Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (10 page)

Right around this time, Gail also had a date with the cosmos. "Somehow I made a conscious decision to take acid so I could see what everybody was talking about. It wasn't illegal; people were still putting it on sugar cubes and keeping it on trays in the refrigerator. So I dropped acid. When I tried to draw a face, the eyelashes kept moving, then they wouldn't move. It was interesting because I came to grips, in a small way, with what I thought I thought I knew about thinking." Whoa. I tell Gail to let me take a few deep breaths and a long sip of tea, so I can think about thinking about how to digest that thought process.

"I had to take it one more time to see if that was a legitimate evaluation, and the conclusion I came to was, if you think you're going to have a paranoid experience, you can have one. I believe acid did the opposite of what everyone said, which was expanding your consciousness. Instead, it allowed you to narrow your focus in a specific and refined way. If you see one thing clearly, no matter how small it is, everything is contained there. It's a map of the entire universe. It was as deep as you allowed yourself to go. In that way it felt like an expansion of consciousness simply because you were looking at something intently and observing it in a way you never had before. The problem, however, was that you didn't have control over that, and under the influence, your response was limited by time and a fading of intensity. But I did feel I was beginning to get the plot. There were no rules because you were taking huge risks, but you were so young that you didn't think of them as risks. Somebody had been telling you all along that you can't do this and you shouldn't do that or these things might happen. Suddenly you realized there never was anyone else. It was always what you chose to believe about what was presented to you. So I said, `Fuck that, I never have to listen to anybody again.'"

In this emancipated state, twenty-one-year-old Gail Sloatman would finally meet her teenage poem's promised reward. A friend took her and Anya to an impromptu meeting in Laurel Canyon where she got her first glimpse of her very near future. "The front door opened, and standing in the door frame was this completely stoned girl. The story was that Jim Morrison was in one bedroom and Van Morrison was in the other, and she was trying to take care of them both. Everybody was supposedly smoking pot or dropping acid at that end of the house, and at this end of the house it was all business. It was Frank's house and just having a look at him caught my breath and I had a moment with him. I thought, `This is something completely different; this is the most unusual person I've ever seen.' Anya was terrified and said, `I've gotta get out of here!' I knew she was completely paranoid, so we had to leave. I mean, Frank just didn't look like a normal human being in any way-certainly he was, but he had a very intense and stern countenance. The way I think about meeting Frank that first time was like an inoculation that didn't quite take."

The next time she saw this intense fellow, Gail was running an errand for Elmer. "I had to do all the deposits for the Whisky, and I was in line at the bank when I saw Frank in another line. I left my line and walked right behind him, and probably looked like an idiot because I walked up to him three fucking times and didn't have the nerve to speak to him."

An oddball chick who worked with Gail at the Whisky surprised her one afternoon. "She was one of those girls with long, straight hair, always flipping it around in her hands, huffing and puffing every time she walked by. I never thought she liked me because she always seemed to be evaluating me. One day she started staring at me, so I thought, `Well, I can play this game,' and stared back. I knew it was going to be about who blinked first-it was that stupid-so rather than blink, she said, `Okay, I'd like you to come over to my house for dinner,' and that broke the ice with her. When Gail walked into the house on Kirkwood to the smell of sizzling lamb chops, she realized she had been there very recently. The huffy girl was Pamela Zarubica, the voice of Suzy Creamcheese, and her roommate was Frank Zappa. "We hadn't even finished dinner when the phone rang, and it was Frank. He wanted to be picked up at the airport because his promo tour had been cut short. Pamela said, `He told me not to bring anyone, but we're going to the airport.' I remember thinking it was her intention to hook us up. So I went to the airport and it was all history after that."

Since I've never heard the romantic beginnings of my fave rock couple, I listen with rapt appreciation. "I was simply standing there and he walked over and made this gesture-to put his briefcase down between my feet. I refused to back up, so I had to move my legs apart. He put it down right between them so the handle was in line with my ankle-bones. I was standing there with this briefcase between my legs and he was really close to me; we were nose-to-nose, and he said, `You're cute!' And that was it. My vaccination."

Did they both know that this was it? "Well, we went back to the house and he didn't say much, just talked about the tour. At one point, Pamela said, `I'm going to sleep in your bed so you guys can have mine.' She had a double bed and Frank's was a single. Then she offered me a little black slip to wear. Frank was tired from traveling and we just crawled into bed and snuggled up, but absolutely nothing happened. He was a perfect gentleman."

Was she at all nervous to find herself in the sack with her fait accompli? "Yeah, I was nervous, but you can be nervous and comfortable at the same time. The next morning I woke up, and landing back in my body, realized where I was, and thought, `Oh God, I think he's awake.' I rolled over and the pillow was like a mountain. All I could see was this one eye, wide open, over the edge of the pillow, looking right at me. I heard my voices saying, 'OK, this is it, and if you do not accept this, you'll never hear from us again.'"

Did Mr. Zappa know he had met his cosmic match? "I never knew that-I didn't know for years, then I read an interview where he said that when he met me it was love at first sight. It's such a corny thing to say-something you would never expect him to say, but he did have his way with cliches."

And how did this budding rock and roll liason progress? "I knew Frank was the one that morning, but nothing happened. Then he called and asked me out on an actual date three days hence. After the Lenny Bruce eulogy, our next date was a gig. I remember I had to stop at the Whisky to run in and get Frank's amplifier. I was trying to drag this giant thing out the front door, and Mario wasn't helping me. He grabbed my shirt and yelled, `You're not wearing a bra!"

Did the Zappa romance start out divinely? Was their chemistry irrepressible and obvious? Did they know right away that they would be together forever? "I think we both knew we had the makings for a great relationship, but we were babies and didn't know how to do it yet. Frank was twenty-five and I was just twenty-one. But yes, there was a real conscious effort to make it something exceptional. I was recently on a press junket with Dweezil and Ahmet. During the interviews, a couple of times the question came up: `What was it like, growing up with Frank Zappa?' I had to jump in and say, `They didn't grow up with Frank Zappa-I did!' And it's true!"

While I have the opportunity, I ask Gail to share some allimportant tips on how she made her rock and roll marriage work for so long. So listen up, dolls.

"I always believed we were so convinced we were communicating that it worked out that we were. Looking back, it's actually possible that we had no fucking clue, and just thought we were totally in sync because we avoided having conversations about a lot of things. When people ask, `What did you talk about?' I always say, `I can tell you we didn't talk about mortgages, ever."' It always seemed to me that Gail and Frank had such an amazing connection. Didn't they ever discuss "serious matters"? Gail raises her eyebrows knowingly, and shakes her head, "Never. That would be the most dangerous thing that could possibly happen. We never made `decisions' together. He was an artist: he did what he had to do and I did whatever I could to make it easier for him. I made a conscious effort to keep everything mundane out of his way and out of his path so he didn't have to deal with that crap. I figured if he was going to put a roof over my head and I got the benefit of that, the least I could do was spare him ordinary details. I'm not gonna try to say I knew what he was doing or even how to do what he was doing."

Does Gail mean she didn't claim to understand what was going on inside his excessively creative mind? "Yes. That's what he did. And that's what I found fascinating to the very end: here's a guy who does that stuff, and however he does that, it is way different than my experience."

Having lived with the Zappa family on and off for a few years, I think a lot of the magic I saw between Frank and Gail was that she did spare him from trips to Ralphs market and other trivialities of life. "Oh yes," she agrees. "Bad things could happen at Ralphs." I tell her that this chapter might be seen as a manual for would-be groupies. "Whenever I've had to answer questions in forms that ask, `What is your profession?' I'd always write `professional wife.' I never, ever put `housewife,' or `wife,' on a form, because it is a fucking job and you can do it well or you can do it not so well."

I surmise that certain genius artists-Picasso, Shakespeare, or Mozart perhaps-were most likely not regular guys and therefore couldn't be expected to function at their highest ability while having to fiddle with mundane day-to-dayness. Gail chuckles, "It was really more about if he didn't get to do what he wanted to do, bad things would happen. I just never stood in the way. I had seen his frustration with the business side of things, and said to myself, `Don't think you're going to help him in business. He's gonna make choices, he'll have to figure it out for himself, and nothing you say is going to change that.' The other thing I realized was: don't be part of the problem that stands in his way-in terms of him getting his work done."

I remind Gail that I have long considered her to be as astutely brilliant as her spectacular husband was in her very own way. "I can't drink to that," she laughs. "There's curds and there's whey, you know what I'm saying?"

Something inexplicable between Frank and Gail definitely worked. There were times I had to put pillows over my head to get some shut-eye while they went at it. Deep down I hoped that someday I'd have such a delightfully loud sex life. "Really?" Gail says, slightly shocked, "I'm so sorry. I had no idea! That's the thing, sex doesn't get different, it just gets better."

Even with all that love and understanding, Frank was on the road a lot and had his own fervid groupies. How did Gail deal with that niggling little detail? "Well everyone had groupies. I mean, you couldn't get around them. There are certain aspects that were not easy and not fun, and it's not like you could be consoled or cry on his shoulder over it. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Was there ever a time when she thought about leaving Frank? "I never thought about leaving him because of another woman, but I did think about leaving him because sometimes it was way too much. When we were at the log cabin, I did leave." What?? I am stunned. She actually fled their idyllic Laurel Canyon sanctuary? "Yeah, I just said, `I've had enough,' and walked out one day. I wrote Frank a note in lipstick on the upstairs bathroom mirror so only he could see it, took the baby, and got on a plane. We had become a crash pad! Anybody could live there at any time, there were no locks on any doors, and Moon and I were not a priority. It felt dangerous for me and my munchkin. What you didn't know was that I had no means of transportation; I had to hitchhike to do the laundry. I had to put my thumb out on Laurel Canyon Boulevard to go to the fucking grocery store. There wasn't even a proper floor in the kitchen. Nobody had any time. And then they'd say, `How come there's no food in the house?' Well, I don't know, why don't you ask Mercy?"

Has Gail noticed any difference in the groupie scene through the years? "There's always going to be groupies for this art form or that art form. Think about how many groupies there were for a guy in a uniform during the war! I happen to be very partial to real rock 'n' roll; what they're calling `rock' now pales. It's not even a substitute. Just like original rock will never be that way again, there were people who were interested in musicians in a different way."

I was never ashamed of being a groupie. I bask and revel in the glorious, twangy odes that my songwriter boyfriend, Mike Stinson, writes for me, and I still consider myself a muse.

"I think those of us who were in service to the music-we were vestal virgins," Gail says. "But you have to realize that vestal virgins were not actually virgins, they were just unfettered by other restraints, totally devoted and in service to whoever it was that they were reserving themselves for. My observations tell me that the early groupie movement was part of a huge shift in consciousness: part of an awareness that was impossible to ignore. Whether it was a nasty sound on the guitar, or what the lyrics said, the people making that music were telling you that everything you suspected about the world you were entering was true. Rock musicians were saying there is an alternative-there is another way to think about things."

I tell Gail that I believe Bob Dylan, my absolute hero, heralded that much-needed shift in consciousness. "Well, I didn't think of Dylan in the sense of hard-core rock and roll, but I did recognize that he was changing what I thought of as an art form. I knew the origin of the songs that people around him in the New York folk scene were singing and writing about. Some were seriously interested in the history behind it and others were performing pop music. Peter, Paul, and Mary were singing traditional folk music, but with Dylan there was a big difference. What he was writing about was totally consistent with the huge shift in consciousness. In that sense he was as much rock and roll as anybody in rock and roll. I remember when I first got to Hollywood, I went to a huge party in the hills. There were big, giant open doors that led out onto a wide balcony. I stepped out to look around, and there was nobody out there. I was alone, standing at this balustrade, and it was a beautiful, beautiful night. I was in California and I thought, `This is fantastic.' As I turned around and headed for the door, this guy came around the corner. It was Bob Dylan and I knew it was Bob Dylan. I thought he was so beautiful. I mean, he was just exquisite, as we all were back then. The dilemma was, `Do I just stop in my tracks and let him pass?' because, you know, it's Bob Dylan. But I just kept on walking and we looked at each other in that moment and he said, `Hello: I can't even describe this perfect Southern California evening-there you are and there he is. Bob Dylan says hello to you and then you just walk on. .