Thread: Camarillo Brillo

yes, i still listen to hot rats a lot, it truly is a masterpiece.

lowell george of the band little feat played rhythm guitar on some tracks.

I had the album Chunga's Revenge with original artwork which I lost in a haze of mescaline sometime in 1972 in a street in Cheltenham where I was selling windowpane acid for 50p a tab.

..... did i ever tell you about the time john lennon and paul mcartney asked me for help with the lyrics of sgt peppers. we were all smoking joints and shooting H in a gaff off carnaby street, clapton was making the tea and dylan dropped in with some coke for us, anyway, come 2am and we were finishing off the lyrics to the final track and when keith richard phoned to ask my advice on..

cont. p98

Originally Posted by taxexile

wonderfully informative zappa interview here.

I wish the interviewer would have asked him about Laurel Canyon...but I doubt he would have answered anyway.

Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, Captain Beefheart, CSN, Three Dog Night, Alice Cooper, the Doors, and Love with Arthur Lee, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judi Sill and David Blue, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills.

https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Scenes-.../dp/1909394122



I read the original of this when McGowan first put it up online...there are some great pics that accompany the story. When the book came out it's title was different from what he called it online. Since McGowan died, sadly some of the pics seem to have disappeared, as did the original links to this at his site. Here's what's left:

Laurel Canyon | The Center for an Informed America

^an excerpt from Part 1 of that last link:

During the early years of its heyday, Laurel Canyon’s father figure is the rather eccentric personality known as Frank Zappa. Though he and his various Mothers of Invention line-ups will never attain the commercial success of the band headed by the admiral’s son, Frank will be a hugely influential figure among his contemporaries. Ensconced in an abode dubbed the ‘Log Cabin’ – which sat right in the heart of Laurel Canyon, at the crossroads of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue – Zappa will play host to virtually every musician who passes through the canyon in the mid- to late-1960s. He will also discover and sign numerous acts to his various Laurel Canyon-based record labels. Many of these acts will be rather bizarre and somewhat obscure characters (think Captain Beefheart and Larry “Wild Man” Fischer), but some of them, such as psychedelic rocker cum shock-rocker Alice Cooper, will go on to superstardom.

Zappa, along with certain members of his sizable entourage (the ‘Log Cabin’ was run as an early commune, with numerous hangers-on occupying various rooms in the main house and the guest house, as well as in the peculiar caves and tunnels lacing the grounds of the home; far from the quaint homestead the name seems to imply, by the way, the ‘Log Cabin’ was a cavernous five-level home that featured a 2,000+ square-foot living room with three massive chandeliers and an enormous floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace), will also be instrumental in introducing the look and attitude that will define the ‘hippie’ counterculture (although the Zappa crew preferred the label ‘Freak’). Nevertheless, Zappa (born, curiously enough, on the Winter Solstice of 1940) never really made a secret of the fact that he had nothing but contempt for the ‘hippie’ culture that he helped create and that he surrounded himself with.

Given that Zappa was, by numerous accounts, a rigidly authoritarian control-freak and a supporter of U.S. military actions in Southeast Asia, it is perhaps not surprising that he would not feel a kinship with the youth movement that he helped nurture. And it is probably safe to say that Frank’s dad also had little regard for the youth culture of the 1960s, given that Francis Zappa was, in case you were wondering, a chemical warfare specialist assigned to – where else? – the Edgewood Arsenal. Edgewood is, of course, the longtime home of America’s chemical warfare program, as well as a facility frequently cited as being deeply enmeshed in MK-ULTRA operations. Curiously enough, Frank Zappa literally grew up at the Edgewood Arsenal, having lived the first seven years of his life in military housing on the grounds of the facility. The family later moved to Lancaster, California, near Edwards Air Force Base, where Francis Zappa continued to busy himself with doing classified work for the military/intelligence complex. His son, meanwhile, prepped himself to become an icon of the peace & love crowd. Again, nothing unusual about that, I suppose.

Zappa’s manager, by the way, is a shadowy character by the name of Herb Cohen, who had come out to L.A. from the Bronx with his brother Mutt just before the music and club scene began heating up. Cohen, a former U.S. Marine, had spent a few years traveling the world before his arrival on the Laurel Canyon scene. Those travels, curiously, had taken him to the Congo in 1961, at the very time that leftist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was being tortured and killed by our very own CIA. Not to worry though; according to one of Zappa’s biographers, Cohen wasn’t in the Congo on some kind of nefarious intelligence mission. No, he was there, believe it or not, to supply arms to Lumumba “in defiance of the CIA.” Because, you know, that is the kind of thing that globetrotting ex-Marines did in those days (as we’ll see soon enough when we take a look at another Laurel Canyonluminary).

Making up the other half of Laurel Canyon’s First Family is Frank’s wife, Gail Zappa, known formerly as Adelaide Sloatman. Gail hails from a long line of career Naval officers, including her father, who spent his life working on classified nuclear weapons research for the U.S. Navy. Gail herself had once worked as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development (she also once told an interviewer that she had “heard voices all [her] life”). Many years before their nearly simultaneous arrival in Laurel Canyon, Gail had attended a Naval kindergarten with “Mr. Mojo Risin’” himself, Jim Morrison (it is claimed that, as children, Gail once hit Jim over the head with a hammer). The very same Jim Morrison had later attended the same Alexandria, Virginia high school as two other future Laurel Canyon luminaries – John Phillips and Cass Elliott.

You clearly misunderstood the thrust of Zappa's thinking which was, quite simply, that popular music in the US, and elsewhere for that matter, primarily reflected social and cultural mores merchandised by corporate commercialism and as such failed as an artistic expression created "of itself".

^Oh I understood that part perfectly well.

I just wished the interviewer had gone more into Zappa's earlier life background. Maybe it would have helped explain why the cancer that eventually killed him...

Francis Zappa was the subject of some of those experiments. At Edgewood, Frank explained, “My dad used to help pay the rent by volunteering for human testing of chemical (maybe even biological) warfare agents. These were called ‘patch tests.’ The Army didn’t tell you what it was they were putting on your skin—and you agreed not to scratch it, or peek under the bandage—and they would pay you ten bucks per patch. Then they would take it off after a couple of weeks. My dad used to come home with three or four of those things on his arms and different parts of his body every week. I don’t know what the stuff was, or what the long-range health effects it might have had on him (or on any of the children that were born after the time that they did it).”^[1] One can only hope that he was not burned “more than was necessary.”

When Edgewood Arsenal wasn’t experimenting on human guinea pigs and making weapons for war crimes, it was doing its part in the war on other living things. As reported in the ever-popular journal Mosquito News, “Early in the season of 1946, it was decided that the Arsenal would be one of the twelve posts chosen for treatment with DDT from the air.”^[8] In due course, the Nobel Prize-winning pesticide ended up inside the Zappa household.^[9] As Frank explained, “my dad brought some home—there was a whole bag of it in the closet. I didn’t eat it anything, but he said that you could—it was supposed to be ‘safe,’ it only killed bugs.”^[1] DDT was outlawed in 1972, after many years of causing cancer and wreaking havoc on countless species, while contaminating everything it touched.

The labs at Edgewood did provide young Frank with some fun toys, though. His dad would “bring equipment home from the lab for me to play with: beakers, Florence flasks, little petri dishes full of mercury—blobs of mercury. I used to play with it all the time. The entire floor of my bedroom had this ‘muck’ on it, made out of mercury mixed with dust balls. One of the things I used to like to do was pour the mercury on the floor and hit it with a hammer, so it squirted all over the place. I lived in mercury.”^[1]

[1] Frank Zappa and Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 19-20, 23.
https://www.amazon.com/Real-Frank-Za.../dp/0671705725