My friend Bill Gubbins is a most unusual man. He’s been a music magazine editor of wide scope (Country Weekly and Creem!), a documentarian, an early virtual reality entrepreneur and a partner with Chris Whittle in launching the controversial Channel One in-school TV network. He’s also definitely the only person I know who worked for David Pecker, the media mogul who put Donald Trump’s darkest secrets in a safe. It’s always a colorful, enlightening experience to talk with Bill.
Even before all that most-interesting-man-in-the-world stuff, Bill Gubbins pulled off perhaps his most exceptional adventure. In the summer of 1969, as a 19-year-old from Bowling Green, OH with no connections other than the Bowling Green State University student newspaper, he managed, with a cocktail of chutzpah and innocence, to ingratiate himself with a man he revered as a demigod, Frank Zappa. The story is too good to give away any of its key beats, so let’s just cut to the end result. He got invited to Los Angeles for four days to be the fly-on-the-wall photographer documenting some of the sessions for Zappa’s top-shelf album Hot Rats. After almost 50 years in storage, his images have been assembled into The Hot Rats Book. And in Zappa parlance, it’s freak-out amazing.
Even for a musically curious guy like myself, Zappa was a hard case. Not love at first listen at all. But over time, I shifted my frame. I stopped hearing him as an artsy rock and roll star who tried too hard and realized his true nature - a seriously advanced contemporary composer who borrowed from and satirized rock and roll idioms. I heard his jazz fusion projects and discovered how stunningly tight his bands were and how demanding the music was. I found more and more of it funky and fun and dreamy (and often very funny), a lot closer to Miles and Mingus than to other cats of his era playing distorted electric guitar and writing songs. The album that sealed the deal for me was Hot Rats.
Weird and pinkly forbidding on the cover, it’s a suite of almost entirely instrumental tunes that absolutely spank with groove, topped with shrewd arrangements of horns, organ, violin and psychedelic electric guitar. It is one of Frank’s most accessible records and regarded as one of his classic five-star works. To sit with nervous, excited Bill Gubbins as he snaps candids in the inner sanctum of three different studios (one being Zappa’s own basement) as this masterpiece is assembled is a vicarious thrill. The images are superb, indicating a raw talent that’s been refined over the years. Bill’s excellent and socially provocative street photography can be seen on his Instagram @BillGubbinsPhotos_. And as if that’s not enough, Bill’s narrative - the jaw-dropping story - of how he came to pull this off, is told not in a standard essay but in a scintillating conversation between Bill and Ahmet Zappa, Frank’s third child and manager of the Zappa estate and trust. The enthusiasm, suspense, curiosity and awe that unfolds in the transcribed dialogue is mutual and infectious.
Wait there’s more. The Hot Rats Book is a companion to a new 6-CD 50th anniversary box set, with its rehearsals, stem tracks, outtakes and banter. Cue that up with the book in your lap, and you’re practically there, in the last LA summer of the 1960s, witnessing an artist and auteur in his prime.
Pictured, my signed, gifted copy of The Hot Rats Book, for which I am deeply grateful.
This journal of music, politics, arts and sometimes auto racing is offered as a free newsletter digest every week or two. I’d love to have you aboard.