Being Frank (23 page)

On my last night in the basement, I sat around talking to Frank. He was able to foretell the fate of the Grand Wazoo in advance; it was going to break up immediately after the tour. In my case, the future was a considerably lesser-known quantity. Frank was in his paternalistic mood (darn!), sitting back in his chair with his feet up on the control board and frowning at me like some poor plumber forced to face the fact that he has stumbled upon the Eternally Leaking Faucet. Sometimes, when he didn't think I was looking, I'd caught him regarding me with a mixture of exasperation and pity. He was probably shaking his head over the fact that I reminded him of himself when he was l8 — only I most likely didn't have his illustrious future in front of me.

“So what are your plans after this?” he asked. It wasn't so much a question as a statement.

All of a sudden I was seized by a bright and desperate idea. I knew that when he got back from the Grand Wazoo Farewell Tour, he was going to have some down time. I also had the feeling that he was about as approachable this minute as he was ever likely to be, for whatever reason.

“Frank,” I said, swallowing fast, before rationality could take over and spoil my plan, “I think you should produce my album.”

He looked as if he wished he could yank on the tap with a spanner and stop the drip for once and for all. “I'm not going to have the timer” he began, but I was ready for that.

“Look,” I said, “I'll have the songs all ready to go by the time you get back from Europe. We don't need to hire the guys from the Grand Wazoo. You and I can play just about everything; all we'd need is a drummer at most. We can record everything in a couple of weeks, on the cheap.”

Frank smelled a rat, and not a hot one, either. “Why should I want to block out the time to do this?” he asked warily.

“Because it's time I made my first record, and I want you to produce it,” I said baldly.

Most people dislike being cornered; Frank absolutely hated it, because it rarely happened to him, and on the rare occasions when it did, none of his usual tactics worked. He growled, “What makes you think I don't have other things to do when I get back?”, but I saw the chink in the brick wall and pressed on into the home stretch. “Look, at least let me demo up the songs. You can listen to them when you get back, and see what you think.”

Of course I had no idea how I was going to accomplish this. In order to make the demos, I first had to compose the songs in question. Oh well — one thing at a rime.

Frank was starting to get very tired. “We'11 see,” he ventured, and I jumped up and threw my arms around him. “Oh boy! Great!” I yelled. He shook his head and started to put up a warning hand, but I stopped him. “I ought to let you get back to what you're doing, “I said selflessly, looking heavenward. “I know you've got to get packed and everything, and, uh, I guess I ought to be doing the same. “I really was sad to be leaving the basement; Frank must have seen that emotion on my face, because he put his arm around me and let me sit down in his lap. After that, neither of us thought about the album project again for quite a while.

I
'd been too busy working on “Statement of Earnings” to look for a job or a place to stay, but fortunately Ruth and Ian Underwood (probably with a little nudging from Frank) graciously agreed to let me crash at their place with the usual half-hearted caveat that it was “just until I could find something permanent".
Right
...

The scene at their house in North Hollywood (it was across the street from the house where Nathanael West had been living when he and his wife were killed in a car accident in Mexico — on December 21, 1940, Frank's birthday) was pleasant and, under the circumstances, fairly normal. Ian spent his days fooling with synthesizers; he was getting a leg up in the film and TV scoring world. Ruth was a classically-trained percussionist who had made an appearance on the early Mothers album “Uncle Meat” as well as in
200 Motels
. At that point, she was in
career limbo
, although a year or so later she would be back working with Frank, and would go on to become one of his most well-known sidepersons.

Ruth and I sometimes sipped Constant Comment (or at least she did; I had my own private stash of Medaglia d'Oro) and talked “girl talk,” a new pastime for me. However, our chats encompassed a rather different universe than the term might suggest — we were more likely to be discussing Harry Breuer or the logistics of constructing a percussion system that operated two timpani, three gongs, and a row of temple blocks
with one beater, as we were to be gossiping about how lousy X. looked in a bikini or who was messing around with whom. (We
did
gossip, of course, but it was a guilty pleasure for both of us; we had to fight off the nagging feeling that we should somehow have been
bigger than that
.) We were both highly verbal, and for some reason we tended to sound like six or eight people rather than two when we had these little chats; multiple personalities, maybe. We agreed that Frank was mighty lucky he'd never had to cope with having both of us in the band at the same rime; it would have driven him completely
around the bend
.

Ruth and I also had something else in common, unfortunately for her — we loved Frank's music and we both knew it firsthand. At that point, though, both she and Ian were going through a phase of trying to break free of the
noxious Zappa influence
and get on with their lives. I was probably the worst roommate the two of them could have had right then. I was forbidden to utter
That Name
in the house; if I
had
to say it, I was obliged to go out in the backyard, away from the windows, and mumble it under my breath. Eventually I would be able to understand extremely well what they were going through, but that wouldn't be for a couple more years; as it was, I sadistically enjoyed teasing them by referring to Frank in Lovecraftian terms as
“He Who Shall Remain Nameless”
and by talking about him in elaborately periphrastic third person. Maybe I wasn't being a considerate guest, but I couldn't help it (not that that excused my conduct).

Ruth and Ian, like many others in that bygone era, were vegetarians. They were also very hospitable hosts, and always set a place for me at the table. My idea of a balanced meal, meanwhile, was (and still is ) a couple of double chili cheeseburgers. (Frank had once drawn a little caricature of me with a burger in each hand:
a balanced meal
.) One day at breakfast (I didn't mind breakfast; after all, cercal is cereal, whether it's Sugar Pops and Golden Creme slightly outdated half and half, or certified Vermont-grown triple organic granola ‘n' genuine positively
non-dairy soy fiber whitener
), Ruth announced that for dinner that very night I was going to have the chance of a lifetime to attain
nutritive and culinary nirvana
(and here I'd always thought those two things were mutually exclusive). She would be spending all day toiling in the kitchen to produce (timpani roll, please) SOYBEAN STEW, and the pleasure of my company was definitely requested at dinner this evening.

I quietly went out and grabbed a burger and fries for lunch so I
could maintain my decorum at the dinner table. But when the grand moment came, I realized I was still going to have to perform. All eyes were on me as the steaming bowl of lumpy brown semisolids was ceremoniously placed before me. Ruth handed me a spoon. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and plunged the spoon into the muck. It resisted slightly, making a muffled sucking sound. I scraped some of the more solid part onto the tip of the spoon, raised it, forced it between my lips, and swallowed it. (
You've had worse things in your mouth, for Chrissakes
, I remonstrated internally.)

“Well, what do you think?” Ruth demanded.

“OK, OK!” I spluttered, spraying khaki goo halfway across the table. “I promise I'll never mention (
urp!
) That Name again as long as I'm here — honest to God!”

Soybean stew never again reared its organic head while I was there. That Name was equally conspicuous in its absence from my conversation, even parenthetically.

Meanwhile, I was taking my demo seriously, whatever opinion Frank might have had of the whole business. I sat down at Ian's Mason and Hamlin grand and went into mass production. Within a week I had eight songs finished, in the form of chord charts and lyrics. Then I tortuously recorded them on a purloined Akai stereo quarter-track tape recorder at 7 l/2 i.p.s., laying down one instrumental or vocal part at a
time and subsequently ‘ping-ponging' the aggregation of tracks back onto one channel, until I had all the parts accounted for. It didn't really sound
too
bad, considering the primitive technology I was forced to utilize.

Ian and Ruth Underwood

There were three vocal numbers, and five instrumentals, I performed all the vocals and played most of the instruments, with a couple of exceptions: an improvised synthesizer /
musique concrete
(screwdriver and metal stool) section by Don Preston on an instrumental called “Moto Guzzi” , and a space-jazz Fender Rhodes piano accompaniment by my old high school sidekick Dave Benoit on a vocal selection called “Heavy Lip Action” (the concept of the song had come to me while witnessing the
multiplicity of labial torments
stoically endured by Earle Dumler, the Wazoo's oboe, English horn, and sarrusophone player).

At this point in his career still a struggling lounge lizard, Dave was trying to compose music for ‘real' instruments, and when he heard about my religious experience with “Statement of Earnings,” he'd started showing up at Wazoo rehearsals, interrogating the musicians and generally making his presence known. After a couple of these appearances, Frank took me aside and asked me who he was, whereupon Dave waltzed over, stuck out his hand, and intoned, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Zappa — I'm David Benoit, the composer.” Frank looked over at me; I rolled my eyes, as if to say
This wasn't my idea, honest.
“Well, let's hear if, then,” said Frank resignedly. “Pass out the parts.” It turned out to be a “Suite for Electric Piano and Acoustic Orchestra” in three — count 'em, three — movements. Guess who the Horrorwitz in question was? He made
me
conduct while he walloped the (plastic) ivories; he'd just happened to bring along his own Fender Rhodes piano. Frank woke up about halfway through the middle
Larghetto non troppo mortuis in extremis
, looked at the clock, and coughed. “Thank you veddy much, Mr. Composer,” he said, warningly. Yes, Dave definitely owed me a favor.