Being Frank Read Free Page A

“Freak Out!”, I didn’t know quite what to think. The dog-killer image was certainly appropriate, but there was also a strong intellectual context. As for the music, it wasn’t quite rock ‘n’ roll, or I wouldn’t have listened to it more than once, but it definitely wasn’t “In Blossom Time,” either. There was too much shouting, mumbling, and fulminating, for one thing, not to mention a lot of percussion, and a xylophone on some of the songs. I was used to xylophones; I had a little three-octave student model, received one year as a Christmas present (I still don’t know why), and on which I had been attempting to play the xylophone theme from “Danse Macabre” for at least three or four years. (I never could get past the place near the beginning, where the sixteenth notes started, without getting tangled up and dropping at least one of the mallets.)
    Then there were endless liner notes in very small type on the inside of the album; I read them studiously, over and over, trying to understand what they meant By the time I had them memorized, I was beginning to get a vague idea that “The Mothers of Invention” wasn’t really a bunch of savages. “They” seemed to be extensions of one person, a fellow exotically named Frank Zappa (I wondered if it was a psychedelic nom-de-guerre ). His presence permeated the entire record, but he was only visible in an underexposed photo on the left hand side of the inner spread as a very large nose, a striped pullover, and a hand holding a drumstick. A dialogue balloon issued from his invisible mouth: “Freak Out!” in Cooper Black, flopped so it read backwards. The note beside this image stated: “Frank Zappa is the leader and musical director of THE MOTHERS of Invention . His performances in person with the group are rare. His personality is so repellent that it’s best he stay away… for the sake of impressionable young minds who might not be prepared to cope with him. When he does show up he performs on the guitar. Sometimes he sings. Sometimes he talks to the audience”.... And the zinger, at the end: “Sometimes there is trouble.” Yeah!
    There was an additional bunch of quotes from people who, in myinnocence, I assumed to be very important (although I’d never heard of a single one of them), warning how dangerous and crazy this Zappa character and his semi-musical concept were. Zappa had also listed his own influences: “These People Have Contributed in Many Ways to Make Our Music What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them.” Among the culprits were Charles Ives, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Maurice Ravel, Eberhard Kronhausen, Ravi Shankar, and dozens of blues and R&B musicians. I was too young to get the in-jokes, but I recognized some of the classical composers.
    I played the two discs endlessly, trying to absorb the multitude of musical styles and attitudes. This was nearly two years before “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” “introduced” the Concept Album to surf music-benumbed American teens, and even though I was used to extracting all the information from recordings, from the data on the label to the graphic design to the details of the music itself, “Freak Out!” was far over my eleven-year-old head. All I knew was that it sounded entirely different from anything I had ever heard before, and that it was hypnotically engrossing. Somehow I couldn’t help playing it over and over and over.
    â€œFreak Out!” was Frank Zappa’s first album. I had no idea of its genesis, or that Zappa had been steadily crawling upward from the socio-musical garbage dump of Antelope Valley rhythm & blues bands and Inland Empire lounge shows, working truly horrifying day jobs and scoring no-budget movies, until he finally got his big break, I