Mount St. Mary's was the first time I had a concert of my music. As with most of the other concerts of my music, I had to pay for it.

MG: What year was that?

That was 1962. That was a bargain, though, because it was only $300. It was a student orchestra. There were probably about 50 people in the audience, and - for some strange reason - KPFK taped it, and I got a copy.

MG: What were the compositions?

There was one thing called "Opus 5," and there were aleatoric compositions that involved a certain amount of improvisation, and there were some written sections that you actually had to play. Some of the things were graphic, and there was a tape of some electronic music that was being played in the background with orchestra, and I had some 8mm films that were being projected.

MG: This obviously didn't pay the rent. How did you pay the rent at the time?

My only source of income was working this barbecue joint up in Sun Village. I'd work there on weekends.

MG: Really?

Yeah. In the band, I wasn't making barbecue.

MG: What was the band?

It was just a pickup band. Some guys that I knew from high school who lived up there. I would come up, plug in my guitar, play with them.

MG: You didn't record any of that stuff?

Yes, we did. Some of that's on the mystery disk, too. There was no rehearsal. You'd just go up there and play bar band music, and if somebody was in the audience, and they wanted to sing a take of "Cora" - they were singing "Steal Away" -

MG: Did anybody ever ask for "Caravan," with the drum solo?

That actually happened when we worked at a gig in El Monte. Some drunken buffoon in the audience requested it. [Slurs like a drunk:] "I wanna hear 'Caravan' with a drum sola!" There are certain things you remember from your career, like that line. When we worked at this music fair out in Long Island, we were the opening act for the Vanilla Fudge. 1968, I think it was. I remember this one guy out in the audience - it was the Westbury Music Fair - and the quote was [loud and belligerent]: "Youse guys stink! Bring on the Fudge:"

MG: You were Captain Beefheart's road manager for a short time.

Yeah.

MG: And you went to Europe?

It was supposed to be the first big rock festival in Prance, at a time when the French government was very right-wing, and they didn't want to have large-scale rock and roll in the country. And so at the last minute, this festival was moved from France to Belgium, right across the border, into a turnip field. They constructed a tent, which was held up by these enormous girders. They bad 15,000 people in a big circus tent. This was in November. The weather was really not very nice. It's cold, and it's damp, and it was in the middle of a turnip field. I mean rnondo turnips. And all the acts, and all the people who wished to see these acts, were urged to find this location in the turnip field, and show up for this festival. And they'd hired me to be the MC and also to bring over Captain Beefheart. It was his first appearance over there. And it was a nightmare, because nobody could speak English, and I couldn't speak French, or anything else for that matter. So my function was really rather limited. I felt a little bit like Linda McCartney. I'd stand there and go wave, wave, wave.

I sat in with a few of the groups during the three days of the festival. But it was so miserable because all these European hippies had brought their sleeping bags, and they had the bags laid out on the ground in this tent, and they basically froze and slept through the entire festival, which went on 24 hours a day, around the clock. One of the highlights of the event was the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, which went on at 5:00 A.M. to an audience of slumbering Euro-hippies.

DM: In turnips. . . .

And to alert them to the fact that they were performing, one of the guys lit a flare and threw it right out into the middle of the audience, which made some of them jump up and dance around wildly and try and put the fire out.

MG: Tell about the hot dogs.

Oh, yeah. Because it was located in a turnip area, and far away from anything that you would call necessary supports for civilization, the menu was limited. The people who were attending this festival, including all the talent, had access to these foodstuffs: Belgian waffles in plastic - these puffy little waffles in plastic, you could have that - or you could have a hot dog. Now the hot dogs were kept in this tank. When I was a kid, they used to have these big tanks for Nehi beverages, you know, a rectangular tank full of water, and there would be drink bottles in it. Well, in this case, there was a tank full of these Belgian weenies. Now, some of them would float to the surface, and the tips that would stick out were green, and we don't know what color the material under the water was, but it was a tank of green weenies poking out, and you could either eat that or the Belgian waffles. And you couldn't send out for a pizza. You were in the middle of nowhere.

MG: Did you ever play with Beefheart's Magic Band?

Yeah.

DM: What year was that?

'69 or '70.

MG: How did you meet them?

I went to high school with him [Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart].

MG: Did you go to class together?

No, not exactly. At the time that I knew him, his father had had a heart attack. His father drove a bread truck, and so Don had dropped out of school to take over the father's bread truck route, which was between Lancaster and Mojave. So I used to go over to his house, and we had all the used pineapple buns that we could ever wish for out of the truck. We'd sit around and listen to rhythm and blues records and eat what was left over from the bread truck route.

MG: Did you have any idea what your futures held?

Did we know we were going into show business? No.

MG: Did you scheme. did you plan, did you fantasize?

At that time, not. I don't have any recollection of sitting around with Don and going, "Yeah, now we'll. . . ." No, we were just listening to R&B records and eating pineapple buns.

DM: You both have a graphics background. Were you artists then, or being musicians, or both?

He had been doing painting and sculpting for a long time. My graphics background was I'd had some art classes in school. I didn't really want to go into that. I did earn my living as a commercial artist for a little while during that period, but. . . .

MG: What kind of stuff did you do?

I did greeting cards, I wrote advertising copy for the First National Bank in Ontario, California, and I did some little illustrations.

DM: Anything that was often out there?

Some of the greeting cards were often out there. I convinced the guy that I was working for - this place in Claremont, California, called the Nile Running Greeting Card studio, that specialized in silk-screening - that cards of a floral nature would likely be considered entertaining by elderly Midwestern women.

MG: Very focused in the graphics!

Yeah, it was niche marketing. You knew what they liked, and you serviced the need. And I was in the silk-screen department with the big rubber gloves, you know, going [makes squeaky, tugging noise] and pulling the Mylar off of these smelly things. And so I talked him into letting me do my own line of greeting cards on an experimental basis, designed some of these cards, and designed a little rack to dispose of them.

DM: Do you have them anymore?

There's some around, yeah. They're truly awful.

DM: Give us the wording and the image.

Well, one of them was - it was printed on chrome-coat stock, you know, a nice glossy stock. The front of the card says, "Captured Russian Photo Shows Evidence of American Presence on Moon First." And you open it up, and there's a picture of a lunar crater with "Jesus Saves" inscribed on it.

DM: You were a bad boy already, huh? What else?

Let's see, there was another one that just said "Goodbye" on the front, and inside: a black hand. And - this is fairly abstract - one where tbe front of the card said, "Farky." You open it up, and there's a picture of a pirate. Think about it for a while. You have to look at this guy and imagine him saying that word, and then you derive the meaning that was intended.

DM: You've always been good at naming things. All these words, you have a great sense of...

I think it's because of this old book that I found.

DM: Which was?

I don't even remember the name of it. It's probably around here someplace. It's an old, decrepit, leather-backed book about the ancient Egyptian religion. One of the little-known facts about this religion is: When you're on your way to heaven. you can't go anywhere unless you know the name of everything. So the Egyptian rulers, in their preparation for going to heaven, spent a lot of time memorizing the name of the doorsill, the name of the door frame, the name of the paving stones, the name of everything. Because nothing would let you by, unless you could name it.

DM: You were worried.

Big time!

MG: How could anybody resist albums with names like Lumpy Gravy, Uncle Meat, Hot Rats, or Burnt Weeny Sandwich?

I don't know. A lot of people did resist it.

MG: How did you get on The Steve Allen Show in '62?

Just called them up, and said I play the bicycle, and you know, they were booking all kinds of goofy things on there. The tape was given to me as a birthday gift a few years ago. Someone found a copy of it and sent it over.

MG: What was it like?

Well, first of all, I'm clean-shaven, and I'm wearing a suit and a tie, and my speech patterns resemble the way Dweezil talks now, which I thought was very odd.

MG: So, when did you grow your mustache and - whatever you called this [indicating hair beneath Frank's lip]?

Actually, I grew it when I was in high school, but I shaved it off after I got out of high school. I had a little skinny mustache and a "Genghis" down here.

MG: You could get away with that?

What were they going to do, throw me out of school? They did.

DM: Did you get thrown out, really?

Yeah. I got in some trouble, and they told me that I could either write a 2,000-word essay or be suspended for two weeks, so I took a two-week vacation, and I showed up back in school with a list of all my R&B records by artist and label, and a list of all the ones that I thought I was going to buy for the next three or four months, and that was my 2,000-word essay. I laughed at them.

DM: What did they say?

What could they say? They didn't like me, and I knew they didn't like me, and I didn't like them. And I graduated with 12 or 20 units less than what you needed to graduate with, but they couldn't think of keeping me there for another year. It was unthinkable.

MG: You were in a band at that time, too, right? So you were just a degenerate.

Absolutely. The scum of the earth, as far as the people in Lancaster were concerned. See, I didn't know when I moved to Lancaster that, prior to my arrival, there had been an unfortunate experience with "Negroes" in the area. A group of black entertainers had come up from what they call "down below," the evil area below the high desert. They had come up. It was Big Jay McNeely and a bunch of other entertainers that had come to do a rock show at the fairgrounds, and along with them came people who were selling reefers and pills, and the founding fathers of the city decided never again shall this music enter our fair cowboy area. I didn't know any of this had happened. I moved there from San Diego, and put a rhythm and blues band together, and decided to throw my own dance, and put up little posters just like in the 1950 movies with the help of this lady who ran the local record store. Her name was Elsie. We rented the women's club, and we were going to have our little dance there. And the day before the dance, walking down Lancaster Boulevard at six o'clock in the evening, I was arrested for vagrancy. They kept me in jail overnight, trying to make sure this dance wasn't going to come off.

DM: How old were you?

Seventeen.

MG: So what happened?

I got out, and we had the dance.

MG: And civilization didn't fall.

It didn't fall. And furthermore, the dance - see, all of the black people in the area lived out in Sun Village, like 20 or 30 miles away from the school. They were in their own little turkey-infested ghetto, and they came to this dance, because I had a mixed band. There was a couple of blacks, a couple of Mexicans. You know, there weren't that many white-bread people who could play anything that resembled rock and roll in the area, so we just had this hodgepodge band. The whole attitude of that area up there was very strange. After the dance there was what could have turned into a really unfortunate confrontation with the lettermen from the school, the varsity white-bread boys, who wanted to beat me and the band up after the show as we were loading our equipment. It was so unbelievably hokey. The Sun Village residents came to our rescue. When they saw what was happening, trunks started opening up and chains started coming out and things like that, and the lettermen walked away.

MG: So you weren't popular in school?

No.

MG: Were you distinctly unpopular?

Yes.

MG: With the kids?

With everybody. What I wore to school was - you know, those - they're wearing them now, those blue-hooded parkas. I would go to school with a blue-hooded parka up, with sunglasses on, my mustache, my little goatee, and I'd take my guitar to school.

MG: Did you play in the school orchestra?

Yeah, drums.

DM: Education is losing all funding for music programs. Is this another black hole in the future?

Well, it seems to me that the subtext for stamping out the arts. . . . In the realm of the arts, you always have the possibility for creative thinking, which means deviation from the norm, the prescribed political norm that everybody is trying to cram down your throat. If they can stop creative thinking, then they've got a better chance of maintaining the stranglehold of stupidity on the entire population. And creative thinking can, and often does, start at an early age. So if they can nip it in the bud, while the little beggars are in school, then it's good for them. I think they would like to replace every single art program with some sort of sport or ROTC thing just to keep people from thinking.

MG: What made you switch from drums to guitar?

I just liked the way the guitar sounded, and I lacked the proper hand-to-foot coordination to play a drum set. When I was in high school orchestras, all you had to do was be able to roll and go boom and ding and stuff like that, but it's a different story to play syncopation. I was never really good enough to be a drummer in a band, and the first rock-and-roll gig that I had - it's been stated before that on my way to the gig as a drummer, I had forgotten my drumsticks, and had to drive back to the other side of town to get thcm.

MG: So you were listening to Varese at the time, and other classical weirdos. Was there anybody else who was digging that besides you?

When I was a senior, my brother Bobby was a freshman. And 1 didn't have any friends, but he had three or four, and they used to come over to the house, and I would make them listen to these records.

DM: You talked about one time being in New York and walking by Varese's place on Sullivan Street and thinking of him being in that room or house or apartment for 25 years, unable to compose music.

He stopped. He stopped writing for 25 years.

DM: Why?

Because nobody would play it.

DM: What happened to him in the last 25 years of his life?

Well, in the last few years of his life, he was "rehabilitated." Columbia decided to do some recordings of his music. . . .

DM: Slonimsky's recordings?

No. Slonimsky's was the first recording of "Ionisations." The second recording of the Varese stuff, as far as I know, was that EMS 401 disc that dates from 1950.

MG: Was that the famous one you bought?

Yeah. In the late '60s, Columbia decided to do some recordings of his music. They did two or three albums with, I think, Robert Craft, the guy who recorded most of the Stravinsky stuff, and there were some concerts in New York City at Town Hall, and so he got a little bit of recognition.

[The talk turns to other "bad boy" composers, including George Anthiel und his "Ballet mecanique.]

There's another album by him, on a Dutch label. I have it. There are a group of pieces for piano and violin. It has "Ballet mecanique" on one side, and it has these obscure pieces - the thing that's odd about these pieces is the rhythm. I put the needle in the groove and started listening, and I went, "Son of a bitch. I could have written that." It really sounded like "The Black Page."

There were a couple of people who were vying for the title of "Bad Boy of Music" during that period. The other guy was Leo Ornstein, who was a composer who wrote piano music, some of which was to be played with a two-by-four. One of his pieces was called "Wild Men's Dance." You couldn't play the chords with your fingers, you needed a two-by-four. You can imagine a guy in a tuxedo in Carnegie Hall going DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN - "This is 'Wild Men's Dance'! I'm the Bad Boy of Music! DUN DUN!"

DM: What is Conlon Nancarrow doing these days?

I think he had a heart attack recently. He still lives in Mexico City. He's another example of a guy who couldn't earn a living in the United States. He was being ignored, so he moved to Mexico, and punched his [player piano] rolls down there. It was cheaper for him to live in Mexico City.

DM: He comes from a little town in Arkansas. He must have had an unhappy youth.

Yeah. Bad boy in Arkansas.

DM: Well, how about Harry Partch?

MG: His music is still being played.

All his instruments went to this foundation which is located in Escondido, and they maintain all this stuff and give performances of his music.

MG: What do you think of Harry Partch?

I like the sound of the instruments, and I like parts of the compositions, but I think that the stuff goes on and on and on and on and on too long. There's too many repetitions. But the idea of it appeals to me a lot. But it's so personalized. He went all the way. He built his own instruments, developed his own tuning system, developed his own compositional machinery, and just went out there and did it, and he was a pretty good hobo at the same time. That's essentially an American composer kind of a thing to do.

DM: Did you run into lots of interesting composers in Eastern Europe?

I've run into a lot of composers. How interesting they are is hard for me to tell, because, you know, when you run into them, you don't always get to hear what they write. But a few of them gave me cassettes of their music. I didn't find them interesting. Some of it just sounded like graduation-from-the-Conservatory exercises, and things like that.

I heard one guy in Moscow who had made a tape. We went to a gallery, Mars, and there was some electronic music playing in the background. I thought it was really very good. It sounded like the work of a guy who should have been writing for orchestra but because he wasn't an official Soviet composer had no access to an orchestra, so he was doing all of his stuff with MIDI gear. And it was good. I think there are plenty of people around the world who have the imagination to create new compositions. One thing that you have to remember: Musicians play music. They don't write it. Composers write music. So if you don't have something for a musician to do, you will be treated to noodling. You will have "The World o' Scales," "The World o' Licks," but you won't have compositions. It's a special knack to invent structures, to invent new harmony, and to invent reasons for doing things. I mean, it's a different skill than being a musician.

MG: Do you think that there's a progression - that music should make progress? That you should do things that haven't been done before?

I think that all music should be personalized. If you decide that you want to be the bad boy of music and play with a two-by-four, then that's your message. Go do it, and the audience that wants to buy records of piano played by two-by-four should have it. But I think that if you're going to do music, it should be something relevant to the person who writes the music. It has more to do with the composer than to do with the style of the times or the school that might have generated the composer. Only in that way is the product valuable: if there's an artifact of an imagination, rather than an artifact of a movement.

MG: What do you think about the traditional composers? Do you care for the old guys?

Well, name me an old guy.

MG: Beethoven?

I have an appreciation for the skill of putting it together, but the sound of it is not something that I enjoy, so. . . .

DM: Brahms? Bach?

Bach is more interesting.

DM: Why?

I just like the way it sounds. The same reason I like Varese. I like the way it sounds. But I wouldn't go out of my way to attend a Bach concert or buy an album of that kind of music. To me, of that period, that is the most tolerable of the material to listen to. I don't start getting interested in so-called classical music until the early 20th Century.

MG: Mahler?

No. I actually like Wagner. I think Wagner was interesting. It's too long, but it's interesting. I have very few Wagner albums, but the things that I've heard, if you look at the time at which it was written, and what he's doing with the material, it's challenging. That's the thing that depresses me about most of the music of that period. It's just not challenging, because it was written to spec. There was a king or a duke or a church or somebody who said, "Hey. You need to write something. We have a festival coming up, and it must be something I will like." So everything was written to suit the taste buds of some joker with a towel on his head.

DM: So the theory that the church or the nobility helped make the Renaissance happen, or the classical period, is not true in your mind?

I think it probably held back some of the greatest composers, because you had no choice. If you wanted to write, you had to write at the behest of somebody who had more money than you. It's like dealing with radio-station programmers and the guy who puts your video on MTV. It has to be exactly this, or it goes nowhere. So, here's a guy with 11 kids to feed, what's he going to do? Give the Prince what he wants [sings "Hallelujah Chorus"]: "Hallelujah. Hallelujah." [Imitates a prince:] "Oh, yeah, I like that. I can understand that."

DM: So you're not a fan of Handel either?

No.

DM: Schoenberg?

I've only heard four or five pieces by Schoenberg that I can enjoy listening to. There's the Septet, and then there's the suite of pieces for orchestra, the one that has "Summer Morning by the Lake" as one of the movements. I think that's really nice. And Begleitungsmusik is a parody of motion picture music. I like that. But there's very little else by Schoenberg that I appreciate. And Berg - I like the "Lyric Suite," I like the - there's a piano solo piece, I think it's called Piano Sonata - it's an early piece. I like that. But, I tried to listen to Lulu. I couldn't do it. I had the album of Wozzeck. I could not get through it.

I like Messiaen. Took me a while, but I like that music. He's colorful. But 1 must admit that the first Messiaen album that I ever got was an Angel recording of Chronochromie, and it baffled the snot out of me. I didn't know what to do with it. I could stay interested for about the first three minutes. I was going, "Whoa, a lot of percussion; that's interesting, but what is this?" It took me years before I could listen to that whole side of the album straight through.

DM: What finally clicked? Just repetition?

No. lt's just that the more I learned, the more interesting it became, because at the time that I was first exposed to this kind of music, I didn't have a musical education. I was just a guy buying records. Everything that I liked was based on my gut reaction to what was on the record. For some reason I liked Varese right away, I liked Stravinsky right away, but these other things not. I didn't like Charlie Parker. I didn't like some other modern jazz things. Listening to these things, I would go, "Why do people like this? I don't understand it."

DM: What became different in the way you listened? What did you start hearing?

Well, when you start learning about structure, when you start learning about how things work, then you can appreciate how other people deal with the material. Look, if you're writing diatonic music, you've got 12 note names over seven or eight octaves. That's a pretty limited universe. What can you do to take these components, shake them up, reassemble them, and make something that you would call a composition? That's a pretty interesting challenge. I think that other art forms have a much more open - not an open format, but more material to work with. If you're a poet, let's say there are 300,000 or 400,000 words in the English language. There's your universe. But the possibilities are a little bit more restricted in terms of the structure when you're dealing with diatonics. So the more I learned about what the rules of the game were, the more I could appreciate how other people might solve this problem. How do you maintain somebody's interest over any period of time with what you've concocted? Today I have such a limited amount of recreational listening time that if I decide that I'm going to listen to something - I have a very big collection of records and CDs - I'll pull something out, and I'll put it on so I can really focus on it and go, "Boy, that's interesting."

DM: When you're listening to music, then, are you responding intellectually more than emotionally? Are you getting swept away by some great cadence, or is it an idea that's hitting you?

You just have an appreciation for what it is. mean, I don't think about the composer. I don't sit there and go, "Boy, what a great guy. He dreamed that up." You know, because all I hear is the music. I hear the material performing its little function before my very ears. I listen to the piece. I don't know anything about he lives of these guys. They may have all been absolute bastards. I probably don't want to know what kind of a guy Webern was, but I like the music. And the same for the other pieces that I enjoy listening to. I'm not thinking about who wrote it, or why he wrote it. I'm only listening to the results.

DM: Do you ever listen with interest to the scoring for TV shows or movies?

Oh, that's so transparent. There's hardly any challenge to that. The thing that always amazes me the most about scoring for films is where they don't use music. That's what's important. To me, films that are heavily laden with score material are almost like sitcoms with too much laugh track. When there's too much [sings beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony] DAH-DAH-DAH DAH. When the cellos come in, you know, the guy's saying, "Dramatic now. Appreciate this dramatic moment. Alert! Alert! Drama coming up. Major 7th chord - they're in love! Look out, here comes the love!" It's offensive to me. I Find the films where you can really . . . if the sound effects are well recorded, and the natural sound of what's going on is interspersed with just a little bit of music, to me it works a lot better.

DM: What about some of the experimenters, like John Cage doing silence [a piece called 4'33" in which the performer makes no intentional sounds]?

I think that's an acquired taste. When I first learned of Cage's work, it seemed like the concept of it was far more entertaining than the audio result, but that could have just been a matter of the performances that were available on record at that time. Because even if you're going to be performing - well, silence is a bad example, but somebody with more abstract notations that require a conscious participation of willingness on the part of musicians to do something constructive in the piece. It's not often that you find musicians who like that idea and who will do a good job with it. I'm pretty sure that early recordings of Cage did not have willing accomplices. [Ed. Note: According to Barking Pumpkin, Frank performed Cage's 4'33" on the Cage tribute recording A Chance Operation, on Koch International (1993).]

DM: You can have a Lot of notes on paper, but if it's not well performed, it's not good to listen to.

It's not that there's a lot of notes on the page. A lot of it is really empty. See, contemporary music seems to go through this period where everybody discovered Webern and said, "Write ventilated music." So, a lot of people were writing highly ventilated constructions, but nobody did as well as Webern with the exception, I think, of this tape of Boulez I heard. I really like that. which is all fairly ventilated, but there was this post-Webernian school that sprang up, and it just turned into "boop, beep" music. And the boop beep was eventually replaced by minimalism, which is pentatonic and repetitive. It was like, give 'em a hook, and keep it coming, and so that's what you got.

DM: What do you got with new age music?

Well, that's like listening to, I think of it as kind of an audio ointment with jingle bells attached.

MG: But it makes the Pringles taste a little better.

Not if you're at the dentist's office, which is the environment in which it seems to thrive. But that's just my own personal thing.

MG: The musical trend that drives me the craziest is when you call a company and are put on hold, and you're forced to listen to whatever it is.

It's awful. That's like people telling you to have a nice day.