Zapped

Many years ago when I was a DJ in California I had an experience which I will never forget. It involved a man who was to become a great musician in the field of Rock and beyond. My story happens before there was any Mothers of Invention and Frank Zappa was not a household name amongst people who played guitar or, as they do today, listen to Zappa’s iconic music. This goes back to 1962.

There was this guy named Vaughn Meader and he and a few others, cut a comedy album named The First Family. It was funny and a lot of people bought it; more than a million in less than two months. You see, it was based on the daily life of President John F. Kennedy, his wife and his two brothers. Meader was an excellent impersonator of JFK and the writing was timely and made for enjoyable listening.

The LP came out in October of ’62 and despite the Cuban Missile Crisis, Meader and co-writers Bob Booker and Earl Doud had an instant hit. By mid 1963 The First Family had sold over 7 million copies, won a Grammy and Meader was a sought after stand-up comedian. Needless to say the bottom fell out when Kennedy was assassinated thirteen months to the day after the LP was produced. Meader went into instant non-recognition, lost his money, took to drugs and died. So much for The First Family. I told you about it to set the scene for my own experience.

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I was working in San Bernardino as an early evening disc jockey on a Rock ‘n’ Roll radio station. Actually we called them Top 40 stations in those days and we were a solid number one in the huge market that extends from East Los Angeles to Palm Springs including Riverside and Redlands and dozens of suburban towns. I had a lot of listeners because 6-9PM is the teen ‘slot’. In those days there was little interference from management as to what a DJ could do on the air as long as he kept it short and played lots of music. It was freewheelin’ to use Bob Dylan’s term.

I had been given the gift of impersonation as well. And using the popularity of both JFK and Meader’s LP, I would often ad lib the time, temperature, a few lines and a bit of nonsense imitating President Kennedy between The Crystals and Marvin Gaye. Nobody had a copy-write on impersonating JFK and if a person was good enough, and I was, why not? I didn’t steal Meader’s material, I used my own.

Somehow and I’m not sure of the answer, a nascent rock band leader named Frank Zappa either heard me or more than likely heard of me and a light bulb went off in that incredibly imaginative mind. He sat down and wrote a song about surfing; a basic rock composition — a nebulous tune but in the wildly popular Surfer style which was the craze in those days before the Brits came to town. The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean and the Ventures plus a dozen local bands all featured songs about surf parties and ‘shootin’ the curl’ and ‘the pipeline’. Zappa called his song The Big Surfer.

It was simple in concept. The ‘Big Surfer’ was President Kennedy and he was at the beach to judge a surf contest. The libretto — and I use the word lightly — was a series of one-liners such as “you’re looking good” or “hiya hiya hiya” etcetera, voiced by me using the JFK accent with a little reverb (echo) added which somehow gave it an outdoors feel like big speakers on a stage on the sand. Zappa himself over dubbed kiddy giggling and had some girls squealing in the background managing to give the thing a fair imitation of how a Surf Contest party would sound.

When Frank Zappa called me and laid out what he wanted from me I gladly accepted. I signed a contract. I was gonna make a record. On Capitol Records yet, where Zappa had jobbed the concept. One night shortly after he called, I got off the air at 9PM and drove to Frank’s tiny studio in nearby Cucamonga. He gave me the script and his band played along with me and Frank pointed when he wanted me to speak. It was easy — in fact I think we did the whole 2 minute song in one take. I drove back to San Berdoo, Frank took his tapes, overdubbed his voices and they cut the thing at Capitol studios, pressed 400 DJ copies and we were set for immortality as it were.

But it never got off the ground. The punch line to the song was: the winner of the Surfing Contest got an all expense paid trip as the first member of the Peace Corps, to Alabama. The American Southern states in 1962, including Alabama, were the front lines of the early Civil Rights Movement: rough and dangerous. Among the movement’s leaders was a 37 year old black man whose name was Medgar Evers. A couple of days before The Big Surfer by Frank Zappa was due for release … with my name on the A side (the flip side was just a 2 minute instrumental surf-riff) … Capitol Records #4981 was withdrawn. Medgar Evers had been shot dead in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

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Frank Zappa, before he died, mentioned  The Big Surfer several times when being interviewed about his early recordings. In Rolling Stone Magazine he says he was sure he had a hit; “We had this disc jockey in San Bernardino who sounded more like Kennedy than Kennedy”. (Caswell Whiteside, the name I use on this website, is a pseudonym). He admitted leaning on the strength of The First Family’s success. We hadn’t invented the term ‘rip-off’ in those days — anyway it was only similar in context, Zappa had produced a single 45RPM musical single as opposed to a spoken word comedy Long Playing album.

What was Frank like? He was a hell of a nice guy, full of fun and put me at my ease immediately. And if I’d been smart, I would have hung on to the few copies he sent me from Capitol but all I have is a tape from a fellow broadcaster who contacted me years later – a Zappa collector who did have the record. Believe me, it’s worth a lot more today than it was 47 years ago.

Filipino Birthdays

There’s a tradition in the Philippines (maybe it should be called a habit) regarding birthdays. When somebody has a birthday all the family gathers. ALL the family—that goes for uncles & cousins right through to the fourth generation, if applicable. And they eat. There is some kind of secret Filipino control placed on these mammoth gatherings or they’d be happening three or four times a week, per family … so there’s a system. I don’t know what it is although I’m thankful it exists.

I don’t go to the Birthday Parties. Why? Because it would be impossible for me to eat the food which is always outside on tables. It’s the flies. Maybe 40 different dishes to feed this mob and about 18-20 flies per dish which is replenished when it’s empty (about every 12 minutes) … well over 2000 flies. In shifts. And only a stone’s throw from the nearest pig-pens. In addition to the fly-dung, the flies carry, on their “feet” a lot of pig dung, pig sweat and maybe a billion tiny molecular sized organisms, several if not all, capable of giving a person some awful tropical disease. (Think about where these organisms come from.) So I don’t eat, in fact I eat NOTHING that is not prepared by my wife.

Our home is fly-proof. Screen doors and well away from pigs. The Filipinos are resistant after hundreds of years living side by side with billions of flies.

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 But there is more. Karaoke. As I have said many times in the past: Karaoke is the revenge the Japanese enacted upon the Western powers for kicking hell out of them in World War Two. More than any other country, Karaoke is at it’s most popular in the Philippines, even more so than in Japan where the Japanese after years of performing Karaoke learned that the Asian wind-pipe was not formed in such a way that it became suitable for singing; only a few chosen countrymen can sing. That being the case, the Japanese, who are inventive people have, within the last 10 years, come up with a form of music they call J-pop. And it spawned Canto-pop (Chinese) and Filo-pop (Filipino)… all are exactly the same, just with different names. Don’t misread me here… I mean all the same SONG.

It is baffling that these Asian people have been able to make hit parades and pop charts, entertain in stage shows and perform in Night Clubs in three different countries…all with just one song. But Karaoke is not J-pop or it’s clones. Karaoke in the Philippines — especially in the smallish rural areas such as the place where my wife and I live — is sung at Birthday Parties. There are a couple of Karaoke rental outfits nearby. Their owners live in big mansions with a lot of roofs (a sign of wealth in the Philippines is how many roofs a family has on their house.) These owners make a killing because their beat-up equipment is in high demand.

The equipment consists of an amplifier, a three foot TV screen which features a crawl line displaying the words of the song that is playing, and two speakers each the size of a large refrigerator. The amplifier is capable of cranking out 1000 watts per channel and it is always turned to full volume. This dusty rig is set up in the outside area of the person’s home, usually under a tree where it is cooler. It is delivered around noon and is rentable for either one or two days. Being as there is a huge mob consisting of people of all ages at these functions, the Karaoke equipment is in constant use from the time of delivery ’till the time of pick-up 24 or 48 hours later, with the exception of … say… 2 AM to 6 AM. At these Birthday Parties, all the men over 19 are drunk from about mid afternoon until they pass out early in the morning.

The women spend most of the time preparing the food and cleaning up the dishes afterwards. The rest of the neighborhood hears. That’s what the rest of the neighborhood who have no connection to the Birthday family do. They hear. Everybody within a one mile radius hears. The songs are almost universally well-known hit songs from the West and the words crawling across the television screen are in English. Quite a few Filipinos can speak the language, most of them badly. But that has no bearing on their imagined prowess with a microphone. They constantly sing off key and they manage to entirely mangle the English lyrics.

It is mostly men and boys singing although young girls sing too. Most of the young people sing beginning around six in the morning until the older men get drunk and demand their time to perform … or as they see it, entertain. They have favorites. And these favorites come up on the average of once every couple of hours. They include “My Way”, “Because”, “You Light Up My Life” and “I will Always Love You”. All these tunes demand a lot of lung-power, ending with high, sustained notes. Not only that, they are mostly songs that have had so much exposure that a little goes a long way. (And in the case of “My Way”, only one version is even remotely acceptable)

However today, as I was working in the garden and trying my best not to “hear” I became aware, for the first time that a new song had been added. One that had the composer been able to foresee the future would have realized that his ballad was to become a great Karaoke favorite amongst drunken Filipino men. “MacArthur Park” The song is difficult to sing. It calls for the vocalist to cover great range. The original version was sung by the British Motion Picture actor who possessed something of a golden throat—-Richard Harris who sang the Jimmy Webb-penned classic as one would expect to hear it sung by an opera star. A Baritone.

Webb, I am sure did not have untrained Filipino Karaoke singers in mind when he wrote it. But if he were here he might well recognize the background music provided by the sound system. He might also recognize the lyrics passing before his eyes on the three foot screen. But upon hearing the off-key squawl that emanated from the cracked, over-amped, piercing speakers at a shrill wattage, he would have wished for nothing more than to have, in his hand, loaded, a 45 caliber automatic hand gun. With extra clips.

Outdoor eating and outdoor Karaoke. Happy Birthday.