Mark, Are You Kidding?

A remembrance of Mark Volman and the Vaudeville Era of The Mothers

Last Friday I, like many of you, woke up to the incredibly sad news that Mark Volman had passed away after battling Lewy Body Dementia and other illnesses for the last couple of years.

My initial thoughts focused on what a loss this was for music, and particularly for the people who worked with Mark over the years. Obviously, most notable among these many people would be Howard Kaylan, Mark’s musical partner going back to the mid-1960s when they were the voices of The Turtles, and through all the years since then when they were better known to the world as Flo & Eddie, the moniker that they initially had to use for contractual reasons when they were a key part of the Vaudeville Era of Frank Zappa’s Mothers.

People who are loyal listeners of the ZappaCast will know that my Zappa mentor was Walter “Waldo” Quadrato, who introduced me to Frank’s music in the mid-1980s (I was aware of Frank, but hadn’t really heard much or any of his music apart from one or two songs that were played on the radio). Walter was what I would call an “upside down“ Frank Zappa fan, he collected everything obsessively, and passed away with his massive Zappa collection still intact. But the one era of Frank’s that he didn’t particularly like was the 1970/1971 Vaudeville Era. I don’t know whether or not he simply didn’t like it musically, or if he liked the humor in the lyrics at one time and did not like it later in life. But he was not a huge fan of that era.

For me, Frank’s music is one compositional whole, and it’s really hard for me to pick any sort of favorite era or favorite album. The Vaudeville band is, for me, a major step forward in the evolution of Frank’s work, particularly lyrically and vocally. It was during this era that Frank laid the groundwork for the sort of lyrics that he would write for the next 10 years or so. Although there had always been sexual undertones in Frank’s lyrics, it was during this era that they became more pronounced, and this gained Frank and the Mothers a whole new audience.

Obviously, this is not for everyone, and one has to consider the context and the time that these lyrics were written in order to understand them. Obviously, the attitudes of adults toward sex have evolved over time, and as a society, I tend to believe that we are now less sensitive to having some outré sexual concepts shoved in our face, so to speak. In 1970 and 1971, this was still rather novel, particularly in popular music. In writing these lyrics, Frank was challenging societal norms, just as he would always do.

But it takes a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, and what better spoonful of sugar could there possibly be then the unique twin talents of Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman? Even if the singers themselves were not necessarily household names at that time, the band they came from, The Turtles, certainly were. They had had a string of hits in the 1960s, and to this day, their classic “Happy Together” remains an evergreen staple, beloved by each successive generation of music lovers.

What Frank lacked in the original1960s Mothers of Invention was vocal harmony. Which is not to say that the music was necessarily geared toward that – it may not have been, even if great singers had been available to him. While they had a great lead vocalist in the form of Ray Collins, it was often Frank that took up the job of singing backing vocal (apart from when George was briefly in the band). This limited the scope of what the band could do at the time, and limited Frank’s musical pallette, at least in the vocal department.

Being from Los Angeles themselves, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan had of course crossed paths with Frank before. But it was on May 15, 1970, when they approached him backstage at the Morhers/Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at UCLA that Frank popped the question to them, asking if they would be willing to join a new Mothers lineup. As the often told story goes, Mark and Howard were both at loose ends, The Turtles having come to an acrimonious end, leaving the two of them, not only without a band, but without the ability to work under their own names due to contractual issues.

It’s pretty amazing to think that in a matter of weeks, a new lineup of the Mothers was not only conceived, but on the road, initially to play a job for the infamous VPRO Piknik, to be broadcast live on Dutch television. Given the amazing vocal blend and general next-level capabilities of Mark and Howard, Frank was able to rearrange a number of older Mothers tunes, as well as composing new material for the band to perform that took advantage of Mark and Howard’s talents. With that, they were on their way. The next year and a half would be filled with adventure, the like of which nobody that wasn’t Frank Zappa could have seen coming at the beginning of their work together. Soon after joining the band, Mark and Howard semi-officially renamed themselves The Phloresecent Leech (Mark) and Eddie (Howard), after two roadies that they had worked with. The reason for the name change was so that Frank could release material featuring them on their first record together, Chunga’s Revenge, without fear of legal reprisal.

Following Mark’s death last week, I was chatting to Joe Travers and Bill Camarata about the whirlwind of activity that the Vaudeville era Mothers got into over the course of that year and a half that they worked together. Consider that from June 1970 through December 1971, Mark, Howard, Frank and The Mothers:

— Toured seemingly incessantly, with relatively short breaks, and much of the time off was spent either recording or learning new material for the road.

— Created enough recorded material for no less than four complete albums, two studio efforts and two live projects. This is, of course, not counting the massive amount of recorded material that was not released contemporaneously.

— Shot a motion picture, and recorded the soundtrack for same.

— Survived several notable disasters, including band lineup upheavals, a fire that destroyed nearly all of their equipment in Montreux and Frank almost being killed on stage in London by a lunatic.

— Learned and performed enough material for several different lineups. I could make the argument here that, in the course of 18 months, no other Zappa band played as large and diverse a collection of new songs as this era of the Mothers.

It was truly a whirlwind of activity. When Frank was pushed from the stage in London on December 10, 1971, it would appear that Frank did not consider that era of the band to be finished just yet, meaning that if the accident had not happened, that band would have continued to perform. But that was not the way things went down in the end, and Mark and Howard and most of the rest of the Mothers were forced to continue on while Frank was forced into a long period of recuperation, picking up jobs where they could as the first lineup of the Flo & Eddie band.

As I noted before, the vocal blend of Mark and Howard was extremely powerful. Often soaring and quite moving, they brought even the older Mothers songs new life while contributing their own unique brand of humor to Frank’s work. One need only listen to their memorized delivery of the classic media “announcer’s test”( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Announcer%27s_test ) every night during “Billy The Mountain” to appreciate what they brought to the table (forward to 17:00 to hear it):

It is my considered opinion that Frank may not ever have been happier with a band than he was in the band with Mark and Howard. While Frank obviously appreciated great technical ability, and probably prized that above any other talent a musician might have, if a musician could make him laugh, that was an asset in and of itself. Mark and Howard (and bassist Jeff Simmons who left the group after six months) made Frank laugh. A lot. In his later years, Frank would fondly remember this era of the band, and pay tribute to it with one of the final albums he would produce in his lifetime, the 1970/1971 retrospective Playground Psychotics, released in 1992. In 1989, Frank called into the radio show that Mark and Howard hosted in New York, and the warmth between them is very evident:

Mark and Howard would reunite with Frank on a few occasions, notably in Detroit in 1976 when they came on to perform some songs with the latest incarnation of the Zappa band:

In 1987, Mark and Howard briefly rehearsed with the band that Frank was putting together at the time, with an eye toward possibly going back out on the road together, only to back out when they realized that singing certain songs, like “Magdalena,” would not be good for the career that they had forged in the years since leaving the Mothers (they eventually reformed the Turtles, and both Mark and Howard continued to perform under that name until illness forced both of them off the road in the early 2020s):

To get back to the point that I was making about my mentor Walter, there are still a fair amount of Zappa fans out there who do not like the music from the period with Mark and Howard in the band, the general feeling being that the lyrics are too crass or haven’t held up well. And no, they are generally not politically correct, but rather they are a product of their age. They are the very embodiment of Frank’s concept of folklore, documenting what was happening at a particular point to a particular group of people. It’s a take it or leave it sort of thing, but I choose to take it. Loosen up, folks, it’s funny and fun.

All this is without acknowledging the amazing instrumental talents of the members of the band during this era, which is a subject for another time.

Mark Volman surely enriched to the music of Frank Zappa. We are all the better for the contributions that he and Howard made to the Mothers. And by all accounts, he was just a nice guy. And very, very approachable. His loss is devastating, but his music lives on.

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