While in the band, Collins often complained about Zappa’s experimentalism and embrace of uncommercial music. Zappa plainly desired commercial success, but his increasingly eccentric musical direction seemed to ensure the band's remaining at pop music's margins. Recall that Collins was the one who brought Zappa into the Soul Giants—which then became the Mothers.
Ray Collins’ niece/protege Shay Collins has been leading her own mission to preserve the memory of Ray Collins (she is in a rock duo called Mother Legacy).
Roy Estrada
(1943 - )
Bassist; singer; pedophile
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Oo-ee-oo!
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Orange Countian truck driver Roy Estrada was a founding member of the Soul Giants, the band from which the Mothers of Invention were formed. Prior to Soul Giants, he briefly fronted his own band.
For the Mothers, Estrada played bass guitar, but he also sang vocals—often in a falsetto for the doo-wop numbers that Zappa, and some of the others band members, loved so much.
Estrada formed the band Little Feat with Lowell George, Richie Hayward and Bill Payne in 1969, playing bass and singing backing vocals on their first two albums. In 1972, he quit to join Captain Beefheart's Magic Band where he supplemented Rockette Morton’s bass playing, thus allowing the latter to play guitar for live shows. “Roy toured the US and Europe with the Magic Band in 1972 and 1973.
Estrada has also done session work as a bassist.
In the 90s, Estrada, then back in Orange County, was convicted of "lewd acts with a child." He returned to prison a decade later where he’ll remain until he dies.
Good grief.
Jim Fielder
(1947 - )
Bassist
Fielder attended high school in Anaheim, there befriending future Zappa associate (Bizarre Productions) Tim Buckley.
Felder was hired to play rhythm guitar for the Mothers during the recording of Absolutely Free (November, 1966) and right after the hiring of Don Preston. Fielder quit the group before the album was released, and his name was removed from the album’s credits.
He also played briefly with the Buffalo Springfield (replacing Bruce Palmer who had been deported for smoking pot).
Fielder was a founding member of Blood Sweat & Tears and played on their early and successful albums.
Fielder has worked extensively as a session musician. He is currently in Neil Sedaka's band. (Suicide imminent.)
Bunk Gardner
(1933 - )
Woodwinds/tenor sax
By late 1966, long-time professional musician Gardner had joined the Mothers of Invention—right after his pal Don Preston joined. He remained with the band until the breakup in late ’69. (In recent years, he’s worked many odd jobs, including as a chef in Laguna Beach.)
Zappa had become acquainted with both Preston and Gardner several years before the founding of the Mothers. The three had gotten together to play “experimental” music.
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Late 60s: Marshall Brevitz’s Thee Experience on Sunset in Hollywood.
Frank was friends with Brevitz. At Thee Experience, bands in town would often "jam" with Zappa and the Mothers: Jimi Experience, Jefferson Experience, et al. |
Jim Guercio
(1945 - )
Guitarist; producer; manager
Guercio moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s and began working as a session musician and songwriter. He wrote Chad & Jeremy's 1966 hit "Distant Shores."
He is listed as a "contributor" to the Mothers’ 1966 debut album Freak Out!
He later managed and produced the successful band Chicago. He split with that band in 1978 when the band discovered that Guercio was taking 51% of the their profits.
He later went into cattle ranching and oil and gas exploration. Natch. (Wikipedia)
Elliot Ingber
(1941 - )
Guitarist; chemical adventurer
Ingber was hired to replace Steve Mann. He was one of the five Mothers featured on Freak Out (1966) but was later fired for using LSD during a performance. A big no-no.
He played with Zappa-associate Captain Beefheart off and on from ’71 to ’76.
No doubt the Captain was relatively chemically open-minded.
Gary Kellgren
(1939 – 1977)
Audio engineer
Kellgren was an American audio engineer. He co-founded The Record Plant recording studios.
He engineered the Mothers’ third album, We’re Only In It For The Money (recorded March–October 1967; released early ‘68). He did the memorably creepy whispering on that album.
In 1977, Kellgren and his girlfriend/secretary were found dead in the swimming pool at his home. Evidently, Kellgren died from electric shock while trying to fix underwater speakers. His girlfriend drowned trying to save him.
—A very "Muthas" ending.
Steve Mann
(1943 – 2009)
Guitarist; schizophrenic
Mann was a songwriter and a highly-respected acoustic guitarist. In 1962, he was introduced to Janis Joplin and he began accompanying her on guitar at open mics around the Los Angeles area. Eventually, Mann left LA for San Francisco and Joplin returned to Texas.
By 1965, he was a studio musician playing for the likes of Sonny and Cher (he played 12-string on “I Got You Babe”).
Mann joined the Mothers before the recording of Freak Out! (1966) but was uncomfortable with the band’s change in direction and so he left (or, more likely, he was asked to leave). Mann is name-checked on the cover of "Freak Out!": "These People Have Contributed Materially In Many Ways To Make Our Music What It Is. Please Do Not Hold It Against Them."
Around 1967, Mann suffered a mental breakdown and went into retirement. He kinda disappeared. His few recordings became collector's items and his work became legendary in musicians’ circles. After the breakdown, he spent the next decades medicated at a series of halfway houses and psychiatric rehab facilities.
By 2003, with the help of friends, Mann briefly returned to performing.
He died in a nursing home in 2009.
Billy Mundi
(1942 – 2014)
Drummer
Mundi joined the Mothers during the recording of Freak Out! bringing the band briefly to a six-piece (although Elliot Ingber was soon fired, bringing the number back down to five).
In 1968, he was enticed to join the new band Rhinoceros and thus to leave the Mothers.
Drummer Jimmy Carl Black disliked Mundi’s drumming, since, according to Black, Mundi tended to speed up songs.
Don Preston
(1932 - )
Keyboards; lunacy
Preston met Bunk Gardner in the Army in 1950.
He backed Nat King Cole in the late 50s.
He joined the Mothers in 1966, playing on Freak Out! He was hired when the band consisted of Zappa, Black, Estrada, Mundi, and Collins (Guitarist Ingber had been fired by then).
Later in his career, Preston scored more than 20 feature films. He’s a widely respected musician.
He has remained a close friend and associate of Bunk Gardner’s. The two often performed together (however, considering their age, that likely ceased).
Preston and Gardner, despite their Muthahood, are the Muthas who refuse to die!
Motherly love
Motherly love
Forget about
The brotherly and other-ly love
Motherly love
Is just the thing for you
You know your Mothers gonna love ya
Till ya don't know what to do
Calvin "Cal" Schenkel
(1947 - )
Graphic artist
Schenkel is an “American illustrator, graphic designer, animator and comics artist, specializing in album cover design” (Wikipedia).
Starting in 1967, he was the main graphic arts collaborator for Frank Zappa (and the Mothers). He designed many Zappa/Mothers album covers.
The first large Zappa project he worked on was the cover for We're Only in It for the Money (the notorious Sgt. Pepper parody). (Zappa asked McCartney if the parody was OK, but Mac was kind of an asshole about it—he just kicked it to the lawyers—and so the parody was relegated to the inside of the gatefold, not on the outside, the cover.)
James “Motorhead” Sherwood
(1942 – 2011)
Soprano, tenor and baritone saxophone; lunatic
Sherwood came to know Zappa in high school in 1956, owing to their shared interest in old blues records. Sherwood, a saxophonist, sat in with Zappa's first band, The Black-Outs, an R&B group.
Sherwood graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston but he returned to California. So, there's that.
After Zappa's first marriage began to fail in 1964, Zappa bought Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga, California, renaming it "Studio Z." The two were in the habit of living in the studio.
Sherwood first joined The Mothers of Invention as a roadie and equipment manager. Sherwood seemed to do lots of clowning around with the early Mothers, contributing sound effects to their first album, 1966's Freak Out! He became a full member of the band around the time of their experimental residence at the Garrick Theater in late 1967.
Sherwood appeared (not always as a musician) on all the albums of the original Mothers line-up.
Sherwood later joined Los Angeles doo-wop group Ruben and the Jets (named after a fictional band associated with the Mothers), which toured in support of Zappa in 1972.
Between 1975 and 1979, Sherwood seemed to drop off the map. Zappa said he'd “got into scientology for a while, but then he recovered." He returned to music in 1980, reuniting with former members of the Mothers of Invention to form the Grandmothers.
He also worked as a plumber.
At the end of his life, he is reported to have been suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. He died in his sleep in 2011.
Alice Stewart
(1942 - )
Guitarist, singer
In 1964, folksinger Stewart met with Zappa at a coffeehouse in Santa Monica. A year later, Alice became a member of The Mothers, which at the time was mostly a blues band. Zappa wanted to incorporate Stuart's acoustic delta blues style with his electric leads. However, she left before they made their debut album.
Zappa later said, jokingly, that he fired Alice from the band because she could not play "Louie Louie.”
Art Tripp
(1944 - )
Percussionist
In 1962, Tripp enrolled at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music to study percussion.
Tripp played as timpanist with the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra and with both the Cincinnati Summer Opera and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.
In 1967, Tripp auditioned for Zappa in New York. He joined the band in time for Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (1968) and Uncle Meat (1969), etc.
After the Mothers folded, Tripp decided to move to northern California with Beefheart & the Magic Band in 1970, commencing a five-year period of recording and touring.
Tripp retired from music in the 1980s and now works as a chiropractor in Mississippi. In the early 90s, he practiced chiropractic in a small town just north of Eureka (McKinleyville). It turned out Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) was living less than a mile down the road; the two reconnected and Beefheart became one of Tripp's patients.
Ian Underwood
(1939 - )
Woodwinds and keyboards
In 1961, Underwood earned a BA in composition at Yale; in 1966, he earned a master's in composition at UC Berkeley.
He joined the Mothers in 1967 in time for their third studio album, We're Only in It for the Money. The Mothers disbanded in late ’69, but Zappa included Underwood in his new Mothers lineup emerging in 1970.
Underwood played with Beefheart on the landmark Trout Mask Replica in 1969.
Underwood left the revamped Mothers in September of 1973.
After Zappa, he became a session keyboardist, and has been busy making music for film and TV.
Henry Vestine
(1944 – 1997)
Guitarist
Vestine—a founder of Canned Heat (1965)—was hired by Zappa for the original Mothers of Invention in late October 1965. Vestine was in the Mothers for only a few months (he was fired for smoking pot) and left before they recorded their debut album, Freak Out!. Demo tapes from Mothers of Invention rehearsal sessions featuring Vestine appear on the Zappa album Joe's Corsage.
Vestine was a guitarist for the band when they were “discovered” by Tom Wilson in 1966, but he was not a member when they recorded their first album a few months later.
He died from heart and respiratory failure in a Paris hotel in 1997 while touring with Canned Heat. (Wikipedia)
Frank Zappa
(1940 – 1993)
Guitarist; composer; producer
1964: during his Studio Z days (Cucamonga, CA), Zappa played with a power trio called the “Muthers.” He was convicted of a phony pornography charge, leading to brief imprisonment and his loss of Studio Z. That incident likely embittered him to police and other authorities.
Influenced by his brief involvement in advertising in the early 60s, Zappa had a plan for filling a “gap” in the music market between classical (serious, advanced) music and pop (simple) music. According to the young Zappa (interview, 1966), those who control the music industry “love business” but “hate music.” He would need a band that could help him with this project to bring quality and complexity to the music-consuming masses. [Indented for emphasis.]
After his brief stint in jail, Zappa joined the Soul Giants in 1965 (replacing fired guitarist Hunt) and convinced the band to record his music. At the time, the band included Black, Collins, and Estrada, but also saxophonist Davy Coronado (leader), who soon quit. ("Davy, who was the wise one of the band, knew the actual truth of the matter, which was if you play original material you cannot work in a bar. He was afraid of being out of work so he quit the band. And he was right, we couldn't get a fucking job anyplace." —Zappa, 1970)
The band, now renamed the Mothers, moved to Los Angeles in early 1965 after Zappa got them a management contract with Herb Cohen. (Cohen remained a key player in the Zappa saga for several years—until litigation ended their partnership in 1976.) The band found steady work at clubs along the Sunset Strip.
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| Tom Wilson |
In early 1966, thanks to Cohen, the Mothers were briefly observed by record producer Tom Wilson when playing "Trouble Every Day", a song about the Watts riots. Wilson erroneously took them to be a white blues band, something his label was looking for. (Canned Heat’s Henry Vestine was in the band at the time.)
Wilson signed the Mothers to the Verve division of MGM—perhaps with the modest plan of putting out some singles. Just prior to recording, however, Wilson spoke with Zappa and realized that the band did much more than “white blues,” and soon a plan was hatched to record an entire album.
Freak Out! was recorded between March 9 and March 12, 1966; it was released 3 months later, on June 27, 1966. (The tracks "Motherly Love" and "I Ain't Got No Heart," however, were recorded earlier, in 1965.)
Among other things, the album captured the "freak" subculture of Los Angeles with which Zappa identified, at least to some extent (nevertheless, on the Mothers albums, he often mercilessly mocked the freaks along with the hippies and the straights).
During the recording of Freak Out!, Zappa moved into a house in Laurel Canyon with friend Pamela Zarubica, who was later hired to be the Suzy Creamcheese of the ’67 European tour. (She has emerged in recent years seeking attention for her trivial role in the sixties pop scene.)
After a short promotional tour following the release of Freak Out!, Zappa met Gail Sloatman (1945 – 2015), who soon moved to Laurel Canyon. The two married in September of 1967, a week before Moon Unit Zappa’s birth. (Upon learning of the pregnancy, 17-year-old girlfriend Sandy Hurvitz, who had signed to Zappa’s new production company, Bizarre, advised Zappa to marry Sloatman. Hurvitz was briefly a member of the Mothers, likely after the recording of Freak Out! According to Hurvits (who later took the professional name Essra Mohawk), Zappa lost all professional interest in her after that.)
Absolutely Free was recorded in November 1966, and released in 1967. At the time, the band comprised eight members: Zappa, Black, Estrada, Collins, Preston, Gardner, Mundi, and Fielder. During this time (late ‘66, early ‘67?), Zappa recorded much of his solo album Lumpy Gravy, a collection of orchestral works ultimately released in early 1968 (after an 8-month legal dispute between record companies).
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Zappa briefly attended Chaffey College in 1959.
It is said that he learned to despise formal education there.
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The band had a successful New York show in late ’66. That led to the experimental Garrick Theater shows that started in March of 1967. That residence was so successful that it was extended to six months.
We’re Only In It For The Money was recorded, in New York, March–October 1967 (essentially, during the Garrick stay); the album was released in 1968.
Soon thereafter: December 1967 - February 1968; recording of Ruben and the Jets (at Apostolic Studios in New York).
The first albums associated with Zappa’s Bizarre production co./record label–We’re Only In It For The Money & Lumpy Gravy—were released in early 1968.
In early 1968, after an 18-month stay, the band left New York, relocating to Hollywood.
March 1969: Zappa produces Trout Mask Replica for Beefheart.
Mothers album Uncle Meat is recorded September 1967 – September 1968. Released, April 21, 1969. It features a large number of overdubs and experimental elements.
Mothers' second European tour in September/October 1968.
Zappa solo album Hot Rats was recorded July – August, 1969.
In late 1969, Zappa broke up the band, citing finances. It seems clear that Zappa was unhappy, too, with the band’s inability to handle the increasingly complex music that he was writing. (Subsequent iterations of the Mothers typically comprised more highly-trained musicians, though he frequently asked original Mothers to join in.)
Hot Rats is released (October 1969), featuring extended guitar solos.
OTHERS:
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Herbert Cohen (1932 – 2010)
Business manager/partner (of Zappa)
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Sandy Hurvitz/Essra Mohawk (1948 - )
Singer signed to Zappa's Bizarre Records.
Briefly, a member of the Mothers.
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Pamela Zarubica (1948? - )
Played “Suzy Creamcheese” (on tour) after the fictional character was
devised for the artwork of Freak Out! Did recorded telephone
conversations on Mothers albums.
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Gail Zappa (1945 – 2015)
Married to Frank: 1967 - 1993 (i.e., until his death)
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Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) (1941 – 2010)
Even more eccentric than Zappa.
Led the legendary "Magic Band"
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…Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on locally. Our own County Supervisor and former Irvine Mayor, Don Wagner, has shown himself to be a menace to public health by first urging in May that the County be “opened up” without meeting State public health metrics. Soon after that, Wagner began questioning the usefulness of masks, bullying the County’s chief Public Health Officer Nichole Quick, MD over the masking matter. What was Dr. Quick’s transgression? Quite simply, she was doing her job. To protect workers and customers alike, Dr. Quick issued an order that required the use of facemasks in public as our small businesses reopened. Wagner challenged the science behind masking, forced the rescission of Dr. Quick’s order and, ultimately, he forced her resignation. Fortunately, Governor Gavin Newsom ended this dangerous nonsense in Orange County by imposing a State mandate of facemask use in public, effective June 18, 2020….
