Reprinted from "Rock Wives, The hard lives and good times of the wives, girlfriends, and groupies of rock and roll" by Victoria Balfour Copyright 1986 by Victoria Balfour. Published by Beech Tree Books (ISBN 0-688-06966-5)
Frank Zappa, composer/arranger/guitarist/bandleader and self-proclaimed genius, has been on the rock scene for almost two decades. His reputation varies widely from critic to critic: Sometimes he is praised for his fusion of classical and jazz music with rock and at other times criticized for writing childish and smutty songs with titles like "The Clap" and "Shove It Right In", as well as for his onstage capers like squirting his audiences with whipped cream from the stiff tail of a stuffed giraffe. Nevertheless, his place in the annals of rock and roll is assured.
Frank isn't the only Zappa to have made a name for himself in the entertainment world, however. In 1982, Frank's teenage daughter, Moon Unit, collaborated with her father on a record called "Valley Girl". Her rap on the record, which introduced such expressions as "Gag me with a spoon" and "Barf me out", made her a celebrity. And Frank's elder son, Dweezil , is embarking on a career in both rock music and in films. But there is at least one member of the Zappa household who has no intention of seeking the limelight: Gail Zappa, the wife of Frank since 1967 and the mother of his four children, has always stayed in the background and prefers to keep it that way, though she is certainly behind her children in whatever they want to do.
Gail and Frank met in Los Angeles in 1966 , the year that Frank's first album Freak Out! was released. He was flying into town after finishing his first promotional tour, and Gail had gone along with one of his friends to pick him up at the airport. At that time in her life, Gail was, by her own admission, an experienced groupie. Nevertheless, she was not prepared for the impact that Frank would have on her when he stepped off the plane. "I was just devastated", she says. "I didn't know what to do. It was like you were totally stripped of any preconceived notions about anything". For one thing, in person Frank was pretty imposing. "He probably scared the shit out of his mother too", laughs Gail.
But Frank couldn't have been too intimidating, because within a month Gail was living with him. The next year, she got pregnant by him. Two days before Moon Unit was born, they were married in a no-frills ceremony at City Hall in New York. (This was Frank's second marriage; his first had ended long before.) In lieu of a wedding ring, Frank bought Gail a little ballpoint pen from a machine for a dime and pinned it to the front of her dress during the ceremony. (For the next few years, Frank would give Gail a pen or a pencil on their anniversary.) Today the Zappas and their children - Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Rodan, and Diva - live in movie-cowboy Tom Mix's Log Cabin Ranch in Los Angeles.
It is midday on a cool day in April. Beyond the green jailhouse gate that stands at the entrance to the Zappa property in the peaceful Hollywood Hills, there doesn't seem to be anyone at the Zappa household who isn't working diligently away at one task or another. Out in the flower garden, a young Englishman and Gail Zappa's mother are ripping out weeds. By the pool, someone who is introduced only as Stomach is laying down tiles. In the house the phones are constantly ringing, and a woman sorts through a huge pile of mail; one or two musicians are striding around with purposeful looks on their faces and guitar cases in hand. Frank Zappa, however, is nowhere in sight; one imagines him holed up in a room somewhere, frowning over music sheets. But as it turns out, he's still in bed. "He's on a biological clock", said Gail Zappa, smiling. She is sitting in what she calls the film room, a cool, dark room in the basement of the house that is packed with Frank's film-editing equipment and boxes of film marked with familiar Zappa titles like 200 Motels and Yellow Snow.
In her black ruffled sundress, white ankle socks, sandals, and long, wispy blond hair, Gail looks a lot younger than what one would expect of someone who has been married eighteen years and raised four children. It seems other people think so, too. "All Moon's friends assure me that I don't look my age", says Gail. She goes on to admit that when she was Moon's age (sixteen), she was attending a "severely Catholic all-girls' school in London", where her father, a nuclear physicist, was working for the U.S. Navy. Daddy, it seems, had his heart set on his daughter going to college, but Gail had other plans. After graduation, she left home, moved into a flat with a girlfriend, and found a job as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development. The year was 1962, and at that time in England a musical revolution was taking place. The Beatles had just had their first hit with "Love Me Do"/"P.S. I Love You", and groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Searchers were beginning to get a lot of air play. After work Gail got pretty involved in the London music scene - "London had a lot of clubs and I was very social".
In 1965 Gail's father was transferred back to the States. That meant that Gail could no longer get a work visa, so she moved back with her family to New York. It was not long, though, before her former roommate in London, a girl by the name of Anya Butler (who would later marry Chris Hillman of the Byrds) came to Gail's rescue. Anya and Gail hitchhiked from New York to LA. And it was in LA that they "decided to be groupies for a while".
At that time in California, a lot of people who were Gail's age were "freaks", who were identifiable by their long hair and way-out clothes. "They were seen on the street together in groups for safety", Gail remembers. "Those were the days when if you drove down a street in a car, and another longhair was driving, you would wave. There were so few longhairs that were (a) making any money and (b) could afford to drive or (c) were showing themselves".
While Gail was not a full-fledged member of the freak scene ("but I was not straight"), she would participate in some freak activities, organized by "the acknowledged leader, Vito, and a guy named Carl Franzoni. We'd all get together and go to concerts and dance".
Another typical activity in that era was hitchhiking. "We went everywhere by hitchhiking!" says Gail, rolling her eyes. "What I did was very dangerous, but I think that that's what one does at that age". She also experimented with drugs. "And I would call it an experiment, because you wanna know what's going on and you're really dumb. Where are you going to get advice from? Every one of your peers is involved with drugs in some way, and it was all terribly cosmic, and you're in a time in your life when you're soul-searching and all that other corny crap".
As for attire, well, Gail remembers, "Anya and I didn't even bring a brassiere with us to California. I don't remember if we were the first, but I certainly remember bothering a lot of people". Though unlike many people at the time, Gail says she did not wear "a white John Lennon hat. And I never went near a go-go cage or burned a flag or helped anyone burn a draft card. I do remember people being arrested for wearing a flag, which most people can't even imagine".
But even almost-freaks have to
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ob working as a secretary for both the Whiskey A-Go-Go and the Trip, LA's most popular music clubs. There was a difference between the two, remembers Gail. "The Whiskey was a lot straighter and had more of a drinking crowd. The Trip was famous because it had all these outrageous acts. It was much more psychedelic".
When she is asked to list her credentials to groupiedom, however, Gail laughs and suddenly becomes shy. "Well", she says "we knew the Byrds and the Beach Boys - I'd say Brian Wilson as a matter of fact. But", she continues "I think everyone who lived in Los Angeles and had anything to do with groups in '65, '66, could be classified as a groupie. I don't know if they knew what was motivating them, but I think, how else do you get it off your chest - this total fascination with the music business and being part of it at the same time? It was almost religious with the girls. They were the worshipers, and those guys were like priests on the altar". This is not to say, however, that there were not some sexual opportunists around at the time. "There were a lot of girls who were in it for the castle in England. That was a prevailing dream: I must have an English pop star and retire to one of those great houses in England".
In those days, Gail didn't have any real career ambitions for herself. "I played around with the idea of designing clothes", she says "I really felt like I was in a state of waiting for whatever it was to present itself and just being available for it when it came along".
That "it" turned out to be Frank. For Gail, meeting him "was a pretty shocking situation. He had every social disease I think that's possible. Well, no. This was before AIDS and herpes. Those were not the Top Forty diseases to have at the time. Certainly the clap was and the crabs. He was infested, and so was his hair. He hadn't taken a bath for months. Or combed his hair. I think it was not so much rock and roll and not so much the road as it is that nobody was taking care of him. You can always spot a bachelor!"
At the same time, Gail found Frank to be very "courteous. Most people come in and expect to find an ogre", she says, her voice suddenly becoming soft. "He's really kind to people. He has a very fierce personality. People ask me 'How did you get to know Frank?' Well, I haven't. I think that's one of the things that is key to the relationship".
In her eighteen years of marriage, Gail says she's learned a thing or two about the occupational hazards of being with a rock star. "The biggest problems with rock-star marriages are drug abuse, insecurity, and confusion about what the fuck you're doing. I think that there are some women who should figure out right away, as soon as possible, that there are some things that you do not talk to your husband about - things that have to do with yourself and how you feel about the relationship that you're not sure about. It's not the job of your husband to answer your questions. He's not the authority. Marriage is a process of self-examination".
Of course, throughout her marriage, Gail has had to live with the fact that groupies do not consider a rock star with a wedding ring off limits. ("I was a groupie. That's how I know".) And Frank has not exactly come out against groupies: In an article he wrote for Life magazine in 1968 he said' "Groupies... one of the most amazingly beautiful products of the sexual revolution". On the subject of groupies, Gail's voice rises a few decibels. "I hate it a lot. I've tried to sit there and 'Yes. I'm going to be calm, cool, and collected and not tear my hair out'. But the fact of the matter is I don't like it at all. I have psychic pictures of what happens. There's no escaping it. I see it - I don't have to go there.
"There are a number of ways you can deal with it". She continues. "You can scream, which will get you nowhere. You can set up all kinds of barricades in your relationship, which doesn't help anything. What you ultimately have to face is being honest. I don't mean being honest with the person. I mean being honest with yourself to figure out what your priorities are, and if you know what they are, you'll be less likely to do anything to trip yourself up. You'll be less hysterical if it's going to push somebody in the wrong direction". Has anyone ever come out and said to Gail that they've seen Frank with another woman? "Yeah, sure", she answers. "All that stuff and anything else you can imagine has happened. I've seen Frank with women". In those cases, what does she do? Gail laughs. "You do what you do", she says, with a little inscrutable smile, but does not elaborate.
Gail describes her brood - the children range in age from four to sixteen - as a "pretty normal American family". That may be, but one doesn't find names like Moon Unit or Dweezil in your average American household. Not surprisingly, Gail says that the names of her children are largely Frank's doing. "Frank gets to name them. I have them. I had Moon when he was on tour in Europe, but as he was going out the door, I said, 'Wait! What shall I name this baby?' Frank said, 'You can name her Moon or Motorhead". In the hospital after Gail had chosen the name Moon, a battery of nurses dropped by Gail's room to protest Gail's choice. "But my mother thought that Moon was a lovely old Chinese name", says Gail.
The second Zappa child (and first son) was given the same pet name that Frank had given to one of Gail's toes: Dweezil. The name of child number three, Ahmet, was a name for an imaginary person "we always had hanging around back when we had no one on our payroll. We'd snap our fingers and say, 'Ahmet? Dishes. Coffee, please'. He's also named after a Japanese monster, 'Rodan". Diva got the name she has because as a newborn baby, she screamed her head off. "And it turns out that Diva has this incredible voice and she can knock you over from a distance of thirty feet".
So far, says Gail, all four children have wanted to change their names. "Moon wanted to change hers to Beauty Heart. And [horror creeps into Gail's voice] Ahmet wanted to change his to Rick. They've had their share of difficulties, but they've really handled it throughout their lives well. I remember Moon in the sixth grade coming home from school, and there was this girl who was really cute and popular and really shit who said, 'Why did your parents name you Moon?' and Moon said, 'Why did yours name you Debbie?'
"The best quote I've read about the names so far is in an interview that Frank did for a Columbus paper and it said something about how the kids didn't like their names and it was always a problem for them when they were growing up but they're going to find out if they haven't already that it's not the first part of the name that's going to give them trouble, it's the last".
After the success of the record "Valley Girl" in 1982, Moon (who emerges from her room briefly in T-shirt and shorts and bare feet and turns out to be surprisingly shy), Gail confides, found it very difficult to relate to her classmates and the activities at high school, so she quit to study acting - a decision that does not appear to upset Gail. "Education in this country sucks", she says, "Moon earned the right to make that decision for herself. She's very bright. She really worked hard in high school, and she took the high school equivalency exam.
"And she's a great actress", Gail says with motherly pride. "Moon has a remarkable ability to express an overview and to develop these characters, which she can project. She's got a great sense of humor - it's really twisted".
Fourteen-year-old Dweezil plays the guitar and hopes to follow his father in his choice of career. "He's working on putting an album together. He's listening to all of Frank's old records and a lot of classical music. He's tracing historical roots and he's beginning to make musical connections". Dweezil already has one single behind him, entitled "My Mother Is a Space Cadet". Although Dweezil told his mom that the title was meant to be general, Gail thinks otherwise. "Certainly there were some things in there that were inspired by my activities, like reading magazines and being numb", she says. "When I get lost in print material - Frank says 'trapped by print material' - that's when they'll go, 'Ah she's reading a magazine. Let's go ask her if we can go somewhere and she'll say yes because she's not listening".
Gail calls herself a "professional mom", which is what she had decided to be very early on in her marriage. "I decided instinctually that we were going to have a lot of problems in our future because when our kids are our age, there's going to continue to be more of us. They're all going out and taking a bunch of drugs anyway, and you know you're living in a society that's creating a bunch of mutants. I thought, 'Fuck this shit. The earth needs all the help it can get".
Gail has no desire to go out and get a nine-to-five job. "Frank would have seriously questioned it. And I think there's a real problem today that women feel compelled to have jobs", she says. "I think if most women sat down and asked themselves why in hell they want to work - why do they want to wear that suit? Why do they want to carry that briefcase? What the fuck does it mean? I think it means that they're competing with their husbands; they have to have some status in their marriage. I don't know why they're not at home taking care of the kids where they should be".
Gail hastens to add that the above "is not a philosophy that Frank and I have discussed. Frank and I try to talk to each other as little as possible. We make an effort not to speak". Why? "Because there's really nothing to talk about unless something isn't okay. Because I do my job, and he does his, and my job is real different. I wouldn't want his job in a million years. It's just such hard work. He's so uncompromising. If it's impossible, he'll do it". A part of Gail's job, however, is making sure that everything runs smoothly for Frank, from day to day. "It's the boring stuff, like following up on the details, like set up an interview at a certain time or make their travel arrangements in a certain way. Mostly you just block for Frank so that all he has to do is do what he does with not too many distractions.
"It's a real job living with Frank, and I'm sure it's the same for him with me. Though I probably provide a certain amount of amusement", she says. "Sometimes he just rolls his eyes. Sometimes he laughs, but probably he's laughing more at me, whereas I'm laughing at something he's said. And I cook for him. He loves it when I cook. I've learned to cheat. I throw things together real quick and I pretend I was working for hours on this. Musicians are notorious. They can't wait. You have to feed them now."
As Gail talks, the bass player in Frank's band pokes his head into the film room. Gail asks him if he needs a ride to the airport, but he says no and disappears. Ask Gail her opinion of rock musicians today and she shrugs. "As a rule, musicians are not fun", she says. "The best of them are characters in their own right. They've developed a style and personality that it is possible for you to get off on. Most of them take themselves so seriously. In the sixties the thing I thought was the downfall of most groups is that they thought they were really doing something [her voice gets cynical] = really making a statement. And they were out there night after night playing to audiences of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. How can you get any satisfaction out of that if you are a mature, responsible male? You can't go on deluding yourself. Some people did by taking vast quantities of drugs. Then they go get these ladies to hang on their arm and they're selling another something to a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. This business is about image. The music business has nothing to do with music anymore".
