Song 185: “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Andrew Hickey

This episode explores Frank Zappa's transition from The Mothers of Invention to becoming an independent artist and label owner, focusing on

Key takeaways

• Zappa's dissatisfaction with his first album 'Freak Out' led him to seek creative control over his music and label.
• The formation of Zappa's independent record labels was a pivotal moment in rock history, enabling artistic freedom and diverse musical experimentation.

Main topics

• Frank Zappa's artistic evolution from The Mothers of Invention
• The formation of independent record labels by rock musicians

Notable quotes

"This should be a very dynamite show." – Speaker 3

Conclusion

Frank Zappa's journey from band leader to independent artist and label owner marked a turning point in rock

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey. Song 185 Peaches and Regalia by Frank Zappa. Before we begin, this episode, surprisingly given the artist in question, has fewer content warnings than most. However, it does feature discussion of songs that mention incest, and quotes one line of lyric referring to underage sex. While other than that there is little to warn people about in the episode itself, including in the musical clips, it's worth mentioning that listening to the full songs discussed, for example by listening to the playlist associated with the episode, might be disturbing for some people. There is also some mention of drug use, and some brief mentions of war atrocities in clips of songs which discuss police violence. Now, on with the show. This episode is the second of three episodes, all of which are linked and all of which discuss, in one way or another, bizarre and straight records. Those labels are among the first to be owned and run by a rock musician, as they were set up by Frank Zappa and his manager Herb Cohen. Though, as we say, there is no first anything, and they came after the Beatles' Apple Records and the Beach Boys' Brother label. But unlike most rock star vanity labels, they released a lot of interesting and important material. in a whole variety of genres. Last time we looked at one of the least known artists on those labels, which, despite having two names, rarely operated as a single company. Next time, we're going to look at probably the most artistically important artist to record for them. This time, we're going to look at the career of Zappa himself in this period, at the clashes with his previous label that led him to set up his own company, and at the making of what is still for many his greatest album, Hot Rats. Speaker 3 (1:49) The way I see it, Barry... This should be a very dynamite show. Speaker 1 (2:09) When we left the Mothers of Invention back in 1966, they had just released their first album, Freak Out, on Verve Records, and, indeed, as a result of that release, had been forced to change their name from just The Mothers to The Mothers of Invention, as the label disliked the possible interpretations that could be put on the shorter name. That wasn't the only thing that Frank Zappa disliked about that album. He was unhappy with it even before it was released, because side four... a long avant-garde percussion instrumental, was, according to Zappa, intended to be merely the percussion part of a more extensive and complicated piece of music, but it was released unfinished. And while the album was praised on its release, at least by the more forward-thinking critics and listeners, by the time it came out it also no longer really reflected the music that the Mothers played live. Even before the album was released, there had been a line-up change. Elliot Ingber, the rhythm guitarist, was very fond of smoking dope and taking acid, something which Zappa not only didn't indulge in but didn't approve of, seeing it as a kind of weakness. Ingber was turning up to shows increasingly stoned, and was, according to some band members, even falling asleep in the middle of performances. The final straw, apparently, was when Ingber turned up to one show on acid and played through the whole show without realising that his amplifier was turned off. After his dismissal, Ingber went on to form a group called the Fraternity of Man. whose most well-known song is the one that got included on the soundtrack to Easy Rider, Don't Bogart Me, a song which suggests the reasoning behind Ingvars Sleking was largely correct. Don't Speaker 3 (3:43) bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over to me. Don't bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over to me. Roll another one. Speaker 3 (4:13) The Speaker 1 (4:14) last thing they think were played on with the mothers is a real oddity. It's hard to express just how big the Batman TV show was in 1966, and everyone seemed to be trying to cash in on it, including musically. As we heard a few episodes ago, the Who recorded the Batman theme. Jan and Dean did an entire concept album based around the series. Speaker 1 (5:37) And even Sun Ra made an album of Batman-themed instrumentals in a one-off studio band consisting of Ra and some of his orchestra's sax players, along with several members of the Blues Project, performing under the name The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale. Speaker 1 (6:24) That album had been produced by the mother's producer, Tom Wilson, and Wilson was clearly invested in the idea of making a Batman hit. He actually got Burt Ward, the actor who played Robin in the series, signed to Verve, and produced a single for him with Zappa arranging, and with the mothers, augmented by orchestral session musicians, as his backing band. They recorded over two sessions. The first produced the B-side, a version of the old standard orange-coloured sky. chosen because the Wham Bam Alakazam line was reminiscent of the Biff Bam Pow overlays that would appear in the TV show. Speaker 1 (7:29) But after that session, and the revelation that Ward was possibly not the world's greatest singer, the plan shifted, and while Ward was given singing lessons just in case his record took off, the A-side was written so that Ward would only have to speak, not sing. Zappa wrote the track, and you can already see the ambiguous fascination with female fandom that would lead to him producing the GTO's album we heard about last episode. Even Speaker 3 (7:52) as a boy wonder, it's really hard to read all the tons of mail I get. Here is a happy letter from someone just about your age. Dear, cute, wonderful, fabulous, magnificent, exquisite boy wonder. A cold chill runs up my spine every time I see you suck a villain. And oh, how I cry when you're even scratched. Speaker 3 (8:20) Please don't send me a mimeographed copy of Interesting Facts About You. Speaker 1 (8:24) Ingber leaving the group kicked off a number of other line-up changes in a very short period of time, though always around the core of Ray Collins on vocals, Frank Zappa on guitar, Roy Estrada on bass, and Jimmy Carl Black on drums. Van Dyke Parks either returned to the band on keyboards or joined for the first time, depending on which of the convoluted sources you read, but didn't remain long enough to be heard on any recordings. Another musician who didn't stay long enough to be recorded was Denny Bruce. Jimmy Carl Black was a great drummer, but he was a great R &B drummer, and not a great technical musician. Zappa respected his musicianship enough to want to keep him in the band, but wanted to augment him with other drummers or percussionists more fluent in the kind of complex time signatures and polyrhythms that Zappa was now writing. Bruce was brought in as a second drummer for a few months, but developed mononucleosis and was unable to continue. so he was replaced with Billy Mundy. Mundy was a former timpanist for the LA Philharmonic, who had become a session player, playing with Van Dyke Parks, guitarist Larry Beckett, and Jim Fielder, who was a bass player, on the first album by Tim Buckley, who shared a manager with the Mothers. Speaker 1 (10:05) Mundy had also briefly been a member of a band called The Lamp of Childhood, formed around Jim Hendrix, Cass Elliott's former husband who we heard about performing with her and Tim Rose as the Big Three, and who had been in the mugwumps with Elliott, Denny Doherty, John Sebastian and Zalianowski. Mundy left The Lamp of Childhood after their first single, a cover of Donovan's Season of the Witch. Speaker 1 (10:58) Along with Mundy came a new keyboard player, who had actually been associated with Zappa longer than anyone in the band except Collins, and would go on to be the band's longest serving member, playing with the Mothers off and on until 1974. Don Preston was from a completely different musical world than the original members of the Mothers, having his roots in jazz and experimental music. Preston had grown up in a musical family. His father was a trumpet and sax player who was an arranger for the house band for the local NBC affiliate in Detroit where he was raised. But it was when he joined the army that he first started to really grow as a musician. Stationed in Germany, he was placed in the army band, which at the time included the great jazz flautist Herbie Mann. Speaker 1 (12:11) At the time, Preston was a moderately competent piano player, and he also soon took up the bass. But as he said later, Herbie Mann was very helpful when I first started playing. I didn't even know what a bridge was, and after I learned what a bridge was, I promptly forgot them a number of times. The other big connection he made during his army days was with his roommate, a trumpet player named Buzz Gardner, who taught Preston about modern classical and experimental music, particularly Berg, Webern and Schoenberg. Festum was learning about all this difficult music, while simultaneously playing odd gigs with pick-up bands, where he'd play either piano or bass. This gave him enough experience that by the time he left the army in 1953, he was good enough to play bass with Elvin Jones, the great jazz drummer who would later go on to great fame with John Coltrane's quartet. Jones was leading late-night sessions, which would feature soloists like Yusuf Latif, Kenny Burrell and Pepper Adams. And these sets would be so long that Jones' normal bass player, Ollie Jackson, would get too tired to play after about four hours, at which point Preston would take over for the rest of the night. For most of the 50s, Preston was primarily a bass player, playing live dates with Shorty Rogers, Nat King Cole, Nelson Riddle and others. Towards the end of the 50s, he formed his own band, A-Ha, which stood for Athletic Harmony Assemblage, and was definitely not the later Norwegian pop band of a similar name, which included Paul Beaver. Beaver was already starting to get interested in the electronic musical instruments which would lead, as we've heard in other episodes, to him becoming the world's first session Moog player. And yes, in this case there is a first for this very specific job, because he started it when the number of Moogs in existence was in single digits. It's Beaver playing, for example, on Star Collector by the Monkees, Cool Cool Water by the Beach Boys, and Going Back by the Birds. Speaker 1 (15:34) Among many, many, many other records. At the time that Preston knew him, Beaver was a tinkerer and had a home studio full of exotic keyboard and electronic instruments, which inspired Preston to return to playing keyboards and to start building his own synthesizer, which by 1966 he had done, a year before Moogs came on the market. Preston had moved to LA in the early 60s, and not long after he'd gone back to being primarily a keyboard player, he had met Frank Zappa. who was in 1962 or 63 putting together a guitar, sax, organ trio to play clubs. Preston had joined this trio on organ, but according to Preston it only lasted as long as the audition, when their music was deemed unsuitable by the club manager. Preston says that one of the songs they played at the audition was the instrumental piece that would later become the Mothers of Invention song, Oh No. Speaker 1 (16:55) Over the next few years though, Zappa and Preston would get together and play experimental music, improvising to abstract images projected onto a screen, along with Buzz Gardner and Buzz's younger brother Bunk. This went on for a year or two, in parallel with Zappa's other activities of playing R &B music with bar bands, and making knock-off surf records with Paul Buff. Preston didn't see Zappa for a year or two, and then found out that Zappa had formed the band that became The Mothers. Zappa invited Preston to audition for the band, but quickly discovered that Preston was not yet familiar enough with rock or R &B music to be a mother. Preston's knowledge of modern classical music and free jazz was all well and good. and exactly the kind of thing Zappa loved. But he also needed someone who was able to just play Louie Louie and other thuggish three-chord garage band staples with the requisite enthusiasm and feel. And Preston wasn't there yet, so he went away and spent a year playing with other rock bands, learning the music. And then, when Van Dyke Parks left the Mothers, Preston was invited to audition again, and this time was successful. Joining this line-up as Ingber's replacement was Del Casha. Casher was a very, very seasoned guitarist who had been playing sessions for many years. He was older than many of the rest of the mothers, having been born in 1937. Like Preston, he was something of a tinkerer and inventor. He had been inspired by Les Paul to invent various early echo devices to augment his playing, and he had been a professional musician since the 50s. He played on the Lawrence Welk show in 1959, and a few years later on Gene Autry's Melody Ranch. Speaker 1 (19:30) It's difficult to talk more precisely about Cash's career, because in his interviews he's frustratingly vague about what he did and didn't play on, in ways that, in general, make him sound rather more important than he actually was. Which is particularly annoying as he was in fact, as we just heard, an incredibly accomplished guitarist and banjo player, and did have a number of very real achievements. But, for example, in interviews he will talk a lot about playing guitar with Elvis in the film Roustabout. in ways that make it sound like Casher played on the soundtrack. In fact, Casher was just chosen to mime guitar in the film, the actual tracks having been played by Scotty Moore, Billy Strange, Barney Kessel and Tiny Tim Prell. He also talks about having been a member of the Wrecking Crew, and talks vaguely about sessions he played on for Phil Spector, Sonny Bono and others. I'm sure he did play on some sessions for some of those people, but I haven't been able to find any confirmation of which ones. and I've never seen his name on any AFM sheets for any sessions I've looked at. There's no official membership of the Wrecking Crew. Like the Nashville A-Team, it's an informal name given to the people who are always called as the first or second choice to play at a lot of the same sessions as each other. And while Kasher may have played on some Wrecking Crew sessions, he would have been a long way down the list of guitarists called on. Just off the top of my head, guitarists who were regularly called on for Wrecking Crew sessions were Tommy Tedesco, Al Casey, Jerry Cole, Mike Deasy, Billy Strange, James Burton, Glen Campbell, Barney Kessel and Louis Shelton. So it's difficult to say much about Kasher, because most of the information we have about him comes from his own interviews, and I don't think he's reliable enough to take his words as straight fact. But that's not to take away from his musicianship, which, as we've heard, was spectacular. Don Preston agreed, saying in an interview later, Zappa always had another guitar player because at that time he couldn't play guitar very well, so he always had a really good guitar player in the early group like Henry Vestine and Elliot Ingber. Even when I joined the band there was some guy, I don't know who it was to this day, but he had like lightning fingers. That's certainly evident on the one surviving live recording of this line-up of the group, released very recently. Speaker 1 (22:16) But Preston also said he was very, very straight-looking and he really didn't fit with the band. He didn't really know any of us and we never got to know him, so he disappeared real fast. That was happening a lot with the early mothers. Speaker 2 (22:28) Ah, let's Speaker 1 (22:29) see. Speaker 2 (22:29) Oh, and we keep changing personnel, though. You've got to understand that our band is constantly in flux because most of them can't stand to play in the band. They really hate what they're doing. They hate to work for me and they don't like their manager at all. So we keep firing people all the time. We fired a couple of guys last week and we keep putting new ones in. And so constantly the band keeps changing sounds because we never know. Kasia Speaker 1 (22:58) was replaced by Jim Fielder. who was, as we have established, a bass player, but switched to rhythm guitar when he joined the Mothers. Fielder was a friend of Jimmy Carl Black's, the two of them having worked in the same music shop. But while Kasha's tenure in the group was very brief, and he never recorded with them, his time in the band did make a huge difference to rock and roll music history. One of the jobs Kasha had at the time was playing in a promotional band for Vox Amplifiers, and he was an advisor on developing new equipment. and one of the things he was involved in in some way was the development of the wah-wah pedal. This is a contentious area, with three different people having claimed to be the one who came up with the idea, all telling plausible stories, but Kasher was definitely involved in developing it in some way, and he made the first ever recordings with the wah-wah in February 1967 for a cardboard demo disc that was sent out to retailers. Speaker 2 (23:56) By rocking the foot back and forth, we get the wah-wah effect. Speaker 2 (24:04) The same applies for chords. The wah-wah pedal lets you go from mellow rhythm to sharp lead, quickly and all without dropping a beat. Speaker 1 (24:25) Casher was still in touch with Zapper when the pedal was being developed, and depending on what you read, he either gave Zapper one, or evangelised about it enough that Zapper bought one as soon as they came on the market, when they were still primarily being marketed to horn players. Zapper started using it immediately as his effective choice. A month later, Zapper met up and jammed with Eric Clapton, who immediately got his own pedal, and used it on Cream's Tales of Brave Ulysses. Speaker 1 (25:22) And over summer 1967, Zappa also spent time with Hendrix and introduced him to the wah-wah pedal, which Hendrix took to even more than Zappa had. Speaker 1 (25:56) So it's very likely that Del Cash's brief time in The Mothers of Invention, a period so brief that for decades Zapper fans argued about if he had even lasted as long as a single gig, changed the sound of rock guitar forever. The big change in The Mothers' sound, though, came with the addition of Bunk Gardner, the brother of Don Preston's army bunkmate Buzz. Bunk Gardner is a serious multi-instrumentalist who plays saxophone, flute, clarinet, bassoon and piano. and, like Preston, was significantly older than the rest of the band. Happily, both Preston and Gardner are still alive today in their 90s. He had played bassoon in the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra from 1950, before being drafted during the Korean War, and his first recordings had been in 1959, playing on an album of orchestral versions of TV western themes, titled Themes from the Hip. Speaker 1 (27:16) Gardner and Preston between them allowed Zapper to expand the mother's instrumental palette immensely. Having musicians who could sight-read music, who were familiar with the avant-garde world that Zapper had always had one foot in, who were able to improvise in modes a million miles away from the blues-based grunting of most rock players of the era, and who played instruments that weren't just the standard guitar, bass and drums, allowed for a whole range of possibilities for orchestration. The Mothers weren't the only band on the LA scene to do something like this. At almost exactly the same time, Love expanded to have Albon Snoopy Fisterer on harpsichord and organ, and jazz sax and flute player Jay Cantrelli, who would later play with Jimmy Carl Black and the Gardner Brothers in Geronimo Black. But they went further in that direction than anyone else. At the same time as all of this was happening, Zappa was also working outside the Mothers, getting more production and arranging experience. Tom Wilson was working with the Animals, and what would turn out to be their final album. Animalism, and brought Zappa in to work on the album. Zappa wrote, arranged and played guitar on the album's opening track, All Night Long. And he also played bass and arranged their version of Fred Neal's folk club standard, The Other Side of This Life, a song which, while it was never a hit, was also recorded around this time by Graham Parsons, Jefferson Airplane and The Loving Spoonful. Speaker 3 (29:29) But that's another side to this lie. I believe. Yes, that's. Speaker 1 (29:40) Zappa and Eric Burden became friendly for a while, with Burden often coming round to visit Zappa and watch Zappa's 16mm experimental films. Apparently most people found these boring or paranoia-inducing, but Burden would stay up till 4am watching them and expected Zappa to become a great director. The two men though were fundamentally mismatched when it came to temperament, with Burden by this point fully converted to the hippie peace and love philosophy. and believing that Zappa's on-stage provocations and aggression made him the Adolf Hitler of music, as he famously said in a Record Mirror interview a couple of years later. Zappa, meanwhile, was unimpressed with the animals as musicians. He gave an interview to Hit Parader, in which he described the process, saying, I get to the studio at 11 o'clock. I'm the only one there. Then Tom Wilson comes in. He asks, where are the animals? I say, gee, I don't know, Tom. I had called the musicians union, and I had brought down a girl who plays the bass and 12-string guitar who's a monster named Carol Kay. She's really good, one of the top studio players in LA. Also Don Randy on piano, Johnny Guerin on drums. I was playing guitar on one tune and bass on the other side of this life. And I had a guy on harmonica, the guy who originally wrote Hey Joe. Eric shows up with his drummer around 1.30 or so because they had been to a monster party the night before. And they'd been out being spectacular celebrities, having a wonderful time in show business all over town, and paying very little attention to minding the store. They come walking in and everyone starts playing demos for them because they didn't even know what they were going to record. Meanwhile, we have all these union people sitting around at triple time because it was a holiday. They were waiting to find out what to do. Finally, they decide what they're going to cut. We make two tracks with the union guys. And then the animals themselves show up around four o'clock in the afternoon, and they run through four or five old R &B songs like Long Tall Sally and Hit the Road Jack. The two songs the Union Cats played on sounded pretty tight. There was yet another band that Zappa worked with at this point, The Factory, a band led by the singer and guitarist Lowell George, who had come to the attention of Zappa and Herb Cohen as a regular support act for the Mothers. Zappa produced a single for the group, Lightning Rodman. Speaker 3 (32:29) He'll make you feel safe, safe as can be. Just long as you don't stand under a tree. He carries his own brass bow. He wears shoes with a fine soul. Speaker 1 (32:48) The single went unreleased though, and the factory instead made some recordings with Marshall Lieb, formerly one third of the Teddy Bears, producing. But of course the most important piece of work that Zappa was working on in late 1966 was the second Mothers of Invention album. Absolutely Free was the first album by the expanded line-up of the Mothers of Invention, and the only one to feature Jim Fielder, who left the band between its recording and release and went on to be a bass player again. Fielder is uncredited on the album, but played rhythm guitar. Various other musicians contributed as well, including John Balkin, a bass player who worked a lot with Buzz and Bunk Gardner both before and after their time in the Mothers, and various session string and horn players, while the album credited Zapper's old school friend Euclid Motorhead Sherwood as a band member, even though he didn't join the band until after the sessions. This would be the first in a long line of Zapper and Mothers releases where the credits don't quite match reality. But for the recording of Absolutely Free, the Mothers of Invention were Zappa and Jim Fielder on guitars, Don Preston on keyboards, Ray Collins on vocals, Bunk Gardner on woodwinds, Roy Estrada on bass, Jimmy Carl Black on drums, and Billy Mundy on percussion. The album comprises two side-long suites of sorts, something that was very unusual at the time of recording for rock music. While it was recorded in November 1966, over just four days, Issues with the record company led to it not getting released until May 1967, almost simultaneously with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, another album with no gaps between tracks, thus somewhat blunting the impact of the innovation. It opens with Plastic People. In live performances, this had been a straightforward parody of Louie Louie, setting lyrics attacking conformism to Richard Berry's original music. Speaker 3 (34:40) Watch the Nazis run your town. Then go home and check yourself. You think we're singing about someone else but your plastic people. Speaker 1 (35:07) However, in the studio it became something more extravagant and also more political. A piece with multiple shifts of mood and time signature, and with spoken sections referencing the then-recent Sunset Strip riots. Speaker 2 (35:27) I hear the sound of marching feet down Sunset Boulevard to Crescent Heights and there at Pandora's Box we are confronted with a vast quantity of plastic people. Take Speaker 3 (35:42) a day and walk around. Speaker 1 (35:50) This is followed by Duke of Prunes, a song that had a long history. The melody for it had started as a piece of orchestral music that Zappa had written for Run Home Slow, the western film written by his high school teacher that he had scored. There it had been the main melodic theme for the score. Speaker 1 (36:35) Zappa had put fairly straightforward love lyrics to the track and titled it And Very True, and it had become a regular part of the Mothers live set. A recently released recording of the Mothers playing it in 1966, the only recording of the Del Casha line-up, shows it sounding at that point very like some of Brian McLean's work with love around the same time. Speaker 1 (37:30) But then in the recording session, Ray Collins decided to have some fun. As he later recalled, Frank had this beautiful tune called And Very True, and when we went in to record it, being a little crazy at the time, I just ad-libbed on the spot. The original lyrics I think were something like Moonbeam through the night, something very loving, although Frank didn't like love songs, and I changed it to Moonbeam through the prune in June I can see your tits. I just made it up on the spot. Speaker 1 (38:31) Duke of Prunes goes straight into two other tracks. Amnesia Vivace, a short free jazz freakout including a quote from Stravinsky's Firebird, and Zappa saying Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Prunes as a reference to Gene Chandler's Duke of Earl. Speaker 1 (39:18) which then goes into a sped up reprise of Duke of Prunes before transmuting into Call Any Vegetable, the second major melodic theme of the side. The vegetables referenced in this track are of course a sneering reference to apathetic people, much like the plastic people of the beginning of the side. Speaker 2 (40:05) Some people don't go for prunes, I don't know. Speaker 1 (40:07) But I've always found it intriguing that around the same time that the Mothers were recording that, the Beach Boys were recording the song Vegetables, which bears some slight resemblance to the Mothers track, and was co-written by Van Dyke Parks, who had recently been a temporary member of the Mothers. Speaker 3 (40:39) I feel better when you send Speaker 2 (40:45) us in Speaker 3 (40:45) your Speaker 2 (40:46) letter and tell us Speaker 3 (40:49) that your favorite educated woman Speaker 1 (40:56) I've no idea if it's an example of convergent evolution, just ideas that were in the air at the same time, or if one influenced the other. And if so, I don't know whether it was Brian Wilson hearing Zappa's song and doing a more naive version, or Zappa hearing the Beach Boys and parodying them. Both groups were aware of each other's work. Zappa later wrote in his autobiography, one of the most exciting things that ever happened in the world of white person music was when the Beach Boys used the progression 5-2 on Little Deuce Coop. An important step forward by going backward, while Carl Wilson and Mike Love both praised Zappa in 1969, with Wilson saying Cruising with Ruben and the Jets was really out of sight, man, while Love said, if he keeps coming up with titles like that, he's going to have friends for life from the Beach Boy organisation. The tracks on the rest of Side 1 are extended, semi-improvisatory variations on the theme of Call Any Vegetable, along with a brief burst of Hulse's Pirate Suite. As with the Stravinsky, Zappa was mixing references to high and low art. Side two starts with America Drinks, a parody of the kind of music Zappa had played when he was starting out, playing cocktail lounges with a band called Joe Perino and the Mellowtones. Speaker 1 (42:38) Interestingly, I've read in several places that the intro to America Drinks is a parody of Love's My Little