Being Frank (25 page)

Frank, at the moment, didn't have any full-time vocalists (he didn't consider himself a vocalist, just a guy who made “mouth noises,” and low grade ones at that). For the album, he brought in a revolving array of hired lungs to assist him in the vocal department. I'm not sure where he found some of them. One chap was a total dipsomaniac, although Frank didn't know it until it was apparently too late. I got my first inclination that there might be a problem when I showed up at the studio around one in the afternoon and found this character sharing a bottle of Pouilly Fuisse with Jean-Luc Ponty, the French violinist; Ponty took a few urbane sips from a Drxie cup — whereupon Mr. Dip upended the bottle and chugged the remainder in one swell
floop!

By the time Frank needed Mr. Dip to record his vocal track, there had been numerous surreptitious trips to the liquor store around the comer, and a fair amount of Courvoisier under the bridge. He vanished into the isolation booth, and you never heard such howling in your life. After the 20th and final take took a couple of wavering steps backward, put out an unsteady hand to stop himself, then passed out cold on the floor. Nonetheless, Frank evidently approved of Mr. Dip's vocal qualities, because he later took Mr. Dip on tour — a very serious mistake, as he discovered. Before too long, Mr. Dip's liquor tab in the various motel lounges had far exceeded his per diem and was reaching toward the National Deficit. Frank promptly gave him the sack, and not the dry sack, either. Like a lot of drunks, Mr. Dip actually had a certain psychotic charm when he was sober. He heard my demo and, by this time having been excused from Frank's employ, wanted to put together a band with me. When I mentioned it to Frank, he strongly suggested that I give it serious thought and then
just say “no” to Mr. Dip
. “He'd end up costing you in the long run,” he said with a bitter little laugh, in the tone of
one who knows
.

Another studio Frank used belonged to Ike and Tina Turner. This studio was right on the edge of L.A.'s African-American district, and the scene there was rather circuslike, with individuals in tribal regalia and fascinating hair wandering into the control room, pausing to listen, making picturesque comments, and then drifting back out again.

Frank was working on a song called “Dirty Love,” a get-down shuffle with a funky clavinet vamp and biting guitar, The lyrics, sung by Frank, represented his sexual and emotional philosophy in, shall we say,
the most basic of terms. I thought that what the tune needed was a down home kind of backup chorus — grunts, groans, the sound of sweat dripping down the walls. Almost jokingly, I told him I could work out some background vocal parts. I was a little surprised, but he let me overdub three backup vocal tracks.

When he played them back with the rest of the song, it was obvious that, although my vocal arrangement was effective, my very white sounding voice just didn't cut it. I sounded about as black and libidinous as Roberta Flack. As we were falling all over the control room laughing about it, Tina Turner came strolling in. She was short, well built, and good natured, Frank graciously offered her a chair (he was a hardcore R&B fan, and, at least to my eyes, seemed to have more than a superficial rapport with black musicians) and let her sit there and listen to the backup tracks too.

“Ssshit, man” she pronounced suddenly,” I could do that blindfolded with a broomstick up my ass.” And she began to laugh wildly.

“I ain't got a broomstick, but I think there's a rancid bandana around here someplace,” said Frank with a wink. He helped her out into the studio and put the headphones on her. Then he ran the tape of the song with the lead vocal foremost in the mix so she could get in sync with it.

It only took her one pass to nail all my vocal harmonies, and another to lay down her first track. The other two followed in short order, grunts, groans, and all, Her three overdubbed parts somehow managed to sound like a whole gospel chorus in the throes of sanctified estrus. ("
Pa-raise Jee-zus! Get down on yo' knees, sister, and testify!
”)

In the control room, I looked over al Frank, grinned, and shrugged. He grinned back, then regained his composure and raced to adjust the furiously slapping VU meters on the board. A few years later, the former Mrs. Turner left her husband, struck out on her own, and became a household name singing Top 40 pop. A feature film was even made about her life and struggles. Whenever I heard her voice on the radio, I was reminded of how she'd recorded my backup vocals on “Dirty Love” — a sterling example of socio-musical incongruity if ever there was one.

I reminded Frank about my album project so often that he finally agreed to cut a test track. He had finished “Over-Nite Sensation” and had a European tour coming up, so we had to work fast. Right away we ran into ‘creative differences'; he wanted to record a vocal, and I had my
heart set on an instrumental, with him playing the guitar. I had written an elaborate instrumental called “Marimba Green,” with a marimba solo for Ruth Underwood, and a
very
long guitar solo. Since I'd finished it after making my original demo, all I had were the charts for it, nothing in recorded form. I brought the music to a rehearsal one day and gave it to Frank to check out, hoping it would impress him so much that he'd want to get right to work on recording it.

The first thing he did when he got my charts was frown, pick up a pencil, and start to scribble on them. I had forgotten what a stickler for detail he was. He proofread steadily during the dead spots in the rehearsal, keeping an eagle eye especially out for rhythmic inaccuracies, and by the time rehearsal was over, there were dozens of tiny, precise, annoying corrections throughout my manuscript. Not one of them was superfluous. I still have that pencil-ridden manuscript stashed away, and every ten years or so I take it out, look at it, and wince. It keeps me humble.

Frank's choice for the back cover photo of my ‘imaginary album'. It featured a number of ‘secret clues' and. in-jokes pertaining to our relationship -- I was wearing his socks, playing a Gibson 335 like the one that got burned at Montreux, posing in front of a Studebaker Hawk ("Billy the Mountain"), etc.

We never did make the album. The more we tried to see eye to eye, the less we agreed. At some point I realized that Frank didn't want
to come right out and say ‘No' to me, but he really didn't want to go through with it. In retrospect, I suspect he was right. When Frank assumed the role of producer, he really took over; he didn't work
with
something, or someone, as much as he worked
on
it, or them, and he generally wasn't satisfied until he'd wrung the last ounce of
audio verité
out of the situation. For my part, I was idiosyncratic and inflexible — not a good combination. Who knows what mutant offspring our collaboration would have wrought? Maybe this ill-begotten child of Patsy Montana and Anton Webern would have crept up on one or both of us and murdered us in our sleep. I never found out; I decided to let Frank off the hook. Besides, in my fantasy my
super-bitchen debut album
was far more satisfying than it probably would have ever been on cold, hard vinyl. You especially oughta hear all those
imaginary guitar solos
!

I
spent most of 1973 with London as my base of operations, shopping around my demo tape to various British and European record companies. A couple of labels, catching a whiff of the Zappa aroma enveloping the project, expressed an interest, and I got all excited — until my agent explained what was going on. The world economy was beginning to slump as a result of the Middle East oil embargo. At least one of the record labels in question was just minutes away from going out of business — the idea was for them to run up a big deficit by signing countless eminently unrecordable acts (
like me
) with no intent of doing anything with them, and then declare bankruptcy, citing the negative cash flow of ‘unprofitable investments'. My youthful idealism, already a little pitted, was further corroded by this exposure to the Real World of Capitalism. Frank was right, as fucking always — my demo was phenomenally non-commercial. I didn't write love songs, and I didn't sing enough to be considered a
girl artist
by any self-respecting record company in the ‘70s. (
Carly Simon
was then the industry benchmark for female musical achievement.)
Five instrumentals ??!
My guitar playing just added insult to injury. It's so depressing being 20 years ahead of your time.

About midway through my London exile, Frank and the band came through to play the Wembley Pool. I called him at the hotel to say hello. He sounded extremely grumpy and short, but he did agree (
gee
thanks, Frank
) to let me ride to that night's gig on the band bus. He sulked all night in a wonderfully autistic fashion. I think he wished I was back in L.A. where he could get at me whenever he felt like it, even if all he might feet like doing was ignoring me.

Before the show I sat with Jean-Luc Ponty in the Wembley Pool canteen, drinking Bird's Instant Coffee Powder in lukewarm water and discussing classical violin repertory. Frank stomped by on his way backstage, saw us debating the respective merits of Menuhin vs. Heifetz, and snorted. There was a gal following determinedly right behind him. I don't remember if she was a redhead or not. He barely said goodnight to me when I got off the bus at the end of the night.

When I'd finally had my fill of
broadening experiences
— like the cholera epidemic in Naples (the joke was
“See Naples and die”
), the curious mental state that derived from the knowledge that as long I was in Europe I'd have to use wax paper instead of Charmin, and the sybaritic pleasures of existence in damp, uninsulated buildings
with no heating in freezing weather
— I ceased drifting about the Continent and returned to the land of cheeseburgers, central air, and long lines at the gas pumps. Once back in L.A., I found a job in Encino as a live-in companion to a well-to-do woman with Menière's disease (the one where your inner ear messes up your sense of balance and you spend a lot of time falling over). My duties consisted of driving her to and from her office near downtown L.A. and keeping her company. In exchange, I had my own room, grub, cigarette money, and a deceptively nondescript-looking 1966 Mustang convertible with a racing engine (a relic of my boss' former marriage; her ex had been a ‘weekend warrior'). I had lots of time to work on my music and writing, freed for once from the pressures of
'objectionable reality.'

Since the album project was basically a dead issue, I wanted to keep from being sucked back into Frank's force field. I attended a couple of rehearsals, trying to remain on genial terms with him, but out of his grip. I hadn't been up to the Purple Empire since our last album project meeting, and I quit calling up and inviting myself over there. Hoping I could focus on my own work, I lay low.

Forget it. Somehow I wound up being sucked back into the whirlpool. Sometimes Ruth needed a ride, sometimes there was a guitar emergency, other times I just happened to be in the vicinity of the rehearsal hall, so I might as well stop by... I suppose I could have quit the whole scene cold turkey, but my best friend (Ruth) and whatever Frank was, were too important to me.