Song 186: “Frownland” by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

This episode explores 'Frownland' by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, examining the band's complex legacy within the broader context of rock music history. It delves into the intersection of

Key takeaways

• Captain Beefheart's music emerged from a deeply personal mythology and psychological complexity, shaped by early trauma and self-mythologizing.

Main topics

• Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
• The history of children's TV rock bands (e.g., The Archies)

Notable quotes

"I wasn't very much in reality, actually." – Don Van Vliet on his childhood.

Conclusion

The story of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band challenges listeners to confront uncomfortable truths about creativity, power, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey. Song 186, Crownland, by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. Before we begin, a quick note. This episode contains discussion of mental illness, drug abuse, and cult-like controlling behaviours. There's also a short clip of a song which those who have urinary incontinence might find upsetting. Pop music is, and always has been, music for the young, and in particular, a lot of pop music has always been aimed at very small children. And because rock and roll and the TV both became popular phenomena at the same time, and the two grew up together, that means that since very early on, there have been attempts to combine rock and roll with children's TV. These attempts got supercharged after the Beatles became the biggest thing, not just in popular music, but in entertainment. Speaker 1 (0:59) Every kid loved the Beatles and their music, and so very quickly the Beatles got their own Saturday morning kids cartoon on American TV, with impersonators voicing the poor lads from, well, wherever they're from. It's not Liverpool. It's no use, John. We can't rehearse with these people hanging about. Get out of there, you little rascal. You're ruining me town. Here now. Let go of that electric cord before I... Speaker 1 (1:28) Settles it. We have to find somewhere else to rehearse. Lads, I know the perfect place. It's big and it's empty. Sounds fine. But how do we all fit inside your head? This is it, mate. That cartoon was popular enough and ran for long enough that by the end of it the cartoon group were having rather racist adventures in a cartoon version of the Mayan civilization to the tune of Tomorrow Never Knows. Speaker 1 (1:54) and then having her follow the bouncing ball sing-along to She Said, She Said, encouraging the little kiddies watching at home to sing She said I know what it's like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad, and she's making me feel like I've never been born. One has to wonder what the people making the cartoon thought they were doing by that point. Of course, part of the problem there was that the Beatles didn't owe their career to children's TV. They were independent musicians who didn't even watch the cartoons featuring the caricatures of themselves. Though, apparently, after John Lennon moved to the US in the 70s, he went through a phase of watching the show in reruns, and their greatest concern when coming up with songs wasn't whether they would be suitable for Saturday morning shows. Of course, the solution to this problem was to create a band specifically for children's TV. Speaker 1 (2:57) Too busy singing. Speaker 1 (3:09) But of course, as we heard in the episodes on the Monkees, they soon enough started to take control of their own music, and by season two, instead of recording songs like Apples, Peaches, Bananas and Pears, they were recording Daily Nightly, a song with elliptical lyrics which, depending on who you believe, are either a protest against the police repression during the Sunset Strip riots, or about sex work. But, as we heard in the episode on the Locomotion, Don Kirshner, the original music supervisor for the Monkees, Speaker 1 (3:38) worked with other people making children's TV. And for example, Little Eva has a guest appearance singing on Hanna-Barbera's McGilligarilla cartoon. And when the Monkees became too difficult for him to work with, Kirshner had the idea of creating a cartoon rock band. If there were no real band members at all, just cartoon characters, they could never do anything that he didn't want them to. And for a while, the Archies worked as well as he could have dreamed. Speaker 1 (5:07) But Kirshner wasn't the first one to have the idea of a rock band that was just a cartoon. Hanna-Barbera had made a few attempts at things like that, though it took them a while to get anything off the ground. In 1965, as we heard in the episode on Vince Taylor, Hanna-Barbera Records started up as its own label. For years, there had been records released of the characters from their cartoons, but now they were becoming a proper record label, putting out tracks by people like Louis Prima and Les Baxter, as well as attempts at creating bubblegum pop. usually performed by Danny Hutton, a session singer who had come to Hanna-Barbera through Kim Fowley, and who would later go on to be one of the lead singers of Three Dog Night. The first of these singles that Hanna-Barbera put out was by a studio group called The Creations Four, Dance in the Sand. Speaker 1 (6:23) That was plugged on an episode of the Flintstones, as was one of the few things that was close to a success for the label, Roses and Rainbows, which was released under Hutton's own name and made number 73 on the charts. Speaker 1 (7:06) and one of their potential projects was to create a cartoon series called The Bats, about a band of that name. Nothing much is known about that series, which never got made, and I've not even been able to find any concept art for it. But they did release one single under The Bats' name, both sides of which were entirely the work of Hutton, who wrote the songs, sang, and played all the instruments. Speaker 1 (7:59) But they also wanted to have a band that could perform as the Bats if need be, so they invited in a local band who had released one R&B single on A&M Records and were making a few waves. They were, for example, booked on the bottom of the bill on the Beach Boys' Summer Spectacular, Below the Birds, The Love in Spoonful, Chad and Jeremy and Love. Their drummer, Vic Mortensen, later told the story, We set up and started knocking out a few of our tunes, which in those days would have preceded Call on Me. We didn't even have Call on Me. Speaker 1 (8:28) We didn't have any original stuff then. I mean, we had the stuff we were doing. So we played two or three tunes for these guys, and they said, That's enough, boys, come with us. We go back into their office, and they pull out a little old record machine and play a 45. Okay, can you boys play that? We said, yeah, we could play that in our sleep. He says, here's the deal, boys. This music was done by a bunch of our engineers in the studio. We have the music, and it's already moving on the charts. We don't have a band. The deal was, the group was called The Bats. Speaker 1 (8:57) Now, being Hanna-Barbera, they wanted to have a group called The Bats doing live, and also spin that into an animated deal. I mean, we looked in our agent's face, like I say he was a young guy. His face just started flushing like he was counting the money already, right? Then we said, No! We're not The Bats! We're Captain Beefheart and his magic band! Speaker 1 (9:47) The man who would become Captain Beefheart was Don Van Vliet, to give him the name he went by in later life. His birth name was Don Vliet, and the van was an affectation he made part of his name as an adult. Van Vliet was a serial self-mythologiser, and would tell people very different stories about his upbringing. To make matters worse, when people have researched these, it's often, but not always, turns out that the ones that sound made up are closer to the truth than a lot of the more straightforward ones. Speaker 1 (10:15) so it's impossible to say with any certainty what the truth is about many of the stories that haven't been researched. Reality would never be one of Van Vliet's strong points. He'd say later, speaking of his childhood, I wasn't very much in reality, actually. But what does seem to be the case is that he was a very willful child, and one who was convinced of his own genius from an early age. He would order his parents around, referring to them by their first names and often screaming at them, Sue, bring me a Pepsi! And they would largely obey. Speaker 1 (10:45) Van Vliet was a child prodigy, though like many prodigies he had what we would now call a spiky skill set. He won awards for his sculpture when he was a very small child, but he always had difficulty reading and writing even in Twaddletud. He was almost certainly undiagnosed dyslexic, and later said this was probably one of the main reasons why I'm a poet, because I couldn't accept the English language as it was, and I changed it. Van Vliet was born in Glendale, California, but when he was a teenager his family moved to Lancaster. Speaker 1 (11:12) a small town 70 miles north of LA which Van Vliet considered culturally dead, and he would often claim his family had moved there deliberately to put him off a career in the arts, which seems unlikely. Soon, though, another family would move to town, the Zappers, and Van Vliet would find in Frank Zapper, who was a few weeks older than him, someone who shared his tastes in music. The two would spend hours listening together to blues and doo-wop records, with a particular fondness for the works of Johnny Guitar Watson. Speaker 1 (12:12) Van Vliet would later claim that he never listened to music at all in his teens, but Zappa's recollections were very different. Van Vliet dropped out of high school after his father had a heart attack, and took over his father's bread delivery route, but, according to Zappa, part of the time Don was helping out by taking over the bread truck route and driving up to Mojave, and the rest of the time he would just stay at home and listen to rhythm and blues records and scream at his mother to get him a Pepsi. Speaker 1 (12:37) Van Vliet very briefly attended Antelope Valley Junior College, studying art, and Zappa was also a student there studying music, and during their brief time there, Zappa persuaded Van Vliet to make his very first recording, with Zappa on guitar. Lost in a Whirlpool is a tasteless, seemingly improvised blues parody, in which the singer has been flushed down the toilet by his ex-girlfriend and has to fight a big brown fish. Its humour is far closer to Zappa's later work than to Van Vliet's. but you can hear the potential there for both singer and guitarist already. Speaker 1 (13:43) Little is known of Van Vliet for the next few years. The main source for his early years is Frank Zappa, who moved away from Lancaster in the late 50s, and the two men didn't get together again until 1963. But, apparently, Van Vliet had a succession of odd jobs, mostly sales-based, and was a surprisingly good salesman. Van Vliet and Zappa next connected when Zappa was in the process of buying PAL Studios and turning it into Studio Z, as we talked about in the episode on Trouble Every Day. Zappa had formed a band called The Suts, with a revolving line-up usually including guitarist Alex Snoofer, who soon changed his name to Alex Sinclair, and drummer Vic Mortensen, and Van Vliet became the group's singer. They recorded several tracks together at Studio Z, like Metal Man Has Won His Wings and Tiger Roach. Speaker 1 (15:32) Both those songs have Van Vliet improvising lyrics based on comic books that were lying around. Metal Man Has Won His Wings comes from an issue of The Metal Men with a story about a living gun, which also had an advertisement for a Hawkman comic reading in part, Electrifying announcement! Hawkman has won his wings and from now on his famous Wheat Wheat Battle Cry will appear in his own magazine, while Tiger Roach was inspired by Green Lantern No. 34, whose cover has Green Lantern fighting a funny looking lizard, and the story title, Speaker 1 (16:00) three-way attack against Green Lantern. None of this material got released at the time, or for many decades later, though they at least made attempts at getting some of it out. Dot Records rejected the submission of some early such recordings, saying, The material has been carefully reviewed, and while it does have merit, we do not feel strongly enough about its commercial potential to give you any assurance of a recording. More specifically, they said that the guitars were distorted. Guitar distortion was not the only uncommercial aspect to the material Zappa, Van Vliet and other collaborators like Euclid Sherwood and Ray Collins were working on though. Collins and Zappa had written a track called Hey Nelda, parodying Hey Paula by Paul and Paula, and released it under the name Ned and Nelda on a small label. Speaker 1 (17:15) That was, as one can imagine, a miserable failure as far as sales went. But that didn't stop Zapper, Collins, Van Vliet, Sherwood and others planning to expand it into a full-scale rock opera, in 1963, to be titled I Was a Teenage Malt Shop. According to Sherwood, it was supposedly about a kid, Ned the Mumbler, who came into one of these small closed-up towns where they didn't allow rock and roll, and so he wrote these songs. He was going to get the whole town singing and enjoying music. Zappa was the main creative force for the collaboration and wrote several songs for the project, some of which, like Status Back Baby, would later turn up on Mothers of Invention albums. But a local CBS affiliate rejected the outline when it was proposed as a TV special, saying, Instead, they moved on to yet another project, a feature film to be titled Speaker 1 (18:09) Captain Beefheart meets the Grunt People. Hello there, kids. It's your old friend Captain Beefheart. You know me. The magic man, invisible and all that jazz. Fly through time and space, dimension warp, all that rhythm. Well, anyway, I'm here tonight to tell you that we have a heck of a little teenage opera for you. You're really going to dig it. It's really groovy. This film was meant to be a science fiction film, and Van Vliet was to play the titular Captain Beefheart. Speaker 1 (18:35) who was named after an unpleasant behaviour by one of Van Vliet's uncles, who used to leave the toilet door open when Van Vliet's girlfriends would come over so he could expose himself to them while urinating, and boast of his member that it looks just like a giant beef heart. This was to be filmed at Studio Z, but unfortunately, as we heard in the episode on Trouble Every Day, Zappa was arrested after a sting operation for making a pornographic audio tape for an undercover policeman, and he lost the studio. Speaker 1 (19:02) and the loose collective of musicians working there split up. Sinclair, Van Vliet and Mortensen soon formed another group, with bass player Gerry Hanley and guitarist Doug Moon. This group took their name from the abandoned film, and became Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. Rather than being named after their singer, at this stage the group, rather than just Van Vliet as an individual, were thought of as Captain Beefheart, and if anyone was the leader at this early stage it was Alex Sinclair. Speaker 1 (19:30) But soon, because Van Vliet was the lead singer, he became identified with the name, which had, after all, apparently been the name of his character in the proposed film. And from this point forward, I'll be using Van Vliet and Beefheart somewhat interchangeably. The Magic Band part of the name also came from the film. The character of Captain Beefheart had magical powers and could appear and disappear, and somebody suggested that he should have a magic band who he could make appear wherever he wanted. While Sinclair was the leader of the group, Speaker 1 (19:58) Van Vliet was always a dominant force in it, and from early on he would try to shape the group's original material. Knowing little about the formalities of music, though, he was unable to play any instruments other than the harmonica. He didn't have the vocabulary to get his ideas across to the other musicians. Not that those ideas were very sophisticated at this point. Don Van Vliet would later become one of the most innovative songwriters in the rock music field, but at the moment he and his band were mostly just playing the blues and Rolling Stones covers. Speaker 1 (20:26) The group's first appearances were at Battle of the Bands shows and similar, but everything changed for them at a teenage fair at the Hollywood Palladium in April 1965, a show we talked about a bit in the GTO's episode a couple of episodes back. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band weren't the only blues band playing there. Another band on the bill was the Rising Suns, playing what some members have described as their first ever gig. Speaker 1 (21:21) The Magic Band were the big hit of the event, which had multiple bands playing multiple stages. But the man who was by now starting to become known as Captain Beefheart dragged Doug Moon to see the Rising Suns and pointed to their guitarist, a 17-year-old named Rye Cooder, and told Moon through gritted teeth that that was the type of playing he'd been telling Moon to do for ages. Now do you get it? The Rising Suns were never very successful, but their members all went on to greater things. The least successful was Jesse Lee Kincaid. who is now best known for writing She Sang Hymns Out of Tune, which was later recorded by Harry Nilsson, but did little else. Speaker 1 (22:26) But their other members were Kuda, Taj Mahal, who became one of the great blues singers of his generation, Gary Magic Marker, who we'll be hearing more of shortly, and Ed Cassidy, who went on to found Spirit. And when Cassidy left the Rising Suns, he was replaced by Kevin Kelly, who went on to join the Byrds. Beefheart spent much of the team fair scoping out the competition, and he'd also noticed the drummer of another group, the Maltese Men, who were playing at the next stage along from the Rising Suns. Speaker 1 (22:54) but he decided one thing straight away. Rye Cooter was going to be joining the Magic Band. Now all he had to do was persuade Cooter to go along with this plan. His attempts to get Cooter into the group were given a boost when the Magic Band got proper management with Leonard Grant and Associates. Grant was a big Hollywood manager, but didn't normally work with rock bands. His biggest client was Frank Gorshin, a comedian, impressionist and actor, who among other things had appeared on the Ed Sullivan show on the same bill as the Beatles and Davy Jones. Speaker 1 (23:23) but is now best known for his appearances as the Riddler in the 60s Batman TV series. Still, while Grant was more versed in light entertainment than in rock and roll, he did start opening doors for them. He is likely the manager who got the group the Hanna-Barbera connection we talked about earlier. Rick Mortensen, the main source for that anecdote, remembered it as being an earlier manager who they ditched quickly, but that timing doesn't make sense. Soon the group were recording their first demo. which shows them as trying at this point to fit into the folk rock scene that was taking over LA at the time. Call On Me shows the influence of the Byrds, and could easily be an album track by Love or even the Turtles. Speaker 1 (24:35) According to Rick Mortensen, Mortensen wrote the music for that song while Van Vliet wrote the lyrics. Indeed, apparently Mortensen wrote the music in response to his father's death, then it was a deeply personal song for him. When it was eventually issued on the group's debut album though, after Mortensen had left, the credit read, Words and Music Don Van Vliet. Dorothy Heard, Grant's assistant, had been the one who had seen the group at the teenage fair and been enthusiastic enough to sign them, and much of their rehearsals took place at her house. Speaker 1 (25:04) She was the one in the grant organisation who was really advocating for the group, and the one the members still talk about when they look back at this period. She started getting them into bigger venues, eventually having them play the prestigious Whiskey A Go-Go. According to several members of the band, at this point Zappa turned up in Van Vliet's life again, having been absent for several months. Years before, Zappa had been the dominant partner in their collaborations, the one who had access to a studio and musicians. Speaker 1 (25:32) Recording that pornographic tape and getting arrested, though, had set Zapper back, and now Van Vliet was the one who was in a hot band that was going places, while the Mothers were still unknowns at this point. Various members of the Magic Band describe Zapper trying to get involved with them in some way, and in particular they talk about a certain amount of resentment on his part about the name Captain Beefheart being his creation. Members of later lineups of the Magic Band have even suggested that the ongoing problems between the two men Speaker 1 (25:59) who would have an on-again, off-again creative relationship for the next decade, all stemmed from the idea that Zappa deserved credit for creating the Captain Beefheart character that Van Vliet was now playing on stage. Later, much later in 2012, after the death of both men, Zappa's widow Gail would actually file a trademark on the name Captain Beefheart. She did so, apparently, because of her belief that since Zappa had come up with the name, and the Zappa Family Trust owned and released some Beefheart recordings, Speaker 1 (26:27) The Zappa family trust, rather than Van Vliet's heirs, owned the name. Regardless of what caused it, this is definitely the point, according to those who were there, when the adolescent friendship between Zappa and Van Vliet turned into a more complicated rivalry. Much of the time from this point forth, the two would exist in an uneasy tension, working together occasionally and attacking each other in the press at other times. Partly the rivalry may have also been down to the fact that Van Vliet wasn't quite secure in his own band yet. Speaker 1 (26:55) He was slowly but surely becoming the leader of the group, but this wasn't an entirely smooth process. Listening to live recordings from the time, it's obvious that he was an excellent blues singer, but mostly imitating other singers, especially Howlin' Wolf. While the songs Van Vliet was writing himself and recording demos of were catchy but derivative things like I'm Glad. Speaker 1 (28:16) Van Vliet also had a big problem with timing on stage. Not with his sense of rhythm, by most accounts, though some of his bandmates say even that, but with following structures. He was a great frontman, but, according to Gary Marker, interviewed by John French, whenever Gerry Handley would get in trouble, I would fill in and I would have to play everything exactly the same. It couldn't change, meaning there could be no flexibility in the arrangement, which severely limited the spontaneity. Speaker 1 (28:41) and Alex would be out there directing Don with the guitar neck as though it were a conductor's wand, because Don had no sense of time. Alex would cue him when to come in because he would always miss the cues. He would know the songs, but he learned them by rote. It was weird because his intonation was fine, but the timing... French, who would join the band himself later, goes on to say, Van Vliet himself had mentioned, shortly after I joined the band, that he had previously had problems with timing and understanding musical cues. Speaker 1 (29:08) He said that he had gone to Alex with a determination to learn, and rigorously demanded, "'Teach me this stuff you say I'm not understanding.' He was illustrating this by grabbing an imaginary Alex's arm and moving him over to a particular place in the room as he described the incident, stomping his foot on the floor and simultaneously pointing down in a defiant and determined posture, emphatically saying, "'Okay, now show me!' Through the years I saw evident surface of Van Vliet's problem, which turned out to be less a timing problem, which could have been cured before I became a member. Speaker 1 (29:38) and more getting lost in the structure and missing cues. Many of the musicians who worked with Van Vliet over the years would agree with French's assessment of him that he was a performer and not a musician. Knowing this, it's understandable that Alex Sinclair still at the time thought of himself as the band's leader. Not that that would last, especially after Sinclair switched instruments. Drummer Vic Mortensen had got drafted, and so Sinclair switched to drums and brought in another guitarist, Richard Heppner. and it was this line-up that recorded the group's first two singles for A&M Records. Speaker 1 (30:45) That was a cover version of an old Bo Deadly song, but while it sounds like something that must have been in their repertoire since the beginning, according to the producer they didn't know the song at all before he suggested it. Surprising enough in itself, but what's more surprising in retrospect is that the producer who suggested they record that hard R&B song was David Gates, who is now best known for being the leader of the 70s soft rock band Bread. Writing, producing, singing, and playing all the instruments except drums, on the group's number one hit, Make It With You, among other hits. Speaker 1 (31:46) Reports differ on how much Gates contributed to the Magic Band's initial sessions, other than playing keyboards on Diddy Wah Diddy. Some participants have Gates choosing all the material, arranging it, and rehearsing the band in the studio, while others say he had little involvement with anything and just nodded through what they were already doing. My guess, and it is only a guess, but an informed one after reading everything I can about the group's early recordings, Speaker 1 (32:12) is that Gates was more involved in Diddy Wah Diddy and arranged that and directed the band, and less involved in the three Van Vliet originals that the group recorded in the same session. Frying Pan, Here I Am I Always Am, and Diddy Wah Diddy's B-Side, Who Do You Think You're Fooling, the first Van Vliet composition to be released. Gates also wrote and played slide guitar on the group's second single, recorded at the same session, Moonchild. Speaker 1 (33:37) Gates later said of that track, I do recall that the record company was shocked when they heard Moonchild, as it was so out there compared to what I guess they had expected from the group, which, in retrospect, is funny given where the group's music would eventually go, but is probably accurate compared to the songs Van Vliet was writing at the time. To my ears, Moonchild sounds like a dry run for Gates' song for the Monkees, Saturday's Child. Speaker 1 (34:31) Moonchild has a more psychedelic lyric, but the general feel of the two songs is surprisingly similar, and both are, of course, very different from the work Gates would become known for. Surprisingly, Diddy Why Diddy started to do fairly well on local radio, starting on KMEN in San Bernardino, where one of the DJs, a Liverpudlian, born John Ravenscroft but who had just started going by the stage name John Peel, was impressed enough by the band name to push for the record to go onto the station's playlist without having heard it. Speaker 1 (35:00) Van Vliet and Peel would have a long, mutually beneficial relationship once Peel returned to the UK and became one of the most important DJs in British radio. He was, in more ways than one, the British equivalent to Rodney Bingenheimer, who we talked about in the GTOs episode. Luck wasn't in the Magic Band's favour though, because while the record was doing well on the West Coast and made the playlists of several important radio stations, another band on the East Coast, The Remains, who were just about to have their biggest moment of fame as one of the support acts on the Beatles' final tour, released their own cover version of the song. Speaker 1 (36:07) Releasing the two singles at the same time got both bands a certain amount of press coverage, but it did prevent either record from becoming a hit. Soon the remains would split up, and Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band were dropped by A&M after Moonchild, their second single for the label, also flopped. There was another line-up change right after the A&M sessions as well. Richard Heppner quit the group, and Sinclair switched back from drums to guitar. In Sinclair's place came P.G. Blakely. Speaker 1 (36:35) who had actually been the drummer at the group's earliest rehearsals, but who had been unable to keep a steady tempo, and been dropped by the group before any gigs in favour of Mortensen. Blakely also soon left, though, and was replaced by John French. French tells a story in his autobiography about how, soon after joining the group, he and Van Vliet drove past the last church French had attended as a teenager, and saw a sign saying, Beware of Magic Bands Outside. Speaker 1 (37:01) According to French, the pastor of the church, when Van Vliet confronted him about this, said that it was a reference to marauding bands of magicians in the Bible, and he had no idea there was a local group called the Magic Band. But in retrospect, French, who is now a born-again Christian, sees it as something of a warning. French had been the drummer of the Maltese Men, a surf band who also played at the Teen Expo, and had been noticed by Van Vliet then, and he had then gone on to join a band called Blues in a Bottle as the vocalist. Speaker 1 (37:30) Blues in a Bottle were actually inspired to a large extent by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and two of the group's other members, Jeff Cotton and Mark Boston, will come up again. When Blakely had left the Magic Band, he'd wanted to start his own band, and had approached some of the members of Blues in a Bottle. And some sort of miscommunication had led French to believe his band had split up, when apparently the other members still wanted to continue working with him. At one of Blues in a Bottle's last gigs, they had supported the Magic Band. Speaker 1 (37:59) who had just started playing sets that were made up predominantly of their own material. And French had been surprised to discover that Blues in a Bottle had actually gone down rather better. Captain Beefheart and his magic band were huge in Lancaster and the surrounding areas, and making waves in LA, but they were floundering. And once again, Van Vliet had been watching the competition. Right after French joined the band, they moved to a communal house in Laurel Canyon. Speaker 1 (38:23) the same area that Frank Zappa moved to around the same time, and which, thanks to Zappa's influence, was about to become where all the hippest people lived. Getting the group to live under one roof was the first part of Van Vliet's plan to make the band fully his, rather than the semi-democracy it still was at this time. Van Vliet also wanted to get rid of Doug Moon and replace him with Rye Cooter, who he'd been subtly courting since the Teen Expo. Now the Rising Suns had split up, and Gary Marker, who was friendly with Van Vliet, Speaker 1 (38:51) was moving into management and production. Deciding that the Magic Band were obviously about to make it big, he came to Van Vliet with a deal. If he could get Kuda to join the