Being Frank Read Free Page B

wasn’t old enough to understand that “Freak Out!” ’s target audience was the groovy Sunset Strip crowd, guys in tight white Levi’s and girls with flowing blonde hair, both sexes coolly regarding the world from behind Ray-Ban sunglasses. None of it had very much to do with me, and yet as I listened to songs like “You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here,” I could imagine the surfing culture around me, and draw my own conclusions.
    A few weeks after buying “Freak Out!”, I found myself sitting with my acoustic guitar, trying to work out chords I could hear plainly in my head but lacked the knowledge and technique to wring from the instrument. It was frustrating, but I could feel that something was changing in the way I thought about music. Plain old open G sounded really stupid all of a sudden; I desperately needed a whole new musical vocabulary .
    I went to the Gene Lees Guitar Studio on Sepulveda, and after hovering nervously near the sheet music for nearly an hour, finally got upthe nerve to ask a clerk for a “good guitar chord book.” The kid was one of seven Catholic boys from an otherwise upright family; he and his brothers all played in various local bands and rarely spoke to mere mortals. Without looking at me he gestured vaguely in the direction of the Mel Bay and Mickey Baker folios in a distant corner, meanwhile continuing to mutter seductively to his girlfriend on the telephone. Mortified, I shuffled over and fumbled through the merchandise. The cheapest thing was a Guitar Chord Finder, printed on a clear plastic wheel that turned to transpose various voicings into different keys. It went into the pick compartment of my guitar case, where it remained, unmolested, until I finally sold the guitar a few years later so I could buy my first electric guitar.
    But stumbling onto “Freak Out!” marked the end of my childhood, musical and otherwise. Although I never lost my fondness for lilting waltzes or slow drags, or any of the other pleasures of hard-core shellac , I developed into a rabid Frank Zappa fan. After several years and a few more Mothers of Invention albums, I began to understand the in-jokes, and I started buying albums of music by some of the composers Zappa had listed on “Freak Out!” — Stravinsky, Varèse, Webern. He turned out to be right: it was interesting music, much more interesting than rock ‘n’ roll.
    Around this time, I wandered into the band room at school one day and there I saw, unwatched, a timpani, a gong, and some orchestra bells. I’d been taking piano lessons off and on for a couple of years, and I had my little xylophone at home, but in the back of my mind was this lurking question: What was it like to bang on something really loud ? , Well, I answered that question in short order. My research was so thorough and so satisfying that South Bay Unified sent my parents a bill for the damage. After popping my percussion cherry, as it were, I began to regard George Antheil and Harry Partch as sex gods. I even had a moody-looking mezzotint of Quasimodo taped to the inside of my locker.
    My songwriting, meanwhile, rapidly metamorphosed into a long catalogue of psychotic ditties which, if my parents had ever heard me perform them, would undoubtedly have landed me in some behavioral psychologist’s bunker. None of the boys I went to school with were capable of writing such demented songs — much less the girls, most of whom had long stringy hair and liked to sit around under trees at lunch period looking soulful and warbling “Blowin’ in the Wind” to out-of-tune nylon-string guitars. There was something “blowin’ in thewind” in my case, all right, but it sure didn’t smell like teen spirit . If I could have grown a mustache or tattooed a scale model of my menacing hero on my chest, just for the shock value, you bet I would have.

    My troubles escalated when I