Being Frank (20 page)

After a few rehearsals I realized that at every rehearsal there was an extra chair placed next to Frank's conducting stand. Never too fast on the uptake, it finally occurred to me that it was
my chair
. No one else ever sat in it; it was my place in the band. (I
had
thought about asking Frank if I could audition for the group, either on guitar or keyboards, but this new material was far more demanding than the stuff the road band had been playing. It required orchestral level sight-reading skills, for one thing. Knowing I'd never pass the audition, now or later I finally settled into my chair and forced myself to quit being so obsessed with the impossible. I didn't want to wind up like
Frank
, did I??)

Frank was completely focused on the business at hand: composing music for this particular group, and hearing them play it. I watched him going through the process, which seemed much more
formal
than all the shenanigans associated with road life, and wondered how he reconciled these distinctly different aspects of whatever it was he did. Naturally my motivations for being at rehearsals weren't entirely pure; I was curious whether our business might resume at the old stand, of course. A few rehearsals passed without occurrence; then one afternoon Frank brought in a new piece, entitled “RDNZL". I helped him pass out all the parts and sat back to listen while he put the players through their paces. Most of the Grand Wazoo material was like riding the Cyclone Racer coaster at the Long Beach Pike — full of turns and twists and dynamics and thrilling climaxes. But the instant I heard the first statement in “RDNZL” — arranged for the horns, rhythm section, and percussion in massed unison, and tossed off so fast I could only catch half the notes and about a quarter of the inner rhythms — as played by that incarnation of musicians, in the distinctly non-climate-controlled Temple of Wazoodom on a fiercely smoggy afternoon, with traffic groaning and screeching past outside on La Brea, I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I wanted to lie down on the floor.

Out of a misplaced sense of decorum, I stayed in my seat, but I looked over at Frank, who was only a few feet away from me. He was awkwardly standing up, conducting from the master score on his music stand. Generally, when he introduced the group to a new piece, he ran all the way through it once without stopping, clinkers and breakdowns and all, both to give the musicians an idea of the shape of the composition and to hear for himself how it had turned out. The players were nearly all ‘first call' pros from orchestral and studio backgrounds, and they were more than capable of a clean reading the first time through. Today they happened to be flawless. I caught Frank's eye; he looked back at me for a second and saw that I was (as he observed later) “
about to reach nirvana, or apoplexy, or something
”, and he smiled at me' that old familiar
rancid socks & hemiolas
smile I remembered from the road when he'd really liked something I'd just done. As he cued a bass clarinet entrance, I began to have the strange sensation that he was employing the group the way he'd formerly utilized some of those
other
random objects,
to get me off
. When he looked at me again with an expression of utter amusement and
doubled the already inhuman tempo
, it was obvious what he was up to. I'm sure the musicians were entirely oblivious to the situation; if they'd known what was going on, they'd probably have demanded triple performance scale. To this day “RDNZL' remains my single favorite Frank Zappa composition. My only regret was that the whole performance wasn't somehow recordable for posterity.

Due to my perfect attendance record at the rehearsals, it wasn't long before I was nearly as familiar with the music as Frank was, and since I usually showed up at rehearsals about the same time as he did, and he was still pretty immobilized, he started handing me his briefcase and letting me pass out the parts. i felt a bit embarrassed because I was so obviously spending my entire life at those rehearsals, and I was glad to be able to earn my keep any way I could. Frank, of course, was well aware of my embarrassment and was trying to make me feel a little less ridiculous while at the same time making his life easier. Maybe he was reminded of his own days of adolescent orchestral klutziness. I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated being able to hear this stuff on a firsthand basis, how from my point of view it was the equivalent of, say, him being able to stand at Varèise's elbow and watch him working on “Dèsérts” or something. But once or twice, when the chance to say something presented itself, I'd open my mouth and nothing would come out. It wasn't the first time.

My parents finally reached the end of their respective ropes with me. One night my father came home from work and sat down in his easy chair with a grim look on his face. He and my mother had obviously been conferring. I didn't wait for the verdict; I went upstairs, packed all of my clothes in an old suitcase and some brown paper bags, then went down and stuck the stuff in the trunk of my 1962 Ford Fairlane, which I'd recently bought with $150 of the insurance check. Next I got my guitar, amp, and music supplies, and loaded them into the back seat. Finally I came back into the house, went into the den, and told my parents goodbye. My mother turned away without speaking. My father looked as if there was something on his mind, but if there was, he didn't say it. I walked out, feeling like the world was ending but not caring if it did because it was such a shitty place.

I spent the night at a friend's, and the next day dragged into the Temple of the Grand Wazoo feeling disembodied and unreal. Frank kept a watchful eye on me during the rehearsal, and at the end, when I brought back all the parts as usual, he put his hand on my shoulder and observed, “You look like you definitely need to ‘
feature your hurt
. “'

I told him how I'd been kicked out of my folks' house, not explaining that it was because I was too busy attending Wazoo U to get a job — or a life, for that matter.

Frank grimaced and shook his head as if he was trying to clear out a few unpleasant memories of his own. “Well” he said, adopting the
motherly/fatherly stance he had always used when lecturing me on the facts o' life, “maybe we can find you a cubbyhole.”

Puzzled, I asked him where. He said that if I'd give him my solemn promise to leave him alone when he was working, I could stay at his place until I found permanent lodgings elsewhere, There was a specific deadline: the band was heading for a short tour of Europe in less than a month, and I'd have to be out of there by then.

That night I moved — lock, stock, and dirty Levi's — into The Basement. I parked around the corner on a side street, oozed furtively up to the house, and crept through the gate, which was open. The door to the Purple Empire stood open as well. I slunk in. Frank — for whom this was the circadian equivalent of about 9 a.m. — had his elbows propped up on his work table, coffee cup and a sausage, cheese, and pineapple pizza within easy reach, going over a new score. He glanced up. “Shut the door,” he said. “Have some pizza.” Then he went back to work as if I wasn't there.

In the Purple Empire the time passed as if it didn't exist, and truly, it didn't. Frank slept by day and worked by night, and since the windows were covered with heavy shutters, I never was sure what time it was out in the ‘real' world. Sometimes musicians came and rehearsed, and once a very sweet young German fellow arrived to interview Frank for some existential Euro-journal, but mostly it was just Frank, the dog, and me. I had everything in there I needed to live and be happy: Frank, his music, even a bathroom — what reason was there to leave that
helioutropia
and go out where people shot and stabbed each other, where Dick Nixon was about to become President, where you were constantly being menaced by Helen Reddy's giant pulsing uvula...

I noticed that the basement hadn't changed much, if at all, since my audition there a year earlier. It was still so dim that I stumbled whenever I came in from the daylight. There was all the same gear, in essentially the same locations — the Scully four-track tape deck, a mixing board, mikes, amps, an arsenal of guitars, endless shelves full of tapes, Frank's intimidating record collection (which ran to about 10,000 items and was duly filed, headed, sub-headed, cross-referenced, and alphabetized), the
Coffee Works
right next to Frank's work area, and the Bosendorfer eight-foot concert grand. I never got to play it, since when Frank was down there he was working and I couldn't disturb him, and when he was upstairs I always felt a bit diffident about sitting down and launching into, say, George Antheil, or Frank Zappa, although I will admit I contemplated it. (Frank
had once described a
very modern composition
he'd read about someplace: the performance requirements were one grand piano, one not so grand pianist, and a
chainsaw
with which the ivories were to be tickled. “
Not on my piano, you don't!
“)

Once or twice when I was alone in the basement, I crept over to the vast ebony shape, beside myself with lust, and mashed the soft pedal all the way to the floor while squeezing out a couple of apologetic little
ppp
arpeggios, just enough to ascertain that nobody had ever played it long and hard enough to break in the action. The rest of the time, I just had to lie there underneath it, panting and drooling as I suffered delirious fantasies about Frank and I playing the infamous four-handed version of.
Petrouchka
with our clothes off. Hell, I'd even let him take the
primo
part. Unfortunately, my little scenario was impossible in more ways than one: Frank's involvement with keyboard instruments was limited to hunt-and-peck note-picking when he was composing and needed to figure out a melody line that wouldn't fit on the guitar. I couldn't help wondering what he was doing with a 970,000 artist instrument when a $75 spinet would have been just as good, and was reminded of the story about my favorite cellist, Jacqueline Du Pré — in one of her early concerto appearances, some crusty old conductor had listened to her tone and then took her to task: “You have such a beautiful instrument between your legs, my dear but all you do is scratch, scratch, scratch.”

The basement was anything but a monk's austere cell; the walls were festooned with artifacts, including the Fender Stratocaster Jimi Hendrix had burned at the Miami Pop Festival, original storyboards by Cal Schenkel for forthcoming film opuses, sociologically noteworthy correspondence from all over the world, photos and clippings from all phases of Frank's musical history, a rust-pocked hood from what appeared to be a once-green,'39 Chevy, hanging on the wall like a sculpture — and assorted objects which I presumed had
religious significance
to Frank, like a whole plethora of motel room keys: dozens of them,
scores
of them. Looking at them all lined up and glinting diabolically in the purple twilight, I felt my knee start jerking so intensely, I almost keeled over.

Doggus, the family dog, evidently suffered from both gastric and parasitic afflictions; when it wasn't farting, it was scratching fleas and farting. It seemed to like me, probably because it mistook me for a small, occasionally mobile extension of the sofa that was our mutual bed. One afternoon on the, on I was having a vivid nightmare in which The Fiend With No Face was suffocating me with a horrible cloud of poison gas. In my dream I was somehow dying in my sleep, until I regained enough consciousness to recognize, just over my head, the posterior quarters of said canine, which was snoring away, using me as
its
sofa. At that moment I heartily envied Frank his hardcore-smoker's lack of smell.