Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention

Garrick Theatre, New York, NY, May 24, 1967

By Roger Paradiso

The Garrick was an old and narrow theater above the Café Au Go Go on 152 Bleecker Street across from the Bitter End. Frank Zappa wanted his band, the Mothers of Invention, to have a residency in New York like the Beatles had in Hamburg. The Garrick was a place where the Mothers played every night and experimented with their act and musical sound. Originally scheduled to just last a couple of weeks around Easter, Frank took over the theater and paid to stay until Labor Day.

They stayed through a typically hot New York summer and, to add to the misery, the theater’s air unit broke and the landlord didn’t have the money to fix it. Memorable songs to come out of this period were Who Are the Brain Police? and Call Any Vegetable. Two albums were recorded in this period: Freak Out and Absolutely Free.

Frank met his wife, Gail, at LA’s Whiskey a Go Go in 1966 and dragged her to New York. Here are some excerpts from her 1990 Billboard interview with Drew Wheeler.

“I thought that Frank was probably one of the grubbiest creatures I’d ever seen,” Gail recalls, “but he was compelling. He had a compelling glare. He had major magnetic charm, I would say.

“New York proved to be no Fun City, and the Zappas were “Desperately poor,” remembers Gail, “It was dreadful, we were living in a horrible hotel, sharing it with very large cockroaches. I remember, in the dead of winter, the milk cartons on the window ledge outside – no refrigerator of course. I think I lived off grapefruits and Frank lived off peanut butter…

“And coffee – we made coffee from the bathtub because the water that came into the bathtub was so hot you could really scorch yourself. You did not need to boil it. It was frightening. Instant coffee. Milk on the window ledge.”

One regular fan had this to say about Frank’s Garrick Theater shows: “One never knew what to expect, there were some nights that you just heard pure music, and … sometimes Frank would just sit in a chair and glower at the audience. Sometimes there were more people on stage than there were in the audience… I remember Stravinsky being played, I remember droning music going on for ages, and then in the middle of all of that, the song that then became Oh No, I Don’t Believe It, sort of breaking through the clouds, and I mean it just shocked me, how anything could be so beautiful, and how such beautiful music could come out of such bizarre looking people.” – Cashbox 10 June 1967

When I was a teenager I bought a bass and tried with some other friends to play Zappa songs. We couldn’t really do it because I sucked and the music was too complex. After college, I ended up writing films and plays and somewhere in there I started an underground paper. Our first paper had Nixon on the front page. We made him look like Hitler. I saw a picture of Trump dressed like Hitler recently and I thought, well, history does repeat itself. I stuck with Zappa, seeing him at the Filmore East in the East Village. I also saw his movies. They were funny and odd indie bombs from iconoclastic Mother Fockers which is what he wanted to call the band until his record company intervened. He ended up being a modern composer as good as any of them.