Introduction
Un livre ?
Quel livre ?

Je ne veux pas écrire un livre, mais je vais le faire quand même, car Peter Occhiogrosso va m'aider. C'est un écrivain. Il aime les livres - il les lit même. Je pense que c'est bien que les livres existent encore, mais ils m'endorment.

Nous allons procéder ainsi: Peter viendra en Californie et passera quelques semaines à enregistrer les réponses à des "questions fascinantes", puis les enregistrements seront transcrits. Peter les éditera, les mettra sur des disquettes, me les renverra, je les éditerai à nouveau, et le résultat sera envoyé à Ann Patty de Poseidon Press, et elle le fera paraître comme "un livre"

Une des raisons pour cela est la prolifération de livres stupides (dans plusieurs langues) qui prétendent être à propos de moi . Je pensais qu'il devrait y avoir au moins UN, quelque part, qui contenait de vraies choses. in it. Veuillez noter que ce livre ne prétend pas être une sorte d'histoire orale "complète". Il est présenté pour consommation uniquement à des fins de divertissement.

ALORS, QUELQUES NOTES PRELIMINAIRES:

[1] Une autobiographie est généralement écrite par quelqu'un qui pense que sa vie est vraiment étonnante. Je ne pense pas que ma vie soit étonnante en quoi que ce soit -- cependant, la possibilité de dire des choses imprimées sur des sujets tangentiels est attrayante.

[2] Les documents et / ou les transcriptions seront étiquetés comme tels.

[3] Les épigraphes à la tête des chapitres (les éditeurs aiment ces petites choses) ont été recherchées et insérées par Peter - je le mentionne car je ne voudrais pas que quiconque pense que je lisais Flaubert, Twitchell et Shakespeare toute la journée.

[4] Si votre nom est dans le livre et que vous ne vouliez pas qu'il soit là (ou si vous n'aimez pas mes commentaires), toutes mes excuses.

[5] Si votre nom ne figure pas dans le livre et que vous vous sentez "laissé de côté", je vous prie de m'excuser.

Chapitre 1
Comme je suis bizarre,
EN TOUS CAS ?

Ce livre existe sur le principe que quelqu'un, quelque part, s'intéresse à qui je suis, à comment je suis devenu ainsi et à ce dont je parle.

Pour répondre à la première question imaginaire, permettez-moi de commencer par expliquer QUI JE NE SUIS PAS. Voici deux "légendes populaires sur Frank Zappa "...

Parce que j'ai enregistré une chanson intitulée "Son of Mr. Green Genes" sur l'album Hot Rats en 1969, les gens croient depuis des années que le personnage qui porte ce nom dans l'émission télévisée Captain Kangaroo (joué par Lumpy Brannum) était mon "vrai". Papa. Non, il ne l'était pas.

L'autre fantasme est que j'ai une fois "pris la merde sur scène". Cela a été proposé avec de nombreuses variantes, y compris (mais sans s'y limiter):

J'étais dans un club londonien appelé Speak Easy en 1967 ou 68. Un membre d'un groupe appelé The Flock, qui enregistrait pour Columbia à l'époque, s'est approché de moi et m'a dit:

J'ai dit: "Je n'ai jamais mangé de la merde sur scène." Il avait l'air vraiment déprimé - comme si je venais de lui briser le cœur.

Pour votre info les gars: je n'ai jamais pris une merde sur scène, et la consommation la plus proche de la merde que j'ai eue, c'était au buffet du Holiday Inn à Fayetteville, Caroline du Nord, en 1973.

Informations plus importantes pour les personnes concernées par ce que je mange

Je n'étais pas fou de la plupart des aliments que ma mère préparait, comme les pâtes aux lentilles. C'était l'un des plats les plus détestés de mon enfance. Elle en faisait pour une semaine dans un gros pot. Après quelques jours dans la glacière, ça noircissait.

Mes plats préférés à l'époque étaient la tarte aux myrtilles, les huîtres frites et les anguilles frites, mais j'aimais aussi beaucoup les sandwiches au maïs: pain blanc et purée de pommes de terre avec du maïs en conserve. (On reviendra sur ce fascinant sujet, car il semble avoir tellement d'importance pour certaines personnes dans l'auditoire).

Le truc ennuyeux et basique

Qu'en est-il de cette épigraphe, hein? Peter, tu me fais craquer déjà. Ok, on y va. . . Mon véritable nom est Frank Vincent Zappa (pas Francis -- Je l'expliquerai plus tard). Je suis né le 21 décembre 1940 à Baltimore, Maryland. Quand je suis sorti, j'étais tout noir - ils pensaient que j'étais mort. Je vais bien maintenant.

Mes origines sont sicilienne, grecque, arabe et française. La mère de ma mère était française et sicilienne, et son père était Italien (de Naples). Elle était la première génération. Le côté gréco-arabe vient de mon père. Il est né dans un Village sicilien appelé Partinico, et s'est approché de l'un des bateaux des immigrés quand il était enfant.

Il travaillait dans le salon de coiffure de son père sur les quais du Maryland. Pour un sou par jour (ou un sou par semaine, je ne m'en souviens pas), il se tenait sur une boîte et faisait mousser le visage des marins afin que son père puisse les raser. Beau travail.

Finalement, il est allé à la fac à Chapel Hill, en Caroline du Nord, et a joué de la guitare dans une sorte de trio de 'crooners ambulants'. (Je reçois toujours des cartes d'anniversaire de la compagnie d'assurances appartenant à Jack Wardlaw, le joueur de banjo.)

Ils allaient de fenêtre de dortoir en fenêtre de dortoir où ils se mettaient à jouer des mélodies telles que "Little Red Wing". Il faisait partie de l'équipe de lutte et une fois son diplôme obtenu, il a enseigné l'histoire à Loyola, dans le Maryland.

Mes parents parlaient italien à la maison pour que les enfants ne sachent pas de quoi ils parlaient - c'était probablement de l'argent, puisque nous semblions ne jamais en avoir. Je suppose que c'était pratique pour eux d'avoir un "code secret" - mais ne pas apprendre la langue aux enfants peut avoir quelque chose à voir avec leur désir de s'assimiler. (Il n'était pas à la mode d'être "d'origine étrangère" aux États-Unis pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.)

Nous habitions auparavant dans les logements de l'armée à Edgewood, dans le Maryland. Il y avait une famille - les Knights - que mon père appelait "cette bande de hillbilly là-bas". Un jour, Archie Knight se disputa avec mon père et tout de suite après, papa courait vers la maison en criant: "Prends le pistolet, Rosie! Prends l'arme à feu!"

C'était la première fois que je savais qu'il avait un fusil (un pistolet chromé .38, rangé dans un tiroir à chaussettes). Ma mère l'implorait de ne pas tirer sur le gars. Heureusement, il a eu le bon sens de l'écouter.

À cause de cet incident, je savais où était l'arme. Je l'ai sorti un jour et je me souviens avoir pensé: "C'est le meilleur pistolet que j'ai jamais vu! " Alors, un jour que personne ne regardait, je l'ai utilisé pour tirer un seul coup et les "bouts bleus" que j'avais coupés au bout de quelques allumettes de cuisine en bois.

Mes parents ont été dérangés lorsqu'ils ont découvert que j'avais collé le percuteur.

Les parents de ma mère avaient un restaurant - également sur le front de mer du Maryland. Elle avait l'habitude de raconter une histoire à propos d'un gars qui est entré et a commencé une bagarre. Je crois que c'est le père de ma mère qui a pris une de ces grosses fourchettes qu'ils utilisaient pour prendre des pommes de terre dans de l'eau bouillante et poignardé le gars dans le crâne avec. Il n'est pas mort - à la place, il s'est enfui, la fourche sortant du haut de la tête comme une antenne.

Le père de mon père s'est rarement baigné. Il aimait s'asseoir sur le porche avec des couches de vêtements. Il aimait boire du vin, et a commencé chaque jour avec deux verres de Bromo Seltzer.

La mère de ma mère ne parlait pas anglais, elle nous racontait donc des histoires en italien - comme celle sur le mano pelusa - la main poilue. "Mano pelusa! Vene qua!" disait-elle avec une voix de 'grand-mère effrayante "- cela était censé signifier " Main poilue! viens ici! " - puis elle courait ses doigts le long de mon bras. C'est ce que faisaient les gens quand il n'y avait pas de télévision.

Mes premiers souvenirs d'enfance ont été de porter un petit costume de marin avec un sifflet en bois sur une ficelle autour de mon cou, aller à l'église tout le temps et s'agenouiller beaucoup.

Nous avons vécu dans une pension de famille une fois, quand j'étais très petit. Je pense que cela aurait pu être à Atlantic City. La dame qui possédait la pension avait un poméranien et le poméranien avait l'habitude de manger de l'herbe et vomir des choses qui ressemblaient à des boulettes de viande blanches.

Plus tard, nous avons habité dans l'une de ces maisons en rangée de Park Heights Avenue, dans le Maryland. Nous avions des planchers de bois lourdement cirés, avec des carpettes. La tradition à cette époque était de tout cirer à fond, jusqu'à ce que vous puissiez voir votre visage dedans (rappelez-vous, il n'y avait pas de télévision, donc les gens avaient le temps de faire ce genre de choses) - et l'autre tradition était: quand papa est rentré du travail, vous courrez l'accueillir à la porte.

Une fois, quand mon père rentrait du travail à la maison, mon frère cadet, Bobby, a couru plus vite que moi et est arrivé. premier à la porte. (C'était une porte avec de petites vitres.) Il l'ouvrit, serra papa dans ses bras, puis ferma la porte. Je suis arrivé en courant et j'ai dérapé sur une carpette et finis le bras gauche à travers la vitre. Je les ai entendu dire qu'ils devraient appeler un médecin pour le recoudre. Je me suis plaint tellement qu'ils n'ont pas cousu - Juste me coller un tas de pansements et je me suis retrouvé avec une cicatrice. Je ne supporte pas les aiguilles.

J'avais des dents horribles, alors mes parents m'emmenaient chez un dentiste italien qui avait un équipement unique - un croisement entre une scie à chaîne et une machine à coudre. Il mettait la chose dans ma bouche et ça faisait voodn-voodn-voodn-voodnnnnnn - pas de novocaïne. J'ai appris à redouter le son du mot 'dentiste.'

Mes parents ont estimé qu'ils devaient consulter un dentiste italien , car ils ne pouvaient pas faire confiance à un de ces blancs. (probablement liés à une certaine sorte de hillbilly) , et c'est ainsi que j'ai fait la connaissance de l'infâme Dr. Rocca. Il aurait été sensationnel comme moine diabolique dans Le Nom de la rose.

Mon premier casque spatial

Mon père était météorologue à l'arsenal d'Edgewood. Ils faisaient du gaz toxique là-bas pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Je suppose donc que le météorologue aurait dû déterminer la direction dans laquelle le vent soufflait lorsqu'il était temps tirer les choses.

Il avait l'habitude de rapporter du matériel chez moi du laboratoire pour que je puisse jouer avec: béchers, flasques de Florence, petites boîtes de petri remplies de mercure - gouttes de mercure. J'avais l'habitude de jouer avec tout le temps. Le sol de ma chambre était couvert de cette saleté faite de mercure et de poussière.

Une des choses que j'aimais faire était de verser du mercure sur le sol et de taper dessus avec un marteau. Ca giclait partout. J'ai vécu dans le mercure.

Lorsque le DDT a été inventé, mon père en a rapporté à la maison - il y en avait tout un sac dans le placard. Je ne l'ai pas mangé ou quoi que ce soit, mais il disait que j'aurais pu. - il était censé être "en sécurité", il n'a tué que punaises.

Les parents siciliens font les choses différemment. Si je disais que j'avais mal à l'oreille, mes parents chauffaient de l'huile d'olive et lea versait dans mon oreille - ce qui faisait mal comme un baisemère - mais ils vous disent qu'il est censé faire du bien. Quand on est enfant, on ne discute pas à ce sujet.

J'ai passé les cinq ou six premières années de ma vie avec du coton qui pendait à mes oreilles - jaune huile d'olive.

Avec mes maux d'oreille et mon asthme, j'avais des problèmes de sinus. Il y avait un "nouveau traitement" pour cette maladie selon les bruits de quartier. Cela impliquait de fourrer du radium dans vos cavités nasales. (Avez-vous déjà entendu cela?) Mes parents m'ont emmené chez encore un autre médecin italien, et, même si je ne savais pas ce qu'ils allaient me faire, il ne semblait pas que ce serait trop amusant. Le docteur avait un long fil de fer - peut-être long d'un pied ou plus, avec au bout une boulette de radium. Il me l'a fourré dans le nez et dans les sinus des deux côtés. (J'aurais dû vérifier si mon mouchoir brillait dans le noir.)

Un autre remède miracle qui venait de sortir était le sulfa. L'hiver était glacial dans cette maison au 15 rue Dexter. Les murs étaient si fins - c'était comme une maison en carton. Nous avions l'habitude de porter des pyjamas à trappe en flanelle. Le matin, pour nous réchauffer, nous nous mettions près du poêle à charbon dans la cuisine.

Un jour, la trappe du pyjama de mon frère cadet a pris feu. Mon père est arrivé en courant et a combattu le feu avec ses mains nues. Ses deux mains et le dos de mon frère étaient complètement brûlés. Le médecin a mis du sulfa sur eux et aucun d'eux n'a été marqué.

Pour contribuer à payer le loyer, mon père se portait volontaire pour des tests sur humains d'agents chimique (peut-être même biologique). On les appelait des 'patch tests.'

L'armée ne vous dit pas ce qu'elle mettait sur votre peau - et vous avez acceptez de ne pas gratter ou regarder sous le pansement - et ils payaient dix dollars par patch. Ensuite, ils l'enlevaient après quelques semaines.

Mon père revenait à la maison avec trois ou quatre de ces choses sur ses bras et différentes parties de son corps chaque semaine. Je ne sais pas ce que c'était, ni quels effets à long terme sur la santé cela aurait pu avoir sur lui (ou sur l'un des les enfants qui sont nés ensuite).

Il y avait des réservoirs de gaz moutarde à moins de deux kilomètres de chez nous, alors tout le monde dans ce projet de logement devait avoir un masque à gaz dans la maison, pour chaque membre de la famille.

Le gaz moutarde fait exploser les vaisseaux dans vos poumons, ce qui vous fait vous noyer dans votre propre sang.

Nous avions un rack au bout du couloir avec des masques valant une blinde. Je portais le mien tout le temps dans la cour - c'était mon casque spacial. Un jour, j'ai décidé de savoir comment cela fonctionnait, alors j'ai pris un ouvre-boîte et ouvert le filtre ( l'extrayant par conséquent). En tout état de cause, j'ai découvert ce qu'il y avait dedans - charbon de bois, filtres en papier et différentes couches de cristaux, y compris, je pense, le permanganate de potassium.

Avant de jeter du gaz moutarde sur un champ de bataille, ils possédaient une autre substance appelée chloropicrine, . une poussière qui provoquait des vomissements - ils l'appelaient "le truc à vomir". La poussière se glisse sur les bords du masque du soldat, le faisant vomir. S'il ne retirait pas son masque, il pourrait se noyer dans son propre vomi, et s'il l'enlève - pour laisser sortir les morceaux - le gaz moutarde le ferait crever.

J'ai toujours été étonné que les gens soient payés pour comprendre comment faire ce genre de choses.

La deuxième partie de mon enfance

La deuxième partie de mon enfance (êtes-vous sûr de vouloir connaître ce genre de choses?) se déroule principalement en Californie, quand j'avais environ dix ou douze ans. Premièrement, je vais vous dire comment nous sommes arrivés là.

J'étais si souvent malade dans le Maryland, maman et papa voulaient bouger. La première fois que j'ai réussi à m'échapper de cet état, c'est quand mon père a trouvé un travail en Floride - un autre poste de la fonction publique, cette fois dans la balistique, quelque chose sur les trajectoires des obus. C'était encore la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Mes souvenirs de Floride comprennent:

[1] A Opa-Locka, y'avait beaucoup de moustiques et si vous oubliiez le pain une nuit, le lendemain, des cheveux verts lui poussent dessus. [2] De temps en temps, nous devions nous cacher sous le lit et éteindre toutes les lumières car quelqu'un pensait que les Allemands allaient arriver. [3] Mon père faisait la margarine en pressant un point rouge scellé dans un sac en plastique un truc blanc qui, une fois écrasé, faisait jaunir le truc blanc, donnant l'illusion de beurre. [4] Mon frère s'est ébouillanté les fesses et mon père a dû lui péter des cloques (la formation en margarine a probablement aidé), et il y a eu beaucoup de cris. [5] On m'a dit de faire attention aux alligators car ils mangeaient parfois des enfants. [6] Tout ressemblait à Technicolor par rapport à Baltimore. [7] J'ai beaucoup joué dehors, grimpant aux arbres, ce qui a provoqué l'apparition d'un champignon sur mon coude. [8] Hormis cela, ma santé s'est améliorée et j'ai pris un pied de plus. [9] Ma mère a eu le mal du pays et, comme j'ai grandi, a pensé qu'il était normal de revenir à Baltimore. [10] Nous sommes retournés à Baltimore et je suis tombé malade à nouveau.

Edgewood, Maryland, était en quelque sorte en campagne. Il y avait un petit bois et une crique avec des écrevisses dedans, juste au bout de Dexter Street. J'y jouais avec Leonard Allen.

Même si j'étais malade tout le temps, Edgewood était plutôt amusant, mais lorsque nous sommes retournés dans le Maryland, nous ne sommes pas allés. à Edgewood - nous avons déménagé dans une maison en rangée dans la ville et je détestais ça.

Je ne pense pas que mes parents l'aimaient beaucoup non plus, parce que peu de temps après, ils parlaient de déménager en Californie. Mon père avait reçu une autre offre de travail au Dugway Proving Ground dans l'Utah (où ils font du gaz neurotoxique), mais nous avons eu de la chance - il ne l'a pas pris. Au lieu de cela, il a pris un job à l' école navale post-universitaire de Monterey, où il enseignait la métallurgie. Je n'avais alors aucune idée de ce que ce bordel voulait dire.

Alors, en plein hiver, nous sommes partis dans notre Henry-J (une désuette et très inconfortable, petite voiture pas cher fabriquée alors par Kaiser ), via la Route du Sud, en Californie. Le siège arrière d'une 'Henry-J' était une planche de contreplaqué, recouverte d'environ un pouce de kapok et d'un matériau de rembourrage rigide en tweed. J'ai passé deux semaines enthousiasmantes sur cette planche à repasser de l'enfer.

Mon père croyait (comme tout le monde sur la côte Est) que la Californie était ensoleillée et chaude. Cela l'a amené à arrêter la voiture quelque part dans les Carolines et à le présenter à une famille noire quelque peu étonnée. à proximité de l'autoroute, tous de nos vêtements chauds pour l'hiver, convaincus qu'on n'aurait jamais plus besoin de cette merde.

Quand nous sommes arrivés à Monterey (une ville côtière du nord de la Californie), il a fait un froid glacial. Pluie et brouillard tout le temps. Oops.

Chimie en Californie du Nord

À cause du travail de mon père, je suis passé assez souvent d'école en école. Je n'aimais pas spécialement ça, mais il faut dire que je n'appréciait pas grand'chose à cette époque. Une "sortie de fin de semaine" à cette période impliquait parfois de s'entasser dans l' Henry-J et en direction de Salinas, un endroit à proximité où ils cultivent de la laitue, en suivant les camions, en attendant qu'elles tombent. Quand cela se produisait, mon père arrêtait la voiture, les ramassait, balayait les morceaux d'asphalte, les jettait à l'arrière avec moi, on les emmenait à la maison et les faisait bouillir .

Je n'ai pas aimé être pauvre. On aurait dit que tout ce que je voulais faire d'amusant, coûtait trop cher - et quand vous êtes un enfant et que vous ne pouvez pas faire des choses amusantes, vous allez vous ennuyer ou être insatisfait ou les deux.

Par exemple, j'aurais aimé avoir un set de chimie. À cette époque, si vous aviez le grand set Gilbert Chemistry, le livret qui l'accompagnait vous apprenait à fabriquer des choses comme du gaz lacrymogène.

À l'âge de six ans, je savais comment fabriquer de la poudre à canon. Je savais quels étaient les ingrédients et je je n'avais qu'une envie c'était de me les procurer tous et en faire. J'avais tout cet attirail chimique à la maison, et je prétendais mélanger les ingrédients - rêver du jour où une de mes petites préparations pourrait effectivement exploser.

Une fois, je pensais avoir mis au point une formule pour un nouveau gaz toxique lorsque la potion liquide sur laquelle je travaillais (basée en grande partie sur du Windex) est entré en contact avec du zinc.

Mon père voulait que je sois ingénieur. Je pense qu'il a été déçu que je n'ait pas d'aptitude pour l'arithmétique et les autres prérequis.

Ils avaient l'habitude de donner aux enfants de sixième année un test appelé le test de préférences Kuder. Il fallait coller une épingle dans la page, dans les cases que vous avez sélectionnées. Le test était censé déterminer ce que vous seriez le mieux adapté à faire, en termes d'emploi, pour le reste de votre vie. Mes résultats de test ont indiqué que mon destin était de devenir secrétaire. J'ai obtenu le meilleur score dans la catégorie "personnel de bureau".

Mon plus gros problème, tout au long de l'école, c'est que les choses qu'ils essayaient de m'enseigner n'avaient pas tendance à à m'intéressre. J'ai grandi avec les gaz toxiques et les explosifs - avec les enfants des personnes qui les construisaient. Qu'est-ce que je m'en foutais de l'algèbre...

Le contenu de l'ancien garage

Nous sommes passés de Monterey à Pacific Grove, une ville tranquille à proximité. J'ai passé mes heures de loisirs à construire des marionnettes et modéliser des avions et fabriquer des explosifs artisanaux à partir des ingrédients que je pourrais trouver.

Un jour, un ami a dit: "Vous voyez ce garage de l'autre côté de la rue? Il est verrouillé depuis des années. Je me demande ce qu'il ya dedans. "

On a creusé sous la paroi latérale. Il y avait un tas de caisses, pleines de balles de mitraillettes de calibre cinquante. On en a piqué un tas, enlevé les têtes avec des pinces, et extrait la "poudre à canon" - seulement, ça ne ressemblait pas à de la poudre à canon. Ca ressemblait à de petites paillettes vert-noir (je pense que cela s'appelait ballistite). C'était un membre de la famille des poudres sans fumée (nitrocellulose) - je n'en avais jamais vu auparavant.

Nous l'avons mis dans un tube de papier toilette et l'avons placé dans un tas de terre au milieu d'un terrain vide et éclairé en utilisant de la guimauve comme fusible (ce plastique brillant et plat avec lequel on fabrique des porte-clés en camp d'été).

Lorsqu'elle est emballée de manière lâche, la ballistite produit une pluie de petites boules de feu orange jaunâtre.

L'autre chose qui s'est avérée être une explosion gratifiante étaient les balles de ping-pong poudrées. Nous passions des heures à remplir des balles de ping-pong de poudre avec une lime queue de rat. J'ai eu l'idée quand j'ai lu l'histoire d'un gars qui s'est échappé de prison en fabriquant une bombe à partir de cartes à jouer. L'article disait que les cartes à jouer étaient enduites d'une sorte de matériau en cellulose, et le condamné avait tout raclé et accumulé en une poussière plastique.

Le boîtier de la bombe était un rouleau de papier hygiénique enveloppé de ruban adhésif. Il s'est fait sortir de prison avec. Je me suis dit: "Il ya un indice là quelque part."

Comment je me suis presque explosé les couilles

Auparavant, on pouvait acheter des pétards Single-Shot chez Hobby Store. Ceux-ci étaient meilleures que celles en petits rouleaux car ils avaient plus de poudre et faisaient un plus grand boum. J'ai passé des heures avec mon couteau X-Acto, è couper le papier et accumuler les charges coupées dans un bocal. À côté de ça, un autre pot plein de mes semi-léthales balles de ping-pong poudrées.

Un après-midi, j'étais assis dans notre garage - un vieux bâtiment en ruine avec un sol en terre battue, comme celui avec les balles de mitraillettes. C'était après le 4 juillet et les gouttières de notre quartier étaient jonchées de tubes de feux d'artifice utilisés. J'en ai recueilli quelques-uns et j'étais en train de recharger l'un d'eux avec ma formule secrète.

Je l'avais calé entre mes jambes, en le remplissant d'une couche de ceci et d'une couche de cela, en tassant chaque couche avec une baguette.

Quand je suis arrivé au niveau des Single-Shots, j'ai dû appuyer trop fort et la charge s'est enflammée. Il a explosé un grand cratère dans le sol en terre battue, a ouvert les portes et m'a projeté quelques mès en arrière, les boules en premier. J'aurais certainement pû m'échapper de prison avec celui-là.

La fin de ma carrière scientifique

J'ai continué à m'intéresser aux choses qui font boom; en dépit de cet incident.

J'avais un copain à San Diego vers 1956 qui était également intéressé par les explosifs. Nous expérimentions depuis environ un mois, pour finalement remplir un pot de mayonnaise rempli au quart de substance qui était une combinaison de carburant de fusée solide (cinquante pour cent de zinc en poudre, cinquante pour cent de soufre) et de poudre à bombe puante.

Lors de la soirée portes ouvertes, nous sommes partis en stop à l'école avec le pot, emprunté des gobelets en papier à la cafétéria, versé la poudre à l'intérieur. On les a distribuées à nos amis et a allumé de petits incendies dans toute l'école (tandis que les parents étaient assis dans les salles de classe, revisant les horaires de leurs enfants).

Le lendemain, j'ai trouvé mon casier (où j'avais rangé le reste du pot) bouclé.

Peu de temps après, dans la classe d'anglais de Miss Ivancic, j'ai été invité à visiter le bureau du doyen, afin que je puisse être présenté au prévôt des incendies.

Ils m'ont jeté dehors de l'école et allaient me mettre en probation, mais ma mère a plaidé à l'agent (qui se trouvait être italien) et a expliqué que mon père était sur le point d'être transféré de San Diego à Lancaster - et ils m'ont laissé partir. Ceci a conclu la première phase de ma carrière scientifique.

Chapitre 2
Ainsi va le voisinage

Vers l'âge de douze ans (1951 ou 1952), je me suis intéressé à la batterie. Je suppose que beaucoup de jeunes garçons pensent que la batterie est excitante, mais ce n'était pas mon idée d'être un batteur de rock and roll ou quelque chose du genre, car le rock and roll n'était pas encore inventé. J'étais juste intéressé par les sons d'une chose sur laquelle une personne pouvait battre.

J'ai commencé avec des percussions orchestrales, en apprenant tous les rudiments - appelés flams, ruffs, ratamacues et paradiddles. J'ai suivi un cours collectif d'été à Monterey avec un professeur nommé Keith McKillop. Au lieu de tambours, il nous faisait pratiquer sur des planches de bois. Nous devions nous tenir devant les planches et pratiquer les rudiments utilisés dans les percussions écossaises.

Après cela, j'ai supplié mes parents de me procurer une caisse claire que je pratiquais dans le garage. Quand ils ne pouvaient plus se permettre de louer la caisse claire, j'ai commencé à jouer sur les meubles - en battant la peinture des bureaux et des choses comme ça.

En 1956, je jouais dans un groupe de R&B de lycée appelé The Ramblers. Nous avions l'habitude de répéter dans le salon du pianiste, Stuart Congdon - son père était prédicateur. Je pratiquais sur des pots et des casseroles, tenus entre mes genoux comme des bongos. J'ai finalement persuadé mes potes d'acheter une vraie batterie (d'occasion, d'un gars dans la rue, pour environ cinquante dollars). Je n'ai pris livraison de la batterie qu'une semaine avant notre premier concert. Comme je n'avais jamais appris à coordonner mes mains et mes pieds, je n'étais pas très bon pour garder le temps avec la pédale de la grosse caisse.

Le chef d'orchestre, Elwood "Junior" Madeo, nous avait trouvé un travail dans un endroit appelé Uptown Hall, à la 40ème et Mead. dans le quartier Hillcrest de San Diego. Notre tarif: sept dollars - pour l'ensemble du groupe.

Sur le chemin du concert, je me suis rendu compte que j'avais oublié mes baguettes (mes seules), et nous avons dûl; retraverser la ville pour les récupérer. Finalement, j'ai été viré parce qu'ils disaient que je jouais trop des cymbales.

Il est difficile d'être un batteur en formation, car très peu d'appartements sont suffisamment insonorisés pour pratiquer. (D'où viennent les bons batteurs vraiment ?)

Les albums de rock and roll ne sont pas apparus sur le marché avant plusieurs années après l'invention du rock. Au début des années cinquante, les adolescents achetaient des 78 ou des 45 tours.

Le premier album rock que j'ai vu remonte aux alentours de 1957 - Teenage Dance Party. La couverture montrait un un groupe d'ADOS TRÈS BLANCS, dansant, avec des confettis qui pendaient un peu partout près de bouteilles de soda. À l'intérieur était une collection de chansons de groupes de doo-wop noirs.

À l'époque, ma collection de disques se composait de cinq ou six singles rythm and blues de 78 tours. Comme j'étais un adolescent de la classe moyenne inférieure, le prix de détail de tous les types de vinyles hi-fi à rotation lente semblait totalement hors de question.

Un jour, je suis tombé sur un article concernant le magasin de disques de Sam Goody dans le magazine Look qui faisait l'éloge de ce merveilleux marchand. L'auteur déclarait que M. Goody pouvait vendre n'importe quoi - et à titre d'exemple, il a mentionné qu'il avait même réussi à vendre un album intitulé Ionisation.

L'article poursuit en disant: "Cet album n'est que de la batterie - c'est dissonant et terrible; la pire musique du monde. " Ahh! Oui! Ca c'est pour moi!

Je me suis demandé où je pourrais trouver un tel disque, car je vivais à El Cajon, en Californie - un genre de petite ville de cow-boy près de San Diego.

Il y avait une ville juste en haut de la colline appelée La Mesa - un peu plus branchée (il y avait un magasin hi-fi). Quelque temps plus tard, je passais la nuit chez Dave Franken, un ami qui vivait à La Mesa, et nous nous sommes retrouvés au hi-fi - il y avait une vente sur les disques de R & B.

Après avoir parcouru le rack et trouvé deux disques de Joe Huston, je me dirigeai vers la caisse et jetai un coup d'oeil au bac LP. J'ai remarqué une étrange couverture en noir et blanc avec un mec là-dessus qui avait les cheveux gris crépus et ressemblait à un scientifique fou. Je pensais que c'était génial qu'un scientifique fou puisse faire un disque. Alors je l'ai ramassé - et voilà, le disque avec "Ionisation" dessus.

L'auteur de l'article du Look s'était légèrement trompé - le titre exact était The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, volume I, , y compris "Ionisation", entre autres pièces, sur une étiquette obscure appelée EMS (Elaine Music Store). Le numéro d'enregistrement était 401.

J'ai remis en place les disques de Joe Huston et vérifié mes poches pour voir combien d'argent j'avais - je pense que je devais avoir environ 3,75 $. Je n'avais jamais acheté d'album auparavant, mais je savais qu'ils devaient coûl;ter cher car la plupart des gens qui en achetaient étaient âgés. J'ai demandé au type à la caisse combien coûl;tait le SME 401.

"Le gris dans la boîte?" dit-il. "5,95 $."

Je cherchais cet album depuis plus d'un an et je n'allais pas abandonner. Je lui ai dit que j'avais 3,75 $. Il y réfléchit une minute et dit: "Nous utilisons cet enregistrement pour démontrer la qualité hi-fi avec - mais personne ne les achète quand on les utilise. Je suppose que si vous le voulez à ce point, vous pouvez l'avoir pour 3,75 $. "

Je ne pouvais pas attendre pour l'entendre. Ma famille avait un véritable lecteur de disques lo-fi, un Decca. C'était une boîte d'environ quatre pouces de profondeur, assis sur de courtes jambes en métal (parce que le haut-parleur était dessous), et il avait un de ces vieux bras de lecture sur lesquels il faut mettre une pièce dessus pour le maintenir. Il pouvait jouer les trois vitesses, mais ça n'avait jamais été réglé sur 33 1/3 auparavant.

Le tourne-disque était dans le coin du salon où ma mère repassait. Quand elle l'a acheté, ils lui ont donné un disque de "The Little Shoemaker", créé par un groupe de chanteurs de garçons blancs d'âge moyen sur Mercury. Elle avait l'habitude d'écouter "The Little Shoemaker" pendant qu'elle repassait, alors c'était le seul endroit où je pouvais écouter mon nouvel album de Varèse.

J'ai augmenté le volume au maximum (pour obtenir un maximum de "fi") et placé avec soin le aiguille polyvalente à pointe en osmium sur la spirale d'introduction de "l'ionisation". J'ai une bonne mère catholique qui aime regarder Roller Derby. Quand elle a entendu ce qui est sorti de ce petit haut-parleur au bas du Decca, elle m'a regardé comme si j'étais débile.

Il y avait des sirènes, des caisses claires, des grosses caisses, un rugissement de lion et toutes sortes de sons étranges. Elle m'a interdit de rejouer ce disque dans le salon. Je lui ai dit que je pensais que c'était vraiment génial et Je voulais l'écouter jusqu'au bout. Elle m'a dit de prendre le tourne-disque dans ma chambre.

Ma mère n'a plus jamais entendu "Le petit cordonnier".

Le tourne-disque est resté dans ma chambre et j'ai écouté l'EMS 401 maintes et maintes fois en parcourant les notes d'accompagnement pour toute information que je pourrais glaner. Je ne connaissait pas tous les termes musicaux, mais je les mémorisai quand même.

Tout au long du lycée, chaque fois que les gens venaient, je les forçais à écouter Varèse - parce que je pensais que c'était le test ultime de leur intelligence. Ils pensaient aussi que j'étais débile.

"Déserts"

À mon quinzième anniversaire, ma mère m'a dit qu'elle dépenserait cinq dollars pour moi (beaucoup d'argent pour nous à l'époque), et m'a demandé ce que je voulais. J'ai dit, "Bien, au lieu de m'acheter quelque chose, pourquoi ne me laisses-tu pas faire appel téléphonique longue distance? " (Personne à la maison n'avait jamais passé un appel téléphonique longue distance.)

J'ai décidé d'appeler Edgard Varèse. J'en ai déduit qu'une personne qui ressemblait à un scientifique fou pourrait seulement vivre dans un endroit appelé Greenwich Village. Alors j'ai appelé l'information de New York et demandé s'ils avaient une entrée pour Edgard Varèse. Effectivement, ils l'avaient. Ils m'ont même donné l'adresse: 188, rue Sullivan.

Sa femme, Louise a répondu au téléphone. Elle était très gentille et m'a dit qu'il n'était pas là - il était à Bruxelles à travailler sur une composition pour l'exposition universelle ("Poème électronique") - et m'a suggéré de rappeler quelques semaines après. Je ne me souviens pas exactement de ce que j'ai dit quand je lui ai enfin parlé - probablement quelque chose comme "Gee - j'aime vraiment votre musique."

Varèse m'a dit qu'il travaillait sur une nouvelle pièce intitulée "Déserts", qui m'ae ravi depuis. Lancaster, Californie, est dans le désert. Quand tu as quinze ans et que tu vis dans le désert de Mojave et que tu découvres que le plus grand compositeur du monde (qui ressemble aussi à un scientifique fou) travaille dans un laboratoire secret de Greenwich village sur une chanson sur ta ville natale (pour ainsi dire), tu peux être très excité .

Je pense toujours que "Déserts" est à propos de Lancaster, même si les notes de pochette du disque Columbia insistent pour quelque chose de plus philosophique.

Pendant mes études secondaires, j'ai cherché des informations sur Varèse et sa musique. J'ai trouvé un livre qui avait une photo de lui dans sa jeunesse et une citation disant qu'il serait aussi heureux à cultiver du raisin qu'à être compositeur. J'ai aimé ça.

Stravinsky et Webern

Le deuxième 33 tours que j'ai acheté est celui de Stravinsky. J'ai trouvé un enregistrement pas cher (sur Camden) de Le Sacre du Printemps interprété par l'Orchestre Symphonique Mondial. (Ca fait assez officiel, hein?) La couverture était un truc improbable, abstrait vert et noir et portait une étiquette en papier magenta avec un lettrage noir. J'ai aimé Stravinsky presque autant que Varèse.

L'autre compositeur qui m'a ému - je ne pouvais pas croire que quelqu'un écrive de la musique comme ça - était Anton Webern. J'ai entendu un premier enregistrement sur l'étiquette Dial interprété par un artiste nommé David Stone Martin. - il y avait un ou deux quatuors à cordes de Webern et sa symphonie op.21 de l'autre côté. J'ai adoré ce disque, mais il était aussi très différent de Stravinsky et de Varèse.

À l'époque, je ne connaissais rien à la musique dodécaphonique, mais j'aimais la façon dont elle sonnait. Comme je n'ai pas eu de formation musicale, cela ne me faisait aucune différence si j'écoutais Lightnin' Slim, ou un chant du groupe appelé The Jewels (qui avait une chanson alors appelée "Angel in My Life"), ou Webern, ou Varèse, ou Stravinsky. Pour moi, c'était de la bonne musique.

Mon éducation toute américaine

Quelques professeurs à l'école m'ont vraiment aidé. M. Kavelman, directeur de l'orchestre Mission Bay High, m'a donné la réponse à l'une des questions musicales brûlantes de ma jeunesse. Je suis venu vers lui un jour avec une copie de "Angel in My Life" - mon air R & B préféré à l'époque. Je ne comprenais pas pourquoi j'aimais autant ce disque. Je me suis dit que, puisqu'il était professeur de musique, peut-être il pourrait me dire.

"Écoutez ceci," j'ai dit et dites-moi pourquoi je l'aime tant.

"Quartes parallèles", a-t-il conclu.

Il a été le premier à me parler de musique dodécaphonique. Ce n'est pas qu'il en était fan, mais il m'a expliqué que cela existait, et je lui en suis reconnaissant. Je n'aurais jamais écouté Webern si cela n'avait pas été de lui.

M. Ballard était le professeur de musique du lycée à Antelope Valley High. Il m'a laissé diriger l'orchestre plusieurs fois, m'a fait écrire de la musique au tableau et la faire jouer par l'orchestre.

M. Ballard m'a également rendu un grand service sans le savoir. En tant que batteur, j'étais obligé de me taper l'horrible tâche de jouer dans la fanfare. Compte tenu de mon manque d'intérêt pour le football, je ne pouvais pas supporter de me trimballer dans un uniforme stupide, en jouant Da-ta-da-da-ta-ta-taaaah; CHARGER! " à chaque fois que qu'un con tapait un foutu ballon de foot en me tapant sur les nerfs tous les week-ends. M. Ballard m'a viré de la fanfare pour avoir fumé en uniforme - et je lui en serai éternellement reconnaissant.

Mon professeur d'anglais à A.V. était Don Cerveris. C'était aussi un bon ami. Don s'est fatigué d'être enseignant et a arrêté - il voulait être scénariste. En 1959, il écrit le scénario d'un film de cow-boy super bon marché appelé Run Home Slow et m'a aidé à obtenir mon premier job de réalisateur de films.

Mon autre obsession

Alors que d'autres lycéens dépensaient leur argent en voitures, je dépensais mon argent en disques (je n'ai pas de voiture). J'allais au magasin de disques usagés pour acheter des disques de jukebox de chansons rythm&blues.

Il y avait une place à San Diego au rez-de-chaussée de l'hôtel Maryland où on pouvait acheter des disques R & B impossible à obtenir ailleurs - tous ces Lightnin' Slim et Slim Harpo du label Excello. (La raison pour laquelle on ne pouvais pas les commander dans les "magasins de disques pour blancs", c'était qu'Excello avait pour politique que si un magasin voulait prendre leur ligne de R & B, il devait également prendre son catalogue de gospel.) La seule façon pour moi d'obtenir un Lightnin' Slim était de parcourir quelques centaines de kilomètres et l'acheter d'occasion, tout éraflé.

Homemade Boogie

A San Diego, il y avait des gangs de quartier, et chaque quartier avait son "groupe cool" - l'équivalent de l'équipe locale de football. Ces groupes se faisaient concurrence - qui avaient la meilleure musicalité, la garde-robe, la chorégraphie.

Un "bon groupe" doit avoir au moins au moins trois saxophones (un dont un baryton), deux guitaristes, une basse et la batterie. C'était considéré comme un groupe plus sérieux si tout le monde portait un manteau de sport en flanelle rose à un bouton. C'était vraiment bien s'ils avaient un pantalon assorti, et c'était superbe si tous les gars du premier rang connaissaient les mèmes pas, et s'ils étaient en haut et bas ' en mème temps sur les chansons rapides.

Les gens qui allaient voir ces groupes les aimaient vraiment. Ce n'était pas des "spectacles de rock" mis en scène par "promoteurs" - à la place, il y avait des gangs de filles qui louaient la salle, louaient le groupe, suspendaient le papier crépon, et vendaient les billets. (Le premier concert que j'ai joué - celui oû j'ai oublié mes baguettes - a été sponsorisé par l'un d'eux, les "BLUE VELVETS.")

La vie sur la voie lente

J'ai passé plus de temps avec Don (captain Beefheart) Van Vliet quand j'étais au lycée qu'après son entrée dans "Show-business".

Il a abandonné l'école pendant sa dernière année, parce que son père, qui était chauffeur de camion à Helms Bread, a eu une crise cardiaque. et 'Vliet' (comme il s'appelait alors) a repris sa route pendant un certain temps - mais la plupart du temps, il séchait l'école chez lui.

Sa petite amie, Laurie vivait dans la maison avec lui, sa mère (Sue), son père (Glen), sa tante Ione et son oncle Alan. Mémé Annie vivait de l'autre côté de la rue.

Voici comment Don a obtenu son "nom de scène": oncle Alan avait pour habitude de se s'exposer à Laurie. Il pissait avec la porte de la salle de bain ouverte et si elle se promenait, marmonnait au sujet de son appendice - quelque chose copmme: "Ahh, quelle beauté! Cela ressemble à un beau gros cœur de boeuf."

Don était aussi un fan de R & B, alors je ramènais mes 45 tours et nous écoutions pendant des heures de tubes obscurs de Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Guitare Slim, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Don and Dewey, the Spaniels, the Nutmegs, the Paragons, the Orchids, etc., etc., etc.

Il y avait des tas de petites patisseries dans la cuisine, comme des roulés à l'ananas invendus ce jour-là - la cuisine était remplie d'amidon - et nous en mangions des tas en écoutant des disques. De temps en temps Don criait après sa mère (toujours dans un peignoir bleu en chenille), "Sue! Donne-moi un Pepsi!" Il y avait rien à faire à Lancaster.

Notre principale forme de loisirs, autre que d'écouter des disques, était d'aller prendre un café au milieu de la nuit au Denny's sur l'autoroute.

Si Don manquait d'argent (c'était avant de prendre la route du camion à pain), il ouvrait la porte arrière du camion, tirait l'un des longs tiroirs avec les brioches mortes et faisait ramper Laurie à travers la fente, dans la cabine verrouillée pour en tirer quelques dollars de la caisse de son père.

Après le café, nous allions nous promener dans son Oldsmobile bleu clair avec la sculpture faite main de loup-garou dans le volant pour parler avec des personnes avec de grandes oreilles.

Chapitre 3
Une alternative au Collège

Je me suis marié pour la première fois à environ vingt ans. J'étais allé à Antelope Valley Junior College à Lancaster et au Chaffey Junior College à Alta Loma dans le seul but de rencontrer des filles. je n'avait aucun intérèt pour l'enseignement supérieur, mais après avoir terminé mes études secondaires, je me suis dit que si je n'étais pas à l'école, je n'allais rencontrer personne, alors je me suis réinscrit.

À Chaffey, j'ai rencontré Kay Sherman. Nous avons quitté l'école, nous sommes mis ensemble et nous nous sommes mariés. je suis allé travailler pour une entreprise appelée Nile Running Greeting Cards. Leur ligne consistait principalement en sérigraphie de cartes de voeux, conçues pour les femmes âgées qui aiment les fleurs. J'ai travaillé dans le département sérigraphie et, après un temps, j'ai fini par concevoir moi-mème quelques-unes des horreurs florales.

J'ai ensuite fait un job à temps partiel à faire la copie et la conception d'annonces pour les entreprises locales, y compris quelques perles pour la First National Bank of Ontario en Californie. J'ai fait aussi de courts séjours comme décorateur de fenêtres, vendeur de bijoux et - le pire - j'ai vendu des encyclopédies de Collier, porte-à-porte. C'était vraiment misérable - mais au moins, j'ai eu un aperçu de la façon dont cette merde fonctionne.

Tout d'abord, ils vous obligent à aller à l'école pendant trois ou quatre jours pour mémoriser l'argumentaire de vente dont il est interdit de dévier, car ils vous disent qu'ils ont payé beaucoup d'argent à un psychologue quelque part qui a tout compris). Le gars qui a découvert celui que je devais mémoriser devrait voir sa licence retirée - ou ces gars ont-ils déjà une licence?

Ils vous enseignent des astuces psychologiques pour convaincre des gens qui ne peuvent même pas se payer un pain de payer trois cent dollars pour des livres qu'ils ne peuvent même pas lire. Par exemple: quand vous allez présenter le marché avec le contrat de vente sur votre bloc-notes, vous devez tenir le stylo sous votre pouce en haut du bloc, près du clip. Lorsque vous remettez le presse-papiers à la personne ("Monsieur, pourquoi ne pas jeter un oeil à ceci - "), vous relâchez le pouce et laissez le stylo se dérouler dans le presse-papiers pour main - et avant qu'il sache ce qui lui est arrivé, il a le contrat et le stylo dans ses mains.

Ensuite, l'idée était de dérouler une photo montrant ce que cette incroyable bibliothèque en contreplaqué pourrait ressembler chez lui. Puis tendre le livre - celui sur le corps humain. J'ai duré une semaine.

Dans le monde du divertissement professionnel, je ne me débrouillais pas beaucoup mieux. Je travaillais le week-end avec un Un groupe de quatre musiciens appelé Joe Perrino et les Mellotones au Club Sahara de Tommy Sandi à San Bernardino.

La direction nous permettait de jouer un [1] twist par nuit. Le reste de la nuit nous étaient censés jouer "Happy Birthday", "Anniversary Waltz" et "On Green Dolphin Street". Je portais une veste blanche avec noeud papillon et un pantalon noir et, assis sur un tabouret de bar a jouer de la guitare électrique. J'en ai eu tellement marre que j'ai arrêté, mis la guitare dans l'étui derrière le canapé et je ne l'ai plus touchée pas pendant huit mois.

L'un des autres bons emplois a été celui de guitariste rythmique dans un groupe de sessions lors d'une soirée de Noël dans une salle de loisirs mormone. La pièce était décorée de chiffons de coton suspendus sur du fil noir (des boules de neige, tu vois?). Le groupe était composé de sax, batterie et guitare. J'ai emprunté un faux livre pour pouvoir suivre les accords puisque je ne connaissais aucune des mélodies. Le saxophoniste était un professeur d'espagnol du lycée local. Il n'avait aucun sens du rythme et ne pouvait même pas compter les chansons, mais il était le leader du groupe.

À ce moment-là, je ne savais rien des Mormons. Ainsi, pendant une pause, quand j'allumais une cigarette, c'était comme si le diable lui-même venait de faire une rare apparition. Un groupe de gars qui semblaient ne pas être tout à fait prêt à se raser ont commencé à s'agiter près de moi et, d'une manière fraternelle, m'a escorté le cul dehors. Je savais que j'allais aimer le show business si je m'y mettais un jour.

Let's Get Into Show Business

À cette époque, il y avait un endroit appelé Pal Recording Studio à Cucamonga, en Californie (ne vous moquez pas). Il a été créé par un homme extraordinaire nommé Paul Buff.

Cucamonga était une tache sur une carte, représentée par l'intersection de la Route 66 et de l'avenue Archibald. Sur ses quatre coins, nous avions un restaurant italien, un pub irlandais, une malterie et une station-service.

Au nord, sur Archibald, il y avait un magasin d'électricité, une quincaillerie et le studio d'enregistrement. Dans la rue était une église pentecôtiste, et à côté, l'école primaire.

Buff avait vécu à Cucamonga avant de s'enrôler dans les Marines. En servant, il a décidé d'apprendre l'électronique, de sorte que, quand il serait sorti, il pourrait appliquer ce qu'il avait appris et créer son propre studio d'enregistrement. Il est sorti, a loué une place au 8040 Archibald Avenue et a entrepris de changer l'orientation de la musique populaire américaine.

Il n'avait pas de console de mixage, il en a donc construit une - à partir d'une vieille vanité des années 1940. Il enleva le miroir et, au beau milieu, à la place des cosmétiques, installé une plaque de métal avec des boutons Boris Karloff.

Il a construit son propre magnétophone à cinq pistes demi-pouce - à un moment où la norme de l'industrie était mono. (Je pense que seul Les Paul avait alors huit pistes. Buff a pu superposer de la même manière que Les Paul, mais d'une manière plus primitive.)

Il voulait devenir un auteur-compositeur-interprète. Il a donc écouté tous les derniers disques à succès. cherchant à trouver où étaient les accroches et, par un processus mystérieux, créé ses propres répliques accrocheuses.

Il apprend par lui-même à jouer des cinq instruments de base du rock and roll: batterie, basse, guitare, claviers et saxophone alto - et apprend ensuite à chanter.

Il a créé des bandes de chansons finies, puis est allé à Hollywood et a tenté de les louer au Capitol, Del-Fi, Dot et Original Sound.

Certaines de ces chansons sont devenues des "succès régionaux". "Tijuana Surf" (avec Paul multiplexant lui-même) est devenu numéro un longue durée au Mexique. J'ai écrit et joué de la guitare côté B, un instrumental appelé "Grunion Run." Il est sorti sur Original Sound sous le nom de Hollywood Persuaders.

J'ai travaillé avec lui pendant environ un an jusqu'à ce qu'il ait des problèmes financiers et qu'il risque de perdre son studio.

Alors, rappelez-vous le film de cow-boy vraiment bon marché pour lequel mon professeur d'anglais au lycée a écrit le scénario en 1959? Après des retards sans fin, Run Home Slow (avec Mercedes McCambridge) a été complété et la bande son sortit en 1963. J'ai même été payé pour cela - pas tout, mais la plupart. J'ai pris une partie de l'argent et acheté une nouvelle guitare, et j'ai utilisé le reste pour "acheter" Pal Records à Paul. En d'autres termes, j'ai accepté de reprendre son bail et le reste de sa dette.

Pendant ce temps, mon mariage s'est effondré. Je demandai le divorce, quittai la maison rue G et emménageai au 'Studio Z,' commencea alors une vie de overdubbage obsessionnel - sans trève, douze heures par jour.

Je n'avais ni nourriture, ni douche ni baignoire; juste un évier industriel où je pouvais me laver. J'aurais crevé de faim là s'il n'y avait pas eu Motorhead Sherwood. Je le connaissais de Lancaster. Il est venu à Cucamonga et n'avais pas de lieu de séjour, je l'ai donc invité à emménager avec moi dans le studio.

Motorhead connaissait bien les voitures et jouait également du saxophone - une combinaison utile. Quand les Mothers fût enfin formé, il a travaillé pour nous comme roadie et a ensuite rejoint le groupe.

Un jour, Motorhead, par des moyens illicites, s'est procuré une boîte de produits alimentaires d'une banque de sang mobile. Il a ramené de la purée de pommes de terre instantanée (je ne sais toujours pas pourquoi une banque de sang mobile transporterait de la purée de pommes de terre instantanée, mais c'est qu'il a dit qu'il les avait eu), du café instantané et du miel.

À ce moment-là, j'avais débarqué un concert le week-end à un endroit appelé l'auberge du village, à Sun Village, à une centaine de kilomètres de distance. Le salaire était de quatorze dollars par semaine (sept dollars par nuit), moins l'essence.

Avec cela, j'ai acheté du beurre de cacahuète, du pain et des cigarettes. Une semaine, nous avons fait des folies et acheté une brique entière de Velveeta.

Quand j'étais au lycée, à Lancaster, j'ai formé mon premier groupe, les Black-Outs. Le nom vient du moment où quelques-uns des types, après avoir bu du schnaps à la menthe poivrée, achetés illicitement par le frère aîné de quelqu'un, se sont évanouis.

C'était le seul groupe de R & B dans tout le désert de Mojave à cette époque. Trois des gars (Johnny Franklin, Carter Franklin et Wayne Lyles) étaient noirs, les frères Salazar étaient mexicains et Terry Wimberly représentait; les autres peuples opprimés de la terre.

Lancaster était alors une ville prospère. Il y avait un afflux énorme d'employés techniques (des gars comme mon père) qui avaient traîné leurs familles dans cet endroit abandonné afin de travailler sur les projets de missiles à Edwards Air force Base. Les premiers habitants, fils et filles d'agriculteurs de luzerne et de propriétaires d'aliments pour animaux, considéraient tous les nouveaux venus en faible estime. Nous étions les gens d' "en bas" - un terme utilisé pour décrire toute personne qui ne vient pas de la région haute du désert où se trouve Lancaster.

L'ordre hiérarchique au lycée était assez bien présenté: membres de l'élite sociale (postiers et pom-pom girls) étaient tous des sous-produits de reproduction des stupides et des bornés qui géraient entreprise céréalière. Le rang le plus bas dans cet arrangement social de 1957 était réservé aux fils et aux filles des familles noires qui élevaient des dindes dans une région située au-delà de Palmdale - Sun Village. Juste un peu au-dessus de cette ligne, il y avait une petite place pour les Mexicains.

Le fait que ce soit un groupe "intégré" dérangeais beaucoup de gens. Cette détresse a été aggravée par le fait que, avant mon arrivée, quelqu'un avait organisé un spectacle de rhythm-and-blues au parc des expositions, et la légende veut que "des gens de couleur ont introduit de la drogue dans la vallée quand ils ont fait ce foutu spectacle, et on ne tolérera plus jamais ce genre de musique par ici."

Je ne savais rien de cette merde quand j'ai monté ce groupe. Quoi qu'il en soit, mon travail à temps partiel au lycée travaillait dans un magasin de disques pour une gentille dame nommée Elsie (désolée, je ne me souviens plus de son nom de famille) qui aimait le R & B. Comme vous pouvez l'imaginer, dans une ville comme celle-là, les concerts payants d'un "groupe de R & B intégré" étaient rares. Un jour, j'ai eu une bonne idée: j'ai décidé de promouvoir mon propre concert au club local des femmes et j'ai demandé à Elsie de m'aider. Je voulais qu'elle loue la salle pour nous et elle a accepté de le faire. Maintenant, je suis quasiment sûr que c'est Elsie qui a fait la promotion du "spectacle de noirs avec produits chimiques en option". "- et je n'avais pas bien saisi les ramifications sociopolitiques locales de tout cela lorsque je lui ai demandé de réserver la salle.

Ainsi, tout était réglé - le groupe répétais à Sun Village dans le salon des Harris, nous avions notre liste de chansons, nous vendions des billets, tout allait bien. Le soir avant le spectacle, en me promenant dans le quartier des affaires vers six heures, j'ai été arrêté pour vagabondage. Je suis resté toute la nuit à la prison. Ils voulait me garder assez longtemps pour annuler le show - comme dans un très mauvais film d'adolescent des années 1950. Ça n'a pas marché. Elsie et mes gars m'ont fait sortir.

Nous avons joué la gig. C'était très drôle. Nous avons eu une énorme participation d'étudiants noirs de Sun Village. Motorhead Sherwood était le hit de la soirée - il a fait cette danse étrange appelée "The Bug", où, prétextant qu'une créature le chatouillait et il se roulait sur le sol en essayant de s'en débarrasser. Quand il l'a eu, il l'a jeté sur les filles du public, espérant qu'elles finiraient sur le sol aussi. Quelques-unes l'ont fait.

Après la danse, alors que nous rangions nos affaires dans le coffre de la vielle Studebaker bleue de Johnny Franklin, nous nous sommes retrouvés entourés par un grand effectif de postiers (la terreur blanche), désireux de causer du tort physique à notre dégoûtant petit "groupe intégré". C'était une erreur car, en voyant le Rassemblement des Ugly Jackets, quelques dizaines de "villageois" ont commencé à sortir des chaînes et des fers à pneus de leurs coffres, avec un regard dans leurs yeux disant, "La nuit est jeune."

Les postiers se sont repliés dans l'humiliation totale - et dieu sait qu'ils sont sensibles à ce sujet - et sont rentrés à la maison retrouver leurs stupides et bornés. Ils sont restés hostiles envers moi et les gars du groupe tout au long du lycée.

Maintenant, ces jeunes hommes remarquables étaient assez bien branchés sur l'équipe de meneuses de claques, et (je sais que ce n'est pas mon imagination), ces filles ne m'aimaient pas beaucoup - et c'est ce qui s'est passé pendant une école assemblée pour inaugurer le nouveau gymnase, une de ces jeunes filles (nom omis parce que je suis un gars sympa) avait l'honneur de diriger l'ensemble du corps étudiant dans une interprétation entraînante de la chanson de l'école, une poésie vraiment nauséabonde, chanté sur l'air de "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra (c'est une berceuse irlandaise)", une chanson si spéciale qu' il fallait chanter debout.

Pour remplir pleinement sa mission, Mme. Nom Omis devait rassembler toute la foule - même moi - ce qui la poussa à crier en ricanant dans le micro: "Tout le monde se lève! Et ça veut dire TOI AUSSI, FRANK ZAPPA!"

Je suis resté assis et, alors que le silence régnait sur le public, sans l'aide d'un micro, j'ai commencé à gâcher toute son après-midi en demandant: "Pourquoi ne vas-tu pas te faire foutre, [nom omis parce que je suis un gars sympa] ! "C'est un mot qu'on n'est pas censé crier à cette époque - en particulier pour une fille qui court partout tout le week-end avec des liasses de papier crépon dans ses mains. Elle s'est effondrée en sanglotant et a dû être escortée vers la porte par les autres voleuses de pom-pom. C'était la pire imitation féminine blanche de la mimique de James Brown jamais réalisée dans l'hémisphère occidental.

La conclusion finale dans le cas de Mme. Le nom omis a eu lieu au lever du soleil, au lendemain de la longue nuit de fête des séniors . Je l'ai faite rire alors qu'elle déjeunait dans le plus beau café de la ville, entouré de ses amies, et le thé glacé est sorti de son nez.

Quoi qu'il en soit, la raison pour laquelle j'ai évoqué tous ces vieux trucs de Lancaster ici est pour fournir quelques détails concernant les paroles de "Village of the Sun" (qui, selon mes critères particuliers bien connus, me paraissent très sentimentales - et il n'y en n'a pas beaucoup dans mon catalogue ). Je ne vais pas les détailler ligne par ligne, mais quelques références méritent d'être rapportées.

Vous pouviez toujours savoir si un gars était un "rat du désert" en regardant le pare-brise de sa voiture. Le vent était une constante ainsi que les particules microscopiques de sable qu'il transporte, capables de gratter un pare-brise jusqu'à qu'à ne plus voir au travers, réduisant simultanément le plus fin travail de peinture personnalisé à néant en une étonnante rapidité.

J'ai entendu dire que le Village Inn avait été détruit par un incendie à la suite d'un "incident racial" au début des années 1970 et que les habitants du quartier avaient pris l'habitude de se tirer dessus.

Pourtant, lorsque j'y travaillais, c'était un endroit génial. Entre les sets, ils allumaient le jukebox et, là, un gars qu'ils appelaient "Le Stumbler" y allait, et dansait POUR LUI! - il l'adorerait en quelque sorte, comme s'il s'agissait du sanctuaire de la musique. Ensuite, il était rejoint par les "assistant Stumblers", et ils se mettaient tous à s'agiter devant.

J'ai regardé ça pendant quelques semaines et finalement, un soir, j'ai décidé de lui parler. Je pensais qu'il était un peu spacial, mais non - c'était un gars bien. Il était ivre, certes, mais pas fou, juste heureux. Il m'a invité à aller chez lui. Je ne pouvais pas refuser cette offre - comme on dit sur l'album Freak Out! : "Qui pourrait imaginer..." quel genre d'endroit M. Stumbler habite? Je devais le découvrir.

Après le concert, je l'ai suivi dans le désert, à quelques miles de là, dans une petite ferme à dindes. Il habitait une sorte de maison faite à la main avec des marches en parpaing. La lumière était allumée à la fenêtre avant. Je l'ai suivi. Malgré l'extérieur douteux, le salon était agréable, avec des meubles neufs et une très grande, très récente chaîne stéréo Magnavox. Apparemment, il avait écouté des disques avant sa soirée devant le jukebox - peut-être un échauffement d'avant-match. L'album sur la platine était la suite Firebird de Stravinsky.

Les graines

Après mon déménagement au "Studio Z", Don Van Vliet est venu rendre visite. J'ai fait quelques enregistrements avec lui à l'époque qui précède le Beefheart Magic Band. Le groupe s'appelait les Soots. Entre autres chansons, il y avait "Metal Man Has Won His Wings," "Cheryl's Canon" et une reprise de la chanson de Little Richard "Slippin 'and Slidin'" (comme chanté par les Howlin' Wolf). À cette époque, certaines maisons de disques louaient les enregistrements principaux de producteurs indépendants. Un producteur apportait un produit fini et recevait une avance en espèces contrant les royalties. Le producteur possédait toujours le master. La société d'édition en a l'usage pendant quelques années, après quoi le contrôle du master revient au producteur. Par l'intermédiaire de Paul Buff, j'avais rencontré à Hollywood des personnes qui travaillaient dans un de ces départements, alors je suis allé voir un gars chez Dot Records nommé Milt Rogers avec deux des masters des Soots. Il a écouté un moment et dit, "On ne peut pas sortir ça, - la guitare distortionne."

Bongo Fury

Don finit par former Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, sortit un single sur A & M et commença à signer un nombre incroyable de contrats avec quasiment tout le monde qui avait un stylo à coller dans sa main. Il était dans l'esclavage contractuel partout. Les entreprises ne le payaient pas, mais les contrats étaient écrits de telle manière qu'il était interdit d'enregistrer - ils l'avaient ligoté pendant des années. Quand il a fait la tournée Bongo Fury avec nous en 1976, il était à peu près démuni.

La vie sur la route avec Captain Beefheart n'était vraiment pas facile. Il transportait toutes ses possessions dans un sac à provisions. Il contenait ses livres d'art et de poésie et un saxo soprano. Il l'oubliait partout - ce qui rendait fou le directeur de tournée. Sur scène, peu importe la puissance des moniteurs, il se plaignait de ne pas entendre sa voix. (Je pense que c'est parce qu'il chantait tellement fort, qu'il contractait les muscles de son cou, provoquant l'implosion de ses oreilles.)

Réplique du masque de truite

Le point culminant de notre relation (selon Rolling Stone ) - ne sont-ils pas une sorte d'autorité en la matière? c'était l'élaboration de l'album Trout Mask Replica ensemble en 1969. Don n'a pas le sens technique, alors, au début, je devais l'aider à comprendre ce qu'il voulait faire, puis, d'un point de vue pratique, comment exécuter ses demandes.

Je voulais faire l'album comme s'il s'agissait d'un enregistrement anthropologique - chez lui. Le groupe vivait dans une petite maison de la vallée de San Fernando (on pourrait utiliser le mot culte ici).

Je travaillais avec Dick Kunc, l'ingénieur du son de Uncle Meat et Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. Pour faire des enregistrements à distance à cette époque, Dick fit installer un mélangeur Shure à huit canaux dans une mallette. Il pouvait s'asseoir dans un coin lors d'un concert en direct avec des écouteurs, ajuster les niveaux et disposer des sorties. du mélangeur-porte-documents alimentant un magnétophone portable Uher.

J'avais utilisé cette technique avec les M.O.I. pour les enregistrements mobiles. Je pensais que ce serait génial d'aller chez Don avec cette plate-forme portable et mettre la batterie dans la chambre à coucher, la clarinette basse dans la cuisine et le chant dans la salle de bain: isolement complet, comme dans un studio - sauf que les membres du groupe se sentiraient probablement plus à la maison, car ils étaient à la maison.

Nous avons enregistré quelques sélections de cette façon, et j'ai trouvé qu'elles étaient superbes, mais Don est devenu paranoïaque et m'a accusé de de faire l'album à peu de frais, et a demandé à entrer dans un vrai studio d'enregistrement.

Nous avons donc transféré l'ensemble de l'opération à Glendale, dans un endroit appelé Whitney, le studio que j'utilisais à cette époque. appartenant à l'église mormone.

Les pistes de base ont été coupées - le temps était maintenant venu pour la voix de Don. D'habitude, un chanteur va en studio, met écouteurs, écoute la piste, tente de chanter au rythme de celle-ci et c'est fini. Don ne pouvait pas supporter le écouteurs. Il voulait rester dans le studio et chanter aussi fort qu'il le pouvait - chantant avec la fuite audio traversant les trois vitres qui composaient la fenêtre de la salle de commande. Les chances de rester dans le rythme étaient nuls - mais c'est ainsi que les voix ont été faites.

Habituellement, lorsque on enregistre une batterie, les cymbales fournissent une partie de "l'air" en haut du mixage. Sans cette information de fréquence, les mélanges ont tendance à sembler claustrophobes. Don a demandé qu'on mette des bouts de carton ondulé sur les cymbales (comme des mutes), et que sur les fûts. Alors, Drumbo a fini par taper des choses qui faiaient "Thump! boomph! doof!" Après le mixage;, J'ai fait le montage et l'assemblage dans mon sous-sol. J'ai fini à environ 6h00. le dimanche de Pâques 1969. Je les appelle et dit: "Venez, votre album est fini." Ils se sont habillés comme s'ils allaient à la messe de Pâques et sont venus. Ils ont écouté l'enregistrement et ont dit qu'ils l'aimaient.

La dernière fois que j'ai vu Don, c'était en 1980 ou en 1981. Il s'est arrêté à l'une de nos répétitions. Il avait l'air assez abattu. Il avait passé des contrats avec Warner Bros., et cela n'avait pas fonctionné. Je suppose qu'il vit toujours dans le nord de la Californie, mais n'enregistre plus. Il a acheté des biens là-bas - quelque part où il pouvait voir les baleines nager.

Faisons un film

Retour en arrière. . . Peu de temps après avoir déménagé au "Studio Z", j'ai entendu parler d'une vente aux enchères au F. K. Rockett Studios à Hollywood. Ils faisaient faillite et écoulaient des décors. Pour cinquante dollars J'ai acheté plus de décors que je ne pouvais en installer dans le studio, y compris un cyclorama double face - violet d'un côté. pour la nuit, bleu de l'autre côté pour le jour - une cuisine, un intérieur de bibliothèque, un extérieur de bâtiment - tout ce que je pouvais avoir besoin pour faire un film pas cher. Tout ce qui pouvait passer les portes a été rentré, monté et repeint.

J'ai fini par dormir dans le décor du laboratoire de Billy Sweeney. À l'arrière du studio, à côté de s toilettes, j'ai construit un navire-fusée en carton bidimensionnel et totalement invraisemblable.

J'ai moi-même peint tous les décors et écrit un scénario basé sur les personnes et les installations disponibles alors : Capitaine Beefheart contre le peuple Grunt. Puis vint la partie difficile - collecter des fonds pour payer le film.

Le Ontario Daily Report a publié un article de fond sur moi et mon projet dans sa page centrale du dimanche - à propos d'un gars étrange à Cucamonga qui essayait de faire un film de science-fiction appelé Captain Beefheart vs. Grunt People. C'est probablement cette histoire qui a poussé la brigade auxiliaire du comté de San Bernardino à s' intéresser à moi.

C'était en 1962 - mes cheveux étaient courts à l'époque, mais les gens de la région pensaient que j'avais les cheveux longs . Le code vestimentaire officieux pour un homme Cucamongan de cette époque était, pour toutes les occasions, une chemise de sport blanche à manches courtes avec un noeud papillon (Pee-Wee Herman aurait été une plaque tournante de la mode). Les t-shirts étaient considérés comme avant-gardistes.

J'ai lancé un casting pour que les habitants de la région puissent jouer dans le film. Un homme est venu auditionner pour le rôle du connard: Sénateur Gurney. J'ai appris par la suite qu'il était membre de l'escouade du comté de San Bernardino, envoyé pour me piéger.

La brigade auxiliaire avait percé un trou à travers le mur du studio et m'espionnait depuis plusieurs semaines. Le prétexte politique à tout cela avait quelque chose à voir avec un développement immobilier imminent qui nécessitait le déménagement des locataires avant l'élargissement de l'avenue Archibald.

L'autre partie du prétexte concerne une fille que j'ai rencontrée dans un restaurant à Hollywood. Elle avait une amie - une fille blanche avec un bébé noir. Ils avaient besoin d'un endroit pour rester. Prochain arrêt, Cucamonga.

Elle et sa petite amie jouaient avec le bébé sur le trottoir devant le studio, bien en vue. des mormons cachés dans l'église de l'autre côté de la rue. Apparemment, cela a provoqué un stress psychologique sur la congrégation et, peu de temps après, l'homme qui avait auditionné me rendit visite. Il n'a pas eu le rôle, mais il s'est avéré être un sacré acteur.

Quelques semaines plus tard, il revint déguisé en (ne riez pas) en vendeur de voitures d'occasion. Il m'a dit que certains de ses des amis faisaient la fête la semaine suivante. Comme j'avais eu un panneau devant le studio (acheté à la vente aux enchères) marqué "TV Pictures", il voulait savoir si je pouvais lui faire un "film passionnant" pour le divertissement de ses potes.

Désireux d'aider (car les occasions de divertir les gens dans ce fascinant métier n'arrivent pas tous les. jour), j'ai expliqué que les films coûtaient beaucoup d'argent et ai suggéré à la place une cassette audio.

Il m'a donné une liste verbale de tous les actes sexuels qu'il souhaitait voir figurer sur la bande. Je ne savais pas à l'époque, mais il transmettait notre conversation à un camion garé devant le studio par le biais de sa (ne riez pas) montre.

Je lui ai dit que je pouvais faire une cassette comme celle-ci pour cent dollars pour le lendemain. Le soir, j'ai fabriqué la cassette avec l'aide d'une des filles - environ une demi-heure de faux cris et sommiers grinçants. Il n'y avait pas de sexe en réalité.

Je suis resté éveillé toute la nuit pour rééditer les rires, puis j'ai ajouté de la musique de fond - une production complète. Le lendemain, le client, dont le nom était inspecteur Willis, , s'est présenté et m'a remis cinquante dollars. J'ai dit que le contrat était de cent dollars et refusai de lui remettre la cassette - je ne l'ai jamais donnée. Malgré ça, la porte s'est ouverte, des flashs ont éclaté, des journalistes courraient partout et des menottes se sont fermées sur mes poignets.

La brigade nous a arrêtés, moi et la fille, et a confisqué chaque cassette et chaque film du studio. Ils ont même pris mon projecteur 8 mm comme "preuve".

J'étais fauché et je ne pouvais pas me payer un avocat. J'ai téléphoné à mon père, qui venait d'avoir eu une crise cardiaque - il ne pouvait pas se payer un avocat non plus. Il a dû contracter un emprunt bancaire pour pouvoir me sauver.

Une fois sorti, je suis allé voir Art Laboe. Il avait publié une partie de mon matériel sur son label Original Sound ("Memories of El Monte" et "Grunion Run") et ai obtenu une avance sur un paiement des redevances, que j'ai utilisé pour renflouer la fille.

J'ai essayé de faire en sorte que l'ACLU s'intéresse à l'affaire, mais ils ne l'ont pas touchée. Ils ont dit que ce n'était pas assez important et que, oui, il y avait eu quelques cas de prise au piège illégale dans cette région. D'ici là mon père a pu engager un avocat qui a dit que mon seul espoir était de plaider nolo contendere (pas de contestation - ou "Je suis tellement fauché que je ne peux même pas m'acheter justice à Cucamonga, alors je vais juste donner mille dollars à cet avocat et fermer ma putain de gueule et espérer qu'on ne me condamnes pas à la peine de mort ").

Avant le procès, mon expert juridique aux cheveux blancs m'a demandé: "Comment pouvez-vous être si bête et laisser ce type vous baiser? Je pensais que tout le monde connaissait le détective Willis. Il est le genre de gars qui gagne sa vie à attendre dans les toilettes publiques pour attraper les pédés. "

J'ai répondu, "je ne me tiens pas dans les toilettes - je n'ai jamais entendu parler de gars qui sont payés pour le faire " Qu'est-ce que c'était? Ma faute si je n'avais jamais rêvé que des ordures comme Willis existaient, ou que quelqu'un au gouvernement met de l'argent des contribuables pour offrir aux gars comme lui un salaire et un "budget de recherche"? j'allais devoir relancer un peu mon imagination pour compenser cette terrible révélation.

J'ai été accusé de "complot en vue de commettre de la pornographie". L'accusation de pornographie était, en vertu de la loi de l'État, un délit. L'accusation de complot, en revanche, était un crime - nécessitant un nombre impressionnant de poursuites pénales.

Alors, comment peut-on s'engager dans "complot en vue de commettre de la pornographie?" En Californie, si deux personnes ou plus discutent de perpétrer un crime - si petit soit-il (comme peut-être le vagabondage) - cela devient comme par magie de la conspiration , et les peines augmentent au-delà de la raison. Il était présumé que j'avais discuté de la fabrication de la bande avec la fille et, par conséquent, j'étais passible d'une période difficile de dix à vingt ans. Toujours envie de passer en Californie, les gars?

À un moment du procès, le juge nous a emmenés avec la jeune fille dans une pièce privée, avec les avocats ils ont écouté l'enregistrement et se sont mis à rire. C'était drôle - et loin d'être aussi bizarre que l es bruits ont finalement été émis sur la quatrième face de l'album Freak Out! .

Les éclats de rire ont rendu furieux l'assistant du procureur, âgé de vingt-six ans, qui a poursuivi l'affaire. Il a demandé, au nom de la justice, que je sois forcé de purger une peine pour cette infraction odieuse.

Le verdict final: coupable d'un délit. La peine: six mois de prison, avec tous sauf dix jours suspendu et probation de trois ans au cours desquelles je ne pouvais pas enfreindre de code de la route ou être dans l'entreprise d'une femme de moins de vingt et un ans sans la présence d'un adulte compétent.

La peine prévoyait également la radiation de mon "casier judiciaire" - après un an, il y aurait rien dans les livres ne dit que je suis jamais allé en prison. Après que la sentence ait été prononcée, j'ai été placé dans le réservoir à l'arrière du palais de justice, d'attendre le bus du shérif pour m'emmener au comté prison. Je lisais un long morceau de poésie de prison griffonné sur le mur ("La Ballade du Do-Do-Mite") quand Le détective Willis entra et dit: "Si vous me donnez la permission de décider laquelle de ces bandes nous confisqués sont obscènes, nous vous rendrons tous les autres - effacés. "

J'ai dit, "Tout d'abord, je n'ai pas le pouvoir de vous transformer de policier en juge, et en outre, vous n'avez aucun droit de faire quoi que ce soit sur ces bandes - l'affaire est close - et je suis viendra après vous pour les récupérer " - mais je n'ai jamais pu récupérer aucune de ces choses, et En ce jour, je ne sais pas ce qui lui est arrivé.

Allons en prison

Les dix jours que j'ai passés dans le Tank C de la prison du comté de San Bernardino ont été très instructifs. Sauf si vous avez été en prison, vous ne pouvez pas imaginer ce que c'est réellement. Ce n'était pas comme la prison de Lancaster où ils vous donnent des crêpes le matin. C'était la prison laide.

Il y avait un énorme gars noir appelé "Slicks" (parce que ses lèvres ressemblaient à ces gros pneus de course lisses appelés 'cheater slicks' ). Il avait essayé de voler du cuivre. du Cuivre?

Les vagabonds se rendaient dans les gares de triage de San Bernardino et retiraient les sabots de frein en cuivre des wagons de marchandises et les vendaient comme ferraille dans une casse en bas de la rue. Slicks pensait que si les brocanteurs payaient très bien pour petits morceaux de cuivre, ils paieraient vraiment bien pour un très gros morceau. Alors, il avait prévu de rentrer dans les locaux de la compagnie de téléphone locale où sont stockés d'énormes rouleaux de câbles téléphoniques.

L'endroit était entouré d'une clôture grillagée. Slicks prévoyait de franchir la clôture, de placer un poteau à travers les rouleaux - comme un essieu - jeter une corde par-dessus la clôture, l'attacher à "l'essieu", tirer sur la corde et laisser le rouleau géant éclater la clôture. Ensuite, il allait l'amener dans le désert, brûler l'isolant du fil et vendre le cuivre.

Il a réussi à grimper par-dessus la clôture et à pénétrer dans l'enceinte avant que les chiens ne le prennent. Est-ce le crime du siècle ou quoi?

Il y avait un gamin mexicain âgé de dix-neuf ans environ, enfermé pendant trois semaines dans l'attente d'extradition à Beverly Hills pour une amende de vagbondage.

Les gardes laissaient les lumières allumées toute la nuit pour nous empêcher de dormir. Il faisait environ 104 degrés là-dedans pendant la journée.

Nous avions droit à une lame de rasoir par jour et une petite douche au bout du bloc cellulaire pour quarante-quatre hommes. L'écume sur le lavabo faisait environ quatre pouces d'épaisseur. Je ne me suis pas rasé ni pris de douche durant tout mon temps.

La nourriture n'était pas excellente. Un matin, j'ai trouvé un cafard géant au fond de ma crème de blé. je l'ai mise dans une enveloppe avec une lettre à la mère de Motorhead. Le censeur de la prison l'a trouvé et le gardien m'a menacé d'isolement si jamais je réessayais.

Ils appellaient les Chow Hounds deux personnes qui mangaient littéralement n'importe quoi. Ils attendaient que tout le monde prenne la première bouchée de nourriture et la trouve repoussante, puis tendaient leurs plateaux pendant que les autres détenus leur jetaient leur "chop suey", formant des bottes de foin miniatures de ... dieu sait ce que c'était.

On nous donnait une demi-heure avant de reprendre les plateaux. Les plateaux des Chow Hounds étaient toujours propres.

Tout ça m'a donné une bonne idée du droit californien, des avocats californiens et un regard intérieur sur l' industrie pénale en action. Je n'ai rien vu depuis qui me fasse changer mon opinion sur la pauvreté du système.

Plus d'informations sur ce que je mange

Après ma sortie de prison, je me suis rendu compte qu'ils allaient démolir le studio et élargir la rue. je ne pouvais rien y faire. C'était si triste. J'ai dû prendre les pinces coupantes pour sortir tout mon équipement de là et évacuer le 'Studio Z.' J'ai dû laisser tous ces décors que j'avais peints, la fusée, le laboratoire du scientifique fou - tout.

J'ai déménagé de Cucamonga dans un petit appartement situé au 1819, avenue Bellevue, dans le quartier Echo Park de Los Angeles et décroché un emploi chez Wallich's Music City, un magasin de disques situé au centre-ville de L.A. au département des singles.

J'avais juste assez d'argent pour faire le trajet en bus pour la première semaine, mais pas d'argent pour la nourriture. Donc avec mon premier salaire je suis allé à un petit marché philippin au bas de la colline et acheté un sac de riz, un sac haricots rouges, une pinte de Miller High Life et quelques condiments pour aromatiser le riz et les haricots. Je suis retourné au maison et fait un grand pot de choses que je prévoyais de vivre pour la semaine prochaine.

J'ai mangé un grand plat et bu de la bière. Mon estomac a enflé comme si l'extraterrestre allait sortir. je suis tombé du fauteuil, me tordant de douleur - maudissant la société Miller High Life.

Rencontrons Jésus

Pendant que je travaillais au magasin, un Noir, Welton Featherstone, est entré et a acheté des singles. Il m'a demandé si j'avais déjà été à l'église. Je lui ai dit que j'avais été élevé catholique et il a dit: "Non, je veux dire avez-vous déjà été dans une vraie église?"

Il m'a parlé d'un lieu appelé l'Église mondiale, qui se trouvait juste au coin de la rue où j'ai vécu. Il était dirigé par O. L. et Velma Jaggers, un couple d'époux évangélistes. Il a dit, "Vous ne le croirez pas. La nuit du baptême de ce soir - vous devez y aller et y jeter un coup d'œil. "

En fait, j'avais déjà vu O. L. Jaggers à la télévision - il avait un programme "religieux" local courte durée. Pendant le spectacle que j'ai vu, il se tenait près d'un tableau noir et dessinait des diagrammes dans le cadre de la "réponse" à une lettre qu' il prétendait avoir reçue d'un spectateur profondément troublé. La lettre demandait une explication théologique de OVNIS, et le révérend s'engagea dans cette réponse:

Alors, je suis allé à l'église mondiale. C'était un grand hangar en tôle près de Temple et Alvarado. Au lieu d'un autel, il avait une scène avec des fleurs et de faux bibelots en or, plantée entre un piano tout blanc et un orgue tout blanc.

Sur la scène se trouvait une énorme découpe de Jésus en carton, posant comme Superman en position de décollage, orienté vers le public.

Il était illuminé de chaque côté par de petites grappes de lumières rouges et bleues - semblables à celles utilisées dans le les allées d'immeubles d'habitation appelées "Kon-Tiki".

La congrégation était pauvre - noirs, philippins, japonais et mexicains. Ils ont passé trois fois la collecte pendant l'heure où j'y étais.

Une "cuve à baptême" était posée à l'arrière de la scène. C'était une sorte d'aquarium à hauteur de taille, remplie avec une eau verte. Les candidats au baptême portaient des robes blanches. Jaggers plongeait chaque victime dans la cuve en l'entraînant (en quelque sorte par la peau du cou), la tête sous l'eau de tout leur long. Un gars ne pouvait pas tenir son souffle et a commencé à s'étouffer. C'était assez dégoûtant.

Alors que je m'apprêtais à partir, je l'ai entendu annoncer (dans un Neumann U-87 portable), lors de la troisième collecte, "Jésus vient de me dire que vous avez encore mille dollars dans vos poches." Des personnes se sont levé de leurs sièges et ont marché dans l'allée, comme des zombies, en distribuant des liasses de billets. En récompense, dit-il, "Je vais maintenant faire pleuvoir le feu du Saint-Esprit sur vous!" Les doigts en l'air, ils ont commencéà les agiter, alors que le Dr. Jaggers criait: "Feu! Feu! Feu! Feu!" (dans une salle bondée).

Les gens ont répondu "Ooooo! Woooooo", comme si cela les avait vraiment touchés. L'organiste a joué une musique effrayante et les lumières rouge et bleue ont clignoté sur Jésus de carton.

CHAPTER 4
Avons-nous encore du bon temps?

Au début, quand Paul Buff était encore propriétaire du studio, j'ai rencontré Ray Collins. Ray avait chanté avec un nombre de groupes de R & B depuis le milieu des années 50 et avait enregistré avec Little Julian Herrera et les Tigers. En 1964, il travaillait comme menuisier, et le week-end, il chantait avec un groupe appelé Soul Giants dans un bar de Pomona appelé le Broadside.

Apparemment, il s'est bagarré avec leur guitariste, Ray Hunt, et il s'est tiré. Ils avaient besoin d'un remplaçant, alors j'ai joué pour le week-end.

Les Soul Giants étaient un groupe de bars assez décent. J'ai particulièrement aimé Jimmy Carl Black, le batteur, un indien Cherokee du Texas avec un intérêt presque surnaturel pour la bière. Son style m'a rappelé le gars avec le grand backbeat sur les vieux disques de Jimmy Reed. Roy Estrada, qui était américano-mexicain et qui faisait également partie du Los Angeles scène R & B depuis les années cinquante, était le bassiste. Davy Coronado était le leader et le saxophone joueur du groupe.

J'ai joué le concert pendant un moment, et un soir, j'ai suggéré de commencer à faire du matériel original pour pouvoir obtenir un contrat d'enregistrement. Davy n'a pas aimé l'idée. Il craignait que si nous jouions du matériel original, nous nous ferions virer de tous les bons bars où nous travaillions.

Les propriétaires de clubs souhaitaient que les groupes jouent alors uniquement avec "Wooly Bully", "Louie Louie" et "In the Midnight". Hour, "parce que si le groupe jouait quelque chose d'original, personne ne danserait, et quand ils ne dansent pas, ils ne boivent pas.

Les autres membres du groupe ont bien aimé mon idée de contrat d'enregistrement et voulaient essayer les éléments originaux. Davy s'est tiré. Il s'est avéré que Davy avait tout à fait raison: nous ne pouvions pas conserver d'emploi ailleurs.

L'un des endroits où nous avons été virés était le Tomcat-a-Go-Go à Torrance. Au cours de cette période dans American Musical Histoire, n'importe quoi avec "Go-Go" collé à la fin était vraiment chaud. Tout ce que vous deviez faire si vous était un musicien désirant un travail stable, devait se frayer un chemin à travers cinq sets par nuit de pistes rythmiques bruyantes, tandis que les filles avec des costumes à franges faisaient le tour, comme si ce mouvement corporel particulier résumait l'esthétique du buveur de bière sérieux

Les groupes qui ont obtenu le plus de travail sont ceux qui prétendent être anglais. Ils étaient souvent des groupes de surf qui portaient des perruques pour ressembler à des cheveux longs ou ajoutaient le mot Beatles quelque part dans leur groupe nom - vous obtenez la dérive. Les groupes de clones de Beatle étaient partout. Nous n'avions pas les cheveux longs, nous n'avions pas des uniformes de groupe et nous étions laids comme de la merde. Nous étions, au sens biblique du mot, UNEMPLOYABLE.

Un magasin de chaussures reconverti à Norwalk avec une licence de bière nous a également licencié. Bien sûr, le concert n'a pas très bien payé: quinze dollars par nuit divisés par quatre gars.

Il n'y avait pas de kiosque à musique, on nous a donc demandé de jouer dans un coin, entouré de tables sur lesquelles trois femmes d'âge moyen (la fierté de Norwalk - peut-être des parents du propriétaire), portant des collants beige pour se cacher que j'imaginais être du fromage de Roquefort moulé en forme de jambes humaines, pendait leur frange putride dans notre visages pendant que nous jouions (c'est vrai, vous l'avez deviné) "Louie Louie."

Comment nous avons eu notre premier manager

Tandis que je vivais dans le bungalow où mon estomac a presque explosé (1964), j'ai encore rencontré Don Cerveris. A cette occasion, Don m'a présenté à un de ses amis, Mark Cheka, un 'artiste pop' de New York. East Village. Mark avait environ cinquante ans et portait un béret. Il vivait à West Hollywood avec une serveuse du Ash Grove a nommé Stephanie, qui avait aussi une apparence de beatnik.

L'objet principal de son travail était un groupe de grands tableaux ressemblant à des cibles de pistolet de la police, conçu pour être vu sous des lumières clignotantes, ce qui donnait l'illusion que les silhouettes sautaient. J'ai trouvé cela un peu déroutant - mais qu'est-ce que je connais de l'art? Nous sommes sortis et avons eu quelques rires, malgré les cibles.

J'étais arrivé à la conclusion que le groupe avait besoin d'un manager et j'avais pensé (Oh! J'allais le regretter!) que la personne requise pour ce poste important devait être quelqu'un avec un "background artistique". C'est alors seulement, raisonnai-je, que notre esthétique serait bien comprise et qu'une fois que nous aurions acquis un directeur sensibilisé, notre futur succès dans le show business serait assuré.

J'ai donc convaincu Mark de faire le voyage mystérieux à Pomona (cinquante milles à l'est), où il pourrait écouter les Mothers en live au Broadside. Que savais-je de la gestion? Je lui ai dit que s'il voulait gérer le groupe et pourrait nous obtenir quelques concerts, on pourrait aller de l'avant.

Il ne savait pas vraiment comment faire ça. Que savait-il de la gestion? Il a amené un gars nommé Herb Cohen, qui dirigeait des groupes de folk et de folk-rock et cherchait un autre acte à suivre. Finalement, ils est devenu cogestionnaire de notre groupe, avec un contrat négocié 'au nom du groupe' par le frère de Herb, un avocat nommé Martin (Mutt) Cohen.

Soudain, nous avons eu un Real Hollywood Manager - un professionnel de l'industrie qui réservait déjà des groupes dans de vraies discothèques Hollywood pendant des années, et ferait probablement de même pour nous.

Après avoir été forcés (à grands frais) dans le Syndicat des musiciens (section locale 47), nous avons commencé à toucher des chèques de paie un peu meilleurs; Cependant, notre nouvelle équipe de direction hautement qualifiée prenait quinze pour cent de ses effectifs. Presque du jour au lendemain, nous sommes passés du niveau de famine au niveau de pauvreté.

La première scène de Freak dans L.A.

Le jour de la fête des mères, en 1964, le nom du groupe a été officiellement changé pour les Mothers. Nous avions commencé à construire une petite circonscription sur le circuit du donjon psychédélique.

Il y avait une "scène" évoluant dans L.A. à cette époque - quelque chose de très différent de la "scène" de San Francisco.

Au milieu des années soixante, San Francisco était très chauvin et ethnocentrique. Vers la manière Friscoids de penser, tout ce qui venait de leur ville était un art vraiment important, et n'importe quoi de n'importe où ailleurs (surtout L.A.) était dogshit. Le magazine Rolling Stone a contribué à promouvoir cette fiction, à l'échelle nationale.

L'une des raisons pour lesquelles les musiciens ont déménagé à San Francisco était de se faire certifier dans le cadre de The Real Deal. L'autre était le "bonus Kool-Aid" lors des concerts de Grateful Dead.

La scène à Los Angeles était beaucoup plus étrange. Peu importe comment Peace & Love les groupes de San Francisco pourraient essayer pour de se faire voir, ils sont finalement venus au sud du mauvais Hollywood pour obtenir un contrat d'enregistrement.

Je me souviens que l'avance la plus élevée payée pour la signature d'un groupe au cours de cette période était celle du Jefferson Airplane - une somme stupéfiante, stupéfiante, de vingt-cinq mille dollars, inouïe.

À l'époque, les Byrds étaient le berceau du rock de Los Angeles. Ils étaient 'It' - et puis un groupe appelé Love était "ça". Il y avait quelques groupes "psychédéliques" qui n'ont jamais vraiment été "ça", mais ils pouvaient toujours trouver du travail et obtenir des contrats d'enregistrement, notamment avec le groupe expérimental de West Coast Pop Art, Sky Saxon et The Seeds, et les feuilles (noté pour leur version de couverture de "Hey, Joe").

Quand nous sommes allés à San Francisco pour la première fois, au début du Family Dog, il semblait que tout le monde portait le même costume, un mélange de Barbary Coast et Old West - des gars avec des moustaches au guidon, des filles en pleine effervescence robes avec des plumes dans les cheveux, etc. En revanche, la costumerie L.A. était plus aléatoire et plus bizarre.

Musicalement, les bandes du nord avaient un peu plus de style country. En Amérique latine, c'était du folk-rock à mourir. Tout avait ce putain d'accord de ré au bas de la nuque où tu bouges ton doigt autour de toi - comme "Aiguilles et épingles."

Le blues était acceptable à San Francisco, mais n'est pas passé du tout à Hollywood. Je me souviens du Butterfield Blues Band jouant au voyage. Ils étaient merde chaude partout dans le pays, mais les gens de L.A aurait préféré écouter "Mr. Tambourine Man".

Juste des gens ordinaires

J'ai vu Lenny Bruce plusieurs fois à Canter's Deli, où il avait l'habitude de s'asseoir dans la cabine avec Phil Spector et manger des knockwurst. Je n'ai pas vraiment parlé avec lui avant notre ouverture au Fillmore West en 1966. Je l'ai rencontré dans le hall entre deux sets et lui ai demandé de signer mon brouillon de carte. Il a dit non - il ne voulait pas y toucher.

À cette époque, Lenny vivait avec un gars nommé John Judnich. John gagnait sa vie à temps partiel en louant des systèmes de son aux groupes locaux. Un système à la pointe de la technologie consistait alors en deux armoires Altec A-7 alimentées par un Amplificateur de 200 watts et pas de système de contrôle (ils n'avaient pas encore été inventés - les magiciens de la vieille école convainquaient tout le monde qu'il était impossible de placer un microphone aussi proche d'un haut-parleur). Chanteurs n'avaient aucun moyen d'entendre ce qu'ils chantaient - ils pouvaient seulement entendre leurs voix résonner sur le mur du fond, dans l'ampli principal. Nous avons utilisé le système de Judnich pour nous produire dans la salle d'exposition du sanctuaire (environ cinq mille sièges). Quoi qu'il en soit, John venait nous rendre visite de temps en temps, et c'est à une de ces occasions qu'il nous a présenté à "Jerry le fou."

Jerry avait environ trente-cinq ou quarante ans et avait passé des années dans des institutions psychiatriques. Il était accro pour accélérer. Quand il était jeune garçon, sa mère (qui travaillait pour le département de probation) lui a présenté une copie de Gray's Anatomy. Il l'a lu consciencieusement et a noté que dans certaines illustrations de muscles, il dit, "tel ou tel muscle, quand présent -", et c'est ainsi que Jerry entreprit de développer le "quand présent" des muscles du corps humain. Il a inventé les "dispositifs d'exercice" pour ces "zones spéciales" qui n'avaient pas été habité par le tissu musculaire depuis la rédaction du livre.

Il ne ressemblait pas à un bodybuilder, mais il était très fort. Il pouvait plier les barres d'arceau (les tiges d'acier utilisées pour renforcer le béton) en les plaçant sur la nuque et en les tirant vers l'avant avec ses bras. En conséquence de Lors de cette expérimentation personnelle, il avait semé des bosses étranges sur tout son corps - mais ce n'était que le début.

Quelque part le long de la ligne, Jerry a découvert qu'il aimait - peut-être même était accro à - l'électricité. Il adorait être sous le choc et avait été arrêté plusieurs fois quand des banlieusards sans méfiance avaient découvert lui dans leurs cours, avec sa tête pressée contre le compteur électrique - parce qu'il voulait juste être tout près.

Lui et un ami ont déjà sauté par-dessus la clôture du poste électrique de Nichols Canyon pour la même raison. le Un ami a failli mourir d'électrocution. Jerry s'est échappé.

Il a vécu quelque temps à Echo Park avec un gars nommé "Wild Bill, le mannequin maniaque", dans une maison remplie avec des mannequins de magasin. Wild Bill était un chimiste qui a fait la vitesse. Jerry transportait l'équipement et les ingrédients la colline escarpée au laboratoire, en échange de l'hébergement et de médicaments gratuits.

Wild Bill avait un passe-temps. Les mannequins de la maison avaient été peints et munis de prothèses en caoutchouc pour qu'il puisse les baiser. Lors des occasions de fête, il invitait les gens à "baiser sa famille" - y compris un mannequin de petite fille (nommé Caroline Cuntley).

Jerry voulait être musicien, alors il s'est appris à jouer du piano en utilisant un miroir. Il m'a dit que en regardant ses mains dans un miroir, placé "ainsi", , la distance entre les touches paraissait plus petite, et c'était beaucoup plus facile d'apprendre de cette façon. Il portait également un chapeau en métal (une passoire inversée) parce qu'il craignait que les gens essayaient de lire dans ses pensées.

Un matin, ma femme, Gail, et moi nous sommes réveillés pour trouver Crazy Jerry pendu par les genoux - comme une chauve-souris - à la branche d'un arbre dans notre cour, juste devant la fenêtre de la chambre. Plus tard dans la nuit, dans notre sous-sol, j'ai fait un enregistrement de son histoire.

Il n'avait pas de dents, donc il avait du mal à parler, mais en quelques heures, nous avons appris cela, une fois, quand il était à "L'Institution" et qu'ils le shootaient à la Thorazine, il était capable de sauter une clôture de douze pieds et s'échapper des gardes.

Il est allé chez sa mère pour se cacher. La maison était verrouillée, alors il se glissa sous la maison et vint dans la cuisine à travers le tiroir à pain. Il se coucha et s'endormit. Sa mère, alors agent de probation, est rentré à la maison, l'a trouvé et l'a renvoy´.

Comparé à Jerry et Bill, Lenny Bruce était tout à fait normal. À cette époque, selon Judnich, Lenny avait l'habitude de rester debout toute la nuit vêtu de la tenue d'un médecin, en écoutant les défilés de Sousa et en travaillant sur ses dossiers juridiques. Il était assez coloré en Californie du Sud à cette époque - mais quelques administrations républicaines et pouf!

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 'booger-smearage' -- on the window by the bed. This window eventually became opaque. One day, the Mom stuck her head into the room and got hysterical, demanding immediate removal of the frosting. According to Ronnie: "We had to use Ajax and a putty knife to get the damn things off."

Eventually, Kenny came back from 'boarding school.' For some reason he didn't want to stay in the house, and so he took up residence in the garage -- with Motorhead (this was before Motorhead moved in with me).

It was winter when they lived out there and, since there was no toilet in the garage -- and not wishing to brave the elements -- the lads relieved themselves nightly into some of the Mom's mason jars, lined up along the garage wall, awaiting the installation of next season's home-canned fruits.

Now, Ronnie wasn't the only cardplayer in the family -- Kenny also liked to play -- and on a few of those cold winter nights, Kenny and Motorhead hosted a few games for the other fun guys in the neighborhood. Eventually, the beer took effect, and everybody started reaching for the jars.

The jars weren't dumped -- they were saved as 'trophies.'

Many games later, the boys ran out of jars. The solution to this problem came in the form of a large earthenware crock (like the one Ronnie used to watch the raisins puff up in).

In a festive ceremony, all trophy jars were poured into the crock -- just to find out how much piss there was around there ("Wow! Look at that! We're really pissin' a lot! Jesus H. Christ, what a lot of piss we got here! Haw haw haw. . .").

Eventually, Kenny moved back into the house, and Motorhead moved in with me. One day, a few months later, Motorhead visited Kenny and, just for old times' sake, took a peek at the crock in the garage. Lifting the board which covered it, they beheld several 'denizens' swimming in the piss -- unknown 'things' that looked sort of like tadpoles.

Kenny fished one out and plopped it on the shop bench. It had a tail, and a head which Kenny described as being "about as big as your little fingernail -- white, with a black dot in the middle of it. . ."

Motorhead poked it with a nail and "some clear stuff came out." Proud of their scientific discovery, they informed Dink. They were then instructed by the bewildered furniture salesman to "pour that whole damn crock down the toilet!," which is what they did -- and to this day, friends, somewhere in the depths of the Ontario sewage system, horrible jelly-wigglers gurgle and multiply -- waiting for their moment of 'heavy rotation' on MTV.

A Mere Oversight

Eventually, MGM made an 'innocent mistake': they missed an option pickup. They forgot to send us the little piece of paper that says, "We pick up your option -- you are still under contract to us -- we still want you to make records for us."

With that as leverage, we negotiated a 'logo deal.' Bizarre Productions was created: a label within the MGM company structure -- a semi-independent entity -- and so Cruising with Ruben & the Jets and Mothermania were released on the Bizarre/Verve label, distributed by MGM.

There was a lot of nonsense in the press when Cruising with Ruben & the Jets came out, about how it had 'fooled people.' I heard one story that a DJ in Philly was playing it like crazy until he found out it was the Mothers, at which point he yanked it. The fact is, everybody knew it was the Mothers of Invention because it said so on the cover: "Is this the Mothers of Invention recording under a different name in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio?"

I conceived that album along the same lines as the compositions in Stravinsky's neoclassical period. If he could take the forms and clichés of the classical era and pervert them, why not do the same with the rules and regulations that applied to doo-wop in the fifties?

The listener wouldn't really think that a song like "Stuff Up the Cracks" was an honest-to-goodness 1950s song. In terms of timbre, it's right on the fringe (because of the vocal parts) -- but those chords would never happen in original doo-wop.

The songs of that period were locked into a choice of three formula/flavors: I-VI-IV-V ("Earth Angel"), or I-II-I-II ("Nite Owl"), or I-IV-V ("Louie Louie"). Very seldom would you hear a III chord or a flat VII chord -- or hear someone going from I to flat VII. There were only a few examples of that type of harmonic deviation during the fifties -- the best one being "This Paradise" by Donald Woods and the Bel-Aires on Flip -- so our chord progressions were not exactly part of that tradition.

What was consistent with tradition on that album was the approach to the harmony, the type of vocal style and timbre used in it, and the simplicity of most of the beats. Of course, some of the lyrics were on a sub-Mongoloid level, but that was just another norm, carried to an extreme.

Give me a fucking break! Is this a song about a douche bag, or what? Some people take that kind of lyric seriously!

There are some dead giveaways in that album, too. For instance, on the fadeout of "Fountain of Love" you can hear the opening notes of Rite of Spring. One song has the background chant of "Earth Angel" superimposed on the chant from another song, and so on.

The satire in Ruben worked on two or three levels. I detest love lyrics. I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics.'

You're a young kid and you hear all those 'love lyrics,' right? Your parents aren't telling you the truth about love, and you can't really learn about it in school. You're getting the bulk of your 'behavior norms' mapped out for you in the lyrics to some dumb fucking love song. It's a subconscious training that creates desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something.

What I think is very cynical about some rock and roll songs -- especially today -- is the way they say: "Let's make love." What the fuck kind of wussy says shit like that in the real world? You ought to be able to say "Let's go fuck," or at least "Let's go fill-in-the-blank" -- but you gotta say "Let's make love" in order to get on the radio. This creates a semantic corruption, by changing the context in which the word 'love' is used in the song.

When they get into drooling about love as a 'romantic concept' -- especially in the lyrics of sensitive singer/songwriter types -- that's another shove in the direction of bad mental health.

Fortunately, lyrics over the last five or six years have gotten to be less and less important, with 'art rock groups' and new wavers specializing in 'nonjudgmental' or 'purposely inconsequential' lyrics. People have stopped listening to the lyrics -- they are now only 'pitched mouth noises.'

Headin' for the Last Roundup

In 1966 and '67, the L.A.P.D. and the Sheriffs Department went to war with the freaks in Hollywood. Every weekend people were rounded up (with no warrants presented or charges stated) as they walked on Sunset Boulevard, forced into Sheriffs buses, driven downtown, held hostage for the evening, then let go -- all because they had LONG HAIR.

The places where they used to eat (Ben Frank's on Sunset and Canter's Deli on Fairfax) were under constant surveillance. The city government threatened to take away Elmer (Whisky-a-Go-Go) Valentine's liquor license if he didn't stop booking long-haired acts into his club. There was no place left to work in Hollywood.

Our New Home

Gail and I moved to New York in 1967 to play in the Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street. The first place we stayed, before we could find an apartment, was the Hotel Van Rensselaer on Eleventh Street. We were living in a small room on one of the upper floors. I was working on the album cover illustration for Absolutely Free at a desk by the window. I remember the place being so dirty I couldn't keep the soot off the artwork.

We lived on sandwiches and coffee from the Smiler's Deli around the corner. It was cold enough that a container of milk left on the outside windowsill wouldn't go bad for days (but when you brought it back in it was covered with soot). The Fugs, who were also working in the Village then, tried to launch a protest against Con Ed (the suspected source of this evil) by urging concerned citizens to mail their snot to the head office.

We were amazed at this grubbiness because we had just come from California, where we had a fairly nice house in Laurel Canyon (for two hundred dollars a month) with a fireplace, two bedrooms, a kitchen, a garage and our very own patch of dirt in the backyard. There were trees around. It was sort of pretty, and we had privacy.

Gail went out to look for an apartment near the Garrick and finally found a place at 180 Thompson Street (apartment 3-C), right around the corner from the theater. I took a break from rehearsal and went with her to look at it. When we got to the door, we found that a wino had passed out, pissed himself, and was wedged against it. In 1967, this was what you got in New York City for two hundred dollars a month.

Our New Home had a bedroom, a living room-kitchenette and a bathroom -- with a view of a brick wall out the window. We lived there for several months before we found a sublet near Seventh Avenue on Charles Street, the ground floor of a brown-stone.

It was our privilege to occupy this space during the garbage strike. The debris was piled up right outside our bedroom window. We listened to the rats at night.

During the time we lived in the Thompson Street cracker-box, my brother visited me from Los Angeles, along with Dick Barber, his friend from high school (who eventually became our road manager) and another friend, Bill Harris (now a prominent film critic). The three of them were sleeping on the living room floor.

About that time I got the idea for the We're Only In It for the Money album, and was looking for an artist capable of creating the ultimate parody of the Sgt. Pepper cover. I heard about Cal Schenkel, a former boyfriend of the girl who was our opening act at the Garrick. He came up from Philadelphia and showed me his portfolio. The stuff was great, but the only way to hire him was to find a place for him to stay in New York. (And guess where it was?) So it was Bobby, Bill, Calvin and Dick, on the floor, in sleeping bags.

Summer of Love?

During that summer, Greenwich Village was absurd. Any rumor, no matter how stupid, could turn out to be true -- so, at one point, rumor had it that a hippie had killed a Marine.

Stories circulated that the Marines were going to come to the Village and kill all the hippies. Everybody who was hippie-looking had their eyes peeled for people who looked like Marines. Everyone figured they wouldn't really come in dressed like Marines, so they were also on the lookout for anyone with hair that was too short, or who had clean fingernails.

In the midst of this, we were working the Garrick, six nights a week, two shows a night, and rehearsing in the afternoon.

New York weather in the summertime is pretty disgusting. Sometime around the first of June, the air conditioner died and the owner of the theater (David Lee Roth's Dad, I'm told) decided that it would be too expensive to fix it.

Picture a room like a long, narrow tunnel (actually, a former 'art movie' theater) that holds three hundred people; easily 102 degrees at all times, totally humid, and no air circulating.

The floor of that stage had a green rug on it. When we filmed the "Mr. Green Genes" video, the people on stage had stomped a bunch of vegetables and whipped cream into it, and it never got cleaned.

The stuffed giraffe and the other toys we used in the show lived in a box on the side of the stage, along with chunks of dead vegetables. All organic matter in the theater had begun to reproduce itself, and was producing 'a bad smell.'

Where's the Beef?

The rotten vegetables were only part of the early M.O.I. 'entertainment statement.' I once proposed the construction of an apparatus which would have been a cross between a gallows and an old-fashioned shower stall. The shower curtain was to have been an American flag, and behind it, hanging from the gallows, was to be a side of beef (at room temperature). I proposed to roll this out at the end of each show, play a fanfare and open the curtain, releasing flies into the audience.

Our Boys in Uniform

Anyway, we were in there every afternoon, rehearsing. One day, three Marines, in full dress uniform, came through the door, sat down in the front row -- and didn't say anything. I asked them how they were doing and, of course, did they want to sit in?

I asked them if they knew any songs. One of the guys said that, yeah, they knew "House of the Rising Sun" and "Everybody Must Get Stoned." I said, "That's great. Would you guys like to sing with us tonight? We'd just LOVE to have Marines singing on stage with us." They said, yeah, they would.

I said, "Go across the street to the Tin Angel, have a few drinks, and come back when the show is on."

When they came back, I brought them up on stage -- although it must have been against regulations for them to do this kind of thing in full dress -- and had them sing "Everybody Must Get Stoned." By that time they were pretty well wrecked, so I suggested, "Why don't you show the folks in the audience what you guys do for a living."

I handed them a big baby doll and said, "Suppose you just pretend that this is a 'gook baby.'" They proceeded to rip and mutilate the doll while we played. It was truly horrible. After it was over, I thanked them and, with a quiet musical accompaniment, showed the ruined parts of the doll to the audience. Nobody was laughing.

Jimi's New Tailor

On another occasion, Jimi Hendrix sat in with us. I didn't know him before then, and I can't remember how I was introduced to him -- probably met him at the Tin Angel. A few days later he came to visit our cubicle on Charles Street with his friend, drummer Buddy Miles. Jimi was wearing green velvet pants -- all decked out -- on his way to a party with Buddy. (The only thing that Buddy said was "Hi, Frank," after which he sat on the couch, leaned back and passed out, snoring.) They were there for about an hour and a half. Buddy had a nice nap, and Hendrix ripped his pants at the crotch while demonstrating a dance step. Gail sewed them up for him. When it was time to leave he said, "Come on, Buddy." The snoring stopped, and they left.

Sal Lombardo

One day, on my way to lunch at the T.A., a guy wearing a buckskin suit -- in July -- with a black scraggly beard and hair sticking out all over the place, came up to me and said, "I want to be in your band."

"What do you play?" I asked. "Nothing," he answered. "Okay," I said, "you've got the job." The guy's name was Sal Lombardo.

Later that night, I handed him some maracas and a tambourine -- he didn't get paid, but he got to stand onstage and 'be in the band.'

Part of our show included the concept of nightly 'enforced recreation' -- sort of like audience participation, only more dangerous.

We'd be playing something and I'd lean over and say, "Sal, see that guy over there? Go get him." Sal would then snatch the guy out of the audience and drag him onstage. It was then my privilege to invent 'recreational activities' for these hapless individuals, inducing them to 'participate.' You can see Sal in the video of Uncle Meat. He's the guy lying on his back with a corncob in his mouth, having whipped cream squirted in his face during 'Mr. Green Genes." That night his entire buckskin suit was covered with real whipped cream. He never had it cleaned. Do you know what real whipped cream smells like on BO buckskin at 100-plus degrees? We're talking bestiality here.

When we stopped working at the Garrick, Sal went off to South America to find some Forbidden City. I saw him again about ten or twelve years later, when he showed up at a gig in Sacramento. He was operating a pizza place then. He swore he had found the Secret City of (fill in the blank with an eleven-syllable word) in South America -- housing untold riches -- but he didn't have any way to get the stuff out.

Loeb & Leopold

There were two suburban Jewish guys who attended the Garrick shows relentlessly. They called themselves 'Loeb & Leopold' (not the real 'Loeb & Leopold,' but an incredibly lifelike simulation). They came to at least thirty shows.

At the end of our run they came backstage, opened up their wallets and, with tears in their eyes, showed me all their ticket stubs. They loved the Garrick shows.

One of the guys -- I'm pretty sure his name was Mark Trottiner -- liked to run up the aisle, jump on stage, grab the microphone out of my hand and scream into it as loud as he could. Then he would fall on the stage, roll over like a dog and urge me to spit Pepsi-Cola all over his body. What a crowd-pleaser.

Ten years later, I was doing a Halloween show at the Palladium, and I looked out into the audience and thought I saw him. It had to be him. I said, "Aren't you the guy who used to --?" It was him. He grew up to become a record distributor in Queens.

Louie the Turkey

Another regular was a guy we called "Louie the Turkey" -- because of his laugh. His real name was Louis Cuneo. He wound up on the Lumpy Gravy album as one of the people talking about incomprehensible stuff, inside a piano.

We would always know when Louie was in the theater because we could hear him in the back of the room. I would invite him onstage, give him a stool to sit on, hand him the microphone and stop the music. He would sit there and laugh -- at nothing -- and the whole audience would laugh with him for five minutes. Then we thanked him, and he'd leave.

Custom Entertainment

We opened the Garrick run during Easter vacation 1967. There were lines around the block, in the snow. However, as soon as school reconvened, attendance plummeted. On our worst night we had three paying customers. We told them we were going to give them an evening of customized, personal entertainment.

There was a passageway in back of the Garrick that led downstairs to the Cafe au-Go-Go's kitchen. Everybody in the band went down and got hot cider and bunches of little snacks. We put towels over our arms, like waiters, went back, served our audience their refreshments and talked with them for an hour and a half.

On another occasion we had only ten or fifteen people. We asked them whether they would like to be the band for the night. They thought it was a good idea, so we gave them our instruments, sat in the audience for an hour and a half and listened to them play the show.

Tom & Jerry

I was in Manny's Musical Instruments in New York sometime in 1967, and it was raining outside. A little guy came walking in, kind of wet, and introduced himself as Paul Simon. He said he wanted me to come to dinner at his house that night, and gave me the address. I said okay and went there.

As I walked in the door, Paul was on his hands and knees in front of what appeared to be a Magnavox stereo -- the same model preferred by "the Stumbler" from Sun Village. He had his ear right up to the speaker, listening to a Django Reinhardt record.

Within moments -- for no apparent reason -- he announced that he was upset because he had to pay six hundred thousand dollars in income tax that year. This was completely unsolicited information, and I thought to myself, If only I could earn six hundred thousand dollars. What did you have to earn in order to have to pay that much tax? Then Art Garfunkel came in, and we talked and talked.

They hadn't been on the road in a long time, and were reminiscing about the 'good old days.' I didn't realize that they used to be called Tom & Jerry, and that they once had a hit song called "Hey, Schoolgirl in the Second Row."

I said, "Well, I can understand your desire to experience the joys of touring once again, and so I'll make you this offer. . . we're playing in Buffalo tomorrow night. Why don't you guys come up there and open for us as Tom & Jerry? I won't tell anybody. Just get your stuff and go out there and sing 'Hey, Schoolgirl in the Second Row' -- just play only your old stuff, no Simon & Garfunkel tunes." They loved the idea and said they would do it.

They did the opener as Tom & Jerry; we played our show, and at the encore I told the audience, "I'd like to bring back our friends to do another number." They came out and played "Sounds of Silence." At that point it dawned on everybody that this was the one, and only, the magnificent SIMON & GARFUNKEL. On the way out, after the show, a college-educated woman walked over to me and said, "Why did you do that? Why did you make fun of Simon & Garfunkel?" -- as if I had pulled some kind of cruel joke on them. What the fuck did she think had just happened? That these two SUPERSTARS had dropped in out of nowhere and we had FORCED them to sing "OOO-boppa-loochy-bah, she's mine!"?

CHAPTER 5
The Log Cabin

When we returned to California in 1968, we moved into a large log cabin, once owned by old-time cowboy star Tom Mix, at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Drive.

The living room was seventy-five by thirty feet, with a huge fireplace. Close to a dozen people, mostly employees, lived there. The rent was seven hundred dollars a month.

Cal Schenkel had his own little art department in one wing of the house. In the basement was a one-lane bowling alley and enough space for the band to rehearse. It had two walk-in safes -- like bank vaults -- and a subbasement which had probably been a wine cellar. It was rustic and decrepit; it really looked like an old-time log cabin, with rough-hewn wood, bristling with splinters.

On the day Mick Jagger stopped by for his first visit, one of the above-mentioned splinters crammed itself into the end of the big toe on my right foot, just as I was making my way to the door.

I greeted Mr. Jagger, hopping on one foot. He asked why I was behaving in this manner. I told him about the splinter and hobbled over to a chair. He followed, got on the floor in front of me, located the little wooden tormentor and removed it. We spent about an hour after that discussing European history.

An Unwanted Visitor

Alongside the house on the grounds was a big concrete fish pond full of weeds. Next to that was a hole in the ground surrounded by a concrete block filled with stagnant water. (I was told that it was a secret passageway that went under the street to Harry Houdini's old house on the other side of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I never found out if that was true.) Running up the hillside, behind the house, was a collection of man-made caves built out of stucco, with electric wiring and light bulbs inside.

The residents at that time included my wife, Gail; my secretary, Pauline Butcher; our road manager, Dick Barber; Pamela Zarubica; Ian Underwood; Motorhead Sherwood; and a girl named Christine Frka -- the woman on the cover of the Hot Rats album crawling out of the crypt.

Christine Frka was our baby-sitter, along with Pamela Des Barres. Moon was about eight months old, and Dweezil hadn't been born yet. That's the cast of characters and the setting.

One of the reasons we finally moved out was that everybody in Hollywood knew where it was, and they were knocking on the door at all hours of the day and night wanting to have a party.

One summer afternoon I was sitting in the living room with Wild Man Fischer and a few of the GTO's (Girls Together Outrageously). The front door was open. A guy walked in off the street and introduced himself as "The Raven," and said that he had something for me.

First he handed me a bottle of fake blood with a rag in it, said, "I have isolated The Specimen!" and pulled out an Army .45.

Wild Man Fischer turned white -- he knew the guy was crazy. My eyebrows went up and down. He obviously wasn't from Southern California, so I said, "Have you been in Los Angeles very long?" "No," he said, "I just got here." Trying to be as 'helpful' as possible, I said, "You know what? If the police see you with that gun around here, you're going to be in a lot of trouble."

"Yeah?" he said.

"Yeah," I said, "-- and I know a place where you can hide it." Everybody who was in the room got up to perform the mystical ceremony designed to 'Help The Raven Hide His Gun.'

We went out the front door, around the side, past the fish tank to that hole with the stagnant water in it. I said, "Look, if you put it in there, they'll NEVER find it."

Everybody had to throw something in the hole. Gail and the rest of the household gathered little objects to toss in. Then we got our visitor to drop his gun in, and I sprinkled some leaves on top of it, saying, "It's taken care of now."

We told him we were very busy then, and urged him to leave -- and started looking for another house to live in.

Girls Together Outrageously

The overall stylistic concept of the GTO's had a lot to do with Christine Frka. Unfortunately, she OD'd sometime during the 1970s -- I don't know exactly when.

Christine was the one who recommended that I record Alice Cooper, and later provided them with the ideas for their costumes. (When I first saw them, they looked pretty much like a bunch of guys from Arizona.)

Christine used to hang out with Miss Sparkie, Miss Mercy, Miss Pamela, Miss Lucy, Miss Sandra and Miss Cynderella. They were totally dedicated and devoted to every aspect of rock and roll -- especially the part about guys in bands who had Big Weenies.

Miss Mercy's claim to fame at that time was an unusual interest: butter. She used to open the refrigerator, remove a quarter-pound stick, and swallow it whole. Miss Sandra always carried a small can of Crisco for personal lubrication.

The only other thing that mattered to them was the concept of raw, unbridled costumery. There was strong competition between the ladies as to which one was dressing in the most 'unique' way. (If you can still find it, Permanent Damage, the album of the GTO's, manages to give a pretty good flavor of their lifestyle.)

Included in it is a tape of Cynthia Plaster-Caster talking on the phone to Miss Pamela (now known as Pamela 'I'm With the Band' Des Barres), comparing notes. They both kept diaries, so they had cross-references to the same guys. Noel Redding, bassist from the Jimi Hendrix group, also kept diaries, intertwined with the other two. It would have been great to see them all in one book.

It's unfortunate that the only diaries published so far have been Pamela's. Good as they are, they're not nearly as well written or insightful as Cynthia's.

I met Cynthia Plaster-Caster when the Mothers were working as the opening act for Cream at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago in 1968. This was toward the end of Cream's existence, when all the guys in the band hated each other. Each guy had his own road manager, his own limousine, his own etc., etc., etc.

During a conversation backstage, Eric Clapton asked if I had ever heard of the Plaster-Casters. I said I hadn't. He said "Well, afier the show, come with me. You won't believe this." So, we went to his hotel.

Upon arrival we found, sitting in the lobby, two girls. One of them had a small suitcase with an oval cardboard emblem glued to the side that said "THE PLASTER-CASTERS OF CHICAGO." The other one had a brown paper bag.

They didn't say a word -- just stood up and followed us into the elevator, and into the room. The suitcase girl opened the suitcase. The other one opened the bag. They took out some 'statuettes': "Here's Jimi Hendrix, and here's Noel Redding, and here's the roadie from. . ."

They put them on the coffee table and took out the rest of their gear -- everything a person might need to make a plaster replica of the human weenus.

We spent two or three hours talking with them. Neither of us volunteered to be 'immortalized.'

The Plaster-Casters were written up in various publications at that time. Probably as a result of this, our office received a portfolio from a guy who claimed to be doing something similar with female organs, casting them in silver. Very nice.

The material used for the molds in each case was the same stuff the dentist puts in your mouth for taking impressions of your teeth. It's a powder called alginate, which, when mixed with water, gets rubbery, and eventually hardens so that plaster can be poured into it.

The way the Plaster-Casters worked was, one of them would mix the goo while the other one gave the guy a blow job. As you can imagine, this sort of thing requires a scientific sense of timing.

The blow-job girl had to take her mouth off the guy's dick at the precise moment the other one slammed the container full of glop onto the end of it, holding it there until it hardened enough to make a good mold. Cynthia wouldn't blow the guys; that was the other girl's assignment. Cynthia mixed the goo.

Meanwhile, the 'subject' had to concentrate on maintaining an erection, otherwise he wouldn't make a good impression.

When Hendrix was cast, Cynthia told me, he liked the glop so well, he fucked the mold.

Jazz: The Music of Unemployment

The first time we played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk was at the 1968 Boston Globe Jazz Festival. After his performance, when introduced to him backstage, I said I really liked what he was doing, and said that if he felt like joining us onstage during our set, he was more than welcome. In spite of his blindness, I believed we could accommodate whatever he wanted to do.

We began our set, wending our atonal way toward a medley of 1950s-style honking saxophone numbers. During this fairly complicated, choreographed routine, Rahsaan, assisted by his helper (can't remember his name), decided to join in.

In 1969, George Wein, impresario of the Newport Jazz Festival, decided it would be a tremendous idea to put the Mothers of Invention on a jazz tour of the East Coast. We wound up working in a package with Kirk, Duke Ellington and Gary Burton in Miami at the Jai Alai Fronton, and at another gig in South Carolina.

The touring package did not carry its own PA -- we had to use whatever speakers existed in each of the venues we were booked into. The hall in South Carolina was rigged with small jukebox speakers, set in a ring around the building. Useless, but there we were -- we had to play the show.

Before we went on, I saw Duke Ellington begging -- pleading -- for a ten-dollar advance. It was really depressing. After that show, I told the guys: "That's it -- we're breaking the bande up."

We'd been together in one configuration or another for about five years at that point, and suddenly EVERYTHING looked utterly hopeless to me. If Duke Ellington had to beg some George Wein assistant backstage for ten bucks, what the fuck was I doing with a ten-piece band, trying to play rock and roll -- or something that was almost rock and roll?

I was paying everybody in the band a weekly salary of two hundred dollars -- all year round, whether we were working or not, along with all hotel and travel expenses when we did get work. The guys in the band were pissed off -- as if their welfare had been canceled -- but at that point I was ten thousand dollars in the red.

CHAPTER 6
Send In the Clowns

I spent part of 1969 working in the studio on the Hot Rats album, and did a few local gigs with Ian Underwood and Sugarcane Harris. It was going nowhere. The album, which I happened to like a lot, sneaked onto the Billboard charts somewhere around 99 and vanished immediately. In the United States, at least, I had produced another flop.

(The very idea! An all-instrumental album, except for one vocal cut -- and that had to feature Captain Beefheart! He's no singer! Why are you wasting America's precious time with this, you asshole!)

As it has turned out, that album, as a catalog item, has outlived just about everything else released in 1970, and, for our beloved friends in the British Isles, stands out as the only 'good' Zappa album ever released -- more about those guys later.

Sometime in 1970, I had an offer for a major concert performance of the orchestral music accumulating in my closet. During the M.O.I.'s first five years, I had carried with me, on the road, masses of manuscript paper, and, whenever there was an opportunity, scribbled stuff on it. This material eventually became the score for 200 Motels (based on an estimate of the number of gigs we played in the first five years -- forty jobs per year?).

The performance was to be held at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion (a basketball arena seating about fourteen thousand people), with Zubin Mehta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. A pretty big deal.

There was a 'catch,' though -- the orchestra didn't really want to play the stuff -- they wanted AN EVENT; something 'unique' -- like -- uhh, maybe a ROCK GROUP and -- uhhhhh -- a REAL ORCHESTRA sort of -- uhhh -- well, you know -- 'rocking out together.' It didn't matter what the music was.

This eventually led to a few problems. First of all, I didn't have a 'ROCK GROUP' -- the M.O.I, had been disbanded for about a year. Second, there were no parts copied for the scores, and I was being asked to pay for this enormous job (seven thousand 1970 dollars). The third problem was that I wanted some kind of tape of the show, and the Musicians' Union wouldn't allow it. (They didn't do anything when some asshole in the audience ran a cassette and made a bootleg album out of it, but they were promising stern action if I made one for my own use -- just to find out what my pieces sounded like. . . but let me slow down here.)

We solved problem number one by putting together an interim one-shot 'Mothers-Of-Invention-Sort-Of-Group.' It did a short tour to warm up, maybe half a dozen dates, and returned to L.A. for the show.

The second problem was solved by me spending the seven thousand bucks on a team of copyists.

The third problem never got solved, and I never got a tape of the show.

It was the most successful indoor concert of the L.A. Phil's season that year -- sold out. Somewhere in that mass of spectators were Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, a.k.a. Flo & Eddie.

They came backstage after the show, said they liked it, and told me that the Turtles had split up and they were looking for something to do. The rest is history.

We worked together for about two years after that on several albums and tours as well as the film 200 Motels. (For those of you wishing for a whiff of that particular nostalgia, I recommend the acquisition of the film itself, along with the documentary I prepared called The True Story of "200 Motels," available in most outlets through Honker Home Video. That story is best told in pictures.)

Oh, My Aching Back

People who have never been in a rock band maintain the most ridiculous fantasies about how glamorous and exciting and endlessly gratifying Life On The Road must be. It's not that I haven't had a few laughs out there -- but let's just say the ratio isn't that terrific.

Some moments are unique, though. It was the middle of winter in Stockholm, 1971. We had just finished two shows at the Konserthuset. I was walking out of the hall when two kids came up to me and said that they had been to both shows that night, that they had a great idea, and wondered if I'd go along with it.

"We have a younger brother named Hannes," they said, "who came to the first show with us, and then went home. He has school tomorrow." The family lived in an area called Tulinge, which is about twenty minutes outside the city. They wanted me to go with them to their house in the middle of the night, sneak into Hannes's room, wake him up and say, "Hannes! Hannes! Wake up! It's me, Frank Zappa." I said, "Okay, I'll do it."

I was taken into a typical kid's room filled with the little models he had built. Hannes was asleep in his little bed. It was freezing cold. I woke him up. As expected, he was very surprised.

The mother and father got up, wearing long nightgowns. They were very nice people. We sat in the kitchen until 5:30 A.M. talking politics.

Except for that incident, the 1971 European winter tour gets the award for being the most disastrous. On December 4, we were working at the Casino de Montreux in Geneva, Switzerland, right on the edge of the lake -- just in front of Igor Stravinsky Street -- a venue noted for its jazz festivals.

In the middle of Don Preston's synthesizer solo on "King Kong," the place suddenly caught fire. Somebody in the audience had a bottle rocket or a Roman candle and fired it into the ceiling, at which point the rattan covering started to burn (other versions of the story claim the blaze was the result of faulty wiring). There were between twenty-five hundred and three thousand kids packed into the room -- well over capacity.

Since more kids were outside, trying to get in, the organizers had cleverly chained the exit doors shut. When the fire began, the audience was left with two ways out: through the front door, which was pretty small, or through a plate-glass window off to the side of the stage.

I made an announcement -- something like: "Please be calm. We have to leave here. There is a fire and why don't we get out?" You'd be surprised how well people who speak only French can understand you when it's a matter of life and death. They began filing out through the front door.

As the room was filling with smoke, one of our roadies took an equipment case and smashed the big window. The crew then began helping people to escape through it into some kind of garden place below. The band escaped through an underground tunnel that led from behind the stage through the parking garage.

A few minutes later the heating system in the building exploded, and some people were blown through the window. Fortunately, nobody was killed and there were only a few minor injuries -- however, the entire building, about thirteen million dollars' worth, burned to the ground, and we lost all our equipment.

We were in the middle of a sold-out tour with ten more dates to go. Back at the hotel, most of the band voted for finishing the tour -- or at least trying. The problem was that, even though we didn't have the greatest equipment in the world, we had been using a few special instruments, including a customized Fender Rhodes piano, and other specialized synthesizer gear we couldn't buy off a shelf in Switzerland. My guitar was gone. All of the stage lights were gone. The PA was gone.

We canceled a week's worth of jobs, during which we scrounged for new equipment. The plan was to get to England two days in advance of The Big Gig at the Rainbow, and rehearse with the new gear. We had two nights of double shows coming up and we had to make sure everybody was comfortable with the new stuff.

We had some problems -- mikes were feeding back and all kinds of weird shit was happening, but still we managed to make it through the first show. At the end of the first show, we went offstage and came back to do an encore. I think we played "I Want to Hold Your Hand." All I remember after that is waking up in the orchestra pit in pain. I didn't know what had happened to me. In the weeks following the attack, I was able to piece it together, but at the time I had no idea.

The band thought I was dead. I had fallen fifteen feet down into a concrete-floored orchestra pit, my head was over on my shoulder, and my neck was bent like it was broken. I had a gash in my chin, a hole in the back of my head, a broken rib and a fractured leg. One arm was paralyzed.

In those days, I didn't carry a bodyguard; 'security' was supplied by the local promoters. In the case of this concert, the security consisted of two big West Indian guys, at either side of the stage. During the encore, they were off smoking reefer someplace.

In their absence, a guy by the name of Trevor Howell had run up onto the stage, punched me and knocked me over into the pit.

He gave two stories to the press. One of them was that I had been "making eyes at his girlfriend." That wasn't true, since the orchestra pit was not only fifteen feet deep but twice as wide, and the spotlight was in my face. I can't even see the audience in those situations -- it's like looking into a black hole. I never even saw the guy coming at me.

He told another newspaper that he was pissed off because he felt we hadn't given him "value for his money." Choose your favorite story.

After he punched me, he tried to escape into the audience, but a couple of guys in the road crew caught him and took him backstage to hold him for the police. He wound up spending a year in jail for inflicting "grievous bodily harm" on me.

The British press found it amusing.

I was taken to a public hospital. I remember being in the emergency room which, like the rest of London at that time of year, was freezing cold. They were clearly understaffed -- a guy two beds down from me had his balls smashed in a brawl someplace, and was howling, unattended.

They couldn't give me any anesthetic because I had a head injury, so after a while I just passed out, and woke up later in a bad-smelling room with beds all around, in a circle, with curtains hung between them. I remember the curtains parting in front of me and a black nurse coming in and seeing my face; like she had just seen a monster. I was pretty mashed up.

I was later transferred to the Harley Street Clinic where I stayed for the next month. I had a twenty-four-hour bodyguard because the asshole who had hit me was out on bail, and we didn't know how insane he was.

When my head had gone over onto my shoulder, it had crushed my larynx, so I couldn't talk. As a result of that, the pitch of my voice dropped a third and has stayed that way ever since (having a low voice is nice, but I would have preferred some other means of acquiring it).

After a month, I learned how to walk on crutches. I was in a cast all the way up to my hip, but my leg refused to heal. They wanted to break my leg again and reset it. I said, "No, thanks -- just leave the fucking cast on."

I stayed in the cast and in a wheelchair for the better part of a year. Eventually the cast came off and I was fitted with a prosthetic device -- one of those things with metal joints and straps and a special shoe. Eventually my leg healed -- but it came out a little crooked. One leg is slightly shorter than the other, the cause of many years of chronic back pain.

During my season in the wheelchair, I refused to do any interviews or have photos taken. I still wanted to make music, and managed somehow to produce three albums (Just Another Band from L.A., Waka/Jawaka, and The Grand Wazoo). I also wrote a science-fiction musical called Hunchentoot, and a twisted sort of musical fairy tale called The Adventures of Greggery Peccary.

Once I had regained mobility, I decided to go back on the road -- with a new band. The band with Mark and Howard didn't exist anymore -- they all had to go out and get other jobs during the year I couldn't work.

The first post-wheelchair appearance was as a reciter, in a performance of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat at the Hollywood Bowl, conducted by Lukas Foss.

Prior to that, I had recorded with a twenty-piece band on the Grand Wazoo album, and I decided I wanted to tour with it -- just six or eight dates, not really a money-making proposition.

So we did a short tour -- the Hollywood Bowl, the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, the Music Hall in Boston, a couple of shows at the Felt Forum in New York City, someplace I can't remember in Holland, and the Oval Cricket Ground in London.

At the press conference arranged by the promoter of the London date, I discovered the depths to which the British will sink in order to sell a concert ticket. During an interview, a young girl entered the room, handed me a bouquet of flowers and walked away. This resulted in quiet questioning by the other reporters who were waiting in the back of the room to talk with me. She told them she was the girlfriend of the guy who had knocked me off the stage, and that she had brought the flowers as a gesture of remorse. I found out later that the promoter had hired her as a publicity stunt.

CHAPTER 7
Drool, Britannia

As a result of all that, the British have earned a special place in my heart. In 1975, they came through for me once again when I was forced to sue the Crown for breach of contract.

My claim arose as a result of a canceled performance by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Mothers of Invention, scheduled to coincide with the conclusion of principal photography on the 200 Motels film.

The Royal Family's attorneys opted to defend their breach by attempting to convert what would have been an arbitratable civil matter into a bogus obscenity trial, in the Old Bailey.

The matter was complicated by a catch-22 sort of musicians' union rule governing rehearsal for a recording session. According to the rule book, there is no scale payment rate for rehearsing for a recording session.

This means that a person hiring an orchestra, for example, either is prohibited from rehearsal altogether or has to pay full recording scale while the orchestra makes all the mistakes you'd never want to release on a record. The union does, however, permit (and posts a scale rate for) rehearsal for a live concert.

To navigate this mysterious policy, making it possible for the Royal Philharmonic to rehearse the music for 200 Motels before recording it, we booked a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, listing the initial rehearsals as rehearsals for the concert -- all completely legal. If, however, the concert were not to occur, the production company (my company) would then have been liable for a massive payment to the union for "extra recording sessions."

A spinster (her descriptive title in the court documents) named Marion Herrod took it upon herself to cancel this sold-out concert at the last minute, after hearing from a trumpet-player friend in the orchestra that the song lyrics were "obscene." (One of the objectionable words was brassiere.)

Her action, on behalf of the Crown (her employer), caused substantial and demonstrable financial damages from the concert (as the ticket money had to be refunded, along with the concert preparation costs) and from the potential balloon payment to the musicians' union.

Okay, let me set the scene for you here -- the Old Bailey is just like you've seen it in all those British courtroom dramas: dark wood paneling; musty smell; robes; wigs (they're made of horsehair); pompous assholes scorning each other -- you get the picture. Here's some stuff you don't know: everybody involved in the proceedings (the judge and both sets of counsels) has to write everything down -- in longhand -- on foolscap (the long legal paper). There's no 'court stenographer' throttling a plastic machine in the corner, and so everyone is instructed to speak slowly -- so, as you read this transcript, remember, everybody is talking in slow motion.

Now, the judge: this guy was maybe eighty years old. He looked like a cartoon of a judge -- perfect, except he didn't have an ear trumpet. During the proceedings, one of the lawyers attempted to introduce the 200 Motels record album into evidence. Upon seeing it, Justice Mocatta asked, "What is that?" The reply: "It is a phonograph record, your lordship."

They then proceed to discuss several songs that were to have been performed at the concert.

The final verdict? Justice Mocatta decided that (my paraphrasing) [1] THE MATERIAL WAS NOT OBSCENE. [2] THE ALBERT HALL HAD, IN FACT, BREACHED ITS CONTRACT. But [3] AS THE ALBERT HALL IS A ROYAL INSTITUTION, IT WOULD BE IMPROPER FOR AN AMERICAN MUSICIAN TO PREVAIL IN A CASE LIKE THIS, SO -- YANKEE, GO HOME.

CHAPTER 8
All About Music

What Do You Do for a Living, Dad?

If any of my kids ever asked me that question, the answer would have to be: "What I do is composition." I just happen to use material other than notes for the pieces.

Composition is a process of organization, very much like architecture. As long as you can conceptualize what that organizational process is, you can be a 'composer' -- in any medium you want.

You can be a 'video composer,' a 'film composer,' a 'choreography composer,' a 'social engineering composer' -- whatever. Just give me some stuff, and I'll organize it for you. That's what I do.

Project/Object is a term I have used to describe the overall concept of my work in various mediums. Each project (in whatever realm), or interview connected to it, is part of a larger object, for which there is no 'technical name.'

Think of the connecting material in the Project/Object this way: A novelist invents a character. If the character is a good one, he takes on a life of his own. Why should he get to go to only one party? He could pop up anytime in a future novel.

Or: Rembrandt got his 'look' by mixing just a little brown into every other color -- he didn't do 'red' unless it had brown in it. The brown itself wasn't especially fascinating, but the result of its obsessive inclusion was that 'look.'

In the case of the Project/Object, you may find a little poodle over here, a little blow job over there, etc., etc. I am not obsessed by poodles or blow jobs, however; these words (and others of equal insignificance), along with pictorial images and melodic themes, recur throughout the albums, interviews, films, videos (and this book) for no other reason than to unify the 'collection.'

The Frame

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively -- because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.

You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?

If John Cage, for instance, says, "I'm putting a contact microphone on my throat, and I'm going to drink carrot juice, and that's my composition," then his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and said so. "Take it or leave it, I now will this to be music." After that it's a matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it's a guy swallowing carrot juice.

So, if music is the best, what is music? Anything can be music, but it doesn't become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music.

Most people can't deal with that abstraction -- or don't want to. They say: "Gimme the tune. Do I like this tune? Does it sound like another tune that I like? The more familiar it is, the better I like it. Hear those three notes there? Those are the three notes I can sing along with. I like those notes very, very much. Give me a beat. Not a fancy one. Give me a GOOD BEAT -- something I can dance to. It has to go boom-bap, boom-boom-BAP. If it doesn't, I will hate it very, very much. Also, I want it right away -- and then, write me some more songs like that -- over and over and over again, because I'm really into music."

Why Bother?

I used to love putting little black dots on music paper. I'd sit for sixteen hours at a time, hunched over in a chair with a bottle of India ink, and draw beams and dots.

No other activity could have enticed me away from the table. I'd maybe get up for coffee or to eat, but, other than that, I was glued to the chair for weeks and months on end, writing music.

I thought it was fun, because I could hear everything in my head, and I kept telling myself how thoroughly bitchen it was.

To be able to write a piece of music and hear it in your head is a completely different sensation from the ordinary listening experience.

I don't write 'music on paper' anymore. The incentive to continue was removed by having to deal with symphony orchestras.

The Anthropology of the Symphony Orchestra

Some critics have said that what I do is a perverse form of 'political theater.' Maybe twenty or thirty percent of my lyrics go in that direction -- the rest of my activities might be more accurately described as 'amateur anthropology.'

For example, when a real anthropologist studies a tribe, he has to eat the bowl of worms, put the grass skirt on and go for it. For me, wandering around in the Mudd Club was kind of like that -- and so was working with a symphony orchestra.

The string players are a tribe; the brass players are a tribe; the woodwind players are a tribe -- subdivided into 'tribe-lets.' (The mind-set of an oboe player is different from the mind-set of a clarinet player, which is different from the mind-set of a flute player, which is different from the mind-set of a bassoon player.) The percussionists are another tribe altogether.

Within those divisions and subdivisions, I was able to observe specific preoccupations -- like: string players tend to be more concerned with their pensions than anybody else in the orchestra.

Apparently there are special pressures experienced by violinists which do not apply to cellists. It takes a long time to learn how to play a violin, and, after you whittle your fingers to the bone, what's the big payoff? A chair in the nineteenth row, sawing away on whole notes, while some guy who might be better at politics (or blow jobs) is sitting in chair number one, getting all the bitchen solos.

Viola players are often failed violinists. Not too many people who play the viola chose it because they love the instrument -- they get demoted to it. This happens in grade school. (The viola can be a clumsy thing to stick under a kid's chin -- so maybe your posture gets weird.) People who can't quite cut it in the violin section get banished to viola-land.

Flute players and harpists look to me like they have a bad attitude because of all that cloud and angel music they have to play. French horn players are arrogant too -- they have to play all the shit that sounds like graduation.

Timpanists? Forget it -- they regard themselves as 'special' because their drums have musical pitches. (None of the other orchestral percussionists is allowed to double on timpani -- only the timpanist can play the timpani.)

In high school, I saw trombone players described in a textbook as "The Clowns of the Orchestra" (indicating that the author found the image of grown men earning their living by sliding lubricated tubing back and forth, and leaving pools of spit in front of their chairs, pretty amusing).

When Schönberg introduced the trombone glissando into modern orchestral writing, critics of the period were outraged, declaring the sound to be obscene, and therefore inappropriate for the concert hall.

Players of certain instruments detest being seated near players of certain other instruments, because the other guy's sound offends them. During my visit to Orchestra-Land, I looked at these folks, and the instruments they had chosen to play, and tried to imagine what strange forces had produced those choices. I got the impression that, in the case of the violin, it might have been (as in Italian families where helpless children are forced into accordionic submission) the violin was the family instrument, and the guy had to learn it.

I don't think there are too many cases where parents have demanded that their children learn to play percussion. The same thing with the bassoon. Not too many parents dream of the day when little Waldo will enthrall the neighbors by blowing on a brown thing with a metal doodad poking out the side of it.

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma -- like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball -- I find this unfathomable -- but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing a bassoon. It's a great noise -- nothing else makes that noise.

I don't think in the beginning musicians worry about "how am I going to make a living from playing this?" They get charmed by the sound of an instrument, and mutate, over time, into victims of its 'behavioral traditions.'

We Hate Your Dots

When a composer sends a score to an orchestra, in most instances, they don't want to see it. You can't understand how horrible it is to have to go through that unless you have manually copied a score -- until you have had to sit there for months (for some guys, years) drawing dots.

The process of preparing a score is an endless job. After you have written hundreds of pages of dots upon dots and checked them to make sure that you didn't make a mistake, somebody has to copy the parts.

Each score page shows the conductor what everybody in the orchestra is supposed to be doing at any given moment during the piece.

One page of full orchestral score that takes forty-five seconds to play can take sixteen hours to draw.

Before an orchestra can play what you wrote, a copyist has to put on his green eyeshade, roll up his sleeves and say, "Okay, the bells." He looks at the score, and copies out just what Mr. Bells is required to do, moment by moment, throughout the piece. Then he copies out the moment-by-moment instructions for Mr. Chimes, and so on down the page for every instrument in the orchestra.

A copyist gets paid money for that -- a lot of money. Who pays for it? The composer, of course.

I have a closet in my basement, full of orchestral scores -- the result of about five years' work by as many as five full-time copyists. The salaries paid out during that period ran close to three hundred thousand dollars, and then the only way I got to hear any of it was to spend an even larger amount and hire an orchestra to play it.

Thanks to songs like "Dinah Moe Humm," "Titties & Beer" and "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow," I managed to accumulate enough cash to bribe a group of drones to grind its way through pieces like "Mo 'n Herb's Vacation," "Bob in Dacron" and "Bogus Pomp" (eventually released on London Symphony Orchestra, Volumes I and II) -- in performances which come off like high-class 'demos' of what actually resides in the scores. So, how did I wind up using those guys? Well, it's a long story. . .

But Did I Learn My Lesson? Nooooooo!

For anyone who ever thought I was a schmuck (or worse), this next section proves it. After the Holland deal bit the dust, there was another one . . . in Poland. . . actually, two different orchestras in Poland -- and always the same result: NO MUSIC -- LARGE EXPENSE. Anyway, finally I said: "These European orchestras are a pain in the ass."

Most of the projects were situations in which a governmental agency was involved -- the government of the municipality or the country, whatever it was -- situations in which 'official guys' had originally suggested the project, and were supposedly going to be responsible for paying for it.

That's when I decided to just go ahead, pay for it all myself and do it with A Real American Orchestra.

We made a deal with the Syracuse Symphony. We booked a concert date (January 30, 1983) at Lincoln Center. The music was going to be played and recorded in the United States.

Well, somehow, AFTER the deal was made, somebody in the Syracuse Symphony 'upper echelon' decided to DOUBLE the agreed-upon price by whipping out an assortment of semi-obscure 'local union regulations.' Syracuse priced themselves out of the market.

So I said -- actually, by this time, I'm screaming -- "Fuck this! I'm not going to get bent over by some deranged American union extortionist!" -- and that's when I decided to rent the BBC Orchestra (or the equivalent) in England. We called the BBC Orchestra. They were booked for the next five years.

They would have been a good orchestra to do it because they specialize in contemporary repertoire, BUT they weren't available. So, we called the LSO -- and, at first, THEY weren't available either.

They were just finishing a film score and had planned a two-week vacation for themselves, after which they were going to start on ANOTHER film score.

The way the LSO works is, it's owned by the musicians -- it's a 'cooperative.' THEY decide who's going to be their conductor and what work they're going to do. When my project was suggested to them, they voted to do it rather than take a vacation, so I went ahead. We rehearsed thirty hours, did one live concert, and then did the recording.

The first small disaster was the seating plan I had prepared -- it didn't work. The place we had originally rented to do the recording in turned out to be smaller than the floor plan sent to me (because of an immovable motion-picture screen, not shown on the plan, that knocked out eight feet of depth from the rear wall of the stage to the front), so we had to find another place to record in.

We tried every 'major concert hall' -- every one of them was booked with Christmas shit. We tried all the smaller town halls -- same deal. We couldn't find a hall anywhere, so we wound up at Twickenham Studios (a film studio where they used to shoot the '007' movies), on an old soundstage, with completely dead acoustics.

It was big enough to hold the 107-piece orchestra, but it sounded diabolical. So, the setup began. This was going to be the first multitrack digital recording of a symphony orchestra -- ever.

But before we could record, we had to present the obligatory 'live concert' in order to satisfy the union rehearsal requirements (see "Drool, Britannia," Chapter 7).

This was a disaster. The LSO gives its performances in a wretchedly 'modern' concert hall called the Barbican. The stage was too small to hold the full orchestra, so a bunch of musicians who wouldn't fit (mostly viola players) got to go home -- and get paid for it.

One unique facility offered by the Barbican is the stand-up bar backstage -- for the use of the orchestra members. It is well stocked and very efficient. They can pour a whole orchestra's worth of booze in nanoseconds. During the break between pieces, the LSO left the stage and availed itself of this convenience. When it returned to play the next piece, many members were roasted -- and so was my music.

Recording the LSO

Then it was time to record. I tried to forget what had happened the night before, put on my record producer helmet and set out to confute the laws of physics.

The French horns (eight of them) were one of the early problems. We put several Telefunken U-47s on them, but they were useless.

The problem was the percussion (six individual stations) all around in back of them -- we were getting tons of leakage. Even on a tight cardioid pattern, we picked up blobs of low-end mung that was wandering around the floor -- so I said, "Although I've never used a PZM [pressure zone microphone] on a French horn before, what have we got to lose?" We took the large 2½ and put it on the floor behind them and that did it.

We were using a KM-84, flown high over the timpani. We gave up on that and used a 4' X 4' Plexiglas sheet to increase the boundary on one of the PZM plates, put it on the wall behind the timpani and got a great sound.

We were using all the Prescribed Mikes for various instruments but, given our acoustic situation in this nasty room, they just didn't work. For example, we tried two AKG 414s, flown above the conductor's podium, for ambience, but all they gave us was an ugly room sound that was like, "Hey, you want to hear the air conditioner? Let's go. Here it is."

Recording musicians want their instruments to sound (at very least) GLORIOUS -- they've been recording for years and they're used to seeing those gray, heavy, serious-looking microphones. ["Oooh fuck! Look at this! I'm going to sound BITCHEN in this!"] THEN somebody comes in and puts a plastic dome with a PZM in it over their heads and they go: "MY TONE! MY PRECIOUS TONE! I'm going to sound PLASTIC!"

The orchestra already had a strange attitude because everything was different from the way they were used to working. They weren't in a concert hall -- they were on a dead and dusty soundstage. They didn't have the BIG GRAY MIKE -- they had the little plastic bubble over their heads (or they had part of a plastic box on the floor). They had LITTLE TINY WIRES, not BIG SERIOUS WIRES. They could trip over these things (especially since they were so fond of alcohol).

Mixing the LSO

In ambient recording, there's always some kind of'LUMP' in the room. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. The more stereo pairs you deal with in an ambient mix, the more likely you are to experience 'LUMP ACCUMULATION.'

In this recording we had to equalize things to emphasize the natural range that the instrument was playing in and, at the same time, neutralize the lumpage. In this room, the UGLY ZONE was located in two areas: 200 Hz and 63 Hz. Both of those frequencies had to be hauled out.

When we mixed it, as partial compensation for the ugliness of the room, we decided that each section in the music would be treated as a different 'SCENE,' and that each 'SCENE' could occur in any kind of an imaginary ambience that was appropriate to its mood (sort of like stage lighting). At this point, the DEAD ROOM became a blessing in disguise -- we could go from scratch, building 'artificial acoustics' with digital impunity.

So, a collection of imaginary environments was created with a Lexicon 224-X digital reverb processor. Each imaginary world had a different set of characteristics. We mixed each section of the music as if it had occurred in its own personalized acoustical space.

Also, because of the way in which the music was mixed, instrumental details came out that you'd never get to hear in the old 'two-mikes-over-the-conductor's-head' style of recording. In earphones, especially, you get the impression of sitting in the middle of the orchestra, with the apparent room size and surface texture of the walls changing, according to the musical character of each section.

The 'Human' Element

In 1986 when I released Jazz from Hell, an album realized on the Synclavier, a lot of reviewers, especially the British ones, said that it was cold, and lacked the 'human' element -- and so, with great delight, the following year I released London Symphony Orchestra Vol. II -- because it is filled with 'human element artifacts.'

On the last day of the last session for that album, I was trying to record a piece called "Strictly Genteel." Union rules specified a short break every hour, and during the last hour of the session, the entire trumpet section left the Twickenham Studio grounds and invaded a pub across the street, arriving back to work fifteen minutes late.

Meanwhile the rest of the orchestra had been sitting in the studio waiting for their trumpet buddies to return. Fifteen minutes might not sound like very much time but, in a professional recording session involving 107 players, fifteen minutes is A LONG TIME. In a recording session, every second counts -- and is being paid for in Large Dollars. In spite of the fact that the piece wasn't near being recordable, there was no way I could make the orchestra play overtime; I couldn't regain the fifteen minutes at the end of the session at any price.

They made so many mistakes, and played so badly on that piece, that it required forty edits (within seven minutes of music) to try to cover them. We used every mixing trick in the book to hide the out-of-tune notes.

A Short History of Recording Technology

Audio tools are available now that enable the artist to control timbre to the point where a psychoacoustical or emotional 'spin' can be placed on any given note or passage (just by changing the digital echo program, for instance).

When I started working in the studio, equalizers (tone control circuits) were rare. Compressors were crude devices that added grotesque amounts of noise to the program material. As these audio tools were refined and made quieter, a new vocabulary of sounds -- and new ways to deal with blocks of sounds -- came into common usage. (One result was that the overall timbre of commercial broadcasting changed.)

The 1950s rock and roll record was a mono recording. In most instances, early recordings were made using a single microphone for the band and vocalist(s). The 'mix' was the acoustical result of the distance between the microphone and the singer, the microphone and the drummer, the microphone and the bass player and so on. How far away you were from the microphone determined how 'important' you were in the final mix.

What qualified as an 'acceptable drum sound' on a 1950s recording seems laughable today.

Since they didn't have digital echo then, the 'flavor' and quantity of the reverberation used on a song were determined by the acoustics of the room in which the recording was made. The echo (or absence thereof) described the geography of an 'imaginary landscape' in which a song would be 'photographed' by the microphone. Studios that had good acoustical echo chambers were highly prized. Some became legendary for their 'hit sound.'

The 1960s brought a few more improvements -- most notably the fuzz-tone, improvements in the electric bass, improvements in guitar amplifiers and improvements in microphone technology.

Increased sophistication of mixing consoles made it possible for any number of microphones in the room to be combined by the engineer to create new audio illusions, impossible in the acoustical world -- a big difference from the mix determined by the distance between the performer and the microphone.

On a multichannel mix you can put a close mike on the kick drum, a close mike on the snare drum, a close mike on the horns and so on -- and then combine them. There is no place in nature where a human being could stand that would allow him to hear all those instruments that way with his ears. This artificial acoustical perspective has become the norm.

Eventually, some instruments found their way into the mix without even being 'listened to' by a microphone. These sounds (usually from synthesizers, electric bass and/or guitar) were injected directly into the board through a direct box.

Digital ambience-creating devices became available. With them, record producers could build 'imaginary rooms' (as I have described) for the mix to reside in.

Using several of those devices, the engineer can create an array of 'imaginary rooms.' This allows individual voices or instruments in the mix to exist in separate and distinct imaginary acoustical environments simultaneously.

Digital Audio

One of the things I always hated about making records was that no matter what the music sounded like coming through the speakers in the control room, by the time you piled it onto analog tape, you had to live with the buildup of hiss.

There are all kinds of artificial ways to hide the hiss (Dolby, dbx, C-4D), but it still lives in the tape. Some people don't care, because if the program material is always loud, always fuzz-tone, they'll never hear a bit of hiss. But if you're doing soft passages, the minute the music thins out, so that there are spaces between the notes, the hiss creeps in and spoils it.

With digital recording, the only hiss on the tape is the hiss that could come from the mike or the mixing board. The tape itself doesn't generate hiss.

The best way I can think of to explain how digital audio works is to say that it's similar to the way you look at a photograph in a newspaper. The newspaper photo is not a 'continuous-tone photograph'; it's broken up into dots, and your eye resolves the dots, allowing you to believe you've seen an image.

In digital audio you can think of the sounds as dots or slices, but they are actually a string of numbers. A sound from The Real World is sliced up, and stored as complex batches of ones and zeros.

Resolution in digital audio is determined by the sampling rate. Each string of numbers is one 'sample,' representing a very short slice of time. The number of slices per second is the sampling rate. The more slices you take, the better the resolution.

In printing they can use a higher-resolution dot screen for a high-gloss magazine than they can for a newspaper (because of the texture and ink absorption characteristics of the paper they're printing on). You and I know that it's still only a bunch of dots in National Geographic, but we can certainly tell the difference in clarity between a photo printed there and one on the front page of The Daily Bugle.

Dance Fever

The most important innovation in recent rock technology is a naughty little appliance, sold in various shapes and sizes, under an assortment of brand names, referred to generically as a 'drum box' or 'rhythm machine.' This device is used by people with diagonal zippers on their clothes to provide the inflexible rhythms and obnoxious artificial hand-claps that cause Americans to 'make the dancer face' (eyes closed; lips poached out -- you know the one -- as if when you do that with your face, it gives you a license to do the other stupid stuff with your buttocks).

Before the emergence of this wondrous tool, record producers worried that the tempo of their hit records would drift (maybe a little faster on the chorus when everybody was banging it out -- maybe a little slower when the "I love you" comes in) -- a terrible problem, which, in the long-long-ago, led to take after take during the recording session to capture a single performance with JUST THE RIGHT GROOVE.

But this is "The Eighties" (phewwww) -- we're modern now, and studio time is more expensive. We can't be waiting around for just the right groove. We need that sumbitch in a hurry -- science has just proven that Americans (who can barely get their shit together on the assembly line) find it absolutely UNPOSSIBLE during their precious off-duty hours to dance to any song unless it's in 4/4 at 120 beats per minute -- no fuckin' around now -- no 119 -- no 121 -- gimme the ol' 120 'n turn up the goddam handclaps! Ow! Ow! Ow! I'm dancin'! I'm dancin'!

Other countries have cultures that go back thousands of years. Ours goes back a couple hundred years and it's not even that bitchen (since the bulk of what we pound our chests over was abducted from somewhere else), and we go around trying to inflict this 'nonculture' on people all over The International Elsewhere -- people regarded by many Americans as 'less than human' (of course, this attitude is justified if we're talking about the British -- but seriously, folks --).

We'd look a little better, internationally -- perhaps 'more trustable' -- if we did a few of the things they've been doing for millenia; giving at least the illusion that we were almost sort-of like them -- almost sort-of civilized -- so that they could almost sort-of talk to us, instead of about us (as if We were subhuman . . . or almost British).

Believe it or not, there are places in the world where music is important. There are places in the world where all the arts are a matter of national pride. We come in, making that fucking 'dancer face' and demand that everybody respect us -- do we have any idea how ridiculous that looks?

What Is Music?

A person with a feel for rhythm can walk into a factory and hear the machine noise as a composition. If we expand that concept to include light, behavior, weather factors, moon phases, anything (whether it's a rhythm that can be heard or a rhythm that is perceived, i.e., a color change over time -- or a season), it can be consumed as music.

If it can be conceived as music, it can be executed as music, and presented to an audience in such a way that they will perceive it as music: "Look at this. Ever seen one of these before? I built this for you. What do you mean, 'What the fuck is it?' It's a goddam ETUDE, asshole."

When someone writes a piece of music, what he or she puts on the paper is roughly the equivalent of a recipe -- in the sense that the recipe is not the food, only instructions for the preparation of the food. Unless you are very weird, you don't eat the recipe.

If I write someting on a piece of paper, I can't actually 'hear' it. I can conjure up visions of what the symbols on the page mean, and imagine a piece of music as it might sound in performance, but that sensation is nontransferable; it can't be shared or transmitted.

It doesn't become a 'musical experience' in normal terms until 'the recipe' has been converted into wiggling air molecules.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance space is sculpted into something. This 'molecule-sculpture-over-time' is then 'looked at' by the ears of the listeners -- or a microphone.

SOUND is 'ear-decoded data.' Things which MAKE SOUND are things which are capable of creating perturbations. These perturbations modify (or sculpt) the raw material (the 'static air' in the room -- the way it was 'at rest' before the musicians started fucking around with it). If you purposefully generate atmospheric perturbations ('air shapes'), you are composing.

Let's All Be Composers!

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Want to be a composer? You don't even have to be able to write it down. The stuff that gets written down is only a recipe, remember? -- like the stuff in Ronnie Williams's MACHA book. If you can think design, you can execute design -- it's only a bunch of air molecules, who's gonna check up on you?

Weights and Measures

In my compositions, I employ a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and releases -- in some ways similar to Varèse's aesthetic. The similarities are best illustrated by comparison to a Calder mobile: a multicolored whatchamacallit, dangling in space, that has big blobs of metal connected to pieces of wire, balanced ingeniously against little metal dingleberries on the other end. Varèse knew Calder, and was fascinated by these creations.

So, in my case, I say: "A large mass of any material will 'balance' a smaller, denser mass of any material, according to the length of the gizmo it's dangling on, and the 'balance point' chosen to facilitate the danglement."

The material being 'balanced' includes stuff other than the notes on the paper. If you can conceive of any material as a 'weight' and any idea-over-time as a 'balance,' you are ready for the next step: the 'entertainment objects' that derive from those concepts.

"Anything, Any Time, Anywhere--for No Reason at All"

If a musical point can be made in a more entertaining way by saying a word than by singing a word, the spoken word will win out in the arrangement -- unless a nonword or a mouth noise gets the point across faster.

This frequently occurs when the stage arrangements of old songs get modified to accommodate each new band. The body of the song, the melody line, the words, and the chords remain the same, but all aspects of 'the clothing,' or the orchestration, are up for grabs, based on the musical resources at hand.

With the 1988 band (twelve pieces, including myself), the orchestration was far more luxuriant for some of the older songs than when they were originally recorded, simply because I didn't want to have eleven guys standing around onstage with nothing to do.

Songs written with one idea in mind have been known to mutate into something completely different if I hear an 'optional vocal inflection' during rehearsal. I'll hear a 'hint' of something (often a mistake) and pursue it to its most absurd extreme.

The 'technical expression' we use in the band to describe this process is: "PUTTING THE EYEBROWS ON IT." This usually refers to vocal parts, although you can put the eyebrows on just about anything.

After "the eyebrows," the ultimate tweeze inflicted on the composition is determining The Attitude with which the piece is to be performed. The player is expected to comprehend The Attitude, and perform the material with The Attitude AND The Eyebrows, consistently, otherwise, to me, the piece sounds 'wrong.'

Since most Americans use a personal version of eyebrowsage in their conversational speech, why not include the technique as a 'nuance' in a composition?

A musician may give the 'illusion' during rehearsal that he knows what I want on a certain passage, but the hard part is getting him to do it correctly, night after night on the road -- because after a while, most musicians forget why I told them to do it that way in the first place, which brings us to...

The Anthropology of the Rock and Roll Band

Very few people choose to play the bass. There are people in the audience who like to listen to the bass, because they like those low frequencies, and the way they make their bodies feel -- but the role of the bass player in the band is not usually the most exciting role, because he has to play repeated figures. We have a viola parallel here: electric bassists are often failed guitar players, demoted to this duty after a band meeting in a garage when they were thirteen.

Drummers often exhibit an attitude which advertises: "I play the drums because I am an animal -- watch me beat these! Girls, are you paying attention now? I'm beating very hard!"

Keyboard players project an aura of frustration because they are not guitar players. (In fact, many musicians are convinced that in order to get The Blow Job after the show, they have to play LEAD GUITAR.)

They believe that if they imitate certain guitar noises, it will automatically guarantee them The Big Payoff -- which is one of the reasons you now see keyboard players wearing those 'things' around their necks that kind of look like guitars but have keys on them (like an accordion that's been hit by a truck, with a nozzle on the end), as if to say: "What?! You'd rather blow the guitar player? Hah! Look at this high-tech dork I'm wearing!"

Most of the people who play keyboards in rock bands are not really skilled musicians. They're usually there to play droning string synthesizer pads or punches, fills and mannerisms that aren't very demanding, providing the chordal accompaniment while the guitar player goes "weedly-weedly-wee."

Unless the keyboard guy is working in a bar band, where you're usually cramped for space and the setup goes wherever you can fit it in, his stuff generally resides in 'the back line.' Because of this, denizens of 'the back line' believe that the closer you are to the front of the stage (especially when cavorting with a phallic-looking appliance, illuminated by a blue spotlight), the better the chances for the ol' you-know-what -- hence the desire of performers in all categories to move "closer to the people" (in spite of the fact that they might grab you by the ankle, pull you off the stage and mutilate you).

How Did They Manage to Do That?

I don't give musicians a 'questionnaire' when they join the band about where they've been to school or what kind of technical information they possess -- I'll hear during the audition whether they can play or not.

For the ones who pass the audition, as soon as I find out what they don't know, I attempt to devise 'language' that will describe my musical intentions, in shorthand form, if they don't know the standard technical terms or if (in spite of the fact that they might be great players) they have never been asked to try some of the things the band veterans have been doing for years from muscle memory.

For example -- say I'm talking to Chad Wackerman. I'll tell him, "The Quaalude Thunder goes here." That's the shorthand description of a drum fill you hear on certain heavy metal albums -- where the guy plays as many notes as he can on all of his thousand tom-toms before he ends with The Big Crash.

There's an assortment of 'stock modules' used in our stage arrangements. It helps if the guys in the band appreciate the musical humor of what's going on. Sometimes they do -- and sometimes they don't. (If a guy can't willingly 'put on the lampshade' and play stooge rock, he's probably wrong for the job.)

These 'stock modules' include the "Twilight Zone" texture (which may not be the actual Twilight Zone notes, but the same 'texture'), the "Mister Rogers" texture, the "Jaws" texture, the Lester Lanin texture, Jan Garberism, and things that sound either exactly like or very similar to "Louie Louie."

Those are Archetypal American Musical Icons, and their presence in an arrangement puts a spin on any lyric in their vicinity. When present, these modules 'suggest' that you interpret those lyrics within parentheses.

We evoke Mister Rogers with a celeste or bells playing some permutation of: "It's a lovely day in the neigh-bor-hood." We use that all the time. Another one is the Fake Devo texture -- anything absolutely squared off, mechanical, dry and dead-sounding. Invocation of this plasticized mantra adds another dimension to a lyric.

The audience doesn't have to know, for example, who Jan Garber or Lester Lanin is to appreciate those textures -- the average guy is not going to say "Hey, Richie! Check this out! They're doing Lester!" -- he knows what that style means -- he's groaned over it in old movies on Channel 13 for years.

This technique has been used in the band since 1966 on Absolutely Free, our second album. There's a twisted reference to Charles Ives at the end of "Call Any Vegetable." One of the things that Ives is noted for is his use of multiple colliding themes -- the musical illusion of several marching bands marching through each other. In our low-rent version, the band splits into three parts, playing "The Star-Spangled Banner," "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" all at the same time, yielding an amateur version of an Ives collision. Unless listeners pay attention in that one spot -- there are only a few bars of it -- they might think it was a 'mistake.'

Then there's a place in "Duke of Prunes" where the "Berceuse" from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite is floated over another, more rhythmic theme from The Rite of Spring.

"I'm Losing Status at the High School" jumps into the opening figure of Petrushka. The 1971 band had an arrangement that quoted the opening trumpet fanfare from Stravinsky's Agon.

Then there are cues used on stage like twirling my fingers as if I'm piddling with a Rasta braid on the right side of my head -- that means: "Play reggae." If I pretend to twirl braids on both sides of my head, it means: "Play ska" (as if it were double-time reggae). During any song, no matter what style it was learned in, on a whim I can turn around and do something like that, and the band will restyle the tune.

If I want something played 'heavy metal,' I put both hands near my crotch and do "Big Balls." Each guy in the band understands what the norms and 'expected mannerisms' are for these different musical styles, and will instantly 'translate' a song into that musical 'dialect.'

Verrrrrry Scarrrrry

Science hasn't told us yet why some people find it amusing when they hear an old-time car horn go "Ah-roooo-gah!" I'm waiting for the answer -- because I'm one of those idiots. I like sound effects A LOT (percussive and vocal), and use them often in my arrangements.

The ending of the 1988 Deluxe Version of "Peaches en Regalia" uses them, along with multiple, superimposed A.A.I.M.'s (Archetypal American Icon Modules).

When the melody comes in after the second intro, we use "Fake Devo," superimposed on "Twilight Zone" in the rhythm section, while the 'nice little melody' is reharmonized with an ugly chord traveling parallel. Then there's a short break, and Ike says, "Whooo-oo!" like Count Floyd from SCTV. It doesn't mean anything, but to see Ike Willis pretending to be Count Floyd for one or two beats in the middle of all that is something I find enjoyable -- and then, just to make sure that you didn't miss it, when the melody repeats the next time, it stops just a little bit longer and he says, "Whoooo-oo, whoooooo-oooo!" Of course it's mega-stupid. That's why I like it.

The first time I saw Count Floyd, I almost strangled. I was drinking a cup of coffee, lying in bed watching television, and it was a complete surprise. Joe Flaherty nailed the essence of TV monster movie cheese without even using a real word from the English language -- Big Eyebrows, Joe -- real Big Eyebrows.

Road Rats

Musicians' 'priorities' change on the road. In rehearsal, they're struggling to get the piece learned; on the road, they're struggling to get a peep at the front row before the lights go down, to see whether there's any interesting 'vegetation' out there. Every band does that. I've never been on the road with an orchestra, but I'm sure they have their trawl-meisters too.

I respect musicians' idiosyncrasies -- they add 'texture' to a performance. Musicians tend to generate better 'texture' when they get 'The Blow Job.' Yes, I want them to find that elusive cross between a waitress and an industrial vacuum cleaner.

One of the more boring chores I am required to perform as a bandleader is maintaining 'corporate discipline' during the show. While the performance is in progress, I know that the radar is on -- everybody is looking for the (you guessed it).

That's okay. They should all get The Blow Job -- but they should get it the honest way -- they should earn it, by playing the songs right. Sometimes they try to cheat. . . and, folks, it is not a pretty sight.

For instance, there are a lot of reasons why musicians like to play solos on stage -- but the usual reason in rock and roll is to get The Blow Job. One way to ensure that you look like the greatest thing going when you play your big solo is to make sure that you end your solo by going up the scale, then grab that last note and repeat it as fast as you can.

The statement is the same on any instrument: "Oh, I'm squirting now!" (Clever subtext to the audience.)

In the case of violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, who was with the band briefly in the early seventies, no matter what the solo was, after a certain period of time on the road he always ended with the same passage -- he'd wiggle up to the top of the instrument and squirt all over the place on the last note. . . and the crowd went wild! But if you're another guy in the band, and you see that happening every night, you go, "Ho-hum."

To a certain extent, Alan Zavod, our 1984 keyboard player, would do the same thing -- he would end his solo with this thing that everybody called "The Volcano." He held the sustain pedal down and churned and smashed away to get a big blur going, and then topped it off at the end with a flourish. It worked every time, but it got to be a band joke. In fact, Alan really is a great pianist (and film composer). It's just that maybe -- because he was working in a rock and roll band -- he thought that type of solo was the appropriate vehicle to project his aura across vast continental areas.

I find it especially disturbing if, when the band is walking onto the stage to get the equipment ready, a musician cranks off a tiny, unaccompanied 'solo-ette' in order to draw attention to himself while piddling with his amplifier.

In Norway, we have played several times in a place called the Drammenshallen, or, as band vets refer to it: the Drammin-drammin-drammin-drammin-hollin-hollin-hollin-hollin. The last time we performed there was in the fall of 1984.

Some months before that date, Ike had used the word 'spoo' -- roughly the equivalent of jizz -- in a conversation. I don't know where it came from, or if he made it up. In any event, 'spoo' turned out to be 'the mystery word' onstage that night.

When we came back to do the encore, Ike arrived first, and was kneeling down in front of his amplifier, doing kind of a low-rent Jimi Hendrix "wee-wee-wee-wee." As I walked out and witnessed this act of near desperation, I said "Spoo!" to him -- he got it right away. [Translation: "You're jerking off in front of your amplifier, Dr. Willis, and I know it."]

Does Humor Belong in Music?

What academicians regard as 'humor' in music is usually stuff along the lines of "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" (remember, in 'Music Appreciation class,' when they told you that the E-flat clarinet is going "ha-ha-ha!"?). Take my word for it, folks -- you can do way better than that.

I've stated elsewhere that "Timbre Rules" -- rules what? For one thing, it rules in 'the humor domain.' The minute you hear a trumpet with a Harmon mute going "Fwa-da-fwa-da-fwa-da," you register 'something' -- a 'humor something.' (There aren't any technical names for these 'things' because they don't give foundation grants to study this kind of stuff.)

Likewise, a bass saxophone, playing in its lowest register, conveys another sort of 'H.S.' (Humor Something) -- and how about our ol' buddy, The Slide Trombone -- surely this graceful, expressive piece of machinery has its own little 'H.S.' radiator built into it.

I've developed a 'formula' for what these timbres mean (to me, at least), so that when I create an arrangement -- if I have access to the right instrumental resources -- I can put sounds together that tell more than the story in the lyrics, especially to American listeners, raised on these subliminal cliches, shaping their audio reality from the cradle to the elevator.

We crack up during rehearsal because some of the stuff is so stupid. When building an arrangement, every time I have an opportunity to insert one of those modules I cram it in, and since rehearsal is a daily two-hour occurrence while we're on the road, the arrangements often change overnight, based on the daily news or some morsel of tour-bus folklore.

During the pretour rehearsals, the band members pencil these 'extras' in next to 'the real notes' so, when they finally have the show learned, they know not only the song-as-originally-written but also, superimposed on it, a flexible grid which will support a constantly mutating collage of low-rent Americana.

I owe this part of my musical existence to Spike Jones.

La Machine

Most of my compositions today are written on and performed by a machine -- a computer musical instrument called the Synclavier. It allows me to create and record a type of music that is impossible (or too boring) for human beings to play.

When I say too boring, I mean that in most compositions, someone has to play the stuff in the background. If you've ever been in a band or know anything about musicians, you know that no musician ever liked to play a background part. His mind wanders.

Much of today's music involves an ostinato bass line or some other type of repeated figure, and if the figure isn't played accurately, with conviction, whatever is laid on top of it doesn't work. To save the sanity of musicians who can't keep their minds focused when assigned to accompaniment duties, this machine will play ostinatos -- cheerfully -- until it's blue in the face (except it never gets blue in the face).

Anything you can dream up can be typed or played into the Synclavier. One of the things I use it for is writing blocks of complicated rhythms, and having them executed accurately by groups of instruments. With the Synclavier, any group of imaginary instruments can be invited to play the most difficult passages, and the 'little guys inside the machine' play them with one-millisecond accuracy -- every time.

The Synclavier allows the composer not only to have his piece performed with precision, but to style the performance as well -- he can be his own conductor, controlling the dynamics or any other performance parameters. He can bring his idea to the audience in a pure form, allowing them to hear the music, rather than the ego problems of a group of players who don't give a shit about the composition.

Obviously, there are things you can do with live musicians that you can't do with the Synclavier, and vice versa. I view them as separate mediums.

Some of the things live musicians do that machines don't do are good, and some are bad. One of the good things that live musicians do is improvise. They respond to the moment, and can play more expressively than the machine. (The machine is not devoid of expression, but I really have to type a lot of numbers into it to approximate the type of expression that I can get instantaneously from a well-rehearsed live ensemble.)

But musicians tend to be lazy, and they get sick and skip rehearsals. In fact, they do the kinds of things that other people do in normal jobs. If they were working in a shoestring factory, it might not make that much difference. In a live concert, everything is pressurized because all you have to work with is that single, living, two-hour hunk of time.

Machines don't get loaded, drunk or evicted and don't need assistance moving their families around in 'emergency' situations. On the other hand, machines don't decide to say things like "We're Beatrice" in precisely the 'wrong' place in the middle of a song, and make people laugh (one of Ike Willis's specialties). Subtracting the bullshit and the mistakes, if I had to choose between live musicians or La Machine, I must admit, from time to time I'm almost tempted to opt for the "human element."

My Job! My Precious Job!

Every so often you hear someone from the Musicians' Union complaining about the possibility of devices like the Synclavier putting musicians out of work. I don't think that will ever happen. There are still plenty of people who believe that the only real music is music played by human beings (wearing leather and large hair).

Other union people seem to be under the impression that if you 'sample' a musician into a Synclavier, you magically (don't laugh) suck the music out of the musician, depriving him of some intangible dignity and/or potential income.

Music comes from composers -- not musicians. Composers think it up; musicians perform it. If a musician improvises when he is performing, he becomes, during those moments, a composer -- the rest of the time, he is the interpreter of a musical design originated by a composer. Composers don't have a union -- and the Musicians' Union actually makes life more difficult for them with certain rule-book technicalities. The Musicians' Union helped to create the market for sampling machines, but refuses to admit it.

Listen to the radio -- a lot of what you think is being played by Beautiful Rock Stars is actually being played by machines like the Synclavier. I know of a group whose producer brought them in for ONE DAY and sampled all their instruments. Then HE put the song together using the sounds of their instruments -- the guys never played on the song. The machine played their instruments for them. All they had to do was come back and sing on top of it and make the video.

While You Were Art

Art Jarvinen is a percussionist and former instructor at Cal-Arts. He put together a chamber ensemble called the E.A.R. Unit: two percussion, two keyboards, clarinet and cello.

He asked me to write an arrangement of "While You Were Out," a solo from the Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar album, for his ensemble to play at one of the Monday Evening Concerts (remember the postcard with "We will be unable to play your piece because it requires a left-handed piano"? -- those guys -- they're still in business).

I created the arrangement on the Synclavier, and, using another of the machine's features, printed out the parts. When he saw them, he realized that it was a difficult piece, and worried that his ensemble wouldn't have enough time to rehearse it, as the concert was imminent.

"You're in luck," I told him, "because you won't even have to play it. All you have to do is learn to pretend to play it, and I'll have the Synclavier take care of the rest. Just go out there and do what all the 'Big Rock Groups' have done for years -- lip-sync it and make sure you look good on stage."

I made them a tape copy of the Synclavier performance and told him, "The way to pull this off is to have wires hanging out of your instruments leading into amplifiers and effects boxes on the floor. Any sound the audience hears that might be deemed 'synthesized' will be overlooked because there's a wire coming out of your instrument."

Final result? The man who ran the concert series didn't know the difference. The two classical reviewers from the major Los Angeles newspapers didn't notice anything either. Nobody in the audience knew, except for David Ocker, my computer assistant, who had helped prepare the materials. Nobody knew that the musicians never played a note.

It produced quite a scandal in 'modern music circles.' Several members of the ensemble, mortified by all the hoo-ha, swore they would never "do it again." (Do what again? Prove to the world that nobody really knows what the fuck is going on at a contemporary music concert?)

Conducting an Orchestra

One thing the Synclavier can't replace is the experience of conducting an orchestra. The orchestra is the ultimate instrument, and conducting one is an unbelievable sensation. Nothing else is like it, except maybe singing doo-wop harmony and hearing the chords come out right.

From the podium (if the orchestra is playing well), the music sounds so good that if you listen to it, you'll fuck up. When I'm conducting, I have to force myself not to listen, and think about what I'm doing with my hand and where the cues go.

My conducting 'style' (such as it is) lurks somewhere between nonexistent and massively boring. I try to keep cues to the bare minimum necessary for the players to do their job by simply indicating where the beat is. I don't think of myself as a 'conductor.'

"Conducting" is when you draw 'designs' in the nowhere -- with a stick, or with your hands -- which are interpreted as 'instructional messages' by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.

Life on Stage

At home, a normal day for me is spent working by myself and not talking to anybody, so I really have to change my life around to go onstage.

As much as I would like to walk out there and 'be myself,' the fact is that the 'self' I am -- when I am just 'being myself' -- would be utterly boring and unwatchable on a stage.

I don't have the skill or the inclination to do the usual rock and roll gymnastics, so I try to strike a balance between being as sedentary as I actually am and doing whatever has to be done in order to add a modicum of physical movement to the show.

I also have to take care of the daily business of running the equivalent of a little circus on the road. Part of this job is to make sure that the band delivers what it's supposed to deliver for the people who bought the tickets.

No matter how much we've rehearsed, I still have to steer the show-in-progress ("Is this sequence working? Is this keyboard solo taking too long to develop? Is everybody watching so that when I give the cue to come in after the alto solo in 'Inca Roads' there won't be a train wreck?"). The only time I can 'lose consciousness' is when I'm playing a guitar solo, and then I have to concentrate a hundred percent on that -- or at least ninety percent -- to do it right.

If I'm in a bad mood, I try not to share that with the audience -- at the same time, I'm not the kind of guy who can put on the 'Mr. Happy Face' and pretend that "all's right with the world" -- acting out a lie is even worse than telling it.

In a situation where the intention is to create some sort of structured spontaneous entertainment (involving audience participation), the audience attending that concert is the only audience that is going to experience it. The piece exists only for them -- unless it's recorded and goes out on a live album -- but, on the moment, it's just for them. If they want to be a part of it, great -- if not? Next case.

We once played a horrible venue -- some kind of sports hall -- in southern Illinois. The band was set up on the floor, and our amplifiers were playing straight into a concrete wall about two stories high, with the audience at the top of it -- looking down. Can you visualize that? It was the worst setup imaginable.

So, naturally, I decided to try some 'audience participation' (like we can barely see them, and I want them to 'participate.' Surrrrre you do).

I divided them into five sections, according to the way the seats fanned out -- each section was going to be a different part of a mass chorus of maybe five thousand people. I said, "Now, you guys over here, you're going to sing 'Harbor Lights.' ' They had never even heard of "Harbor Lights," but we showed them how it goes.

Then I said to each of the other sections, "You are going to sing 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.' You're going to sing the opening bassoon solo from The Rite of Spring. You're going to sing the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, and you lucky folks over there get 'Ave Maria.' I'll show you when to come in." What a noise that was.

I try to have a good time on stage -- it helps to compensate for the unpleasant physical sensation of being forced to perform in halls with shitty acoustics after waiting for a couple of hours in a dressing room that smells like sports vomit (but that's what I get for choosing rock instead of the bassoon). Maybe I'd better talk about the guitar for a minute here. . .

Stuff About Playing the Guitar

My father kept his college guitar in the closet. I plunked around on it every once in a while, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work. It didn't make any sense to me. It didn't feel good when I touched it.

Then, my younger brother Bobby picked up a cowboy-style, arch-top, F-hole guitar at an auction for $1.50 and started playing it. At that time I was interested in R&B. I liked the sound of blues guitar solos, but guitar wasn't the featured instrument on most of the records out then -- the saxophone was.

I waited for records that had guitar solos on them, but they were always too short. I wanted to be able to play my own solos -- long ones -- so I taught myself how to play the guitar. I didn't bother to learn any chords -- just blues licks.

Stylistically, my (approach is closest to Guitar Slim, a mid-fifties blues player who recorded for the Specialty label (check out the solo on "Story of My Life") until somebody stabbed him to death with an ice pick.

When I first heard it I thought: "What the fuck is he doing? He really gets 'pissed off at it.' " His style of playing seemed to be 'beyond the notes' -- it had more to do with the 'attitude' with which he was mangling his instrument. What came out was not just the sum total of certain pitches versus certain chords versus certain rhythms -- to my ear, it was something else. Besides the 'attitude,' he also provided the first instance I can recall of a distorted electric guitar on a record.

Although I wouldn't say I could play a Guitar Slim lick sitting here today, his mangle-it strangle-it attitude provided an important aesthetic guidepost for the style I eventually developed. My two other influences were Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown.

I'm not a virtuoso guitar player. A virtuoso can play anything, and I can't. I can play only what I know, to the extent that I've developed enough manual dexterity to get the point across -- but that has deteriorated over time.

With the 1988 band, I didn't have to play very much in the show, because the focus was on the horn arrangements and the vocals. I didn't have to play fifteen-minute guitar solos, and, really, there's not much of a market for that anymore -- the interest span of the audience has shriveled to about eight bars, and in those eight bars, you are expected to play every note you know.

The concept of "The Rock Guitar Solo" in the eighties has pretty much been reduced to: "Weedly-weedly-wee, make a face, hold your guitar like it's your weenie, point it heavenward, and look like you're really doing something. Then, you get a big ovation while the smoke bombs go off, and the motorized lights in your truss twirl around." I can't do that stuff. I still have to look down at the neck to see where my hand is when I'm playing.

One of the reasons people want to become guitar players is that they think there's more to it than there actually is. When I first started, I was very enthusiastic about the improvisational possibilities offered by the instrument, but this has been dampened somewhat by the fact that, in order to engage in the type of improvisational escapades that seem natural to me, I must be accompanied by a 'specialized' rhythm section.

A soloist choosing to work in this odd style ultimately winds up as a hostage -- he can go only as far into the 'experimental zones' as his rhythm section will allow him to go. The problem lies in the polyrhythms. The chances of finding a drummer, a bass player and a keyboard player who can conceive of those polyrhythms -- let alone identify them fast enough to play a complementary figure on the moment, are not good. (The grand prize goes to Vinnie Colaiuta, the drummer for the band in 1978 and '79.)

It's hard to explain to a rhythm section during rehearsal what to do if I'm playing seventeen in the space of fourteen (or Monday and Tuesday in the space of Wednesday). I can't specify in advance everything that ought to happen in the accompaniment when the shit hits the fan in the middle of a solo.

Either a drummer will play steady time, in which case my line will wander all over his time, or he will hear the polyrhythms and play inside them, implying the basic pulse for most rock drummers, accustomed as they are to life in the petrified forest of boom-boom-BAP.

Jazz drummers can't do it either, because they tend to play flexible time. Polyrhythms are interesting only in reference to a steady, metronomic beat (implied or actual) -- otherwise you're wallowing in rubato.

Just as in diatonic harmony, when upper partials are added to a chord, it becomes tenser, and more demanding of a resolution -- the more the rhythm of a line rubs against the implied basic time, the more 'statistical tension' is generated.

The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'goodguys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.

I want to know three things when I go on stage: [1] that my equipment is working, [2] that the band members absolutely know the material, so I don't have to worry about them, and [3] that the rhythm section can hear what I'm playing and that it has some 'concept' of it so it can help build the improvisation.

If those conditions are met, if the acoustics are reasonable, and if I'm satisfied with my amp sound (I could probably write another small book on that topic), then all I want to do is go on autopilot, wiggle my fingers and listen to what comes out.

During the 1984 tour, I would usually play eight solos per night (five nights a week, times six months), and out of that there might have been twenty solos that were musically worthwhile enough to put on a record. The rest of it was garbage. It's not that I wasn't trying to play something; most of it just didn't come off.

If you're working this way, the chances of doing it 'right' every time are not good -- but I'll take the chance. I don't feel I have anything to apologize for, or any exalted reputation to uphold.

My Splendid Voice

It has been my experience that writing for singers precludes certain options provided by instruments -- and the options get even more limited if the voice being written for is mine, since I don't have much of a range.

I can easily 'talk a song' or do 'meltdown,' but I can sing only about an octave, with seventy-five to eighty-percent pitch accuracy. Let's be honest about it, friends 'n neighbors: with specs like that, I couldn't even pass an audition to get in my own band.

I can't play guitar and sing at the same time. My brain can't handle it. I can't even play rhythm guitar and sing. It's hard enough for me to stay in tune just singing. For a while there, I couldn't find anybody to fill the position of 'lead singer,' so I had to do it myself.

This led to a desperate search for professional-sounding singers. Voilà! Ike Willis and Ray White -- but a lot of other vocalists who auditioned, when confronted with lyrics like "Andy Devine had a thong rind," decided to think twice about their careers. They didn't want anything like that to crawl out of their mouths.

My Lyrics Are Dumb. So What?

Some of the stuff I write is in the 'musically uncompromising boy-is-this-ever-hard-to-play' category. Then there's the other category -- songs in which the 'intrigue' resides in the lyrics, rather than the music.

If a piece intends to actually tell a story, I don't build an elaborate accompaniment because it gets in the way of the words. Take "Dinah Moe Humm," for example. The 'artificial cowboy' setting was chosen because it seemed right for the story -- but a song like "The Dangerous Kitchen" is another deal altogether.

The words were completely written out, but the melody and the accompaniment were improvised nightly, in a style we call "meltdown." The accompaniment was designed to provide rhythm, texture and sound effects, not necessarily chords, melody and a 'good beat' -- a sort of rock Sprechstimme setting, combining a parody of the 'poetry and jazz' aroma of beatnikism with an abstraction of the type of onomatopoeia found in those Beethoven meadowland movements -- with the cuckoos and wind, etc. (except, in this case, there's no cuckoo -- just the stuff in the strainer).

I don't have any pretensions about being a poet. My lyrics are there for entertainment purposes only -- not to be taken internally. Some of them are truly stupid, some are slightly less stupid and few of them are sort of funny. Apart from the snide political stuff, which I enjoy writing, the rest of the lyrics wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for the fact that we live in a society where instrumental music is irrelevant -- so if a guy expects to earn a living by providing musical entertainment for folks in the U.S.A., he'd better figure out how to do something with a human voice plopped on it.

'Deviation from the Norm'

One of the things I've said before in interviews is: "Without deviation (from the norm), 'progress' is not possible."

In order for one to deviate successfully, one has to have at least a passing acquaintance with whatever norm one expects to deviate from.

When a musician comes into my band, he already knows sets of musical norms. The drummers know all the drumbeat norms (how to play disco, how to play a shuffle, how to play fatback, etc., etc.). Bass players know all the bass player norms (thumb pops, walking lines, 'traditional' ostinatos, etc., etc.). Those are today's radio music norms. Part of the fun in preparing touring arrangements is nuking those norms.

The place where one finds the least enthusiasm for norm-nuking is in the world of the symphony orchestra. If you hand an orchestral musician a piece of new music, his instant response is likely to be: "Feh! This was written by some guy who is still alive!"

Players come into the orchestra already knowing what's 'good' -- because they've played it a million times in the conservatory. So, when a composer approaches an orchestra with a piece of music embodying techniques or ideas that weren't 'certified' during the musicians' conservatory days, he is likely to experience rejection at the molecular level -- as a defense mechanism of the entire orchestra.

As soon as an orchestra attempts to play something they don't know, they run the risk of fucking up. There are only two ways for them to avoid this potential embarrassment. One is to rehearse -- but who will pay for this precious rehearsal time? The other is to avoid playing any new music.

When a guest conductor comes to town, he is not usually giving a performance of something by a living composer. He's doing Brahms; he's doing Beethoven; he's doing Mozart -- because he can warm it up in one afternoon and make it sound okay. This makes the accountants happy, and allows the audience to concentrate on his choreography (which is really why they bought the tickets in the first place).

Why is that any better than a bunch of guys in a bar band jamming on "Louie Louie" or "Midnight Hour"?

Hateful Practices

I find music of the classical period boring because it reminds me of 'painting by numbers.' There are certain things composers of that period were not allowed to do because they were considered to be outside the boundaries of the industrial regulations which determined whether the piece was a symphony, a sonata or a whatever.

All of the norms, as practiced during the olden days, came into being because the guys who paid the bills wanted the 'tunes' they were buying to 'sound a certain way.'

The king said: "I'll chop off your head unless it sounds like this." The pope said: "I'll rip out your fingernails unless it sounds like this." The duke or somebody else might have said it another way -- and it's the same today: "Your song won't get played on the radio unless it sounds like this." People who think that classical music is somehow more elevated than 'radio music' should take a look at the forms involved -- and at who's paying the bills. Once upon a time, it was the king or Pope So-and-so. Today we have broadcast license holders, radio programmers, disc jockeys and record company executives -- banal reincarnations of the assholes who shaped the music of the past.

The contemporary 'harmony textbook' is the embodiment of those evils, in catalog form. When I was handed my first book and told to do the exercises, I hated the sound of the 'sample passages.' I studied them anyway. If something is hateful, you should at least know what it is you're hating so you can avoid it in the future.

Many compositions that have been accepted as "GREAT ART" through the years reek of these hateful practices. For example, the rule of harmony that says: The second degree of the scale should go to the fifth degree of the scale, which should go to the first degree of the scale [II-V-I].

Tin Pan Alley songs and jazz standards thrive on II-V-I. To me, this is a hateful progression. In jazz, they beef it up a little by adding extra partials into the chords to make them more luxurious, but it's still II-V-I. To me, II-V-I is the essence of bad 'white-person music.'

(One of the most exciting things that ever happened in the world of 'white-person music' was when the Beach Boys used the progression V-II on "Little Deuce Coupe." An important step forward by going backward.)

It's the instructor's job to make you learn how to do all the stuff in those books. To get a grade, you must write exercises proving that you are capable of accommodating the entertainment needs of deceased kings and popes, and, after you've proved it, you get a piece of paper that says you're a composer. Is that nauseating or what?

It's worse in the graduate courses that teach students how to do 'modern' music. Even modern music has hateful practices -- like the twelve-tone business that says you can't play note one until you've cycled through the other eleven, theoretically thwarting tonality by giving each pitch equal importance.

The Ultimate Rule ought to be: "If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it's bitchen; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty." The more varied your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like.

American radio listeners, raised on a diet of ________ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.

In radio music, timbre rules (the texture of the tune, i.e., "Purple Haze" played on accordion is very different from Hendrix playing it on a squealing feedback guitar).

On a record, the overall timbre of the piece (determined by equalization of individual parts and their proportions in the mix) tells you, in a subtle way, WHAT the song is about. The orchestration provides important information about what the composition IS and, in some instances, assumes a greater importance than the composition itself.

American listeners know very little about the ethnic music of other cultures, and the closest they get to contemporary orchestral composition is the latest film or TV background music.

It's amazing that schools still offer courses in musical composition. What a useless thing to spend money on -- to take a course in college to learn how to be a modern composer! No matter how good the course is, when you get out, what the fuck will you do for a living? (The easiest thing to do is become a composition teacher yourself, spreading 'the disease' to the next generation.)

One of the things that determines the curriculum in music schools is: which of the current fashions in modern music gets the most grant money from the mysterious benefactors in Foundation-Land. For a while there, unless you were doing serial music (in which the pitches have numbers, the dynamics have numbers, the vertical densities have numbers, etc.) -- if it didn't have a pedigree like that, it wasn't a good piece of music. Critics and academicians stood by, waiting to tell you what a piece of shit your opus was if your numbers didn't add up. (Forget what it sounded like, or whether it moved anybody, or what it was about. The most important thing was the numbers.)

The foundations that provide grant money for people engaged in these pursuits occasionally decide to stop funding one style of music after becoming entranced with another. For instance, it used to be that they would fund only boop-beep stuff (serial and/or electronic composition). Now they're funding only minimalism (simplistic, repetitive composition, easy to rehearse and, therefore, cost-effective). So what gets taught in school? Minimalism. Why? Because it can be FUNDED. Net cultural result? Monochromonotony.

In order to gain status at the university, a professor or composer in residence has to be plugged into something that's really hot -- something FUNDABLE, and, as of this writing, the secret word is MINIMALISM. So, after a busy semester grading the papers of their minimalist trainees, they adjust their berets and fill out the request forms for 'foundation assistance.' Students and instructors alike compete annually for pieces of this pie.

One day, these cultural institutions are going to stop funding minimalist music and fund something else, and the Serious Music Landscape will be littered with the shriveled remains of 'expert graduate minimalists.'

Bingo! There Goes Your Tenure!

The following section is excerpted from the keynote address I delivered at the 1984 convention of the American Society of University Composers (ASUC).

"Is 'New Music' Relevant in an Industrial Society?"

Pierre Boulez

I met Boulez after sending him some orchestral scores, hoping that he would be interested in conducting them. He wrote back saying that he couldn't because, although he did have a chamber orchestra of twenty-eight pieces, he did not have a full-size symphony orchestra at his disposal in France (and even if he did, he probably wouldn't have used it, as he later stated that he didn't care for 'The French Orchestral Tone,' preferring the BBC Symphony).

I bought my first Boulez album when I was in the twelfth grade: a Columbia recording of "Le Marteau Sans Maître" (The Hammer Without a Master) conducted by Robert Craft, with "Zeitmasse" (Time-mass) by Stockhausen on the other side.

Within a year or so of that, I managed to get hold of a score. I listened to the record while following the score, and I noticed that the performance was not very accurate. I later acquired a recording of "Le Marteau" on the Turnabout label, with Boulez conducting, and was surprised to find that he took the first movement much more slowly than the tempo marked in the score. I razzed him about it when we met.

Boulez is, to use one of Thomas Nordegg's favorite phrases, "serious as cancer," but he can be funny too. He reminds me a little of the character that Herbert Lorn plays in the Pink Panther movies. He doesn't have the 'psychotic wink,' but he has some of that nervous quality about him, as if he might -- given the proper excuse -- start laughing uncontrollably.

I went to lunch with him in Paris, prior to the Perfect Stranger recording. He ordered something called brebis du [fill in the blank] -- I didn't know what it was. It was some kind of meatlike material on weird lettuce with a translucent dressing. He looked like he was really enjoying it. He offered some to me. I asked him what it was. He said, "The sliced nose of the cow." I thanked him and went back to my pepper steak.

I saw him conduct the New York Philharmonic with Phyllis Bryn-Julson as soloist at Lincoln Center in '86 or'87. The audience was extremely rude. The first half of the program had pieces by Stravinsky and Debussy; the second half was a piece by Boulez. After the intermission, the audience came back in and waited for him to begin his piece -- which was very quiet compared to the first two -- and then about half the audience got up -- noisily -- and walked out. He kept on conducting.

I would have enjoyed the opportunity to grab a microphone and scream, "Sit down, assholes! This is one of 'The Real Guys'!"

The Perfect Stranger

Since releasing the LSO album, I have turned down at least fifteen commissions from chamber music groups of varying sizes from all over the world who offered me cash to write a piece of music for them. If I were a composer just starting out, I would think that was the greatest thing in the world -- but I don't have the time anymore, and I shudder to think what would happen to the music if they played it without my being there during rehearsals.

Complicating matters, these commissions are offered in a way that requires my presence at the premiere performance -- during which I would be expected to sit there and pretend it was terrific.

That's what happened to me when Boulez conducted the live premiere of "Dupree's Paradise," "The Perfect Stranger" and "Naval Aviation in Art?" It was underrehearsed.

I hated that premiere. Boulez virtually had to drag me onto the stage to take a bow. I was sitting on a chair off to the side of the stage during the concert, and I could see the sweat squirting out of the musicians' foreheads. Then they had to go into the IRCAM studio the next day and record it.

In the game of new music, everybody has to take a chance. The conductor takes a chance, the performers take a chance, and the audience takes a chance -- but the guy who takes the biggest chance is the composer.

The performers will probably not play his piece correctly (bad attitude; not enough rehearsal time) -- and the audience won't like it because it doesn't 'sound good' (bad acoustics; weak performance).

There's no such thing as a 'second chance' in this situation -- the audience gets only one chance to hear it because, even though the program says "World Premiere," that usually means "Last Performance."

Before an audience can tell whether or not it likes a piece, it needs to listen to it. Before it can listen to it, it has to know that it exists. In order for it to exist in a form in which it can be heard (not just on paper), it has to be performed. In order for a large audience to experience it, the performance must be recorded, released, distributed and given retail shelf space.

Interesting new music does exist. In spite of my rude comments earlier in this chapter, I know that sincere, optimistic people continue to compose it. Well, where the fuck is it then? Glad you asked! On the rare occasions when it does get recorded, it doesn't get The Big Push (or even the Wizened Little Shove), so any audience that might enjoy listening to it has difficulty finding it.

Mr. Retailer doesn't give a shit -- he needs to move as many Michael Jackson records out the door as he can. He too has a mortgage to pay. "Joe Blow's Super-Bitchen Concerto" that used to wind up in Bin 29 -- way in the back -- is not even there anymore.

If we expect to develop any kind of musical culture worth preserving for future generations in the U.S., we need to take a good look at the system which determines how things get done why they get done how often they get done and who gets to do them.

CHAPTER 9
A Chapter For My Dad

My Dad had a top-secret security clearance when he worked at Edwards Air Force Base (1956-59). During that period I kept getting thrown out of high school, causing him to worry about a reduction in his classification -- maybe even the loss of his job altogether. He told me at that time if I would just settle down and get good grades, he would send me to Peabody Conservatory in Maryland, probably thinking, "Well, it's a music school -- he wants to do something in music -- he doesn't want to be an engineer -- let's give him this to keep him quiet," but, by then, I had gotten to hate 'education' so much, I was so fed up with going to school -- any school, conservatory or not -- I didn't want any part of it.

I think my Dad was an interesting man -- even if I didn't get along all that well with him. He was good at mathematics -- he wrote (and published himself) a small book on gambling probabilities.

One thing that he always wanted to do was write a History of the World -- with Sicily as the hub. (Can you imagine how a guy from Rome would laugh at that idea -- the way people in Italy think of Sicilians? The way Romans think of everybody else?)

Mostly I tried to stay out of his way -- and I think he tried to stay out of mine as much as he could. After I got into 'show business' and made some money, I bought a house for my parents, and, at that point, I guess they thought I was sort of okay.

My Dad died while I was on the road. We were working at the Circle Star Theater in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1973. Gail made the funeral arrangements in my absence, and still tells the story of the guy from the funeral parlor who had a silver shovel for a tie clip.

My mother seems to like it if she sees my name in the papers, and if she sees me on TV she thinks it's good -- but she's a devout Catholic, so who can tell what she really thinks about what I do or the things I say?

I feel that if you live life in pursuit of 'certification,' 'appreciation,' or 'compensation' in any form from your parents, you're making a big mistake. The sooner you can say, "Okay, they're them and I'm me, and let's make the best of it," the better off you're going to be.

We could improve worldwide mental health if we acknowledged that parents can make you crazy.

I believe that, to a certain extent, kids get weird because their parents made them weird. Parents have more to do with making their children weird than TV or rock and roll records.

The only other thing that makes them weirder than TV and parents is religion and drugs.

Over the years, my interest in history has grown to the point that I can almost comprehend my Dad's fascination with it. He never managed to write his Sicilian History of the World, but, since I've got a couple of hours here, let's try another approach -- with rock and roll as the historical focal point. . .

The Entire World: A Short History

Okay -- we're pretending to be serious now -- Popular music tells us something about popular culture, which then tells us something about popular thought processes (or the absence thereof).

When rock and roll first appeared, adults were completely hostile towards it. Today, they aerobicize to it.

The people who performed it -- as well as its consumers -- were thought of in the beginning as an undesirable social element. Then the sixties came along and, wonder of wonders, natives from a miserable little island off the coast of France reinvented this wheel and rolled it back in our direction (right over our foot). With a sickening crunch, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones became household words in America.

The British Invasion introduced us to the concept of the self-contained singing band. Singing bands who played their own instruments were not common in the United States at that time (we had surf music). Up till then, rock records were made either by soloists or groups of vocalists, backed by anonymous guys who attempted to operate musical instruments.

The success of the British groups forced a change in the way new American groups were put together. They now had to be self-contained, because every bar that hired live music wanted its own little U.S. version of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.

During this period, it was discovered that millions -- perhaps billions -- of dollars could be made by selling circular pieces of black plastic in a cardboard sandwich with a stupid picture on the front.

In the beginning, "The Big Bucks" were made by low-life chiselers who screwed doo-wop groups out of their royalties. While the chiselers played golf, the singers vanished into the never-never land of needles and cookers.

The seventies came along. By then, the captains of corporate America had convinced themselves that they had The Answer, and so it came to pass that the world was introduced to the warmth and sincerity of corporate rock.

Corpo-rock mutated into 'disco' -- developed on the actuarial assumption that music by nonpeople is better and cheaper than music originating from 'the alternative source.'

All those nice men who owned the bars and clubs where groups used to develop stopped hiring musicians, and replaced them with record players, big speaker systems and twinkling lights.

Disco satisfied social as well as musical needs. Disco people got to dress up all the time and go to places (if the guy at the door let them in) where everybody sort of 'looked good' -- and later, after an evening of chemical alteration, everybody looked even better, and the next thing they knew, they were getting The Blow Job.

Punk, in the late seventies, purported to be a rebellion against that sort of silly behavior. Maniac bands started thrashing away in dingy little places with no decor, developing their own silly behavior. Yes, punk took us back to the energetic roots of rock and roll -- and its mysterious accounting procedures. The guys with the safety pins in their noses probably netted less than their doo-wop junkie ancestors.

New wave evolved from punk, basically, by sterilizing its own safety pin. Newly glammed punkers sang "Yum-yum!" as they 'assumed the position' once again, sucking The Corporate Hooter (it's crusty nozzle emerging from a 'space-cloth' nursing bra this time).

Listen to These Clothes

No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to. No musical innovation will ever succeed on a large commercial scale without the full involvement of the industries which profit tangentially from it: clothing and 'merchandise.'

Death by Nostalgia

The really big news of the eighties is the stampede to regurgitate mildly camouflaged musical styles of previous decades, in ever-shrinking cycles of'nostalgia.'

(It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice -- there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia For The Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.)

"I Dunno"

One of the good things that happened in the sixties was that at least some music of an unusual or experimental nature got recorded and released. So, who were those wise, incredibly creative executives that made this Golden Era possible? Hip young guys with Perrier breath? No -- they were old cigar-chomper guys who listened to the tapes and said, "I dunno. Who knows what the fuck it is? G'head -- put it out there! Who knows? I dunno."

We were better off with that attitude than we are now. The 'bright young men' are far more conservative -- and more dangerous than the old guys ever were.

So, how did The New Guys get in there? Some got in because their Dad was one of The Old Guys. Some of them actually worked their way in -- the guy with the cigar said one day: "Sherman, look, I took a chance -- it went out there -- next thing I know, we sold a few million units. I still don't know what the fuck this shit is, but we gotta do some more. I tell you, Sherm -- I need some advice! Why don't we get one of those hippie bastards in here?" So, they hire the hippie bastard -- not to do anything 'big,' just carry the coffee; bring the mail; stand around and look happening. So one day the old guy says: "Sherman, listen -- I think we can trust him; he looks like he's 'happening.' We'll make him an A&R man -- let HIM talk to these stupid fuckers with the tambourine 'n incense. He understands this shit -- he's got the same hair."

From there, he's moving up and up; next thing you know he's got HIS feet on the desk and he's saying, "Get rid of Sherman, Ms. Maxwell -- and -- oh, that 'new group'? We can't take a chance on them. . . it's just not what the kids really want -- I know -- I got the same hair."

Things will not improve until these cocksuckers move back to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

There is something to be said for an executive who is willing to take a chance on an idea, even if he doesn't like or understand it. The new guys don't have that spirit. They are forever looking over their shoulder. (Remember when they used to have the same hair? All that shit they stuck up their nose made it fall out a couple of years ago.)

The Economics of Artistic Freedom

Just Listen to That Budget

When the risks of creating a successful 'entertainment object' are increased by high production costs, committees (and the pitiful decisions they make) always flourish.

Committees make it possible for incompetent corpo-weasels to maintain their perks (and the fiction of fiscal prudence), while spending mega-budgets on 'sure-thing' movies, 'sure-thing' Broadway shows and 'sure-thing' recording artists.

The 'sure thing' is called a 'sure thing' because it has been outfitted with an 'insurance policy' -- The Committee Itself. Nobody on it is EVER going to be held responsible for ANYTHING -- so WHAT CAN GO WRONG? Is it any wonder that project after project devolves into putrid nothingness -- with more on the way?

In order to merchandise 'whatever it was that met with everyone's approval,' The Committee must spend even more time and money to make sure nobody finds out that there ever was such a thing as 'good stuff,' so, explaining that this is a matter of National Security, it enlists the aid of the Federal Government -- perhaps a covert operation or two -- to obliterate any criteria by which a customer might recognize how shitty the 'new stuff' really is. [Fade up: "Battle Hymn of the Republic"; mass applause.]

There are millions of people who love music, but have tastes which differ from the 'corporate ideal' -- that's where independent labels come in. However, unless an independent is distributed through a major label, chances are the retailer is not going to pay on his ninety-day account -- unless the independent has another hit coming in the door next month. The independent usually doesn't, but the major label might, and it is this leverage that gets the bills paid.

The major labels are more interested in merchandising than music. The idea is to get ONE blockbuster monster motherfucker hit album every year.

Corpo-wisdom dictates that if any one guy sells thirty million records, when the kids come into the store to buy The Big Hit, they'll also pick up something else. This is called a "traffic-builder. " Ever wonder why every year at the Grammys one guy sweeps up all the awards?

CHAPTER 10
The One You've Been Waiting For

This is the chapter with the 'road stories' in it (sanitized to protect the people who need protection, and/or people from whom clearances would be difficult to obtain).

Sometimes What Goes In Does Not Go Out

Once upon a time we had a road manager who used to work for a famous 'TV Teen Idol' who decided to do a tour with a large backup band. One of the dates was Dallas, Texas -- home of a Famous Groupie Person.

The afternoon before the show, Mr. Road Manager received a phone call from the F.G.P., who said, "How many guys in the band? There'll be girls for everyone after the show." The F.G.P. even volunteered to procure a specimen for Mr. Road Manager.

Sure enough, as the band was walking offstage, there stood the F.G.P. -- and an entourage of A.G.P.'s (assistantgroupiepersonettes). The F.G.P. was ordering them: "You go with him. You go with him. You go with him. You go with him," etc. Then there was a BIG PARTY. Mr. Road Manager wound up with an A.G.P. who stimulated him greatly, all the time thinking to himself: "What a GREAT BAND! Even the road manager gets laid!" -- however, it was not to be. After the party, in his hotel room, the girl announced that she couldn't fuck him, because one of those BIG ENGLISH GROUPS had been in town the week before, and a famous drummer had fucked her with a fountain pen -- and it was still in her.

Sleeping in a Jar

I couldn't tape the following story at the time it occurred (1971), but in 1987 I invited the protagonist to participate in a videotape interview. First: my version, as I remember it.

The star of STORY #2 is a girl named Laurel Fishman. (We'll use her real name because she is, in fact, proud of her accomplishments.)

She had been a regular attendee at our concerts in Chicago and other Midwestern cities in the 1960s, and in 1970 she won a contest run by a radio station in Chicago. The contest was to tell in twenty-five words or less how the Mothers of Invention had saved your life.

Her entry said that, since hearing the song "Call Any Vegetable," she had gotten in touch with her friends in the vegetable kingdom and, as a result of this, her body functions had been more regular.

The contest winner was to receive a backstage pass to our concert at the Auditorium Theatre, with one guest. I didn't even know the radio station was having a contest. At the gig, the promoter told us about it, and introduced us to THE WINNER -- Laurel Fishman.

She had screaming orange-red hair, and makeup out to here, and was a little bit on the pudgy side. She walked in with a guy who looked like Carl Franzoni from the early Freak Out! days.

She had brought with her a 'present' for the band. It was a piece of her own shit, which looked like it had been hand-molded into a perfect sphere, sitting in a mason jar. She claimed that was exactly how it had left her body. I couldn't imagine how that could be true -- I thought I saw palm prints on it.

Jim Pons, the bass player at that time, was fascinated by it. After the show, he took it with him. We got to the motel, got out of the car and were walking to the elevator. Pons couldn't stand it anymore -- he had to find out if it was real. He unscrewed the lid, took a big whiff, and went, "OOOhhhh my God!" It wound up in the trash can just outside the elevator in the motel.

Stuff Up the Cracks

In 1981, on one of Steve Vai's early tours, we were playing at Notre Dame University, and Laurel Fishman showed up. By some twist of fate, Steve wound up with Laurel in his motel room. They engaged in a variety of practices involving a hairbrush, and Steve drooling on his own dork while she jerked him off. (I got the whole catalogue of events the next morning during 'Breakfast Report.')

Since I'd known Laurel for years, and since she was being 'commemorated' in this 'folk song,' I thought that I should at least let her know what I was writing -- and that if she had any objections to it, she should state them.

Not only did she not have any objections -- she thought it was a good idea. She wrote out a release, in longhand, along with a list of all of the different objects she had been 'penetrated' with by Mr. Vai (e.g., parts of guitars, assorted vegetables and the drummer's umbrella).

The Fabulous Musician

Once upon a time, in a town in northern Florida, a certain Fabulous Musician met three girls in the parking lot of the hotel. He found one of the girls -- the blonde -- to be the most appealing, and asked her to meet him for recreational deployment after the show.

The band was handled by a booking agency, and the agency representative happened to be staying at the same hotel.

Somehow, between the sound check and the end of the show, the agent had clamped onto the girl that the Fabulous Musician was interested in.

The Fabulous Musician, being a student of human nature, was not disturbed by this usurpation of his 'beloved.'

He was, however, certain of several things:

He also calculated that, by the time he got back to the hotel, he'd only have to wait a mere few minutes for the agent to accomplish his evil mission.

The Fabulous Musician told the other guys in the band (sitting in his room, on the seventh floor) that something 'interesting' was going to happen, and that they should be 'standing by.'

Grasping his trusty Polaroid camera, he leaped from his balcony onto the next and, with the click of a shutter and the flash of the flashbulb, produced an instantly 'compromising photograph' of the agent, who opined, "I certainly would like to have that photograph" -- to which the Fabulous Musician replied, "I certainly would like to fuck that girl."

A trade was made. The agent received the photograph and retired, naked, to the corner of the room, reading The Godfather. The Fabulous Musician called across to the other balcony for the rest to join him.

The girl, menstruating vigorously, seemed delighted at the prospect of further gratification.

The band seated itself around the bed as if it were an operating theater, and watched in amazement as the Fabulous Musician lifted a bottle of 'complimentary champagne' from a nearby table, placed his thumb over the end, and shook it into a froth, finally plunging it into the crimson tunnel -- releasing a torrent of purple spew.

The girl achieved what appeared to be an immense orgasm. The Fabulous Musician withdrew the bottle with a flourish, turned to the spectators, said: "Cheers, lads!" and drank the remaining liquid.

The Not-So-Fabulous Musician

The Story Of The Fabulous Musician eventually entered the realm of'classical folklore.' It's one of the road stories passed down, band to band to band, and so it came to pass that another musician -- a very COST-CONSCIOUS MUSICIAN (with ungodly bad breath) -- heard the tale, was inspired by it and set out to surpass it, through the medium of his own personal magnetism.

He scoured the countryside to find a maiden willing to tolerate the procedure. Eventually finding a 'suitable somebody' willing to utter the magic words "Why not?," he took her to a small German hotel.

At this point, he was confronted with a major economic decision. Realizing the exorbitant price of mini-bar champagne (yet fervently seeking his niche in history), he opted for the 'low road.' "Forget the champagne!" he said, taking a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets out of his shaving kit, stuffing them up the girl, and pouring water in. The results were not the same.

CHAPTER 11
Sticks & Stones

The people most offended by my lyrics seem to be rock critics. The audience usually likes them.

I have been attacked in print, on a personal level, for years -- by people I have never met, who appeared to be trying to punish me for having the nerve to write on certain topics. (One newspaper in Colorado described me as a "degenerate" and a "menace to society.")

Most album reviews sidestep the musical content, because writers with enough technical knowledge to discuss music do not usually cover rock and roll. Whatever image I may have in the marketplace has been based, to a certain extent, on the opinions of people poorly qualified to make the judgment in the first place. Some examples:

Why They Write That Stuff About Me

Rock journalists' did not exist in 1965 and 1966 when the Mothers started out. Anyone who put out an album back then ran the risk of having it reviewed by a person who wrote featurettes for the cooking section of the Daily Whatsis.

When an interview or review like the ones above got published, it got stuffed into a morgue file someplace, to await a reincarnation on the day the next album got released or the group made a subsequent concert appearance.

Morgue files allow a lazy journalist to quote massive chunks of somebody else's story (as if it were a 'researched fact'), saving him a few hours of work, and providing a convenient certification for his 'premise' (never at odds with the opinions expressed by the Ancient Incompetents whose work fills those files).

Unfortunately, I started doing interviews way back then. Yes, I talked face to face with many of the original Ancient Incompetents.

When rock journalism, as a form, finally developed, the wit and wisdom of the Ancient Incompetents became the data base for all writing to follow -- so the material that has accumulated over the last two decades relating to my work begins with the garbage in that data base -- magnified, embroidered, embellished and tweezed in every conceivable way since then.

To illustrate at least part of this concept, I include here an 'electro-factoid' currently running on the Dow Jones computer information service:

There are several reasons why my music has never really been 'explained' in the press. For one thing, the people who write the articles don't really care how it works or why it works. I think this applies in a general way to rock criticism of every group.

Also, in those instances where the writer might actually care, his editor, convinced that the public doesn't care, will either cut or modify the article.

The manner in which Americans 'consume' music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie -- it's consumed that way without any regard for how or why it's made. Then, when it's merchandised, the emphasis shifts to the pseudo-personality of the artist -- a magnification of the stage persona. Do we really want to know HOW Michael Jackson makes his music? No. We want to understand why he needs the bones of the Elephant Man -- and, until he tells us, it doesn't make too much difference whether or not he really is 'bad.'

About Boredom

If one thing keeps rock and roll boring, besides the radio-station programmers and the record-company executives, it's the writings of rock and roll journalists. They decide if a group is 'good' by listening to a couple of cuts from the first album -- then if the second album is 'different,' they write that the band is fucking up -- it's not 'consistent.'

The rock press sends a message to performers that they should stay in their mold: "Don't change. If you do, we're going to say that your new record is a piece of shit."

Then the guy at the record company who knows nothing about music, except for what he reads in Rolling Stone, will read the review and think, "This group is dead -- let's put the bucks into the next one." -- whereas a kid who listens to the record might make up his own mind and say, "Go fuck yourself, I like it."

For each type of music, there are listeners who think that reviewers don't know what they're talking about. These listeners, when excited about a certain group or style of music, will fight for it in their hometowns.

These are the people who have made it possible for me to stay in music through the years -- and I thank them for it.

Am I a 'Sexist' -- or What?

If you were to take all the lyrics I've ever written and analyze how many songs are about 'women in demeaning positions,' as opposed to 'men in demeaning positions,' you would find that most of the songs are about stupid men.

The songs I write about women are not gratuitous attacks on them, but statements of fact. The song "Jewish Princess" caused the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith to complain bitterly and demand an apology. I did not apologize then and refuse to do so now because, unlike The Unicorn, such creatures do exist -- and deserve to be 'commemorated' with their own special opus.

The basic function of any ethnic protective PR organization is to do what Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-California) suggested on the Larry King show -- "maintain the fiction." (He used it in the context of protecting the Reagan administration during the Iran-contra scandal, suggesting it was our duty as Americans to support The President by looking the other way.)

Italians have an organization which seeks to 'maintain the fiction' that no Italians are in the Mafia, nor do they sell drugs while engaging in murder for hire. If you want to believe that, fine -- welcome to Fantasy Land. If you want to believe that wrestling is real, go for it -- and if you want to believe that women are a wonderful species that: [1] never goes to the toilet; [2] can't possibly do anything wrong; [3] is completely superior to men, then believe it -- whatever makes you feel good.

Why They Don't Play My Stuff on the Radio

Sometimes a radio station will get one phone call from one person who screams that he is going to complain to the FCC. Instead of the guy at the station thinking about how many listeners love the song, want to hear it again, and will support the station for playing it, usually the guy panics -- and takes my record off the air. I object to that.

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think 'I'm wrong.' The number of people who thought Hitler was 'right' did not make him 'right.' The same principle should be applied to anyone who has an individualistic attitude. Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

CHAPTER 12
America Drinks & Goes Marching

During a lecture in San Francisco, someone asked: "If you're against drugs, why do you smoke cigarettes?"

I answered, "To me, a cigarette is food. I live my life smoking these things, and drinking the 'black water' in this cup here. This may be a baffling concept to the people in San Francisco who believe that they will live forever if they stamp out tobacco smoke."

The Drug Question comes up all the time in interviews because people refuse to believe that I DON'T use them. There seems to be a consensus in America -- since so many people, in all walks of life, use drugs -- that a person can't possibly be 'normal' if he doesn't use them. If I tell them I don't use drugs, they look at me like I'm crazy and question me about it.

Between 1962 and 1968, on maybe ten occasions, I experienced the 'joys' of socially circulated marijuana. It gave me a sore throat and made me sleepy. I couldn't understand why people liked it so much. (If I had liked it, I'd probably be smoking it today, since I like to smoke.)

Americans use drugs as if consumption bestowed a 'special license' to be an asshole. Whatever heinous act they might have participated in the night before can be instantly excused by saying they were 'high' while they were doing it.

Through the magic of Altered Body Chemistry, America in the eighties has devolved into an enormous hatchery for consumers. Corporate policy (itself influenced by drugs and alcohol) has decreed the breeding and maintenance of hundreds of millions of helpless illiterates, destined to spend their lives buying useless shit. When the shopping spree is over, the victims of this policy will gather in sad little groups and show their 'treasures' to each other, discussing how they're going to keep them, since the government is always trying to tax them away.

So, how do they deal with this sort of stress? Sex would seem to be the most efficient natural solution, but these mutants have been driven to 'secondary sources' by lunatic doctrines (religious and political) which propound that sex is bad.

People who don't have an outlet often turn to violence -- like those All-American bubbas who can't get laid and express themselves by pounding the snot out of each other in the parking lot of the neighborhood bar.

I have a theory about beer: Consumption of it leads to pseudo-military behavior. Think about it -- winos don't march. Whiskey guys don't march, either (sometimes they write poetry, which is often more horrible, though).

Beer drinkers are into things that are sort of like marching -- like football.

Maybe there's a chemical in beer that stimulates the [male] brain to do violence while moving in the same direction as other guys who smell like them [marching] -- "We, as a group of MEN, will drink this refreshing liquid, after which we will get together and beat the snot out of that guy over there."

Beer seems to produce behavioral results which are psycho-chemically different from those produced by other alcoholic beverages.

Alcohol (the part that 'gets you drunk') is only one ingredient. There are other things in beer, and those [herbal and/or biological] components could affect the [male] brain, creating this violent tendency.

Go ahead and laugh. One day you're going to read about some scientist discovering that hops, in conjunction with certain strains of 'yeast creatures,' has a mysterious effect on some newly discovered region of the brain, making people want to kill -- but only in groups. (With whiskey, you might want to murder your girlfriend -- but beer makes you want to do it with your buddies watching. It's a buddy beverage -- for buddy activities.)

Think about it: "Who IS this 'Mr. Coors'? What does HE do for a 'good time' -- and why does a man who owns a beer company need a 'top-secret security clearance'?" Did you see him during the Iran-contra hearings? He has a top-secret security clearance. Do the guys at Anheuser-Busch have the same clearance? And when you see a beer commercial, besides 'the buddy pitch,' don't they also throw in a little jingoistic, bunting-encrusted, flag-waving hoopla -- the all-American beer syndrome? Every major industrialized nation has A BEER (you can't be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline -- it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need A BEER).

I think the mutant behaviors exhibited by people 'under the influence' should be studied more closely. Gin drinkers, for example, are a breed apart.

People choose an allegiance to a certain beverage. Like bourbon guys -- they're bourbon guys and that's it. And scotch drinkers? Forget it. They don't want to know from 'pinkgin.'

In contrast to Mr. Beer Guy, picture a guy who is religiously devoted to Château Latour. Is he marching? He ain't marching.

CHAPTER 13
All About Schmucks

In the future, etiquette will become more and more important. That doesn't mean knowing which fork to pick up -- I mean basic consideration for the rights of other animals (human beings included) and the willingness, whenever practical, to tolerate the other guy's idiosyncracies.

We live in a world where people preach at you constantly (like now, even) -- telling you not to be fat, you can't smoke, you can't eat butter, sugar will kill you, everything's bad for you -- especially sex.

Every natural human urge has been thwarted in one way or another, so that some cocksucker gets to make a dollar off your guilt.

Certain people buy into this because they don't want to rock the boat. Unfortunately, adaptation of this sort requires that the adaptee willingly destroys his own personality.

If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mother, your Dad, your priest, to some guy on television, to any of the people telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it. If you want to be a schmuck, be a schmuck -- but don't wait around for respect from other people -- a schmuck is a schmuck.

I suggest we learn how to take anything bad that happens to us and polarize it. Instead of being overwhelmed by a negative event, dodge to the side like those t'ai chi guys and let it whizz by your pants. Maybe it makes a little breeze -- big deal. (Please, don't mistake this for optimism.)

There is an organization in Texas called The Church of the SubGenius, devoted to the teachings of some guy with a pipe in his mouth named "BOB." I'm not a member, but part of their 'theology' parallels mine.

As the planet gets more crowded, we must realize that 'slack' is precious, schmucks are plentiful, impingements are impractical and werewolf etiquette for self-defense is a personal necessity.

Techniques must be developed to enable each of us to escape the other guy's bullshit (just as he wishes to escape ours). Heaven would be a place where bullshit existed only on television. (Hallelujah! We's halfway there!)

People should be encouraged to look after their own self-interest, but avoid inflicting themselves on other people -- especially don't inflict yourself on a schmuck. The guy has already made his choice. Cut the schmuck some slack.

Secondhand Smoke

I think the whole issue of secondhand smoke as a health hazard is a fantasy, but if someone complains in a restaurant that my smoke is bothering them, I won't smoke near them.

I think the anti-smoking business is a yuppie invention -- an extension of the concept that "we'll always be young, rich, and healthy." People who would ordinarily be chain-smoking, and loving every minute of it, are now eating salads and jogging till they puke.

If they want to live that kind of life, fine -- I have other priorities.

I like tobacco. As a kid, I took cigarettes out of ashtrays and pulled them apart to see what was inside. I liked the way tobacco smelled; I didn't care whether it was fresh or stale. Some people like garlic; I like tobacco. I like pepper, tobacco and coffee. That's my metabolism.

I didn't smoke until I was fifteen because of my asthma -- my mother always told me, "If you smoke, you'll die." One day, I had the opportunity to smoke a Lucky Strike, and I didn't die.

The only times I've stopped smoking were when I had a cold. Once, when I got a chest cold in the middle of a tour, I stopped smoking -- but then a funny thing happened: I noticed I could smell things that I couldn't smell before. Some people would say that was terrific. I didn't like it. I didn't like the way things smelled.

I walked into a hotel room and I could smell the rug, the disinfectant -- as for smelling 'the great outdoors,' I don't live outdoors. Outdoors for me is walking from the car to the ticket desk at the airport.

Who's Yer Tailor?

I just saw Reagan's Surgeon General, Doctor Koop, on CNN, making the statement that (I'm paraphrasing here): "The behavior of smokers is pharmacologically the same as that of heroin addicts and cocaine addicts." Oh, really? Who is this geek with the bogus epaulets on his shirt? Since when does the Surgeon General get to wear a costume?

Throughout his tour of duty, this "Doctor" has dispensed to the American public what I consider to be unscientific information (from what appears to be a fundamentalist perspective) on a wide range of health matters.

His explanation of the origins of the AIDS epidemic on an HBO special, for example (paraphrasing) -- "It came from a green monkey in Africa -- perhaps the native, who was skinning it to eat it, cut his finger by accident, and some of the tainted blood got on him.

Folks, it is far more likely that the disease was spread in Africa (and Haiti) as the result of injections administered by evangelical 'medical missionaries' -- either on purpose (as part of "God's Republican Plan For The Advancement Of Rich American White People") or through incompetence (using dirty needles for multiple injections without sterilization). How did it get back to the U.S.? Is it possible that some of those nice little missionaries share Jim Bakker's blessed sexual preferences? Then, of course, there was Doctor Koop's C-SPAN appearance at a "PMRC SYMPOSIUM" -- providing 'certification' for the 'scientific conclusions' of fundamentalist lunatics, raving about "backwards masking." Does this guy need a song, or what?

"Words That Start with 'B' That
Remind Me of What Republicans Do"

The eighties can best be summed up by the TV image of red-white-and-blue party balloons, escaping into the atmosphere, the recurring Republican pictorial metaphor for -- what? Freedom?

(And the Democrats, trying SO HARD to act like Republicans, occasionally adopted this same metaphor during the 1988 campaign.)

When the Republicans really go at it, they "let off balloons." What the fuck is that? We see the bunting draped down here, and then: whoosh, the balloons go up. Who makes those balloons? Who blows them up? Who makes the bunting? Who makes out on these contracts?

There's no question in my mind -- the beer, the balloons and the bunting all start with "B" for some Cosmic Reason.

Bullshit also starts with a "B." If you took Beer, Balloons and Bunting, then stirred in the Bullshit, you'd wind up with a scientific description of how the Republican Party works its Special Magic on the American electorate. Oh -- let's add Bourbon, Blow Jobs and the Bohemian Grove.

Hydrogen

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

This is not a matter of 'pessimism' vs. 'optimism' -- it's a matter of accurate assessment.

Not only is there more stupidity than anything else in terms of universal quantity, but there is a wonderful quality to this stupidity. It is so intensely perfect that it completely overwhelms whatever it is that nature has piled up on the other pan of the scale.

Stupidity is replicating itself at an astonishing rate. It breeds easily and is self-financing.

The person who stands up and says, "This is stupid," either is asked to 'behave' or, worse, is greeted with a cheerful "Yes, we know! Isn't it terrific!"

When Hitler was doing his shit, a whole bunch of people thought he was terrific, too. How could they be wrong? There were so many of them; they thought they looked good together -- their arms all went up at the same time.

It seems to me that Americans in the eighties exhibit a remarkable willingness to embrace Fascism, especially when it is presented to them on a TV tray with balloons and bunting all over it.

It would be easier to pay off the national debt overnight than to neutralize the long-range effects of OUR NATIONAL STUPIDITY.

Forget about Iranian stupidity, or Chinese, or Russian, or South American, or Canadian stupidity -- our very own homemade incompetence gets The Grand Prize.

We're not talking light-hearted foolishness here -- when we go for stupid we go for BIG STUPID -- like people who shoot at you on the freeway, or the Rambos and Ramboettes who blow people away in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants with automatic weapons.

Here it comes, folks! Watch it grow! One day, the BIG STUPID goes to a PTA meeting, winds through the PTL Club, wends its way to the White House, spreads out from the Oval Office like a cow flop into the judiciary system, dribbles over onto the desks of BIG BUSINESS, and the next thing you know we've got THE VERY BIG STUPID.

THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.

I can't think of any developing nation with a genuine 'fondness' for America. People in these countries see America as a threat to their national security; they see US as an 'Evil Empire.' Everything Reagan said in the early days about Russia is easily descriptive of our country, viewed by a developing nation.

Because we possess THE VERY BIG STUPID, they know there is always the possibility that we might use it on them -- accidentally.

Folks, over the years we have developed a first-strike capability with this hideous weapon, and have already deployed it several times, disguised as Reagan Administration 'foreign policy.'

Some people in the Imaginary Heartland of America might say, "Who gives a shit? They ain't going to get us. They ain't coming over here. Why, some of em don't even have air-o-planes."

That kind of guy has bought stock in the THE VERY BIG STUPID, and has reaped a philosophical dividend which states on its face that, as a Special Christian Nation, we have the right to stomp all over the other guys (Manifest Destiny). God is on Our Side, and we're supposed to do this, because we're the only creatures sophisticated enough to bring peace and sanity to the rest of the world. Pheeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuwwwwwwwww.

The Exaltation of Ignorance

Stupidity has a certain charm -- ignorance does not.

It has been said that ignorance is bliss -- I'm not so sure. Perhaps I have been deprived in this regard but, never having been truly ignorant, I find it difficult to speak with any authority on the topic of such a 'blissful state.'

I have, however, observed a lot of other people who were certifiably ignorant, and I wouldn't say they were in a state of 'bliss.' They were having a good time, but I wouldn't call it 'bliss.'

When we celebrate Ignorance, and make that the National Standard of Excellence, we embarrass ourselves.

We celebrate it in hit records, TV sitcoms, most films, most commercials and, to a great extent, in our schools.

Our school systems train kids to be ignorant, with style -- functional ignoramuses. They do not equip students to deal with things like logic; they don't give them the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any product or situation. They are groomed and launched to function as mindless buying machines for the products and concepts of a multinational military-industrial complex that needs a World Of Dumbells to survive.

As long as you're just smart enough to do some kind of job, and just dumb enough to swallow the bunting, you're going to be 'all right' -- but, if you venture beyond that, you run the risk of mysterious stomach problems and migraine headaches.

I believe that U.S. schools have a Search and Destroy program, aimed at any hint of creative thinking exhibited by students. Somebody plans this curriculum. Somebody writes those textbooks. Somebody sets those standards. Somebody watches to make sure it all goes well. Somebody pays big bucks for this shit.

CHAPTER 14
Marriage
(As a Dada Concept)

Civil or religious certification of marriage reduces your beautiful 'relationship' to a business contract (between the partners, between the partners and the government, or between the partners, the government and Mr. God).

Except in the most extreme (religious fanatic) cases, the ceremony and the contract have no bearing on what people have to do to stay together. I've never met anyone who felt that marriage was a 'special career,' at which he or she must excel, but, if we are to believe the drivel on CNN, such people do exist somewhere in yuppie-land -- white-bread mutants who set out to breed that one perfect little child-artifact-piece-of-furniture- combination snackpack.

This will be a frightening bunch when they grow up -- all the worst behavioral traits of their accursed parents, combined with the ability to play a violin at seven, speak four languages by nine and graduate law school by eleven. (Picture a civil war between them and the children of today's homeless in a few years.)

Mr. Dad

No matter what fantasies you maintain regarding 'your personal relationship to The Universe At Large' -- everything gets modified within the contexts of 'spouse-ism' and 'dad-ism.'

As I walked out the door in September of 1967, on my way to the mysteries of our first European tour, I told Gail, "If it's a girl, call it Moon, and if it's a boy, call it Motorhead." About two weeks later, I got the call that Moon had been born.

Her first word was "werp." The reason it was "werp" instead of "Mama" or "Dada" was that I used to edit tape (the Lumpy Gravy talking sections) in the living room. When you're editing dialogue and moving the reels back and forth, the backwards voices sometimes sound like they're saying "werp."

Gail and I never sat down and said, "Now we're going to have another baby." When the first one arrived I thought, because of where we were living and how much money I was making, that it would be really inconvenient, but it turned out to be okay -- especially when we moved back to California the following year.

Moon is proud of the fact that she was born in New York, but I don't think she would have been too happy if she had been forced to grow up in The City Of Cubicles.

When Dweezil was born, Gail decided to have 'natural childbirth.' At that time, the only hospital in Los Angeles that would allow this process to occur with a Dad in the delivery room was Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital.

When it was time for the Big Delivery, we experienced a slight delay -- we had to fill out a mass of papers before they'd let us in, riddled with irrelevant questions like: "What religion are you?"

Gail looked at me and said, "What do we put?" I said, "Musician."

That was the first thing that upset the admitting nurse. The second thing to spoil her afternoon was when she asked: "What are you going to name the child?" Gail said, "Dweezil."

Gail's got a funny-looking little toe which had been the source of family amusement so often that it had acquired a 'technical name': it wasn't really a toe -- it was a "Dweezil." I thought then, and continue to think today, that Dweezil is a nice name. Fuck the nurse if she didn't like it.

The nurse pleaded and pleaded with us not to name the child Dweezil. Labor pains and all, she was going to make Gail stand there unless we gave her another name to put on the form. I couldn't see letting Gail suffer just to argue the point, so I rattled off an assortment of first names of guys we knew: IAN (Underwood) DONALD (Van Vliet) CALVIN (Schenkel) EUCLID (James "Motorhead" Sherwood). As a result, Dweezil's original birth certificate name was Ian Donald Calvin Euclid Zappa. The nurse thought that was okay.

In spite of this harrowing experience, we always called him Dweezil. He was five years old when he discovered the real names on his birth certificate.

(I was in my mid-twenties when I found out! Up until the time I had to get a passport for the first European tour, I thought my name was Francis -- a name I had always hated. In order to get the passport, I had to present my birth certificate -- a mysterious document I had never seen before. My mother mailed it to me from California, and on it, much to my delight, was a name OTHER THAN FRANCIS -- well, it wasn't that good -- "Frank" isn't much of a bargain -- but I had thought for years, even printing it on album covers, that I was Francis Vincent Zappa Junior. How could I be such a fool?)

Dweezil was very upset, and demanded that steps be taken to rectify this tragedy. We hired an attorney and had his name legally changed to Dweezil.

That may seem like an unusual kind of demand for a five-year-old, but Dweezil was a very unusual child. When he was very young, his main interest was cars. I've seen kids who like to play with cars, but not the way Dweezil was into cars. One of his first whole sentences was: "What happened to the green car?"

When we took him home from the hospital, we had a green Buick. We hadn't had it for a couple of years, and he wanted to know what had happened to it.

When Dweezil crawled, he didn't crawl on his hands and knees; he crawled on his back. He would arch his back, and he would move by kicking his feet, balancing himself on the back of his head. He had actually worn hair off the back of his head by crawling across the floor in this manner. One day, he just got up and started running -- no walking, right away to running.

He hated long pants, and refused to wear them to school. He went to school in shorts no matter what the weather was. Then he got interested in Japanese calligraphy. He had a little friend at school who was Japanese, and they used to play together all the time. This friend was apparently quite an influence on him. Dweezil got mad at Gail once and wrote her a scathing note -- in what appeared to be kanji characters -- just handed it to her, without comment.

Moon at one time wanted to learn how to play the harp. She took lessons for a year and then gave up. Every once in a while, they all think they want to play drums.

Diva, our youngest, got her name because she was the loudest baby in the hospital. Ahmet was delivered by C-section, and when I first saw him he wasn't making too much noise. I said to the nurse who was wheeling his incubator out of the delivery room, "What's going on here? He's not breathing!" She said, "Oh, it's probably just some mucus." It wasn't. He had hyaline membrane disease; he was premature and one of his lungs was collapsed.

He would have died if I hadn't been there and noticed that there was a problem. The nurse was wheeling that wagon down the hall like she was pushing a piece of ham.

So Ahmet spent the first part of his life in intensive care. This was while I was making the Apostrophe' album. I would work all night in the studio and end my shift with a visit to the hospital. I could talk to him and cheer him up, stick my hand in the incubator and hold his finger and say, "Come on and get it."

He still has scars on his chest from all the needles and hoses they had to stick into his lung to take the fluid out and puff it up -- but you'd never know how sick he was to look at him now. He's probably going to be eleven feet tall by the time he grows up.

People make a lot of fuss about my kids having such supposedly 'strange names,' but the fact is that no matter what first names I might have given them, it's the last name that is going to get them in trouble.

You Name It

It has traditionally been my job to name things around the house. When somebody brings a cat or a dog home, everyone waits until I name it, and then that's what we call it -- with very few exceptions. ["Go find the grouchy guy and get him to name this damn thing."]

We had a sheep dog named Fruney. He eventually turned into Frunobulax, the monster in the song "Cheepnis."

The oldest and most durable citizen in our pet collection was Gorgo (short for Gorgonzola, one of the Grunt People in the original Captain Beefheart screenplay), a vile-tempered Siamese, recently deceased.

We used to have a great bird -- a cockatiel, which I named Bird Reynolds. He would sit on my shoulder and talk to me. Bird also liked to sit on the edge of our Ping-Pong table when it was folded up in the living room.

I don't know how or why Moon ever decided to do this, but one day we found her staring at Mr. Reynolds, with her arms out, flapping them, saying: "Tidal wave! Tidal wave!" For some reason, this caused Mr. Reynolds to dance sideways along the top edge of the folded table. It was infallible. All she had to do was stand in front of him, hold her arms out and say, "Tidal wave," and we had action.

A raccoon, brought home for a visit, injured Mr. Reynolds, and, while he was recovering and incapable of defending himself, he met an untimely end when one of the cats stuck his paw into the cage and swatted him in the middle of the night.

The business of naming things had its heyday in the times of the ancient Egyptians. It was believed then that, in order to successfully negotiate the voyage to the afterlife, the deceased tourist was required to know the names of everything he might encounter along the way, as he would be required to ask permission to pass from each and every one of these entities or inanimate objects. This included things like door sills, doorknobs, paving stones, etc., etc. In other words, folks, some schmuck with a golden hat on had to dream up all the names, then keep them a secret, so that later, another schmuck who was dead would have to memorize them, just so he could qualify for the Egyptian equivalent of Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

How Our Cottage Industry Works

The grim side of having your own record business is that you have to finance yourself. The average guy who wants to go into the music business is probably still better off getting a record contract and letting someone else pay for his production.

The 'business part' takes time away from the 'glamorous part' of making music, and I don't know many musicians who have the temperament to deal with that. I'm lucky; I don't have to do the mundane stuff because Gail seems to find it fascinating.

I get my share of drudgery though -- like typing out liner notes, writing the ads, supervising the packaging and so on, then Gail gets to do all the follow-ups; calling the vendors for production services and meeting with the bankers and our accountant, the wildly amusing Gary Iskowitz. She grumbles about it sometimes, but I think that deep down she likes it.

This division of labor works best when we see each other the least. Don't get the wrong idea from that -- Gail is also my best friend. If you can't be friendly with your spouse, it's not going to be much fun to live together. Friendship (let's get maudlin now) is a very important dimension. I think that a marriage without a friendship has to be pretty dreadful.

Gail has said in interviews before that one of the things that makes our relationship work is the fact that we hardly ever get to talk to each other.

We talk about business when we have to, but the rest of the time we don't talk at all. The other factor that has kept things interesting is that when I'm touring -- which has been almost every year since we got married except 1984 to 1987 -- I am gone from the house six months out of the year.

Even when I'm not touring, our work keeps us on different schedules. The Cottage Industry -- getting out records, tapes, CDs and videos, the mail order business and everything that entails -- is sufficiently complicated that, in order to handle all the chores, I have to work the night shift and she has to work the day shift. We see each other on the edges when the shifts change.

If I worked the same hours she does, nothing could get done. Gail has to be awake during the day because the kids have to go to school and she has to handle the telephone. My schedule sort of twirls around the clock. I can't stay on nights all the time because every night I work an extra hour or so, editing, or recording, or on the Synclavier, or, presently, on this fucking book -- pushing it a little later each night -- but then, once I go to sleep, I want to grab eight or ten hours, and so my "day" keeps changing around. Every three or four weeks I'm back on daylight -- and I dread it, because I can't get anything done. The phone rings all the time. All those questions Gail was dealing with when I was sleeping on the day shift, now I have to answer -- live, in person. I can't edit -- I can't write -- I can't do anything because of the constant interruptions.

Daylight is an ugly time of day. So many people are awake, and if I go outside, I know what they're all thinking. They are mainly doing bad things. White-collar criminals fucking up the world. Phooey on them.

Nighttime is better. It's not just that it's quieter, but I can feel the absence of daytime bullshit. People have stopped scurrying. (I don't mind them scurrying when I'm asleep during the day -- I'll find out what they were up to when I wake up and watch the six o'clock news.)

How to Raise Unbelievable Children

I don't have 'friends.' Anybody who is 'the boss' in a business does not get to have 'friends' -- he gets to have employees and/or acquaintances -- and no matter what he does, they will always dislike him because he has the nerve to sign their paychecks. (Let's get a famous doctor to figure that one out some time.)

I don't have any time for 'social activities.' I do, however, have a wonderful wife and four totally unbelievable children, and that, folks, is way better.

As far as rearing children goes, the basic idea I try to keep in mind is that a child is a person. Just because they happen to be a little shorter than you doesn't mean they are dumber than you. A lot of people make that mistake, and forget how much value there is in raw intuition -- and there's plenty of that in every child.

They may not have verbal skills or manual skills yet, but that is no reason to treat them like they're inferior little lumps whose destiny it is to grow up to be inferior Big Lumps like you.

We do all the regular stuff, like trying to keep them away from danger and out of trouble, but, after that, we have the responsibility of providing them with the basic data they're never going to get in school.

To the extent that it is practical, we share with them our personal philosophies, and attempt to impart to them what we like and what we don't like -- so that we at least have some basis for understanding each other -- but, in the final analysis, we realize that they are 'organisms unto themselves.' Whatever they're going to do in life, they're going to do regardless of home instruction.

My Bad Attitude

The worst aspect of 'typical familyism' (as media-merchandised) is that it glorifies involuntary homogenization,

Thanksgiving rolls around, and the kids want to have a Thanksgiving dinner -- they lay out the dining room table with all kinds of food, just like in the movies. Folks, they have to drag me, kicking and screaming, out of the studio to go upstairs and join them.

I will sit at the table, and eat -- because I like the food -- but I hate sitting around acting 'traditional' to amuse the 'little folks who happen to be genetically derived from larger-folks-who-buy-them-sportswear,' enduring a 'family meal,' during which I might be required to participate in some mind-numbing 'family discussion' with mashed potatoes dribbling out the side of my mouth. I eat, and get the fuck out of there as fast as I can. It's the same with Christmas dinner or any other 'traditional family gathering.' I can't stand it. I don't want to be rude, and I don't want to spoil their fun -- but I think they realize by now that I have what they would describe as a 'bad attitude' about those kinds of things.

The same is true if I have to go out to eat dinner. A three-hour dinner to me is a miniature eternity, no matter how good the food is. One of the reasons is that while I'm waiting for the food to come, I have to sit there and talk to people. I really don't like to talk. It's like exercise for me.

More Food Stuff

Gail cooks maybe once or twice a month -- the rest of the time she's on the phone, handling the business. I would like to have 'regular meals,' but very seldom do we have anything interesting to eat around the house.

Most of the time, the house is like a teenage hotel, featuring our four kids plus all their friends. It's like a dude ranch or something. Usually they order pizzas, or they all go out to dinner. If any groceries are brought in, and tons are, I can never get to the stuff fast enough before it is inhaled.

I work in the middle of the night so, when I get hungry, I wind up digging in drawers to find something a teenager would refuse to eat. If I know we bought hot dogs that day, maybe I'll find a couple of buns left. The hot dogs are all gone. There aren't even any in the freezer. So I eat peanut butter. Most of the time the bread is gone -- so I just shovel some out of the jar with a spoon.

The pantry is usually full -- but it's full of things you have to cook. The icebox is full too -- with steaks and chickens. You have to cook these things. I don't know how to cook these things! If I did, who the fuck's got time to stand around and deal with that? Please God! Don't make me eat a salad!

I like fried spaghetti. I like Fried Anything. Whatever it is, FRY IT -- except if it's a hot dog. Then you stick a fork in it and burn it in the fire on top of the stove (yes, folks, the legendary Super-Delicious Burnt Weeny Sandwich). By the way, the best time to eat fried spaghetti is for breakfast.

The kids look at me eating this stuff and go "Yuck!"

I say, "This is DAD food. One day you're going to have to learn how to eat this shit, because you're going to have a house full of kids too, and the food is going to be gone, and you're going to open the icebox and say, 'Uh-oh, what is that stuff?' "

We've tried to get some sort of system so I don't 'suffer' in the middle of the night. None of them have worked. It's impossible. There's another little icebox downstairs, next to the studio. Periodically it gets stuffed with things-to-eat-that-you-don't-have-to-cook, but no matter what goes in there, it vanishes within a day or so -- and there are no ghosts in that part of the house.

The Giraffe Cafe

From time to time Diva operates something called "The Giraffe Cafe." First, she made a sign that says, "The Giraffe Cafe -- OPEN." Then -- on those SPECIAL DAYS -- she hangs it on the door upstairs. This means she has made Jell-O. "The Giraffe Cafe" has provided many nights of elegant dining when there was nothing around to fry.

It was raining the other day. Diva walked in and said, "Oh! Can I go out and play in the rain?" I said, "Of course." She got all dressed up for it -- like it was a special event -- and spent an hour singing at the top of her lungs in the backyard. I can imagine some parents saying, "Now don't go out there, you'll catch a cold." I think that would have broken her heart.

Kids have a natural sense of mysticism, and a feeling of being connected to nature. The natural world is very exciting when it's all brand-new. For example, kids have an appreciation for snow which is generally not shared by the guy who has to shovel a driveway. The older you get the more you take nature for granted (unless you're Euell Gibbons and you want to eat everything that's lying on the ground until you die from it).

Diva is a dear little girl. She just turned nine. She likes to do a lot of 'normal little-girl things,' but (Praise Gawwwwd!) she has her bizarre side too. She had a Barbie doll once, but Ahmet burned most of the hair off, so Diva finished the job by squeezing Duco cement on her face, deforming the nose and forehead. (I'm sure there's an organization somewhere that would protest that.) Diva called her "Snot Woman" (not bad, sweetheart).

Dada has remained alive and well in my household since. . . forever. Even though the kids don't have the faintest idea of what it is, they're it. The whole house, and everything connected with what goes on around here, reeks of it.

INTERCONTINENTAL ABSURDITIES (founded 1968) is a company dedicated to Dada in Action. In the early days, I didn't even know what to call the stuff my life was made of. You can imagine my delight when I discovered that someone in a distant land had the same idea -- AND a nice, short name for it.

Ahmet Meets the IRS

There are phases that kids go through to develop the social skills necessary to work and interrelate with other people. Somewhere along the line, you're either going to learn to be a 'good employee' or a 'good boss'; there's not much in between.

One of the things that will decide if you will be an employee or a boss is whether you are allowed to develop the creative streak that will enable you to start your own business, or enable you to progress as an employee to the point where you're responsible for the activities of others.

At the ages my kids are now, they want to have fun, so why should I be bothering them with little details? Well, we sneak it in there. For example, Ahmet got a small part in a TV sitcom recently. We had a discussion about it, and now he realizes that he will have to pay income tax. His response to this news: "That sucks." Knowing that it sucks is a good place to start when planning your career.

It is also useful to show kids 'what the guidelines are,' and tell them that you expect them to adhere to those guidelines. If they don't adhere to the guidelines, then you think of different ways to reimpress the guidelines on them.

It's different in every case. When you have a confrontation with a child, it might be that the child is momentarily obsessed with some new concept, and isn't taking into account the feelings of others, or any number of real things that might be going on in the real world. It's only about, "Can I go over to Janey's house? And if I can't, then why not?"

"No" is not a good enough answer. So, if you're trying to deal with situations like that, screaming and hollering is the least effective method. One of the principles that works most of the time around here goes like this: If there is a difference of opinion between me and Ahmet, for example, about something he wants to do, if he can give me a good LOGICAL reason why HE'S RIGHT and I'M WRONG, I'll let him do it.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Sometimes, as a punishment, Gail and I tell the kids that they can't watch TV for a week -- we found that preferable to beating them over the nose with a tire iron.

I used to tell Dweezil that if he was bad, I was going to make him watch The Man With The Brown Suit On. The rest of us may find televangelists entertaining, but eleven-year-olds generally don't.

Now, of course, Dweezil watches Robert Tilton for laughs, on his own 'media center' in his bedroom. He's got a VCR, a TV, a computer, a CD player and all the rest of it -- bought with money he earned.

He has a unique little place in the house with a stairway going up the outside that leads right to his room, so he can come and go as he pleases, but most of the time he likes to stay home. He's not as bad as I am, because he'll actually leave once in a while and go to a movie or a concert.

Both Moon and Dweezil took the California high school equivalency test at fifteen, which is the earliest age the law allows, so they both have high school diplomas. We're going to do the same for Ahmet and Diva. I want my kids out of the California school system as soon as possible.

As far as their 'cultural education' is concerned -- films and books and so on -- I make suggestions, but I'm not the kind of Dad to sit there and badger them until they 'experience the splendor' of something that only I might find interesting.

We have made sure that they acquired all the basic skills -- like being able to read and write, knowing how to do arithmetic, and having some basic knowledge of science -- and also some manners. After that, they're encouraged to make it up as they go along.

Moon likes to read, so she keeps up with things; and Diva loves to read. They take after Gail, who is The Big Reader in this family. Dweezil seldom reads, and Ahmet can't stand it (Ah! My sons!).

I don't think any of them has the desire to go to college, nor would I urge them to go -- but, if they ever decided to, I wouldn't stop them... so long as they wanted to pay for it.

Children of the Darned

Okay, a few last points about the current state of childrearing in America. A lot of people who cry out for government intervention or, as Tipper Gore calls them, 'consumer tools' to help raise and control their children are people who are just too lazy to do it themselves. These are the "Me" Generation assholes who think that their lives are the most important thing going. Once they have reproduced themselves, they adopt the attitude that the little replicant crawling around on the floor mustn't be a 'burden' to them, taking up too much of their 'hard-earned leisure time.'

They want to make sure that while they're out running around, getting really really healthy, and keeping their tans and wearing those rags around their heads, somebody will take care of their precious 'child-creature' for them. WAIT A MINUTE! I'VE GOT IT! How about The Government? Or some nice Christian Group? Or somebody who says he's "qualified"?

Grandma never would have put up with this shit.

I am disturbed by the way people like that treat their children -- especially the single-child yuppo-family that uses the child as a status object: "A perfect child? Of course! We have one here -- he's under the coffee table. Ralph, stand up! Play the violin!"

It's as if they are saying, "Yeah, just look at HIM. We fucked! This came out. Now he can do so much homework! Yeah, we have a good boy. How about yours? Those people over there -- they have an ugly one with a Jughead hat."

"Oh, we got ours a coonskin one -- he was so-o-o grateful."

The more boring the child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents -- because they have a tame child-creature in their house.

That's why they'll bring their neighbors in, open the door to the kid's room and show him off: "Here, look at this! Ever seen one of these up close?" -- and if the creature in the room isn't frothing at the mouth and listening to backwards masking with heavy metal clothes on, then the parents are considered a 'success'; to be admired in the community.

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. Children are naïve -- they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.

CHAPTER 15
Porn Wars

The background history of the Parents' Music Resource Center, or PMRC, would take up more space than it's worth to spell out in detail. There are several 'historical accounts' from which to choose. Let's arbitrarily choose this one:

One day in 1985, Tipper Gore, wife of the Democratic Senator from Tennessee, bought her eight-year-old daughter a copy of the soundtrack alburn to Prince's Purple Rain -- an R-rated film which had already generated considerable controversy for its sexual content. For some reason, however, she was shocked when their daughter pointed out a reference to masturbation in a song called "Darling Nikki." Tipper rounded up a bunch of her Washington housewife friends, most of whom happened to be married to influential members of the U.S. Senate, and founded the PMRC.

On or about May 31, 1985, the PMRC sent a letter to Stanley Gortikov, then president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), accusing the record industry of exposing the youth of America to "sex, violence, and the glorification of drugs and alcohol." Maybe they hadn't been watching television lately. The letter went on to demand a rating system for rock records similar to the MPAA rating system for films. The signatories included Gore, Susan Baker (wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker), Pam Howar and Sally Nevius (wives of prominent Washington businessmen) and the wives of nine other U.S. Senators.

Within moments, Edward O. Fritts, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, wrote letters to forty-five hundred commercial radio stations, implying that if they broadcast songs with explicit lyrics they would risk losing their licenses.

As this frenzy for self-mutilation developed, people within the record and broadcast industry debated amongst themselves as to what the most 'prudent course of action' might be -- in other words, they were all in such a hurry to bend over for these harpies that the only details left for them to decide were:

So, in a music trade publication called Cashbox, I wrote them an open letter.

Did anyone give a shit about this? No. So, I decided to write an open letter to The President, which read, in part. . .

The President did not answer my letter. Instead, he gave a speech, a short time later, in Crystal City, Virginia, wherein he claimed that everybody in the record industry was a pornographer. Finally on September 19, 1985, the Senate Commerce, Technology and Transportation Committee held a day of highly publicized hearings to discuss the PMRC's proposal (a kangaroo court -- five of the Committee's members had wives in the PMRC).

I testified before the Senate committee, along with John Denver and Dee Snider. My only regret about that episode is that, under the rules of the hearing, I was not afforded an opportunity to respond when I was denounced by a semiapoplectic Slade Gorton (former Republican Senator from Washington State) for my "Constitutional ignorance." I would have liked to remind him that although I flunked just about everything else in high school, I did get an 'A' in Civics.

If he wanted to tell me I was just an ignorant musician, why didn't he use the 'Ted Koppel method' and say, "Now, Mr. Zappa, you're an intelligent man. . ." Anybody who gets that recitation from Ted twice in one episode of Nightline has surely been told how stupid he is.

One of the best lines of the afternoon came from Senator James Exon (D) of Nebraska -- not exactly a liberal guy -- who asked, "I wonder, Mr. Chairman, if we're not talking about federal regulation, and we're not talking about federal legislation, what is the reason for these hearings?" This received great applause, but was not carried by the network news.

Exon also pointed out that these hearings were better attended, by audience and media (thirty-five TV feeds, fifty still photographers) than any other legislative procedure he had been involved in, including hearings on the budget and Star Wars.

A few months later the RIAA caved in and, on November 1, 1985, agreed to place warning stickers on potentially offending albums, reading, "Explicit Lyrics -- Parental Advisory."

The timing was interesting -- the agreement was announced just a few days after the Senate version of The Blank Tape Tax received a committee hearing -- October 30, 1985 -- and who was listed as one of the bill's cosponsors? Senator Albert Gore, of course.

When Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, asked Tipper Gore how many of the records released every year she would put into the objectionable category, Tipper said five percent. If five percent of the records are objectionable to the PMRC, and the process of stickering is further mitigated by the looseness of the agreement, it is not surprising that in the years since the RIAA's agreement with the PMRC was made, only a few albums have had stickers on them -- placed on those albums either because the group thought it would be 'a sales tool' or because they had no clout and the record company stuck them with it.

Shortly after the second anniversary of that agreement, the PMRC asked for a review of the agreement because there had been noncompliance. The fact is, not many people do albums with lyrics that they would object to, and most of those who do are signed to record companies which are not members of the RIAA, and so are not covered by the ladies' pathetic little non-agreement.

The PMRC's list of people signed to member labels of the RIAA who were 'offensive' in 1985 was pretty ridiculous. The Captain and Tennille were on it for "Do That to Me One More Time." The Jacksons were on for "Torture." Bruce Springsteen was on for "I'm on Fire," and, of course, Prince, for the fabulous "Darling Nikki." Where was he throughout all this? He went apeshit and sued some spaghetti company for calling their product 'Prince,' but remained curiously silent during the record-ratings stuff.

None of the artists who made it onto the list which became known as The PMRC's Filthy Fifteen had anything in their lyrics even close to the stuff in my catalog, and yet, for some reason, I was never accused of being a 'violator.'

You Want a Sticker? I'll Give You a Sticker!

Because of a dispute with MCA (Musicians' Cemetery of America) Records, which had contracted to distribute Barking Pumpkin Records in 1983, I invented MY OWN STICKER.

MCA planned to release Thing-Fish. The deal was done -- they were up to the test-pressing stage. A woman in the 'quality control department' of their pressing plant listened to my album and became quite upset. Because she was offended, MCA backed out of the deal. So in 1984 I prepared this little item:

Now What?

The agreement between the PMRC and the RIAA is, for all intents and purposes, unenforceable. Now the PMRC has moved into the world of video, complaining about television, home video and MTV. Paradoxically, Al Gore introduced legislation that would make it easier for people in Tennessee to get cable service, bringing MTV and slasher movies into entertainment-starved backwoods homes.

There were a lot of things that didn't add up during the PMRC episode. It seemed to me, and I stated it in interviews at the time, that the whole business looked like the ground floor of a presidential campaign for The Junior Senator From Tennessee.

Following up on this -- a CNN show called Crossfire covered the PMRC topic twice with me as a guest, the first time in 1985 (when I told that guy from The Washington Times to kiss my ass), and then again in 1987, when George Michael's sex song was 'controversial.' Believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, the premise of that second debate on Crossfire was (don't laugh) "Does Rock Music Cause AIDS?", with an opening bumper that included clips from Mr. Michael's video.

The Blacklist

The first time I got involved with the PMRC issue was when I debated Kandy Stroud in Washington, D.C., on CBS Nightwatch in August 1985. It was supposed to be a one-hour taped debate in front of a live audience (which happened to include Stroud's young children, listening raptly as Mom recited the familiar litany of "oral sex at gunpoint," etc., etc.).

During the audience question-and-answer session, a Washington, D.C., disc jockey named Serf stated that the whole thing reminded him of the radio blacklist days -- when certain artists and records were forbidden to be played on the air. That grabbed my attention. Several things were edited out of the show by the time it finally went on the air, and that was one of them.

The following week I was in New York doing a live radio interview on WNEW-FM. I was talking with the disc jockey about the blacklist days. I asked him, "Have you ever seen one?" "Yeah," he said. "I've seen it." "You've seen The Blacklist?" I said. "Would you go to court and say that you have?" Then the guy started to get really worried.

After the Commerce Committee hearing on September 19, I began doing a lot of interviews on the PMRC topic. Sometime in November, right after the RIAA made their stupid agreement with the PMRC, I was back in New York, and one of the people who came there to interview me had been hired to write an article for Playboy magazine. She had heard the radio broadcast on WNEW with the reference to a blacklist and, through the Freedom of Information Act, had managed to actually get her hands on one.

She showed it to me and explained that the reason people haven't seen the blacklists before is that when you try to find one through the Freedom of Information Act, they don't help you. You have to ask exactly the right agency for exactly the right documents, or you don't get them. Who would ever think of asking the Department of Defense for a blacklist of pop songs? She did, and that's where it came from. It was dated April 1971 or 1972, and it had "Puff the Magic Dragon" on it alone with maybe nineteen other songs.

The blacklist wasn't just the one piece of paper. It was a stack a couple of inches thick, and included all the corresponding FCC documents (it appeared that they were helping to implement the restraints -- in violation of their charter) -- and she was going to write an article about it for Playboy. It never appeared. I don't know where she is. I don't know what happened to the blacklist. Three other journalists were sitting in the room when she came in -- a guy from Cashbox and two women from High Times -- and the list was shown to them. She thought she had a scoop, and she wasn't going to show the whole batch of documents to everybody, but a few of the people there saw it, as I did, and said, "I don't believe this."

True Confessions

On February 14, 1986, the Maryland State Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on a bill proposed by delegate Judith Toth to modify the existing state pornography statute so as to include records, tapes and CDs. The bill had already been passed by the Maryland House of Delegates, and a Senate vote in favor would have placed it into law in Maryland, creating a dangerous national precedent.

Maryland has some funny ideas as to what constitutes pornography. Considering that it was my home state, I thought the least I could do was to help keep its citizens from making total fools of themselves, so I went there to offer my testimony.

The night before the hearing, the lobbyist hired by the RIAA, Mr. Bruce Bereano, threw a cocktail reception in Annapolis so I could meet a few of the state delegates. It was an evening of handshaking, autograph signing and posing for pictures. As I was introduced to each legislator, I asked which way he or she had voted. The bill, after all, had already passed the House by ninety-six to thirty or thereabouts. The delegates were honest and told me frankly how they had voted, and if they said they had voted for the bill, I gave them a pretty good razz. I said, "This is your last chance to recant. All you have to do is fill out this piece of paper and say you've changed your position." I got five of them to write confessions at that reception, and the next day at the hearing, I said, "Here are the confessions of the delegates who realize that this bill is really bad and wish they had never signed it." The next day, at the hearing, I read their names and confessions into the record.

On Your Feet, or on Your Knees

I was able to acquire video tape of the State Senate proceedings in 1987, just as I was editing together the first of the Honker Home Video projects. I decided to combine parts of my testimony with the actual statements made by Ms. Toth and Delegate Owens in a way that would dramatize the issue, and included this in a one-hour show called Video from Hell. This is a transcription of the dialog-as-edited from that show. . .

The show ends with me talking over the credits, in an interview with a Maryland TV station, giving the final chapter to this silly story. . .

More Initials to Watch Out For

Governmental agencies and groups like the PMRC find promotion easier when their bullshit is concealed behind an acronym. The 'aura' these organizations hope to generate from the use of the acronym could be scientifically described as 'The Acro-Nymbus' -- and any person believing that such an 'aura' certifies competence could be scientifically described as an 'Acro-nymbecile.'

William Steading is the founder of the NMRC, the National Music Review Council. He runs two radio stations, one in Dallas and one in Salt Lake City, owned by the Mormon church. I received a flyer in the mail from this group, talking about their idea for cleaning up lyrics. The PMRC wanted to put The Scarlet Letter on offensive LPs; the NMRC wanted to put an "Attaboy" sticker on albums, indicating that it contains nothing objectionable.

At Steading's stations, when a new record came in, someone would listen to it, decide what he didn't like, transfer the record to tape, edit the tape and play the 'clean' tape on the air instead of the record.

That was rather deceptive. Some unsuspecting listener hearing the Steading Version might think it was a harmless little ditty, go out and buy the record, only to find out later it was about some leather weasel getting cornholed.

The NMRC plan gets it both ways: a station can play supposedly 'hot music' without worrying about losing its broadcast license to the FCC.

When groups like this go after 'SHOW BUSINESS ITSELF' -- where so many people have 'skeletons in their closets' -- they often go unchallenged. Albert Gore set up a committee to investigate payola in the record industry, and held his own little hearings, shortly after his wife's day in the spotlight, just to keep the pressure on -- and then had the nerve to come to Hollywood, meeting with the same folks whose livelihood he and his wife were threatening, and ask for presidential campaign contributions.

As I said before, nobody looks good with brown lipstick on, but Al looked RIDICULOUS.

Who's Paying the Bills?

During a debate with Jennifer Norwood from the PMRC, Jello Biafra (of the Dead Kennedys) asked, "Who's paying the bills?" Norwood blurted out that the PMRC was funded by Occidental and Merrill Lynch.

Our pension plan is with Merrill Lynch, so Gail called and talked with the head man. If they were in fact supporting the PMRC, it was going to cost them our account. He insisted it wasn't company policy. Apparently, a call had gone out for people to 'donate' for a PMRC picnic. Somebody at Merrill Lynch in Washington, D.C., had noticed that Mrs. Packwood was a signatory to the PMRC letter, and, at the time, Senator Packwood was the chairman of the Finance Committee. So here's a guy at Merrill Lynch thinking that if he makes a contribution to the PMRC, he'll get to go to the picnic, meet Mrs. Packwood and thereby get his elbow into Mr. Packwood.

Back in Control

Back in Control is an "entity" which, for a price, will take a child and remodel its behavior to suit the needs and desires of a 'concerned parent.' In her book, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, Tipper Gore recommends this group.

If you were to follow Tipper's advice and use the company's services, here's what you might expect -- for example, if you think that your child is showing signs of becoming a punker or a heavy metaler, this "entity," and others scattered around the United States, will depunk or demetalize your child (leaving you free to go sportfishing). Parents who find themselves baffled by the arcane behavior of "today's young people" can now just sort of ship the little buggers off to psycho-camp.

If you're interested in disposing of your kids in this manner, Back in Control offers a pamphlet, listing 'clues' as to what the danger signs are. One of them is (don't laugh) if the child is wearing tennis shoes. Yes, a sure sign of something evil developing at ground level.

The pamphlet includes a section on 'symbols' which indicate 'the possibility' of satanic or demonic behavior. One of the symbols was the Star of David. The Back in Control people said they saw the Star of David on an Ozzy Osbourne album. What a jokester that Ozzy is! (I understand they have been forced to modify that section of the pamphlet.)

For some reason, they don't like me very much. I got hold of a letter written by the head guy, putting me in the same category as Joseph Goebbels and Senator Joseph McCarthy -- claiming that I was using THE BIG LIE technique against them. Pheuuuuuuuuuuuuw.

If the scare tactics of groups like the PMRC and Back in Control have not made an impact on musicians, they have certainly made one on the executives of the record companies who can tell artists what the labels will or will not accept as suitable material under the artist's contract.

If you make a record, you are not automatically assured that the song you wrote and recorded will reach the marketplace, because some coward in the record company may come up and say he can't allow it to escape for 'moral' reasons.

If the artist can't sing the song he wants to sing, release the record he wants to release, and earn the living he is entitled to earn from doing what he loves, he is cheated, and the audience is cheated -- because they don't get to hear the best work of the artist -- only that which he is allowed to release. Will the artists ever get back in control? Tune in again tomorrow, folks.

CHAPTER 16
Church & State

I know you've heard it all before, but, one more time, folks: The U.S. Constitution specifies that the church and state be kept separate.

Besides the Moral Majority, a lot of other entities in the TV religion industry claim to be conservative but are, in fact, the U.S. equivalent of the mongos blowing the shit out of the Middle East.

Anybody who claims that the Road to Righteousness is mapped out in some book (or pamphlet) he's waving around is an asshole (at least) or (more likely) a fanatic, in the clinical sense of the word.

Ever watch The Great Communicator addressing the National Association of Religious Broadcasters? Face it, folks: Ron is their Kept Boy. They've got him by the short ones -- he must play ball or they'll cut the PR budget -- for him and all the rest of the Helpful Republicans. Remember, a few years ago they were beating the bushes for Jimmy Carter -- and if they ever found another Democrat to do their chores for them, they could easily switch back.

So, in order that the goods and services continue to be delivered, The Men Behind The Gipper insist that he surround himself with 'Qualified Advisers' --

[Insert sound effect of a large toilet flushing.]

(Wasn't it sensational the way Ed-III kept everybody busy with his porno-mania, while Born-Again-Ollie cranked up that hilarious private-sectorized 'Secret Government'!)

A deranged mullah with a rifle in his hand exhorting rows of prospective martyrs to Bite The Big One is not amusing, even at a distance of five thousand miles. Jerry Falwell suggested on a Larry King show (August 1988) that his followers be ready to "die, if necessary" when participating in anti-abortion "civil disobedience." We'd be wise to keep our eyes on the self-proclaimed Holy Men in our own backyard -- including Jesse Jackson.

Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk

In the early days of the Reagan Administration, we started seeing judicial test cases involving school prayer, creationist theory, and so on. One of the results was that, at the height of this frenzy to give the illusion of 'being fair' (one of our major faults, I might add) a decision was made in the California schools to order new science textbooks.

They were ordered to be written in a way that balanced Creationist Mumbo-Jumbo with The Other Kind Of Mumbo-Jumbo. When the books finally arrived, there was so little 'science' in them, they were rejected (and probably resold to somebody else's school system).

I hereby place a curse upon the cretins who assert that:

C.A.S.H.

Once upon a time, I filed papers to start my own religion.

Here are some samples of the Tenets of the Faith, as listed in the actual documents filed in Montgomery, Alabama.

Some of those were my additions -- not part of Judge Hand's ruling, which was struck down a short while later. After hearing this splendid news, I un-filed the papers and 'dissolved the religion.'

I probably should have kept it going, since I came up with a few other nice 'doctrines' -- for example: THE DOCTRINE OF INVOLUNTARY INDUCTION, which provided that, as Founder of the Faith and Writer of the Rules, there was no reason why I couldn't lay my hands on a map and decree that all human beings residing in whatever territory I might be fingering at the time were Involuntarily Inducted into the Church of American Secular Humanism -- whether they liked it or not.

As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, this transcends mere Mumbo-Jumbo, sending us reeling into the realm of Mumbo-Pocus.

Think about the 'rules' of Christianity for a moment. Okay -- What was it that Adam ate that he wasn't supposed to eat? It wasn't just an apple -- it was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The subtle message? "Get smart and I'll fuck you over -- sayeth the Lord." God is the Smartest -- and he doesn't want any competition.

Is this not an absolutely anti-intellectual religion?

Section 501(c)(3)

In a 1987 C-SPAN broadcast, Father Robert Drinan stated that, in 1979, the Republican Party made a deal to modify their platform in order to gain the financial and logistical support of The Religious Right.

Shortly thereafter, Ronald Reagan ponced into the Oval Office with a pat on the fanny from the NARB superstars who organized the Jeezo-Minions to vote Republican with partisan TV sermons and direct-mail fund-raising campaigns -- and managed to keep their tax exemptions! How did they pull that one off?

The section of the IRS code that bestows this license to pillage and plunder specifies that the exempted person or organization may not lobby for (or against) any political candidate, or for (or against) any specific piece of legislation -- if you violate this, you lose your exemption and become liable for criminal prosecution. Here is the actual tax code language:

The IRS is charged with the enforcement of this law -- on the books since the thirties, virtually unchanged, in spite of many revisions in the rest of the tax code. Section 501 (c) (3) has never been a secret.

The boss of this purported 'enforcement' is the Secretary of the Treasury -- for most of Reagan's second term that was James (Born Again) Baker III.

Did he ever demand an audit of this multibillion-dollar con game? Were any of the regional IRS auditors Born Again, and reluctant to prosecute their church-mates at CBN, Oral Roberts University, or 'Water-Slide-For-Jesus-Incorporated'? Should they not have been replaced with more objective personnel? (Did such personnel exist anywhere in the Reagan IRS?) I believe we have a classic case of selective nonenforcement here.

Would it be too extreme to suggest that in Baker's case, in the regional auditor's cases and in the case of the Televangelical Republican Protectorate At Large, this might be an indictable offense?

The payback for the 1979 agreement was to be delivered in easy monthly installments, throughout the Reagan presidency -- legislative initiatives against abortion, in favor of school prayer, against homosexuals -- all to be upheld by a bouquet of handpicked 'trustworthy' Supreme Court justices -- in an atmosphere of total immunity from IRS interference.

Does anybody remember that Jim and Tammy Bakker were brought in as guests for Reagan's inauguration, and in 1983 Mr. Ron gave them a humanitarian award?

Didn't Falwell's 1988 fund-raising campaign to pardon Ollie North qualify him for a citation?

How does this work? We send him money and then Ollie gets off the hook? What? Are we supposed to help Falwell buy a pardon? If the money is used for "lobbying purposes," do we have a little 501 violation on our hands? And how about those Mavic Mike comic books he distributed at the Republican convention?

Who Loves Ya?

People have a desire to believe in 'good luck,' 'angels' of one sort or another, 'devils' of one sort or another -- 'mysterious forces' which somehow link back to a 'godhead,' or a 'controlling force,' or a 'masterplan,' developed by some 'All-Knowing Consciousness' that LOVES THEM, and wants to make everything okay for them.

Why do people want that? They're going to spend a lot of time trying to make things from The Real World fit that mold.

The minute something happens that doesn't follow the formula, they start worrying. It makes some of them psychotic -- like the guy with the sword, hacking up people on the Staten Island Ferry because Jesus told him to do it.

One reason people practice religion is that participation creates the illusion of belonging to an extended family. Whatever the Imaginary-Guy-In-The-Clouds won't do for them (sometimes he's busy -- inventing crack; causing droughts; stirring up mischief here and there), their fellow parishioners might.

If you want to stand on the steps of any building (or water-slide), all dressed up on a Sunday morning, for whatever purpose (a Christian business discussion, perhaps), great -- go for it.

If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine -- but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good -- and CARES about any of it -- to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

One of the reasons these evil industries have survived throughout the ages is that the big guys have always made sure that the customers confuse the 'results' of their 'prayers' with 'the existence' of The Guy On The Cloud.

What people call 'prayer' could just as easily be an unknown (or improperly described) psychic phenomenon which manifests a tangible physical result. Any group of people, focused on the same goal, might be able to aim an unknown amount of an unknown energy at some specific 'target.' Presto: "Prayer That Works."

Robert Tilton: Under a Curse

I've been watching a televangelist named Robert Tilton, out of Dallas, Texas. He's the one who closes his eyes and says, "Thank you, Jesus!" as if Jesus were whispering to him throughout the show. Seen him yet?

At the end of one broadcast, Tilton announced that those viewers who didn't send in money were "robbing God." Because of that, he said, they were "under a curse." Naturally, the only way the curse could be lifted was for them to send even more money than they might have previously considered.

By this 'act of faith,' he said, God would know that they were really sincere, and, at that point, financial benefits would flow into their lives. In other words: you prove you are worthy of being prosperous by sending an exceptional amount of money to the address at the bottom of the screen, and that 'act of faith' triggers the "This One's Okay" blinker on the Big Ol' Jesus Faith of Our Fathers Tally Board -- and, as soon as "HE" sees it, "HE" waves "HIS" blessed hand, and: Voila!

It's a variation on those real estate schemes they used to advertise on cable all night -- sort of like 'solving your cash flow problems through Divine Intervention.' (Was this the origin of 'Voodoo Economics?')

Ladies and gentlemen, here's Mr. Robert Tilton in action:

The mysterious group of syllables above is Mr. Bob 'speaking in tongues.' He reverts to this procedure at random intervals during the broadcast. A little later on we get. . .

Eventually he gets down to business and asks for money.

On a really good show he crawls -- he spreads the 'prayer requests' out on what he calls his 'ramp,' gets on his hands and knees, crawls over them, 'speaks in tongues,' and tells you that there are lines still open. You have to see him crawling through the 'prayer requests' -- rooting through them, like a pig sniffing for truffles.

One possible 'scientific reason' for this unusual behavior might be that more parts of his body touch the papers -- seated, he can only 'lay hands upon them,' but when you have knees, hands, the possibility of elbows -- maybe even shoes -- laid upon the correspondence, more parts of his 'anointed body' can be used to 'bless' them.

The other thing he does is squint his eyes and get silent for a while, and then he says, "Thank you, Jesus!" -- as if Jesus just gave him a 'message.' Have you ever seen an echidna? It's an animal from Australia that's a cross between an anteater and a porcupine, and looks like it has venereal warts all around its eyes. When he squints, he looks like an echidna.

Right now, people around the world think America is all Big Macs and Levis -- but, if they knew about this stuff, they'd run away screaming every time an American landed in their country (the guy might have made one of those weird vows to Tilton, and the unsuspecting Berliner might be forced to witness the deranged tourist's 'seed' multiplying all over the airport).

In Tilton's case, viewers who have 'released their faith' may be releasing something other than 'faith' (the way he defines it). They could be releasing a form of energy the Chinese have known about for seven or eight thousand years.

I don't think prayer in its truest sense is anything to scoff at, but the sad fact is that people are being manipulated, and their energy -- their life force -- is being usurped and used for the personal benefit of the Video Energy Vampire who leads them in 'prayer.' This is the essence of televangelism.

At its worst, it can lead to a suggestion that the whole congregation pray for the death of a Supreme Court justice. Reverend Hymers (the guy who led the protest against The Last Temptation of Christ) actually did this. He suggested that his followers wish the death of a certain justice because of his views on abortion.

We must be vigilant! Victims of this psychic manipulation could wind up haunting the mini-malls of America, like the zombies from Night of the Living Dead, stalking human souls in their sacred vehicles, marked on the rear bumper with the 'Sign Of The Fish.' Forget about a Russian invasion -- these guys live next door to you! Develop those reflexes, folks! Every time you see The Fish, think about using The Harpoon.

Just Like Magic

Let's say you're a person of not extensive education, but you own a TV set -- and let's say a preacher comes on and tells you to do something like that. Just because a man is uneducated does not mean he is without a life force. He might say to himself: "Sounds good to me -- let's go for it!" Everybody has this energy, and the 'disposable' portion is not dependent on an individual's status in life, or how far he got with his education. (It might even be inversely proportional.)

Somebody watching Tilton, or Oral Roberts, or Swaggart, or any of the others, is told to 'release his faith' -- and he says, "Okay, I'm releasing my faith -- Woo! Woo! Now what?" Poof! -- the 7-Eleven blows up. You never know.

Or he 'prays' for money, and this 'influences the decision' of someone who hires him the next day -- he gets a job and blames it on Jesus. He may think Tilton made it happen, and send ol' Bob a bag of money, paying off that seed faith gift of one-hundred dollars, one thousand dollars, or ten thousand dollars.

One man's 'prayer' is another man's 'unknown quantity.'

We might observe another man's 'successful prayer' and say, "He's doing black magic. He's making shit happen without touching it."

Or we might say, "He's very religious; he's a dear, sweet, loving person!"

We should say, "Who knows what the fuck he's doing -- but something happened. There's a Brown Thing in the kitchen! C'mere, Wanda! It's a goddamn poltergeist!"

Faith Healing

There is a parallel to this in kundalini yoga. I'm not sure it's related to exactly the same energy force, but, in situations where large amounts of sexual energy are released, strange things can happen.

Let's look at 'faith healing' in that context. I saw a woman on one of those shows who looked like she was decorating her cookies because the preacher 'laid hands on her.'

That wasn't Jesus making her squirt -- she hit L-109 because a nice man with an expensive suit on was 'touching her.' He had her by the neck: "Get into this position! Okay? Here comes The Lord! All warm inside now? You feel that warmth flowing through you now?"

I believe The Real Stuff has never been called by The Right Name.

Everyone should have the opportunity to figure out their own 'name' for it, but remember: If you name it wrong, you could wind up on your knees, snorkeling the philosophical sausage of some guy with a silk suit on.

The Dangerous Christians

One of the misconceptions about evangelicals in the U.S. is that they're all as extreme as Swaggart, Falwell and Robertson. They're not. Most of them just want to worship at their local church. They don't give a shit about those guys on television -- they think they're clowns and that what they do cheapens everyone's religious experience. On this, we definitely agree.

I once received an anonymous letter, poorly typed and stuffed into a manila envelope, from a man who described himself as a "highly placed person in the Fundamentalist Movement." He said he was typing it himself, on his lunch hour, while his secretary was gone, because if would be "dangerous" for him if anybody knew that he was communicating with me. (All those nice Christians he's working with? Dangerous?) He told me in this letter that certain things I was saying about fundamentalists were not correct, and then proceeded to give me the information I needed to make my points properly. He was on my side. Whoever he was, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank him.

Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned -- I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination.

Missionary Foreign Policy

Missionary evangelism is the height of cultural arrogance. To go to somebody else's country and attempt, through trickery, food or medical treatment, to capture "souls" for Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, L. Ron Hubbard, Sun Myung Moon -- whoever -- presumes that the guy with the travel budget and the hypodermic needle has a 'spiritual edge' over the 'native' he's going to 'save.'

The goal of U.S.-based evangelism has been, more often than not, to render docile a native labor force, so that it might be exploited later by a multinational company (perhaps a secret 'donor' to the crusade itself).

This is the worst kind of amateur foreign policy. The Logan Amendment prohibits such 'privatization,' and under it, the activities of U.S. missionary evangelists (as well as rogue NSC zealots) should be prosecuted.

Form 211

Internal Revenue Service Form 211 (APPLICATION FOR REWARD FOR ORIGINAL INFORMATION) is an easy-to-read, one-page document provided to enable public-spirited citizens to report somebody, anonymously, for tax evasion:

It's absolutely confidential -- no one can obtain a copy of your filled-out form, even through the Freedom of Information Act. In other words, they'll never know who did what to whom. The payoff? Usually, ten percent of anything the IRS collects.

Is it possible that somewhere in the depths of the PTL scandal, somebody filled out a 211?

Let's say that someone turned over documents that proved Jim and Tammy did something illegal -- and let's say that because of this information, the government collects. The guy who filled out the 211 would then be entitled to a nice chunk -- and not even The Washington Post would be able to prove who was behind it.

As Ollie North might say: "That's a pretty neat idea!"

A number of people were in a position to file this APPLICATION FOR REWARD FOR ORIGINAL INFORMATION on the PTL (including Falwell), so, if the IRS ever collects, it will be interesting to see who gets to open the Swiss bank account. (If it's Falwell, he can just funnel it through Ollie's, since they're so close now.)

Making a Mockery of the Founding Fathers

Let me close out this chapter with a note about one of Pat Robertson's more reprehensible activities: rewriting American history with a 'Christian' bias.

His 700 Club broadcasts have systematically disinformed viewers as to the real attitudes of the Founding Fathers on religion and its relationship to government. This seems to have been done in order to merchandise his peculiar vision of an America under the thumb of religious regulators. (One broadcast suggested the deployment of a "Spirit-Filled Police Force" that would just know -- with the help of the Lord, of course -- who the real criminals were.)

The revolutionaries who got this country started were not, as Robertson would have us believe, a bunch of wig-headed Jeezo-Grovelers, whimpering for guidance from The Unseen Hand. They had a First Amendment premonition about pimp-weasels like him. Speak up, boys. . .

"The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine. " George Washington
	"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Thomas Jefferson
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." Thomas Paine
	"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." Thomas Jefferson
"The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." Abraham Lincoln
(Quotes as listed in Salvation for Sale, by Gerard Thomas Straub.)

CHAPTER 17
Practical Conservatism

Politically, I consider myself to be a (don't laugh) Practical Conservative. I want a smaller, less intrusive government, and lower taxes. What? You too?

Last tax season, I had a discussion with (the wildly amusing) Gary Iskowitz and (the utterly fascinating) Bob Kahan. Gary used to be the chief of the IRS audit division in Maryland and Washington, D.C., and Bob is one of the few decent Los Angeles attorneys.

Gary was providing the laughs with a recitation of Reagan's description of our new tax laws: "Equity, simplicity and fairness." Come! Let us experience the curious warmth of Irish humor.

THE TIME IT TAKES TO PREPARE YOUR RETURN^*

Form	Record keeping	Learning about the law or the form	Preparing the form	Copying, assembling, and sending the form to IRS
1040	3 hrs., 7 min.	2 hrs., 28 min.	3 hrs., 7 min.	35 min.
Sch. A (1040)	2 hrs., 47 min.	25 min.	1 hr., 1 min.	20 min.
Sch. B(1040)	33 min.	8 min.	16 min.	20 min.
Sch. C (1040)	7 hrs., 4 min.	1 hr., 11 min.	2 hrs., 9 min.	25 min.
Sch. D(1040)	1 hr.,2min.	45 min.	54 min.	35 min.
Sch. E(1040)	3 hrs., 12 min.	1 hr., 2 min.	1 hr., 22 min.	35 min.
Sch. F(1040)	10 hrs., 53 min.	2 hrs., 2 min.	4 hrs., 10 min.	35 min.
Sch. R (1040)	20 min.	16 min.	22 min.	35 min.
Sch SE (1040)
Short	20 min.	11 min.	13 min.	14 min.
Long	26 min.	22 min.	37 min.	20 min.
*Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service

This eventually led to a discussion of a paper Gary wrote in college, about what would happen if the U.S. income tax were removed, and replaced with a national sales tax on all goods and services. Here're a few points he made (my paraphrasing):

I believe we are entitled to the benefits of large-scale services which only a Federal Government can provide -- national defense, Social Security, high-ticket research, help for the homeless, etc. -- only so long as we are willing and able to pay for them; however, if such services are requested and rendered, it should be the goal and the responsibility of the government to make the deal work at a bargain price, with the least amount of fuss -- not with the largest amount of paperwork, the highest payroll, and endless, insufferable layers of bureaucracy.

Efficient Federal Government should present social policy choices to the electorate in clear language:

If we know we want services on a national scale, and if we know we have to pay for them somehow, who'd object to this plan? '

Answer: many of the people who claim to be 'conservative' today -- especially the ones who seem so eager to turn America into a place where morality is dictated by religious dogma, certified by bizarre judicial decisions, legislated by semantic chicanery (Ever try to read a California ballot?), maintained by 'emergency police measures' and, occasionally, implemented by selective enforcement of the tax code. These not-so-conservative -- in fact extremely radical -- varmints prefer to keep the IRS just the way it is, and don't mind paying a little extra to have it available as a tool for political extortion.

By the way, have you ever wondered what the specific 'mission' of the Internal Revenue Service is? Here's the 1964 version, still in effect:

The Color of Money

Even if we leave the IRS alone, there is a world of delinquent payments waiting to be collected. In order to identify the taxable dollars from drug dealing and other unreported income, it has been suggested that we change the color of our currency. Nothing green would be legal tender anymore -- the government would trade everybody straight across.

At the point of the coupon exchange, Mr. Tax Man gets a good squint at your cash flow, and bills you accordingly. Personally, I'd rather dump the Federal income tax.

National Defense

If you own something, you will fight to protect it. If you don't -- who gives a shit?

The strongest defense any nation can have is a robust economy. What is that? Have we ever really seen one? The trickle-downers think it's 'robust' when the guys in the Fortune 500 clean up. A nation is really strong when everybody's got a piece of the action. Everybody.

We have been criminalized by our own tax code -- ninety-seven percent of the population has to chisel and scam to survive. This is not 'robust.' Are we too stupid to create a real national defense?

Thanks to our schools and political leadership, the U.S. has acquired an international reputation as the home of 250 million people dumb enough to buy 'The Wacky Wall-Walker.' Let's face it: Without us, everybody else who wants to sell stuff would be in Big Trouble.

As long as we remain marginally literate, materially insatiable and stupid enough to merger away our future to the point that we become competitively impotent, we are covered by a 'Strategic Life Insurance Policy' -- with the premiums willingly paid by our trading partners.

It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that if the Russians were to launch a U.S. invasion, Japan would gladly provide battalions of ninjas to take care of the 'problem' for us. If we get blown away, who's buying next year's Toyotas?

And the Russians? Considering how badly we're doing these days, can we afford to nuke any nation willing to spend one hundred dollars for a pair of Levi's? (And what about all that Pepsi Nixon arranged for us to sell over there?)

Star Wars

Does anybody reading this actually believe America is prepared for a 'conventional war' with anybody? If trouble breaks out, what are we gonna do? Whatever it is -- unless the guy in the White House is a lunatic -- it's not going to involve our Fabulous and Totally Expensive Nuclear Arsenal.

We are not going to have a big-ass Mondo Nuclear War. Period.

Nuclear explosions under the Nevada desert? What the fuck are we testing for? We already know the shit blows up. We're building machinery for a war that is as unlikely as it would be unwinnable, and, in the process, creating environmental side effects that defy contemplation.

Defense money should be put into manpower and equipment appropriate to the kinds of conflicts we are really going to encounter in the next quarter-century. The manpower should be dedicated, the equipment should be easy to operate and maintain, and the management of military assets should be streamlined.

Let's say we have to make some 'show of force.' The most common scenarios involve small guerilla or terrorist groups. Nuclear retaliation? It has been suggested by others that Aerosol Pork Grenades would be a better deterrent -- Islamic martyrs are denied entrance to heaven if they show up at the gate smelling like a pig. Denial of The Big Payoff removes a certain cachet from acts of voluntary self-destruction.

If we were to subtract that portion of the defense budget dedicated to 'weapons we will never use' (either because they could backfire on us, or guys with U.S. high school diplomas are sort of 'unqualified' to operate them -- or maybe they never worked at all, but because they provided jobs in some guy's home district for five years, Congress kept the contract going), and apply it to education, low-cost housing and non-military R&D, we'd all be better off.

But nooooooo! We spent blobs of money on a start-up contract for SDI and find out later that the initial research reports that said "It will work!" were falsified by omission.

For those of us still stupid enough to desire ownership of this preposterous system, I suggest that it could have been paid for fifteen minutes ago with about ten percent of what this 'fiscally conservative administration' has already spent on balloons, bunting, straw hats, confetti and the rest of the detritus required to make a narcoleptic pinhead look 'presidential' for the last eight years.

SDI won't save us from nuclear suitcase bombs, poison gas, bio-weapons or cocaine smugglers -- and it carries a trillion-dollar price tag. Attention shoppers! Let's take the trillion, divide it by our total population and pass out the results of the arithmetic -- in cash -- along with a bazooka and a box of grenades to every family in America. Given the choice between terminal taxation and this 'incentive program,' I think most Americans would opt to defend themselves (and their exciting new bank accounts) against anything as unlikely as a full-scale Russian invasion.

Central America

Washington, D.C.: a city infested with statues -- and Congressional Blow-Boys who wish they were statues.

Did these fine statesmen really think Nicaragua was a menace to our national security? Yeah? Then why the fuck did they hire an amateur army to look after our 'interests' down there? Wait a minute -- what are our 'interests' down there?

We have just spent eight years being governed by dorks who acted like building a wall around Texas to ward off Sandinistas marching up through Mexico could be a super-bitchen strategic idea. (Unless we used another amateur army of'illegal alien' laborers, we couldn't even afford it -- the Teamsters contract for hauling in the raw material could easily cripple the economy.)

If we expect to protect our legitimate business interests on foreign soil, we are going to have to develop more efficient and appropriate tools for the job. These might include:

And, if necessary, pork spritzers or gunpowder -- not plutonium or nerve gas.

South Africa

It is a strategic necessity (as much as a moral one) for the U.S. to see that apartheid is brought to an end. You say you don't care? It doesn't matter that much to you? No big deal? If one of the competing black factions takes over, will you really sleep better knowing that whoever wins the inevitable intertribal war has an H-bomb? And how about that growing segment of the white population marching around with a nouveau swastika flag, piling flowers on the local Hitler shrine, hoping to oust the existing government, so they can have the bomb? Folks: Pork Cologne will not work on these people.

The Middle East

It is absurd that people are dying over such a miserable piece of real estate. Israel has a right to exist AND the Palestinians are entitled to their own state.

The land issue would have been settled long ago if it weren't for the religious fanatics on both sides, the misguided efforts of the U.S. Israel lobby, the weakness and shortsightedness of several U.S. administrations, and our old friends in the weapons business. Guys who live on yachts purchased with the proceeds of bullet sales tend to feel awkward and out-of-place in the unemployment line. This often leads them to ingenious forms of 'product promotion.' Is it not a slight embarrassment that many of these gentlemen are of the American persuasion?

Government in 'the New Perfect America'

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Politics Is the Entertainment Branch of Industry.

C-SPAN's coverage of governmental proceedings is wonderful. Caution! Buffoons on the Hill! Wallowing in blabber and spew, regiments of ex-lawyers and used-car salesmen attempt to distract us from the naughty little surprises served up by deregulated corporate America.

Has it become impossible to govern the U.S. by reason or logic? America under Reagan saw the rise of governance by trickery, fear, disinformation and superstition. Oh Jesus! Here come those fucking balloons again.

Nancy's War on Drugs

Speaking of superstition and balloons, let's examine the U.S. drug policy.

Once upon a time, we had a stupid law called Prohibition, based on the notion that alcohol was an 'immoral' chemical compound. Instead of saving the National Soul from demon rum, this policy was directly responsible for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people being murdered in gang wars or poisoned by severely unripened beverages.

Prohibition also made it possible for organized crime to develop and thrive on a scale never imagined by any of the legislation's sponsors. Have we detected any similarity to late-eighties America yet?

Illuminated by the rosy glow of a trillion-dollar global drug business, our covert war in Nicaragua looks like a badly directed snuff film, shot on location in a cocaine money laundry.

There has always been a symbiotic relationship between right-wing administrations and purveyors of 'sinful goods.' As long as the moralizers control the government, the purveyors' products remain officially forbidden. This keeps the price up and inflates their profits -- a perverse system of international agricultural price supports. Would we really be surprised to discover that triple-rinsed coca-bucks have financed Republican campaigns at all levels for years?

Alcohol Prohibition gave us Eliot Ness. Drug Prohibition gives us Nancy Reagan, George Bush, Manuel Noriega, Oliver North, the jolly lads in the Medellin Cartel, and, of course, their local distributors over by the school yard.

Alcohol Prohibition introduced us to the thrilling exploits of wise-guy gangsters, supplying the entertainment needs of a booze-guzzling public -- held hostage by a truly stupid piece of legislation. They dressed sharp, threw good parties, greased city hall and had enough money left over at the end of the day to buy a few unions and build Las Vegas.

Prohibition today has produced cartels of international party-boys who take in enough cash daily to finance the LBO of any corporation on the planet. Darlin', every crystal that crawled up your nose (at least since January of 1980) has helped to create the economic power base for a worldwide secret government.

Suicide

The reasons why people opt for the dubious thrill of 'controlled substance consumption' vary, but one factor seems consistent at all social levels: IN SPITE OF THE OBVIOUS PHYSICAL RISKS, PEOPLE WILL CONSUME THEM, NO MATTER WHAT.

Party Chemicals, including alcohol, are usually consumed because Mr. Party Guy wants to achieve some variation on a condition we'll call "blotto." For some, this amounts to a slow death -- and they still want to do it. "Suicide -- fast or slow? Should any government have the right to force an adult to stay alive if that individual chooses death -- fast or slow?" In some instances, perhaps. Generally, not.

I believe that people have a right to decide their own destinies; people own themselves. I also believe that, in a democracy, government exists because (and only so long as) individual citizens give it a 'temporary license to exist' -- in exchange for a promise that it will behave itself. In a democracy, you own the government -- it doesn't own you.

Along with this comes a responsibility to ensure that individual actions, in the pursuit of a personal destiny, do not threaten the well-being of others while the 'pursuit' is in progress.

A Matter of Semantics

It disturbs me to hear news reports describing the "menace of drugs" sandwiched in between commercials for off-the-shelf painkillers, sleep inducers, diet capsules and beer.

Any societal "menace" involved would be more accurately catalogued as "substance abuse behavior" -- a generic term to describe any chemically induced irresponsible conduct, whether derived from glue, nutmeg, dietary supplements, alcohol or the current list of compounds on the "controlled substances" list.

A drug is neither moral nor immoral -- it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole.

There are many compounds which chemically alter human behavior. They pose individual health risks, and risks to the safety of third parties who might depend on the unimpaired competence of the user who is piloting a 747, performing open-heart surgery, judging a murder trial or writing federal legislation.

The fact is, no complete psychopharmacological 'behavior table' exists for the multitude of substances (controlled or otherwise) which humans might ingest -- even accidentally -- including foodstuffs, which could, based on an individual's body chemistry, produce hallucinations, psychotic episodes, or any number of other undesirable physical conditions leading to 'impaired behavior' -- but, for some reason, we have fixated on drugs.

The "drug problem" is real -- but it has been muddled by bad semantics. If we could eradicate every compound on the controlled substances list tomorrow, the "criminal" acts resulting from chemically altered states of human behavior (if we assume that people are basically well-intentioned animals, and only get weird when alien molecules attack them) would still continue.

Life could be described as a complex form of electrochemical entertainment: electrical charges modifying chemical compounds which recombine to make electrical charges which etc., etc., etc., eventually leading to "Life As Behavioral Theater" (with performances perceived via electrochemical sensors -- which create charges, modify compounds, create more charges and so on). Still with me? In short, even before we had LSD, there were mushrooms -- and before PCP, we had maniacs, robbers and murderers. Can we win any "war on drugs"? Are you kidding?

The biggest danger from the drug trade is not the occasional lethal blunders committed by users and street dealers -- the real evils lurk in the financial and political power which flows upstream to the cartels' overlords. These guys have enough loose cash to snatch up a chunk of any nation on a whim.

U.S. drug users are financing the lower half of this equation, while our licensed representatives finance the rest by making life easy for the big guys with unenforceable pseudolegislation and a hilariously inept war on drugs. What do you say when U.S. Customs officers, asked to engage in vigorous interdiction, find it inconvenient to be tested for drug consumption themselves?

Send In the Marines?

Should we declare that a state of war exists between the U.S. and each drug-producing, drug-distributing and/or money-laundering nation, in order to legitimize the involvement of all military branches? What do we do about China? They have an H-bomb and a fairly large army. "Oh, well. . . heroin's not that big a problem anymore -- let's just go after those bad cocaine dealers." Are we to seriously consider armed international conflict because middle-aged men in the entertainment community need illicit pharmaceutical assistance in order to keep their dicks hard? Are we gonna roll out the leftover Agent Orange and fuck up somebody's jungle because 'creative people at the network' rely on native medicine when making the complex aesthetic decisions which determine American television's fascinating content?

Law and Order

Part of what we have licensed the government to do is maintain 'law and order' -- first, to create enforceable laws to provide an outline for the practical aspects of social existence, coupled with a license to use force, if necessary, in order to apply them. What the fuck went wrong?

For one thing, we had a bumper crop of lawyers a while back, and every one of them wanted to earn a living -- but, with so many lawyers competing for the criminal dollar, how could they expect to get their rightful hunk of American Pie? The answer was obvious: America needed more criminals. Not the really bad kind that do murder and rape and stuff -- we needed regular, easy-to-defend, middle-class neighborhood criminals, with cash and equity. The lawyers of America set out to create a world where their services would be indispensable.

They ooched into the governmental machinery at every level, and, while we weren't looking, created a body of incomprehensible, contradictory, unenforceable laws (the IRS Code, for instance) which could be transgressed by anybody, anytime, without their even knowing it, thereby placing entire families in economically life-threatening situations -- unless they knew a (don't laugh) good lawyer.

Then, the peculiarities of our case law system took over. Case law is what happens when a stupid judicial decision from one place gets cited as a "legal precedent," forming the basis for another stupid judicial decision somewhere else -- like a computer virus.

Remember: In the beginning, we gave this theoretical temporary license to the theoretical government to create this theoretically organized social system, to be administered on a democratic basis -- and part of the deal required that the license holder would create law for us and, with it, maintain order.

It was supposed to be done by guys who knew something about how to do it (and wanted to do it, because we needed it). They said they could do it. We believed them. We voted for them. But what did we get? A mutant subspecies that tells lies for a living, unwittingly assisted by semiliterate juries (chosen by the lawyers themselves) who do the rest of the damage to the system by excreting mounds of case law.

We could thin out the ranks of the legal profession a bit if it were required that everything lawyers and judges say in court be under oath, with treble punishment and property confiscation penalties for them if they lie -- or if any of the documents generated or used as evidence are found to be written forms of lies.

Zero Tolerance?

The new drug law that mandates the death penalty and confiscation of property connected with any drug-trafficking operation could lead to some intriguing conversations with Mrs. Thatcher. British offshore banking policy allows -- even promotes -- practices which assist in the laundering of drug money.

Of all foreign governments involved in the current epidemic of LBOs and purchases of American assets -- including the Arabs, the Germans and the Japanese -- Britain (or unknown entities acting through British banking agents) has grabbed the most.

In many respects, the U.K. is well on its way to becoming a Third World nation -- where the fuck are they getting all the cash to buy us up?

Is it an act of war to buy somebody's country out from underneath him? If somebody offers to buy your country (or what amounts to economic control of your country), and you sell it to him, does that mean your country plans to go into 'retirement'? What are we gonna do? Take the cash and move to Switzerland?

Other Options

If we were to decriminalize and commercially 'recontrol' the "controlled substances" (dispensing them on a rack next to the alcohol in State Stores, or in chains of Federal Party Pharmacies, for example), benefits to the U.S. Treasury could be substantial, as would domestic 'cocaine brewery' profits.

At least one aspect of our agricultural problem would be solved ("What should we plant next year, Wanda?"), the prison population would diminish, and, most importantly, we could put a crimp in the pipeline feeding cash to the guys in the jungle.

I don't know about you, but I have never issued a 'temporary license to govern' to any guy in any jungle, but, because they made so many friends in Washington during the last eight years (just helping out with 'the war effort'), they act as if it had been granted by proxy.

Would 'recontrol' put the cartels out of business? Probably not. What if RJR Nabisco decided to open a 'brewery division' -- Dan Dorfman would report rumors of another big takeover, the stock would soar (a lot of church and pension-fund buying) and the cartel would wind up as a legit U.S. business -- just like some of our most illustrious old-money families who hit it big when the booze trade got redignified.

What if a kinder, gentler CIA chose to produce a low-cost 'designer drug' with special 'social engineering characteristics,' and mount yet another covert civilian test for profit, arranging for this New Buzz to drive Traditional Flavors out of the marketplace? It worked with LSD. (And doesn't PCP -- makes you crazy; takes five guys to hold you down; etc. -- have a sort of'militarily useful' aura about it?)

Communism

Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn't work. It's against a basic law of nature: "PEOPLE WANT TO OWN STUFF."

Perestroika virtually certifies this as an axiom. You still want to call it "Communism"? Sure -- g'head -- call it what you want. We don't need to say, "I told you so." Leave a guy some dignity. The Cold War? Have another Pepsi -- it makes you moonwalk.

In exporting their philosophy, the Soviets employed a technique reminiscent of U.S. evangelical TV ministries. They told people who were hungry and sick they'd give them food and penicillin. The evangelists forced them to read the Bible; the Communists made them read The Little Red Book -- and if you couldn't read, the motherfuckers would recite it to you through a bullhorn.

The Soviets have spent many years (and a lot of money) marketing and maintaining a political Edsel, fueled by the assumption that entire populations will cheerfully endure Spartan conditions, then hand over the fruits of all labor to a benevolent bureaucracy which would redistribute the wealth in an 'equitable manner.' What?

In every language, the first word after "Mama!" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine!" when you grow up, has -- to put it mildly -- a fatal design flaw.

From the time Mr. Developing Nation was forced to read The Little Red Book in exchange for a blob of rice, till the time he figured out that waiting in line for a loaf of pumpernickel was boring as fuck, took about three generations. Television helped to speed up that cycle.

Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, it they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.

Why, then, do so many Americans, while professing to adore Freedom and Democracy, support -- even demand -- that actions be taken by their own government which bear a striking resemblance to Old-Style Evil Empire Communism? (Censorship? Disinformation? The Public Library Spy-Squealer Program?) Are we really that unspeakably stupid?

Use It or Lose It

Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to the test, usually find it to be an 'inconvenience. ' We have opted instead for an authoritarian system disguised as a Democracy. We pay through the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then wonder how all those assholes got in there.

Communism doesn't work because it is out of phase with human nature. Are we going to wake up one day to find this statement equally true when applied to the concept of Western Democracy?

CHAPTER 18
Failure

Failure is one of those things that 'serious people' dread. Invariably, the persons most likely to be crippled by this fear are people who have convinced themselves that they are so bitchen they shouldn't ever be placed in a situation where they might fail.

Failure is nothing to get upset about. It's a fairly normal condition; an inevitability in ninety-nine percent of all human undertakings. Success is rare -- that's why people get so cranked up about it.

Here are a few examples from my own personal collection of crumbled dreams. These are excerpts from actual business proposals, presented to guys with suits on, in The Real World.

Even though they all flopped, the very idea of walking into a corporate office and dropping one of these boogers on Mr. Show-Me's desk made it all worthwhile -- a guy's gotta have a hobby.

The first example is a letter sent to a Chicago attorney, Arnold Silvestri, sometime in the early eighties. . .

The next document explains the meeting mentioned above at Rothschild Venture Capital, held at a time in the long-forgotten past, when CDs weren't even on the market. . .

Another miserable flop was a concept for a late-night TV show. In 1987, assisted by Danny Schrier, an aggressive young agent at ICM, I embarked on a depressing journey into the air-conditioned wilderness of TV-Land, pitching ideas to groups of individuals worthy of further anthropological study. It all began with a meeting in the ABC network office, on or about March 13, 1987.

And now, one of the most ridiculous proposals of 1988. This was presented to Mayor Pelletiere (a Socialist), Vice Mayor and Minister of Culture Corbani (a Communist), and Minister of Youth Affairs Treves (an Anarchist) of Milan, in June of that year.

CHAPTER 19
The Last Word

It is 5:30 A.M., December 25, 1988. I just finished reading the first set of galleys and have sprouted an eye-popping headache -- nonetheless, this final material must be prepared in order to keep the 'recent history' part of the book up-to-date and make the deadline.

Since I submitted the manuscript, George Bush won The Olympics of Banality, Jim Bakker got indicted for tax fraud, Robertson is back on The 700 Club, the U.S. agreed to substantive talks with the PLO, and Congress passed a heinous piece of legislation designed to curb "audio pornography."

The 1988 CNN election coverage was biased beyond belief -- every shot of Bush in the "bumpers" leading into news segments attempted to make him look "presidential" (with Mickey Mouse?), while every shot of Dukakis was designed to make him look like a dork (remember the one where he made that little weasel-face while catching a limply-tossed baseball in some supermarket parking lot? Pretty subtle, eh?)

"CNN -- Your Network of Record" has devolved into "CNN -- Your Network of Bullshit, Superficial Speculation and Calculated Innuendo." They have a knack for dispensing "opinion-shaping" video-factoids disguised as "hard news." (For example, the words "Star Wars" or "Strategic Defense Initiative" are seldom uttered on CNN without the viewer being subjected to a rerun of an animated clip showing nuclear missiles from The Evil Empire with big red stars on them being vaporized by what appears to be a Saturday morning cartoon ray gun. Clever subtext: "Who could argue with deployment of this wonderful family-saving defense system? Why, of course it works! See there! Just blew up another one!")

Right around Christmas, CNN (with White House guidance, no doubt) began to pre-sell the concept of a sequel to the first Libyan bombing raid -- a "surgical strike" against a new poison gas factory, possibly to be carried out by (watch the file footage, now) cruise missiles, launched from submarines -- all of this accompanied by "hints" about when it might take place. Mr. Turner, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Daniel Schorr got out just in time.

Liberal Media Bias?

The concept of a "liberal media bias," spoon-fed to CNN viewers in talk-show blather and pompous 'news commentary' throughout the Reagan years, has at last been exposed for the pitiful manipulation it always was.

"Liberal" bias? Suppose a newsperson was some sort of frothing "liberal" -- would he get a broadcast job in the first place? Not on CNN. But, suppose he did, and tried to sneak some form of "bias" into a story, do we think he'd last a week? Get serious. Frothing right-wing extremists are, however, prominently displayed and in plentiful supply on CNN.

The license holders for most broadcast outlets (especially the commercial networks) hardly qualify as "liberal" by any stretch of the imagination -- and the guys on the board of directors? Gimme a break. This applies to all news outlets -- electronic and print. The guy who owns the outlet determines policy and content -- that's why he owns it, so he can control it. This power to mold public opinion is bartered for 'favors' among 'friends' -- it is the essential tool of spin-control.

The "liberal media bias" scam was a smoke screen, designed to conceal the squads of White House spin-doctors, sprinkling antiseptic on each morsel of "news" as it wafted past the rotor blades in The Gipper's backyard -- all in the name of balance and fairness, of course.

Between 1980 and this writing, a news story could be deemed balanced and fair only if it had a hefty rightward spin. Certain types of stories got "special attention": HEALTH-ENDANGERING GAY LIFESTYLES THREATEN ENTIRE NATION or RISING INFANT MORTALITY RATE LINKED TO GROWTH IN ABORTION INDUSTRY. Most of this shit sounded like it was drafted in "The Pastor's Study" at Falwell's Old-Time Ministry of Gospel Propaganda. Will the next four years be any different? What do you think?

The Gipper goes into private practice now -- look for him as a TV pitchman for G.E. or some other defense contractor, and, perhaps, a born-again film career (Bedtime for Bonzo II: Terror of the Green Monkey).

Would a Kind And Loving God let an asshole like that (and all his fabulous appointees) escape unpunished after eight years of Constitutional desecration?

(No, but one with a way-sick sense of humor is toying with the idea even as you read this.)

Epaulet Update

As a follow-up to my comments on Dr. Koop: CNN reported that of all the deadly diseases threatening America, AIDS weighed in at #7 (#1 was cancer with approximately 700,000 deaths per year; #2 was heart disease with approximately 500,000; #3 was diabetes with approximately 300,000; etc., etc.). The total AIDS death toll (since they first started counting) was quoted in the vicinity of 40,000.

Another story reported that the age groups most frequently afflicted were people thirty years old and over, and infants born infected -- with little evidence of the disease among heterosexuals in the teens and twenties; but, for some reason, the teen group gets targeted by the moralizers for admonitions: "Abstain from sex unless you are married, lest ye perish from this righteous punishment (created, of course, by a Kind And Loving God) in order that He might maintain penile discipline among naughty little libertines like you."

Folks, take 250 million live people and divide by 40,000 dead people -- what percentage is that? Epidemic? Have we just experienced semantic meltdown, or witnessed the birth of a new medical phenomenon: The CNN Micro-Media Epidemic?

Poison Gas Again

Also on this topic, I obtained a copy of A Higher Form of Killing by Jeremy Paxman and Robert Harris, published by Hill & Wang. On page 240 you will find an excerpt from an Army manual discussing the feasibility of manufacturing and deploying "ethnic chemical weapons" -- designed to kill people from specific ethnic backgrounds.

On page 241 you will find an extract from a 1969 Senate appropriations hearing, with testimony (speaker unidentified) regarding the development of a new class of biological weapons (note the plural) which would be "refractory" to the human immunological system.

Whose testimony was this? Was he asking for money to build a few of these diseases? What senators heard this testimony? Are they still in office? Did they appropriate any funds? If so, who got them? What did they eventually spend them on? The book doesn't say, but presumably some answers might be found in The Congressional Record.

(I also recommend The Mind of the Bible Believer by Edmund Cohen, PhD., Salvation for Sale by Gerard Thomas Straub and Holy Terror by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman for any of you wishing to follow up on the Church/State issues discussed earlier.)

Okay. That's it. THE END.

It's been a pleasure talking to you -- and don't forget to register to vote.