My initial exposure to Frank Zappa didn’t come in high school, or even college, but on my first “real” job, as a copy boy at a now-defunct Bibleburg newspaper back in 1973.
I had dropped out of college (a miserable little four-year robot factory in Assahola, Colorado) and taken up a series of fascinating jobs: day laborer; janitor; installer of screens on various barracks at Fort Cartoon and patio covers and/or storm windows on civilian dwellings; that sort of thing. No advanced degree required.
After a falling out with my boss and co-worker, I found my applying for and getting the copy-boy gig. It was something of a change of pace, to be sure. Smoking dope on the job was frowned upon, for example, as were ragged jeans and T-shirts. But the money was phenomenal — $64.94 each and every week, after taxes. The big time.
The Bibleburg of the mid-Seventies was not unlike the Bibleburg of today, a place of both uniforms and uniformity (white and elderly, with a veneer of John Birch Society). Its leading newspaper was the Gazette-Telegraph, a drab bumwad owned by the starkly libertarian Freedom Newspapers, which promoted an editorial philosophy just to the right of Gens. Curtis LeMay, Augusto Pincochet and Francisco Franco.
Happily, I was working at the Sun, a decidedly smaller, less doctrinaire outfit owned by Hank Greenspun out of Las Vegas, and it had a very good, semi-hip staff, many of whom went on to bigger and better things (Bill Busenberg to National Public Radio; Neil Westergaard to The Denver Post; George Gladney to the University of Wyoming’s Department of Communication and Journalism). I quickly learned that I was not the only stoner in the newsroom, or even the lone weirdo, and before long I was burning fatties and drinking beer with a small clot of like-minded oddballs.
One of them was a Mothers fan, and turned me on to FZ with “The Mothers: Fillmore East, June 1971.” What an album that was and is, a mighty departure from what I’d been listening to (a diverse mix of blend of Beatles, Stones, Elton John, Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and whatnot). Insanely complex and fascinating music mated to genially perverse lyrics (“All groupies must bow down/In the sacred presence of the Latex Solar Beef”); Flo and Eddie rippin’ it on “Happy Together”; and a killer version of the Zappa classic “Peaches en Regalia.” I mean, what’s not to like?
It was my first real inkling that a guy could drop back in, earn a living and still have a good time. So I went back to college (this time up north at the ConAgra School of Journalism in Greality, Colorado), graduated, and set off on a 15-year, circular tear through a series of mostly undistinguished Western newspapers that dropped me off right back here, where I started — in scenic metropolitan Bibleburg, Colorado, listening to the Mothers.
Do the Mud Shark, baby.
This just in: The Rocky Mountain News is for sale, but the wiseguys think it will follow the Sun into the hellbox of newspaper history. It’s not my fault; I never worked there, though I applied several times.
Mad Blog Media 