Rock: Mephisto in Hollywood

"Five thousand young people are there," TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler wrote, describing a Frank Zappa concert in Philadelphia. "They are expecting to be blasted out of their seats by a succession of rock groups like Jeff Beck, and Sly & the Family Stone. But the Mothers of Invention, who come on first, take the heart right out of the kids. They look old, entirely too old to be a rock group, and underfed, and definitely weird. Especially Frank Zappa, scrawny and at his most unappetizing in long red underwear, straggly black hair tied in a ponytail, a sinister goatee elongating a sallow, canine face. Noise comes out of the band, noise like a zoo is burning down. It is King Kong, one of Frank's creations. The kids start to rock back and forth like they always do. But as the full shock of this noise hits them, you can see them shrivel down in their seats until they sit there paralyzed, barely breathing. Twelve minutes later, the piece rumbles to a stop in the middle of an unbelievable shriek from the saxophones. The kids sit stunned."

As it happens, that was one of the Mothers' last concerts. For five years, Zappa and the eight other Mothers tried to make satiric hash of rock, displaying a suicidal urge, or so it seemed to many, to play music so weird, as Zappa put it, that "you just have to run screaming from the room the moment you hear us." To many people, Zappa, in fact, has often seemed to be a force of cultural darkness, a Mephistophelian figure serving as a lone, brutal reminder of music's potential for invoking chaos and destruction. Zappa sees himself merely as a devil's advocate who started out by disguising his own serious music as rock ("There's nothing reprehensible in atonal music played over a boogaloo rhythm"), hoping to find a permanent place for it. At 29, Zappa has now disbanded the leading underground rock group in the U.S. "I got tired of playing for people who clap for all the wrong reasons," he says. "Those kids wouldn't know music if it came up and bit 'em on the ass."

The move was far from suicidal. Zappa already has enough material recorded to produce twelve more Mothers LPs. If they are like the first eight, that will mean words too dirty and music too complex to be played on the radio. No matter. It is plainly time to branch out further. Zappa is now president of the first underground rock conglomerate ever, Bizarre, Inc. It includes two record labels—Bizarre and Straight—as well as a management firm, a public relations agency, an advertising agency, several music-publishing companies, a film-production company and a book division that will start off with The Groupie Papers, a look at life among the female camp followers of rock.