Frank Zappa's Bicycle Debut

By Jerry Hopkins?

www.jerryhopkins.com, 2002

It was one of those great moments in music that you don't recognize as such until a long while later.

I was working as a talent coordinator for Steve Allen's five-times-a-week, late-night variety show in Hollywood in 1963. My job was to find someone unusual for him to interact with every night. Steve called me his "vice president in charge of left-fielders." Others used the phrase "kook-booker." Some of the acts I introduced were merely unusual, and all Steve had to do was ad lib. Thus, I brought a genuine flea circus out of retirement and on another night an octogenarian pulled three automobiles up the street in front of the television studio with his long, white beard.

Other guests were more interactive than reactive for Steve. Someone would "teach" the comedian how to do something, like walk a tight rope, or eat fire, or Steve might get a massage with a vacuum cleaner-like device that was supposed to reduce fat and tone muscles, or get tattooed. The rules for my job were simple. Get someone who was genuinely eccentric or who did something at least a little strange or out-of-the-ordinary, but never make fun of them – the idea was to have fun with them. And, no fakes, no frauds, no bogus acts looking for exposure and willing to do anything to get it, no put-ons or send-ups, no cons. Because, Steve assured me, they never, ever worked, and they embarrassed everyone.

Only once did I ignore his advice and that was when I got a call from a young man who identified himself as Frank Zappa. He said he wanted to teach Steve how to "blow bicycle." "Blow bicycle," I repeated.

"Yeah, you know, like, the bicycle is a musical instrument."

I thought it was a dumb idea, and a bad joke besides, and I felt somewhat uncomfortable about the caller's use of the jive vernacular (knowing that Steve had provided a jazz piano in recordings by Beat Generation poets), but for some reason I asked Frank to come in and a couple of days later he arrived with his old Schwinn. He was wearing a black suit (all three buttons buttoned), a white shirt, and a black knit tie. Still in his early 20s – and years before he became a pop music icon who bridged the gap between classical music and rock – he looked like a small town bank teller trainee.

He put his bike on its kick-stand in the lobby of the Hollywood theater where we video taped the show and plucked the spokes as if they were the strings of a harp, pitter-pattered on the seat as if it were Buddy Rich's tom-tom, and, removing the hand-grips, blew across the hollow chrome handle bars, creating the sounds of a wind instrument. He then played a short, improvisational piece and upon its completion, stood waiting for my reaction.

I laughed. "You've got to be kidding," I said. "You didn't like it?" he said, seeming genuinely wounded. "I can play another song."

We talked. I was sure it was a gag, but I couldn't get him to admit it, and I thought that might be the key to his pulling it off. At that point in his life, he had no album or club date to promote, so I suspected he wanted to appear on the show for the $235 that was paid every "performing" guest. Yet he seemed so damned serious. I also had to admit that what I'd heard was musical. Still, I worried about incurring Steve's wrath, so I told Frank I'd call the next week.

Concerned about failure, over the weekend I hatched a plan that I thought might guarantee chaos if not hilarity, and out of the mayhem some laughs. On Monday, I called Frank and asked, "How would you like to conduct a bicycle symphony?"

I explained that we'd fill up the television stage with bicycles – two-wheelers like the one he brought in with him for the "audition," tricycles, unicycles, those Victorian ones with the big front wheels, bicycles-built-for-two, everything we could find in the big "property houses" that delivered props to the Hollywood studios. The whole stage would be crowded with bicycles, I said, and Frank could do whatever he wished with them.

This was not my introduction to the use of ordinary objects to make music. Like many people coming of age in the 1950s, I saw musical spoons and saws played on television's "Ed Sullivan Show" and I remember someone playing Christmas carols on a table full of champagne glasses by rubbing his fingers around the wet rims.

At the same time, a hypnotically new sound was coming out of the Caribbean using hammered (and tuned) steel barrels, or drums. During the folk music boom that followed, musicians put metal thimbles on their fingers and played the corrugated iron surface of a washboard and blew across the open end of a ceramic jug (giving a name to jug bands).

Blues guitarists used the necks of bottles on the frets to create a "sliding" sound. More recently, in an oddball South Korean musical called "Nanta (Wild Beating)," performers beat knives on chopping blocks and hammered kettles and pots and pans to a frenzied rhythm that became a season's hit at Tokyo's Disney World, and then began a world tour. And let's not forget Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Helikopter-Streichquartett," a composition for string quartet and four helicopters. (Premiered above Amsterdam in 1995, with four choppers hovering over the city; imagine it!)

Ken Butler made his first instrument in 1978 when he added a fingerboard, tailpiece, tuning pegs and a bridge to a small hatchet. He went on to make music from tennis racquets and other sporting equipment, guns, brooms, and even a toothbrush, a rubber band, a plastic drinking straw. What elevates the music made on such objects above novelty is the fact that when you play the recorded sounds for a human audience – in isolation from any visual stimulus; in other words, the listener doesn't see the music being played – no one would guess that in this instance the musical "axe" really was one.

"Weren't all instruments, and, indeed, all inventions, a novelty at first?" Butler asks.

It is as if, since our less sophisticated ancestors first started banging rocks together, or maybe hitting tree trunks with sticks in some sort of organized pattern, we've been determined to make music by whatever means available. Music – something that is difficult to define but generally is believed to have melody, rhythm, harmony, and dynamics – was from the beginning and is now a part of every aspect of life, inextricably linked to all human activity – from religious ritual to frothy entertainment – and nothing is too outlandish or impossible.

Over the years, while many found music in the ambient environment, others, like Ken Butler and Frank Zappa, deliberately sought the unexpected and much to their and our delight, created new music in the process.

Sadly, I don't remember specifically what Frank and Steve did on that long-ago night in that Hollywood television studio, but I do recall that it worked and that afterward Steve suggested I not bring on any more put-ons.

He was smiling when he said it. One musician, after all, knows another when he hears one.