Being Frank Read Free

furiously against the little ridge that separated the playing surface from the label. In sharp contrast to this thrilling shellac universe , rock music came on thin plastic 33 1/3 r.p.m. stereo discs with tiny grooves and dull, mass-produced looking, non-hand-lettered labels — light in weight and in content. The whole idea of it bored me.

    I drifted down the bins of albums, looking at the covers. There weren’t all that many records; this was about five years before the profitability level of rock ‘n’ roll was discovered by multinational conglomerates. The paltry stock was segregated by plastic dividers with black block letters announcing TEEN FAVORITES, EASY LISTENING, DIXIELAND, GOSPEL…
    In the TEEN FAVORITES ghetto I flipped through Bob Dylan’s“Highway 61 Revisited,” the Rolling Stones’ latest release, a couple of collected-hits packages, and altogether too much Sonny & Cher. Cher was no Mary West, and Sonny certainly no Harry Golden. (Tiny Tim and his ukulele weren’t yet a cloud on the pop music horizon.) Suddenly I stopped cold. A black-and-fuchsia-and-blue album had literally and figuratively jumped out at me! I had never seen anything remotely like it in my life. From the cover glared the menacing faces of savages with long, matted hair and beads, the photo crudely colored over with what looked like a smeary crayola. They bore no resemblance whatsoever to the simpering, Prince Valiant-coifed rock groups on every other album cover — these guys looked like they’d steal your dog and eat it alive and kicking, if they got the chance. On the back cover was a typewritten note with a hand-printed signature by one Suzy Creamcheese, describing how these degenerates had been hired to play at her high school prom and had ruined it. The band was called The Mothers of Invention, and the album entitled “Freak Out!”. Without knowing why, I felt I had to own it.
    â€œFreak Out!” was a double album, two discs in a foldout cover, price $7.98. I checked inside my little green vinyl coin purse and found a quarter and a dime (I’d skipped lunch at school that day). Back home I had four dollars and some change stashed in a jewelry box, my life savings. I sighed and hiked back down the hill.
    My mother was in the living room, watching “Dark Shadows” on TV and shortening a secondhand dress, turning it into a blouse. She made all her own clothes, not from patterns but by creating new things from old ones. At the time I thought this was extremely tacky and wished she would use patterns like anybody else. Later I would come to realize that the motivation for her idiosyncratic tailoring was a strange and complex convolution of childhood poverty (even though we were staunchly middle class and she could have afforded new clothes if she’d wanted them), her own inherent creativity, and a fierce defiance I never fully understood.
    I told her there was a new record I wanted to buy, but that I was about a dollar and a half short. She looked up from the sewing machine with faint irritation. “You’ve got lots of records” was all she said, and went back to her work.
    For the next two weeks I went without lunch. This wasn’t much of a hardship — the food in the school cafeteria was famous up and down the state for being the worst in California, perhaps in the nation, at least in my humble opinion, and there was always the solace of cookiesor bread and cheese when I got home from school, to tide me over until dinnertime.
    Finally, one Wednesday afternoon, I toiled back up the hill to Unimart and went straight to the record department. I paged through the selections in front of the TEEN FAVORITES divider until I got to the plastic card itself. Nothing, No “Freak Out!”. Somebody richer had beat me to the punch.
    I survived the disappointment somehow, and Unimart eventually restocked. The first time I played my very own copy of