Behold the contract that signed the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously) Miss Pamela (Pamela Ann Miller, later Pamela Des Barres), Miss Sparky (Linda Sue Parker), Miss Lucy (Lucy Offerall, later Lucy McLaren), Miss Christine (Christine Frka), Miss Sandra (Sandra Lynn Rowe, later Sandra Leano), Miss Mercy (Mercy Fontentot, aka Judith Edra Peters) and Miss Cynderella (Cynthia Wells, later Cynthia Cale-Binion; the Frank Zappa produced all-girl groupie band to Bizarre Records, the label run by Zappa and his then-business partner, Herb Cohen. (Their album, Permanent Damage, actually came out on Zappa and Cohen’s Straight Records and featured the talents of Lowell George, Ry Cooder, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, Ron Wood, Jimmy Carl Black, Nicky Hopkins and Don Preston.
The group started out as “The Cherry Sisters” and then became The Laurel Canyon Ballet Company.
I like how they all signed in different colored pens.
This contract was on eBay a couple of weeks ago, but I got distracted 20 minutes before the auction ended and forgot about it until it was too late.
“I’m in Love with the Ooh Ooh Man,” a love-song about a boy with a first name that’s the same as his last (that would be Nick St. Nicholas, the bass player of Steppenwolf). Sung by Miss Pamela; the music was written by Monkee Davy Jones.
Mondo Hollywood, Robert Carl Cohen’s poetic 1967 documentary, begins not as you might expect, with shots of LA’s tie-died hippies but rather with a John Birch Society-type anti-Communist meeting attended by, among others, Glenn Beck’s idol, W. Cleon Skousen, the kooky Mormon “historian,” FBI agent, crackpot conspiracy theorist, and slavery apologist. (Mitt Romney studied under Tea party icon Skousen while in college at Brigham Young University).
Without meaning to, Cohen’s time-capsule film begins by pointing out to viewers how, in some respects, so very little has changed since the 1960s—these folks are the Teabaggers of 1965, they’re even reading the very same batshit crazy Cleon Skousen books—and then he shows how much they did change, or at least the beginnings of that change to come.
Mondo Hollywood uses what appears to have been a lot of silent (very well shot) 16mm footage, and interviews and voice overs done at different times, to create a fascinating time capsule of life in Los Angeles during the very year when the culture went from black and white to vivid psychedelic color. Along the way, we’re introduced to poets, dreamers, acid eaters, trust fund kids, body painters, strippers, proto-hippies (or “freaks” as the Los Angeles variety of hippie was known in 1965-66), transsexuals, avant-garde artists and—this being Los Angeles—plenty of movie stars, a young Frank and Gail Zappa seen at a wild party and even then governor Ronald Reagan, who rails against “filthy speech advocates” at UC campuses. Spookily, future Manson murderer Bobby Beausoleil as well as future Manson Family victim, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, both appear in the film.
It’s interesting to note that Mondo Hollywood was set to open the Avignon Film Festival in 1967 but was banned by French government censors who stated:
“This film, in the opinion of certain experts of the Commission [of Control], presents an apology for a certain number of perversities, including drugs and homosexuality, and constitutes a danger to the mental health of the public by its visual aggressivity and the psychology of its editing. The Commission proposes, therefore, its total interdiction.”
Not much in the film would raise an eyebrow today, these “perversions” have all been mainstreamed. I still can’t get over the vintage Tea party crowd at the beginning, myself.
Although I didn’t actually see Mondo Hollywood until many years later, I used to have a huge square poster, similar to the album cover pictured above, hanging over the bed in my first NYC apartment in the 80s. I really wish I still had it!
Local Los Angeles radio spot advertising the then-new Mothers of Invention LP Absolutely Free and a concert at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium with opening act Tim Buckley (both Frank Zappa and Tim Buckley were managed by Herb Cohen).
A terrific-sounding, lovingly remastered version of Absolutely Free has just been released by Universal, now in the midst of an ambitious Zappa catalog overhaul being overseen by Gail Zappa.and Zappa expert Joe Travers. The first dozen of his 60s and early 70s albums—everything from 1966’s Freak Out! to the 1972 live set, Just Another Band From L.A.—are already out. The next batch is due within a matter of days.
When Matt Groening hired Danny Elfman to write the theme for The Simpsons, he gave him a mixed tape of songs that he wanted the music to sound like: The theme from The Jetsons, some of Esquivel’s “space age bachelor-pad music,” a teach-your-parrot-to-talk record, selections from Nino Rota’s Juliet of the Spirits soundtrack and this unused Frank Zappa-produced radio commercial for Remington electric shavers that features the vocal stylings of none other than a young Linda Ronstadt.
The future queen of country rock is nearly unrecognizable here, speeded-up, multi-tracked and sounding like she’s just taken a hit off a helium balloon. At the end, Zappa tells listeners that the Remington electric razor “cleans you, thrills you… may even keep you from getting busted.”
According to legend, after giving the tape several listens Elfman told Groening, “I know exactly what you’re looking for!”
Strange, but true, in the early 80s, Frank Zappa joined showbiz celebs like Nipsey Russell, Scatman Crothers, Erik Estrada, Henny Youngman, and One Day at a Time mom, Bonnie Franklin, to record radio PSAs for the American Dental Association. The spots admonished kids to brush, floss and go for regular dental check-ups. Here are three of them: “Dental Floss Tycoon,” “Trick Or Treat” and “Keep Your Teeth.”
If you haven’t heard yet, Universal Music Group is re-releasing the entire Frank Zappa oeuvre and the first dozen of his 60s and early 70s albums—everything from 1966’s Freak Out! to the 1972 live set, Just Another Band From L.A.—are already out.
You can get more information and updates on the Frank Zappa remasters by following Jeff Newelt’s Twitter feed.
Frank Zappa joins comedian Robert Klein (and a small studio audience) in 1979 to discuss the first installment of his then-current project Joe’s Garage (inspired apparently by the goofy “don’t take drugs, kids” high school visits from narcotics officers) giving a blow by blow account of what happens in his quirky rock opera.
In Joe’s Garage, a narrator called “The Central Scrutinizer” tells the story of “Joe,” an average everyday kid who forms a rock band in a dystopian America where music itself is against the law.
If you haven’t heard yet, Universal Music Group is re-releasing the entire Frank Zappa oeuvre and the first dozen of his 60s and early 70s albums—everything from 1966’s Freak Out! to the 1972 live set, Just Another Band From L.A.—are already out. This is one of the most significant catalogs of 20th century music and it’s about time it’s gotten a polish with 21st century audio tools. (I haven’t actually heard them yet, still just checking the mail every hour…)
It will come as no surprise to frequent readers of this blog, or even a reader of the above paragraph, that I’m a Frank Zappa fanatic (a painting of the original Mothers in drag hangs above my desk as I type this). I was first exposed to his music (specifically “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black”) via the Dr. Demento radio show in 1975 when I would have been nine (Via that very same broadcast, I also discovered two other life-long favorites: The Bonzo Dog Band and Noel Coward).
I have such an exhaustive selection of Zappa bootlegs and DVDs that it’s borderline absurd, so the re-release of these albums, for me, is an invitation to dive back into them (something I do at least every two years anyway). For younger music fans, this might be their first exposure to Zappa’s music and in an effort to encourage that discovery, or re-discovery, for old and new Zappa fans alike, during the next week or so you’ll be seeing some great new Zappa-related posts, plus some older posts pulled from the DM archives.
Although it would be ridiculous to describe Frank Zappa as, in any way, “obscure,” the blunt fact is that his music is not widely known to the general public in 2012. Whether you chalk this up to the “difficulty” of his music, that he’s been dead for a generation, or that he acted so far outside of the music industry as he did during his maverick career—Zappa was one of the very first popular musicians (well, Zappa and Frank Sinatra, I suppose) to have his own record label and operated as an “indie” long before that term was coined—it really doesn’t matter much, and besides, in this case, there’s a real opportunity for FZ to blow some new minds. It’s criminal that he’s not better known than he is today, but I’m sure Mozart and Beethoven’s music went through lulls over the years, too…
My point is, dear younger readers, that right now is a really good time to discover the genius of Frank Zappa. Oh that I could hear these albums again for the first time. I envy your youth for that reason alone… but I’m already getting off topic. The primary reason why I would recommend Frank Zappa so strongly to music fans who are new to the Zappa catalog, but curious, is that FZ’s prodigious output is one of those things that you can dive into for months and months at a time: There’s a lot of incredible music that he produced and he’s sort of a genre until himself, really, like when you first get into krautrock or reggae.
Few other musicians of his era, and of his stature, have such massive back catalogs to immerse yourself in as Frank Zappa and such an interesting life story to read about as you do so. The guy was a genius on so many levels. Aside from being a great composer, musician, guitar god, and all around avant garde god/freakster, Frank Zappa was also an astute businessman and one of the tiny handful of the 20th century bandleaders (think Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sun Ra) who was able to keep fairly large groups of touring musicians on the road for decades (a tremendous feat in itself). And he had an idea for something like iTunes two decades before Steve Jobs brought it to fruition. Did you know that? It’s true.
The fact that this music hasn’t become over familiar throughout the years, from the point of view of 2012, is a big plus, if you ask me. And like I was saying above, to get to hear this music with fresh ears, that’s an experience I’d like to have.
You can get more information and updates on the Frank Zappa remasters by following Jeff Newelt’s Twitter feed.
Below, the original Mothers of Invention with a unique take on their concert staple, “King Kong,” at the Grugahalle, Essen, Germany, on September 28th, 1968:
Frank Zappa’s 1974 album Roxy & Elsewhere captured for posterity one of the most musically accomplished incarnations of The Mothers (George Duke, keyboards; Tom Fowler, bass; Ruth Underwood, percussion; Bruce Fowler, trombone; Walt Fowler, trumpet; Napoleon Murphy Brock, tenor sax, vocals; and Chester Thompson and Ralph Humphrey on drums) onstage and on fire.
Roxy & Elsewhere was recorded primarily over three nights (December 8,9,10, 1973) live at The Roxy nightclub in the heart of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. The Roxy is a pretty intimate club—a performer onstage there could practically make eye-contact with every member of the audience—and the musicianship during these sets was particularly inspired.
“Well, I wish there was…The status of that film is this: I spent about $30.000-40.000 trying to get the thing on film, and I got it on film, and there’s some things that happened down there that were absolutely fabulous. However, they’re too weird to show on television, and I don’t think there’s really a market in the theaters for a straight concert film like that…So right now, it’s sitting in my shelf, being an expensive piece of home movie. Maybe one day, when TV loosens up a little bit, we’ll be able to show the lovely Brenda, doing…(FZ and George Duke laugh)...that was a real nice piece of film, that Brenda…(more laughter).”
A DVD of the Roxy shows has long been promised, but has never come out. Zappa “vaultmeister” Joe Travers was quoted on the Wikipedia entry for the album about the long-delayed DVD release:
“It’s sitting in the vault. Waiting for a budget to do it properly. Basically the film footage, the negatives were transferred by Frank in the ‘80s using ‘80s technology. What we want to do is go back to the original negatives and do it in High Definition and then create a 5.1 mix from the original masters so that we have surround sound as well as Frank’s 2 channel stereo mix. Once we get all that together, then we need to cut the program. Edit the program together, camera angles, what shows, what we are going to include from what shows or include all the shows. I have no idea what Dweezil and Gail want to do. It’s great stuff, but the process of just getting to that point is going to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time.”
This tantalizing 32-minute chunk of that film—neither song (“Montana” and “Dupree’s Paradise”) were actually on the Roxy & Elsewhere album—was screened at the Zappa Plays Zappa concerts and posted on the Zappa.com website for a while. George Duke’s solo that starts at about 11 minutes in is a thing of wonder to behold. The Roxy shows were also a fantastic showcase for Ruth Underwood’s skills. (Part of the Roxy performance of “Dummy Up” can be seen in the Zappa doc, The True Story Of 200 Motels).
With the Universal Music Group re-releasing remastered versions of the entire Frank Zappa catalog beginning at the end of August, hopefully a Blu-Ray of the 1973 Roxy shows in 5.1 surround will soon be on the way.
Zappa was supposed to be the MC of the festival, but when the language barrier made that impossible, opted to jam with a few of the groups on guitar, including, of course, The Magic Band.
“All I can remember is playing in front of thousands of people huddled together in sleeping bags at three in the morning in this huge circus tent. It’s 27 degrees out, and there’s frost on my strings! It was Don, Victor, Mark, me and Jeff Burchell on drums. Frank was sitting in with us, because he was supposed to be the festival MC - a difficult job when he spoke no French and most of the audience spoke no English. Having Frank play with us made me a little more nervous than normal. I think we played five tunes - the five tunes Jeff knew and that was it. Pretty weird flying us all the way over there and playing one gig!
Don Van Vliet’s recollection of the festival:
“We had a good time. I don’t know, what they were doing; they were throwing what looked like birds nests at us, and then one fellow out of the audience - between one of the compositions - said my name was Captain Bullshit, and I said: “well, that’s all right baby, you’re sitting in it.” You know what I mean? I don’t know if he was an American; I’m not sure, because he was using early Gary Cooper movie talk. Like “yep,” things like that. I think they did well in five days and moving it from France to Belgium. But it was awfully cold… the people in the audience, I don’t know how they did it. I think it was probably pretty nice for them to leave their bodies… but the amplifiers were blown out by the time we got to them, and we need clarity for that, and there wasn’t any. I don’t know. I hope they enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.”
Naturally, as with the Pink Floyd footage that has slipped out of the vault to collectors (and YouTube) there’s no Festival Actuel footage of Zappa actually jamming with Captain Beefheart! Fwustrating! Was Zappa strapping on a guitar the signal to turn the camera off? Of course not, so where is this priceless footage?!?!?
In any case, there’s 5:32 seconds of sync-sound footage of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band in 1969 on my computer screen, so what am I complaining about? They do “She’s Too Much For My Mirror” and “My Human Gets Me Blues.”
The lineup for this concert was Don Van Vliet, vocals, tenor & soprano sax, bass clarinet; Victor Hayden (“The Mascara Snake”) bass clarinet; Bill Harkleroad (“Zoot Horn Rollo”) guitars; Mark Boston (“Rockette Morton”) bass; and Jeff Burchell (“Imposter Drumbo”) drums & percussion. Frank Zappa sat in on guitar on “When Big Joan Sets Up’” at the end of their set.
“The Actuel Rock Festival,” sponsored by the fashionable Parisian magazine Actuel (along with the BYG record label) was to be the first ever major rock festival in France, and was heralded as Europe’s answer to Woodstock. French authorities, still smarting from the riots of May 1968, forbade it and the festival, which was originally going to take place in or near Paris, was held just a few miles beyond the French border, in Amougies, Belgium.
The festival took place over the course of five freezing cold days in late October (24-27) of 1969. The audience numbered between 15-20,000 people who were treated with performances by Pink Floyd, Ten Years After, Colosseum, Aynsley Dunbar (this is allegedly where Zappa met his future drummer), former Yardbird Keith Relf’s new group Renaissance, blues legend Alexis Korner, Don Cherry, The Nice, Caravan, Blossom Toes, Archie Shepp, Yes, The Pretty Things, Pharoah Sanders, The Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart and many more.
From the notes of the 1969 The Amougies Tapes Zappa bootleg:
Frank Zappa was present at the festival in a twofold capacity. First, as Captain Beefheart’s road manager; secondly, as M.C., assisting Pierre Lattes, a famous radio/TV presenter at the time (and the pop music editor for Actuel magazine). The latter task proved problematic given Zappa’s limited French, the prevailing language among the audience, who themselves didn’t seem to understand much English. Instead, Zappa relinquished his M.C. job for one of occasional guest guitarist. He plays with almost everybody, especially with Pink Floyd, Blossom Toes, Archie Shepp and Aynsley Dunbar, a fabulous drummer he will hire shortly thereafter. He introduces his friend Captain Beefheart and provides a powerful stimulant to all the other musicians. Most legendary, of course, is Frank Zappa’s jam with Pink Floyd on a very extended “Interstellar Overdrive”. The festival was filmed by Jerome Laperrousaz, and the film was to be called MUSIC POWER. Due to objections from various bands (most notably Pink Floyd) whose permission hadn’t been properly secured, the film was never officially released.”
Frank Zappa: I was supposed to be MC for the first big rock festival in France, at a time when the French government was very right-wing, and they didn’t want to have large-scale rock and roll in the country. and so at the last minute, this festival was moved from France to Belgium, right across the border, into a turnip field. they constructed a tent, which was held up by these enormous girders. they had 15,000 people in a big circus tent. this was in November, I think. the weather was really not very nice. it’s cold, and it’s damp, and it was in the middle of a turnip field. I mean mondo turnips. and all the acts, and all the people who wished to see these acts, were urged to find this location in the turnip field, and show up for this festival. and they’d hired me to be the MC and also to bring over Captain Beefheart. it was his first appearance over there. and it was a nightmare, because nobody could speak English, and I couldn’t speak fFench, or anything else for that matter. so my function was really rather limited. I felt a little bit like Linda McCartney. I’d stand there and go wave, wave, wave. I sat in with a few of the groups during the three days of the festival. but it was so miserable because all these European hippies had brought their sleeping bags, and they had the bags laid out on the ground in this tent, and they basically froze and slept through the entire festival, which went on 24 hours a day, around the clock. One of the highlights of the event was the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which went on at 5:00 a.m. to an audience of slumbering euro-hippies.
Although Frank Zappa himself had apparently forgotten that he had once jammed with the Floyd, the photos don’t lie and neither does the recording. Who else could that be on guitar at approx 4:15 in? Clearly it’s not David Gilmour:
Asked about jamming with Zappa, Nick Mason has this to say in 1973:
Frank Zappa is really one of those rare musicians that can play with us. The little he did in Amougies was terribly correct. But he’s the exception. Our music and the way we behave on stage, makes it very hard to improvise with us.”
The really frustrating thing about all of this is that the visual documentation (as well as superior sound recordings) of this collaboration MUST exist (or at least did at one time). Pink Floyd forbade Jerome Laperrous to use his footage of their performance from the Actuel Festival for his Music Power documentary of the event, but that still hasn’t stopped it from escaping to YouTube (see below), so where is the Zappa footage???
As the audio recording didn’t really show up and circulate until 2006, there is still hope. Another of the groups who Zappa sat in with at the festival were British psych rockers Blossom Toes, who released a CD in 2009, Love Bomb: Live 1967-69, that included Zappa’s participation in their Amougies set.
Frank Zappa lecturing at the Gifford Auditorium of Syracuse University on 23rd April 1975, along with George Duke and Captain Beefheart. The talk is about how he first discovered music, the economics of the music business, shooting 200 Motels (and getting paid from the movie industry) and his creative process. It opens up to questions after about 15 minutes.
In 1968, a young Genesis P-Orridge went to see a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention concert in Manchester: “It was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen in my life.”
When Genesis P-Orridge thinks you’re the weirdest thing ever, that really counts for something…
This spifnificent recording of the original Mothers of Invention caught live performing an epic “King Kong” and “Oh In the Sky” for the BBC’s Colour Me Pop TV program has been bootlegged since the 1980s on VHS. Over the years I’ve found myself continually trading up whenever I’d find a better DVD copy at flea markets and then on the Internet. Well, this is the most significant upgrade I’ve seen yet and it doesn’t require that you do anything except for to turn it up loud and make it full screen for maximum enjoyment.
I truly find that this is THE single best video performance I’ve ever seen of Frank Zappa, and trust me, I’ve seen them all (and then some).
Frank Zappa discussing television, sin and language on Canadian TV show The Day It Is in 1969.
“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.” ~ Frank Zappa.
