1. Billy The Mountain
- See also ARF: Notes & Comments.
Mark Volman, quoted by Harvey Kubernik, Canyon Dreams. The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2009, p. 244
Putting together Billy the Mountain was a series of vignettes that connected around a forty-three minute opera. Howard and I usually started with Frank on guitar, the three of us, and we were given the music to learn. Frank felt most comfortable playing and singing the melody, so there were very few times where Frank placed himself into the four-part harmony or three-part harmony. He kind of left that to Howard, Jim Pons, and me. We'd take the bit and show up at the rehearsal hall on Highland Avenue and lead the band through what he wanted.
The Origins Of Billy The Mountain
Scott Fresina, "Kirby Rocks," The Jack Kirby Collector #55, Fall 2010
Roz [Kirby] jumped in and explained that Zappa wrote a song based on one of Jack [Kirby]'s stories of characters. I found out later that it was a song called "Billy the Mountain." Billy was a mountain that could kick ass or whatever, I guess! Billy was based on JIM [Journey Into Mystery] #68—the monster was Spragg, the Living Mountain.
Billy & Old Zircon
FZ, interviewed by Rob Fixmer, Bugle American, December 17, 1975
OK, so what does ["Sofa"] have to do with "Billy the Mountain"?
Well, did you ever wonder where Billy the Mountain came from?
No, I can't say that I did. I just accepted old Billy at face value.
And you didn't ever wonder about Billy's childhood or how he got there in the first place?
No.
Well, I did.
Are you speaking geologically or something?
No. I'm talking about, you know, here's a mountain that can talk and has got a tree for a wife. Now, where the fuck do they come from? I mean, he's got to have some kind of a background. Well, where he comes from is, a long time ago when there was nothing in the universe except blackness and this floating sofa, God explained to the sofa while holding a cigar, speaking German, and with a Pachuco cross between his thumb and his first finger, looking at the sofa, and he's trying to explain to the sofa where he's at and where he's coming from, and making sure the sofa understands his or her or its particular place in this cosmos that he's constructed. He gets the sofa organized, see. And then he orders boards of oak throughout the emptiness to support the sofa, and then he calls for his girlfriend.
God's girlfriend.
That's right. The Short Girl, he called her. So Short Girl and Squat, the magic pig, are both there, and he makes a home movie with the girl fucking the pig, and sends it to a lab that he knows. And she sings a song to the pig, and he sings a song to the girl. The next thing you know, this guy named Old Zircon, a phased-out Byzantine devil, his body covered with old musical instruments . . . .
[...] So anyway, Old Zircon, the phased-out Byzantine devil appears on the side, and he's got a plan. Because after God makes the movie and sends it to the lab, he sends these cherubs to pick up the package. So they fly off to the lab while he's lying down on the sofa. He's having a sleep and dreaming a great dream. Well, Old Zircon appears in this dream and he walks out of the cave and his cloven hooves hit the rocks, causing sparks to shoot out, igniting all the adjacent moss. And these flames come up. And smoke comes up from the flames. And he beats his magic drum and he blows his magic trumpet, and strums his little guitar. The sound waves of all these instruments being manipulated at the same time cause the smoke to form into several large, new, lumpy mountains, one of which can talk. That's where Billy comes from. Now what you don't know is that Ethell the Tree is under the control of Old Zircon who has this special flashlight that controls her thoughts and she's operating Billy. So this is all working in the background. Just like a Wagnerian opera, who can sit through it? You know? And when you're trying to get the proper level on a 33-1/3 disc, if you go over 18 minutes per side you're in trouble. And when you talk about musical ideas that take hours to spin out, you can't get it on a record. So a lot of the things that I'm talking about happen over a series of albums, because you're only putting out one every four months at the most.
Billy The Mountain, The Movie
Liner notes:
Schenkel collapses in debris during preparation of story board for "BILLY THE MOUNTAIN." Clay model of roving monolith visible near left elbow. Studebacher Hoch & his trained flies appear over Schenkel's head and to right.
FZ, interviewed by Martin Melhuish, "Zappa's 200 Motels—Life On The Road, Part 2," Grapevine (Canadian Edition), December 23, 1971
As far as another movie goes, I started working on Billy The Mountain as soon as 200 Motels was in the can.
FZ, interviewed by Ian Pollock, Time Out, December 17-23, 1971
Presumably you've got the next movie in your head already.
I've got it better than in my head, I've got it on paper. (At this point he showed me the script of 'Billy The Mountain', a fairy tale about a mountain that walks across America, going on a vacation with his wife Ethel the tree).
When do you start shooting?
If we started pre-production at the end of this tour, which is December 22nd, we won't be able to shoot this until August because there's a lot of pre-planning to it. We've already had a meeting with UA about it, and they're interested, but we haven't made a deal.
The success [of 200 Motels] in the States will be pretty handy, won't it?
It's a pretty expensive movie—even with the success in the States they might still have to think about this. It'll be between 2½ and 5 million dollars to do this. '200 Motels' was only 679,000 dollars—we came in 40,000 dollars under budget. We're going to do that one in video too here.
Why here?
Because this is where the technique is. The processing was all done here at the Vitronics up by the airport. I mean they have a similar processing facility in the US, but the video facilities aren't as good.
[...]
Why is 'Billy the Mountain' going to be more expensive?
Because of the amount of animation that's involved, and because I have some machinery that I want to add to the normal video equipment that has to be constructed to make it do other things computerised machinery.
Is the machinery your own idea? Are we going to see something completely different?
Yes, it's my own idea. I hope to be able to make it completely different, but a lot depends on the design of these devices that I'm hoping to use.
Steve Peacock, "Zappa's Latest Box Of Tricks," Sounds, November, 1971
The music for the film will be played by the Mothers—"doing our rock and roll comedy music"—and by a synthesiser orchestra. [...] The way they're going to make the film this time, is to shoot the Mothers straight. playing the music and narrating the story of Billy The Mountain. After that, they'll use insets and superimpositions, and other fiendish tricks, to illustrate the story; shots of the Mothers acting out the story in costume, and animation sequences. [...]
"It tells the story of the creation of life on this planet and in this version, it begins with an empty sky, a fat maroon sofa floating around in it, God sees the sofa, admires it, and decides to explain to the sofa the basis of their future relationships, and he does this, singing in German.
Then he decides he needs some entertainment so he summons his girlfriend The Short Girl, and her assistant, Squat The Magic Pig, and proceeds to shoot a home movie using the girl and the pig and the sofa. And when he's finished shooting the film he has some Winged Holy Children take it to a lab where they don't ask any questions, and while he's waiting for his rushes to come back he lays down on the sofa to take a nap, and as soon as he goes to sleep, he has a great dream, and when he dreams the Devil appears.
Now the Devil walks out of a cave and he introduces himself with a song and dance routine, and he has these cloven hoofs, you see, and he's stomping around on the rocks outside the cave and the sparks from his hoofs ignite all adjacent moss, and the moss goes up in flames, the smoke is billowing around, and as he sings in a low voice the smoke turns to stone forming several lumpy new mountains, and one of them can talk. And the one that can talk is named Billy the Mountain.
Billy the Mountain has a tree growing off his shoulder named Ethel, and Ethel is his girlfriend, who soon becomes his wife, and Ethel the tree is under the control of Old Zircon, the phased-out Byzantine devil. Old Zircon induces Ethel the Tree to trick Billy the Mountain into taking her on a vacation. And so he gets up on his massive granite foot, and starts walking across America, and he's destroying America as he walks from California to Virginia Beach.
Meanwhile, in a small neat room behind a grocery store, there's this mysterious figure named Studebaker Hawk, and Studebaker Hawk is dressed in a chequered tablecoth with waxdrips on it from some candles stuffed up a Chianti bottle, and he's wearing dark green denim trousers such as a bus driver might enjoy, and he sits before a glowing view screen on which he monitors all things potentially dangerous to civilisation as we know it. And on this screen he's watching Billy the Mountain.
Now Billy has this large cliff for a jaw, and when he talks the cliff goes up and down, and clouds of brown smoke puff out, and rocks and boulders hack up, and he (Studebaker Hawk) sees the new brown clouds coming out of Billy's mouth and he sings about it because he becomes worried about the implications of brown clouds in terms of the ecology. He gets on the phone to informed Sources in Washington DC. and finds that the line is busy.
Meanwhile, all these disasters keep happening in the Mid-West. On his way. Billy gets hungry, and he eats a diner. You know what a diner is? Well in the United States they have these restaurants that are made out of old street cars, and he eats one. He sees it's got all this rancid food in it so he eats the whole street car—all the stale lemon pies and bacon drips, he eats the cash register and the chlorophyll lozenges and gum displayed nearby.
But as he's walking, he finds that it's interfered with his delicate granite intestinal membranes, causing severe gas, fire, and molten lava, and Billy the Mountain becomes Billy the Volcano, about the time he gets to Indiana. He's vomiting all these melted chrome diner appliances all over the countryside.
By this time Studebaker Hawk has finally gotten a call through to his informed sources in Washington, and he meets a character called Little Emil, who gives him a code, and when Studebaker Hawk manages to figure out the code he discovers that the Government wants him to stop the rampaging volcano.
And the way they want him to stop it is by sneaking up on it with a special new bomb which will not only destroy the volcano but it'll wipe out the middle of the United States to a width of about a thousand miles. And this upsets him because he thinks of the long range ecological consequences of such a disaster.
So he thinks to himself that there must be some mistake, that the computer in the Pentagon must have gone apeshit, because their rationale for doing this, as explained by the code, is you can go ahead and blow up the Mid-West because those dumb f-king farmers will never know the difference. That's what the computer print-out had said. So he gets suspicious, and he refuses to obey his orders and calls Washington back, and says he has another better way to stop Billy the Mountain.
And the rest of the story is the part I don't want to give away, because it's what Studebaker Hawk's plan is, and who Little Emil really is, because he doesn't work for the Government, he owns it."
- Little Emil appears on "Billy The Mountain—Part 1" on Carnegie Hall (2011).
Notes On The Lyrics
. . . their voices echoing through the canyons of your minds (POO-AAH!)
- The "canyons of your mind(s)" are also mentioned in "We're Turning Again" on Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention (1985) and "Farther O'Blivion" on Road Tapes, Venue #2 (2013).
The first noteworthy piece of real estate they destroyed was EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE . . .
- Edwards Air Force Base is also mentioned in "Be-Bop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen's Church)" on Roxy & Elsewhere (1974).
And TO THIS VERY DAY, 'Wing Nuts' and Data Reduction Clerks alike, speak in reverent whispers about that fateful night when TEST STAND #1 and THE ROCKET SLED ITSELF . . .
Denny Walley, quoted by John French, Beefheart: Through The Eyes Of Magic, 2010, p. 38
Actually, "wingnuts" are Air Force guys.
. . . sucking up two thirds of it for UNTIMELY DISPERSAL over VAST STRETCHES of WATTS!!!
- See notes on "Trouble Every Day" on Freak Out! (1966).
Now, some folks say he looked like
ZUBIN MEHTA
- see notes on Contempo 70
Consider this rumor, which was published about three weeks ago in ROLLING STONE! (Oh, it's gotta be true!)
FZ, quoted by Ed Baker, The Hot Flash, May, 1974
I have nothing but bad things to say about Rolling Stone, I think it's the pits. They certainly haven't done me any favors. And I think if what they've done to my reputation and the way in which they treat the work that I do is consistent throughout the magazine for the way that they write about other people, then I don't think anybody is getting a fair shake from them. It's an extremely biased publication. And the one thing that sticks out to me when I read it is it's got this very parochial, extremely San Francisco, Marin County, Bay Area consciousness where anything that does not originate from that area is substandard. And I think that's fake.
- Rolling Stone is also mentioned in "Easy Meat" on Tinsel Town Rebellion (1981).
Right beside ELLIOT ROBERTS' big Bank Book
"Elliot Roberts," Wikipedia (accessed December 4, 2011)
Elliot Roberts (born Elliot Rabinowitz on February 22, 1943) is an American music manager, record executive, and philanthropist, best known for helping start the careers of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
- also mentioned in "Call Any Vegetable" from Carnegie Hall (2011)
Next to the boat
Where CROSBY flushed away all his stash
- David Crosby appears on the Freak Out! (1966) list of contributors and on the cover of We're Only In It For The Money (1968). He is also mentioned in "Do You Like My New Car?" on Fillmore East—June 1971 (1971), "Billy The Mountain" on Just Another Band From L.A. (1972); "The Groupie Routine" on You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 1 (1988); "Billy The Mountain—Part 1" on Carnegie Hall (2011); and Them Or Us (The Book) (1984).
- See also The Big T.N.T. Show (1966), and You Are What You Eat (1968).
To THE CAN
Where Neil Young slipped another disc
FZ, quoted by Ian Pollock, Rainbow Theatre Programme, December, 1971
The only pop music that's played around the house a lot is Neil Young because my wife and kids like that and I enjoy it too.
Studebaker Hoch
Mark Volman & Howard Kaylan, interviewed by Michael Watts, Melody Maker, October 23, 1971
Howard and I cut a record not too long ago, a demonstration record, just for fun, under the auspicious name of a group called "Studebaker Hawk," and we gave it to [Marc] Bolan, and they were gonna have it released on Fly.
He overdubbed some guitars, and Mickey played some congas, everyone clapped along.