Dreaming of the Masters

It was 1973 and we were lost.  Literally and figuratively.

We didn't know what to do with our life - hey, we were 19 and who does then? But we were particularly, almost existentially, lost.  We had graduated high school but just barely, and we knew we weren't ready yet for college.  We found it difficult to find a job and when we did, it would only pay minimum wage, not enough to buy us a car, and then we had a hard time holding that job down, much less getting there without a car.  

Our parents had moved since our graduation, but we were forced by various circumstances to take a room in their new house, a small office room with a roll-out bed next to the laundry machine.  We were miserable and had no plan on how to improve things. Our prospects looked like things were just going to get worse and worse.

One Saturday, out of sheer boredom and with nothing else to do, we borrowed the Mom's car and drove as far east as the roads would take us before they ended at the sea (we lived on Long Island). And somehow we managed to screw even that up.  We got lost.  Not that we had anyplace particular to be, so "lost" is a relative term - you can only be "lost" when you have someplace else you want to be.    

Anyway, we randomly pulled into a railroad salvage store that we came across, a used junk shop that sold things that apparently fell out of freight cars or something.  No particular reason, we weren't in the market for railroad salvage, but we had no place else to be that day and don't know what else to do with ourselves, so we start randomly rummaging through railroad salvage.

Along with various appliance parts, storm-door fittings, and broken lamps, we saw a box of records labeled "Used Jazz."  We aren't into jazz - it was 1973 and like everyone else that we knew at the time, we were listening to David Bowie and Alice Cooper.   But we start looking through the box anyway because why not?  

We recognized some of the names on the albums but were totally unfamiliar with the music.  But, oh look, there's Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass (pass).  And there's something by somebody named "Boots" something (ditto). Nothing in the box intrigued or interested us.

But then we came across a record called King Kong: Jean Luc Ponty Plays the Music of Frank Zappa.  We had no idea who this Jean Luc Ponty guy was (nobody did at the time, he was French and hadn't started recording in the States yet except for this one obscure album) but we were fans of Frank Zappa, and we knew that Zappa was into jazz (he talked about it all the time on his record liner notes), so it made sense to us that a record like this might exist.  It was only $1.00 and didn't seem to be too badly scratched, so we splurged and bought it and took it back home to hear what it was like.

Now, we'd like to tell you that we had some kind of profound revelation - that our first jazz album changed our life or how we heard music.  But that's not the case.  We liked the album, but not because it was jazz or sounded different from what we had heard before, but because it sounded like Frank Zappa. It was even produced by Zappa and the cut Music for Electric Violin and Low Budget Orchestra is virtually a medley of songs from Uncle Meat and Absolutely Free. But other than finding ourselves an apparent "undiscoverd" Zappa album, it was no great revelation.

We'd love to say the record somehow turned our life around, gave us new meaning, or pointed out the way for us, but it didn't.  We remained lost for several more years before we finally sorted ourselves out.

But somewhere deep in our slow-witted late-adolescent brain, a dim light bulb briefly flickered, telling us not to be afraid of the label "jazz," that this music might be okay, at least as long as Frank Zappa was involved in it. And maybe this Jean Luc guy.  Maybe some others, too.  We still weren't gonna listen to no Herb Albert shit, though.

We eventually found our way back home (Long Island, if nothing else, is highly linear and if you drive in any one direction long enough, you'll eventually either come across salt water, Montauk Point, New York City, or home).  The Moms got her car back before it was too late.

After recording King Kong, Jean Luc became a member of Zappa's Mothers of Invention for a couple of years before starting off on his own long and terrible career, first as a generic jazz-fusion musician and then as a bland, middle-of-the-road, adult contemporary, "smooth jazz" hack.  We hate that kind of music and would prefer to rub sandpaper on our eyeballs than subject our eardrums to that kind of torture, but to each their own we guess.

We'll still always have King Kong and memories of Montauk railroad salvage stores.