Neil Slaven - Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story Of Frank Zappa

When it happened, I was having a drink with friends at The Mondrian, a hotel on Sunset down the street from the Comedy Store, which 30 years before had been Ciro's. I'd been in town for ten days, researching in the basement of the new Los Angeles Library, a monolithic building that inside looks like Fort Knox in a Slide Area, and junking in second-hand bookshops and memorabilia stores for obscure interviews and press reports.

From a number of sources, I knew that Zappa's health was failing but people were still going up to the house. All week, I'd agonised about ringing to ask if I could pay my respects. But in the war between two principal character traits, timidity and arrogance, timorousness prevailed. After all, I wasn't exactly a close friend of the family.

Sunday morning was spent at the Pasadena Swap Meet, where I found a few magazines and resisted buying all the bootlegs on offer. The evening was quiet until around eight, when the radio announced that what we all knew had to happen but please God, not yet had taken place.

Frank Zappa was dead. And buried. Gone on his final tour.

He'd left just before 6 pm on Saturday, December 4, 1993, with Gail and Moon and Dweezil and Ahmet and Diva there to see him off. The other ceremony, unheralded, took place on Sunday morning, with family and close friends present. The rest of us would have to wait for the opportunity to indulge in sentiments that he always professed to be an inappropriate use of valuable time.

Well, Frank, I was upset anyway, OK? I'd only met you once and that had taken 24 years to achieve. The occasion had been less than momentous for you. Despite my advancing years, I'd been overawed and the lines of communication between my brain and my mouth had hung by a thread. Even so, you granted me several hours of your precious time as, for the umpteenth time, you ran through a long and productive career that needed days rather than hours to detail adequately. Then you introduced me to your family and showed me round the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. You even set up the Synclavier and played some of 'N-Lite', explaining its operation to my uncomprehending ears.

Despite my being English and a journalist, you were tolerant and polite even though you were obviously in some pain, and let me gauge when my visit was over. Like many others before and since, I was leaving with the impression that I'd made a friend, even if that friend didn't have the time to indulge the need for further contact that was already coursing through my veins. We stood in the dark on the steps outside your house and shook hands. I looked into your eyes and said, "Good luck." It was a lame thing to say; we both knew that luck was not a factor in the inevitability to come. I drove away wondering, "Why did I end up being so trite when I wanted to be profound?"

But what do you say to a man whose music you've lived with for half your life? Who'd probably helped to shape your view of the world and your aspirations, even though the dedication and perseverance that he showed weren't yours to command? (We'd talked about my still-unrealised ambition to compile a film history of man's inhumanity to man, using Varese's Arcana as a soundtrack.) Who relentlessly pursued every one of his objectives while others wandered from indecision to self-indulgence? Whose thirst for knowledge and grasp of detail over a wide range of subjects continued unabated, in parallel with his musical explorations?

Right from the release of Freak Out!, Frank gathered people like myself, figuratively speaking, around him. In 1966, he chose to term himself and them freaks. Needless to say, they treated as a destination what he saw only as a point of departure. I never thought of myself as a freak, except insofar as liking the Mothers of Invention seemed to qualify me as one to friends who could only manage the stylistic leap from the Shadows to The Rolling Stones. As far as I was concerned, they took the easy option. I liked challenging music, so I'd heard Varese, Stravinsky and Penderecki. I didn't read music, I didn't understand what was happening. But I responded to the result, as I did to the drums of Burundi, the gongs of a Balinese gamelan orchestra or Moondog's eerie and unique percussion instruments recorded on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue. (We talked of him, too.) Even so, it was still hard to like Frank's music at first hearing. It was demanding, densely layered, sardonic and satirical. But once in a while there was a bluesy turn of phrase from the guitar which connected the Mothers with another of my musical interests.