Case History/Day 3 of Zappadan

Zappadan always creates serious problems with my personal time/space continuum. The planetary alignment, the stars seem to be affected by forces beyond my senses. I tumble forward and backward on a loop that is connected and disconnected.
It all begins in a Catholic Elementary School basement in Detroit. I was 15 years old? A Teen Club for the neighborhood kids to bring records, drink soft drinks and hang out while the nuns looked on in fear. I was not a regular. My friends and I hung out and listened to the Yardbirds and our ultimate ambition at the time was to form a rock band, have an actual sexual experience with another person and to grow cool side burns.

The kids were hanging out listening to Jan and Dean, The Beach Boys and dancing to The Bird. The nuns thought that Freddie and The dreamers were a nice influence.
The it happened. Over the tinny cheap PA speakers in the hall, a noise like two giant balloons rubbing together at high volume with a beat blasted everyone into stunned silence...There was a voice, "Suzy? Suzy Creamcheese?" And they said it couldn't happen here......

This went on for a few minutes. The nuns were too stunned to react. Then Sister mary Tehonella, the thake charge authoritarian of the group strode into the back room and ripped the record off the turntable. She reappeared dragging my buddy George by the arm nd up the stairs and out the door. He was clutching a record jacket.

So we followed George and he told us that he was officially banned from the teen club.
We were impressed. I offered him one of my Chesterfields which I smoked because I felt for some reason had an aura of sophistication. I looked at Georges record. It was freak Out by The Mothers of Invention and I had never seen anything like it before.
The next day, since I had the most unsupervised existence, George and my buddies came over to my house and played the record.

Things changed fast in my life. I went to an inner city high school, Cass Tech which specialized in the Arts and had a very diverse group of friends. It was the dawning of the Age of Aquariums...The Age of Aquarius never really happened in Detroit. There were "hippies" and hippie hang outs, but most of us knew that we were really freaks and mutants. Living in Detroit only helped to foster that realization, every day.
Freak Out became the soundtrack of my life. I liked lots of other music, but my tastes had been fatally influenced already.

My buddies, Larry and Rudy started one of the first high school "underground" papers in the USA, Yellow. We got to work on it in the offices of the still publishing Revolutionary Paper, The Fifth Estate in an office on the John C. Lodge Expressway below Canfield Ave. One cold afternoon, I was in the office with Larry and found myself creating the ad for the first Mothers of Invention performance in Detroit at The ford Auditorium. I wish I had a copy of that ad. I was doing proto psychedelic lettering and created a collage of giant pigs attacking the skyline of Detroit.

We were able to get free tickets to the show. Also while we were working in the Fifth Estate office, we checked out the want ads for the next issue and saw an ad recruiting "hippie types" to hang out at the opening of an art gallery. An artist had painted the flower children in San Francisco and needed sopme livehippes for atmosphere.
We showed up. I was wearing a double breasted Salvation Army jacket and a wide tie with jeans and was barefoot. I ended up on television and in the newspaper and appropriate quotes were attributed to me like, "Groovy" and "They really make it!".
The next day, when the paper came out and television footage was shown most of my living relatives disowned me, except for an uncle who died recently and my sister told me that the cutting from the paper was in his wallet.

I saw the Mothers at The Ford Auditorium. They abused the rising stage and played a program of covers of sleazy R&B and greasy Rock songs. Frank would announce the song, the artist and the label and the recording serial number. Then theyy launched into an extended version of the early proto King Kong! It was great! I was never the same...the syndrome had truly set in.
This was the beginning of my 43 year obsession with frank Zappa and his work and the world revolving around it. My esthetic was profoundly twisted and I had become a teenage dada monster. Happy Day 3 of Zappadan!