Mephisto in Hollywood

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In signing talent, Zappa has only one criterion: the acts have to be even weirder than the Mothers. And are they ever. For Bizarre, Zappa has even recorded an ex-mental patient named Wild Man Fischer, who has made his living for years by standing on the sidewalk of Sunset Strip and shrieking distraught songs of his own creation at people for a nickel a song. The Straight label offers groups like Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, a gaggle of males who live together in a big house in the San Fernando Valley, wear dresses, sheets and lampshades and rehearse their mad meanderings 14 hours a day.

Personally, Zappa is as bizarre as any of the people he is pushing. He even shocks other pop musicians. A few years ago, he performed at the Grammy Awards, making pig noises for about 20 minutes because he found the audience rude and noisy. What may or may not qualify as slightly more appetizing is this line spoken by a girl on the Bizarre LP Uncle Meat: "No one could ever understand our bizarre relationship because I was your intellectual frigid housekeeper, especially when you'd be going to bed with one chick at night and I'd wake up in the morning to find . . . you weren't with the same one you were with the night before ..."

It would all be sheer horror if the talent, however wildly misused, were not there. But it is. Zappa's LP Ruben & the Jets, an irreverent look at rock 'n' roll of the mid-1950s ("Cheap thrills, in the back of my car/ Cheap thrills, how fine they are"), is musical satire at its best. The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet (on the album Freak Out!), atonal, multi-rhythmic, grating stuff, puts most of today's electronic composers to shame for unpretentious thrust and sheer zany imagination.

Moon Unit. A self-taught composer whose idols are Stravinsky and Varese, Zappa thinks that he would have been taken a lot more seriously if he had chosen a classical life. His current success, however, is the best proof possible of the cross-pollination of movies, television and recordings now occurring in Hollywood. These days even the freakiest musicians can go independent, be their own managers, producers and A & R men—and make money. Working in the basement of his Laurel Canyon home, which he shares with his wife Gail, their daughter Moon Unit, 1½, and a baby son whom they call Dweezle, Zappa is editing his first film, Burnt Weenie Sandwich, a documentary about the Mothers. His second, Captain Beefheart v. The Grunt People, is ready for the camera. Neither one of them could possibly compare to the $4,000,000 flick he hopes to do next. Zappa is ready, willing, able, and graphic in talking about that one if someone listens: