A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 140: “Trouble Every Day” by the Mothers of Invention

Episode Date: December 25, 2021

Episode one hundred and forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble Every Day” by the Mothers of Invention, and the early career of Frank Zappa. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Christmas Time is Here Again” by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of rock music and 500 songs by Andrew Huck. Episode 140 Trouble Every Day By the Mothers of Invention Just a quick note before I begin There are a couple of passing references in this episode to rape and child abuse. I don't believe there's anything that should upset anyone, but if you're worried, you might want to read the transcript on the podcast

website before or instead of listening. But also, this episode contains explicit, detailed descriptions of racial violence carried out by the police against black people, including against children. Some of it is so distressing that even reading the transcript might be a bit much for some people. Sometimes in this podcast, we have to go back to another story we've already told. In most cases, that story is recent enough that I can just say, remember last episode when I said But to tell the story of the mothers of invention I have to start with a story that I told 69 episodes ago

In episode 71 Which came out nearly two years ago In that episode On William the handgive I briefly told the story of little Julian Herrera at the start I'm going to tell a slightly longer version of the story now Some of the information at the start of this episode Will be familiar from that and other episodes

but I'm not going to expect people to remember something from that long ago, given all that's happened since. The DJ Art LaBeau is one of the few figures from the dawn of rock and roll who is still working. At 96 years old, he still promotes concerts and hosts a syndicated radio show on which he plays Oldies book goodies, a phrase which could describe him as well as the music. It's a phrase he coined and trademarked back in the 1950s, when people in his audience would ask him to play records made a whole,

three or four years earlier, records they had listened to in their youth. Leboe pretty much single-handedly invented the rock and roll nostalgia market. As well as being a DJ, he owned a record label, Original Sound, which put out a series of compilation albums, oldies-book goodies, starting in 1959, which started to cement the first draft of the do-wop canon. These were the first albums to compile together a set of older rock and roll hits and market them for nostalgia, and they were very much based on the taste of his West Coast teenage listenership,

featuring songs like Earth Angel by the Penguins, but also records that had a more limited geographic appeal, like Heaven and Paradise, by Don Julian and the Medal Arks. As well as being a DJ and record company owner, Lebo was the promoter and MC for regular teenage dancers at El Monte Legion Stadium, at which Kipp and the Flips, the band that featured Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston, would back local performers like the Penguins, Don & Jury or Richie Valens, as well as visiting headliners like Jerry Lee Lewis.

Elmonte Stadium was originally chosen because it was outside the LA City Limits. At the time, there were anti-rock and roll ordinances that meant that any teenage dance had to be approved by the LA Board of Education, but those didn't apply to that stadium. But it also led to Le Bo's audience becoming more racially diverse. The stadium was in East LA, which had a large Mexican-American population,

and while LeBos' listenership had initially been very white, soon there were substantial numbers of Mexican-American and black audience members, and it was at one of the El Monte shows that Johnny Otis discovered the person who everyone thought was going to become the first Chicano rock star. before even Richie Valens in 1957, performing as one of the filler acts on the Bo's Bill.

He signed Little Julian Herrera, a performer who was considered a sensation in East Delhi at the time, though nobody really knew where he lived or knew much about him other than that he was handsome, Chicano, and would often have a pint of whiskey in his back pocket, even though he was under the legal drinking age. Otis signed Herrera to his label, Dig Records, and produced a little. several records for him, including the record by which he's now best remembered, those lonely, lonely nights. After those didn't take off the way they were expected to, Herrera and his vocal group The Tigers moved to another label, one owned by LaBeau, where they recorded, I Remember Linda. And then one day, Johnny Otis got a knock on his door from the police. They were looking for

Ron Gregory. Otis had never heard of Ron Gregory, and told him so. The police then showed him a picture. It turned out that Julian Herrera wasn't Mexican-American and wasn't from East L.A., but was from Massachusetts. He had run away from home a few years back, hitchhacked across the country, and been taken in by a Mexican-American family whose name he had adopted. And now he was wanted for rape. Herrera went to prison, and when he got out, he tried to make a comeback, but ended up sleeping rough in the basement of the stadium where he had once been discovered. He had to skip town because of some other legal problems and headed to Tijuana, where he was last seen playing R&B gigs in 1963. Nobody knows what happened to him after that.

Some say he was murdered, others that he's still alive, working in a petrol station under yet another name. But nobody has had a confirmed sighting of him since then. When he went to prison, the Tigers tried to continue for a while, but without their lead singer they soon broke up. Ray Collins, who we heard singing the falsetto part in I Remember Linda, went on to join many other Doomwop and R&B groups over the next few years, with little success. Then in summer 1963, he walked into a bar in Panama,

and saw a bar band who were playing the old Hank Ballard and the Midnighters song, Work with Me Annie. As Collins later put it, I figured that any band that played Work with Me Annie was all right, and he asked if he could join them for a few songs. They agreed, and afterwards, Colin. struck up a conversation with the guitarist and told him about an idea he'd had for a song based on one of Steve Allen's catchphrases. The guitarist happened to be spending a lot of his time recording at an

independent recording studio and suggested that the two of them record the song together. The guitarist in question was named Frank Zappa. Zappa was originally from Maryland, but had moved to California as a child with his conservative Italian-American family when his father, a defence contractor, had got a job in Monterey. The family had moved around California with his father's work, mostly living in various small towns in the Mojave Desert, 70 miles or so north of Los Angeles. Young Frank had an interest in science, especially chemistry,

and especially things that exploded. But while he managed to figure out the ingredients for gunpowder, his family couldn't afford to buy him a chemistry set in his formative years. They were so poor that his father was. regularly took part in medical experiments to get a bit of extra money to feed his kids. And so the young man's interest was diverted away from science towards music. His first musical interest, and one that would show up in his music throughout his life, was the comedy music of Spike Jones,

whose band combined virtuassic instrumental performances with sound effects. and all began with cocktails for two and Palladis of popular classical music and it's very closely to be a photo finish or an oil painting and now Lewis streets with a left and Lewis is in their slugging and it's a battle and now they're tearing hair there's hair all over the ring there's hair all over the place i don't know whose hair it is

It's mine. And there goes the winner! Jones was a huge inspiration for almost every eccentric or bohemian of the 1940s and 50s. Spike Mulligan, for example, took the name Spike in tribute to him. And young Zappa wrote his first ever fan letter to Jones when he was five or six. As a child, Zappa was also fascinated by the visual aesthetics of music. He liked to draw musical notes on staves and see what they look. like. But his musical interests developed in two other ways once he entered his teens. The first was

fairly typical for the musicians of his generation from LA we've looked at, and will continue to look at, which is that he heard G by the Crows on the radio. He became an R&B obsessive at that moment, and would spend every moment he could listening to the black radio stations, despite his parents' disapproval. He particularly enjoyed Huggie Boyes radio show, broadcast from Dolphins of Hollywood, and also would religiously listen to Johnny Otis, and soon became a connoisse of the kind of Armambian blues that Otis championed as a musician and DJ. I hadn't been raised in an environment where there was a lot of music in the house. This couple that owned the chili place, Opal and Chester, agreed to ask the man who serviced the juke

box to put in some of the song titles that I liked because I promised that I would dutifully keep pumping quarters into this thing so I could listen to him and so I had the ability to eat good chili and listen to three hours past midnight by Johnny Guitar Watson for most of my junior and senior year. Johnny Guitar Watson, along with Guitar Slim, would become a formative influence on Zappa's guitar playing, and his playing on three hours past midnight is so similar to Zappa's later style that you could easily believe it was him. But Zappa wasn't only listening to R&B. The way Zapper would always tell the story, he discovered the music that would set him apart from his contemporaries, originally by reading an article in Look magazine.

Now, because Zappa has obsessive fans who check every detail, people have done the research and found that there was no such article in that magazine. But he was a lot of the book. But he was telling the story close enough to the time period in which it happened, that its broad strokes, at least, must be correct, even if the details are wrong. What Zappa said was that the article was on Sam Goody, the record salesman, and talked about how Goody was so good at his job that he had even been able to sell a record of ionisation by Edgar Verres, which just consisted of the worst and most horrible noises anyone had ever heard, just loud drumming noises and screeching sounds. He determined then that he needed to hear that album, but he had no idea how he would get

hold of a copy. I'll now read an excerpt from Zappa's autobiography, because Zappa's phrasing makes the story much better. Some time later, I was staying overnight with Dave Franken, a friend who lived in La Mesa, and we wound up going to the hi-fi place. They were having a sale on R&B singles. After shuffling through the rack and finding a couple of Joe Houston records, I made my way towards the cash register and happened to glance at the LP bin. I noticed a strange-looking black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy grey hair and looked like a mad scientist. I thought it was great that a mad scientist had finally made a record, so I picked it up, and there it was, the record with ionisation on it. The author of The Look article had gotten it slightly wrong.

The correct title was the complete works of Edgar Verrez, Volume 1, including ionisation, among other pieces, on an obscure label called EMS, the Lane Music Store. The record number was 401. I returned the Joe Houston Records and checked my pockets to see how much money I had. I think it came to about 375. I'd never bought an album before, but I knew they must be expensive because mostly old people bought them. I asked the man at the cash register how much EMS 401 cost. That grey one in the box, he said. 595. I'd been searching for that record for a record for a over a year and I wasn't about to give up. I told him I had 375. He thought about it for a minute and said, we've been using that record to demonstrate high-fies with, but nobody ever buys one

when we use it. I guess if you want it that bad, you can have it for 375. Zapper took the record home and put it on his mother's record player in the living room, the only one that could play LPs. His mother told him he could never play that record in the living room again, so he took the record player into his bedroom, and it became his record player from that point on. Ferez was a French composer who had, in his early career, been very influenced by DeBucci. De Boosie is now, of course, part of the classical canon, but in the early 20th century he was regarded as radical, almost revolutionary, for his complete rewriting of the rules of conventional classical music tonality into a new conception based on chordal melodies, pedal points, and use of

non-diotonic scales. Almost all of Veres' early work was destroyed in a fire, so we don't have evidence of the transition from Debussy's romantic-influenced impressionism to Verrez's later style. But after he had moved to the US in 1915, he had become

wildly more experimental. Ironisation is often claimed to be the first piece of Western classical music written only for percussion instruments. Verrez was part of a wider movement of modernist composers. For example, example, he was the best man at Nicholas Slinimski's wedding, and had also set up the

International Composers Guild, whose manifesto influenced Zappa, though his libertarian politics led him to adapt it to a more individualistic rather than collective framing. The original manifesto read in part, dying is the privilege of the weary, the present-day composers refuse to die. They have realised the necessity of banding together, and are fighting for the right of each individual to secure a fair and free presentation of his work. In the 20s and 30s, Verres had written a large number of highly experimental pieces, including Equatorial, which was written for bass vocal, percussion, woodwind, and two theramine cellos.

These are not the same as the more familiar theramine, created by the same inventor, and were, as their name suggests, pheromins that were played like a cello, with a fingerboard and bow. Only ten of these were ever made, specifically for performances of Verez's work, and he later rewrote the work to use And Martino instead of Theriminchellos, which is how the work is normally heard now. But Verez had spent much of the 30s, 40s and early 50s, working on two pieces that were never finished, based on science fiction ideas.

Lastronom, which was meant to be about communication with people from the star Sirius, and Espasse, which was originally intended to be. to be performed simultaneously by choirs in Beijing, Moscow, Paris, and New York. Neither of these ideas came to fruition, and so Verrez had not released any new work, other than one small piece, etude pour espasse, an excerpt from the larger work, in Zappa's lifetime. Zappa followed up his interest in Verraz's music with his music teacher, one of the few people in the young man's life who encouraged him in his unusual interests. That teacher, Mr. Cavillman, introduced Zappa to the work of other composers like Vayburn,

but would also let him know why he liked particular R&B records. For example, Zapper played Mr. Cavillman, Angel in My Life by the Jewels, and asked what it was that made him particularly like it. The teacher's answer was that it was the parallel fourths that made the record particularly appealing. Young Frank was such a big fan of Verez that for his 15th birthday, he actually asked if he could make a long-distance phone call to speak to Varez. He didn't know where Varez lived, but figured that it must be in Greenwich Village, because that was where composers lived.

And he turned out to be right. He didn't get through on his birthday. He got Verez's wife, who told him the composer was in Europe, but he did eventually get to speak to him and was incredibly excited when Verrez told him that not only had he just written a new piece for the first time in years, but that it was called Desair, and was about deserts, just like the Mojave Desert where Zappa lived.

As he later wrote, when you're 15 and living in the Mojave Desert, and you find out that the world's greatest composer, who also looks like a mad scientist, is working in a secret Greenwich Religion Laboratory on a song about your hometown, so to speak, you can get pretty excited. A year later, Zappa actually wrote to Varez,

a long letter which included him telling the story about how he'd found his work in the first place, hoping to meet up with him when Zappa travelled to the East Coast to see family. I'll read out a few extracts, but the whole thing is fascinating for what it says about Zappa the precocious adolescent, and I'll link to a blog post with it in the show notes.

Dear sir, perhaps you might remember me from my stupid phone call last January. If not, my name again is for, Frank Zappa Jr. I am 16 years old. That might explain partly my disturbing you last winter. After I had struggled through Mr. Finkelstein's notes on the back cover, I really did struggle too, for at the time I had no training in music other than practice at drum rudiments. I became more and more interested in you and your music. I began to go to the library and take out books on modern composers and modern music, to learn all I could about Edgar Verres. It got to be my best

subject, your life, and I began writing my reports and term papers on you at school. At one time when my history teacher asked us to write on an American that has really done something for the USA, I wrote on you and the Pan American Composers League and the New Symphony. I failed. The teacher had never heard of you and said I made the whole thing up. Silly but true. That was my sophomore year in high school. Throughout my life, all the talents and abilities that God has left me with have been self-developed. And when the time came for Frank to learn how to read and write music, Frank taught himself that too.

I picked it all up from the library. I have been composing for two years now, utilising a strict 12-tone technique, producing effects that are reminiscent of Anton Weber. During those two years, I have written two short Woodwind quartet and a short symphony for winds, brass and percussion. I plan to go on and be a composer after college,

and I could really use the council of a veteran. and such as you. If you would allow me to visit with you for even a few hours, it would be greatly appreciated. It may sound strange, but I think I have something to offer you in the way of new ideas. One is an elaboration on the principle of Ruth Seeger's contrapuntal dynamics, and the other is an extension of the 12-tone technique, which I call the inversion square. It enables one to compose harmonically constructed pantonal music in logical patterns and progressions while still abandoning tonality. Verres sent a brief reply, saying that he was going to be away for a few months, but would like to meet Zappa on his return. The two never met, but Zappa kept the letter

from Verres framed on his wall for the rest of his life. Zappa soon bought a couple more albums, a version of The Right of Spring by Stravinsky, and a record of pieces by Véburn, including his symphony opus 21. Incidentally, with the classical music here, I'm not seeking out the process. performances Zappa was listening to, just using whichever recordings I happen to have copies of. Zappa was also reading Slenimski's works of musicology, like the

Thesaurus of Scales and melodic patterns. As well as this serious music though, Zappa was also developing as an R&B musician. He later said of the Weber an album, I loved that record, but it was about as different from Stravinsky and Verez as you could get. I didn't know anything about 12-tone music then, but I liked the way it sounded.

since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightning Slim or a vocal group called The Jules, who had a song out then called Angel in My Life, or Webern, or Rez, or Stravinsky. To me, it was all good music. He had started as a drummer

with the group called The Blackouts, an integrated group with white, Latino and black members, who played R&B tracks like, directly from my heart to you, the song Johnny Otis had produced for Little. Richard. But after 18 months or so, he quit the group and stopped playing drums. Instead, he switched to guitar, with the style influenced by Johnny Guitar Watson and Guitar Slim. His first guitar had action so bad that he didn't learn to play chords, and moved straight on to playing lead lines with his

younger brother Bobby playing rhythm. He also started hanging around with two other teenage bohemians, Euclid Sherwood, who was nicknamed Motorhead, and Don Vleet, who called himself Don Van Vleet. Vliet was a truly strange character, even more so than Zappa, but they shared a love for the blues, and Vleet was becoming a fairly good blues singer, though he hadn't yet perfected the Howling Wolf imitation that would become his stock in trade in later years. But the surviving recording of Vlite singing with the Zappa brothers on guitar, singing a silly parody blues about being flushed down the toilet, of the kind that many teenage boys would write, shows the promise that the two men had. Zappa was also getting the chance to hear his more serious music performed.

He'd had the high school band play a couple of his pieces, but he also got the chance to write film music. His English teacher, Don Severus, had decided to go off and seek his fortune as a film script writer, and got Zappa hired to write the music for a cheap western he'd written, run home slow. The film was beset with problems. It started filming in 1959, but didn't get finished and released until 1965,

but the music Zappa wrote for it did eventually get recorded and used on the soundtrack. In 1962, he got to write the music for another film, The World's Greatest Sinner, and he also wrote a theme song for that, which got released as the B-side of How's Your Bird, the record he made with Ray Collins. Zappa was able to make these records, because by the early 60s, as well as playing guitar in bar bands, he was working as an assistant for a man named Paul Buff. Paul Buff had worked as an engineer for a guided missile manufacturer, but had decided that he didn't want to do that anymore,

and instead had opened up the first independent multi-track recording studio on the West Coast, PAL Studios, using equipment he designed and built himself, including a five-track tape recorder. Buff engineered a huge number of surf instrumentals there, including wipeout by the safaris. Zappa had first got to know Buff when he had come to Buff's studio with some session musicians in 1960. to record some jazz pieces he'd written, including this piece, which at the time was in the style of Dave Bruebeck,

but would later become a staple of Zapper's repertoire re-archistrated in a rock style. Buff really just wanted to make records entirely by himself, so he taught himself to play the rudiments of guitar, bass, drums, piano, and alto saxophone, so he could create records alone. He would listen to every big hit record, figure out what the hooks were on the record, and write his own knock-off of those. An example is To Warner Surf by the Hollywood Persuaders, which is actually buff on all instruments, and which according to Zappa went to number one in Mexico, though I've not found an independent source to confirm that chart placing,

so perhaps take it with a pinch of salt. The B-side to that, Grunion Run, was written by Zappa, who also plays guitar on that side. Zappa, buff, Ray Collins, and a couple of associates, would record all sorts of material at Powell. Comedy material, like Hay Nelda, under the name Ned and Elder, a parody of Hey Paula by Paul and Paula. Do-Wop Parodies like Masked Grandma, R&B,

and more. Then, Buff or Zapper would visit one of the local independent label owners and tried to sell them the master. Art LeBoe, at Original Sound, released several of the singles, as did Bob Keane at Donna Records in Delphi. The How's Your Bird single also got Zappa his first national media exposure as he went on the Steve Allen show, where he demonstrated to Alan how to make music

using a bicycle and a pre-recorded electronic tape in an appearance that Zappa would parody five years later on the Monkees TV show. The first thing that I should do is demonstrate to you the different types of sounds that you can get from a bicycle because it actually does make some very interesting sounds. And of course, that's what we're all interesting. in. There's new sounds, yes.

It's one of the sounds that you're in. Yes. Oh, you have a microphone down there, I see. Well, I'll need this microphone to pick up the next... But possibly the record that made the most impact at the time was Memories of El Monte, a song that Zappa and Collins wrote together about Art LeBow's dancers at El Monte Stadium,

incorporating excerpts of several of the songs that would be played there, and named after a compilation LeBoe had put out, which had included I Remember Linda by Little Julian and the Tigers. They got Clebe Duncan of the Penguins to sing lead, and the record came out as by the Penguins on original sound. If I could go back to those days of a pass,

I'd show you a love, a love that would last remember those wonderful dances in Elmontie. By this point though, Pall Studios was losing money, and Buff took up the offer of a job working for Lebo full-time, as an engineer at original sound. He would later become best known for inventing the Kepex, an early noise gate which engineer Alan Parsons used on a bass drum to create the heartbeat that opens Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. That invention would possibly be Buff's most lasting contribution to music,

as by the early 80s the drum sound on every single pop record was recorded using a noise gate. Buffs sold the studio to Zpper, who renamed it Studio Z and moved in. He was going through a divorce and had nowhere else to live. live. The studio had no shower, and Zappa had to just use a sink to wash, and he was surviving mostly off foods scrounged by his resourceful friend Motorhead Sherwood. By this point, Zappa had also joined a band called The Suts, consisting of Don Van Vleet, Alex Sinclair, and Vic Mortensen, and they recorded several tracks at Studio Z, which they tried to get released on Dot Records, including a cover version of Little Richard's Slipping and Slide in, and a song called Tiger Roach,

whose lyrics were mostly random phrases called from a Green Lantern comic. That's fine. Tiger's fine. Monster blocks. Light switch. Flutcher sparks. Ice cream. Zappa also started writing what was intended as the first ever rock opera.

I was a teenage malt shop. And attempts were made to record parts of it with Vliet, Mortensen and Motorhead Sherwood. I was a teenage malt shop. Zappa was also planning to turn Studio Z into a film studio. He obtained some used film equipment and started planning a science fiction film to feature Vlite, titled Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People. The title was inspired by an uncle of Vleet, who lived with Vlite and his girlfriend, and used to urinate with the door open so he could expose himself to Vleet's girlfriend,

saying as he did so, look at that, looks just like a big Beefheart. Unfortunately, the film would not kill. get very far. Zappa was approached by a used car salesman who said that he and his friends were having a stag party. As Zappa owned a film studio, could he make them a pornographic film to show at the party? Zappa told him that a film wouldn't be possible, but as he needed the money, would an audio tape be acceptable? The used car salesman said that it would, and gave him a list of sex acts he and his friends would like to hear. Zappa and a friend Lorraine Boucher went into the studio and made a few grunting noises and sound effects.

The used car salesman turned out actually to be an undercover policeman, who was better known in the area for his entrapment of gay men, but had decided to branch out. Zappa and Belcher were arrested. Zappa's father bailed him out, and Zapper got an advance from Art Lebo to pay Belcher's bail. Luckily, Grunion and Run, and memories of El Monte, were doing well enough that Lebo could give Zappa a $1,500 advance. When the case finally came to trial, the judge laughed at the tape and wanted to throw the whole case out but the prosecutor insisted on fighting and zapper got 10 days in prison and most of his tapes were impounded never to be returned he fell behind with his rent

and studio z was demolished and then ray collins called him asking if he wanted to join a bar band Hitchack rock. Hitchack, baby. Hitchieck, baby. Hitchieck, baby. The soul giants were formed by a bass player named Roy Estrada. Now, Estrada is unfortunately someone who will come up in the story a fair bit over the next year or so, as he played on several of the most important records to come out of L.A. in the 60s and early 70s. He is also someone about whom there's fairly little biographical information.

He's not been interviewed much compared to pretty much everyone else, and it's easy to understand why, when you realise that he's currently halfway through a 25-year sentence for child molestation, his third such conviction. He won't get out of prison until he's 93. He's one of the most despicable people who will turn up in this podcast, and frankly, I'm quite glad I don't know more about him as a person. He was, though, a good bass player and falsetto singer,

and he had released a single on King Records. and instrumental titled Jungle Dreams. The other member of the rhythm section, Jimmy Carl Black, was an American Indian. That's the term he always used about himself until his death, and so that's the term I'll use about him too, from Texas. Black had grown up in El Paso as a fan of Western swing music, especially Bob Wills, but had become an R&B fan after discovering Wolfman Jack's radio show

and hearing the music of Howling Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. Like every young man from El Paso, he would travel to Juarez as a teenager to get drunk, see sex shows and raise hell. It was also there that he saw his first live blues music, watching Long John Hunter, the same man who inspired the Bobby Fuller for, and he would always claim Hunter

as the man whose shows taught him how to play the blues. Black had decided he wanted to become a musician when he'd seen Elvis perform live. In Black's memory, this was a gig where Elvis was an unknown Support Act for Farron Young and Wanda Jackson, but he was almost certainly slightly misremembering. It's most likely that what he saw was Elvis's show in El Paso on the 11th of April, 1956, where Young and Jackson were also on the bill, but supporting Elvis, who was headlining. Either way, Black had decided that he wanted to make girls react to him the same way they reacted

to Elvis, and he started playing in various country and R&B bands. His first record was with a group called The Keys, and unfortunately I haven't been able to track down a copy. It was reissued on a CD in the 90s, but the CD itself is now out of print and sells for 60 pounds. But he did re-record the song with a later group he led, the Manish Boys. He spent a couple of years in the Air Force, but continued playing music during that time, including in a band called The Exceptions, which featured Peter Satera, later of the band Chicago, on bass. After a brief time working as a lineman in Wichita, he moved his family to California, where he got a job teaching drums at a music shop in Anaheim, where the bass teacher was Jim Fielder, who would later play bass in blood, sweat and tears.

One of Fielder's friends, Tim Buckley, used to hang around in the shop as well, and Black was at first irritated by him coming in and playing the guitars and not buying anything, but eventually became impressed by his music. Black would later introduce Buckley to Herb Cohen, who would become Buckley's manager, starting his professional career. When Roy Estrada came into the shop, he and Buckley struck up a friendship, and Estrada asked Black to join his band The Soul Giants,

whose line-up became Estrada, Black, a sax player named Davy Coronado, a guitarist called Larry, and a singer called Dave. The group got a residency at the Broadside Club in Pernoma, playing Woolly Bully and Louis-Louis and other garage band staples. But then Larry and Dave got drafted, and the group got in two men called Ray, Ray Collins on vocals and Ray Hunt on guitar.

This worked for a little while, but Ray Hunt was, by all accounts, not a great guitar player. He would play wrong chords, and also he was fundamentally a surf player while the Soul Giants were an R&B group. Eventually, Collins and Hunt got into a fist fight, and Collins suggested that they get in his friend Frank instead. For a while, the Soul Giants continued playing Midnight Tower

and Louis Louis, but then Zappa suggested that they start playing some of his original material as well. Davy Coronado refused to play original material because he thought, correctly, that it would lose the band gigs, but the rest of the band sided with the man who had quickly become their new leader. Coronado moved back to Texas, and on Mother's Day, 1965, the Soul Giants changed their name to the mothers. They got in Henry Vestine on second guitar and started playing Zappa's originals, as well as changing the lyrics to some of the hits they were playing. Zappa had started associating with the freak crowd in Hollywood, centered around Vito and Franzoni, after being introduced by Don Chavaris, his old teacher-turned screenwriter,

to an artist called Mark Chaker, who Zappa invited to manage the group. Chaker in turn brought in his friend Herb Cohen, who managed several folk acts, including the modern folk quartet and Judy Hensk, and who lagged Zappa had once been arrested on obscenity charges, in Cohen's case for promoting gigs by the comedian Lenny Bruce. Cohen first saw the mothers when they were recording their appearance in an exploitation film called Mondo Hollywood.

They were playing in a party scene, using equipment borrowed from Jim Gwirtio, a session musician who had briefly joined the mothers, but who is now best known for having been Chicago's merger and producing hit records for them and blood, sweat and tears. In the crowd were Vito and Franzoni, Brian McLean, Ram Dass, the Harvard psychologist who had collaborated with Timothy Leary in controversial LSD experiments that had led to both losing their jobs

and other stalwarts of the sunset strip scene. Cohen got the group bookings at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go and The Trip, two of the premier L.A. nightclubs, and Zappa would also sit in with other bands playing at those venues, like the Grassroots, a band featuring Brian McLean and Arthur Lee, which would soon change its name to love.

At this time, Zappa and Henry Vestine lived together, next door to a singer named Victoria Winston, who at the time was in a duo called Summer's Children with Kurt Becher. Winston, like Zapper, was a fan of Edgar Varez, and actually asked Zappa to write songs for summer's children, but one of the partners involved in their production company disliked Zappa's material, and the collaboration went no further. Zappa at this point was trying to incorporate more ideas from modal jazz into his music.

He was particularly impressed by Eric Dolphy's 1964 album Out to Lunch. But he was also writing more about social issues, and in particular he had written a song called The Watts Riot's song, which would later be renamed Trouble Every Day. Now, the Watts Uprising was one of the most important events in Black American history, and it feels quite wrong that I'm covering it in an episode about a band made up of white, Latino, and American Indian people, rather than a record made by by black people, but I couldn't find a way to fit it in anywhere else.

As you will remember me seeing in the episode on I Thought the Law, the LA police under Chief William Parker were essentially a criminal gang by any other name. They were incompetent, violent and institutionally racist, and terrorised black people. The black people of LA were also feeling particularly aggrieved in the summer of 1965, as a law banning segregation in housing have been overturned by a ballot proposition in November 1964, sponsored by the real estate industry and passed by an overwhelming majority of white voters

in what Martin Luther King called one of the most shameful developments in our nation's history and which Edmund Brown, the Democratic governor, said was like another hate binge which began more than 30 years ago in a Munich beer hall. Then, on Wednesday, August 11th, 19th, the police pulled over a black man, Marquette Fry, for drunk driving. He had been driving his mother's car and she lived nearby, and she came out to shout at him about drinking and

driving. The mother, Rina Price, was hit by one of the policemen. Fry then physically attacked one of the police for hitting his mother. One of the police pulled out a gun, a crowd gathered, the police became violent against the crowd, a rumor spread that they had kicked a pregnant woman, and the resulting protests were exacerbated by the police carrying out what Chief Parker described as a paramilitary response. The National Guard were called in, huge swathes of South Central LA were cordoned off by the police with signs saying things like, turn left or get shot. Black residents started setting fire to and looting local white-owned businesses that had been exploiting black workers and customers, though this looting was very much confined to individuals who were known to have

made the situation worse. Eventually it took six days for the uprising to be put down at a cost of 34 deaths, 132 injuries and 3,438 arrests. Of the deaths, 23 were black civilians murdered by the police and zero were police murdered by black civilians. Two police were killed by other police in accidental shootings. The civil rights activist Bayard Rustin said of the uprising, The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting

that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life. Frank Zappa's musical hero, Johnny Otis, would later publish the book, Listen to the Lambs about the Watts Rebellion, and in it he devotes more than 30 pages to eyewitness accounts from black people. It's an absolutely invaluable resource.

One of the people Otis interviews is Lily Ford, who is described by my copy of the book as being the lead singer of the famous roulette. This is presumably an error made by the publishers rather than Otis, because Ford was actually a singer with the Ray Letts, as in Ray Charles's vocal group. She also recorded with Otis under the name Lily of the Valley. Now Ford's account deserves a large excerpt, but be warned, this is very, very difficult to hear. I gave a content warning at the beginning, but I'm going to give another one here. A lot of our people were in the street seeing if they could get free food and clothes and furniture

and some of them taking liquor too. But the white man was out for blood. Then three boys came down the street laughing and talking. They were teenagers, about 15 or 16 years old. As they got right at the store, they seemed to debate whether they would go inside. One boy started a couple of times to go. Finally he did.

Now a cop car finally stops to investigate. Police got out of the car. Meanwhile, the other two boys had seen them coming and they ran. My brother-in-law and I were screaming and yelling for the boy to get out. He didn't hear us, or was too scared to move. He never had a chance. This young cop walked up to the broken window and looked in, as the other one went round the back and fired some shots,

and I just knew he'd killed the other two boys, but I guess he missed. He came around front again. By now, other police cars had come. The cop at the window aimed his gun. He stopped and looked back at a policeman's sitting. in a car. He aimed again. No shot. I tried to scream but I was so horrified that nothing would come out of my throat. The third time he aimed, he yelled halt and fired before the word was out of his mouth. Then he turned around and made a bull's-eye sign with his fingers to his

partner, just as though he had shot a tin can off a fence, not a human being. The cop stood around for 10 or 15 minutes without going inside to see if the kid was alive or dead. When the ambulance came, then they went in. They dragged him out like he was a sack of potatoes. Cops were everywhere now. So many cops for just one murder. There's a lot of it in' Hopeing for the best Even I go to bread Every time I hear I'm saying

That there's no way to debate There's a lot more of this sort of account In Otis's book And it's all worth reading Indeed, I would argue That it is necessary reading And Otis keeps making a point Which I quoted back in the episode

On William the Hand drive But which I will quote again here A newborn Negro baby Has less chance of survival than a white A Negro baby will have its life ended seven years sooner. This is not some biological phenomenon linked to skin colour like sickle cell anemia. This is a national crime, linked to a white supremacist way of life and compounded by indifference. Just a reminder, the word Negro, which Otis uses there, was, in the mid-60s, the term of choice used by black people.

And it's this which inspired the Watts Riot song, which the mothers were playing when Tom Wilson was brought into the trip by Herb Cohen Wilson Wilson had just moved from any Wilson had been from Columbia to be doing

to Simon and Garfunkel to Verve, a subsidiary of MGM which was known for Jazz records but was moving into rock and roll. Wilson was looking for a white blues band and thought he'd found one. He signed the group without hearing any other songs. Henry Vestine quit the group between the signing and the first recording to go and join an actual white blues band Canned Heat. And over the next year the group's lineup would fluctuate quite a bit around the core of Zappa, Collins, Estrada and Black, with members like Steve Mann, Jim Gwercio, Jim Fielder,

and Van Dyke Parks coming and going, often without any recordings being made of their performances. The line-up on what became the group's first album, Freak Out, was Zappa, Collins, Estrada, Black, and Elliot Inber, the former guitarist with The Gamblers, who had joined the group shortly before the session and would leave within a few months. The first track the group recorded, Any Way the Wind Blows, was straightforward enough. The second song, a satisfaction knock-off called Hungry Freaks Daddy, was also fine. But it was when the group performed their third song of the session, who were the brain police,

that Tom Wilson realised that he didn't have a standard band on his hands. Luckily for everyone concerned, Tom Wilson was probably the single best producer in America to have discovered the mothers. While he was, at the time, primarily known for his folk rock production, he had built his early career on Cecil Taylor and Sun Mar records, some of the freakiest jazz of the 50s and early 60s. He knew what needed to be done. He needed a bigger budget.

Far from being annoyed that he didn't have the white blues band he wanted, Wilson actively encouraged the group to go much, much further. He brought him wrecking crew members to augment the band, though one of them, Mac Rebenak, found the music so irritating, he pretended he needed to go to the toilet, walked out and never came back. He got orchestral musicians to play Zappa's scores and allowed the group to rent hundreds of dollars of percussion instruments

for the side-long track, Return of the Sun of Monster Magnet, which features many Hollywood scenesters of the time, including Van Dyke Parks, Kim Fowley, future Manson family member Bobby Boussela, record executive David Anderlay, songwriter P.F. Sloan and cartoonist Terry Gilliam, all recording percussion parts and vocal noises. Such was Wilson's belief in the group that Freakout became only the second rock double album ever released,

exactly a week after the first, Blonde on Blonde, by Wilson's former associate Bob Dylan. The inner sleeve included a huge list of people who had influenced the record in one way or another, including people Zappanoe like Don Severis, Don Vleet, Paul Buff, Bob Keane, Nick Vennett and Art Lebo, musicians who had influenced the group like Don and Dewey, Johnny Otis's sax players, Preston Love and Big Jay McNeely, Eric Dolphy, Edgar Ferrerz, Richard Berry, Johnny Guitar Watson and Ravi Shankar, eccentric performers like Tiny Tim, DJs like Hunter Hancock and Huggy Boy, science fiction writers like Cordwana Smith and Robert Checkley, and scenesters like David Crosby, Vito and Franzoni.

the list of 179 people would provide a sort of guide for many listeners who would seek out those names and find their ways into the realms of non-mainstream music writing and art over the next few decades. Zappa would always remain grateful to Wilson for taking his side in the record's production saying, Wilson was sticking his neck out.

He laid his job on the line by producing the album. MGM felt that they had spent too much money on the album. The one thing Wilson couldn't do, though, was persuade the label that the group's name could stay as it was. The Mothers was a euphemism, for a word I can't say if I want this podcast to keep its clean rating, a word that is often replaced in TV clean edits of films with melon farmers, and MGM were convinced that the radio would never play any music by a band with that name,

not realising that that wouldn't be the reason this music wouldn't get played on the radio. The group needed to change their name. And so, out of necessity, they became the mothers of the world. of invention. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on.

Christmas time is here again by the Beatles. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up. for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favourite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey,

and produced by me and tilt a little. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 500-the-numbersongs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person

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