was no less abrasive, the piece de resistance here being ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’, which Zappa himself describes as his one and only political (as opposed to sociological) song — a scathing indictment of the bureaucratic/legislative mentality, replete with side-swipes at the gross deceits of conventional American existence. Here a middle-aged man procures a 13-year-old girl, “Off with her clothes and into a bed, where she tickles his fancy all night long. His wife’s attending an orchid show. She squealed for a week to get him to go…”
Of course, Zappa’s own contemporaries got off no more lightly; ‘Plastic People’ (plasticity was the ultimate crime in Zappa’s book) was a sneering put-down of kids in a Los Angeles night-club, and also managed to accommodate some oblique references to the President, the CIA and ‘Louie, Louie’.
But Zappa was saving the full measure of his virtriol for America’s young for his next album, ‘We’re Only In It For The Money’. Release of ‘We’re Only In It’ was delayed for 11 months by legal wrangles apparently instigated by a certain Paul McCartney taking exception to the way the cover mercilessly parodied the Beatles’ own ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album sleeve. But it was more than the sleeve Zappa was sniping at. If ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ itself was an anthem to the spirit of psychedelia, ‘We’re Only In It’ was a derisive cat-call. Recorded in the summer of 1967 — the summer of love — the album proved conclusively that Zappa wasn’t about to accept the platitudes of Haight-Ashbury as regurgitated through ‘Time’ magazine, and that those who were deserved short shrift.
To Zappa the whole hippy movement was a sham, its tenets a grand delusion, a way of enslaving people with mores and conventions no less uniform or repressive than those of `straight’ America which hippies claimed to be rejecting. Brown shoes didn’t make it, because brown shoes are the symbol of narrow-minded conformity; but kaftans and beads don’t make it either — for exactly the same reasons. And when you boiled it right down there was little difference between the love-in and the Rotary Club meet.
While the pop media — and pop songs — conspired to present an image of San Francisco as the rich soil from which the buds of a new utopia would spring, Zappa — the acerbic cynic — saw it as the psychedelic dungeon where phony hippies could go, buy a wig, sleep on Owsley’s floor, get hippy trippy, stay a week, catch the crabs and get the bus back home — and his declaration was right there in ‘We’re Only In It For The Money’s’ first track, ‘Who Needs The Peace Corps?’. And if anybody was in any doubt as to Zappa’s views after that they need only listen to ‘Flower Punk’ (sung to the tune of ‘Hey Joe’ where our innocent child of nature climaxes the song by blowing out his brains on a 2700 microgram dose of STP, “leaving a bizarre audial residue all over your teenage record-player!” That’s Zappa — always a freak, but never a hippie.
Part of Zappa’s observation was that the delusions of the parents are visited upon the children: “All your children are poor unfortunate victims of lies you believe/A plague upon your ignorance that keeps the young from the truth they deserve”, he says at one point. But Zappa was not entirely bereft of hope: “You’ll be absolutely free”, he says, “Only if you want to be”; take responsibility for your own life and your own freedom — although if the prophesy implicit in the last cut of the album comes true they may not be worth much. For Zappa intended ‘The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny’ to be listened to in conjunction with a read of Franz Kafka’s ‘A Penal Colony’ — as a dire omen about the concentration camps once used to inter Japanese during the second world war being used now as part of what Zappa called ‘THE FINAL SOLUTION to the NON-CONFORMIST (hippy?) PROBLEM’. Was Zappa being unnecessarily alarmist, or just kidding? Either way, it hasn’t happened — at least not yet. But when it can’t happen here…
‘WE’RE ONLY In It For The Money’ antagonised a lot of people. That was the idea. Zappa’s intention was always to shake his audience out of complacency, even at the risk of total alienation — and this was particularly true of his live performances with the Mothers. On stage he might use whatever material presented itself to make his point. In the Mothers’ seminal stage-show, ‘Absolutely Free (Pigs And Repugnant)’, which was billed as a ‘musical’ and ran at a Greenwich Village theatre in mid-1967, Zappa invited some U.S. Marines up on stage and threw them a toy doll saying “That’s a gook baby… Show us how we treat gooks in Vietnam”. The Marines tore the doll apart. “I don’t think we’ve ever had an audience that really expected what they saw”, Zappa once said, “Never…”
Lowell George, who played with the Mothers in 1968, recalls one gig in upstate New York opening for the Vanilla Fudge. “Frank had played some long drawn-out piece of instrumental music, ‘Return Of The Hunchback Duke’ — it was a cop from some utterly boring, atrocious Italian opera. Frank thought it was so funny he wrote a piece of music based on it. So we played this piece and at the end this guy stood up and yelled at the top of his voice ‘Youse guys stink — BRING ON THE FUDGE!’ So Frank says ‘Being you like it so much we’ll play it again’. And we did…”
In the Mothers Zappa had a band not only willing to collaborate in such lunacy, but with the musical chops to do it; a band which could respond at any time to Zappa’s signals to switch from 3/4 to 7/8 time without dropping a beat or — as somethimes happened in concert — to all suddenly sing the highest note they could hit when Frank suspected the audience’s attention might be wandering.
‘We’re Only In It For The Money’ was followed by ‘Lumpy Gravy’, credited as a Frank Zappa album, which had actually been recorded six months before ‘Money’ but been delayed by contractual problems. A sleeve-note described it as ‘a curiously inconsistent piece which started out to be a BALLET but probably didn’t make it’. Lumpy gravy is normally inconsistent.
Basically, the piece was a collage — orchestral music, juxtaposed with Ventures-style guitar instrumentals, long-sections of taped dialogue and everything from ’63 Oldsmobiles to rampaging pigs and ponies, snippets of what might otherwise be considered ‘noise or environmental bullshit’ integrated into the musical structure; random sounds used as actual musical material. It was a brilliant example of Zappa’s ‘creative-editing’ technique — editing in rather than out; and an example too of the ‘serial’ concept at play in much of Zappa’s work.
The two main orchestral themes of the piece would both crop up on subsequent Zappa albums, re-modelled and re-titled (`Oh No’ and ‘King Kong’). Zappa will often play a riff as a ‘trailer’ for a track which appears on another album, re-record the same song in different ways (`Mr Green Genes’, for example, crops up on the album ‘Uncle Meat’ as a vocal and on ‘Hot Rats’ as an instrumental) or throw in references to arcana like Dog Breath or Zircon Encrusted Tweezers on different albums.
`Lumpy Gravy’ was certainly one of Zappa’s most idiosyncratic projects ever and the record least likely to pierce the barrier which lack of radio play put up between him and teenage America. ‘Cruisin’ With Ruben And The Jets’ was Zappa’s attempt to hurdle that particular obstruction. “Is this the Mothers of Invention recording under a different name in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio?” a sleeve-note enquired. Well, yes — and what’s more it worked. ‘Cruisin’ actually made the playlist of several Top-40 radio stations’. Zappa always insisted that this collection of facsimilies of the doo-wop Pachucho songs he had grown up on, was not the parody everybody said it was but a `neo-classical’ album — more affectionate than irreverent.
Certainly it was remarkable for the accuracy with which Zappa and the Mothers captured the spirit of the era, not least in the hilarious sleeve-notes about the hero, Ruben Sano, who was 19 when ‘he quit the group to work on his car’, having saved enough money to buy ‘a ’53 Nash and four gallons of gray primer’.
`Cruisin’ With Ruben’ was the Mother’s last release for Verve. Angry at the company’s censorious attitude and lack of financial support, newly-formed Zappa had taken his production company, Bizarre Records, to Warners. The first record under the deal was another double-album, ‘Uncle Meat’, the contents of which so offended the English licensees of Bizarre that the record only appeared in this country through the graceful intervention of Transatlantic Records. Originally written as the soundtrack for a movie “You will probably never get to see” (we didn’t) about an evil scientist lusting for revenge (Zappa’s alter-ego plotting against the supressive forces of music business orthodoxy?), ‘Uncle Meat’ was principally an instrumental, the few vocal tracks having little to do with the movie storyline delineated in the album booklet.
The best songs were Zappa’s sardonic hymns to Southern California teendom, replete with references to fake I.D.s, daddy’s car and hub cap theft, notably the extraordinary ‘Dog Breath’ and it’s lyrical sequel ‘The Uncle Meat Variations’ — superb examples of Zappa’s talent as a composer and arranger of vocal parts. ‘Mr Green Genes’ may or may not have been a satirical indictment of consumerism, while ‘Electric Aunt Jemima’ could have been about almost anything. Zappa has stated that the Aunt Jemima in question is a common or garden amplifier and that the song grew out of a discussion he once had in a diner with Capt. Beefheart. How apt that the snippet of edited-in dialogue that follows should be the Kafka-esque:
“I can’t tell when you’re telling the truth…”
“I’m not…”
“How can I tell if anything you’ve said to me is…”
“You can’t…”
That said, there is some great music on `Uncle Meat’, illustrating the experimental nature of the Mothers’ work at this period — saxophonist… Ian Underwood whipping it out, live on stage in Copenhagen, the cryptic `Project X’, and an 18 minute collage of interpretations of ‘King Kong’, Zappa’s opus magnus in the genre that would subsequently come to be called jazz-rock’ — and an emminently satisfying piece of work it is too. `Uncle Meat’ also contained some amusing taped asides; an enlightening Suzy Cream-cheese monologue; a discussion of Zappa’s groupie-status and Jimmy Carl Black (credited with drums and ‘poverty’ on the sleeve) complaining how hard up the band is and how much better they’d be doing “If we’d all been living in California…” “If we’d all been living in California” Zappa retorts, “We wouldn’t be working at all…”
Money was certainly a problem. The Uncle Meat film was never made because of a lack of funds, and it was the prohibitive cost of keeping a large unit like the Mothers on the road that eventually led Zappa to dissolve the band after the next album, another predominantly-instrumental affair, ‘Burnt Weenie Sandwich’. Whatever else may have been in question about Zappa, his principles were above reproach; if he had ever been in it only for the money there was no question that he had the wherewithal to have cleaned up long before.
Mark Volman, who along with his partner Howard Kaylan, would join the Mothers a year later in 1970 once said that Zappa could have had a Top-40 hit any time he choose, but that he’d turn up at the studio with a highly-commercial song and then insist on putting the word ‘fuck’ in the lyrics. “I dislike commercial pop”, Zappa told Disc in 1970, “because I cannot accept the intention behind it. Most groups and singers are in the business to make hit records rather than to make music, to make themselves glorified instead of actually creating something worthwhile and artistic. I don’t get those vibrations from Stravinsky.”
But money, or the lack of it, wasn’t Zappa’s only reason for disbanding the Mothers. He was evidently disillusioned with his audience’s misunderstanding of the Mothers’ intentions, and with the critic’s ongoing response to the band. “The reviews we got were so simplistic”, Zappa explained at the time, “and I don’t want to go on having to put up with all that bullshit.” He continued: “I over estimated the powers of comprehension of the audience. The only point at which we had a realistic connection was when we played simple music of the same kind all the time… things like 20 minutes in E. Flat minor on ‘King Kong’.” And more. “There’s nothing more embarrassing than someone who agrees with you for the wrong reasons. People thought the Mothers were great — the funniest act they’d ever seen on stage. That’s nothing to do with what the group was into. The Mothers were no joke. We were successfully exploring new methods of communication through music.”
But no longer… The Mothers went their separate ways — Roy Estrada to form Little Feat with Lowell George; Jimmy Carl Black and Bunk Gardner putting together a band called Geronimo Black which subsequently had an album released here on the Uni label (and which, incidentally, is well worth a listen). Zappa involved himself with producing and directing other acts on Bizzare and it’s sister label – Straight. He produced the apocalyptic ‘Trout Mask Replica’ for Captain Beefheart and was mid-wife for two extraordinary ‘documentary’ albums: one ‘Permanent Damage’ by the G.T.O.’s, a crowd of groupies of his aquaintance, the other ‘An Evening With Wild Man Fischer’ — full-flight monologues by a slightly crazed individual Zappa had ‘discovered’ singing on the pavement of Sunset Strip. Other Straight/Bizarre albums of the day included ‘Pretties For You’ by another Zappa protege, Alice Cooper: albums by Tim Buckley and Judy Henske and Jerry Yester and a recorded concert by Lenny Bruce.
Zappa himself was also busy working on a solo album, with musicians that included ex-Mother keyboards/sax player Ian Underwood, drummer John Guerin and bass-player Max Bennett (both of whom would subsequently work with Joni Mitchell and L.A. Express) and violinists Sugar Cane Harris and Jean Luc Ponty — (a French classically trained musician who would subsequently record a solo album of Zappa material himself, ‘King Kong’ under the composer’s direction).
The album was ‘Hot Rats’ which still stands as the zenith of Zappa’s achievement as a composer and instrumentalist and, not to put too fine a point as a point on it, probably as one of the greatest albums of contemporary music heard in the last 20 years.
By Zappa standards ‘Hot Rats’ was unusual; six self-contained compositions with beginnings, endings and something like middles, with no squawks, snorks, claps, oinks, backward-running tape, or editing-in, all of sufficient length to allow Zappa and Underwood as featured players within the small-group setting the freedom to indulge in some lengthy and unfettered soloing. In short, it was almost staggering in its orthodoxy. And the playing that resulted was quite superb, through the majestic organus-maximus reworking of ‘Mr Green Genes’, the haunting ‘Peaches En Regalia’, and ‘The Gumbo Variations’, an exhilarating saxophone tour de force by Underwood.
The creme de la creme, however, was ‘Willie The Pimp’, which begins as a straightforward rock guitar riff has Captain Beefheart singing a couple of verses before giving way to a steaming marathon guitar solo from Zappa, developing the theme with a remarkably fluid intensity, retaining an elemental drive and power through deceptively complex changes before being joined by the buzz saw violin of Sugar Cane Harris — to play out the last repeated choruses of the tune.
In terms of power, majesty and perfectly balanced dynamism, Zappa’s performance remains the equal of any by whatever rock guitarist you care to name. Hot rats indeed!
The Mothers — or at least the Mark 1 model of the Mothers — was dead, but a fine epitaph for the band was forthcoming in ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’, an album of material — much of it recorded live in places as diverse as Birmingham and the Bronx — dating from 1967 to 69. It was a collection that provided a vivid summnation of the range and depth of Zappa’s work to date, from the highly surrealistic edginess of `Didja Get Any Onya’ (with vocal by Lowell George) to the abrasive, ‘My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama’.
There was a good example of the Mothers’ lucid ensemble playing on the complex. ‘Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbeque; a re-working of a ‘Lumpy Gravy’ theme, ‘Oh No’, with a swell vocal performance by Ray Collins of lyrics that harped on Zappa’s preoccupation ‘with the naivete of ‘the love generation’ — You say with your love you can change all of the fools, all of the hate/I think you’re probably out to lunch…; and a typical example of the quirky sense of humour of the dada of them all where the effortless momentum of an instrumental cut, ‘The Orange County Lumper Truck’ is suddenly interrupted by a manic laugh and two minutes of intolerable feedback. It’s the album’s concluding piece, recorded live. The absolute last word, of course, goes to the audience — screaming for more…
WHAT ZAPPA was preparing for them was something, well, completely different. For the past two years he had been toying with the idea of a full-length piece for group and symphony orchestra with a theme inspired by the trials and tribulations of the touring musician — ‘200 Motels’. In May 1970 Zappa got his way when the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under the distinguished direction of Zubin Mehta agreed to collaborate — on the provision that Zappa reassemble a band called the Mothers — in order to guarantee ticket-sales. Former members Billy Mundi, Ian Underwood, Don Preston and Ray Collins came back into the fold, joined by an English drummer who had formerly played with Jeff Beck and John Mayall, Aynsley Dunbar, and a bass-player named Jeff Simmons, who had recorded a solo album for straight, ‘Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up’, the previous year.
In the audience for the Mothers/L.A. Philharmonic concert, ‘on acid and looking for work’, were Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, erstwhile leaders of popular teen-combo the Turtles. Zappa had found his vocalists for the second incarnation of the Mothers. Kaylan and Volman were natural material; probably the first people ever to drop acid in the White House bathroom (when Turtles played for a Presidential party), their anarchic sense of humour (the Laurel and Hardy of the dope generation) and naturally sarcastic mien made them the ideal tool for Zappa’s manipulation. Their first appearance on record was under the pseudonyms of the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie, adopted for contractual reasons.
‘Chunga’s Revenge’ was in fact credited as a Frank Zappa solo album; a predominantly instrumental (and curiously lacklustre) affair, with Zappa’s guitar cutting a swathe through a small-group backing provided by what would prove to be the nucleus for the Mark II Mothers — Underwood, Simmons, Dunbar and a new keyboards-player, George Duke, who would be a mainstay of Zappa’s bands over the next five years. The vocals were billed as a preview of the story from ‘200 Motels’ — `coming soon’. In fact, none of the tracks from `Chunga’s’ were to appear on ‘200 Motels’ although the lyrical themes gave a fair indication of what we were to expect in the future, notably ‘Road Ladies’.
There apparently comes a time in any artists’ career when his lyrical themes gravitate from matters of common interest towards those things which comprise his or her own personal experience — the rock and roll lifestyle. Zappa proved to be no exception, but — ever the social scientist — he was at least able to bring a fresh perspective to hear on the subject. Where others had glorified life on the road, or wallowed in self-pity at the duress of touring, Zappa simply put it under the microscope and raised one jaundiced eyebrow at what he saw: ‘Don’t it make you feel lonesome when you go out on the road’ he said in ‘Road Ladies’ “You got no-one but promoters and groupies to love you, and a pile of dirty laundry by the hotel door” and “Don’t you ever miss your house in the country/And your hot little mama too”…
ZAPPA and the Mothers arrived in England to perform, and subsequently make the film of, `200 Motels’ in February 1971. Zappa’s intention was to perform the piece at the Royal Albert hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a plan that was stymied when the Albert Hall administrators somehow obtained a copy of the ‘200 Motels’ script before the performance and immediately cancelled it on the grounds of ‘obscenity’. The incident reached farcical proportions when Zappa asked for the cancellation in writing, was refused and duly turned up on the day of the performance to rehearse. He, the band and orchestra were refused admittance to the hall.
Zappa pressed on with the filming at Shepperton Studios, wrapping the whole project up in under three days. The movie and the album of the movie appeared later that same year to unanimously hostile reviews. Described by Zappa as a ‘surrealistic documentary’ of life on the road, ‘200 Motels’ dealt with such instrinsic components of the Mark 2 Mothers’ cosmology as ‘groupies, group personality chemistry, macrobiotic food and tie-dye T-shirts’.
Dialogue, Zappa explained, was based on “suppositions extrapolated from mathematical predictions of peoples’ personalities”; in other words, it was almost true to life to depicit Volman and Kaylan as being ruled almost exclusively by their own libidos and to show the unfortunate Jeff Simmons cracking up in a motel-room, tormented by the voices of his good and bad conscience. (Simmons part was in fact played by Ringo Starr’s chauffeur).
Simmons himself had quit the Mothers temporarily, apparently after a row with Zappa over his role. Ringo Starr played Zappa’s alter-ego, Larry the Dwarf. Zappa, off-camera for virtually the entire film, played his usual role. The prestidigitator. Of course.
With the Philharmonic Orchestra sited behind barbed-wire in what looked like a P.O.W. camp and most of the real action taking place in an impressionistic mock-up of anywhere — USA — ‘Centreville — a real nice place to raise your kids up’ — Zappa took a hard look at the singular lunacy of life on the road, lambasting in the process the narrow, stifling conventions of small-town American life and particularly the curious relationship between musicians and groupies — based on the tawdry ritual of pulling, with each preying on the other in a grim, joyless and ultimately dehumanising variation of cat-and-mouse.
The music which accompanied all this works admirably within the context of the film, but as an album it’s convoluted orchestral and choral passages make it difficult listening to say the least. According to Zappa, the Royal Philharmonic “beat the shit out of the music — they just didn’t play it properly”. There were some memorable moments nontheless: the temporarily reinstated Jimmy Carl Black’s rendering of ‘Lonesome Cowboy Burt’; the stark-naked and sad description of groupies limbering up for a night’s work, ‘Half a Dozen Provocative Squats’; ‘Magic Fingers’, an extremely horny powerhouse rock and roll song, straight out of the ‘Willie the Pimp’ copy-book; and — for weirdness value alone — an orthodox choral group chanting the immortal and baffling line ‘The lad searches the night for his newts’ as if they really mean it…
ZAPPA carried his obsession with on-the-road carnality into the Mother’s live performances. The next, live, album ‘June 1971/Fillmore East’ contained a number of songs with groupie-groping as the main theme. ‘The Mud Shark’, for example, pivoted around some potentially slanderous allusions to the things Vanilla Fudge got up to in motels with a mud shark, a gorgeous young lady and an 8mm camera (maybe Frank had never forgotten or forgiven his experience with Fudge fans in upstate New York), and `Do You Like My Car’ was an extremely raunchy and hilarious dialogue between a groupie and a musician (Kaylan and Volman), based around the lady’s criteria of a prodigiously-sized organ and a hit record in the charts; naturally enough the cut segued into a really sincere version of ‘Happy Together’. But musically ‘Fillmore East’ was Zappa’s least interesting effort to date, with lukewarm reworkings of ‘Peaches en Regalia’ and ‘Willie The Pimp’ and a new version of another old song, ‘The Little House I Used To Live In’ from ‘Burnt Weenie Sandwich’.
The plain fact was that Zappa seemed to be running out of ideas, and to have exhausted the potential of this particular Mothers line-up. But whatever plans Zappa himself might have had to find this way out of his apparent impasse were rudely disrupted in December 1971 when he was thrown off stage into the orchestra pit at the end of a concert at the Rainbow Theatre by a crazed spectator who’s girlfriend had apparently professed ‘a crush’ on the guitarist. So much for the Mark 2 Mothers. Volman and Kaylan split to pursue a solo career, taking bass-player Jim Pons and keyboards-player Don Preston with them.
Zappa himself was condemned to spend the next nine months in a wheelchair and a further three months in a surgical brace. Unable to tour he concentrated on ‘desk’ work, putting together a touring group called Ruben and the Jets for Mercury Records (their subsequent album proved no match for Zappa’s ‘neo-classical’ effort of four years before) and producing another Mark 2 Mothers’ live album from tapes of a concert the band had played in Los Angeles three months before Zappa’s mishap. Called ‘Just Another Band From L.A.’ it’s centrepiece was ‘Billy The Mountain’ a 25 minute circuitous fairy-tale, about a mountain that pulls up it’s roots and sets off on an odyssey across the heartland of America — a journey which Zappa plotted with some brittle asides and smart-ass verbal one-liners on American life, delivered with considerable verve and panache by Flo and Eddie, but containing little of substance musically to back it up.
The story was ostensibly the basis for yet another movie, yet to come to fruition. Side 2 comprised four shorter songs, including another re-working of ‘Dog Breath’ and an energetic version of ‘Call Any Vegetable’ — both of which provided an interesting contrast between the more obvious rock and roll bent of these Mothers and the more artful leaning of their predecessors. There was also another example of ‘conceptual continuity’. “Any visual similarity between the cover of this album and the ‘Uncle Meat’ illustrated booklet (not to mention ‘Ruben and the Jets’) is thoroughly intentional and contains four secret clues”, Zappa wrote on the sleeve. You could while away the weeks until Zappa’s return figuring them out…
THE MEDIUM Zappa chose to make his return to the recording studio was an instrumental album, ‘Waka/Jawaka’ (Hot Rats) which, fittingly enough contained the best music to be heard from Zappa since the first ‘Hot Rats’ album nearly three years before. Aynsley Dunbar and George Duke were the only players left from earlier days, augmented by another guitarist Tony Duran (from the Mercury Ruben and the Jets), bass-player Erroneus and a brass section including trumpeter Sal Marquez, who would figure prominently in Zappa’s subsequent projects. The entire first side of ‘Waka/Jawaka’ was devoted to ‘Big Swifty’, a fairly orthodox jazz suite built around quicksand-shifting rhythms with some inspired free-form soloing from Duke, Marquez and Zappa.
Side 2 comprised three more concise pieces; `Your Mouth’ — a fine piece of R&B swing with close-harmony vocal parts and some stinging guitar work from Zappa; the remarkable ‘It Just Might Be A One Shot Deal’, where Zappa with a flash of the old quixotic arranging talent tied in four separate themes in the space of 4 1/2 minutes without once letting the seams show; and Waka/Jawaka’ itself, a brisk, no-nonsense instrumental piece dominated by a clipped, tightly-arranged and highly polished brass section. It was Waka/Jawaka’ that would prove to be the prelude to Zappa’s next album project. `Grand Wazoo’ was a one-off, in the tradition of ‘Lumpy Gravy’ and ‘Cruisin’ With Ruben’, although like both those albums it contained within it reference to both past and future Zappa projects, keeping the ‘conceptual continuity’ ethos intact. With music from a 21-piece orchestra, burritos from Ernie’s Taco House and barbecued chicken from the Hollywood Ranch Market, the album could be explained in the light of one of Zappa’s typically unlikely fables; in this case good old Uncle Meat the inventor magicking up a life-size, historically inaccurate replica of Ancient Rome (or somewhere like it) where the forces of funk in the shape of Emperor Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus and his Big Band Army wage war on the forces of musical mediocrity, and get in a few acidic observations on the state of the American music business on the side.
All of which is only on the sleeve… Inside Zappa marshalls his ranks to deliver some exhilarating swing jazz, a touch of absurdist humour (with Zappa and chorus mimicking the strident tones of an orchestra) and one sweet and slinky after-hours piece, ‘Blessed Relief’. For the moment Zappa had clearly put any social comment on freeze, and while he wasn’t saying anything of great importance musically with ‘Grand Wazoo’ he was at least saying it with verve, potency and his usual fastidious attention to perfection.
Zappa’s 21-piece Mother proved to be a beast with only a limited life-span.
BY THE time of his next album, ‘Over-nite Sensation’, the band had been trimmed back to a more manageable 8-piece, with Ian Underwood back in the fold alongside 2 new additions, Underwood’s wife Ruth on marimba and vibes and violinist Jean Luc Ponty. The first album to appear on Zappa’s new label DiscReet (both Straight and Bizarre had been wound up), ‘Overnite Sensation’ signalled a move towards more straightforward rock and roll forms — or least as straightforward as Zappa was ever about to get, which wasn’t really straightforward at all. But it was certainly slick, tight, immaculately arranged and performed and above all direct. The old anarchic, rambling, experimental, sometimes ragged but consistently startling playing of the prototype Mothers seemed gone for ever.
Lyrically, Zappa seemed in a bemusing mood. ‘I’m The Slime’ brought some of the old bile rising to the back of the throat with Zappa delivering a sociological treatise in the grand old tradition, albeit on the most obvious of evils, TV ‘gross and perverted, obsessed and deranged’ ‘the tool of the government and industry too. Destined to rule and regulate you’ — delivered in a rancid-breath vocal with suitably sinister minimalist backing. For the most part, though, Zappa seemed still preoccupied with the humourous possibilities of fucking with particular regard to the female protoganists, who Zappa invariably depicted as dumb and over-demanding.
‘Camarillo Brillo’, for example, was a sardonic snide put-down of the archetypal tarot-throwing, free-fucking, be-poncho’d (“I mean is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears’ poncho…?”) hippi broad (and the way Zappa tells it she is a broad, no question). Some critics have argued that Zappa is advocating sexual liberation in recognition of Reich’s theory that a fascist mentality is the result of sexual repression. But a listen to ‘Dinah-Moh-Hum’ a raunchy, tongue-in-cheek-and-every-other-orifice-you-care-to-mention-song shows that Frank’s just being plain dirty.
By far the best song in the collection, however, a Zappa classic and worth the price of admission alone, is ‘Montana’ — a charming little ditty about a dental-floss farmer, and “I don’t care if you think it’s silly folks”. It was as if Zappa had been saving the best of his musical tricks for this one song; an ingenious melody, impeccable group performances, a charming nonsensical choral interlude and out-going chorus which demands listener participation. Brilliant.
Whatever else it may have signified, ‘Overnite Sensation’ clearly marked a move in a more accessible musical direction; no edit-ins, experimental blowing or dada-istic inserts of backward running tape or screeching feedback. In 1969, around the time of the break-up of the first Mothers, just after the release of ‘Uncle Meat’, Zappa had been asked how he saw his music shaping up 5 years hence. He had replied that it would “probably get more obscure.”
In one sense he was right; it’s hard to think of a more obscure theme for a song than dental-floss farming in Montana. But in another sense he was way off mark. Zappa’s musical direction now put him within reach of a greater audience than at any time in his career.
Even he must have been surprised, however, when his next album, ‘Apostrophe (‘)’ gave him his first Top-10 album ever. To mark the occasion Zappa hired a marching band to parade past the Burbank offices of Warner Bros records.
‘Apostrophe (‘)’ was not a Mothers’ album in name, although all the players from ‘Sensation’ were in attendance, augmented by a bevy of musicians from past Zappa albums including Guerin and Sugar Cane Harris, a clutch of new vocalists, some new brass players and one Jack Bruce. Slickness was definitely the operative word, in the playing and particularly the production, which makes this one tailor-made for headphone listening. The first four tracks of the album — engaging enough drollery about eskimoes, huskies, priests and pancakes with the only discernible moral being to ‘Watch out where the huskies go an’ don’t you eat that yellow snow’ — run like a train on greased-lightning tracks, switching direction with the passenger barely noticing as it rattles over the points; a masterpiece of clever arranging, deploying brass, chorus and rhythm section to dazzling effect.
The most powerful cut was the title track, co-written with Bruce, a rumbling steam-roller of an instrumental, easily the most impactive piece since ‘Willie the Pimp’. For the rest, there was ‘Uncle Remus’, an eliptical comment on black America where Zappa asks ‘Are we movin’ too slow?’ and the ultimate protest is driving to Beverly Hills to ‘knock the little jockeys off the rich peoples’ lawns’; and ‘Cosmik Debris’, a cutting dismissal of gurus’ medicine-cabinets full of universal panaceas.
There are other subjects more deserving of attack, but it was good to hear Zappa dispensing vitriol in full measure. There was even an opaque reference to ‘conceptual continuity’: ‘Once upon a time/ Somebody said to me/(This is a dog talkin’ now)/What is your conceptual/Continuity/Well I told him right then (Fido said/ It should be easy to see/The crux of the biscuit/ Is the Apostrophe (‘). Oh, yeah…?
There were no more clues forthcoming on Zappa’s next album, a live affair, ‘Zappa/Mothers Roxy and Elsewhere’, performed by yet another permuation of the Mothers, with Napoleon Murphy Brock replacing Ian Underwood on sax and sharing vocal duties with Zappa. A curious album this, four sides, mostly instrumental with Zappa really testing the mettle of his players with some inventive and taxing arrangements — particularly on `Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing’ and `Pygmy Twylyte’.
APRIL 1975 saw Zappa back for another appearance in London, this time in the Law Courts, suing the Albert Hall for breach of contract over the cancelled ‘200 Motels’ performance for years earlier. Zappa himself could not have written a more surreal scenario than his stand in the witness box. (The transcript was prepared by Michael Gray for Let It Rock).
QC: . . . Would you say that any young woman who seeks to contact a member of a rock and roll group in order to procure sexual intercourse — that such a woman is in a very sorry state?
FZ: Er, no. I would not.
QC: I don’t think you can have heard the question. I will repeat it . . . and later –
QC: What does ‘pussy’ mean. The pubic hair surrounding female private parts?
FZ: In the part of America that I come from, it means the private parts themselves.
(QC then asks about the two newts in the nightclub in another song).
QC: Are you sure that ‘newts’ just means newts? There is nothing at all suggestive about that?
FZ: Anyone who is disturbed by the idea of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous… and so on, ad absurdium
NEEDLESS to say, Zappa lost the case, the judge ruling that the Albert Hall was entitled to cancel if it thought the concert was open to `reasonable objection’. Zappa was ordered to pay the costs of the hearing, an estimated £20,000 and immediately announced he would appeal. `One Size Fits All’, released a couple of months after the court-case, was a happier event. Dispensing with the brass arrangements which had dominated `Roxy and Elsewhere’, Zappa returned to a small ensemble format which he employed to maximum potential with some characteristically exacting and ingenious arrangements with a heavy bias towards heavy, energising rock rhythms, particularly on the straightforward recession blues, ‘Can’t Afford No Shoes’ and ‘San Ber’dino’ a caustic double-time rock and roll song abut a couple doomed to spend their lives in trailer-park heaven down the San Ber’Dino Freeway where ‘They got some dark green air/An’ you can choke all day…’ `San Ber’dino’ was also notable for the participation on harmonics of Captain Beefheart, masquerading under the pseudonym Bloodshot Rollin’ Red; the first time the good Captain had actually played with Zappa since the ‘Hot Rats’ album. Relations between the two had deteriorated over the years since then, but evidently by 1975 they were reconciled to the point of touring together. The resultant album, `Bongo Fury’ was a disappointment, torrid blues jams, heavy on the harp, but little to suggest that the reunion was really worthwhile or that anything more substantial would come from continuing it. In fact, the album never even saw release here, stymied by a continuing contractual wrangle between Virgin, who have Beefheart under contract, and Warners. Since then there have been signs of a diversification in Zappa’s activities. He surprised everyone by agreeing to produce Grand Funk’s last album, and has completed two disparate recorded works, the yet to be released ‘Six Pieces For Orchestra’ “really low-budget symphony-orchestra” — which doubtless indulges his passion for the modern classical form which has been absent from his more recent work — and his most recent release, ‘Zoot Allures’, credited simply to `Zappa’ — the name for his new touring outfit. The Mothers are no more.
ZOOT ALLURES’ has only a couple of familiar faces, Ruth Underwood and Napoleon Murphy Brock (on one cut) and Roy Estrad, on a sabbatical from Little Feat, helping out on backing vocals. Zappa has surrounded himself with some fresh young faces (the cover has Frank looking like Mephistopholes flanked by three cherubim), a castrato vocalist Davey Moire, Andre Lewis on keyboards and Terry Bozzio on drums. Zappa himself plays bass and synthesiser as well as guitar.
It’s not an ensemble that gives much room for compositional development, but Zappa has always served recruited musicians to serve his purpose and here it seems pretty straightforward. Fairly undemanding rock is the order of the day it seems, although like everything else he does it’s still distinctly Zappa — even if you are left with the feeling that he’s taken something of soft option and not taxing his abilities to the fullest.
There are some fine moments nonetheless: `Friendly Little Finger’ is a delightfully idiosyncratic instrumental with Zappa’s guitar doing a dervish-dance over a shifting bass/percussion backing, and sounding uncannily like Zoot Horn Rollo (and there’s irony in there somewhere), and the title track is another beautifully constructed guitar interlude.
But the highlight of the collection is ‘The Torture Never Stops’ — Zappa’s ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre: 10 minutes of gratuitous gore; guitar dripping like green slime down a dungeon wall to congeal with the ‘rats, snot and vomit’ on the floor; screams swirling through the mix and a wicked vocal from the Grand Inquisitor himself.
Elsewhere Zappa seems in as sarcastic a mood as ever, even if his subject matter does seem a little, well, obvious, ‘Wind Up Working In A Gas Station’ is, predictably, an ode to higher education, while ‘Wonderful Wino’ parodies an unfortunate more in need of sympathy than rancour; but then Zappa never was one to indulge in sentimentality — “He parodies everything, and nothing — however deep — is safe”…
Then there’s ‘Disco Boy’, which really shows that the more things change the more they stay the same, with Zappa satirising the habitues of an L.A. nightspot — exactly the same target he hit with ‘Plastic People’ 10 years ago.
A lot has happened since then. The naivety which Zappa attacked in 1967 has given way to complacency. In many ways Zappa has been proved right. Yesterday’s hippies — and how he enjoyed baiting them — have become today’s bank-clerks and bureaucrats. Brown shoes still don’t make it.
But Zappa’s still a freak. And work is still in progress…
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