Tag Archives: Mothers of Invention

Zappa, Elvis & Nixon ► Monday Musical Appreciation(s)

, , , , , , , ,
Frank Zappa before the mustache

There are two big events in today’s music history and I couldn’t decide between them. On this day in 1940 Frank Zappa was born. In unrelated news, 30 years later Elvis Presley bluffs his way into Nixon’s White House and is presented with a law enforcement badge so the drug-addled King of Rock and Roll can help fight the War on Drugs. No, really!

I can still remember the day I bought Zappa’s first LP, Freak Out. It was in the Kresge’s record department and the band was one of the ugliest I had ever seen. I was 14 years old and had never heard of The Mothers of Invention before, but there was something about the cover that made me buy it. The back cover has what purported to be a letter from what purported to be a Suzy Creamcheese:

These Mothers is crazy. You can tell by their clothes. One guy wears beads and they all smell bad. We were gonna get them for a dance after the basketball game but my best pal warned me you can never tell how many will show up…sometimes the guy in the fur coat doesn’t show up and sometimes he does show up only he brings a big bunch of crazy people with him and they dance all over the place. None of the kids at my school like these Mothers… specially since my teacher told us what the words to their songs meant. Sincerely forever, Suzy Creamcheese, Salt Lake City, Utah.

All of that added up to GOTTA HAVE IT!

I distinctly remember taking it home and being surprised by that it was a 2 LP set (apparently only the 2nd double album of the Rock era, following Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde by mere weeks). I also remember how utterly confused I was after I listened to the entire 4 sides. The first 2 sides consisted of what could only be described as Demented Doo Wop. It was hard to tell if Zappa was satirizing the genre or lovingly recreating it, especially after listening to the final 2 sides. I didn’t have the language then for what it was, but I was immediately hooked. I have been a life-long Frank Zappa fan ever since.

However, as I keep saying, it’s all about the music. Here’s Frank Zappa’s first official LP of a career that produced more records than anybody else in the Rock era:

The unanswered question is why my unformed, teenager mind so readily glommed onto Zappa, way ahead of the curve.

Animation created by author from public domain White House photos

The Elvis Presley incident is a bizarre footnote to the entire Watergate presidency of Richard Nixon and provided a strange capper to the long career of Elvis Presley.

To make a long story short: Nixon went on the lam from Graceland and the Memphis Mafia after an argument with his wife Priscilla and his father Vernon over the cost of Christmas gifts.

First he flew to Washington, but then took off to Los Angeles. There he concocted an incredible plan to meet President Nixon. According to the Smithsonian Institute, of all places:

Elvis was traveling with some guns and his collection of police badges, and he decided that what he really wanted was a badge from the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs back in Washington. “The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him,” Priscilla Presley would write in her memoir, Elvis and Me. “With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.”

After just one day in Los Angeles, Elvis asked [Jerry] Schilling to fly with him back to the capital. “He didn’t say why,” Schilling recalls, “but I thought the badge might be part of the reason.”

On the red-eye to Washington, Elvis scribbled a letter to President Nixon. “Sir, I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out,” he wrote. All he wanted in return was a federal agent’s badge. “I would love to meet you,” he added, informing Nixon that he’d be staying at the Washington Hotel under the alias Jon Burrows. “I will be here for as long as it takes to get the credentials of a federal agent.”

That’s all it took to get an Oval Office meeting with Nixon, who happily posed for pictures with the King of Rock and Roll. The National Archives has an entire online exhibit called When Nixon Met Elvis and there’s a hilarious movie, Elvis Meets Nixon, which takes some liberties with the truth and features my cyber-friend Curtis Armstrong as Farley Hall. Both are highly recommended by me.

Nixon went on to quit the presidency over Watergate, while Elvis died on the crapper.

Book Review: Shell Shocked by Howard Kaylan with Jeff Tamarkin

, , , , , , , ,
Actual cover by the actual Cal Schenkel

SHELL SHOCKED; My Life With The Turtles, Flo & Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. . . .
by Howard Kaylan with Jeff Tamarkin

A few years back my buddy Alan scored some tickets to Hippiefest, the Rock and Roll nostalgia show then schlepping across ‘Merka during the Summer of Love, aka 2009. As is our wont when attending concerts, we went early for the people watching.

It could have been was the name “Hippiefest.” Or else it could have been the fact that Hippiefest included, along with The Turtles featuring Flo & Eddie, Chuck Negron of Three Dog Night, Felix Cavaliere of The Rascals, Joey Molland of Badfinger and Leslie West with a tribute to Mountain; all ’60s icons. Regardless, the audience was a veritable sea of tie die. Alan (who is 13 years younger than me) and I laughed and made fun of all the old, decrepid Hippies wallowing in ponytails and nostalgia — until I realized I was one.

Howard Kaylan, of the aforementioned Flo & Eddie’s Turtles, has now written his life story, which turns out to be a very funny book about far more than Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll — although it’s got plenty of that, too. This is a book about the very continuum of Show Bidnezz itself, filled with unexpected twists and turns and populated with cameos by the unlikeliest of people, including Soupy Sales, Ian Whitcomb, Aston “Family Man” Barrett, Care Bears, Johnny Carson, Jerry Lewis, Orson Bean, and Twiggy, just to name a few. And, of course, the book is also jam-packed with stories about those in the music business that you’d expect, like Marc Bolan, Frank and Gail Zappa, Ray Davies, John Sebastian, Chip Douglas, Bob Ezrin, Alice Cooper, The Beatles, Brian Jones, and Jimi Hendrix, among many others. [The last 3 encountered on the same magical night.] The list of cameos goes on and on, but none of it comes off as name-dropping on Kaylan’s part. He’s just telling his stories.

Flo & Eddie’s Turtles at Hippiefest during the Summer of Love of 2009

For me the most revealing scene takes place near the beginning of the book. Howard was still a kid and he’s on his first great Road Trip, riding in the back seat as his dad drove clear across the country to take a job with General Electric in Los Angeles. The Kaplan [sic] family stopped in Las Vegas and took in the free lounge show of Louis Prima and Keeley Smith. Kaylan admits:

Louis and Keeley invented a style of cabaret that my singing partner Mark [Volman] and I later adapted (all right, we took it, okay?) and still use in every single performance. Louis would clown it up, big time, while the lovely Indian maiden, Keeley, would stand as stiffly as a mannequin and sing in her mesmerizing style, seemingly oblivious to her husband’s mad antics. Only eight or nine short years later, those two fat front men in the Turtles were cashing in by doing the very same thing. If you don’t know who they were, maybe you remember David Lee Roth’s big hit “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody”? That’s a note-for-note cover of Louis Prima’s arrangement. Seriously, if you are still drawing a blank, get a DVD or go on YouTube and check out their nightclub act from the ’50s and ’60s. They were amazingly ahead of their time. Hey, Sinatra loved them. The whole business loved them. They molded me.

[Full disclosure: “Just A Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” is a song that I have nailed many times during drunken Karaoke nights. I always do the Prima version, even though the Karaoke machine thinks it’s David Lee Roth’s version.]

By the time you get to the end of Shell Shocked Kaylan has detailed several more Road Trips, each more hilarious than the last. However, it was Kaylan’s stories about The Business of Show, like the Prima/Smith tale above, that gave me a new view of the entertainment industry. I had always viewed the invention of Rock and Roll as The Great Dividing Line™ between then and now. The Brill Building had figuratively burned down. Nothing was ever the same. However, Kaylan’s life story comfortably straddles that line between Old Show Biz and Everything That Came After. Show Bidnezz is, and has always been, a continuum, with Kaylan’s memoirs just the latest piece of the puzzle.

One of the most amusing stories in the book is also the subject of “My Dinner With Jimi,” the 2003 movie about Kaylan’s first visit to Swingin’ London, flush with his earliest Turtles fame. I won’t give anything away other than to say the telling of the story in the book is much funnier than the movie (written by one Howard Kaylan, tackling his first full-length movie script). I don’t know if it was the direction, the silly ’60s costumes and wigs, or the barely adequate acting, but the movie never grabbed me. However, Howard’s telling in the book makes it clear why someone wanted to film that story. It’s HIGH-LARRY-US. As a Show Biz Raconteur™ Kaylan delivers the goods time and time again in Shell Shocked.

Freak Out was the antithesis of bubblegum

What makes Howard’s story so interesting is that he’s far more than just a single thread in the great Rock and Roll tapestry. Yet so few people know him by name. They’ll be familiar with hits like “Happy Together,” “Let Me Be,” and “Elinore,” but The Turtles were not a group known individually.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a Johnny-come-lately to The Turtles oeuvre. Oh, sure I knew the hits, but back in the ’60s I had a predjudice against anything I considered “bubblegum.” That’s why I was a Zappa fan from Day One. Freak Out had one of the ugliest bands I had ever seen on the cover and bought it for that reason alone. I listened to it so much I knew every note and I could quote by heart the liner notes that said:

“I’d like to clean you boys up a bit and mold you. I believe I could make you as big as the Turtles.”
~~~~~A Noted L.A. Disc Jockey

That’s why it was such sweet irony that a few years later the two lead singers for The Turtles, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, had joined Frank Zappa and not the other way around. However, due to what must have been one of the worst contracts in the entire music bidnezz, Volman and Kaylan were not only prevented from using The Turtles name, which is slightly understandable, but were also prevented from using their own names, which is simply incomprehensible. That’s why they were forced to adopt the noms de song of The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie, eventually shortened to Flo & Eddie.

It was only as members of Zappa’s band that I came to appreciate Kaylan’s backstory and the subversive quality to The Turtles music, especially the latter LPs. However, it was as the voices of Zappa, singing about how touring can make you crazy, that gave Volman and Kaylan street cred, not only to me, but millions of Zappa fans around the world. Sadly their connection with Zappa came to an abrupt end when the 1971 tour disintegrated in disaster. First came the fire in Montreux, which burned the stage and all their equipment; an event witnesses by Deep Purple and memorialized in the song “Smoke on the Water.” The band gamely voted to continue the tour with borrowed equipment. A week later, while performing the encore at London’s Rainbow Theatre, a jealous fan jumped onstage and pushed Zappa into the orchestra pit.

At this point in their career Flo and Eddie were forced to reinvent themselves and strike out on their own again. [Even more full disclosure: It was at this low point in their career that I met Flo & Eddie and came to their rescue. I tell that tale in Flo and Eddie and Mark and Howard.] Flo and Eddie albums followed, as did backing vocals for some of Rock’s most iconic artists and songs, and then comes the family-friendly cartoons. Name any other artist talented enough to go from singing about sex with mud sharks to Care Bears.

All of these twists and turns are told with great verve and humour by Kaylan (although he chose to leave our meeting out). Kaylan kept a diary from his earliest days, which must have been an enourmous help, considering the Rock and Roll lifestyle makes many mornings cloudy.


A Zappa era song sung by Flo & Eddie about the Rock and Roll lifestyle.

Any quibbles I have with Shell Shocked are minor: 1). While Kaylan dishes the dirt, with most of the stories being told on himself, the most negative portrayals in the book have to do with ex-managers and other Show Biz people who ripped him off. However, Kaylan avoids naming names. Someone must have warned him about defamation lawsuits; 2). I had hoped to learn more about how he felt during the Kafkaesque period when he wasn’t allowed to ply his trade under his own name. Sadly he doesn’t talk about his feelings here (or elsewhere) in the book; 3). The actual business dealings with Zappa and, post-Frank, Gail Zappa. Gail continues to release posthumous Frank Zappa recordings that feature Flo and Eddie. My understanding is that Howard sees no money from these releases. However, Kaylan was very circumspect in describing Gail in the book and I get the sense he held a lot back.

Howard Kaylan, star of stage, screen, and now book lists

This is mere nitpickery on my part, only realized in retrospect for this review. I certainly didn’t miss it in the reading. From cover to cover Shell Shocked is a terrific, rollicking trip through the world of Rock and Roll. It gets the Aunty Em seal of approval.

SHELL SHOCKED; My Life With The Turtles, Flo & Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. . . . by Howard Kaylan with Jeff Tamarkin; Backbeat Books, Paperback, ISBN 978-1-61780-846-3 304 pages, index, pictures

***

***

Me and Flo and Eddie and Mark and Howard ► A Musical Appreciation

, , , , , , , , , , , ,
“I’d like to clean you boys up a bit and mold you.
I believe I could make you as big as The Turtles“
~~~~~Noted L.A. disc jockey

A mere 3 days ago I wrote about Frank Zappa, one of my musical heroes. Today I want to tell the story of how I met Flo & Eddie. 

I’m telling this story because I am sure Howard Kaylan left this chapter out of his forthcoming book, “Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc.” That’s why it has been left to me to tell the unabridged story. Get comfortable, kiddies.

Three days ago, when writing about the Zappa LP Freak Out, I said: 

Not to brag, but I was there from the beginning. I discovered Frank
Zappa some time in 1966 when I first set eyes on the cover of Freak Out
at my local Kresge’s record department. As one descended on the
escalator into the basement, a gap opened in the wall revealing Kresge’s
2-rack record department. The farther one descended, more of the record
department was revealed in the expanding triangle of the record
department. As teens we’d crane our heads into that crack to see what
was new each week.

One day in 1966 my eyes spied what was the ugliest record cover I had ever seen. I had to own it.

Inside the gatefold cover of Freak Out was a quote — almost a throw-away line inside a cover jam-packed with words and collages — from a “Noted L.A. disc jockey” who said about The Mothers of Invention, “I’d like to clean you boys up a bit and mold you. I believe I could make you as big as The Turtles“.

Clearly Frank Zappa had other ideas about that. In less than 5 years, Zappa would co-opt The Turtles and hire Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan — the former-lead singers of The Turtles — as vocalists for the Mothers.

Unfortunately, Mark and Howard had signed the worst record contract in all of show biz, or so it seemed. Not only were they prevented by White Whale Records from using the name of their former-group, which no longer existed, they were also prevented from using their real names. That’s why, and how, Mark and Howard became The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie, which was shortened to Flo & Eddie. That name appealed to me because it’s a pun: A river can flow and eddy.

Flo & Eddie appeared for the first time on a Zappa LP with Chunga’s Revenge.

I want to take you all the way back to the mid-to-late ’70s, before the earth had cooled, or warmed, or the climate had changed, or something.

I no longer lived in Detroit. I now lived in Toronto and worked at the best record store in the city, Round Records on Bloor Street. I was still a Zappa fan, as the Mothers seemed to get uglier and uglier. I naturally followed the Zappa arc of LPs that started with Chunga’s Revenge and ended with the movie 200 Motels, all which featured Flo & Eddie on lead vocals. The entire theme of the Flo and Eddie Mothers’ Years is that “touring can make you crazy” and who would know that better than those two guys who had a hit single on the charts — WITH A BULLET!

Who knows how long Flo & Eddie might have stayed with Zappa had it not been for that disastrous 1971 European tour? After the episode that spawned the song “Smoke on the Water,” the band was stuck in Europe with several more concerts on the tour and all their equipment destroyed by fire. Frank took a vote and the band wanted to continue the tour, even if it meant on borrowed, inferior, equipment. At the very next gig, at the Rainbow, a deranged fan pulled Frank Zappa offstage into the orchestra pit. He sustained terrible injuries, which ended the tour and Flo & Eddie’s participation with Frank Zappa.

However, Flo & Eddie started to release records on their own, which were just as terrific as The Turtles or Mothers records. I started following Flo & Eddie and had several of their records, which is why, when Mark Volman & Howard Kaylan walked into Round Records, I turned to the rest of the staff and said, “They’re all mine!”

Round Records was the last real alternative record store (remember those
black things?) in Toronto. How Flo & Eddie had heard about us I
don’t know, but when they walked in the door I recognized them
immediately. I already knew the broad outline of their entire career up to that point.

So, I just acted cool behind the counter and gave Flo & Eddie about 15 or 20 minutes to browse. I watched them collect more and more records under their arms. The waiting was killing me! When they finally had about 15 or 20 LPs under their arms, I approached and asked if I could help them.

[Approximating and paraphrasing the conversation.]

“We’d like to take these records,” says Mark.

“Okay, I’ll ring them up.”

“No, you don’t understand.  We’d like to take these records.”

Wait!!! What???

They explain how they’ve been hired to give record reviews on a new Cee Bee Cee tee vee show, “90 Minutes Live,” with Peter Gzowski and just want to borrow the records for a day.

Peter Gzowski: A face for radio.

I have to explain this show for ‘Merkins. When CBC decided to launch a program to go up against Johnny Carson (really!) they chose Canada’s most respected RADIO broadcaster, Peter Gzowski. Peter’s radio show was a wonder. Altho’ broadcast across the nation, Gzowski had the warmth and empathy of a man sitting at your kitchen table, talking with the luminaries of the day. His show was a National Conversation, an institution. This Country in the Morning and, later, Morningside were a very big part of the fabric of Canadian society. Nothing like it exists in the U.S. of A.

When Cee Bee Cee tee vee turned to Gzowski to host 90 Minutes Live it turned, as the old joke goes, to someone who truly had a face for radio.  Not that he was ugly or anything, but no matter how much CBC cleaned Gzowski up for the camera, he still came across looking somewhat like a rumpled bed.  90 Minutes Live might have been a great show, if you closed your eyes.

Gzowski eventually went back to radio.

To recap: Flo & Eddie have this gig at The Cee Bee Cee and they want to borrow the records overnight. For some stupid reason I said I had to check with my boss, who was at lunch at the time. However, I guaranteed them that I’d have the records at the studio on Yonge Street by showtime.

My boss thought I was an idiot for not turning over $100.00 of records to Flo & Eddie on nobody’s say-so. No matter because, at the appointed time, I showed up at the CBC studio with a stack of records under my arm. My name was on a guest list. I handed over the LPs and I was shown a place just off-camera to watch the show.

I wish I could remember the records being reviewed. Some of the LPs were highly praised and some were trashed. I cringed as I watched those records that didn’t get the Flo & Eddie Seal of Approval™ get flung across the studio. YIKES! I have to try and sell those tomorrow! I do remember them as being very funny and not letting Peter get a word in edgewise.

At the end of the segment the albums were collected and handed back to me and none’s the wiser.

The show only lasted 2 years, but it became routine for me to take a stack of records to the Cee Bee Cee to get thrown around by Flo & Eddie. And that, kiddies, is how I met Flo & Eddie.

Frank Zappa ► A Musical Appreciation

, , , , , , ,

Dateline December 4 – On this day in 1971 Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were on stage in Montreax, Switzerland when the casino caught fire. The night was immortalized in Deep Purple’s song “Smoke on the Water.” On the same date 22 years later Frank Zappa died of prostate cancer.

The ugliest LP cover I had ever seen.
I had to own it.

Not to brag, but I was there from the beginning. I discovered Frank Zappa some time in 1966 when I first set eyes on the cover of Freak Out at my local Kresge’s record department. As one descended on the escalator into the basement, a gap opened in the wall revealing Kresge’s 2-rack record department. The farther one descended, more of the record department was revealed in the expanding triangle of the record department. As teens we’d crane our heads into that crack to see what was new each week.

One day in 1966 my eyes spied what was the ugliest record cover I had ever seen. I had to own it.

It was a double-record set in a gatefold cover, among the first for a Rock and Roll LP. The music was also a revelation. One LP was all Doo Wop, but done in a slightly demented style, as opposed to straight up. The other LP contained longer songs and musical collages that were NOTHING like demented Doo Wop, but were demented all the same. I became an instant fan and followed Frank Zappa’s career, like a lemming follows whatever a lemming follows, ever since.

When I signed up I didn’t realize that by the time it was over I’d have collected some 90 albums, many of them double and triple sets, making Frank Zappa one of the most prolific artists/composers/Rock musicians of the 20th Century. However, I wasn’t a fan because he was prolific. I was a fan because he made great music. Here’s just a small taste of what Frank Zappa composed and released. Enjoy.