I Badly Needed to Get Back in Touch With My Inner Zappa

When I was a church-going kid with a family which forbid or discouraged so many things (including pop music, TV and movies) the fortuitous fact that my dad had a couple of tape decks and some recording equipment (for recording the sermons of visiting preachers, of course) was a constant consolation.  My dad would buy things like a good SLR camera or recording equipment, and he'd partly figure out how to use them, and then eventually lose interest and they'd gather dust until I got grudging, guarded permission to use them.  I would take them, dust them off and promptly try to see what I could make them do.  Mostly weird stuff.  So, "trick photography" and recording odd stuff.

The effects that I agonizingly worked to get from the camera are now so easy and quick to do with Photoshop, that it's funny and sad at the same time.

The tape decks weren't really designed to do multi-tracking, and I would really have needed a third one and a mixer board to do that properly, but I made do and did things.  I hooked together anything that could be hooked together and did things. When I worked at Radio Shack, of course this brought even more opportunities to find ways to hook things to other things.  I had a tape player (ghetto blaster) of my own which was cheap, and if you held the play button down halfway, the tape would slide through it too quickly, so you could play stuff you'd recorded, but all sped up.  The effect was kind of random, so the amount it was speeding up was pretty erratic and random-sounding.  Some kids were taking endless piano lessons and learning to play "Left Hand Exercise #3" perfectly into a tape recorder.  I delighted in the idea that I could record ANYTHING into that machine, and in that one area of my life, it didn't have to be correct.  Of course, I didn't swear into it or anything.  Not even once.  Because I didn't swear.  I think, looking back, the idea was to simultaneously do two things: feel good about knowing how to use electronic equipment in both conventional and unconventional ways, and also to make things that were completely ridiculous.  Ridiculous was important.  It was what some of us did instead of rebellion, because it was kind of better.

In a setting where so much was forbidden, and so many more things would make people wonder if you were normal and worthy of respect (which was a deeper and more important thing than what was forbidden), when propriety and conventionality and orthodoxy were SO important; making a recording which was just plain brain-stoppingly ridiculous was terribly satisfying.  To listen to most of that stuff now is pretty excruciating, of course, as it sounds like childish, giggling nonsense, but at the time, it felt very good on a very deep level.  I think it was about being so bone-achingly tired of giving the expected, proper, conventional, safe, approved response; and of doing only expected, proper, conventional, safe, approved things to pass the overabundance of un-televisioned, computer-free time, that it was like tossing a pie in your boss' face or something.  Gratifying.

The more conventional, understood route was, of course, to simply rebel.  Smoking cigarettes and drinking beer (along with going to the movies and watching TV and fooling around with girls) were not allowed, so when you'd get so to-the-very-core-of-your-young-life sick of living in moment-by-moment fear of being frowned upon, a lot of us would end up smoking cigarettes and shotgunning beer in front of the TV or at a drive-in with a partly-clothed, equally drunk  girl.  Not me.  For some reason, the idea of saying "You think I'm a scoundrel, a faithless hedon?  Fine!  I'll be that so you can understand me.  Judge me, but at least I'll have my freedom!" seemed far too...cooperative and explicable.  There was a place prepared within the system for people like that.  It was the Naughty Chair.  I suppose it wasn't the best seat to have, but at least it gave you somewhere to sit.

I longed to do things that were not just naughty and predictable (the things kids have always done) but interesting; things which no one had thought they'd ever have to forbid, because no one had thought of doing them.  (Of course, eventually I was kicked out of my church for a parody I wrote in mockery of a religious pamphlet I felt they'd displayed a monumental lack of audience-savvy in titling "Wild Whipped Cream."  The fact that they were publishing and mass-producing and distributing this thing, with not the Slightest Clue that it sounded like porn boggled me.  I couldn't respect that.  I mocked it.  I was kicked out and shunned for life by the culture in which I was raised, and for which I Sat Out The Eighties when I was supposed to have been a teenager.)

A young man who was attending church and reading the bible and not rebelling was something people understood, though it was rare.  I kinda was that, most of the time.  A young man sneaking out to fool around with girls and drink and smoke and watch V:The Series was something even more common at church and equally easy to understand.  I mean, who DIDN'T want to do those bad things?  We all did.  Many of us just didn't allow ourselves to, but we all understood the urge.

But satire, parody, a delight in nonsense and non sequitur?  What on earth was wrong with people who were into that?  Why would someone want to do that when there was Sorry and checkers and volleyball to be played?  How could they mock stuff which involved the fate of the Eternal Souls of the lost multitudes of the world? 

I can't claim I was very eccentric really, but I had an absolute delight in mocking things that I felt needed to be mocked.  If my parents had an old record with a ponderous pipe-organist playing melancholy and funereal hymns while Ralph Platt, bird-call imitator extraordinaire, shared his repertoire of swallow and thrush songs on an LP called The Birds Sing His Praise..., I sure didn't think "What a talented guy.  How lovely to combine the majesty of those elegant hymns with the sounds of the wonder of God's Creation!  Praise Him!" but thought rather "That is the most messed up thing I've listened to this month!"  Ojibwa choirs singing "Amazing Grace" in their native tongue?  Failed trombonist Marcy Tiegler holding her

 "Little Marcy" doll and singing hymns like "I Tuned In On Heaven (On The Radio of Prayer)"?  Roy Roger and Dale Evans, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jim Nabors, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Bill Gaither on an endless variety of family-approved ______  ______  sings Hymns albums?  We had all of that.  And I would take bits of it and make silly(er) things out of it.  I would play an abrasive speed metal electric guitar solo in the middle of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God."  I would try to devise Beach Boys or doo-wop styled additional vocals to sing into saccharine versions of "Amazing Grace."  It didn't sound good.  It wasn't really clever.  It was, however, deeply satisfying, and in many ways it Got Me Through.

When a kid at school decided to wear a chain around his neck with a padlock on it, or some other "not seen in the latest John Hughes movie" fashion choice, something which made him clearly not a jock, nerd OR prep, I always kinda admired them.  When the three girls with the uber-heavy dark eye makeup, black trenchcoats and dyed-black hair all shaved whitewalls into the sides of their heads and left their lank dark hair long on top, I simultaneously thought "They sure look a lot less hot now!" and "I am deeply intrigued by the freedom seen in just going out and doing stuff like that and making it work and not whining about not liking it afterward."

Freedom.  Spontaneity.  Unconventionality.  Those were like drugs to me.  I got high on them and felt euphoria at the very thought of that kind of thing.  My fashion choices and hair styles didn't go too far down that road, of course.  Because I wasn't like that.  I was more internal.

What I did was read things that were unusual and nonsensical or deeply into the absurd (The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Stainless Steel Rat, stuff like that).  What I did was I found people who liked to be downright inexplicable to talk to.  And what I also did was I started to experiment with actually listening to genuine pop music.  The eighties was an interesting time to try to decide whether you thought the artists and songs were good, or silly.  Some, clearly, were both.

Pop and rock music were big church no-no's too.  It was in the late 80s and in my late teens that I really started to secretly experiment with listening to mainstream pop and rock.  I didn't have the Internet, but I had a radio and a used cassette tape store, friends with tapes and LPs, and bargain bins at stores all over teh place.  I found it easy to like things like the singles The Police would put out, and The Joshua Tree by U2, and Creedence Clearwater Revival's greatest hits album, and Neil Young's catalogue of frequently ill-advised experiments in genre-jumping.  The Northern Pikes, too.  I was looking for pretty songs and catchy songs and cathartic songs, but every time there were sound effects and vocal samples and spoken bits, and oddities of various kinds, I always had this feeling of "Look at you, you crazy, courageous bastard!  This is supposed to be a commercial album with hits, and you've got an air raid siren in there, or a voice going 'aawwwhhoooooghhhhhhiiiiiiii!'  Outstanding!"  It was a while before I found I loved Pink Floyd 

I wanted things that were clever, and passionate, and unconventional.  I found Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, which were dark and creepy, horrifying and mournful and beautiful and terribly funny and witty.  I found Pink Floyd.  And I found Frank Zappa.

At first it was about my friends and I making odd mix tapes for each other.  I call them "mix tapes," but really what they were was hooking up a few tape decks and making soundscapes of weird stuff, with absurd bits of monumentally unusual recordings by established recording artists showing up here and there.  So, a typical effort by me would have some unusual trippy Pink Floyd "before or during the song" bits that weren't really a song, with the voice of someone from our church preaching earnestly in there too, and the sounds of cattle lowing and water dripping, and a bit of a Captain Beefheart record album I'd found in a bargain bin.  I had a four-track tape recorder and a microphone, and I could mash tomatoes into the sink while recording the squishy sounds with the microphone held in the other hand and put that throughout a song I had recorded and then played on a portable tape deck stuck inside an aquarium full of crickets my father was keeping for his grade 5 science class, and slowly have the song slow down and be replaced at the end by sounds from a bus terminal I'd picked up from somewhere, while a joke-store Bag of Laughs electronic gizmo that laughed maniacally was going off in the background, with occasional poinking sounds throughout, achieved by smacking my palm against the end of the largest cardboard mailing tube I could find and occasionally crinkling tin foil.

The results weren't calculated to be listened to over and over.  It was a bit about combining the absurd, and mostly about imagining surprised, confused annoyance or delight in the listener, and messing with them a bit.  The fact that there were only four tracks, and no computers were available for editing or mixing the sounds, that there was only one microphone, that normally I was by myself making this alchemy of the adolescently absurd, all this meant that it was more time-consuming, harder to achieve, and more rewarding than the paint-by-number, drag and drop computer approach that I was able to do once home computers reached that point.

Frank Zappa did music that was often unsettling, sometimes funny, frequently tediously self-indulgent, but reliably free and delighting in the unexpected.  When Zappa died in 1993, I watched the A&E Biography episode about him.  I hadn't watched it since.  I just downloaded and watched a version someone obviously captured and uploaded to the Internet from a scummy videotape.  It really did something good for me. It reconnected me to the joy of doing the unexpected.

I am a classroom teacher.  Not only am I supposed to meticulously plan my lessons out, I am to plan them out in service of the curriculum the provincial government's Ministry of Education has decreed be taught to teens of the age and ability level I have been sent.  And every day the kids ask to not do what we're supposed to, not do what we've planned.  And I try to find things that fulfil expectations as to what kind of thinking, what kind of discussion should be happening, but which look like something else, or which I can feel in a delighted, self-satisfied way, "I'll bet no one else in the province is doing THIS today!"

Mostly I find ways to share good things with teens, things that I love.  Things that hadn't been made yet when I was their age, or things that I wish someone had exposed me to.  Things that surprise and delight, annoy and perturb, challenge and confuse the kids, but which things won't have parents or kids approaching the principal to complain that I'm "not doing what he's supposed to."  Right now I feel like sharing Frank Zappa.  Because that guy said "Look at me!  I'm doing exactly what I want, and no one's done it before. Whether you've come to be delighted or outraged, you are equally welcome."