Gary James' Interview With
Frank Zappa's girlfriend
Nigey Lennon



When she was just a teenager, Nigey Lennon sent Frank Zappa a tape of her songs. So taken by her talent, he invited her to tour with him. Eventually they became lovers. Nigey Lennon spent five years with Frank Zappa. She's chronicled her story in the book Being Frank, My Time with Frank Zappa (California Classics Books, P.O. Box 29756, LA CA., 90029).

Nigey Lennon talked to us about Frank Zappa and her book.

Q - Could you have written this book while Zappa was alive? What if anything would have happened to you?

A - When Frank died in 1993, I hadn't seen him or talked to him for 18 years. His death brought up all sorts of unresolved emotions and I was forced to confront every aspect of my relationship with him, and go back and re-examine his influence on me musically and otherwise. That process was what led me to begin working on Being Frank. If he hadn't died when he did, I'm sure I wouldn't have had those thoughts and reactions and I wouldn't have been driven to write about them. It's important to understand that Frank had created his own universe and the more time went by and the more successful he became, the more closed off and self-referential that universe was. As far as he was concerned his view of himself was the only correct one. There simply was no room in his universe for other interpretations. In 1971, when, David Walley wrote No Commercial Potential, the first Frank Zappa biography, Frank at first co-operated with Walley. Then, when it was published he bullied the publisher to try and get it off the market. Frank always claimed to be a champion of free speech, but he didn't seem to feel that that freedom extended to other people's views of him, no matter how benign those views might be. I'm sure that deep down Being Frank would have upset him, because factually it contradicts some key aspects of the image he worked hard to project. He wouldn't have expressed it that way of course. If somebody had asked him what he thought of it, he would have tossed off a snide, withering comment; something like, "the official view, boys and girls, is that this book is poot."

Q - Is your book, as Daniel Schorr says, "Exploitive of a personal relationship"? How much do you think the pubic really needs to know about anybody's personal and private life?

A - As a political reporter, Daniel Schorr has inevitably at one time or another had to have utilized his connections with public figures in order to get an interview. His comment was hypocritical to say the least. But, I don't think he knew Frank beyond a certain mutual Washington back-scratching level. Frank sought him out because he had influence in politics not because he was looking for a pal. He definitely didn't know Frank during the period I discuss in Being Frank. I hate to disappoint people, but Being Frank isn't a kiss and tell book. It's not like Pamela Des Barres' I'm With The Band. It's more like a factual Catcher In The Rye. A coming of age memoir. In a way it's more about me than it is about Frank. I'm the narrator and Frank is the main character. But he's presented through my eyes, as a force that profoundly affected my life. If l wanted to, I could have written a truly sleazy book and it might have been picked up as a mass market paperback, and I could've gone on Oprah Winfrey and Letterman. That however, simply wouldn't have been the appropriate way to describe the complexities of my relationship with Frank. My background as a writer is in Western history, literature and humor. I don't particularly listen to Rock 'n' Roll. I don't read show biz bios or tabloids, and I don't watch TV at all. So that whole world is foreign to me.

Q - In the writing of this book, did you at any time consider the feelings of Frank Zappa's children when the book was published?

A - During the writing of the book, I did my best to handle the material judiciously without consciously censoring myself. I tried to write it in such a way that any one·reading it could undedstand that this was my honest description of the events that transpired. I specifically didn't mention people who weren't directly involved in my day to day relationship with Frank. That included Frank's kids. I never knew any of them. They were either very young or not born yet during the period covered in the book. I can't imagine how they view their father. It's not my job to try. How many of us really understand our parents? Especially parents who write songs with titles like "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee"?

Q - Good or bad, is there anything at this point that can hurt or damage Zappa's image?

A - I don't think the book makes Frank out to be a bad person. Even if it did, or if somebody somehow got a bad impression of him from reading it, I doubt very much whether it would matter. Frank was seriously misunderstood by a lot of people and that was at least partially his own doing. The fact that he had an extra curricular sex life probably doesn't make much difference in the grand scheme of things unless you happen to have bought into the bizarre concept of Frank Zappa as family man, which seemed to prevail in the last few years of his life.

Q - What was on the tape you sent him that caught his attention? Did he ever tell you?

A - The demo tape I sent Frank in 1969 consisted of five or six songs I had written. All of then were pretty short. Several had lyrics. Frank specifically mentioned that he liked my guitar playing on the songs. He also liked some of the lyrics, like one called "The Bones Go Down", which was about the La Brea tar pits.

Q - Do you consider Zappa a musical genius?

A - I once asked Frank how he could listen to Stravinsky on the one hand and then turn around and listen to some amateurish sounding Doo-Wop group with the same intense appreciation. He replied, "There's just two kinds of music, good music and bad music. If you like something, it's good music. If you don't, it's bad music." To me, Frank Zappa is good music. He may not be Bartok or Bach, but his harmonic vocabulary, his peculiar rhythms, his fiery, audacious guitar playing, and his overall compositional scope speak to me and resonate in me the way no other music ever has or will. Evidently a lot of other people feel that way too. Does that indicate genius? Why not!

Q - You say that Frank had been "damaged emotionally". What do you mean by that? By whom?

A - There was a number of different events in Frank's life, all negative, which marked turning points for him. I think he developed his whole reverse psychology philosophy as a result of being a funny looking Italian kid in the '50s and being sneered at by his supposedly normal peers. He probably decided at a relatively early age that he was not only going to join the football team, he was going to spend the rest of his life revealing the emptiness of those guys' lives. It was the classic smart loner syndrome, only he elevated it into an art. But there were two specific things that really affected him profoundly. One was 1963, before anybody knew who he was, and the other thing happened in 1971, after he had become well established on the music scene. In 1963 he was involved in an entrapment case in Cucamonga, California. He was set up on a conspiracy to commit pornography charge, convicted of a felony and spent a few weeks in jail. In 1971, at the end of a long tour, he was thrown off the stage at the Rainbow Theatre in London by a member of the audience and severely injured. I didn't know Frank in 1963, but the Cucamonga bust had obviously left deep scars on his psyche. The Rainbow Theatre assault occurred at the end of the tour I was on. I saw Frank constantly when he came home and he was never the same afterward. When I met him in 1970, Frank had a warmth and charm, a quaint, affectionate quality unlike anything I've seen before or since. After the Rainbow Theatre assault, that warmth began to be increasingly replaced by hostility, cynicism and arrogance. His whole view of the world was shaken by that guy's attack. I don't think he ever trusted anybody again after that.

Q - Was Frank Zappa a bitter man? He certainly comes across as bitter. Didn't he achieve what he set out to achieve?

A - I think Frank had unrealistically high expectations. I think his view was that he was a rare, exemplary individual in a devious, dangerous, incompetent world. To Frank, people were shlubs at best, traitors at worst. Part of that was his adolescence and his Catholic upbringing. Part of it was that as he became more famous, he increasingly lost touch with the real world. In a sense, the more he achieved, the worst it got because he kept withdrawing farther and farther into his own reality. Once on the '71 tour, everything was going wrong. I'd come down with the flu. The airport baggage claim had misplaced my guitar and who knows what else. But I was cracking jokes about it. Frank noticed and told me, "Don't ever lose your sense of humor." I wish he could have taken his own advice. He had a great sense of humor, but his sourness and cynicism often seemed to dominate. But after all, a cynic is just a romantic who's been disillusioned by life. So maybe it made sense anyway.

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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