Rock After 30?

By Tom Nolan

Phonograph Record Magazine, March 1978

A three-year-old named Ahmet, playing Aquaman with a rope coiled over his shoulder, greets me with, "F--- You! F--- your ass! I hate you!" An older boy named Dweezel is asking where's the cow skull his pet snakes like to slither through. Except for the presence of children, little has changed in Frank Zappa's workroom since he moved into this Mulholland Drive house several years ago. The walls are still lined with hundreds of boxed, unreleased tapes of concerts by Zappa's group, the Mothers of Invention. Desks and consoles still overflow with the endless multi-media projects in various stages of completion. And Zappa himself – barechested, a bit fatigued from an all-night recording session – looks the same as he's always looked since his debut on the scene in 1966: the ponytailed, Dada-moustached eccentric older brother to spiritual teenagers of all ages. Frank has created a timeless, bizarre world that perpetuates itself year after year a self-contained universe in which the age of the proprietor is, he thinks, irrelevant.

How is he different from performers like Elton and Mick, who seem to see performing as a dead end?

"For them it is a dead end, 'cause I don't think what they're doing is making music. What they're talking about is a career decision. If you're makin' music you just keep makin' it until you don't feel like it anymore. I happen to be working in a field of music closely tied to live performance. And since we give the best possible live performances of my own music, there's no reason I shouldn't go out there year after year and play it. I don't see anyone else striding in line to play my tunes, and if the world's gonna hear my music then I'm gonna have to be its representative, whether I'm out there with crutches, a wheelchair, or an iron lung, and I don't give a f-ck if anybody knows how old I am either. I've never tried to hide the fact that I'm 37 years old, and you can all kiss my ass.

"Not only that, I've been doing it so long I'm really good at it. And I didn't need to get a facelift, either, like Mick did, years ago. That's why he looks like a gnome. He went and got a god-damned face lift!

"People have to become aware of the fact that performers like myself are an invaluable natural resource. We are resilient, and we keep going! We don't just have careers – we make music. That's the difference.

"You make it sound as if it were unusual for a person to stay in any business for a long period of time," he goes on. "In the popular music field, endurance might be statistically unusual, but what makes it look so weird is that everybody else flakes off so fast – which means they weren't cut out for it to begin with, or else they were a hype.

"I know what the age ranges are of people who buy records, but that doesn't mean I tailor my records to that age group. I certainly don't function on the level of selling a lot of singles to 13-year-olds.

"There've been a lot of adjustments since we first started out, because then nobody knew about us or was interested in what we were doing. So we were kinda operating in a vacuum. It took about three or four years just to let people know we were alive. It's the difference between waiting around for someone to hire you for a concert, and touring six months a year."

That young audience, though, is important for survival; and the Mothers are always able to draw new fans when they tour. Whether or net the music is aimed at 13-year-olds, it appeals to many of them.

"Some of the people at our concerts, especially in the East, are real diehard; they're literally the same people coming backstage year after year. But every year there's also younger kids. When we got a gold album with Apostrophe and it was getting a lot of airplay on AM stations, we had 15-year-old girls screaming at the front of the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., doing all that teeny-bop-a-gogo thing. We'd never seen anything like it! Then in the same concert, when we started our Freak Out medley – songs from our first album, ten years ago – these kids started singing along to those. They'd heard us on the radio and gone back and bought our earlier records. I mean those kids were in diapers when those first albums were released. I got a letter from an eleven-year-old in Portland whose favorite album is Lumpy Gravy, and that's been out of print for years."

The niche Zappa has carved for himself in the world of rock is enduring and impressive. Even those who can't stand his music admire him for his integrity, his outspokenness, and his singleminded determination to make the kind of art he wants to make. The devotion of his fans borders on monomania, and he has become known as a "catalog artist," one whose records sell steadily over the years.

Nevertheless, he has always had trouble raising money for projects, and his long-term relationship with Warner Bros. Records has ended in litigation.

"I always imagined I'd be making music," he says, "but I never kidded myself for a minute that if I wanted to make the kind of music I was interested in that I wasn't gonna have to work hard in order to do it. There are no patrons of the arts for unusual projects in the rock 'n' roll field. Nobody was handing me budgets. Every time I've done something unusual I've had to go and kick somebody's ass to get the money. But it was kind of hard to imagine ten years ago what the record business would turn into. Man, it really sucks.

"In the '60s, the record executives hadn't yet arrived at the Burbank school, where they all wear faded levi jackets, grow beards, buy Porsches and hang three or four gold chains and a coke spoon around their necks. Then, they were still like accountants in narrow ties. So they hired these company hippies to hang around the office and look good. The hippies would buy the sandwiches, get the coffee, and be visible when a new act came into the office. The act would see a member of their peer group and feel safe and secure getting reamed by this record company. Well, the same guys who were getting the coffee in the '60s stuck around, and now they're in the A&R department. And instead of being the last bastion of creativity in the record business, they're worse than the guys with the narrow ties. They're signing the worst people, making the worst decisions, and doling out huge amounts of money for things that are extremely mediocre.

"The whole motivation for making pop music has changed over the last ten years. When I first started there were a whole lotta people who just wanted to get out there and play. Now groups get formed because they wanna be stars, see if they can out-Led Zeppelin the Led Zeppelin in breaking up hotel rooms. A buncha guys get together and say, I look cute, you look cute, he looks cute – by the way do you know how to play any instruments? The role of the guy in the A&R department has changed from listening to music to being a fashion coordinator. Let's face it, it's always been tough for people who are not physically attractive; but today, it's dangerous. I guess the only way left to make it if you're not cute is to jam a big safety pin through your cheek."

Frank's acerbic judgements on his contemporaries' "product" are celebrated, and, no doubt, partly inspired by showmanship; but his disaffinity with almost any non-Zappa music seems genuine. The new jazz? "Bionic disco music. Bionic raga swill." Singer-songwriters? "Ah, the intensive care artists – those really sensitive people who earn a living through their Deep Personal Hurt? Despicable." Modern classical composers? "There's no one working in the so-called serious vein that I feel any rapport with, because invariably they don't know anything about rock 'n' roll." Rock per se? "A couple people are doing good things. Queen. Captain Beefheart. Black Sabbath. I like old rhythm and blues, before they stuck the violins on." Zappa actually fits very uncomfortably into the world of rock. He sees himself as a composer who happens to work within the rock framework, but all the trappings lifestyle leave him cold. He doesn't drink or take drugs. For all the famous musicians who profess to admire him, he rarely socializes. "I've always been on the fringe of all that. I never hung out with those people. I don't have any pop music friends who stop by the house for spectacular parties and all that crap. I just do my work."

Zappa stays in his house as much as possible, engaged in what he sees as far from "normal" activity. ("What I do is for the most part irrelevant to the mainstream of American life. It's sort of like being a mad scientist ...") His isolation is complete, his universe intact and untouched. Changes occur, but they are the changes that come to any 37-year-old. Zappa cites marriage and fatherhood as the things that have most affected him in recent years. He and Gail Zappa have three children: Ahmet, Moon and Dweezel.

"At first I thought I wouldn't enjoy being a father, but I was such a fool! I mean, I liked puppies and kittens and things, but when you have a real live little human being to piddle around with ... I'm glad somebody still gets excited about swimming lessons, and whether or not first basemen's gloves are soft enough. I worry about things like inner-groove distortion at the time of mastering ..."

He says he often writes pieces for the kids' amusement, like the one he's working on now: a symphonic number titled "The Three Stoogens." The chart for it is spread on the piano, in the composing corner of the workroom. Frank has boxes full of these non-rock orchestral works, compositions that are performed only on those rare occasions when he hires his own hall and musicians. "The copyist's bill alone for the concert I did at UCLA a few years ago was $ 10,000. It's a real loser all the way around. But that's part of a person's job, you know – to do something truly eccentric once in a while."

Given an opening, Frank leaps to put on a tape of that UCLA concert, then just as quickly whips out the written score so I can follow along, read the thing while I'm hearing it. Now he's happy, sharing his music with an audience of one. As he watches furtively for reaction to the avant-gardish surrealistic turn-of-the-centpry sounds ploinking out of the workroom's giant speakers, Frank seems not so very different from his real idols, such self-consciously moderne composers as Erik Satie and Edgard Varèse, revered eccentrics who tinkered in their private artistic domains to their dying days. You get the feeling that not until he's fifty-six will Frank have fully grown into the picture he has of himself; that twenty years from now, still at work in a room like this one, Zappa will somehow have become Satie's contemporary.