It was very beneficial, if you wanted to do music for the entertainment industry, to be based in the Los Angeles area. There hadn't been much of a blues scene there, and before 1967, neither was the rock scene highly considered. San Francisco was the place to put flowers in your hair, even if the song was written and performed in Los Angeles. It was the use of session musicians, expert anonymous hired hands, stepping in for band members not up to snuff, that caused critics to be suspect of most L.A. based bands.
It didn't matter if the same thing was being done in London all the time. Young guns like Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore played on hundreds of records before they became famous. Los Angeles was the corporate center of the entertainment industry. During the 1960s, that was considered the worse possible situation for rock music to thrive. Naturally, the Monkees, prefabricated to television specifications, epitomized this thinking. Even hip groups like the Byrds used session musicians all over their early material.
Two musicians, Harry Nilsson and Frank Zappa, worked extensively in movies, managing to do so largely because they were in based out of Los Angeles. Both had great talent, both show up in some strange places, both left a considerable legacy. Otherwise, they were polar opposites; one a teetotaler, the other a hard partier. One on the road constantly through the 1960s and 1970s, the other one never performing a single live concert. This is the tale of Harry & Frank.
Harry Nilsson grew up dirt poor, working in a bank while he peddled his songs around Hollywood. There was always a need for a good tune; soon enough, Harry landed songs with everyone from Fred Astaire to the Yardbirds. Hustling a recording contract, he managed a few albums that garnered acclaim, including high praise from the Beatles, but not much sales. A hit for the Monkees, 'Cuddly Toy', put him on the fast track, and he wound up working on a major motion picture.
The director was Otto Preminger, one of the handful whose name was above the title, and the movie, unfortunately, was 'Skidoo'. I am sure that I will return to this train wreck of a film at some future point, there is so much to say about it.. In short, it is so bad as to achieve legend. If you ever want to see Jackie Gleason on acid, this is the movie for you. 'Skidoo', jaw droppingly inappropriate in every way for every second, is the very definition of so-bad-it's-good.
Nilsson provided the soundtrack, supposedly because they wanted a hip young musician 'with it', part of the drug culture that the movie so desperately panders to. Too bad Harry only liked to drink, quite a lot as it will transpire in the future. Still, it was more camp that psychedelic. The music is better than the film, which is not saying much. Harry even gets to sing the entire credits for the movie, the only time I have heard that trick done.
The Beatles' acclaim was more important than a film so bad it was pulled from every theater after four days, so no permanent damage was done. There was a brief tour of Europe, which he hated so much that he never toured again, although it did result in a couple of television specials, in Sweden and Britain. To keep the money going, Nilsson started writing and performing on lots of television, shows like 'The Ghost & Mrs. Muir' or 'The Courtship of Eddie's Father'. His big break came when Bob Dylan, in a dry spell writing songs, missed his deadline.
The movie was 'Midnight Cowboy', the only X rated film to ever win an Oscar. It won three, in fact, and deserved every one. The director, John Schlesinger, used Nilsson's 'Everybody's Talking' as a temporary track while editing, to establish a rhythm. When Dylan didn't deliver on time, they kept the track, which became a monster hit, establishing Harry as a musical force. The song Dylan finally came up with, 'Lay Lady Lay', would also have worked wonderfully.
'The Point' came next, a concept album about mathematics. Was Harry tripping with Jackie Gleason? It was very good, spawning a television movie the next year. Three Dog Night covering his song 'One', making it a number one. He covered Badfinger's 'Without You', also a number one. Nilsson was on top of the world. What could go wrong?
Too much partying; Nilsson was now a celebrity, hanging with Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, even John Lennon during his 'Lost Weekend in L.A.' phase. Ocean of booze, mountains of cocaine impaired his judgement, ruining his vocal chords. Records stopped selling, but that was not the worse. Rock bottom in every way was Harry's starring vehicle of a movie, 'Son of Dracula'.
This is the pits, made even more terrible by the inclusion of all Harry's previous hits. It may have seemed like a sure-fire thing at the time. In 1973, a movie could be made in England for nothing, the English film industry at a virtual standstill. However, it helps to have a script, some actors, and a notion of what you want the finished film to look like. This hunk of cinema shit avoids anything resembling entertainment, effectively knocking Nilsson to minor cult status for the rest of his life.
Frank Zappa was middle class, the smart weirdo in high school who went out of his way to piss people off. He never lost that trait, thank God. Teaching himself notation, he was one of the rare rock performers of his era who could not only write music, but write every part for a symphony. He love atonal music, but he also worshiped Do Wop, revealing the fundamental contradictions that made up his personality. Zappa seemed to live his entire brilliant life as if to prove Galileo wrong; the world revolved around FZ, not the sun.
Working in advertising as an artist, Frank hustled the outer reaches of Hollywood, eventually landing some scoring jobs on a couple of low budget independent movies. One was a Western written by his high school English teacher, 'Run Home Slow'. Zappa went to work, creating a full orchestral score that sounds very modern. Hard to find, never having a soundtrack album, a snippet was finally released on 'Mystery Disc' around the time of FZ's death.
Around the same time - independent movies could take years to see the light of day, if they ever did - Zappa hooked up with resident Hollywood madman Timothy Carey. Carey was a prolific character actor, a favorite of Kubrick early in his career, who produced and directed a nut-job movie as a starring vehicle for himself. Doing the worse Elvis imitation ever, the film is fascinating, if only to see how far Carey is willing to go. He does not disappoint. Neither does Frank, who serves up some reasonable early rock & roll.
Zappa slowly dropped out of the straight life, first working in a recording studio producing mostly surf music, then buying the studio. He was promptly busted by the cops for producing an obscene audio tape(!!!), setting up a life-long adversarial relationship. Hooking up with a scruffy Blues band, he called them The Mothers, quickly assuming control. They even made a very early appearance in 'Mondo Hollywood', a movie that dares show you hairy freaks dancing with abandon.
FZ was the ultimate hustler, even producing, writing and arranging a single for the seriously pitch-challenged Burt Ward, 'Boy Wonder, I Love You." Frank showed up not only on the Monkees television show, but also in 'Head', lecturing Davey Jones to work on his music. Zappa immediately assumed the position of elder statesman for the Los Angeles freak scene. As early as 1968, in the liner notes to the 'Uncle Meat' album, there was mention of an upcoming movie. It wouldn't be that easy.
There was filming at least as early as the Royal Albert Hall performance in 1968. An arrangement of some sort was made with cinematographer Haskell Wexler; quite a bit of The Mothers of Invention music shows up in 'Medium Cool', the best movie about Chicago in 1968, the year of the Democratic Convention riots. Wexler filmed a great deal of material around 1970, but none was released at the time. Documentaries all over European television seemed to follow the original Mothers whenever they toured abroad.
Dissolving the Mothers, reforming it with remnants of the Turtles (especially uber vocalists Howard Kaylan and Mark Volan, aka Flo & Eddie), Zappa managed to get MGM to back a musical, filmed in England, '200 Motels'. He co-directed with Tony Palmer, a veteran of the British rock scene who later admitted he understood absolutely nothing about the plot or the movie. In my opinion, that wasn't the point; Zappa simply wanted to hear his orchestral music performed, and it was expensive to hire the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The movie was an excuse to get the funding he needed.
The movie is... unique, to say the least. Zappa insisted on all the music to be played live on the set, yet they only had a week or so to complete the project. It was filmed on videotaped, later transferred to film, the fist time this technique was ever used. Huge portions of the script had to be abandoned, but it doesn't matter. There are so many layers of reality stacked on top of each other, the texture is so dense, that watching it is akin to swimming in lumpy gravy.
You'll either love this movie or hate. I love it, but even I have to admit that, like most of Zappa's work, it is difficult to make it through to the end in one sitting. Ringo and Keith Moon show up, as do a few groupies. There is animation, all manner of weirdness. It is wonderful seeing this now being sold as a 'Classic MGM Musical' alongside 'Singing in the Rain'. Pity the poor sucker who falls for that ploy!
Zappa kept at it even after the notorious 'Smoke on the Water' Montreux fire, then getting pushed off stage a week later in London, nearly dying. He worked relentlessly, archiving virtually everything including both audio and visuals, finding ways to fund whatever creative impulse he had. There was an attempt to film a performance at the Roxy Theater around 1975, but technical glitches (cameras out of sync) kept that from being seen for over 40 years. He hired Bruce Bickford to do Claymation and animation just because he could afford to, at least for awhile.
Frank managed one last film in 1979, 'Baby Snakes', a typically weird concoction of live performances at a Halloween concert in New York City, backstage shenanigans, and Bickford material. His edit was over three hours long; the studio made him cut it down to less than 120 minutes. Another endurance test, you never know what's coming next. Of course it's too long, but again, there's nothing else like it in the world, although it is not as ground breaking as '200 Motels'.
With the advent of video editing, Zappa went crazy in the 1980s. He had his own mail order business, run out of his house by his wife Gail. No longer touring regularly, he cranked out a dizzying array of straight-to-video material, selling it himself. By the time he died in 1993, he hadn't dented the archival material. More new product continues to emerge decades later.
His output was massive before he died, even more massive after his death. Amazingly, he managed to pay for all of it as he went along, the only musician of his era to never be indebted to a record company. He was famously litigious, successfully suing any corporate entity to cross him. Love him or hate him, you have to admire the sheer volume of material, in rock, jazz, classical, as well as uncategorical. There will truly never be another Frank Zappa, that is for sure.
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