Being Frank (12 page)

Gender may have been one of his unconscious prejudices, though he didn't seem overtly sexist. Even so, his misplaced sense of propriety may have been
one
of the reasons why our collaboration was so brief. There
weren't
many women guitarists in the early '70s, at least not blatant lead players. Frank had worked with a guitarist named Alice Stuart back in the beginning, but he told me she had been a folky, fingerstyle player; he said he'd fired her because she couldn't play “Louie Louie". My basic impulses came from years of listening to damn-the-torpedoes Western swing and hot jazz records, which gave my playing a raw, aggressive, unpredictable edge. Frank was intrigued by it, but he was also a bit put off; he was always trying to get me to play even ‘uglier', in a distorted-signal, screeching-feedback sense, but when I did, he couldn't quite handle it — maybe the picture of a
young lady beating the shit out of an electric guitar
wasn't really something he wanted to see. Once he asked, “Doesn't having that thing [i, e., the guitar] strapped on to you hurt your tits?” He was being facetious, in his inimitable way, but I sensed that what he was really saying was,
What's a nice girl like you doing with a
thing
like that
? Hopefully not upstaging
him
.

Sometimes he'd just talk about music. He lived and breathed it, and a casual question from me was likely to elicit a flood of stories and free association. I wish I'd made tapes of some of those discussions, like
the one where he described how during the 1930s Edgard Varèse had quit composing for almost 25 years, partly because at that point musical technology hadn't caught up to him yet, but also because he was depressed and discouraged at the way his music was being received. From there the conversation somehow drifted to the subject of underdogs. When he'd spent a brief period in jail in San Bernardino, Frank told me, he had sat there, powerless to do anything but fume over the injustices of the legal system and think about playing the guitar, He said he'd fantasized about playing guitar chords so loud and ugly that they'd tear the rebar right out of the cement-block walls and blast him to freedom. No wonder he'd always been so fond of Johnny “Guitar” Watson's early record “Three Hours Past Midnight” — the one where the guitar solos resembled a barrage of machine-gun fire. In Frank's lengthy opus “Joe's Garage,” recorded in the late '70s, Joe, the guitar-playing protagonist, is jailed because musicians are perceived as a threat to society. There, stuck in his cell, he dreams of playing monstrous lines on the guitar as a form of revenge against his captors. They can't control his thoughts, and they especially can't do anything about his imaginary guitar playing.

Any idiot could see that Frank fought against restraints of any kind with every ounce of his will. Just a hint that someone or something was about to confine or limit him was enough to make him start imploding with outrage. On one level, he rejected boundaries: musical, sexual, or political; more prosaically, he refused to wear a watch, saying, with strange symbolism, that it hampered his guitar playing. He always slept naked, and when he wasn't going out of the motel room he generally had his shirt off; if it was warm enough, he shucked his pants as well.

I couldn't own him, but since I was borrowing him so often, the distinction was pretty well lost on me.

Situations arose regularly which put me in an awkward position. One afternoon during a lengthy sound check, Frank was making the band go over and over one eight-bar section of a song; the rhythm section was being especially obtuse. I was sitting in a folding chair on one side of the stage when one of the musicians' girlfriends came up to me and said artlessly, “You know, Nigey, Frank's guitar is so loud it's drowning out everybody else, He'll listen to
you
— why don't you go over there and tell him to turn down a little?” I guess they wanted to
set me and Frank against each other, hoping to get me kicked off the tour. I didn't give them the satisfaction. Had I not been involved with Frank, I would probably have been trying to organize the musicians, anarcho-syndicalist that I am, but given the potential for conflict of interest, I tried to stay out of politics.

On another occasion, there was a party going on in our room after a show. Leaving the revelers to revel, I slipped into the shower. When I got out, I decided I needed a Coke from the hall machine, which was located not more than 20 feet away from the door of the room. It was pretty late, and since I was warm and steamy from the shower, I decided to run out and grab the Coke clad only in a minuscule bath towel, figuring I'd run back into the bathroom and get dressed afterwards, before anybody had a chance to even notice. They were all fairly well preoccupied, it seemed to me.

I dashed out into the hall and obtained the beverage (the machine was out of everything but ginger ale, but that was OK: for some reason Frank often had a pagan craving for warm, flat Schweppes — “
the universal solvent
”) , and then I raced back to the door and turned the knob. I'd left it unlocked, but suddenly I heard the deadbolt shoot closed inside. And there I was, locked out, my undignified posterior playing peek-a-boo from under that green logo, in the hallway of a godforsaken Holiday Inn in the wee small hours of oblivion — some pre-anthropoid road rat's idea of a joke. Of course it had never occurred to me to take the key with me.
Har, har, har.
I stood there pounding on the door and muttering, incoherent with rage. Anyone who had seen me at that moment would have taken me for a madwoman, with my long dripping hair, extremely casual garb, and demented expression. But at least nobody
would
see me — all the world was safe in bed at that hour.

As fate would have it, just then I heard footsteps coming toward me down the hall. I pressed myself flat against the door, wishing I were the Incredible Shrinking Woman, or that I could be instantly turned into a pumpkin. No dice. Here were the young, painfully straight-looking couple from the room next door, trying valiantly not to stare at me in all my glory while thinking, no doubt, that the lurid tales they'd half-heard about traveling rock ‘n' roll bands were vastly understated. A wild non sequitur raced through my mind:
For
this
I learned to play Stravinsky??!

At the same instant, the door to the room burst open without warning, and I came close to breaking my neck as I fell inside. Inside, everybody was rolling around on the floor, braying like jackasses. Frank, assuming his role of disciplinarian, feebly attempted to issue a stern rejoinder to the culprits, but even he broke down in the middle and was unable to continue.

As my understanding of him developed, I began to realize that in a surprising number of ways, Frank Zappa was all about the 19th century, not, as nearly anyone would have thought, the mid-20th-century. (When I was able to take a look around
Chez
Zappa, I wasn't at all surprised to find that it had a formal parlor with a bunch of knickknacks on the mantel, Tiffany lamps, quaint chairs, ugly upholstery, and a strong feeling of stuffy propriety despite its psychedelic purple walls.) The battles, sexual and musical, Frank was fighting were Victorian: his musical heroes Stravinsky, Webern, and Varèse had all been born in the 19th century and had struggled to throw off the shackles of 19th-century musical convention, albeit each in a different way. Even Frank's obsession with technology was Victorian, as was his droll, largely verbal sense of humor. He claimed not to be much of a reader, but his vocabulary was so flexible and precise, not to mention picturesque, that it gave him away as an audodidact, whether he liked it or not. I imagine that, growing up as the first-generation child of immigrant parents, he had absorbed their 19th-century European attitudes. In fact, he was scornful of everything
American — beer, sports, Manifest Destiny, you name it.

When I heard about his first visit to Europe on tour with the band a few years earlier, I gathered it had been something of an epiphany for him to walk through the streets of Vienna and see Webern's musical scores in shop windows, or to stop by a cafe where people sat around all day doing nothing but reading newspapers and talking politics. As an instinctive intellectual mired in a crass commercial culture, he was struggling like
The Fly
— “Help me! Help me!” He had been condemned, whether he really knew it or not, to
Life in the Wrong Era
— he belonged in
belle époque
Paris, or Berlin in the ‘20s, not “I Like Ike” America. I'd survived high school by immersing myself in the proto-Dadaist writings of French madman Alfred Jarry, and had daydreamed about being the star of literary and musical orgies in
fin-du-siécle
Paris; while as a 15-year-old exile in the Great American Desert, Frank had similarly fantasized about what it would have been like to pal around with Varèse in Greenwich Village around the time of the Armory Show.

Although I shared with Frank the eccentricity of being brought up at least nominally in the vicinity of Victorian values, unlike him I didn't feel smothered by them. What had attracted me to him was the dimly perceived sense that we had those values in common; when it came to our reactions to them, however, we were bound to clash.

In true Victorian fashion, Frank kept his emotions under tight control, at least most of the time. He seemed to be a private person who had been forced to adapt to life in the limelight by circumstance; as a rugged individual in a conformist world, he had reached the conclusion that his survival hinged on selling the public on his peculiar art by using reverse psychology, exaggerating his ‘unsavory' qualities. It worked, but it took its toll on him. He would have preferred to stay home and work on his music, but instead here he was on the road, with brain damaged college kids asking him if he'd ever eaten shit on stage and concert promoters coming up with science fiction figures when they ‘counted the house'. He hated interviews and small talk, but on tour his day was made up of almost nothing but both. He was fond of me, I could tell — maybe even more than that — and yet when I looked at the chain of events that led up to my being here with him at this point in time, I had to admit that I was really only a member of that same old public — I just happened to be able to play the guitar. When I thought what it would have been like to have his undivided attention, I began fervently wishing that I was ten years older and that I'd met him in another universe entirely — someplace like the produce section of the Thriftimart in Cucamonga
in 1962, when he was still just the village outcast, not yet a highly touted
MENACE TO AMERICAN YOUTH
. Of course no one
person
ever received Frank's undivided attention. That was reserved solely for his work. It didn't seem to bother him that on the road, sex became an activity squeezed into the ‘window' between the sound check and the gig, or before the ride to the airport at 5:30 a.m. I tried not to think about how much he could have delivered if just once he turned his whole mind to it -- but that was dangerous ground, and I knew it. I was beginning to understand that I couldn't surmount the obstacles of a relationship with Frank Zappa, as much as I wished the truth were otherwise.

Throughout the whole experience I found myself wondering, logically enough, where exactly the boundaries were in our relationship. I'd never suspected (
“Who could imagine?”
...) that this off-the-wall tour situation would wind up throwing me and Frank together, with the consequences to both of us; although it's hard to believe Frank hadn't foreseen what was likely to happen, Initially I had wanted simply — out of morbid, embarrassed adolescent curiosity — to find out what kind of a lover my musical hero was. Now, weeks later, I wasn't much closer to knowing the answer, but things had gone so far beyond that point that I didn't care anymore. I just wanted to keep experiencing Frank's universe. There wasn't any way to describe the way I felt about him; our relationship was intense, volatile, stimulating, contradictory, and exhilarating by turns.