Kid Gloves (10 page)

My hands went instinctively in such premises to
the racks labelled New Wave & Progressive (that's the old New Wave, of course, not the one
that succeeded punk). I was an anti-connoisseur of most popular music. Dance music, in
particular, I didn't understand at all. Music was to be listened to in stillness, with a little
tapping of the foot if there was no avoiding it. Both feet might be called on in the case of
polyrhythms.

It seems very plausible that we kept Matthew out
of the room, theoretically to protect his innocence but really to reinforce our feeling of being
a corrupt secret society. Almost every lyric on the album was filthy in a way that left the
Beatles in the dust. Sometimes the words were witty, like these from ‘Camarillo Brillo': ‘She
stripped away / her rancid poncho / An' laid out naked by the door / We did it till we were
un-concho / An' it was useless any more …' But usually not.

The doors in the house had 1930s-style locks
which only worked from the inside, little depressed recesses about the size of a thumb that
could be slid across to engage a catch. We were safely locked in. Dad tried the door and when it
failed to yield he gave the knob a theatrical rattling. ‘Tim? Adam? What
are you doing in there?' We weren't doing anything – we weren't smoking cigarettes, for
instance, let alone dope. We were giggling at smut. But by great good fortune Dad entered the
room just at the point when Frank Zappa's relentless campaign of obscenity was taking a break.
It was the long fade-out on a disgraceful song called ‘Dinah-Moe Humm', in which the song's
narrator – which doesn't seem the right word – accepts a bet of forty dollars from a defiantly
unresponsive woman that he won't be able to give her an orgasm. She (the Dinah-Moe Humm of the
title) has in turn bet her sister, also present, an unspecified number of dollars that she (D-M
H) can prove that men are scum. The whole song glories in its woeful crassness. The only lyric I
could make any sort of claim for is ‘Kiss my aura, Dora – it's real angora'. Not Cole Porter, to
be sure, but creditable in the cultural context.

The song winds down at last from its disgraceful
efforts, with Zappa crooning smugly ‘Dinah-Moe … and a Dinah-Moe' on a long fade-out. This
was the point at which Dad entered the room. The air must have been awash with late-adolescent
relief, as well as a trace of our disappointment that no showdown had taken place. Matter and
anti-matter had come within a micron of achieving each other's destruction. Our buried hunger
for confrontation had been thwarted, and the puritan had entered the room just as the smut-hound
was leaving. They hadn't recognized each other.

Even Dad's canny forensic nose couldn't
reconstruct the outrage he had just missed. He joined in with the song on its slow fade-out,
murmuring ‘Dinah-Moe … Dinah-Moe' in his turn and nodding his head in time. As the track
finished he conceded that the song had ‘got something', then left without fuss.

It's a shame he didn't stay
for the next track, ‘Montana', the last on the album, with its daffy lyrics about making a
fortune from raising dental floss. (It added to the song's amusement value that in 1973, along
with most of our compatriots, we had no idea what dental floss was, what benefits it was
supposed to confer.) This at last was filth-free, close to family entertainment – if it hadn't
been, of course, some instinct would have led Dad to stay and we would have had that longed-for,
long-avoided barney after all.

Would we have listened to
Over-Nite
Sensation
so much if Dad's values hadn't been there in the background, begging to be
affronted? Yes, probably, since in those days an album was quite an investment. A new record was
something to be listened to intensively. The lurking suspicion that you had wasted your money
was no excuse for tucking it away behind something you liked better. A new album must have pride
of place on the turntable, played over and over again until it wore a groove in your mind
whether you liked it or not.

Now I'm going to pull back and take a broader
view of this theme of differences of musical taste, somehow sexually charged, between the
generations in the 1960s and '70s. Putting it another way, I'm going to lean on this theme until
it suddenly gives way, rather as engineers test a structural element for tensile and compressive
strength by subjecting it to increasingly powerful forces. The pioneer in this field is the
Kirkcaldy Testing Works, now a museum on Central Street, Southwark (it opens to the public on
the first Sunday of the month). The main testing machine at the museum is close to fifty feet
long and weighs more than a hundred tons, so massive in fact that it was installed first, with
the works then built round it. I'll be working on a smaller scale.

The backing vocals on
Over-Nite
Sensation
were by Zappa's standards both elaborate and well-sung. Normally such vocal
tracks on Mothers of Invention records were done in-house, with band members
contributing cheerfully raucous falsetto. This was the equivalent in sound of the matter-of-fact
dowdy cross-dressing of the Monty Python troupe, hardly intended to convince or confuse.

Even when Zappa recruited a pair of vocalists who
had previously sung mellifluously enough with The Turtles, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, the
results were on the scrappy side. Since Zappa was such a perfectionist about other aspects of
performance, this must have been the way he liked it. The pair of ex-Turtles were billed as ‘The
Phlorescent Leech & Eddie' (later ‘Flo & Eddie'), not so much a musical development as a
legal requirement, since they had signed away the right to put their real names on marquees or
album covers. It was legitimate for them to be credited in the small print.

If Dad and I had unstable layers in our sexual
ideology at this time, areas of painful inconsistency, which we may not have admitted to
ourselves, then perhaps the same was true of Frank Zappa also, however fierce his commitment to
a cynicism as rancid as the lady's poncho in ‘Camarillo Brillo'. The Mothers of Invention
catalogue is defiantly short on the love song, so much a staple of popular music that popular
music could hardly exist without it. Even song titles – ‘My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama',
‘Penis Dimension', ‘Uncle Meat', ‘Penguin in Bondage' – seem to jeer or snarl.

Zappa includes wholesome feelings only to
travesty them, and yet he can't seem to leave them alone. There comes a time when even the most
sympathetic listener must start to doubt his bad faith. A year or two before
Over-Nite
Sensation
the Mothers released, and I bought, a live album called
Fillmore East – June
1971
. I was baffled by the grubby artwork, not realizing (never having seen a bootleg
disc) that this authorized recording was pretending to be one. It's the last record I
remember having to listen to on the sitting-room stereogram at Gray's Inn,
before the first tentative step towards the privatization of music represented by the record
player in the bedroom. Up to this point music had been social and shared, for better or worse,
but now it became individual, or conspiratorial, as a matter of course, and any overlap between
listening groups became problematic.

The only music of mine that I remember Dad being
unable to stand, even when played at low volume as far away from him as the small size of the
Anglesey house would allow, was Steve Reich's
Drumming
. He said he couldn't think or do
any work while it was playing. It disrupted analytical brain function at an almost neurological
level. It's possible that Reich would be pleased with this experimental result.

Much of the material on
Fillmore East – June
1971
is continuous with its predecessor
200 Motels
, meaning that the obscenity is
wearing and relentless, but Zappa is too much of a showman to stake everything on the sourly
grubby. So to balance ‘Bwana Dik' (sample lines: ‘My dick is a Harley / You kick it to start')
comes the Turtles' ‘Happy Together', played for laughs by the original vocalists, Kaylan and
Volman, but still offering the sweetness of a pop tune and a couple of choruses sung
a
cappella
. The album ends with a Zappa original, ‘Tears Began To Fall', whose up-tempo
jauntiness is at odds with the self-pitying lyrics: ‘Tears began to fall and fall and fall /
Down the shirt / 'Cause I feel so hurt / Since my baby drove away …'

One version of the lyrics available on the
Internet gives the trajectory of those tears as ‘down the church', but although being left at
the altar is a hardy trope of the heartbroken ballad, I go with ‘shirt', which makes better
sense and even rhymes. The poor sap is so pole-axed by sorrow that he doesn't have the nous to
wipe his eyes.

How many times can you parody
sentiment before you admit that it affects you? A whole lot of times, if you're Frank Zappa. In
1968 he released an entire album of doo-wop,
Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets
, which
may have been poking fun (at a genre long out of fashion, and what's the point of that?) but
also committed to vinyl some of the earliest songs he had written. On
Chunga's Revenge
the most attractive music is the instrumental ‘Twenty Small Cigars', but the most beguiling song
is certainly ‘Sharleena', expressing the emotions of another goofy dude amazed to be deserted by
a woman, asking her friends for news of her and crooning in pre-feminist cluelessness that he
would be ‘so delighted' if they ‘sent her back' to him. Just as
Fillmore East
was a
pseudo-bootleg, ‘Sharleena' is a pseudo-parody, really just a homage in denial about its own
sincerity.

I realize that conversations between Dad and
Frank Zappa, who never met, were never likely to be intimate or sparkling, but knowing what I
know now I feel I could have steered them onto safe territory. Dad may not have been a fan of
doo-wop as such, but he was mad keen on the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, vocal groups of
the previous period who had a certain amount of influence on the genre.

Male vocals are one of the genre requirements of
doo-wop (along with nonsense lyrics, close harmony and the prominence of falsetto), so it could
be taken as a step away from the disputed territory of parody and pastiche for Zappa to hire
women to sing on
Over-Nite Sensation
. But I'm not sure it worked out that way.

The singers booked weren't exactly small time.
They were the Ikettes, Ike Turner's backing singers, and Tina Turner was part of the package.
The vocal parts were tricky and took time to master. She may not have been the quickest learner
(compared to Linda Sims and Debbie Wilson), but
Tina was proud of her work
on these tracks and wanted Ike to hear them.

He wasn't impressed, asking ‘What is this shit?',
and took the Ikettes' name off the album credits. Ike Turner's reputation hasn't exactly soared
over the years, and it seems uncontroversial to say he was not the helpmeet and business manager
most people would choose.

His negotiating position when approached by Zappa
was strange in itself, since he didn't want the singers paid more than $25 a track. Most
negotiators with their eye on profit stipulate a floor rather than a ceiling to the auction, but
he clearly considered it important to keep Tina's status in the marketplace low, throwing her in
as a bonus with the backing singers who were presumably recruited in the first place to back
her. The deal between Turner and Zappa, Ike and Frank, was a strange confluence of negativity. A
businessman who didn't want his wife to know her true worth was signing a contract with another
who prided himself on his cheapness in everything. Zappa aimed with the help of a world-class
vocalist, her services acquired well below market rates, to give vocal depth and lustre to songs
about the low inherent value of women, though this was not of course what I heard in 1973.

Danger! The heavy rhetorical superstructure is
bringing this conceit close to collapse. It's all going a bit Tay Bridge. Time to underpin the
whole ramshackle edifice with stanchions of properly reinforced personal material.

If Dad had confronted me, or us, with this
scatological wallowing, pointing out how sickening it was, with its reliance on our complicity
in its degradation of women, what would I, or we, have said? Never mind that he lacked a
feminist vocabulary. He was by generation a sexist but hardly misogynistic. Family life didn't
require him to show his ideological
colours more clearly by calling on him
to shape the future of a female child – there are adjustments that fathers without daughters
don't have to make. The sensible thing would have been to play for time, pointing out that the
two of the Mothers' albums from the previous year,
Waka/Jawaka
and
The Grand
Wazoo
, came as close to big-band revivalism as avant-garde progressive rock could
reasonably be expected to get.

Then I would probably have said, ‘You just don't
get it,' delivered with an attempt at scornful finality – so much easier to pronounce, as a
sentence, than its more truthful cousins,
I just don't get it. I don't get how free speech
and censorship can both be so … nasty
. If I didn't want to be protected, then it was
a mystery how I was going to avoid being degraded myself.

When arguments of this sort loomed with Dad I
held tight to my trump card, which was probably why relatively few of them were fully played
out. Dad had an acute tactical sense of when an opponent had a secret weapon, so that it might
be wise to hold his fire. And what was my secret weapon? Only that Dad had a copy of
The
Godfather
on the bookshelves in his study, which fell open at a grotesquely sexual passage
on page 26. Cheap paperbacks blab, they spill every secret. Only a respectable quality of
binding keeps its counsel, discreet about which pages have been most urgently consulted, exactly
where the reader's lowest self has been worked on. I was armed against any attack from Dad. Let
him who is without smut cast the first stone.