8/13/2023 0 Comments Jimi hendrix killing floor wikiAnd anybody who expected to remain in his orbit would have to come second to that.Īsk anyone now, nearly 20 years after his death from prostate cancer in 1993, who Frank Zappa was and they might describe any number of people. But then Frank Zappa neither lived his life nor made his music to please 'most people'. Nor, a cynic might add, was the music he composed. He would raise his head from his desk or the piano and think about what you had said to him, and give you a very short, swift answer to make it clear that you were not welcome."Īs Zappa told an early interviewer: "The lifestyle that I have is probably neither desirable nor useful to most people." And from the minute he got up to the minute he went to bed, he would be working. "He made it very clear he shouldn't be interrupted if he was working. Pauline Butcher, Frank's former secretary, speaking from her home in Singapore, recalls her boss as a formidable man. And, as he explains in his semi-autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book: A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians." For he is not just any rock musician, but a composer. Nothing must keep Gail's husband from his work. … I mean, it sounds insane, but those things had to be done. I did the laundry that way too! I'd have Moon on one hip and laundry on the other. "I went right out the back door with my thumb out and went down to the market. If we had to get groceries, I hitchhiked," she says. The hardest part, though, is that Gail can't just drive to the store to buy food. The stove is on a platform so high that she has to reach up to put on the frying pan. Going into the kitchen, where there is no floor ("I don't know what happened, it just disappeared!"), Gail hunts for whatever food might be left to make breakfast. Oh, and a rock'n'roll band would arrive in the middle of the night and just walk in there were no locks on the door. "One time I said to Frank: 'That guy's been here for three days and I don't even know who he is!' He said: 'Don't worry about it.' Then you'd run into Miss Mercy with a stick of butter peeled like a banana that she'd just be eating. "Life was complete chaos," she recalls now. The only person up at this hour is Zappa's 23-year-old wife, Gail, who tiptoes around the bodies with their eight-month-old baby daughter, Moon Unit, under her arm. Then there are those non-residents, famous and not-so, sleeping in various nooks and crannies, or just stretched out in front of the huge stone fireplace, beneath the 14-candle chandelier. As are most of the other people who share the house with him: his English secretary Pauline Butcher, his former girlfriend Pamela Zarubica, his recording engineer Dick Kunc, designer Cal Schenkel, tour manager Dick 'Snork' Barber, and Mothers Of Invention band members Ian Underwood and Jim 'Motorhead' Sherwood. Outside, finches and sparrows are chirping and the sun is burning off the first-light smog inside, though, the atmosphere is still blinded and dark, the air choking with cigarette smoke.Īs usual, Zappa has been up all night working at the piano and desk that dominate the enormous main living area, swivelling in his chair from desk to piano and back again as he composes his masterpieces, one after the other, while guzzling strong black coffee and chain-smoking the cigarettes that have been his only drugs since he was 11 years old. May 1968: early morning in the sprawling, 18-room log cabin on the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Drive where the famous 'freak-out' artist Frank Zappa lives. The Mothers of Invention in Germany, 1968.
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