Frank Zappa and the Mothers Play Ugly -- Village Voice, January 11, 1968
Hoodoo
Clip Job
Frank Zappa and the Mothers Play Ugly
By Tony Ortega, Monday, Apr. 5 2010 @ 6:00AM
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives.
January 11, 1968, Vol. XIII, No. 13
Zappa & the Mothers: Ugly Can Be Beautiful
by Sally Kempton
[FZ & Gail on city street:]
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/vv.mr-mrszappa254.jpg
It is 1 a.m. on a Friday night and the Mothers of Invention are
recording part of the soundtrack for their forthcoming movie. Ian is
playing the harpsichord and Bunk is playing the flute. They huddle
together in a cluster of microphones, Bunk leaning over Ian's shoulder
to read the music propped up on the harpsichord stand. Bunk wears a
goatee and a matching moustache, and his long thick hair is gray (in the
studio light it looks like a powdered wig). Resembling a figure in an
old etching, he bends closer to Ian, his flute poised, and Ian
straightens his back and places...
[torn page]
...the paradigm California voice, could be heard on the radio doing
"greasy teenage commercials" for Hagstrom Guitars. During the Mothers
live appearances he sits on a stool, his expression deadpan above his
bandillero moustache, and occasionally he will lean over and spit on the
floor under the bandstand, saying to the audience: "Pigs!"
vv.mr-mrszappa254.jpg
"Actually, we don't turn on the audiences," he said the other day. "Not
in the sense that other groups do, anyway. I think of that sort of thing
as the strobes going and everybody dancing and love-rock-at-the-Fillmore
bullshit -- if anybody felt like that about us it'd be for the wrong
reasons. Last week we were playing in Philadelphia and we got seven
requests, so we played the all at once. It was fantastic. Sherwood was
playing the sax part to one song: the whole thing, even the rests. It
was really great. But nobody knew what we were playing. They couldn't
even tell the songs apart. Half the time, when we're really doing
something, the audience doesn't know what it is. Sometimes the guys in
the and don't know."
But the Mothers' first album sold a quarter of a million copies and the
second has done almost as well. And when they played a long stretch at
the Garrick last summer they were beset by loyal groupies. Perhaps the
groupies sensed the presence of a governing intelligence, perhaps they
simply dug perversity. In any case, the Mothers have an audience.
Frank Zappa is 27 years old. He was born in Baltimore and began playing
drums in a rock-and-roll band in Sacramento when he was 15.
"It's almost impossible to convey what the r&b scene was like in
Sacramento," he says. "There were gangs there, and every gang was loyal
to a particular band. They weren't called groups, they were called
bands. They were mostly Negro and Mexican, and they tried to get the
baddest sound they could. It was very important not to sound like jazz.
And there was a real oral tradition of music. Everybody played in the
same songs, with the same arrangements, and they tried to play as close
as possible to the original record. But the thing was that half the tie
the guys in the band had never heard the record -- somebody's older
brother would own the record, and the kid would memorize it and teach it
to everybody else. At one point all the bands in Sacramento were playing
the same arrangement of 'Okey Dokey Stomp' by Clarence Gatemouth Brown.
The amazing thing was that it sounded almost note for note like the record."
Zappa was lying in bed, eating breakfast and playing with his
three-month old baby. He lives with his wife Gail and the baby in a long
basement apartment in the West Village. The apartment has a garden and
its walls are papered with posters and music sheets and clippings from
magazines; there is a full length poster of Frank in the hall and a
rocking chair in the living room with a crocheted cover that says 'Why,
what pigs?"
Frank was in bed because he had been up all night before, recording.
"The reason I can stand New York is because I spend all my time here or
at the studio," he said.
"Mostly at the studio," said his wife, smiling.
"Let's see, my life," he said. "Well, when I was 16 my father moved us
to a little town out in the country. That was terrible. I hated it. I
was used to Sacramento, you see. I was the strangest thing that ever hit
that high school. They were so anxious to get rid of me they even gave
me a couple of awards when I graduated. After that, my father wanted me
to go to college. I said no, I was interested in music. I didn't want to
go to college. So I hung out at home for a while, but there was nobody
to talk to, everybody else was being at college, so I finally decided I
should go too. That was very ugly. I stayed for a year. In the meantime
I had shacked up with this girl and married her. We stayed married for
five years during which time I held a number of jobs" (he listed the
jobs). "Then in 1963 we were living in Cucamonga and there was a
recording studio there which I bought for $1000, also assuming the
former owner's debts. He had hundreds of tapes, among them such big hits
as" (he named three or four obscure songs), "and I took the tapes and
the equipment and began fooling around. About that time I got divorced
and moved into the studio. I spent all my time experimenting; a lot of
the stuff the Mothers do was worked out there."
A year later the studio was torn down to make room for a widened road,
but by that time he had gotten the Mothers together. "We were playing at
local beer joints for like $6 a night. I finally decided this would not
do, so I began calling up all the clubs in the area. This was in 1965,
and to get work you had to sound like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
You also had to have long hair and due to an unfortunate circumstance
all my hair had been cut off. I used to tell club managers that we
sounded exactly like the Rolling Stones. Anyway we finally got a booking
in a club in Pomona, and were something of a hit. It was more because of
our act than because of our music. People used to go away and tell their
friends that there was this group that insulted the audience.
"Then MGM sent someone around to sign us to a contract. Their guy came
into the club during a set of 'Brain Police' and he said, 'Aha, a
protest rhythm and blues group,' so they paid us accordingly. The fee we
got for signing was incredibly small, particularly considering the
number of guys in the group."
Nowadays, of course, Zappa runs something of an empire. He has an
advertising agency ("mostly to push our own products, at least so far"),
and a movie coming out which someone else shot but for which they are
going to do the soundtrack. The movies is a surrealistic documentary
called "Uncle Meat"; it is shot in a style Zappa refers to as "hand-held
Pennebaker bullshit," and it will be edited to fit the music.
"Then we're going to do a monster movie in Japan -- Japan is where they
do the best monster work. And we're starting our own record company.
We'll record our own stuff and also some obscure new groups."
It was time for him to go to the studio. The Mothers have rented
Apostolic Studios on 10th Street for the entire month of January -- "One
hundred and eighty hours -- not as much time as the Beatles use, of
course, we can't afford that" -- andthat is where Zappa spends most of
his time. He puts on a brown leather greatcoat, pulls a red knitted cap
over his ears, and sets out, talking about his music as he walks.
"Stockhausen isn't really an influence," he says. "That is, I have some
of his records but I don't play them much. Cage is a big influence.
We've done a thing with voices, with talking, that is very like one of
his pieces, except that of course in our piece the guys are talking
about working in an airplane factory, or their cars.
"It was very tough getting the group together in the beginning. A lot of
the guys didn't want to submit to our packaging. They didn't like making
themselves ugly, but they especially didn't like playing ugly. It's hard
getting a musician to play ugly, it contradicts all his training. It's
hard to make them understand that all that ugliness taken together can
come out sounding quite beautiful."
The studio, when he arrived, was nearly deserted, except for Mother Don
Preston, who sat at the organ wearing earphones and playing a piece
audible only to himself. "Can you run a playback on the violins?" he
asked when Frank came in.
"Sure," said Frank. "We recorded this thing last night -- I found some
violins in a closet and I gave them to three of the guys,. None of them
had ever played a violin before. They were making all these weird sounds
on them, and then in the middle I got them to add some farts. It's a
concerto for farts and violins."
But instead of playing back the violin thing, Dick put on a tape of
"Lumpy Gravy," one of the Mothers' new records, an instrumental piece,
framed at the beginning and end with cocktail music, and interspersed
with quiet, hollow, surreal voices talking behind a continuous hum of
resonating piano strings. The music has overtones of Bartok and Ives,
but by some stylistic alchemy it ends by sounding like nothing but
Zappa. It is an impressive record. Three or four people had drifted into
the control room while it was playing, and after it was over someone
said, "I love that piece."
"Yeah, but will the kids go for it," said Frank.
"It's good to have it out," said Don, "so people will know what you can do."
"No, no," Frank said. "It's good to have it out so I can take it home
and listen to it."
[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the
Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job
archive page
<http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/clipJobArchive.php> to see
excerpts back to 1956.]
--
Trout Mask Replica
KFJC.org, WFMU.org, WMSE.org, or WUSB.org;
because the pigoenholed programming of music channels
on Sirius Satellite, and its internet radio player, suck
Charles Ulrich
Hoodoo <ver...@objectmail.com> quoted:
> Frank Zappa is 27 years old. He was born in Baltimore and began playing
> drums in a rock-and-roll band in Sacramento when he was 15.
<http://maps.yahoo.com/#mvt=m&lat=35.65011&lon=-119.341695&zoom=6&q1=sacr
amento%2C%20ca&q2=san%20diego%2C%20ca>
> Zappa was lying in bed, eating breakfast and playing with his
> three-month old baby. He lives with his wife Gail and the baby in a long
> basement apartment in the West Village.
Is this the only article ever written about FZ that mentions his kids
without making fun of their names?
--Charles
Hoodoo
(Central Daylight Time), spoke thusly:
>> Frank Zappa is 27 years old. He was born in Baltimore and began
>> playing drums in a rock-and-roll band in Sacramento when he was
>> 15.
>
> <http://maps.yahoo.com/#mvt=m&lat=35.65011&lon=-119.341695&zoom=6&q1=sacr
amento%2C%20ca&q2=san%20diego%2C%20ca>
That link got broken when posted. I stitched it back together and
created the following alternative from the map webpage:
http://snipurl.com/y8sta [maps_yahoo_com]
Is step #9 a reference to Broadway The Hard Way? <grin>
>> Zappa was lying in bed, eating breakfast and playing with his
>> three-month old baby. He lives with his wife Gail and the baby in a
>> long basement apartment in the West Village.
>
> Is this the only article ever written about FZ that mentions his
> kids without making fun of their names?
Good question, Perhaps it is.