Introduction
Book?
What Book?

I don't want to write a book, but I'm going to do it anyway, because Peter Occhiogrosso is going to help me. He is a writer. He likes books -- he even reads them. I think it is good that books still exist, but they make me sleepy.

The way we're going to do it is, Peter will come to California and spend a few weeks recording answers to 'fascinating questions,' then the tapes will be transcribed. Peter will edit them, put them on floppy discs, send them back to me, I will edit them again, and that result will be sent to Ann Patty at Poseidon Press, and she will make it come out to be 'A BOOK.'

One of the reasons for doing this is the proliferation of stupid books (in several languages) which purport to be About Me. I thought there ought to be at least ONE, somewhere, that had real stuff in it. Please be advised that this book does not pretend to be some sort of 'complete' oral history. It is presented for consumption as entertainment only.

SO, A FEW PRELIMINARY NOTES:

[1] An autobiography is usually written by somebody who thinks his life is truly amazing. I do not think of my life as amazing in any sense -- however, the opportunity to say stuff in print about tangential subjects is appealing.

[2] Documents and/or transcriptions will be labeled as such.

[3] The epigraphs at the heads of chapters (publishers love those little things) were researched and inserted by Peter -- I mention this because I wouldn't want anybody to think I sat around reading Flaubert, Twitchell and Shakespeare all day.

[4] If your name is in the book and you didn't want it to be there (or you don't like my comments) -- my apologies.

[5] If your name isn't in the book and you feel 'left out' -- my apologies.

Chapter 1
How Weird Am I,
ANYWAY?

This book exists on the premise that somebody, somewhere, is interested in who I am, how I got that way, and what the fuck I'm talking about.

To answer Imaginary Question Number One, let me begin by explaining WHO I AM NOT. Here are two popular 'Frank Zappa Legends'. . .

Because I recorded a song called "Son of Mr. Green Genes" on the Hot Rats album in 1969, people have believed for years that the character with that name on the Captain Kangaroo TV show (played by Lumpy Brannum) was my 'real' Dad. No, he was not.

The other fantasy is that I once 'took a shit on stage.' This has been propounded with many variations, including (but not limited to):

I was in a London club called the Speak Easy in 1967 or '68. A member of a group called the Flock, recording for Columbia at the time, came over to me and said:

I said, "I never ate shit on stage." He looked really depressed -- like I had just broken his heart.

For the records, folks: I never took a shit on stage, and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.

More Important Information for People Who Wonder What I Eat

I wasn't crazy about most of the food my mother made -- like pasta with lentils. That was one of the most hated dishes of my childhood. She would make enough to last a week, in a big pot. After a few days in the icebox it used to turn black.

My favorite things to eat then were blueberry pie, fried oysters and fried eels -- but I also used to love corn sandwiches: white bread and mashed potatoes with canned corn dumped on it. (Every once in a while, we'll come back to this fascinating topic, since it seems to matter so much to certain people in the audience.)

The Boring, Basic Stuff

How 'bout that epigraph, huh? Peter, you're cracking me up already. Okay, here we go. . . My real name is Frank Vincent Zappa (not Francis -- I'll explain it later). I was born on December 21, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland. When I popped out, I was all black -- they thought I was dead. I'm okay now.

My ancestry is Sicilian, Greek, Arab and French. My mother's mother was French and Sicilian, and her Dad was Italian (from Naples). She was first generation. The Greek-Arab side is from my Dad. He was born in a Sicilian village called Partinico, and came over on one of the immigrant boats when he was a kid.

He used to work in his Dad's barbershop on the Maryland waterfront. For a penny a day (or a penny a week -- I can't remember), he would stand on a box and lather the sailors' faces so his Dad could shave them. Nice job.

Eventually he went to college at Chapel Hill, in North Carolina, and played guitar in some sort of 'strolling crooner' trio. (I still get birthday cards from the insurance company owned by Jack Wardlaw, the banjo player.)

They used to go from dormitory window to dormitory window, serenading coeds with songs like "Little Red Wing." He was on the wrestling team and, when he graduated, he took a job teaching history at Loyola, in Maryland.

Both my parents used to speak Italian in the house so the kids wouldn't know what they were talking about -- which was probably money, since we never seemed to have any. I guess it was convenient for them to have a 'secret code' -- but not teaching the kids the language may have had something to do with their desire to assimilate. (It was not fashionable to be of 'foreign extraction' in the U.S. during World War II.)

We used to live in the Army housing facility in Edgewood, Maryland. There was a family -- the Knights -- to whom my Dad referred as "that hillbilly bunch over there." One day Archie Knight got into an argument with my Dad, and the next thing I knew, Dad was running toward the house, shouting, "Get the gun, Rosie! Get the gun!"

That was the first time I knew that he had a gun (a chrome .38 pistol, stuffed in a sock drawer). My mother was pleading with him not to shoot the guy. Fortunately, he had the good sense to listen to her.

Because of that incident, I knew where the gun was. I took it out one day and remember thinking: "This is the best-looking cap pistol I've ever seen!" So, when nobody was looking, I used it to shoot single-shot caps, and the 'blue dots' I had chopped off the end of some wooden kitchen matches.

My parents were disturbed when they discovered that I had gummed up the firing pin.

My mother's parents had a restaurant -- also on the Maryland waterfront. She used to tell a story about a guy who came in and started a fight. I believe it was my mother's Dad who took one of those big forks they used for taking potatoes out of boiling water and stabbed the guy in the skull with it. He didn't die -- instead, he ran off, with the fork sticking out the top of his head like an antenna.

My Dad's Dad seldom bathed. He liked to sit on the porch with wads of clothes on. He liked to drink wine, and started off every day with two glasses of Bromo Seltzer.

My mother's mother didn't speak English, so she used to tell us stories in Italian -- like the one about the mano pelusa -- the hairy hand. "Mano pelusa! Vene qua!" she would say in a scary 'grandma voice' -- that was supposed to mean "Hairy hand! Come here!" -- then she would run her fingers up my arm. This is what people used to do when there was no TV.

My first memories of childhood include wearing a little sailor suit with a wooden whistle on a string around my neck, going to church all the time and kneeling down a lot.

We lived in a boardinghouse one time when I was very little. I think it might have been in Atlantic City. The lady who owned the boarding house had a Pomeranian and the Pomeranian used to eat grass and vomit things that looked like white meatballs.

Later, we lived in one of those row houses on Park Heights Avenue in Maryland. We had wood floors, heavily waxed, with throw rugs on them. The tradition in those days was that you waxed everything until you could see your face in it (remember, there was no TV, so people had time to do stuff like that) -- and the other tradition was: when Dad came home from work, you ran to meet him at the door.

Once, when Dad was coming home from work, my younger brother, Bobby, ran faster than I did, and arrived first at the door. (It was a door with little panes of glass in it.) He opened it, hugged Dad, then closed it. I came running and skidded on the throw rug, crashing my left arm through the glass. I heard them talking about how they should get a doctor to stitch it up. I complained so much they didn't stitch it up -- just stuck a bunch of Band-Aids on it and I wound up with a scar. I can't stand needles.

I had horrible teeth, so my parents used to take me to an Italian dentist who had a unique piece of equipment -- a cross between a chainsaw and a sewing machine. He'd stick the thing in my mouth and it would go voodn-voodn-voodn-voodnnnnnn -- no novocaine. I learned to dread the sound of the word 'dentist.'

My parents felt that they had to go to an Italian dentist -- because they couldn't trust one of those 'white-person' (possibly-related-to-some-sort-of-hillbilly) dentists, and so it was that I made the acquaintance of the nefarious Dr. Rocca. He would have been sensational as an evil monk in The Name of the Rose.

My First Space Helmet

My Dad was employed as a meteorologist at the Edgewood Arsenal. They made poison gas there during World War II, so I guess it would have been the meteorologist's job to figure out which way the wind was blowing when it was time to shoot the stuff off.

He used to bring equipment home from the lab for me to play with: beakers, Florence flasks, little petri dishes full of mercury -- blobs of mercury. I used to play with it all the time. The entire floor of my bedroom had this 'muck' on it, made out of mercury mixed with dust balls.

One of the things I used to like to do was pour the mercury on the floor and hit it with a hammer, so it squirted all over the place. I lived in mercury.

When DDT was first invented, my Dad brought some home -- there was a whole bag of it in the closet. I didn't eat it or anything, but he said that you could -- it was supposed to be 'safe,' it only killed bugs.

Sicilian parents do things differently. If I said I had an earache, my parents would heat up some olive oil and pour it in my ear -- which hurts like a motherfucker -- but they tell you it's supposed to make it feel better. When you're a kid, you don't get to argue about it.

I spent the first five or six years of my life with cotton hanging out of my ears -- yellow, from olive oil.

Along with my earaches and asthma, I had sinus trouble. There was some 'new treatment' for this ailment being discussed in the neighborhood. It involved stuffing radium into your sinus cavities. (Have you ever heard of this?) My parents took me to yet another Italian doctor, and, although I didn't know what they were going to do to me, it didn't sound like it was going to be too much fun. The doctor had a long wire thing -- maybe a foot or more, and on the end was a pellet of radium. He stuffed it up my nose and into my sinus cavities on both sides. (I should probably check to see if my handkerchief is glowing in the dark.)

One of the other wonder remedies that had just come out then was sulfa. Winter was freezing cold in that house at 15 Dexter Street. The walls were so thin -- it was like a cardboard house. We used to wear flannel trapdoor pajamas. In the mornings, to get warm, we stood by the coal stove in the kitchen.

On one occasion, the trapdoor on my younger brother's pajamas caught fire. My Dad came running in and beat the fire out with his bare hands. Both his hands and my brother's back were totally burned. The doctor put sulfa on them and neither of them got scarred.

My Dad used to help pay the rent by volunteering for human testing of chemical (maybe even biological) warfare agents. These were called 'patch tests.'

The Army didn't tell you what it was they were putting on your skin -- and you agreed not to scratch it, or peek under the bandage -- and they would pay you ten bucks per patch. Then they would take it off after a couple of weeks.

My Dad used to come home with three or four of those things on his arms and different parts of his body every week. I don't know what the stuff was, or what long-range health effects it might have had on him (or on any of the children that were born after the time that they did it).

There were tanks of mustard gas within a mile of where we lived, so everybody in this housing project had to have a gas mask in the house, for each member of the family.

Mustard gas explodes the vessels in your lungs, causing you to drown in your own blood.

We had a rack at the end of the hall with a family's worth of masks on it. I used to wear mine out in the backyard all the time -- it was my space helmet. One day I decided to find out how it worked, so I took a can opener and opened up the filter (thereby mining it). In any event, I found out what was inside it -- charcoal, paper filters and different layers of crystals, including, I think, potassium permanganate.

Before they would squirt mustard gas onto a battlefield, they had some other stuff called chloropicrin, a dust that induced vomiting -- they called it "puke stuff." The dust would creep around the edges of the soldier's mask, causing him to vomit. If he didn't take his mask off, he could drown in his own spew, and if he did -- to let the chunks out -- the mustard gas would get him.

I was always amazed that people got paid to figure out how to do this stuff.

The Second Part of My Childhood

The second part of my childhood (are you sure you want to know this stuff?) takes place mostly in California, when I was about ten or twelve. First, I'll tell you how we got there.

I was sick so often in Maryland, Mom and Dad wanted to move. The first time I managed to escape from the state was when my Dad took a job in Florida -- another civil service position, this time in ballistics, something about shell trajectories. It was still World War II.

MY MEMORIES OF FLORIDA INCLUDE:

[1] Opa-Locka had a lot of mosquitoes and if you left the bread out overnight, green hair grew on it. [2] Every once in a while we had to hide under the bed and turn all the lights off because somebody thought the Germans were coming. [3] My Dad 'made margarine' by squeezing a red dot sealed inside a plastic bag with white stuff in it which, when smushed up, caused the white stuff to turn yellow, giving the illusion of 'butter.' [4] My brother got a boil on his butt, and my Dad had to squeeze stuff out of it (margarine training probably helped), and there was a lot of screaming. [5] I was told to watch out for alligators because they sometimes ate children. [6] Everything looked like it was in Technicolor compared to Baltimore. [7] I got to play outside a lot, climbing trees, which eventually led to a fungus on my elbow. [8] Except for that, my health improved, and I got about a foot taller. [9] My mother got homesick and, since I was taller, figured it was okay to go back to Baltimore. [10] We went back to Baltimore and I got sick again.

Edgewood, Maryland, was sort of out in the country. It had a little woods and a creek with crawdads in it, just at the end of Dexter Street. I used to play down there with Leonard Allen.

Even though I was sick all the time, Edgewood was sort of fun, but when we moved back to Maryland, we didn't go to Edgewood -- we moved into a rowhouse in the city and I hated it.

I don't think my folks liked it very much either, because the next thing I knew, they were talking about moving to California. My Dad had gotten another offer to work at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah (where they made nerve gas), but we got off lucky -- he didn't take it. Instead, he took a position at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, teaching metallurgy. I had no idea what the fuck that meant.

So, in the dead of winter, we set out in our 'Henry-J' (an extinct and severely uncomfortable, small, cheap car manufactured then by Kaiser), via the Southern Route, to California. The backseat of a 'Henry-J' was a piece of plywood, covered with about an inch of kapok and some stiff, tweedy upholstery material. I spent two exhilarating weeks on this Ironing Board From Hell.

My Dad believed (as I'm sure everyone on the East Coast did) that California was all sunshine and warm weather. This led him to stop the car somewhere in the Carolinas and present, to a somewhat amazed black family standing near the highway, all of our warm winter clothing, convinced as he was that we would never need any of that shit again.

When we arrived in Monterey (a coastal town in Northern California), it was freezing cold, and it rained and fogged all the time. Oops.

Chemistry in Northern California

Because of my Dad's work, I switched from school to school fairly often. I didn't enjoy it, but then, I didn't enjoy much of anything in those days. A 'weekend outing' of that period occasionally meant piling into the 'Henry-J' and driving toward Salinas, a place nearby where they grow lettuce, and following the trucks, waiting for some to fall off. When it did, my Dad would stop the car, pick it up, brush away the asphalt chunks, toss it in the backseat with me, take it home and boil it.

I didn't enjoy being poor. It seemed like everything that I wanted to do, that would be fun, cost too much money -- and when you're a kid and you can't do fun stuff, you're either going to be bored or dissatisfied or both.

For instance, I would have loved to own a chemistry set. In those days if you got the large-size Gilbert Chemistry Set, the booklet that came with it would teach you how to make stuff like tear gas.

By the time I was six years old I knew how to make gunpowder -- I knew what the ingredients were, and I couldn't wait to get them all together and make some. I had all that chemical paraphernalia around the house, and I used to pretend to mix ingredients -- dreaming of the day when one of my little concoctions would actually explode.

Once I thought I had come up with a formula for a new poison gas when the liquid potion I was working on (based largely on Windex) came in contact with some zinc.

My Dad wanted me to be an engineer. I think he was disappointed that I didn't have an aptitude for arithmetic and the rest of the stuff that was required.

They used to give kids in the sixth grade something called the Kuder Preference Test. You had to stick a pin in the page, in boxes that you selected. The test was supposed to determine what you would be best suited for, in terms of employment, for the rest of your life. My test results indicated that my destiny was to become a secretary. I scored highest in 'clerical.'

My biggest problem, throughout school, was that the things they were trying to teach me tended not to be the kinds of things I was interested in. I grew up with poison gas and explosives -- with the children of people who built these things for a living. Did I give a fuck about algebra?

The Stuff in the Old Garage

We moved from Monterey to Pacific Grove, a quiet town nearby. I spent my recreational hours building puppets and model planes and making homemade explosives from whatever ingredients I could find.

One day, a friend said, "See that garage across the street? It's been locked for years. I wonder what's inside of there."

We burrowed under the side wall. There was a pile of crates, full of fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets. We stole a bunch, removed the bullet heads with pliers, and extracted the 'gunpowder' -- only it didn't look like 'gunpowder,' it looked like little greenish-black sequins (I think it was called ballistite). It was a member of the smokeless powder family (nitrocellulose) -- I'd never seen any of that before.

We put it in a toilet-paper tube and stuffed it into a mound of dirt in the middle of a vacant lot and lit it, using gimp for a fuse (that shiny, flat plastic stuff you make key chain holders out of in summer camp).

When loosely packed, ballistite produces a shower of little yellowish-orange fireballs.

The other thing that turned out to be rewardingly explosive was powdered Ping-Pong balls. We used to spend hours filing Ping-Pong balls into dust with a rat-tail file. I got the idea when I read about a guy who escaped from jail by making a bomb out of playing cards. The article said that the playing cards were coated with some kind of cellulose material, and the convict had scraped it all off and accumulated a plasticized dust.

The casing for the bomb was a toilet-paper roll wrapped with tar tape. He blew his way out of a jail with it, so I thought: "There's a clue here somewhere."

How I Almost Blew My Nuts Off

You used to be able to buy single-shot caps at the hobby store. These were better than the ones on the little rolls because they had more powder in them and made a bigger bang. I spent hours with my X-Acto knife, cutting away the extra paper, saving the trimmed charges in a jar. Along with this, I had another jar full of the semilethal Ping-Pong dust.

One afternoon I was sitting in our garage -- an old rickety one with a dirt floor, like the place with the machine-gun bullets. It was after the Fourth of July and the gutters in our neighborhood were littered with used fireworks tubes. I had collected a few, and was in the process of reloading one of them with my own secret formula.

I had it propped between my legs, filling it with a layer of this and a layer of that, packing each layer down with the butt end of a drumstick.

When I got to the layer of single-shot caps, I must have pressed too hard and the charge ignited. It blew a large crater in the dirt floor, blew the doors open, and blew me back a few feet, balls first. Why, I could have almost escaped from jail with that one.

The End of My Scientific Career

I continued to be interested in stuff that went boom in spite of that incident.

I had a friend in San Diego around 1956 who was also interested in explosives. We had been experimenting for about a month, finally collecting a quart mayonnaise jar full of stuff that was a combination of solid rocket fuel (fifty percent powdered zinc, fifty percent sulfur) and stink-bomb powder.

On Open House Night, we hitchhiked to school with the jar, borrowed some paper cups from the cafeteria, poured the powder into them, passed them out to our friends and started little fires all over the school (while everybody's parents sat in the classrooms, reenacting their offspring's daily schedules).

The next day, I found my locker (where I had stored the jar with the leftover formula) wired shut.

A short time later, in Miss Ivancic's English class, I received an invitation to visit the dean's office, so that I might be introduced to the fire marshal.

They threw me out of school and were going to put me on probation, but my mother pleaded with the probation guy (who happened to be Italian) and explained that my Dad was about to be transferred out of San Diego to Lancaster -- and they let me go. This concluded Phase One of my scientific career.

Chapter 2
There Goes the Neighborhood

Around the age of twelve (1951 or '52) I started getting interested in the drums. I guess a lot of young boys think the drums are exciting, but it wasn't my idea to be a rock and roll drummer or anything like that, because rock and roll hadn't been invented yet. I was just interested in the sounds of things a person could beat on.

I started off with orchestral percussion, learning all the rudiments -- things called flams, ruffs, ratamacues and paradiddles. I had taken a summer-school group course in Monterey with a teacher named Keith McKillop. Instead of drums, he had us practicing on wooden planks. We had to stand in front of the planks and practice the rudiments used in Scottish drumming.

After that I begged my parents to get me a snare drum, which I used to practice on in the garage. When they couldn't afford to rent the snare drum anymore, I started playing on the furniture -- beating the paint off bureaus and things like that.

By 1956 I was playing in a high school R&B band called the Ramblers. We used to rehearse in the living room of the piano player, Stuart Congdon -- his Dad was a preacher. I practiced on pots and pans, held between my knees like bongos. I finally talked my folks into buying a real drum set (secondhand, from a guy up the street, for about fifty dollars). I didn't take delivery on the drum set until a week before our first gig. Since I had never learned to coordinate my hands and feet, I was not very good at keeping time with the kick-drum pedal.

The bandleader, Elwood "Junior" Madeo, had gotten us a job at a place called the Uptown Hall, at 40th and Mead in the Hillcrest district of San Diego. Our fee: seven dollars -- for the whole band.

On the way to the gig, I realized that I had forgotten my drumsticks (my only pair), and we had to drive back across town to get them. Eventually I was fired because they said I played the cymbals too much.

It's hard to be a drummer-in-training, because there are very few apartments that are soundproof enough to practice in. (Where do good drummers really come from?)

Rock and roll albums didn't appear in the marketplace until several years after rock itself was invented. In the early fifties, teenagers bought 78s or 45s.

The first rock and roll album I ever saw was around 1957 -- Teenage Dance Party. The cover showed a group of VERY WHITE TEENS, dancing, with confetti dangling all over the place near some soda bottles. Inside was a collection of songs by black doo-wop groups.

Back then, my record collection consisted of five or six rhythm-and-blues 78-RPM singles. Since I was a lower-middle-class teenager, the retail price of any kind of slowly rotating hi-fi vinyl seemed entirely out of the question.

One day I happened across an article about Sam Goody's record store in Look magazine which raved about what a wonderful merchandiser he was. The writer said that Mr. Goody could sell anything -- and as an example he mentioned that he had even managed to sell an album called Ionisation.

The article went on to say something like: "This album is nothing but drums -- it's dissonant and terrible; the worst music in the world." Ahh! Yes! That's for me!

I wondered where I could get my hands on a record like that, because I was living in El Cajon, California -- a little cowboy kind of town near San Diego.

There was another town just over the hill called La Mesa -- a bit more upscale (they had a 'hi-fi store'). Some time later, I was staying overnight with Dave Franken, a friend who lived in La Mesa, and we wound up going to the hi-fi place -- they were having a sale on R&B singles.

After shuffling through the rack and finding a couple of Joe Huston records, I made my way toward the cash register and happened to glance at the LP bin. I noticed a strange-looking black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy gray hair and looked like a mad scientist. I thought it was great that a mad scientist had finally made a record, so I picked it up -- and there it was, the record with "Ionisation" on it.

The author of the Look article had gotten it slightly wrong -- the correct title was The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume I, including "Ionisation," among other pieces, on an obscure label called EMS (Elaine Music Store). The record number was 401.

I returned the Joe Huston records and checked my pockets to see how much money I had -- I think it came to about $3.75. I'd never bought an album before, but I knew they must be expensive because mostly old people bought them. I asked the man at the cash register how much EMS 401 cost.

"That gray one in the box?" he said. "$5.95."

I'd been searching for that record for over a year and I wasn't about to give up. I told him I had $3.75. He thought about it for a minute, and said, "We've been using that record to demonstrate hi-fi's with -- but nobody ever buys one when we use it. I guess if you want it that bad you can have it for $3.75."

I couldn't wait to hear it. My family had a genuine lo-fi record player: a Decca. It was a little box about four inches deep, sitting on short metal legs (because the speaker was on the bottom), and it had one of those clunky tonearms that you had to put a quarter on top of to hold it down. It played all three speeds, but it had never been set to 33 1/3 before.

The record player was in the corner of the living room where my mother did the ironing. When she bought it, they gave her a free record of "The Little Shoemaker," by some middle-aged white-guy singing group on Mercury. She used to listen to "The Little Shoemaker" while she was ironing, so that was the only place where I could listen to my new Varèse album.

I turned the volume all the way up (in order to get the maximum amount of 'fi'), and carefully placed the all-purpose osmium-tipped needle on the lead-in spiral to "Ionisation." I have a nice Catholic mother who likes to watch Roller Derby. When she heard what came out of that little speaker on the bottom of the Decca, she looked at me like I was out of my fucking mind.

It had sirens and snare drums and bass drums and a lion's roar and all kinds of strange sounds on it. She forbade me to play it in the living room ever again. I told her that I thought it was really great, and I wanted to listen to it all the way through. She told me to take the record player into my bedroom.

My mother never got to hear "The Little Shoemaker" again.

The record player stayed in my room, and I listened to EMS 401 over and over and over, poring through the liner notes for every bit of information I could glean. I couldn't understand all the musical terms, but I memorized them anyway.

All through high school, whenever people came over, I would force them to listen to Varèse -- because I thought it was the ultimate test of their intelligence. They also thought I was out of my fucking mind.

"Deserts"

On my fifteenth birthday, my mother said she would spend five dollars on me (a lot of money for us then), and asked me what I wanted. I said, "Well, instead of buying me something, why don't you just let me make a long-distance phone call?" (Nobody in our house had ever made a long-distance phone call.)

I decided that I would call Edgard Varèse. I deduced that a person who looked like a mad scientist could only live in a place called Greenwich Village. So I called New York information and asked if they had a listing for Edgard Varèse. Sure enough, they did. They even gave me the address: 188 Sullivan Street.

His wife, Louise, answered the phone. She was very sweet, and told me he wasn't there -- he was in Brussels working on a composition for the World's Fair ("Poème électronique") -- and suggested I call back in a few weeks. I don't remember exactly what I said when I finally spoke to him -- probably something articulate like "Gee -- I really dig your music."

Varèse told me that he was working on a new piece called "Déserts," which thrilled me since Lancaster, California, was in the desert. When you're fifteen and living in the Mojave Desert, and you find out that the World's Greatest Composer (who also looks like a mad scientist) is working in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory on a 'song about your hometown' (so to speak), you can get pretty excited.

I still think "Déserts" is about Lancaster, even if the liner notes on the Columbia LP insist that it is something more philosophical.

All through high school I searched for information about Varèse and his music. I found one book that had a photo of him as a young man, and a quote, saying he would be just as happy growing grapes as being a composer. I liked that.

Stravinsky & Webern

The second 33 1/3-RPM record I bought was by Stravinsky. I found a budget-line recording (on Camden) of The Rite of Spring by something called The World-Wide Symphony Orchestra. (Sounds pretty official, eh?) The cover was a green-and-black abstract whatchamacallit, and it had a magenta paper label with black lettering. I loved Stravinsky almost as much as Varèse.

The other composer who filled me with awe -- I couldn't believe that anybody would write music like that -- was Anton Webern. I heard an early recording on the Dial label with a cover by an artist named David Stone Martin -- it had one or two of Webern's string quartets, and his Symphony op. 21 on the other side. I loved that record, but it was about as different from Stravinsky and Varèse as you could get.

I didn't know anything about twelve-tone music then, but I liked the way it sounded. Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels (who had a song out then called "Angel in My Life"), or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music.

My All-American Education

There were a few teachers in school who really helped me out. Mr. Kavelman, the band instructor at Mission Bay High, gave me the answer to one of the burning musical questions of my youth. I came to him one day with a copy of "Angel in My Life" -- my favorite R&B tune at the time. I couldn't understand why I loved that record so much, but I figured that, since he was a music teacher, maybe he knew.

"Listen to this," I said, "and tell me why I like it so much."

"Parallel fourths," he concluded.

He was the first person to tell me about twelve-tone music. It's not that he was a fan of it, but he did mention the fact that it existed, and I am grateful to him for that. I never would have heard Webern if it hadn't been for him.

Mr. Ballard was the high school music instructor at Antelope Valley High. He let me conduct the orchestra a couple of times, let me write music on the blackboard, and had the orchestra play it.

Mr. Ballard also did me a big favor without knowing it. As a drummer, I was obliged to perform the gruesome task of playing in the marching band. Considering my lack of interest in football, I couldn't stand sitting around in a stupid-looking uniform, going 'Da-ta-da-da-ta-ta-taaaah; CHARGE!" every time somebody kicked a fucking football, freezing my nards off every weekend. Mr. Ballard threw me out of the marching band for smoking in uniform -- and for that I will be eternally grateful.

My English teacher at A.V. was Don Cerveris. He was also a good friend. Don got tired of being a teacher and quit -- he wanted to be a screenwriter. In 1959, he wrote the screenplay for a super-cheap cowboy movie called Run Home Slow, and helped me get my first film scoring job on it.

My Other Obsession

While other guys in high school were spending their money on cars, I spent my money on records (I didn't have a car). I went to used record outlets to buy jukebox records of rhythm-and-blues songs.

There was a place in San Diego on the ground floor of the Maryland Hotel where you could buy R&B singles unobtainable elsewhere -- all those Lightnin' Slim and Slim Harpo sides on the Excello label. (The reason you couldn't order them in the 'white-person record stores' was that Excello had a policy that if a store wanted to carry their R&B line, it also had to take their gospel catalog.) The only way I could get a Lightnin' Slim record was to travel a couple hundred miles and buy it secondhand, all scratched up.

Homemade Boogie

San Diego had neighborhood gangs, and each neighborhood had its own 'cool band' -- the equivalent of the 'home team' in football. These bands competed with each other -- who had the best musicianship, wardrobe, choreography.

A 'good band' had to have at least three saxophones in it (one of which had to be a baritone), two guitar players, bass and drums. It was regarded as a more serious band if everybody wore a pink flannel, one-button roll sport coat. It was really good if they had pants to match -- and it was superb if all the guys in the front row knew the same steps, and if they went 'up and down' at the same time on the fast songs.

The people who went to see these bands really loved them. These weren't 'rock shows' put on by 'promoters' -- instead, there were girl gangs who would rent the hall, hire the band, hang the crepe paper, and sell the tickets. (The first gig I ever played -- the one where I forgot my drumsticks -- was sponsored by one of them, the "BLUE VELVETS.")

Life in the Slow Lane

I spent more time with Don (Captain Beefheart) Van Vliet when I was in high school than after he got into 'show business.'

He dropped out during his senior year, because his Dad, who was a Helms Bread truck driver, had a heart attack and 'Vliet' (as he was known then) took over his route for a while -- but most of the time he just stayed home from school.

His girlfriend, Laurie, lived in the house with him, along with his Mom (Sue), his Dad (Glen), Aunt Ione and Uncle Alan. Granny Annie lived across the street.

The way Don got his 'stage name' was, Uncle Alan had a habit of exposing himself to Laurie. He'd piss with the bathroom door open and, if she was walking by, mumble about his appendage -- something along the lines of: "Ahh, what a beauty! It looks just like a big, fine beef heart."

Don was also an R&B fiend, so I'd bring my 45s over and we'd listen for hours on end to obscure hits by the Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Guitar Slim, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Don and Dewey, the Spaniels, the Nutmegs, the Paragons, the Orchids, the etc., etc., etc.

There were piles of sweet rolls in the kitchen, like pineapple buns that didn't sell that day -- the place was crawling with starch -- and we'd eat mounds of them while the records were playing. Every once in a while Don would scream at his mother (always in a blue chenille bathrobe), "Sue! Get me a Pepsi!" There was nothing else to do in Lancaster.

Our major form of recreation, other than listening to records, was to go for coffee in the middle of the night to the Denny's on the highway.

If Don was short on cash (this was before he took over the bread truck route), he'd open the back door of the truck, pull out one of the long drawers with the dead buns on it and make Laurie crawl through the slot, into the locked cab, where she would sneak a few bucks out of his Dad's change-maker.

After coffee, we'd ride around in his light blue Oldsmobile with the homemade werewolf-head sculpture in the steering wheel, and talk about people who had large ears.

Chapter 3
An Alternative To College

I got married for the first time when I was about twenty years old. I had gone to Antelope Valley Junior College in Lancaster and Chaffey Junior College in Alta Loma for the express purpose of meeting girls. I had no interest in higher education, but after finishing high school it occurred to me that if I wasn't in school, I wasn't going to meet any -- so I 'reenlisted.'

At Chaffey, I met Kay Sherman. We dropped out of school, started living together and got married. I went to work for a company called Nile Running Greeting Cards. Their line consisted mostly of silk-screened greetings, designed for elderly women who liked flowers. I worked in the silk-screen department and, after a while, wound up designing a few of the floral horrors myself.

Then came a part-time job writing copy and designing ads for local businesses, including a few beauties for the First National Bank of Ontario, California. I also had short stints as a window dresser and a jewelry salesman and -- the worst one -- I sold Collier's Encyclopedias, door to door. That was truly wretched -- but at least I got an inside look at how that shit is done.

First, they make you go to school for three or four days to memorize the sales pitch (from which you are not allowed to deviate, since they tell you that they paid a lot of money to a psychologist somewhere who figured it all out). The guy who figured out the one I had to memorize should have his license revoked -- or do those guys ever get a license?

They teach you psychological tricks to convince people who can't even afford a loaf of bread to pay three hundred bucks for a set of books they can't even read. For instance: when you go to pitch the deal, and you have the sales contract on your clipboard, you should hold the pen under your thumb at the top of the board, near the clip. When you hand the clipboard to the person ("Sir, why don't you just take a look at what it says right here -- "), you release your thumb and let the pen roll down the clipboard into the guy's hand -- and before he knows what the fuck happened to him, he's got the contract and the pen in his hands.

Then, the idea was to unfurl a rolled-up piece of oilcloth with a photo on it, showing what this incredible plywood bookcase with the books sticking out of it would look like in his home. Then I let him hold an actual book -- the one that had the plastic overlays of the human body. I lasted a week.

In the world of'professional entertainment,' I wasn't faring much better. I was working weekends with a four-piece lounge band called Joe Perrino and the Mellotones, at Tommy Sandi's Club Sahara in San Bernardino.

The management allowed us to play one [1] 'twist number' per night. The rest of the night we were supposed to play "Happy Birthday," "Anniversary Waltz" and "On Green Dolphin Street." I wore a white dinner jacket and bow tie and black pants and sat on a bar stool and played the electric guitar. I got so sick of it that I quit, put the guitar in the case, stuck it behind the sofa and didn't touch it for eight months.

One of the other great jobs was as a rhythm guitarist in a pickup band at a Christmas dance in a Mormon recreation hall. The room was decorated with wads of cotton hanging on black thread (snowballs, get it?). The band consisted of sax, drums and guitar. I borrowed a fake-book so I could follow the chord changes, since I didn't know any of the tunes. The sax player was, in civilian life, a Spanish teacher from the local high school. He had no sense of rhythm and couldn't even count the tunes off, but he was the leader of the band.

I didn't know anything about Mormons at the time, so, during a break when I lit up a cigarette, it was as if The Devil Himself had just made a rare personal appearance. A bunch of guys who looked like they weren't quite ready to shave yet started flailing over to me and, in a brotherly sort of way, escorted my ass out the door. I knew I was going to love show business if I ever got into it.

Let's Get Into Show Business

At that time there was a place called the Pal Recording Studio in (don't laugh) Cucamonga, California. It was established by an amazing gentleman named Paul Buff.

Cucamonga was a blotch on a map, represented by the intersection of Route 66 and Archibald Avenue. On those four corners we had an Italian restaurant, an Irish pub, a malt shop and a gas station.

North, up Archibald, were an electrician's shop, a hardware store and the recording studio. Across the street was a Holy Roller church, and up the block from that was the grammar school.

Buff had lived in Cucamonga before enlisting in the Marines. While serving, he decided to learn electronics, so that when he got out he could apply what he had learned and build his own recording studio. He got out, rented a place at 8040 Archibald Avenue and set out to change the direction of American Popular Music.

He didn't have a mixing console, so he built one -- out of an old 1940s vanity. He removed the mirror and, right in the middle, where the cosmetics would have gone, installed a metal plate with Boris Karloff knobs on it.

He built his own homemade, five-track, half-inch tape recorder -- at a time when the standard in the industry was mono. (I think only Les Paul had an eight-track then. Buff was able to overdub the same way Les Paul could, but in a more primitive manner.)

He wanted to become a singer-songwriter, so he listened to all the latest hit records, figured out what the hooks were and, through a mysterious process, created his own little hook-laden replicas.

He taught himself how to play the five basic instruments of rock and roll: drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and alto saxophone -- then taught himself how to sing.

He made master tapes of finished songs, then drove into Hollywood and attempted to lease them to Capitol, Del-Fi, Dot and Original Sound.

Some of these tunes actually became 'regional hits.' "Tijuana Surf" (with Paul multitracking himself) became a long-running number-one record in Mexico. I wrote and played guitar on the B side, an instrumental called "Grunion Run." It was released on Original Sound under the name of the Hollywood Persuaders.

I worked with him for about a year until he got into financial trouble and was in danger of losing his studio.

So, remember the really cheap cowboy movie that my high school English teacher wrote the script for in 1959? After endless delays, Run Home Slow (starring Mercedes McCambridge) was completed and scored in 1963. I even got paid for it -- not all of it, but most of it. I took part of the money and bought a new guitar, and used the rest to 'buy' Pal Records from Paul. In other words, I agreed to take over his lease and the rest of his debt.

Meanwhile, my marriage fell apart. I filed for divorce, moved out of the house on G Street, and into 'Studio Z,' beginning a life of obsessive overdubbage -- nonstop, twelve hours a day.

I had no food, no shower or bathtub; just an industrial sink where I could wash up. I would have starved in there if it hadn't been for Motorhead Sherwood. I knew him from Lancaster. He came to Cucamonga and didn't have a place to stay, so I invited him to move into the studio with me.

Motorhead had a way with cars and also played the saxophone -- a useful combination. When the Mothers were finally formed, he worked for us as a roadie, and later joined the band.

One day Motorhead, by some illicit means, acquired a box of foodstuffs from a mobile blood bank. He got some instant mashed potatoes (I still don't know why a bloodmobile would carry instant mashed potatoes, but that's where he said he got them), some instant coffee and some honey.

By then I had landed a weekend gig at a place called the Village Inn, in Sun Village, eighty miles away. The pay came to fourteen dollars a week (seven bucks per night), minus gas.

With that, I bought peanut butter, bread and cigarettes. One week we splurged and bought a whole brick of Velveeta.

When I was in high school, in Lancaster, I formed my first band, the Black-Outs. The name derives from when a few of the guys, after drinking peppermint schnapps, purchased illicitly by somebody's older brother, blacked out.

This was the only R&B band in the entire Mojave Desert at that time. Three of the guys (Johnny Franklin, Carter Franklin and Wayne Lyles) were black, the Salazar brothers were Mexican and Terry Wimberly represented the other oppressed peoples of the earth.

Lancaster was a boomtown then. There was a huge influx of technical employees (guys like my Dad) who had dragged their families into this godforsaken place in order to work on the missile projects at Edwards Air Force Base. The original inhabitants, sons and daughters of alfalfa farmers and feed-store owners, held all the newcomers in low esteem. We were the people from "down below" -- a term used to describe anyone who was not from the high desert area where Lancaster was located.

The pecking order at the high school was pretty well laid out: members of the social elite (the lettermen and cheerleaders) were all reproductive by-products of the coots and codgers that ran the local feed & grain business. The lowest rung on the ladder in this 1957 social arrangement was reserved for the sons and daughters of the black families who raised turkeys in an area beyond Palmdale -- Sun Village. Only slightly above that rung was a little slot for the Mexicans.

The fact that this was an "integrated" band disturbed a lot of people. This distress was compounded by the fact that, prior to my arrival, someone had put on a rhythm-and-blues show at the fairgrounds, and legend had it that "colored people brought dope into the valley when they did that damn show, and we're never gonna let that kind of music 'round here again."

I didn't know about any of this shit when I put the band together. Anyway, my part-time job in high school was working in a record store for a nice lady named Elsie (sorry, I can't remember her last name) who liked R&B. As you can imagine, in a town like that, paying gigs for an "integrated R&B band" were few and far between. One day, I got a great idea: I decided to promote my own gig -- a dance -- at the local women's club hall, and I asked Elsie to help me. I wanted her to rent the hall for us, and she agreed to do so. Now, I'm pretty sure about this -- it was Elsie who had promoted the original "colored-person show with optional chemical commodities" -- and I didn't fully grasp the local socio-political ramifications of all this when I asked her to book the hall.

So, everything was set -- the band rehearsed out in Sun Village in the Harrises' living room, we had our song list, we were selling tickets, everything was fine. The evening before the dance, while walking through the business district at about six o'clock, I was arrested for vagrancy. I was kept overnight in the jail. They wanted to keep me long enough to cancel the dance -- just like in a really bad 1950s teenage movie. It didn't work. Elsie and my folks got me out.

We played the dance. It was a lot of fun. We had an enormous turnout of black students from Sun Village. Motorhead Sherwood was the hit of the evening -- he did this weird dance called "The Bug," where he pretended that some creature was tickling the fuck out of him, and he rolled around on the floor, trying to pull it off. When he 'got it off,' he threw it at girls in the audience, hoping that they would flop around on the floor too. A few of them did.

After the dance, as we were packing our stuff into the trunk of Johnny Franklin's wasted blue Studebaker, we found ourselves surrounded by a large contingent of lettermen (The White Horror), eager to cause physical harm to our disgusting little 'integrated band.' This was a mistake because, upon seeing the Gathering of the Ugly Jackets, a few dozen 'Villagers' started hauling chains and tire irons out of their trunks, with a look in their eyes that said, "The night is young."

The lettermen folded, in total humiliation -- God, they're so sensitive about that sort of thing -- and went home to their coots & codgers. They remained hostile to me and the other guys in the band all the way through to graduation.

Now, these upstanding young gentlemen were pretty well plugged into the cheerleading squad, and (I know I'm not imagining this) those girls did not like me very much -- and so it came to pass, during a school assembly to inaugurate the new gymnasium, one of these maidens (name omitted because I'm a nice guy) was given the honor of leading the entire student body in a rousing rendition of the school song, a truly nauseating piece of poetry, sung to the the tune of "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra (It's an Irish Lullabye)," a song SO SPECIAL that it had to be sung STANDING UP.

In order for her to fulfill her mission, Ms. Name Omitted had to get the entire crowd on its feet -- even me -- which led her to shout sneeringly into the microphone: "Everybody up! And that means YOU TOO, FRANK ZAPPA!"

I remained seated and, as a hush fell over the audience, without the aid of a PA system, proceeded to spoil her entire afternoon by inquiring: "Why don't you go fuck yourself, [name omitted because I'm a nice guy] !" This was a word you were not supposed to shout in those days -- especially to a girl who jumped up and down on weekends with wads of crepe paper in her hands. She collapsed, sobbing, and had to be helped out the door by the other pom-pom rustlers. It was the worst white female impersonation of the James Brown cape-over-the- shoulder routine ever performed in the Western Hemisphere.

The final wrap-up in the case of Ms. Name Omitted took place right around sunrise, after the senior all-night party. I made her laugh while she was eating breakfast at the nicest coffee shop in town, surrounded by her friends, and iced tea came out of her nose.

Anyway, the reason I brought up all this old Lancaster stuff in here is to provide some details concerning the lyrics to "Village of the Sun" (which, by my admittedly peculiar standards, strikes me as a sentimental lyric -- and there aren't many of those in my catalog). We're not going to take it apart line by line, but a few references are worth following up on.

You could always tell if a guy was a 'desert rat' by the windshield on his car. The wind was a constant factor, and so were the microscopic particles of sand it carried, capable of pitting a windshield till you couldn't see out of it anymore, simultaneously reducing the finest custom paint job to garbage in an amazingly short period of time.

I heard that the Village Inn was destroyed by fire in a 'racial incident' in the early 1970s, and that the people in the neighborhood had acquired the habit of shooting each other.

However, while I was working there, it was a great little place. Between sets they'd turn on the jukebox and, as soon as they did, a guy they called "The Stumbler" would go over to it, and dance FOR it -- he'd sort of worship it, as if it was The Shrine Of Music. Eventually, he'd be joined by a couple of 'assistant stumblers,' and they'd all bob and weave and grovel in front of it.

I watched this for a few weeks and finally, one night, decided to talk to him. I thought he'd be some kind of space-wino. He wasn't -- he was an okay guy. He was drunk, to be sure, but not out of his mind -- just happy. He invited me to go to his house. I couldn't turn this offer down -- like it says on the Freak Out! album: "Who could imagine. . ." what kind of a place Mr. Stumbler lived in? I had to find out.

After the gig, I followed him out into the desert a few miles, to a small turkey ranch. There was a handmade sort of house with cinder-block steps. The light was on in the front window. I followed him in. In spite of the shabby exterior, the living room was pleasant, with new furniture and a very large, very new Magnavox stereo. Apparently he'd been listening to some records before his evening romp in front of the jukebox -- maybe a pregame warmup. The album on the turntable was Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.

The Soots

After I moved into 'Studio Z,' Don Van Vliet came to visit. I made some recordings with him then which predated the Beefheart Magic Band. The group was called the Soots. Some of the songs were "Metal Man Has Won His Wings," "Cheryl's Canon" and a cover version of the Little Richard song "Slippin' and Slidin'" (as if sung by the Howlin' Wolf). In those days certain record companies would lease the master recordings of independent producers. A producer would bring in a finished piece of product and be given a cash advance against royalties. The producer still owned the master. The releasing company would have the use of it for a few years, after which control of the master would revert to the producer. Through Paul Buff I had met people in Hollywood who worked in those departments, so I went to a guy at Dot Records named Milt Rogers with two of the Soots masters. He listened for a while and said, "We can't release these -- the guitar is distorted."

Bongo Fury

Don eventually formed Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, released a single through A&M and proceeded to sign an amazing assortment of contracts with just about anybody who had a pen to stick in his hand. He was in contractual bondage all over the place. Companies weren't paying him, but the contracts were written in such a way that he was precluded from recording -- they had him tied up for years. When he did the Bongo Fury tour with us in 1976, he was just about destitute.

Life on the road with Captain Beefheart was definitely not easy. He carried the bulk of his worldly possessions around in a shopping bag. It held his art and poetry books and a soprano sax. He used to forget it in different places -- just walk away and leave it, driving the road manager crazy. Onstage, no matter how loud the monitor system was, he complained that he couldn't hear his voice. (I think that was because he sings so hard he tenses up the muscles in his neck, causing his ears to implode.)

Trout Mask Replica

The high point of our relationship (according to Rolling Stone -- and aren't they some kind of authority on these matters?) was making the Trout Mask Replica album together in 1969. Don is not technically oriented, so, first I had to help him figure out what he wanted to do, and then, from a practical standpoint, how to execute his demands.

I wanted to do the album as if it were an anthropological field recording -- in his house. The whole band was living in a small house in the San Fernando Valley (we could use the word cult in here).

I was working with Dick Kunc, the recording engineer on Uncle Meat and Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. To make remote recordings in those days, Dick had a Shure eight-channel mixer remounted in a briefcase. He could sit in a corner at a live gig with earphones on and adjust the levels, and have the outputs of the briefcase mixer feeding a Uher portable tape recorder.

I had been using that technique with the M.O.I. for road tapes. I thought it would be great to go to Don's house with this portable rig and put the drums in the bedroom, the bass clarinet in the kitchen and the vocals in the bathroom: complete isolation, just like in a studio -- except that the band members probably would feel more at home, since they were at home.

We taped a few selections that way, and I thought they sounded terrific, but Don got paranoid, accused me of trying to do the album on the cheap, and demanded to go into a real recording studio.

So we moved the whole operation to Glendale, into a place called Whitney, the studio I was using at that time -- owned by the Mormon church.

The basic tracks were cut -- now it was time for Don's vocals. Ordinarily a singer goes in the studio, puts earphones on, listens to the track, tries to sing in time with it and away you go. Don couldn't tolerate the earphones. He wanted to stand in the studio and sing as loud as he could -- singing along with the audio leakage coming through the three panes of glass which comprised the control-room window. The chances of him staying in sync were nil -- but that's the way the vocals were done.

Usually, when you record a drum set, the cymbals provide part of the 'air' at the top end of the mix. Without a certain amount of this frequency information, mixes tend to sound claustrophobic. Don demanded that the cymbals have pieces of corrugated cardboard mounted on them (like mutes), and that circular pieces of cardboard be laid over the drum heads, so Drumbo wound up flogging stuff that went "thump! boomph! doof!" After it was mixed, I did the editing and assembly in my basement. I finished at approximately 6:00 A.M. on Easter Sunday, 1969. I called them up and said, "Come on over; your album is done." They dressed up like they were going to Easter church and came over. They listened to the record and said they loved it.

The last time I saw Don was 1980 or '81. He stopped by one of our rehearsals. He looked pretty beat. He had gone back and forth with some contracts at Warner Bros., and it just hadn't worked out. I suppose he is still living in Northern California, but not recording anymore. He bought some property up there -- someplace where he could see whales swim by.

Let's Make a Movie

Going backwards again. . . shortly after moving into 'Studio Z,' I heard about an auction at the F. K. Rockett Studios in Hollywood. They were going out of business and dumping some scenery. For fifty dollars I bought more scenery than I could fit in the studio, including a two-sided cyclorama -- purple on one side for night, blue on the other side for day -- a kitchen, a library interior, a building exterior -- everything I needed to make a cheap movie. Every piece that would fit through the doors was dragged in, set up and repainted.

I ended up sleeping in the set for Billy Sweeney's Laboratory. In the back of the studio, next to the toilet, I built a totally implausible, two-dimensional, cardboard rocket ship.

I painted all the sets myself and wrote a script based on the people and facilities available at the time: Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People. Then came the hard part -- trying to raise money to make the movie.

The Ontario Daily Report ran a feature story on me and my project in its Sunday centerfold -- about how a weird guy in Cucamonga was trying to make a science fiction movie called Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People. It was probably that story which caused the San Bernardino County vice squad to take an interest in me.

This was in 1962 -- my hair was short then, but the local folks thought I had long hair. The unspoken dress code for a Cucamongan male of that period, for all occasions, was a white, short-sleeved sport shirt with a bow tie (Pee-Wee Herman would have been a fashion plate). T-shirts were considered avant-garde.

I put out a casting call for local people to play in the movie. A man came to audition for the role of the asshole: Senator Gurney. I later found out that he was a member of the San Bernardino County vice squad, sent to entrap me.

The vice squad had bored a hole through the studio wall and was spying on me for several weeks. The local political subtext to all this had something to do with an impending real estate development which required the removal of the tenants before Archibald Avenue was widened.

The other part of the subtext had to do with a girl I met in a restaurant in Hollywood. She had a friend -- a white girl with a black baby. They needed a place to stay. Next stop, Cucamonga.

She and her girlfriend used to play with the baby on the sidewalk in front of the studio, in plain view of the Holy Rollers lurking in the church across the street. Apparently this caused some psychological stress on the congregation and, shortly thereafter, I was visited by the man who had auditioned. He didn't get the part, but he did turn out to be quite an actor.

A few weeks later he returned, disguised as (don't laugh) a used-car salesman. He told me that some of his friends were having a party the following week. Since I had a sign outside the studio (purchased at the auction) that said "TV Pictures," he wanted to know if I could make him an 'exciting film' for the entertainment of his brethren.

Eager to help (as opportunities to entertain the gentlemen in this fascinating profession do not occur every day), I explained that films cost a lot of money and suggested instead an audio tape.

He gave me a verbal list of all the different sex acts he wished to have included on the tape. I didn't know at the time, but he was broadcasting our conversation to a truck parked outside the studio through his (don't laugh) wristwatch.

I told him I could make a tape like that for one hundred dollars, and have it for him the next day. That evening, I manufactured the tape with the help of one of the girls -- about half an hour's worth of bogus grunts and squeaky bedsprings. There was no actual sex involved.

I stayed up all night to edit out the laughs and then added some background music -- a complete production. The next day the auditionee, whose name was Detective Willis, showed up and handed me fifty dollars. I said the deal was for one hundred dollars and refused to hand over the tape -- it never changed hands. In spite of that, the door flew open, flashbulbs popped, reporters ran all over the place and handcuffs were slapped on my wrists.

The vice squad arrested me and the girl, and confiscated every tape and every piece of film in the studio. They even took my 8mm projector as 'evidence.'

I was flat broke and couldn't afford a lawyer. I phoned my Dad, who had recently had a heart attack -- he couldn't afford a lawyer either. He had to take out a bank loan in order to bail me out.

Once I got out, I went to see Art Laboe. He had released some of my material on his Original Sound label ("Memories of El Monte" and "Grunion Run") and got an advance on a royalty payment, which I used to bail out the girl.

I tried to get the ACLU to take an interest in the case but they wouldn't touch it. They said it wasn't important enough and that, yes, there had been quite a few cases of illegal entrapment in that area. By then my Dad had been able to hire a lawyer, who said my only hope was to plead nolo contendere (no contest -- or "I'm so broke I can't even buy justice in Cucamonga, so I'll just give a thousand bucks to this lawyer here and keep my fucking mouth shut, hoping you don't give me the death penalty").

Before the trial, my white-haired legal expert asked me, "How could you be such a fool to let this guy con you? I thought everybody knew Detective Willis. He's the kind of guy who earns his living waiting around in public restrooms to catch queers."

I answered, "I don't stand around in toilets -- I never heard about guys that get paid to do that." What was it? My fault that I never dreamed that scum like Willis existed, or that somebody in the government set aside tax dollars to provide guys like him with a salary and a 'research budget'? I was going to have to crank up my imagination a little to compensate for this dreadful revelation.

I was charged with "conspiracy to commit pornography." The pornography charge was, under state law, a misdemeanor. The conspiracy charge, on the other hand, was a felony -- requiring impressive amounts of penal servitude.

So, how does one engage in "conspiracy to commit pornography?" In California, if two or more people discuss the commission of any crime -- no matter how small (like jaywalking maybe) -- it magically becomes a conspiracy, and the penalties escalate beyond reason. It was presumed that I had discussed the making of the tape with the girl and, therefore, was eligible for ten to twenty years' hard time. Still want to move to California, folks?

At one point in the trial, the judge took me and the girl into his private chambers, along with all the lawyers, listened to the tape and started laughing. It was funny -- and nowhere near as bizarre as the vocal noises eventually released on side four of the Freak Out! album.

The laughter infuriated the twenty-six-year-old assistant DA who prosecuted the case. He demanded, in the name of justice, that I be forced to serve time for this heinous offense.

The final verdict: guilty of a misdemeanor. The sentence: six months in jail, with all but ten days suspended, and three years' probation -- during which I could not violate any traffic laws or be in the company of any woman under twenty-one without the presence of a competent adult.

The sentence also provided for the expungement of my 'criminal record' -- after one year there would be nothing on the books saying that I ever went to jail. After the sentence had been pronounced, I was placed in the holding tank in the back of the courthouse, to wait for the sheriff's bus to take me to the county jail. I was reading a long piece of jailhouse poetry scribbled on the wall ("The Ballad of Do-Do Mite") when Detective Willis walked in and said, "If you'll give me permission to decide which of those tapes we confiscated are obscene, we'll give you back all the rest of them -- erased."

I said, "First of all, I do not have the authority to change you from a policeman into a judge, and furthermore, you have no right to do anything to those tapes -- the case is closed -- and I'm going to come after you to get them back" -- but I never was able to get any of the stuff back, and to this day I don't know what happened to it.

Let's Go to Jail

The ten days I spent in Tank C at the San Bernardino County Jail were very educational. Unless you've been to jail, you can't imagine what it's actually like. This wasn't like the jail in Lancaster where they gave you pancakes in the morning. This was ugly jail.

There was an enormous black guy in there called "Slicks" (because his lips looked like those big smooth racing tires called 'cheater slicks'). He was in for stealing copper. Copper?

Vagrants used to go to the San Bernardino rail yards and pry the copper brake shoes off boxcars and sell them as scrap metal at a junkyard down the street. Slicks figured that if the junk dealers would pay pretty good for little lumps of copper, they'd pay real good for a really big hunk. So he planned to break into the local telephone company compound, where huge rolls of telephone cable were stored.

The place had a chain-link fence around it. Slicks planned to climb over the fence, put a pole through one of the rolls -- like an axle -- throw a rope over the fence, hook it up to the 'axle,' pull on the rope and let the giant roll crush down the fence. Then, he was going to take it out into the desert, burn the insulation off the wire and sell the copper.

He got as far as climbing over the fence and into the compound before the dogs got him. Is this The Crime Of The Century, or what?

There was a Mexican kid in there, about nineteen years old, who had been locked up for three weeks, awaiting extradition to Beverly Hills on a jaywalking ticket.

The guards left the lights on all night to keep us from sleeping. It was about 104 degrees in there during the day.

We were supplied with one razor blade per day, and one small shower stall at the end of the cell block for forty-four men. The scum on the shower basin was about four inches thick. I didn't shave or take a shower the whole time I was there.

The food was not terrific. One morning I found a giant cockroach in the bottom of my cream o' wheat. I put it in an envelope with a letter to Motorhead's mother. The jail censor found it, and the warden threatened me with solitary if I ever tried anything like that again.

There were two guys they called the Chow Hounds who would literally eat anything. They would wait until everybody took the first bite of food and found it repulsive, then they would hold their trays out while the other inmates dumped their 'chop suey' onto them, forming miniature haystacks of... who the fuck knew what it was.

We were given one half hour to eat before the trays were recollected. The Chow Hounds's trays were always clean.

This gave me a real good whiff of California law, California lawyers, and an inside look at the California penal industry in action. I haven't seen anything since then to change my opinion of how poorly the system works.

More Information About What I Eat

After I got out of jail I realized that they were going to tear down the studio and widen the street, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was so sad. I had to get the wire cutters and yank all my equipment out of there and evacuate 'Studio Z.' I had to leave all those sets I had painted, the rocket ship, the mad scientist's lab -- everything.

I moved from Cucamonga into a little apartment at 1819 Bellevue Avenue, in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles, and got a job at Wallich's Music City, a record store in downtown L.A. I worked as a salesman in the singles department.

I had just enough money to make bus fare back and forth for the first week, but no money for food. So with my first paycheck I went to a little Filipino market at the bottom of the hill and bought a bag of rice, a bag of red beans, a quart of Miller High Life and some condiments to flavor the rice and beans. I went back to the house and made a big pot of stuff that I planned to live on for the next week.

I ate a big dish of it and drank some beer. My stomach swelled up as if the Alien was going to pop out. I fell off the chair, writhing in agony -- cursing the Miller High Life company.

Let's Meet Jesus

While I was working at the store, a black guy named Welton Featherstone came in, shopping for singles. We got to talking and he asked me if I'd ever been to church. I told him I'd been raised a Catholic, and he said, "No, I mean have you ever been to a real church?"

He told me about a place called the World Church, which happened to be right around the corner from where I lived. It was run by O. L. and Velma Jaggers, a husband-and-wife evangelical team. He said, "You won't believe it. Tonight's 'Baptism Night' -- you gotta go down there and check it out."

I had actually seen O. L. Jaggers on TV once -- he had a local 'religious' program that ran for a short time. During the show I saw, he stood by a blackboard and drew diagrams as part of the 'answer' to a letter he claimed to have received from a deeply troubled viewer. The letter requested a theological explanation of UFOs, and the reverend obliged with this answer:

So, I went to the World Church. It was a large Quonset hut near Temple and Alvarado. Instead of an altar it had a stage with flowers and fake gold knickknacks, displayed between an all-white piano and an all-white organ.

Over the stage was an enormous cardboard cutout of Jesus, posed like Superman in the takeoff position, projecting out, over the audience.

It was illuminated on either side by small clusters of red and blue lights -- like the ones they use in the driveways of apartment houses called 'Kon-Tiki.'

The congregation was poor -- black, Filipino, Japanese and Mexican. They were subjected to three collections during the hour I was there.

The 'baptism tank' stretched across the rear of the stage. It was a waist-high sort of aquarium-thing, filled with green water. The baptismal contestants wore white robes. Jaggers dunked each victim into the tank, dragging him (sort of by the scruff of the neck), with his head under water, the length of it. One guy couldn't hold his breath and came up gagging. It was pretty disgusting.

As I was about to leave, I heard him announce (into a handheld Neumann U-87), during the third collection, "Jesus just told me that you have another thousand dollars in your pockets." A bunch of people got out of their seats and marched down the aisle, like zombies, dishing up wads of cash. As their reward, he said, "I'm now going to rain down the fire of the Holy Ghost on you!" They put their fingertips up and started wiggling them, while Dr. Jaggers shouted: "Fire! Fire! Fire!" (into a crowded room).

The people responded by going, "Ooooo! Woooooo," as if it was really getting all over them. The organist played scary music and the red and blue lights flashed on the cardboard Jesus.

CHAPTER 4
Are We Having A Good Time Yet?

During the early days, when Paul Buff still owned the studio, I met Ray Collins. Ray had sung with a number of R&B groups since the mid-fifties, and had recorded with Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers. In 1964, he was supporting himself by working as a carpenter, and on weekends he sang with a group called the Soul Giants at a bar in Pomona called the Broadside.

Apparently he got into a fight with their guitar player, Ray Hunt, punched him out, and the guitar player quit. They needed a substitute, so I filled in for the weekend.

The Soul Giants were a pretty decent bar band. I especially liked Jimmy Carl Black, the drummer, a Cherokee Indian from Texas with an almost unnatural interest in beer. His style reminded me of the guy with the great backbeat on the old Jimmy Reed records. Roy Estrada, who was Mexican-American and had also been part of the Los Angeles R&B scene since the fifties, was the bass player. Davy Coronado was the leader and saxophone player of the band.

I played the gig for a while, and one night I suggested that we start doing original material so we could get a record contract. Davy didn't like the idea. He was worried that if we played original material we would get fired from all the nice bars we were working in.

The only things club owners wanted bands to play then were "Wooly Bully," "Louie Louie" and "In the Midnight Hour," because if the band played anything original, nobody would dance to it, and when they don't dance, they don't drink.

The other guys in the band liked my idea about a record contract and wanted to try the original stuff. Davy departed. It turned out that Davy was absolutely right -- we couldn't keep a job anyplace.

One of the places we got fired from was the Tomcat-a-Go-Go in Torrance. During this period in American Musical History, anything with "Go-Go" pasted on the end of it was really hot. All you were required to do, if you were a musician desiring steady work, was to grind your way through five sets per night of loud rhythm tracks, while girls with fringed costumes did the twist, as if that particular body movement summed up the aesthetic of the serious beer drinker.

The groups that got the most work were the ones who pretended to be English. Often they were surf bands who wore wigs so that they looked like they had long hair, or added the word Beatles somewhere in their band name -- you get the drift. Beatle clone groups were all over the place. We didn't have long hair, we didn't have band uniforms and we were ugly as fuck. We were, in the Biblical sense of the word, UNEMPLOYABLE.

A converted shoe store in Norwalk with a beer license also fired us. Of course the gig didn't pay that well: fifteen dollars per night divided by four guys.

There was no bandstand, so we were asked to play in a corner, surrounded by tables upon which three middle-aged women (the pride of Norwalk -- perhaps relatives of the owner), wearing dark tan pantyhose to hide what I imagined to be Roquefort cheese molded into the shape of human legs, dangled their putrid fringe in our faces while we played (that's right, you guessed it) "Louie Louie."

How We Got Our First Manager

While I was living in the bungalow where my stomach almost exploded (1964), I ran into Don Cerveris again. On that occasion, Don introduced me to a friend of his named Mark Cheka, a 'pop artist' from New York's East Village. Mark was about fifty and wore a beret. He was living in West Hollywood with a waitress from the Ash Grove named Stephanie, who was also sort of beatnik-looking.

The main focus of his work was a group of large paintings that looked like police department pistol targets, designed to be viewed under flashing lights, which gave the illusion that the silhouettes were jumping around. I found this a little baffling -- but what the fuck do I know from art? We hung out and had some laughs, in spite of the targets.

I had come to the conclusion that the band needed a manager, and had thought (Ow! Was I going to regret this one!) that the person required for this important position needed to be someone with an 'artistic background.' Only then, I reasoned, would our aesthetic be properly understood, and, once we had acquired a manager of such sensitivity, our future success in show business would be assured.

So, I convinced Mark to take the mysterious voyage out to Pomona (fifty miles east), where he might listen to the Mothers, live, at the Broadside. What did I know from managing? I told him that if he wanted to manage the group and could get us some gigs to go ahead.

He didn't really know how to do that. What did he know from managing? He brought in a guy named Herb Cohen, who was managing some folk and folk-rock groups and was looking for another act to pick up. Eventually they became joint managers of our band, with a contract negotiated 'on behalf of the group' by Herb's brother, an attorney named Martin (Mutt) Cohen.

Suddenly we had a Real Hollywood Manager -- an industrial professional who had actually been booking groups into Real Hollywood Nightclubs for years, and would presumably do the same for us.

After being forced (at great expense) into the Musicians' Union (local 47), we started to pick up slightly better paychecks; however, our new, highly skilled management team was taking fifteen percent off the top. Almost overnight we had jumped from starvation level to poverty level.

The Early Freak Scene in L.A.

On Mother's Day, 1964, the name of the band was officially changed to the Mothers. We had begun to build a little constituency on the psychedelic dungeon circuit.

There was a 'scene' evolving in L.A. at that time -- something very different from the 'scene' in San Francisco.

San Francisco in the mid-sixties was very chauvinistic, and ethnocentric. To the Friscoids' way of thinking, everything that came from THEIR town was really important Art, and anything from anyplace else (especially L.A.) was dogshit. Rolling Stone magazine helped to promote this fiction, nationwide.

One of the reasons musicians moved to San Francisco was to be certified as part of The Real Deal. The other was the 'Kool-Aid Bonus' at the Grateful Dead concerts.

The scene in Los Angeles was far more bizarre. No matter how 'peace-love' the San Francisco bands might try to make themselves, they eventually had come south to evil ol' Hollywood to get a record deal.

My recollection is that the highest cash advance paid for signing any group during that time was for the Jefferson Airplane -- an astounding, staggering, twenty-five thousand dollars, an unheard-of sum of money.

The Byrds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were 'It' -- and then a group called Love was 'It.' There were a few 'psychedelic' groups that never really got to be 'It,' but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves (noted for their cover version of "Hey, Joe").

When we first went to San Francisco, in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West -- guys with handlebar mustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc. By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and outlandish.

Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that fucking D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around -- like "Needles and Pins."

The blues was acceptable in San Francisco, but didn't go over in Hollywood at all. I remember the Butterfield Blues Band playing at the Trip. They were hot shit everyplace else in the country, but the people in L.A. would rather have listened to "Mr. Tambourine Man."

Just Plain Folks

I had seen Lenny Bruce a number of times at Canter's Deli, where he used to sit in a front booth with Phil Spector and eat knockwurst. I didn't really talk with him until we opened for him at the Fillmore West in 1966. I met him in the lobby between sets and asked him to sign my draft card. He said no -- he didn't want to touch it.

At that time, Lenny lived with a guy named John Judnich. John earned his living part-time by renting PA systems to local groups. A state-of-the-art system then consisted of two Altec A-7 cabinets powered by a 200-watt amplifier, and no monitor system (they hadn't been invented yet -- the old-school audio wizards had convinced everyone that it was impossible to put a microphone that close to any speaker). Vocalists had no way to hear what they were singing -- they could only hear their voices bouncing off the back wall, from the main PA. We used Judnich's system to perform in the Shrine Exposition Hall (about five thousand seats). Anyway, John used to visit every once in a while, and it was on one of these occasions that he introduced us to "Crazy Jerry."

Jerry was about thirty-five or forty, and had been in and out of mental institutions for years. He was addicted to speed. When he was a young boy, his mother (who worked for the Probation Department) presented him with a copy of Gray's Anatomy. He read it dutifully and noted that in some of the illustrations of muscles it said, "such and such a muscle, when present --," and so it was that Jerry set out to develop the "when present" muscles of the human body. He invented 'exercise devices' for those 'special areas' that had not been inhabited by muscle tissue since the book was written.

He didn't look like a bodybuilder, but he was very strong. He could bend re-bars (the steel rods used to reinforce concrete) by placing them on the back of his neck and pulling forward with his arms. As a result of this personal experimentation, he had sprouted weird lumps all over his body -- but that was just the beginning.

Somewhere along the line, Jerry discovered that he loved -- maybe was even addicted to -- electricity. He loved getting shocked, and had been arrested a number of times when unsuspecting suburbanites had discovered him in their yards, with his head pressed against the electric meter -- because he just wanted to be near it.

He and a friend once jumped over the fence of the Nichols Canyon power substation for the same reason. The friend nearly died from electrocution. Jerry escaped.

He lived for a while in Echo Park with a guy called "Wild Bill the Mannequin-Fucker," in a house filled with store mannequins. Wild Bill was a chemist who made speed. Jerry used to carry equipment and ingredients up the steep hill to the lab, in exchange for lodging and free drugs.

Wild Bill had a hobby. The mannequins in the house had been painted and fitted with rubber prosthetic devices so he could fuck them. On festive occasions, he would invite people over to "fuck his family" -- including a little girl mannequin (named Caroline Cuntley).

Jerry wanted to be a musician, so he taught himself to play the piano by using a mirror. He told me that by watching his hands in a mirror, placed "just so," it made the distance between the keys look smaller, and it was a lot easier to learn that way. He also wore a metal hat (an inverted colander) because he was afraid that people were trying to read his mind.

One morning, my wife, Gail, and I woke up to find Crazy Jerry hanging by his knees -- like a bat -- from the branch of a tree in our backyard, right outside the bedroom window. Later that night, in our basement, I made a recording of his life story.

He didn't have any teeth, so it was hard for him to talk, but in the course of a few hours we learned that, once, when he was in 'The Institution' and they were shooting him full of Thorazine, he was able to jump a twelve-foot fence and get away from the guards.

He went to his mother's house to hide out. The house was locked, so he crawled in under the house and came up in the kitchen through the bread drawer. He got in bed and went to sleep. His mother, the probation officer, came home, found him and turned him in again.

Compared to Jerry and Bill, Lenny Bruce was quite normal. At that time, according to Judnich, Lenny used to stay up all night dressed in a doctor's outfit, listening to Sousa marches and working on his legal briefs. It was sort of colorful in Southern California in those days -- but a couple of Republican Administrations and poof!

Duke of What?

In 1965, there were only three clubs in Hollywood that meant anything in terms of being seen by a record company, all of them owned by the same 'ethnic organization.'

One was called the Action, one was called the Trip, and the other was the Whisky-a-Go-Go.

The Action was a place where actors and television personalities went to hang out with hookers; the Whiskey was the permanent residence of Johnny Rivers, who played there for years; and the Trip was the big showplace where all the recording acts played when they came to town -- Donovan, the Butterfield Blues Band, Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs; bands like that all played there.

There were a few other clubs in town, but they didn't have the same status as those places. A new group coming to work on the circuit would start at the Action; then, maybe on Johnny Rivers's day off, they could play at the Whisky (but they wouldn't get their name on the marquee, which would still say "Johnny Rivers"), and, if they got a record contract, they got to play in the Trip. We eventually landed a job at the Action.

On Halloween night 1965, during the break before the last set, I was sitting on the steps in front of the place, wearing khaki work pants, no shoes, an 1890s bathing shirt and a black hornburg hat with the top pushed up.

John Wayne arrived in a tux with two bodyguards, another guy and two ladies in evening gowns -- all very drunk.

Reaching the steps, he grabbed me, picked me up and started slapping me on the back, shouting, "I saw you in Egypt and you were great. . . and then you blew me!"

I took an immediate dislike to the guy. Remember, all kinds of show people went to this club, from Warren Beatty to Soupy Sales, so it wasn't unusual for someone like "the Duke" to show up.

The place was packed. When I got up on stage to begin the last set, I announced: "Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, it's Halloween. We were going to have some important guests here tonight -- we were expecting George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party -- unfortunately, he couldn't make it -- but here's John Wayne."

As soon as I said that, he got up from his table, stumbled onto the dance floor, and started to make a speech. I leaned the microphone down so everyone could hear it; something along the lines of "--and if I'm elected, I promise to. . . ." At that point, one of his bodyguards grabbed him and made him sit down. The other one handed the microphone back to me and told me to cool it or there was going to be BIG TROUBLE.

At the end of the show, the manager of the club came over to me and said, "Be nice to the Duke, because when he gets like this he starts throwing fifty-dollar bills around."

I had to pass his table on my way out. As I went by, he got up and smashed my hat down on top of my head. I took it off and popped it back out. This apparently annoyed him, as he shouted, "You don't like the way I fix hats? I've been fixin' hats for forty years." I put it back on my head and he smashed it down again. I said, "I'm not even gonna give you a chance to apologize," and walked out.

How We Got Our First Record Deal

Not long after that, Johnny Rivers went on tour and we were hired as a temporary replacement at the Whisky-a-Go-Go. By chance, Tom Wilson, a staff producer for MGM Records, was in town. He was up the street, at the Trip, watching a 'big group.' Herb Cohen talked him into a quick visit to the Whisky. He walked in while we were playing our 'BIG BOOGIE NUMBER' -- the only one we knew, totally unrepresentative of the rest of our material.

He liked it and offered us a record deal (thinking he had acquired the ugliest-looking white blues band in Southern California), and an advance of twenty-five hundred dollars.

The average budget for an LP in those days was six to eight thousand dollars. Most albums consisted of the A and B sides of an artist's hit single, plus seven or eight other "filler tunes" -- just enough to satisfy the minimum contractual time per side (fifteen minutes).

The other industrial norm was that most groups didn't really play their own instruments for the basic tracks on their albums. They'd arrive in a Purple-Hazish condition and play the song a few times, after which the producer or A&R man would tweeze it, then the studio musicians who had been standing by would learn the tweezed version and play it -- in tune, and with a "good beat." There was a whole bunch of 'session specialists' who ghosted for the major acts then (the Monkees were the classic example of one of these acts).

We played all our own basic tracks on Freak Out!, with studio musicians added only for orchestrational color.

Hungry Freaks

Wilson was based in New York, and had gone back there after booking the dates for the sessions. We were broke. MGM didn't give us the advance right away -- the money was supposed to come later.

The producer of Run Home Slow, Tim Sullivan, still owed me some money for the film score. When I finally located him, he was working out of a building on Seward Street, in Hollywood (Decca's old scoring stage).

He didn't have any cash but, in lieu of payment, he let us use his place to rehearse in. We had the best rehearsal hall any band could ever want, but we were starving. We collected soda bottles and cashed them in, using the proceeds to buy white bread, bologna and mayonnaise.

Thanks, Jesse

Finally, the day of the first session rolled around -- about three in the afternoon at a place called TTG Recorders, Sunset Boulevard at Highland Avenue.

The MGM Records accounting representative was a stingy old guy named Jesse Kaye. Jesse walked around with his hands behind his back, pacing the floor while we were recording, making sure nobody ran up any extra overtime costs by going beyond the three hours allotted for each session.

During a break, I went into the control booth and told him: "Look, Jesse, we got a little problem here. We would like to stay on schedule. We would like to get this all done in the three hours -- these glorious three hours that you've given us to make this record -- but we don't have any money and we're all hungry. Could you lend me ten bucks?"

There was a drive-in restaurant downstairs from the studio, and I figured ten 1965 dollars would be enough to feed the whole band and get us through the session. Well, Jesse's reputation was such that, if anybody had seen him lending money to a musician, he would have been ruined. He didn't say yes and he didn't say no. I walked away, figuring that was it -- I wasn't going to ask him anymore. I went back into the studio and prepared for the next take. Jesse walked in. He had his hands behind his back. He came over, casually, and pretended to shake hands with me. There was a ten-dollar bill rolled up in his palm. He tried to pass it to me, except I didn't realize what was going on, and the money fell on the floor. He made a face like "Oh, shit!" and grabbed it up real fast, hoping nobody had seen it, and stuffed it into my hand. Without this act of kindness from Jesse, there might not have been a Freak Out! album.

Who Are the Brain Police?

Tom Wilson had returned to Los Angeles for the sessions. He was in the control booth as we began recording the first tune, "Any Way the Wind Blows." He was tapping his foot and nodding (the way record producers do in the movies). The second tune was "Who Are the Brain Police?". . .

I could see through the window that he was scrambling toward the phone to call his boss -- probably saying: "Well, uh, not exactly a 'white blues band,' but. . . sort of."

Freak Out! was a double album, and all the songs on it were about something. It wasn't as if we had a hit single and we needed to build some filler around it. Each tune had a function within an overall satirical concept.

As the sessions continued, the more enthusiastic Wilson became. About the middle of the week I told him, "I would like to rent five hundred [1965] dollars' worth of percussion equipment for a session that starts at midnight on Friday, and I want to bring all the freaks from Sunset Boulevard into the studio to do something special." He agreed.

We got the equipment and the freaks and, starting at midnight, recorded what turned out to be side four of the album. Wilson was on acid that night. I didn't know he had taken it -- he told me later. I've tried to imagine what he must have been thinking, sitting in that control room, listening to all that weird shit coming out of the speakers, and being responsible for telling the engineer, Ami Hadani (who was not on acid), what to do.

What's in a Name?

By the time Freak Out! was edited and shaped into an album, Wilson had spent twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars of MGM's money -- a ridiculous sum in those days, even for a double LP. (In fact, I believe Freak Out! was the first rock double LP.)

We were then informed that they couldn't release the record -- MGM executives had convinced themselves that no DJ would ever play a record on the air by a group called "The Mothers" (as if our name was going to be The Big Problem).

They insisted that we change it, and so the stock line is:

Freak Out! by "The Mothers of Invention" finally hit the street. Listeners at the time were convinced that I was up to my eyebrows in chemical refreshment. No way. As a matter of fact, I had several arguments with the guys in the band who were into 'consciousness-altering entertainment products.' The whole thing blew up at a band meeting when Herb Cohen wanted to get rid of Mark Cheka. Cohen said we could continue to give Mark a percentage, but he wanted to take over since, basically, Mark didn't know squat about the management business.

"Well, as long as we're cleaning house here," some of the guys thought, "let's get rid of that Zappa asshole too." Yes, folks, some members of the band wanted me to go away and leave them alone because (don't laugh) I wasn't using drugs.

The classic line of the meeting was delivered by Ray Collins: "You need to go to Big Sur and take acid with someone who believes in God." Pheeeeeuuuuuw.

Our First Tour

Undaunted by this fascinating suggestion, I continued my duties as the 'resident asshole.'

The very first Mothers of Invention tour took place in 1966, at a time when hardly anybody outside of L.A. and San Francisco had long hair. We were all ugly guys with weird clothes and long hair: just what the entertainment world needed. Fuck all those beautiful groups.

It was a low-budget promo tour, set up by MGM, taking us first to Washington, D.C., for a television show called Swingin' Time on channel 20 -- a TV dance show for the sons and daughters of our nation's leaders.

The show had put together a "Freak Out Dance Contest," and invited the contestants to dress "freakishly" for the event. How freakish were they? The weirdest guy in the room was wearing two different-colored socks.

In Detroit, we did a television show where we were asked to do something perverted: "lip-sync our hit." We didn't have a 'hit,' but the producer said, "Lip-sync your hit -- or else." So I asked, "Do you have a prop department here?" Fortunately, there was one.

From it, I gathered an assortment of random objects and built a set. We had been asked to pretend to play either "How Could I Be Such a Fool?" or "Who Are the Brain Police?" so I suggested that each member of the group choose a repeatable physical action, not necessarily in sync with (or even related to) the lyrics, and do it over and over until our spot on the show was concluded -- Detroit's first whiff of homemade prime-time Dada.

Next stop: Dallas. We flew into Love Field and found ourselves walking down a long hall, full of soldiers and sailors -- stopped dead in their tracks, staring in utter disbelief. They didn't say anything. They didn't throw anything at us. They didn't shoot us like Easy Rider -- they just stood there.

We were then whisked off to a shopping mall, to some downstairs place where yet another TV teenage dance show was in progress. We played live on that one.

The high point of the performance was Carl Franzoni, our 'go-go boy.' He was wearing ballet tights, frugging violently. Carl has testicles which are bigger than a breadbox. Much bigger than a breadbox. The looks on the faces of the Baptist teens experiencing their grandeur is a treasured memory.

My Fabulous Wife

At the end of this grueling three-city tour, I was introduced to a fascinating little vixen, employed as a secretary at the Whisky-a-Go-Go: Adelaide Gail Sloatman. It took a couple of minutes, but I fell (don't laugh) in love, and we started living together -- eventually memorializing the union in a severely ridiculous civil ceremony in 1967.

We got married a couple of days before I left for the first European tour. She was nine months pregnant, with delivery imminent. We went to the New York City Hall, arriving just before closing time. I didn't have a wedding ring -- in fact, Gail still doesn't have a wedding ring.

There was a vending machine on the counter where you picked up the license that sold ballpoint pens with "Congratulations from Mayor Lindsay" printed on them: ten cents apiece. I had to buy one in order to fill out the form.

We then rushed over to one of the little 'marrying cubicles.' It was green inside, and reminded me of a pool table. In the middle of the room was a cheesoid Formica replica-pulpit. On it was a time clock, the kind you would punch in on when you went to work. The Man In Charge punched our card, recited The Formula, and asked for The Ring. I told him I had a ballpoint pen, and pinned it on Gail's bulging maternity dress.

Yes, folks, I do have a little bit of something in common with my 'brother-in-Christ,' Pat Robertson -- except I never lied about it.

Brown Shoes Don't Make It

In its initial release, MGM reported to us that the sales of Freak Out! amounted to a paltry thirty thousand units -- not exactly a hit. Our royalty was sixty or seventy cents per double LP, which wasn't so bitchen either. On paper, at least, we had a flop. The accounting statements indicated that WE owed MGM money.

When it came time for us to do our second album, Absolutely Free, MGM proclaimed that we couldn't spend more than eleven thousand dollars on it.

How They Used to Screw You

The recording schedules were ridiculous, making it impossible to perfect anything on the album. It was typical of the kind of bullshit we had to put up with until I got my own studio.

When you record for 'a label,' you're always working on their budget -- on their schedule. When the budget runs out, that's it. If the master doesn't sound right, what the fuck do they care? It goes out anyway -- it's only 'product' to them.

During this period, I began to hear rumors about problems within MGM. They had one of the best-selling records of all time: the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago -- but it turned out that at least a quarter of a million units had disappeared out the back door of the pressing plant, and the same seemed to be true of other MGM artists' albums, including ours.

This trick was called "The Pressing Plant Overrun." It was pretty simple: the pressing plant would get an order to press, say, two thousand units of Dr. Zhivago. The guy operating the press would then be instructed (by whom? we still don't know --) to run off four thousand units, then some other guy would pull up in the middle of the night, open the back of his station wagon (or truck or whatever), the boxes of records would get dumped in, then he'd drive to another state and either sell the records to 'friendly dealers' or trade them for rooms full of furniture -- and the artists involved would get an accounting statement that showed their sales to be half of what they actually were. Everybody was having such a good time in 'flower-power-land' they didn't realize what kind of hose job they were getting.

That was only the beginning of my problems with multinational record companies. By 1984 I had sued the two industry giants, CBS and Warners, and had learned a lot more about 'creative accounting practices.'

We went through a major legal struggle with MGM over royalties on those first LPs. It took about eight years to resolve. Part of their defense in the case was based on a claim that they had had a (don't laugh) FIRE AND A FLOOD in the part of the building where the records pertaining to royalties were stored.

One Sick Motherfucker with a Razor Blade

I usually don't listen to my records once they are finished and released, but in 1968, during the second European tour, We're Only In It for the Money won the Dutch equivalent of a Grammy.

There was an award ceremony, during which I was handed a little statue -- with the album playing in the background. I noticed that whole chunks of songs were missing. Someone at MGM had been offended by the lyrics and had arbitrarily chopped portions of them out -- in one instance, about eight bars of music -- just enough to fuck up the song on the way to the bridge.

The Big Offender was a line from the song "Let's Make the Water Turn Black":

I couldn't understand why anyone would chop that out. Years later I learned that an MGM executive was convinced that the word "pad" referred to a sanitary napkin. He became obsessed with the idea that a waitress somewhere was feeding sanitary napkins to people in a restaurant, and demanded (in violation of our contract) that it be removed. That guy needs to see a doctor.

When I realized that the record had been censored, I told the people at the ceremony: "I can't accept this statue. I prefer that the award be presented to the guy who modified the record, because what you're hearing is more reflective of HIS work than mine." I handed the prize to some people from a 'countercultural' rock publication, who desecrated it nicely and put it on display in their office.

Boogers from Hell

"Let's Make the Water Turn Black" was a true story about two brothers, Ronnie and Kenny Williams -- a couple of musicians I knew in 1962 during the early Paul Buff/Pal Records era (it was Ronnie who introduced me to Paul).

It is difficult to describe these guys, their family and their 'hobbies' -- so much of it will sound like fiction -- however, let me assure you that this has all been documented on tape, in their own words.

The family was from Arkansas. The Dad (Dink) was a furniture salesman in San Bernardino, but, back in the way-back-when, he used to play 'bones' or 'spoons' in a minstrel show. To relive the golden days of yesteryear he would, from time to time, force his children to accompany him (Ronnie on guitar, Kenny on trombone) in a living room replay of a minstrel routine called "Lazy Bones."

The kids often found this to be an inconvenience, as they were fascinated by, and constantly perfecting new techniques for, The Manly Art Of Fart-Burning. Kenny explained to me that it was scientific -- that it demonstrated (this is a real quote) "Compression, ignition, combustion and exhaust."

I can't remember the Mom's name, but she was a pleasant, hardworking lady who helped pay the rent by waitressing at a place called Ed's Cafe, in Ontario.

Ronnie attended high school in Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb, dropping out in his sophomore year. While in school, he made pocket change by selling homemade 'raisin wine' to kids in his class.

It was an evil confection, made out of raisins, yeast, sugar and water -- then sun-fermented (for at least a couple of days) in mason jars on the roof of the old homestead. (If you care to try this yourself, remember, as Ronnie once explained: "You wait for the raisins to swell up to about the size of deer turds. . .")

This eventually led to trouble when, in an attempt to raise his product's octane level, he built a still in the backyard, and it exploded.

Ever the professional, he maintained a thick book of'recipes' for new and exciting beverages. He called it THE MACHA. When he finally trusted me enough to display this masterpiece, I asked him, "Why do you call it 'THE MACHA'?"

He swallowed some sinus phlegm and said, "Cuz it reminds me of the Mafia' -- hyulk, hyulk..."

After the explosion, the family moved to Ontario, California. Kenny got arrested for something (I don't know what) and went to 'reform school.' In taped interviews he refers to this experience by saying: "While I was away at boarding school --"

So, while Kenny was away at 'boarding school,' Ronnie and his pal Dwight Bement (eventually the tenor sax player for Gary Puckett and the Union Gap) had the house pretty much to themselves. Both parents were working, so the guys were in Dropout Heaven, spending their days playing poker in Ronnie's bedroom.

During the games (we can't be sure how this part got started), they began a competition of 'b