[ED: Originally Published in Zoo World, April 23, 1973 and Written by Arthur Levy].
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"The first time I ever took
the Mothers out on the road I approached it from a sociological point of view. "After
the first tour I made a statistical analysis, in a crude sort of way,
of what had happened, trying to gauge response in different parts of the
country. The customs, the folkways, and the morality at the time we
went on the road varied widely from area to area. The first place we got
off the plane when we did our first tour was Washington, D.C. We were
doing a thing on a UHF station where a guy announced they were gonna
have a freak out party on this record hop dance show and told all the
kids to wear the weirdest clothes they could wear. And we had kids
wearing two different socks and you worked your way down from there.
That was a freak-out party at the time."
The Mothers of Invention
If omens still mean anything in America, the good kind of omen, then it's time we all congratulated
Frank Zappa for keeping the Mothers of Invention alive for the seven years since an album called
Freak Out!
was first unleashed. And hope for at least another seven years of
whatever it is that Frank has been doing until now, which is, uh ...
weird, y'know?
"From there we went to Detroit and did a television
show there. There was no audience to see and we played at a roller rink
in some part of Detroit and the kids were still 1950s there.
"Then
we went to Dallas and worked in a shopping center at a place with a TV
show emanating from it. It was a sunken room with high windows that were
at street level so the people could look in and see a TV show going on.
And the kids were 1950s, still doing the dance where the legs go off to
the side," and Frank makes an upside-down "V" and wiggles the two
fingers to show how they danced.
"And I got back from that tour
and I couldn't even imagine what was going on around the rest of the
country 'cause I hadn't traveled that much prior to the tour. That was
Analysis number 1: I came up with the result of total mystification on
the part of all parties concerned. And it seemed that there was a
definite need, in the audience, for an alternative to what they'd been
presented with thus far in terms of music, entertainment, something to
do. It seemed like most of the kids we saw on that tour had already been
sold a complete bill of goods by everybody who was making novelties,
men's wear, women's wear, shoes. They'd gotten a kit and each area was
into its own little merchandising thing.
"Each tour after that I
would gather little bits of information on what the kids were doing,
what it was like to live in different parts of the country and up until
now I think the South is probably still the best in terms of just the
best attitude towards being alive."
If Frank's conversation seems a
bit unorthodox compared to what you know or have heard about him over
the years, it might be because he was talking over dinner in a Bavarian
restaurant not too far from a stage where he and the newest aggregate of
Mothers were to play a return to Florida, of sorts, a place that Zappa
had known well ever since he inaugurated Marshall Brevitz's Thee Image
(forerunner to Thee Experience, the rock hall whose name he took with
him to California when Jim Morrison shut out the lights on rock 'n roll
in Miami, March, 1969), warming up the club for bands like
Led Zeppelin,
Moby Grape,
the Jefferson Airplane,
Spirit,
the Grateful Dead,
and a host of other bands that Marshall Brevitz brought to Miami
regularly in the heyday of 1968.
Now Frank Zappa sits in a Bavarian
restaurant surrounded by people who've long since forgotten about such
things and, frankly, hardly even notice the table with the twelve
musicians and hangers-on. Between bits of goulash and splaetzle (Frank
calls it "dumpling debris"; Steve the Roadie calls it "dumpling
leavings") Frank talks about Marshall in California.
"He's in Los
Angeles. My last two albums were recorded in his studio, Paramount. He
doesn't own it any more, though, it was changed over, sold out over
somebody's head.
"It was a good studio that's really good to work in but it's so
busy that they don't have adequate time to maintain the equipment. So
you take your chances. You go in there and a vital piece of equipment
might not work. So the engineer will call the maintenance man who'll
call Marshall who'll sort of show up with something to eat, you know,
while you're sitting there waiting for the machine to work. We've been
served barbecued dessicated chicken and hot dogs and many things. I had
so many equipment failures there that the next time it's gotta be
pheasant under chartreuse or I'm not coming back. Pathetic."
"Herb's
doing fine, he's into architecture now. We just bought an office
building on Sunset Blvd. and we renovated it - what do I mean 'we' -
Herb designed some decorations for the building which are not exactly my
idea of a good time but he likes it and he's gotta work there.
"You
see, Herb, being a world traveler, has seen architecture of many lands.
And one of his favorites is the Moorish Arch. Only the Moorish Arch, in
all of its grandeur, has been translated into stucco by some guys he
found in Los Angeles. He says 'Open these windows here, a Moorish Arch,'
like that. And they say 'We can do it', so they bend a little tin and
put stucco around it and they're all different and all crooked.
"But
it has a courtyard in the middle of the office building and he can sit
in his office and look across and see two ugly Moorish Arches. That gets
him off, really, he loves it. There's a few other designs and factors
he's come up with. We've got an 11-foot hand-carved door in the front.
It was quite attractive for the first, I'd give it, 3 weeks. And then
suddenly the weather got to it. They must've put one coat of varnish on
it and already the parts are getting weird. So it's not Apple Records,
what the heck."
"I
met him over here, he was working on some albums for World Pacific,
about 2 or 3 years ago. I got a phone call from Dick Bock, the producer,
who said he wanted to introduce him to me and I said 'sure' and he came
over to the house.
"I'd heard of him before but his English
wasn't as good then as it is now and so we couldn't talk very much at
that time. It was a little weird, heh heh. But his English is a lot
better now especially since he's seeing parts of the U.S. that a
European tourist might never go to. Learning about things like the
Waffle House, which is real big in Georgia."
The album that came
out of that initial meeting was called King Kong, a remarkable work when
you consider that budgetary limitations put studio time at a premium
and restricted several of Jean-Luc's solos to one take only. But now,
with Jean-Luc and Frank working together, things are more promising.
"We've
recorded some stuff already that's gonna be released. There's one piece
that I like very much, just he and I playing together. He's playing the
baritone violin and I'm playing the bouzouki, which, in case you don't
know, is a Greek, long-necked mandolin that I had tuned a funny way. And
we improvised a duet that's about 12 minutes - turned out really good.
I haven't named it yet but you'll know it when it comes out cause it
doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard before."
The band is
being recorded every night it plays - on one sixteen track machine
(just in case something of album quality should transpire), one
reel-to-reel stereo unit, and two cassette decks, which the band listens
to collectively on the bus or plane between dates. The cassettes are
the best learning device available, according to Frank, allowing the
musicians to adjust whole sections of the presentation if necessary,
relative to each other.
"So
when everybody listens to a tape of it all have an equal shot at
tightening things up. I think it's a very practical way to do it and
it's all for the benefit of the audience 'cause they get a better
program out of it," which is spoken with the smiliest smile Frank has
smiled since the conversation began.
Once the band is to the point
where all the "musical technical" stuff is memorized it's time to work
on the choreography, always a vital part of any Mothers assemblage
onstage.
"It's structured up to this point: I say 'at this point
everybody will move', I won't say exactly what they're supposed to do.
One implication is that they're to twitch rhythmically at a certain
area, cause if you start saying '2 to the right, 2 to the left, back up'
and all that stuff, it's gonna look hokey. But just the idea that a
sudden burst of kinetic energy is released onstage at that musical
moment where it means something is very effective.
'"I think that
it tends to emphasize what the music is doing. The other main advantage
is that when you work in a hall that holds 10-15,000 people, anybody
who's halfway back in the hall sees you the size of a peanut. And if
you're standing absolutely still while you're playing the visual element
of the program suffers greatly and the person in the audience starts to
nod out. It's hard for them to retain a long interest span on inanimate
objects. But if you keep it moving a little bit ..."
Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, who've risen to the heels of success
now, not quite a year since leaving Frank's company. While there are
those of us who maintain that Flo 'n Eddie's disposition to Frank is
considerably kinder and more good-natured than say, the attitudes of his
ex-bass player Orejon (now back with
,
himself not the world's most fanatical Zappa-booster), Frank
nevertheless maintains a strict attitude in their direction, especially
concerning the hype Flo 'n Eddie disseminated to get some initial
publicity when they left the Mothers.
"I was amazed that they
could be so low-grade cause they were saying some outrageous lies and
stuff just to get some kind of copy in the papers. View it as you wish,
sensationalism, mere sensationalism."
Zappa and the band spent two
and a half hours on-stage for their Florida audience and no one yelled
out for 'Louie, Louie' even once. Or 'Caravan' with a drum solo, for
that matter. Or 'Help, I'm A Rock'. Instead it was 'The Zombie Woof',
you see, as Frank says: "A 'Zombie Wolf' would come from New England but
a 'Zombie Woof' is interdenominational, he's Interfaith, you know what I
mean? That's all I can tell you."
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