Contempo '70
Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 12, 1970
LISTEN! SEE!! FEEL!!!
20TH CENTURY MUSIC.
HOW IT WAS, HOW IT IS.
CONTEMPO 70
PRESENTED BY:
THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC
In cooperation with the UCLA Committee on Fine Arts
ZUBIN MEHTA
MUSIC DIRECTOR
PIERRE BOULEZ
GUEST CONDUCTOR
Ahmanson Theatre · Sunday, May 3, 8:00 pm
ZUBIN MEHTA
THE SWINGLE SISTERS
MORTON SUBOTNICK
Webern: 5 Pieces for Orchestra, op. posth.*
Subotnick: Play! 4**/Berio: Sinfonia**
Ahmanson Theatre · Sunday, May 10, 8:00 pm
ZUBIN MEHTA
Stravinsky: Octet/Symphony in 3 Movements
Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra
Pauley Pavilion, UCLA · Friday, May 15, 8:30 pm
ZUBIN MEHTA · FRANK ZAPPA
AND THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION
Powell: Immobiles 1-4**/Varèse: Intégrales
Zappa: Set by The Mothers
"Excerpts from 200 Motels" for
Mothers & Orchestra***
Royce Hall, UCLA · Sunday, May 31, 3:00 pm
PIERRE BOULEZ
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony #1
Webern: 5 Pieces for Strings, Op. 5/Variations, Op. 30
Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments/Suite, The Firebird
*first U.S. performances of all 5 pieces
**first performance in L.A.
***first performance anywhere
The Project & The Rehearsals
That was brought about by a chance meeting at KPFK. I was with David Raksin. [...] He was going to introduce me to Mehta because I'd been pissing and moaning about how hard it was to get a piece of music played by air orchestra. So he just sort of undertook to help me get that to happen. I met Mehta and [Fleischmann] during this radio interview that was in progress at KPFK and we went in there and joined them and started yakking it up on the air. After it was over, I talked to Mehta for about ten minutes, during which -- he probably won't remember -- he commissioned me to write a piece of music for the 1971 season -- just sort of offhand. I said, "Well. I got this other thing that's been sitting around for awhile. Do you want to take a look at it?" He was too busy to look at it, but [Fleischmann] looked at it, and [...] he liked the score very much and he sort of got Zubin to check it out. We had another meeting, and we've been meeting for about three months trying to figure out whether it is financially feasible to actually go ahead and do it, because the cost is way up there. I'm getting more rehearsal time for this piece than I expected. It still isn't enough, I don't think, but they've got six rehearsals laid out, which is heavy business.
The only problem is that they're still rioting at UCLA. That may cancel it. We're playing -- it's supposedly being held at UCLA in the Pauley Pavilion, which is an 11,000-capacity basketball dome. [...] I wouldn't say [Mehta is] obviously excited. He's going along with the gag.
I met Bill Kraft of the percussion section. They have a very difficult job to do. I also know -- what's his name? -- Kurt [Reher], who is -- I don't know whether he's first cellist or what. He was on the Freak-Out! album -- one of the cello players on there. I bumped into him. I haven't talked to any of the other orchestra members. They have to bring in some people from the outside, though, to augment the orchestra in order to do it. Emil Richards is joining the percussion section. I've got to go over to his house because he's got that exotic collection of gongs and weirdness, and he said he'd supply any of whatever -- to bring down. This other guy that I worked with, and who I like very much is John Rotella. He's going to be playing the baritone and bass sax parts, and Ernie Watts is playing the alto and tenor part of the orchestra. [...] I've got one more extra added attraction -- do you know George Duke? He's going to be playing the celeste and electric piano part with the orchestra. I like his playing very much.
[The entire piece runs] two and a half hours. [...] We're doing movements one, three and four. Movement three is only one page long, but it's a special system that's got a lot of choreography in it -- a special deal. The second movement is this big dramatic movement with a chorus and the dancers and vacuum cleaner and all that stuff. That was too expensive to do, so they couldn't put that in. [...] I've been writing this for three years. It's based on sketches and material that were actually completed on the road or in motels, for one reason or another, and then the final orchestration was done in my house over about three months, just prior to Christmas last year.
All I'm interested in doing is hearing what the music sounds like that I wrote in those motels. If I can hear it, then I can write some more. [...] The way I
see it is that finally after all the years that it took me to write this thing,
I'm going to get a performance of this piece of music. It's not what I'm doing
now, you see. That's what I did then. I just want to hear what I did then.
There's no way to tell who is going to show up or if anybody is going to show up for that thing. There are so many other problems involved in it, like for instance acoustic problems. That place is very dead acoustically. You have a 96-piece orchestra and you have a 9-piece electric band. We're louder than they are when we're soft. I mean, just any electric group -- an orchestra just ain't loud. That's the worst thing about an orchestra. And so they're miking the orchestra. That means there's going to be about maybe twenty mikes on the orchestra and those microphones are also going to pick up our amplifiers, because we're set behind the orchestra. Two of the six rehearsals that we have are just to balance the sound. Now if that works out and you can actually hear what's supposed to come out, then we'll be lucky.
I wanted to record it, but it would cost a lot to do that. The only way that it will get recorded is if somebody wants to do a TV special on it. They're trying to sell it to the networks. If they can get somebody on a network to say "Yes, we want this," then they'll record it. That will be their big reason for spending the money. But otherwise, the union scale to do that is just horrible.
The Concert
In May 1970, then-music director Zubin Mehta combined forces with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention for the premiere of Zappa's "Concerto for Mothers and Orchestra" at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion. Zappa infamously kicked things off by yelling, "All right, Zubin, hit it!," sending his band -- well, a version of it put together for this concert -- and the Philharmonic into a frenzied performance that included bodily noises, confetti and a romp into the audience as well as more serious orchestral themes and a lot of Zappa/Mothers' riffs. (Some of this music ended up in Zappa's crazy life-on-the-road movie "200 Motels.")
Frank Zappa & Peter Occhiogrosso, The
Real Frank Zappa Book, 1989, p. 109-111
Sometime in 1970, I had an offer for a major concert performance of the
orchestral music accumulating in my closet. During the M.O.I.'s first five
years, I had carried with me, on the road, masses of manuscript paper, and,
whenever there was an opportunity, scribbled stuff on it. This material eventually
became the score for 200 Motels (based on an estimate of the number of
gigs we played in the first five years--forty jobs per year?).
The performance was to be held at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion (a basketball arena
seating about fourteen thousand people), with Zubin Mehta conducting the Los
Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. A pretty big deal.
There was a 'catch,' though--the orchestra didn't really want to play the stuff--they wanted AN EVENT; something 'unique'--like--uhh, maybe a ROCK GROUP and--uhhhhh--a REAL ORCHESTRA sort of--uhhh--well you know--'rocking out together.' It didn't matter what the music was.
This eventually led to a few problems. First of all, I didn't have a 'ROCK GROUP'--the M.O.I had been disbanded for about a year. Second, there were no parts copied for the scores, and I was being asked to pay for this enormous job (seven thousand 1970 dollars). The third problem
was that I wanted some kind of tape of the show, and the Musicians' Union wouldn't allow it. (They didn't do anything when some asshole in the audience ran a cassette and made a bootleg album out of it, but they were promising stern action if I made one for my own use--just to find out what my pieces sounded like . . . but let me slow down here.)
We solved problem number one by putting together an interim one-shot 'Mothers-Of-Invention-Sort-Of-Group.' It did a short tour to warm up, maybe half a dozen dates, and returned to L.A. for the show.
The second problem was solved by me spending the seven thousand bucks on a team of copyists.
The third problem never got solved, and I never got a tape of the show.
It was the most successful indoor concert of the L.A. Phil's season that year--sold out. Somewhere in the mass of spectators were Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, a.k.a. Flo & Eddie.
They came backstage after the show, said they liked it, and told me that the Turtles had split up and they were looking for something to do. The rest is history.
"Most rock groups could not do this sort of thing because they cannot
read music," said Zubin Mehta confidently. "Frank Zappa, on the
other hand, is one of the few rock musicians who knows my language."
As conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mehta is known not only for
his willingness to step in where many Angelenos fear to tread, but for his
ability to get away with it musically. In the peerless leader of the Mothers
of Invention (Time, Oct. 31), however, Mehta was taking on a man whose main
goal in life seems to zap the musical establishment.
The odd musical conjunction of the two men also involved 104 stunned members
of the Los Angeles Philharmonic gathered for the world premier of Zappa's 200 Motels, written for the Mothers and orchestra. What the concert,
held before 11,000 rock fans at the U.C.L.A. basketball arena, mainly proved
is that any marriage between rock and the classics is likely to be stormy
indeed. As ther Mothers' bassist Jeff ("Swoovette") Simmons said
tolerantly of the orchestra: "Those dudes are really out of it, man.
It's like working with people from another planet."
There were times when the orchestra players felt the same way about Zappa
and his matriarchy. Attired in pony-tail and yellow-striped pants, Zappa started
things off himself: "All right, Zubin, hit it." That was a bit brazen
and did not go over too well the violins, who outnumber everybody else and
use their weight to preserve a little decorum now and then. Nonetheless, when
Zubin hit it, they hit it too. When the rest of the orchestra said "Bleep,"
the violins joined in. When they required to do fey finger snaps over their
heads, they complied. When asked to belch, literally, they drew the line and
said "Blurp." When percussionist William Kraft, dutifully following
the score, fired a popgun, they played on unblinking. Meanwhile, platformed
six feet above the orchestra, the Mothers were lullabying away at some of
their "greatest hits," like Lumpy Gravy, Duke of Prunes,
and Who Needs the Peace Corps. Then, everyone in the orchestra suddenly
screamed, one final frightening chord was heard, and with a giant blurp 200
Motels closed down for the night.
No complaints, however, were heard from the Philharmonic management, clearly
overjoyed to have got its players into the same hall with that many young
people and brought $33,000 into the box office. As for Mehta, if he did not
have the last laugh, he at least had the last lash: despite Zappa's protests,
he cut out the entire second part of 200 Motels. Just as well, Part
2 calls for a chorus to blow bubbles through straws and the soprano soloist
to sing "Munchkins get me hot."
David Felton, Rolling Stone, July 9, 1970
In three hours Zappa:
- Introduced the orchestra members to a spirit of freedom they will find hard
to forget, punctuating their scores with burps, grunts and adlib confetti
throwing. At one point the bass horn player stood up with his horn, twirled
around like a drunken elephant and sat down. At another, the entire orchestra
walked off stage and into the audience, each member apparently playing his
own composition.
- Relentlessly chided Mehta with remarks like, "All right, Zubin, hit
it!" and "Now you know the cue where to in, don't you, Zubin?"
(Mehta got in a few of his own licks, like warning the audience, "You
must no think that this is any way a rock concert . . . this is music like
any other music.")
- Subjected the orchestra and audience to a mild dissertation on teenage cum
stains that ended with a brutal parody of Jim Morrison's oedipal walk down
the "ancient hallway" in which the hero discovers his father "beating
his meat' to a Playboy magazine. "He's got the Playboy magazine rolled into a tube and has inserted his member right into a tube
and has inserted his member right into the tube . . . Father, I want to kill
you . . . Not now, son, not now!"
- Invited members of the Philharmonic to stay for an adlib encore of King
Kong, during which cellist Kurt Reher established himself as a master
freak and clarinetist Michele Zurkovski had a stuffed toy giraffe inserted
up her dress.
Musically, Zappa presented few surprises, since his material has always combined
rock and classic elements. His version of Edgar Varese's Intergrales and his own 200 Motels for Mothers and Orchestra included the usual Zappa
riffs from Varese, Stravinsky and Gustav Holst.
In general, the sound was terribly distorted, although it did indicate how
closely, on purely a sensual basis, an amplified rock band can resemble an acoustical
orchestra.
But as Zappa pointed out in his opening statement, "When you play music
in a hall designed for basketball, you take your chances."
FZ quoted in Zappa!, 1992
Well, the case of working with Zubin [Mehta] was all pretty cut and dried. The Los Angeles Philharmonic management thought that it would be a successful concert. They certainly didn't do it because of musical content. Basically, I had to buy the privilege of having my music performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In order to prepare the parts for the orchestra, I had to pay the copying rate, which in 1971 was somewhere between $7,000 and $10,000. I'll guarantee you I didn't make anything like that from the concert. Plus the fact that they wouldn't even let me make a cassette recording of the performance. They told me that if I turned the tape on, I would have to pay the whole orchestra Musicians' Union scale. So they had two rehearsals for all this music, and -- you know -- it was a festive occasion because there was a rock group onstage and an orchestra playing, and it was being done in a basketball stadium. So there we have it.
David Ocker, Mixed Meters, January 19, 2008
I've heard stories of that
night from many different people - including composer Mel Powell (who
stopped the performance of his piece half way through).
Marc Shulgold, Rocky Mountain News, January 29, 2003
Mel Powell [...] once angrily stomped out of a concert his music shared with Zappa and the Mothers.
The Night That Mel Powell Packed Up and Went Home
Mel Powell's "Immobiles 1-4" almost received its local premiere during
the Los Angeles Philharmonic's recent Contempo '70 series. The dean of the school
of music at California Institute of the Arts has accepted an invitation from
The Times to explain his hasty mid-concert withdrawal of the new composition,
and to comment on the popular local attempts to fuse symphonic music with rock
'n' roll.
"The very hypocrisy young people abhor is at work ensnaring them, seducing
them"
"Pop music . . . is manifestly in the wrong zone when set beside a symphony
orchestra"
FZ: When we do things...like the introduction to Call Any Vegetable is the opening part of Agon by Igor Stravinsky. Nobody recognizes that. We played it at that concert in Los Angeles with the Philharmonic -- Zubin Mehta didn't recognize it! And we're playing it exactly off the score; we voiced it out, the exact same things that are on the page, there's nothing left out, just that it's being played by electric instruments. The only person that knew that we played Agon in L.A. was Lalo Schifrin. Nobody in the orchestra even recognized it.
When you play music in a hall
designed for basketball, you take chances. We were positioned high above the
stage and the sound was so distorted we couldn't hear ourselves. When we did,
we'd play one note and drown out the whole orchestra. So, generally I wasn't too
pleased with it, but the audience spent the entire evening jumping up and down
and shouting so they obviously liked it, and maybe that made it worthwhile. What
really bothered me most was the attitude of the typical symphony musician. They
don't care, they sit back sneering at everything and play whatever's put in
front of their faces, without any spirit or drive.
George Duke
Maybe two months [after the King Kong sessions], I was at my mother's house in Marin City, and one Sunday afternoon I got a call from Frank. He asked me to come down and be a part of this show he was doing at UCLA with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta, and the Mothers Of Invention.
The Bootleg
Splat's Zappapage
The musicians union wanted royalties for recording rights, so Frank declined to record that show. But somebody in the crowd did have a tape recorder, and the resulting music has wound up on a variety of bootlegs.
Rock et Folk, June, 1980 (translation by A. Murkin)
RF: What do you think of the bootleg which was recorded at the 200 Motels concert with the L.A. Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta?
FZ: I've never heard it.
Additional informant: Charles Ulrich
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