Kid Gloves Read online

The song winds down at last from its disgraceful efforts, with Zappa crooning smugly ‘Dinah-Moe … and a Dinah-Moe’ on a long fade-out. This was the point at which Dad entered the room. The air must have been awash with late-adolescent relief, as well as a trace of our disappointment that no showdown had taken place. Matter and anti-matter had come within a micron of achieving each other’s destruction. Our buried hunger for confrontation had been thwarted, and the puritan had entered the room just as the smut-hound was leaving. They hadn’t recognized each other.

  Even Dad’s canny forensic nose couldn’t reconstruct the outrage he had just missed. He joined in with the song on its slow fade-out, murmuring ‘Dinah-Moe … Dinah-Moe’ in his turn and nodding his head in time. As the track finished he conceded that the song had ‘got something’, then left without fuss.

  It’s a shame he didn’t stay for the next track, ‘Montana’, the last on the album, with its daffy lyrics about making a fortune from raising dental floss. (It added to the song’s amusement value that in 1973, along with most of our compatriots, we had no idea what dental floss was, what benefits it was supposed to confer.) This at last was filth-free, close to family entertainment – if it hadn’t been, of course, some instinct would have led Dad to stay and we would have had that longed-for, long-avoided barney after all.

  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. Bu
t 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.

  Danger! The heavy rhetorical superstructure is bringing this conceit close to collapse. It’s all going a bit Tay Bridge. Time to underpin the whole ramshackle edifice with stanchions of properly reinforced personal material.

  If Dad had confronted me, or us, with this scatological wallowing, pointing out how sickening it was, with its reliance on our complicity in its degradation of women, what would I, or we, have said? Never mind that he lacked a feminist vocabulary. He was by generation a sexist but hardly misogynistic. Family life didn’t require him to show his ideological colours more clearly by calling on him to shape the future of a female child – there are adjustments that fathers without daughters don’t have to make. The sensible thing would have been to play for time, pointing out that the two of the Mothers’ albums from the previous year, Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, came as close to big-band revivalism as avant-garde progressive rock could reasonably be expected to get.

  Then I would probably have said, ‘You just don’t get it,’ delivered with an attempt at scornful finality – so much easier to pronounce, as a sentence, than its more truthful cousins, I just don’t get it. I don’t get how free speech and censorship can both be so … nasty. If I didn’t want to be protected, then it was a mystery how I was going to avoid being degraded myself.

  When arguments of this sort loomed with Dad I held tight to my trump card, which was probably why relatively few of them were fully played out. Dad had an acute tactical sense of when an opponent had a secret weapon, so that it might be wise to hold his fire. And what was my secret weapon? Only that Dad had a copy of The Godfather on the bookshelves in his study, which fell open at a grotesquely sexual passage on page 26. Cheap paperbacks blab, they spill every secret. Only a respectable quality of binding keeps its counsel, discreet about which pages have been most urgently consulted, exactly where the reader’s lowest self has been worked on. I was armed against any attack from Dad. Let him who is without smut cast the first stone.

  I could imagine arraigning Dad in some sort of family tribunal.

  Mars-Jones Jr: Perhaps the clerk of the court will be good enough to read aloud the passage marked. There by my thumb. Speak up, man! You’re mumbling.

  ‘Her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle.

  It pulsated in her hand like an animal and almost weeping with grateful ecstasy she pointed it into her own wet, turgid flesh.’

  Prisoner in the dock, you there, judge of first instance – Is that something you would wish your cleaning lady to read? I hardly think so. Small wonder you are unable to meet my eye. Yet you left it in plain sight on your bookshelves, where it might cause any amount of distress to impressionable young people, tender-minded homosexuals among them, who might stumble upon it. I put it to you, judge in the dock, that you are no more than a whited sepulchre, yea a whited sepulchre, full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness …

  For all I know, Dad had the same conflicted feelings about passages like that as I did about pages from Burroughs and Genet, which disgusted me but gave me a jolt of nihilistic arousal just the same. If we’d had that confrontation I was so well armed against, he might have admitted that this was his objection to the availability of pornography, not the fear that Psychopathia Sexualis might be bought by the lower orders from station bookstalls but the fear that he might buy something viler than The Godfather himself. Before this conversation could take place, of course, he would have had to start cultivating the habit of admitting doubts and vulnerabilities.

  I had unwittingly bought an album to which Tina Turner and the Ikettes contributed backing vocals, but I wasn’t yet ready to buy actual black music – my breakthrough came at long last with Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ in 1977. Can it really be true that Dad was more open to black music than I was as a teenager? There’s a certain amount of evidence to support the suggestion, and in our family we’re crazy for evidence. We can’t get enough of it, either to strengthen our hand or to inform ourselves about the high cards the opposition is likely to play.

  Dad bought only two singles in 1968 and both of them were MOBO, as it’s called now, Music Of Black Origin. In fact they book-ended the range of what the culture had to offer at the time. There was The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ ‘O Happy Day’, gospel at its most submissive and serene. And there was Pigmeat Markham’s raucous novelty record ‘Here Come The Judge’. I thought ‘O Happy Day’ was soupy, and I was not the one in the family who habitually ordered soup. I thought ‘Here Come The Judge’ was infantile, and I was embarrassed that Dad got so much pleasure from it (‘This judge is hip and that ain’t all / He’ll give you time if you’re big or small’).

  Pigmeat Markham was as much a comedian as a musician, almost a vaudeville act insisting on a bygone stereotype – it was only a few years since he had been appearing at the Apollo blacked-up, with his lips painted white. Of course Dad didn’t pay attention to the racial angle. ‘Here Come The Judge’ was cashing in on the popularity of Markham’s appearances on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. And naturally it was the catch-phrase itself that appealed to Dad.

  For a while he used the song as his theme tune, entering a room (‘Here Come the Judge, Here Come the Judge’) to his own accompaniment of rhythmic speech. It seemed a bit amateur, somehow, even self-defeating. The Queen doesn’t blow her own trumpet. She has heralds for that. Dad was a one-man band.

  Gloriously, we had the last laugh. We listened to the B-side, billed as ‘Here Come The Judge (Part 2)’, which amounted to an extended smutty joke of exactly the sort that Dad hated. A defendant is up in front of the Judge on a charge of indecent exposure. Eventually it turns out that he has twenty-seven children. The case is dismissed by the Judge on the basis that the defendant hasn’t had time to put his pants on. We knew how appalled Dad would be if he realized what he’d subsidized with his six-and-eightpence.

  So we had the last laugh as far as ‘Here Come The Judge’ went. Unfortunately Dad had the laugh after that. The song’s place in the history of popular music has been reassessed, and it’s now sometimes described as the first rap record. Oh God. It’s official. Dad was ahead o
f his time, while I was barely keeping up with mine.

  When for example a record like Dave and Ansell Collins’ ‘Double Barrel’ made an appearance on Top of the Pops, I was sincerely mystified, waiting for an actual song to appear, something properly equipped with verses and chorus. Lyrics too, please. It didn’t occur to me that a groove might be enough in itself, more than enough – but now I’ve redoubled the fogey factor just when I was trying to make it go away. I should just punch the Gieseking button on the juke-box one more time, and give my rocking chair a stately nudge.

  The counterculture embraced sleaziness pretty much whole-heartedly, but there were things in it that helped me just the same. Tim was more adventurous than me, a little more than can be accounted for simply by the twenty-month age difference. He had been given tickets to a preview of Flesh while queuing with a girlfriend to see Klute. Flesh! Girlfriend! Klute! He was seizing the day, seizing both the day and the night.

  He also kept various underground magazines in the little chest of drawers between our beds in the attic of the Gray’s Inn flat, through which I would guiltily rummage. In one of them there was a strip cartoon of two men in bed together. They weren’t getting up to anything, except amusing each other by reading aloud from Dr David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, published in 1969.

  I knew about this book without having read it, making paranoiac use of my peripheral vision, flickering towards a headline and flinching away (still perhaps the perceptual mode of the closeted teenager, unless the Internet has made it obsolete) to absorb its dismal message from the attendant newspaper coverage. David Reuben was a doctor, and if he said that public sex was the supreme expression of attraction between men, and that quarrels between cohabiting men had a bitchiness beyond anything known in the normal world, who was I to doubt it?