Germaine Greer
Newsgroups: alt.fan.frank-zappa
From: mdryden@cix.compulink.co.uk (Martyn Dryden)
Subject: Germaine Greer re FZ (Was: FZ on British TV. Friday, Dec 17th.)
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1993 01:24:07 +0000
In message <1993Dec17.111810.1@vaxa.strath.ac.uk>,
cbas125@vaxa.strath.ac.uk writes:
> Also there was a really good article by Germaine Greer in the Guardian earlier
> this week, about FZ. Very (surprisingly) complimentary. Unfortunately I've
> thrown it out (I've been moving flat). Is there anyone else out there who can
> post it up?
Yes indeed, it was a most intelligent, personal and thoughtful piece,
and the only one I've read so far that's mentioned getting the crabs.
So here it is:
FRANK WAS THE REAL THING LIVING IN A NIGHTMARE
Germaine Greer
The Guardian (UK), Monday December 13 1993
Frank Zappa is dead. The obituaries have been published. The ones I
read were full of peculiar caveats and qualifications. Despite
Zappa's this and despite Zappa's that, he was someone, well,
relatively important, even quite, even very. A mass of
contradictions, he was wise and he was foolish, conformist and
outrageous, Italo-Armenio-Californian freak-businessman, condescended
to by Cockneys, taken seriously by Czechs and the American State
Department. I read, too, about cultists visiting the tomb of Jim
Morrison in Pere Lachaise. I knew Jim Morrison slightly, saw a bit of
him, not long before he blew a gasket getting into a hot bath. Most
of the dead popstars courted their own deaths: Janis Joplin fallen
down between her bed and the wall, stiffed by an overdose; Jimi
Hendrix, supposedly suffocated by his vomit in narcotic swoon; Marc
Bolan wrapped around a tree.
Frank Zappa's life had to be prised out of him piecemeal by secondary
cancer of the bone. Frank knew none better that life is not fair; the
savagery of his own death would not have surprised him. It only
surprises me because I have some lingering hope that God does not
reward good with evil. The Frank Zappa who has died was one of the
best men I ever knew. Not zany, not weird, not difficult, at least
not to me, perhaps because I am as zany, weird and difficult as he.
I'd be delighted to think I was like him. I don't. Frank Zappa was
saner, braver, more level headed, more constant and more loyal than I
will ever be.
The story begins on a Sunday morning in Hernando's Hideaway, the
ground-floor coffee-shop swept away now by the refurbishment of the
Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It was in the days when I was struggling to
get out of what accountants used to call a tax spiral. The worst part
of the struggle was that I used to do lecture tours around the US.
The worst part of the lecture tour was always California, because it
was the furthest away from home, the worst time zone and the dead
middle of the weeks of touring. Los Angeles seemed to me, and still
seems to me, the antechamber of hell.
In my sumptuously fitted bathroom in the Beverly Wilshire, with the
help of a huge magnifying mirror, I had made an appalling discovery: I
had crabs in my eyebrows and goodness knew where else. I rang the
boyfriend in Detroit who pretended to be furious with me, when it was
actually my turn to be furious with him. I trudged downstairs
morosely pondering my next move, and into Hernando's Hideaway. Frank
andd Gail Zappa were there, already immersed in coffee and the Sunday
papers. I think they called out to me to join them. Somehow I ended
up at their table. They told me about having been driven out of their
house by the decorators and I told them about the crabs.
Zappa was tickled pink. Nobody knew more about crabs than he did, he
reckoned. He would take care of it. The commissionaires brought his
car, a black Bentley with smoked-glass windows, and we slid darkly,
silently off along the boulevards to Schwob's, only the most famous
drugstore in the entire world. In strode Frank shouting loudly for
blue lotion. I nerved myself for some brazen rejoinder, but he took
my infestation upon himself. By this time I already knew two
important things about Frank Zappa, important and rare things: he was
in love with his wife and she was in love with him. I don't know and
I don't care, any more than Gail Zappa did or does, how much mileage
the groupies got out of him. Gail and Frank made no display of
togetherness - there was no handholding or canoodling, but they had
the heightened physical and spiritual awareness of each other that
comes with being in love. They were really good to be around.
The next time I was in LA I saw them at the house in Laurel Canyon,
which I remember was an oasis of real life surrounded by a nightmare.
Here were sensible kids, who could converse without yelling and
display a polite interest in strangers, who wisecracked as they
watched television and occasionally did homework. Frank's
ever-expanding collection of motel keys hanging from the ceiling kept
us all in mind of the real nature of his work. On good days, when he
was at home, he worked away in his studio downstairs, just like a
Mediterranean dad with his workshop on the ground floor and the family
apartment upstairs. He never tired of the wife and kids, he never
tired of the house, and above all he never tired of the work.
Gail would say it was their peasant common sense that kept them so
constant, but it was more than that. Both Gail and Frank were fully
aware of what was actually going on in LA. They looked on the most
seductive, the most destructive culture in the world and they resisted
it. They pulled off the crowning achievement; they had kids who
genuinely liked them. I don't know how they did it. It is something
to do with their combination of intelligence, high spirits and
genuineness. Something like that.
Some might say that Frank Zappa was basically conventional and that
his freakish exterior was a fraud. In LA it was, is and ever shall be
conventional to be a promiscuous junky thrill-seeker. The Zappas paid
a certain price for not conforming. In a supermarket one day, Frank,
clad in nothing but a deep turquoise jump-suit that was unzipped to
where his pubic hair began, attracted the attention of a bleached and
bejewelled woman who kept dragging her Neanderthal escort around after
him while she squealed asinine complaints about his appearance. Frank
suddenly turned and bawled right into the woman's pop-eyed face, "Blow
it out your arse!" The woman screamed ear-splittingly, her walker
shaped up, and utter mayhem ensued. Frank just stood there, a clown
figure, towered over by the muscleman, and steadily stared him down.
I lost my address book and I lost touch with the Zappas, but I never
forgot the way they were. Most of the work that Frank did in his
downstairs studio is known to very few people. I hope his real career
as a twentieth-century composer rather than a rock star is about to
begin, but if it isn't, no big deal. He was, unlike Jim Morrison, the
real thing.