Adam Mars-Jones - Kid Gloves - A Voyage Round My Father

Would we have listened to Over-Nite Sensation so much if Dad’s values hadn’t been there in the background, begging to be affronted? Yes, probably, since in those days an album was quite an investment. A new record was something to be listened to intensively. The lurking suspicion that you had wasted your money was no excuse for tucking it away behind something you liked better. A new album must have pride of place on the turntable, played over and over again until it wore a groove in your mind whether you liked it or not.

Now I’m going to pull back and take a broader view of this theme of differences of musical taste, somehow sexually charged, between the generations in the 1960s and ’70s. Putting it another way, I’m going to lean on this theme until it suddenly gives way, rather as engineers test a structural element for tensile and compressive strength by subjecting it to increasingly powerful forces. The pioneer in this field is the Kirkcaldy Testing Works, now a museum on Central Street, Southwark (it opens to the public on the first Sunday of the month). The main testing machine at the museum is close to fifty feet long and weighs more than a hundred tons, so massive in fact that it was installed first, with the works then built round it. I’ll be working on a smaller scale.

The backing vocals on Over-Nite Sensation were by Zappa’s standards both elaborate and well-sung. Normally such vocal tracks on Mothers of Invention records were done in-house, with band members contributing cheerfully raucous falsetto. This was the equivalent in sound of the matter-of-fact dowdy cross-dressing of the Monty Python troupe, hardly intended to convince or confuse.

Even when Zappa recruited a pair of vocalists who had previously sung mellifluously enough with The Turtles, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, the results were on the scrappy side. Since Zappa was such a perfectionist about other aspects of performance, this must have been the way he liked it. The pair of ex-Turtles were billed as ‘The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie’ (later ‘Flo & Eddie’), not so much a musical development as a legal requirement, since they had signed away the right to put their real names on marquees or album covers. It was legitimate for them to be credited in the small print.

If Dad and I had unstable layers in our sexual ideology at this time, areas of painful inconsistency, which we may not have admitted to ourselves, then perhaps the same was true of Frank Zappa also, however fierce his commitment to a cynicism as rancid as the lady’s poncho in ‘Camarillo Brillo’. The Mothers of Invention catalogue is defiantly short on the love song, so much a staple of popular music that popular music could hardly exist without it. Even song titles — ‘My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama’, ‘Penis Dimension’, ‘Uncle Meat’, ‘Penguin in Bondage’ — seem to jeer or snarl.

Zappa includes wholesome feelings only to travesty them, and yet he can’t seem to leave them alone. There comes a time when even the most sympathetic listener must start to doubt his bad faith. A year or two before Over-Nite Sensation the Mothers released, and I bought, a live album called Fillmore East — June 1971 . I was baffled by the grubby artwork, not realizing (never having seen a bootleg disc) that this authorized recording was pretending to be one. It’s the last record I remember having to listen to on the sitting-room stereogram at Gray’s Inn, before the first tentative step towards the privatization of music represented by the record player in the bedroom. Up to this point music had been social and shared, for better or worse, but now it became individual, or conspiratorial, as a matter of course, and any overlap between listening groups became problematic.

The only music of mine that I remember Dad being unable to stand, even when played at low volume as far away from him as the small size of the Anglesey house would allow, was Steve Reich’s Drumming . He said he couldn’t think or do any work while it was playing. It disrupted analytical brain function at an almost neurological level. It’s possible that Reich would be pleased with this experimental result.

Much of the material on Fillmore East — June 1971 is continuous with its predecessor 200 Motels , meaning that the obscenity is wearing and relentless, but Zappa is too much of a showman to stake everything on the sourly grubby. So to balance ‘Bwana Dik’ (sample lines: ‘My dick is a Harley / You kick it to start’) comes the Turtles’ ‘Happy Together’, played for laughs by the original vocalists, Kaylan and Volman, but still offering the sweetness of a pop tune and a couple of choruses sung a cappella . The album ends with a Zappa original, ‘Tears Began To Fall’, whose up-tempo jauntiness is at odds with the self-pitying lyrics: ‘Tears began to fall and fall and fall / Down the shirt / ’Cause I feel so hurt / Since my baby drove away …’

One version of the lyrics available on the Internet gives the trajectory of those tears as ‘down the church’, but although being left at the altar is a hardy trope of the heartbroken ballad, I go with ‘shirt’, which makes better sense and even rhymes. The poor sap is so pole-axed by sorrow that he doesn’t have the nous to wipe his eyes.

How many times can you parody sentiment before you admit that it affects you? A whole lot of times, if you’re Frank Zappa. In 1968 he released an entire album of doo-wop, Cruisin’ with Ruben and the Jets , which may have been poking fun (at a genre long out of fashion, and what’s the point of that?) but also committed to vinyl some of the earliest songs he had written. On Chunga’s Revenge the most attractive music is the instrumental ‘Twenty Small Cigars’, but the most beguiling song is certainly ‘Sharleena’, expressing the emotions of another goofy dude amazed to be deserted by a woman, asking her friends for news of her and crooning in pre-feminist cluelessness that he would be ‘so delighted’ if they ‘sent her back’ to him. Just as Fillmore East was a pseudo-bootleg, ‘Sharleena’ is a pseudo-parody, really just a homage in denial about its own sincerity.

I realize that conversations between Dad and Frank Zappa, who never met, were never likely to be intimate or sparkling, but knowing what I know now I feel I could have steered them onto safe territory. Dad may not have been a fan of doo-wop as such, but he was mad keen on the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, vocal groups of the previous period who had a certain amount of influence on the genre.

Male vocals are one of the genre requirements of doo-wop (along with nonsense lyrics, close harmony and the prominence of falsetto), so it could be taken as a step away from the disputed territory of parody and pastiche for Zappa to hire women to sing on Over-Nite Sensation . But I’m not sure it worked out that way.

The singers booked weren’t exactly small time. They were the Ikettes, Ike Turner’s backing singers, and Tina Turner was part of the package. The vocal parts were tricky and took time to master. She may not have been the quickest learner (compared to Linda Sims and Debbie Wilson), but Tina was proud of her work on these tracks and wanted Ike to hear them.

He wasn’t impressed, asking ‘What is this shit?’, and took the Ikettes’ name off the album credits. Ike Turner’s reputation hasn’t exactly soared over the years, and it seems uncontroversial to say he was not the helpmeet and business manager most people would choose.

His negotiating position when approached by Zappa was strange in itself, since he didn’t want the singers paid more than $25 a track. Most negotiators with their eye on profit stipulate a floor rather than a ceiling to the auction, but he clearly considered it important to keep Tina’s status in the marketplace low, throwing her in as a bonus with the backing singers who were presumably recruited in the first place to back her. The deal between Turner and Zappa, Ike and Frank, was a strange confluence of negativity. A businessman who didn’t want his wife to know her true worth was signing a contract with another who prided himself on his cheapness in everything. Zappa aimed with the help of a world-class vocalist, her services acquired well below market rates, to give vocal depth and lustre to songs about the low inherent value of women, though this was not of course what I heard in 1973.