Monthly Archives: August 2023

December 10, 1997 Todays Nuclear Balance of Power

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editors Note: This article first appeared in EIR Vol. 24, No. 51, Dec. 19, 1997, pp. 1230.

Of information society, let it be said: Once more, this recent October, an unsinkable Titanic was fatally holed by its collision with the waiting, relevant species of iceberg. The impregnable post-1989, globalized financial system, is now settling into the watery abyss. Unfortunately, sanity being what it is, or is not, these days, even after the global events of October and November, most of the passengers, including former Citibank chief Walter Wriston, are still clinging to the sinking ship, clinging to a delusory faith in an unsinkable utopia, in an eternal, neo-Malthusian, information societys economy.

Yes, there seem to be some ups and downs on the markets, is the gist of most U.S. adults reluctant acknowledgement of the recent several weeks of global financial storms; but, they add, the economy is still basically sound. They would never let it happen here. Until I see it announced on television, I am not going to let myself believe, that that sort of crisis will ever come here. Although the modern Manichean, that citizen, leaves unclear, who, or what these mysterious potencies, they, might be; the impression is, that they are awesomely Olympian.

Such popular superstition put to one side, given the catastrophes to the global financial system since late October through early December, no economist or political figure anywhere on this planet, could still be excused for believing a U.S. daily news media which promises that the current Asia crisis will never spread into the U.S. economy. After such events, no professional could still honestly deny the exceptional accuracy of my published, February 1997 forecast: an outbreak of a global, systemic financial crisis, beginning no later than October 1997. The recent seismic shocks to the worlds financial system, have assumed the form of an eerie drum-beat; from Asia, through Europe, and into the Americas, the situation has become constantly worse. Until certain key governments end the presently ongoing attempts, to bail out a sinking financial Titanic, whose bottom has already been ripped out irreparably, the crisis will become worse, world-wide, that at an accelerating rate.

Meanwhile, as if to show us that matters were not already as bad as they might become, the policies demanded by both thuggish U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and IMF Director Michel Camdessus, for example, have already begun what threatens to become, very quickly, a hyperinflationary spiral, like that which struck Weimar Germany during 19221923. The difference is, that, if this Weimar-1923-style policy of Greenspan and Camdessus were continued throughout Asia, and into the oncoming explosions in Russia, and South America, the result must be a Weimar-style hyperinflation, which might reach total breakdown, world-wide, not over months, as in 19221923, but, because of the added impact of a global, $100 trillions-equivalent derivatives bubble, compressed into a period as short as weeks.

H.G. Wells was the first publicist of the argument of a nuclear balance of power, and also a key figure in shaping what would become the rock-drug-sex counterculture. Wells, writes LaRouche, like the Dick Morris who did so much to sink the U.S. Democratic Partys 1996 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, typifies the use of the pimp as a publicist.

In such economics matters, mere statistical studies may inform us of such relevant considerations, such as the fact that the patient is dead, but they provide little help in defining the cures which might have saved the economy, if not its financial system. If we wish to cure the disease, we must go behind the mere symptoms, to identify the agency which those symptoms express. To discover the cure, we must discover the source of the sickness. To find the continuing source of this global civilizations sickness, the presently onrushing, systemic, global financial crisis, we must focus upon the pattern of decisions which continue, even today, to shape economic practice: not the mere statistical effects of that practice. It is the substance of Genghis Khan, not his statistical shadow, which constitutes the mortal threat to our civilization. In short, to overcome the danger, the U.S. government must reverse the policy-trend of the recent thirty-odd years.

What must be introduced, would be considered by todays commonplace, elected illiterates in the subject of economics history, such as Speaker Newt Gingrich, as very radical changes in policies. If precisely those policies are not soon introduced, to deal with an already hopelessly bankrupt set of international financial and monetary institutions, this is a bottomless crisis. In the case those policies are not introduced very soon, this planetary civilization would be doomed, doomed by a lack of moral fitness to survive, doomed to plunge into the post-modernist barbarism of a prolonged new dark age, even before the 2000 U.S. election-campaigns begin. Unless, we can detect and eradicate those policies and supranational institutions, which have caused the past thirty-odd years decline in world economy, our culture is a dying culture, our nations, their populations, the casualties of a dying, global civilization.

Figure 1

Germany and Hyperinflation, 1921-23

(Index 1913 = 1)

Figure 2

Hyperinflation, Germany , 1921-23

(value of German mark in U.S. cents)

Source: Stephen V.O. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 1921-31 (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1967).

Thus, modern European civilization, now somewhat more than six hundred years old, is, presently, dying. Nothing could save the present financial and monetary system itself. By the end of this century, perhaps sooner, it, in its present form, will be gone, either by responsible actions of key governments, or, lacking that remedy, by way of either hyperinflationary, or hyperdeflationary collapse, forever. As my own and other features in EIR have repeatedly warned, this financial-monetary system is like a doomed, sinking ship; the passengers, the nations, the peoples, and the physical economy living within this civilization, could be saved, but only if they are willing to abandon that doomed ship itself. They could survive, but only if they give up, suddenly, those post-1964, radical changes in culture, which have doomed the present world economic order.

Unfortunately, the prevailing evidence warns us, that no more than a small minority of the populations and their doomed governments are yet willing, to support the policies needed to allow our nations to survive that global systemic financial crisis which has recently entered its terminal phase. For the moment, the boob-tubed majority of the pleasure-seeking populations of Europe and North Americamost notablyseem to have lost the will to grasp for anything but the next fleeting instant of momentaryor, should we better say, monetarypleasure.

We must view the majority of the people of most nations today, as like the pompous, doomed Akkadians of Biblical Belshazzars Babylonian empire; most of the leading institutions of this planet appear to have lost that essential quality, moral fitness to survive. So, as the artist portrayed a similar circumstance, Belshazzars Feast: once again, the moving finger writes; the new message is now nearly completed.

How did our world get into such a mess? When and how did we start down the road to this catastrophe? What habits must we rip out of our institutions, and ourselves, if we, and our republic are to survive the ongoing, terminal disintegration of the entire worlds present financial and monetary systems?

To understand how all this occurred, how the most powerful civilization ever crafted, brought itself, like the fabled Ozymandias, to this present point of degradation and self-destruction, listen to a true story which begins with the Sept. 6, 1901 assassination of patriotic U.S. President William McKinley, by an imported terrorist protg of New Yorks Emma Goldmans Henry Street Settlement House, Leon Czolgosz. The mortal wounding effected by this assassins attack, an attack steered by self-anointed tyrannicide Goldman herself, brought a nasty spawn of the Confederacy, Theodore Roosevelt, into the U.S. Presidency, on Sept. 14, eight days later. About the same time, in England, a pathetic, perverse, but, subsequently, very influential British publicist, Herbert George Wells (18661946), escaped from what had been well-deserved obscurity. This Wells would later describe his personal acquaintance and ideological ally, Theodore Roosevelt, aptly, as The Big Noise of America.

That intersection of these two personalities, Wells and Theodore Roosevelt, with the accession of Prince Edward Albert as Britains King Edward VII, typify a century gone wrong from the start, the century of 1) two World Wars, 2) a terrifying nuclear balance of power, which Wells was the first to propose publicly and widely, beginning 1914, and, 3) the recent thirty-odd years of worldwide reign of a global, neo-Malthusian nightmare, the latter another Wells dogma. These three factors, including the two dogmas, the one proposed, the other adopted by Wells, became, significantly through his contributing influence, the principal proximate cause of the presently ongoing worldwide economic-breakdown crisis.

In these and other ways, among literate historians and other relevant authorities on the matter, H.G. Wells has notable importance for our understanding the strategic, political, economic, and moral crisis now enveloping this planet. An unlikely candidate for fame and influence? He was, admittedly, like fellow Fabian tribesman George Bernard Shaw, essentially a shallow poseur, in the literal sense of the Latin derivation of vanity: a miserable, invidious, misanthropic wretch, a picaresque eternal lout of immense vanity, of a personal character to be compared, and that not too favorably, with the popular image of a mafia boss. He was, in short, exactly the sort of lackey the British oligarchy would employ and cultivate to do a particularly nasty bit of thuggery.

From the time of this English Sparafuciles rocketting out of obscurity, at the beginning of this century, he is to be compared with the notorious textbook case of Typhoid Mary; like her, incontestably a figure who has, in his time, radiated a certain unpleasant influence. To appreciate Wells high-ranking, and generally rising importance in relevant world events, during the interval 19011939, think of him as, like Adolf Hitler, or his fellow-criminal Bertrand Russell, a carrier of what has proven to be an extremely virulent strain of cultural syphilis. Wells did not destroy our civilization by himself; but, he played a key, and exemplary part, as a tissue in which the relevant killer-strain of infection was cultured and disseminated.

Both Wells depraved admirers and the populists typically associative, Hobbesian view of a world government conspiracy, treat Wells, and other lackeys of his type, as either admirable, or despicable geniuses. Wells was no genius; his talent was, as he implicitly describes himself, a man with a pimps insight into the susceptibility of a depraved clienteles not-so-hidden private sexual fantasies. In each case an influential idea is attributed to Wells, whether by devotees or detractors, we discover that no such originality ever existed. His role was never that of a discoverer of principles; indeed, there is nothing of principle in Wells vocabulary. Wells was not an inventor, but, rather, a publicist, a man like Dick Morris, the recently notorious cousin of the late Roy M. Cohn, a pathetic creature who turned his pimps instinct for the sexual perversities of a general public, into a public-relations career.

This is a crucial point, so we should add a few more relevant observations on the distinction we have just made.

For example, Wells writes:

The political function for which a publicist such as Wells, is subjected to a competitive process of selection, is to transform the ideas which the prospective employers intend to promote, into the easy form in which the mere name of such ideas can acquire pleasurable associations within a large ration, if not yet the majority, of a targetted population and the institutions which that population regards as expressing its self-interest.

That is not the manner in which ideas should be given wider currency; the cognitive methods of Classical humanistic education, are the proper approach to all forms of education of a population, especially the population of a nation which wishes to escape the fall from republic to tyranny. Wells, like the Mephistopheles of Goethes Faust, is a British empiricist, who avoids cognition; he targets the populations irrational susceptibilities, the targets non-cognitive, associative modes of fantasy-life: erotic imagery.

Wells, like the Dick Morris who did so much to sink the U.S. Democratic Partys 1996 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, typifies the use of the pimp as a publicist. Run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes it! Throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks! Read the polls, and discover which of last nights political entertainments found their way into the polluted imageries of a relative majority of the targetted strata of the population. Hence, the use of Wells policy of sexually-oriented utopian propaganda, in the case of the financially successful basing of the origins of the Promise Keepers cult on the use of Jungian homoerotic imageries.

That sort of pimp, like the mass-media generally, makes his living, and gains his political influence, through reliance upon appeal to the kind of underlying sexual perversity echoed in todays popular print and electronic mass-media of entertainment, and in the fictionalized fantasies presented in those media under the misleading rubric of news.

This is a characteristic of degenerated cultures, such as that of the Roman Empire, or British popular culture today, in which the proposed size of the testicles of the sports arenas leading gladiators, or, such matters as the size of an actresss breasts, or the reported sexual peccadilloes of entertainment celebrities, evoke far greater passion from the population, than those issues of policy upon which the lives of themselves and their posterity hang. As Wells expressed the same view, but from his vantage-point, In a world where pressure on the means of subsistence was a normal condition of life, it was necessary to compensate for the removal of traditional sexual restraints, and so my advocacy of simple and easy love-making had to be supplemented by an adhesion to the propaganda of the Neo-Malthusians.

Neo-Malthusian propaganda in the 1960s (an ad in the New York Times), and in the 1990s (a Zero Population Growth hawker in a farmers market). H.G. Wells laid the foundationIn a world where pressure on the means of subsistence was a normal condition of life, it was necessary to compensate for the removal of traditional sexual restraints, and so my advocacy of simple and easy love-making had to be supplemented by an adhesion to the propaganda of the Neo-Malthusians.

In general, whether for evil, as in the case of Wells, or for good, an idea gains currency through one or another kind of process of social ingestion. Properly, ingestion begins at the head, and is, next, transmitted from the cognitive process of one head, to replication of the same species and type of cognitive process in the head of another; but, in the lower reaches of society, types such as Wells, Dick Morris, and Richard Mellon-Scaifes circles, prefer to address the targetted populist audiences preference for fantasy, from the nether apertures of the publicists body. In the case of the oligarchy which adopted Wells, it was his uncanny ability, like his Fabian fellow-tribesman George Bernard Shaw, to target and reach the most morally debased level of his chosen audience, whose relative successes showed the oligarchy how to shape its ideas in a form of expression which would capture what Wells recognized as the baser susceptibilities of the intended mass of dupes.

In sum: Wells did not invent sex; he merely sold it. Therein lay his talent, and the quality of his influence.

In the reports included in this issues Strategic Study, our interest in Wells is focussed upon those features of his activity, which bear upon his crucial and continuing role in originating, beginning 1914, on the eve of World War I, a new variety of balance of power doctrine, premised upon chemist Frederick Soddys assurances of the feasibility of a terrible new military power, nuclear-fission weaponry.

This is the now all-too-familiar doctrine, which features the development and use of nuclear weapons as a form of terror, by means of which nations might be forced to abandon national sovereignty, and to join a new, feudalist world order, which Wells, like his crony Bertrand Russell, advocated as world government. Within the setting of that topic, our more specific interest here, is the crucial role which the nuclear balance-of-power doctrine has had, in imposing those utopian, neo-Malthusian dogmas which have, increasingly, ruled, and ruined, and continue to menace the worlds economic decision-making, during the recent thirty-odd years.

On these accounts, H.G. Wells was not only the first publicist of the argument of nuclear balance of power; he was also among the key figures in misshaping what became that mass youth-counterculture which, like the mythological Circe, took over the minds and bodies of a majority of the 19641972 generation of university students. As such a mere lackey, he played a key role in bringing about the process of self-destruction, which, in turn, sent the entirety of modern European civilization to its presently ongoing financial disintegration.

To understand Wells, his selection by his aristocratic patrons, and the impact which he has had upon this century, one must begin at the year 1901, the year in which President McKinley was murdered by a London-centered international terrorist organization of that time, the year in which Wells utopian, and frankly, as he himself insisted on the term, neo-Malthusian rant, Anticipations, was published. This book was then a leading part of the activity which brought Thomas Huxley admirer Wells into the Fabian Society, and into that eating-club, called the Coefficients, where he became a kind of early-on Josef Goebbels for Lord Alfred Milners imperial enterprises.

On these matters, Wells writing is characterized by a vivid recollection of what he views as the central fact of his world: that he exists in it, surrounded by celebrities whose acquaintance he wears as his literary plumage. Even world figures, including such non-British figures as Theodore Roosevelt, V.I. Lenin, Josef Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and so on, appear in the writing of this irascible Rumpelstiltskin as if they might be merely his predicates. Thus, in his writings, the larger world in which he is situated, is mostly out of focus, a blur. In his own mind, this British Steppenwolf was less in the world, than prancing pompously on stage, before it.

Nonetheless, outside the virtual reality which he describes his erotic fantasy-life to be, there existed a very real world, and a very real situation, a world in which he exerted some very real influence. That real world was chiefly hatred against the British monarchys traditional adversary, the continued existence of Benjamin Franklins and Abraham Lincolns United States. This was a U.S. which he and his patrons feared, and hated, bitterly, even more than they hated the U.S.s late-Nineteenth-Century allies, Japan, Germany, Russia, and, the France of Thiers, President Sadi Carnot, and historian-diplomat Gabriel Hanotaux. Without that essential situation dominating the world in which Wells lived, the Wells of the first half of the Twentieth Century could not have existed.

Follow lackey Sancho Panza (Wells) and aristocratic Don Quixote (Russell), from the starting-point of their journey, hatred against the United States, to their choice of weapons for our republics destruction. There are the three, interdependent, utopian working-notions thematically central to all of the 19011939 publicist activity of H.G. Wells, and of the Gernsback-Campbell U.S. school of radically positivist, pulp science-fiction which Wells inspired: 1.) nuclear weapons, 2.) world government, and 3.) masturbatory neo-Malthusianism. Find thus the bridge between the Wells of 19011928, and the 19641972 mass-brainwashing of university campus Baby Boomers. To grasp the thrust of their Open Conspiracy, consider that characteristic of the U.S.A. which was the focus of their fear and satanic quality of hatred.

Since 1863, what the ruling British oligarchy, otherwise traditionally named the Venetian Party, has feared, and hated, more than anything else, was the relatively awesome power which the United States economy came to represent during the course of the years 18611876. The facts of this history have been richly documented in books and leading papers published by this writer and his associates over more than a quarter-century. For our purposes here, the relevant essentials of that matter, as this bears upon the roles of Wells and Russell, are fairly summarized as follows.

Until the 18621863 interventions of Russias Czar Alexander II, the British monarchy of Lord Palmerston and Bertrand Russells grandfather, Lord Russell, was fully committed to destroying the United States. As British agent August Belmont underscored this fact in his own admissions, Londons intent in launching its puppet, the Confederate States of America, was to force the Washington, D.C. government to accept the sovereignty of the British Confederacy puppet, thus creating the situation in which London could divide the North American continent among a Balkans-like collection of perpetually squabbling local tyrannies, this according to the same balance of power illogic which the dubious Zbigniew Tweedledum Brzezinski has proposed for Central Asia.

When, despite Belmont asset McClellans complicity, Britains Confederacy assets failed to bring the matter quickly to the conclusion London intended, Palmerston, Russell, and Palmerstons French stooge, the Emperor Napoleon III, prepared to deploy the combined naval forces of Britain, France, and Spain against both Mexico and the U.S. blockade of the Confederate ports. When the Czar not only threatened to make war throughout Europe, should Britain deploy naval forces against those of the U.S., but dispatched two Russian naval fleets to aid the U.S. in the case of a British naval intervention in the Civil War, Palmerstons and Napoleon IIIs plan to destroy the U.S., had to be scrapped in favor of other, longer-term options.

During this period, the crucial feature of Lincolns strategy, was the rapid development of the basic economic infrastructure and agro-industrial potential of the region under his command. What Lincoln was fighting, from his side, was what Germanys great Alfred von Schlieffen defined as annihilation warfare, in contrast to the predominantly Eighteenth-Century model of cabinet warfare which generals such as Lee and McClellan proposed to fight instead. Victory in battles was necessary, but not decisive by itself. Decisive was the increase of the annihilation capability which one side was developing in depth, relative to the destruction of the core-capability of the opposing forces. In the end, it was the anvil Grant, the hammer Sherman, and Sheridan, who typified the expression of Lincolns strategic will on this account.

This mode of warfare, aimed to annihilate the adversarys economic-military capability for continuing to deploy effective war-fighting capabilities, had been introduced to the United States, beginning approximately 1814, from the France circles of Lazare Carnot, Frances celebrated 17921794 Organizer of Victory, and from Carnots former teacher and ally, Gaspard Monge of the cole Polytechnique. Carnot is the founder of modern warfare, a form of warfare which Carnot himself integrated with the introduction of machine-tool-design methods to the logistics and technology of war-fighting. This was adopted at the West Point of Commandant Sylvanus Thayer, whose production of a military Corps of Engineers became the germ of later U.S. military superiority, and represented an essential building-block for the Carey-Lincoln economic miracle of 18611876.

Under the guidance of economist Henry C. Carey, the 18611876 period saw the rapid development of the U.S. economy into not only the worlds most powerful, but the most technologically advanced, by far. This resulted in the successful adoption of the Carey-Lincoln model by Japans Meiji Restoration, and radical changes in the economic policies of Bismarck, making Germany the rising economy in Europe. Similar benefits of the U.S. revolution in industrial society, were extended to the Russia of U.S. ally Czar Alexander II, D.I. Mendeleyev, and Count Sergei Witte. The aid to Russias technological progress came both directly from the U.S., and by way of U.S.-Russia-Germany cooperation.

Meanwhile, with the overthrow of British agent Napoleon III, France under Adolphe Thiers, Sadi Carnot, et al., had ceased to be the number-two enemy of the U.S.A., and was engaged in cooperation in the great, railway-building and related land-bridge development projects in Eurasia. Until corrupt French creatures, agents of London, arranged a capitulation to Lord Kitcheners London, in the Fashoda incident of 1898, France was effectively a partner of the great nation-building projects which Lincolns victorious U.S.A. had inspired and was fostering in Eurasia. Until British-directed, chiefly diplomatic countermeasures of the 18941901 interval, the combination of the U.S.A.s links to Japan and to the nationalist forces of China, complemented U.S. patriots commitment to fostering Eurasia economic cooperation among France, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan.

From the success of Frances Paul Barras in ousting war-hero Lazare Carnot from all positions of political power in France, until the initial successes of President Lincolns naval blockades, during the U.S. Civil War, London was assured, that the potential strategic danger from the continued existence of the U.S.A., was a manageable threat. The developments of 18611876 nearly obliterated British strategic self-confidence on this account. These events demonstrated to the nations of that time, the absolute, and vast superiority of the Leibniz-Franklin-Hamilton-Carey-List American System of political-economy, over the British intellectual export to its intended victims, the free trade model. The spread of Henry C. Careys American model into Japan, Germany, Russia, and nationalist China, transformed the threat to the British monarchy, from a grave potential one, into an immediate challenge to the continued existence of our republics traditional and continuing chief foreign adversary, since 1714 to the present day.

At the close of the century, when Wells first emerged from obscurity, the American System had shown great resiliency against even the worst treason and external afflictions it had suffered until that time. The election of a patriot in the Lincoln-Carey tradition, President William McKinley, threatened to undo the treachery accomplished under Confederacy spawn Grover Cleveland; the U.S.A. led by McKinley, was an active challenge to the continued existence of the British Empire. A new Japan emperor, friendlier to Britain, presided over the first, 1894 Japan-China war, a direct break of Japan with its former U.S. ally; the 19411945 U.S.-Japan war was a direct outgrowth of Japans prolonged, Twentieth-Century alliance with Britain against U.S. interests. The immediate grave danger to the British Empire was eliminated, for the ensuing two decades, by the assassination of President McKinley. King Edward VIIs successful use of treasonous French officials from the ranks of Frances assortments of revanchist scoundrels, enabled London to pit France and Russia against Germany, and to deploy combined French and British freemasonic agents to orchestrate the Balkan War used to detonate World War I.

Russells expressions of hatred against the United States, like his mass-homicidal threats against darker-skinned more prolific races, are already beyond the bounds of toleration; the man was a conscienceless beast. Yet, even Russells anti-American rants do not approach the virulence and pervasiveness of Wells expressed hatred against everything American. Only a low-life lackey could muster such public displays of obsessive hatred against his masters opponent as Wells does. Sometimes, as British whodunits instruct us, the households Royal commissionaire, the butler, often a fanatical British-Israelite thug, makes a readier assassin than the typical British version of Oblomov, the butlers EstablishedChurch master.

Bertrand Russell: When I first became politically conscious, Gladstone and Disraeli still confronted each other amid Victorian solidities, the British Empire seemed eternal, a threat to British naval supremacy was unthinkable, the country was aristocratic, rich and growing richer.... For an old man, with such a background, it is difficult to feel at home in a world of ... American supremacy.

After Wells Death, Russell summarized his own and Wells common view in the following terms:

The distinction, and convergence of implied master (Russell) and house-servant (Wells), are compactly represented by Russells autobiographical outburst:

Russell was speaking in the context of Britains continuing, Churchillian hatred against that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt who, but for his untimely death, would have quickly rid this planet of all colonial empires and also of continued British export of its pernicious, theologically, implicitly satanic, free trade swindle to the foreign nations its intended victims.

As previously stressed, in sundry relevant locations, since the 14391440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council of Florence, and since the subsequent establishment of Louis XIs France as the first modern form of nationstate republic, the central issue underlying all the important wars and related political, social, and philosophical conflicts within extended modern European civilization, has been the conflict between the notion of the equality of all persons, as made in the cognitive image of God, against the contrary policy of those oligarchical classes then centered in Venices imperial role as the then-dominant maritime and financier power of the Mediterranean region and northern Europe. The case of Russell, Wells, et al., is no exception to this rule. The Civil War between the United States of President Abraham Lincoln and the British puppet-state known as the Confederacy, is a perfect expression of precisely this issue.

As stressed in earlier locations, the exceptional quality of superiority of the design presented in our 1776 Declaration of Independence and 17871789 Federal Constitution, is a reflection of the historic circumstance, that post-League of Cambrai Europe continues, to this day, to be characteristically a corrupted form of nation-state, in which one of the two ruling classes of feudal society, a financier-oligarchy of what has been known variously, since the Seventeenth Century, as the Venetian Party, AngloDutch oligarchy, or, more recently, Club of the Isles, World Wildlife Fund, etc., has usually occupied the positions of top-most authority over government and economy. Although we were polluted with spores of such an oligarchical slime-mold, with our New England opium-traffickers, our New York bankers, and our southern slave-owners, our constitutional principle was of such excellent moral superiority over that of any other nation-state established in modern times, that we have managed, thus far, to emerge, sooner or later, afresh from every protracted period of corruption by the influence of our own domestic oligarchical classes.

On this account, we were not an exception to the best currents within Italy, France, Germany, and so forth; the highest levels were reached by such German-speaking admirers of our republican struggles as Friedrich Schiller and Ludwig van Beethoven. Indeed, those best currents from precisely those countries, provided the majority of the founding kernel of our citizenry. The difference is, that we used our distance from Europe to constitutional advantage, thus becoming the only modern European form of nation-state which gained the freedom to be founded upon a consistent moral principle. That, and only that, is our exceptional superiority as a form of nation-state. This is the only reason for the stubborn persistence of the British monarchys continuing role, since 1714, of being the principal, mortal adversary of our republic. The fact, as many foolish Americans demonstrate the point, that the British oligarchy regards us with an even greater, more consistent enmity than our U.S. patriots, such as the present writer, view the British monarchy.

This is not to suggest, that Clement Prince Metternichs Habsburg monarchy was any less fervent an enemy of the United States than Benthams, Castlereaghs, Cannings, and Palmerstons Britain. Probably, putting aside a significant number of happier exceptions, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, the Emperor Joseph II, and Beethovens student, the Archduke Rudolf, the continental European land-owning aristocracy, taken as a class, was more aptly represented by the secret police under such Austrian Chancellors as Wenzel von Kaunitz and, the official pimp, of the 1814 (sexual) Congress of Venice, Metternich. That class, generally, was more brutish than the British. The difference is, that the landed aristocracy of the southern regions of Europe and the Americas, was a dying species, a great nuisance for the security of the United States during the first half of the Nineteenth Century, but with little potency for the longer term, even then.

As this reporter has stressed early and often, the difference between U.S. patriots in the tradition of Franklin and Lincoln, and the British ruling classes and their lackeys, is not other than, nothing less than, an uncompromisable difference respecting the concepts of God, man, and nature. Russells, Hitler-like, sordid racialism, expressed in proposals for genocide, to be accomplished by aid of means which he himself acknowledged to be disgusting Malthusian methods, including bacteriological warfare, expresses this unbridgeable moral gulf between our respective forms of government.

In Jonathan Swifts satire, Lemuel Gulliver visits the kingdom of the Houyhnhnms, in which lordly horses posteriors reign over rutting humanoids called Yahoos, which were devoid of morals or speech, an apt picture of the British Isles aristocrats and lower classes at the time. Gulliver: He did me the honor to raise his hoof gently to my mouth.

To make the needed summary of our argument on this point, as short as possible, the reader is referred to the charming stories of Jonathan Swifts 1726 Gullivers Travels. One must get past the misapprehension, that these are merely childrens stories. They are, chiefly, political satires on the condition of the British Isles under King George I. The most relevant among these, is the tale of the fictional Lemuel Gullivers visit to the kingdom of the Houyhnhnms, in which lordly horses posteriors reigned over rutting humanoid creatures, called Yahoos, which latter were devoid of morals or speech: an apt picture of the British Isles aristocrats and lower classes at that time. It is relevant to emphasize here, that that is also a fair satire on the Eighteenth-Century depravity to which the British population has been returned, since the onset of those pestilences known as the Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher governments.

The chief practical expression of the issue which underlies the incurable hostility between all U.S. patriots and the present British oligarchy, is the interrelated issues of popular education, popular employment, and popular physical standard of household incomes. Summarily: If each man and woman is made, equally, in the image of God, by virtue of those sovereign cognitive potentials of the individual mind, by means of which man increases our species power over nature through such means as new, validated discoveries of physical principle, then the education, employment, and conditions of family and community life of each and all persons must be ordered accordingly.

In such a society, which our Leibnizian 1776 Declaration of Independence, and the Preamble of our 1789 Federal Constitution, define this republic of ours to be, there can be no superior social classes, nor any institution by means of which any form of usuryfinancier usury or slaveryis allowed as means by which one group of persons can subjugate, or otherwise loot another. Each newborn personality must be cultivated to the utmost degree possible, in the development of those powers of cognition which define each as made in the image of God. Each must be afforded, to the degree possible, the opportunities of useful employment which are consistent with such developed cognitive powers. Each household, and community within society must be afforded the opportunities which are consistent with these other requirements.

Not only must we desire this naturally lawful state of affairs for our nation itself. We can not be happy unless we are working to ensure the same rights for all humanity, for all nations.

Here, on these two points, we part company with our foremost traditional enemy, the British Venetian-style financier oligarchy and its representative instrument, the imperial monarchy.

The question is then often posed, Can we not persuade such wretches as poor lackey H.G. Wells, that our desire is in their best interest as human individuals? Can the British not be brought to understand, that we wish nothing so much for them, as that they might enjoy the same preconditions of happiness we defend for our own nation? Why not? Perhaps a miserable wretch like Bertrand Russell, belongs to the criminal class his title and outlook define his loyalties to be? But, what of the ordinary, poor Brit, or simply one of unpretentious circumstances: Why should he or she not see the wisdom of abandoning his nations long-established policy of destroying the liberties of ones own people?

With such questions, one touches upon the existence of a principle of evil, like that which gripped the poor Confederate soldier, almost in a condition of slavery, and illiteracy, like the African-American slave, himself. Why should he fight for the cause of his actual oppressor? How can a miserable wretch such as lackey H.G. Wells exist? Wells would recognize the answer to that question: Eros! Will Shakespeares friend, Christopher Marlowe, wrote elegantly of this in his Dr. Faustus. John Miltons Satan, like Bertrand Russell, would rather reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. Wells, like Adolf Hitler, another of the same pedigree, would rather be Satans lackey in Hell, than a citizen in Heaven; on both counts, both Russell and Wells succeeded. You will not bring them back, nor, likely, any of their kind. They have been destroyed by the culture of which they are a part.

Thus, if we do not willingly purge ourselves of a bad culture, one which, like that 19641972 youth- counterculture, has brought this civilization to the presently ongoing systemic collapse, this generation now in topmost positions of power, and its children and grandchildren, will pay the horrid price suffered by any culture, whose virtual extermination is a prerequisite to further human progress.

That should be warning to those who are reluctant to give up the acquired traits of the 19641972 youth-counterculture. History is so composed, that bad cultures tend to eliminate, or, at least, greatly weaken themselves. Although several thousand years were required to crush the degraded Semitic culture which grew up in Mesopotamia, when the crucial blow was finally struck, by Alexander the Great, the way was cleared for the role which Christianity began to play just over three centuries later. Archeology and related studies warn us, that it is by the weakening of a bad culture, which would otherwise be an impediment to human improvement, that mankind has progressed. Thus, if we do not willingly purge ourselves of a bad culture, one which, like that 19641972 youth-counterculture, has brought this civilization to the presently ongoing systemic collapse, this generation now in topmost positions of power, and its children and grandchildren, will pay the horrid price suffered by any culture, whose virtual extermination is a prerequisite to further human progress. Similarly, if we allow the British cause, as represented by Wells, Russell, and their like, to continue to dominate the course of current history, we and our posterity shall be in large degree, soon obliterated, as the levels of global population are reduced, through the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to the range of not more than the several hundred millions world population which Europes Fifteenth Century encountered.

The central issue of all known human existence to date, and the essential issue which prompts all U.S. patriots to recognize the British oligarchical system as our republics first, continuing, and principal mortal adversary, is this issue of establishing a form of society consistent with the inborn, cognitive potential of each and all human individuals. The issue is to eliminate all expressions of multi-tier society, in which those beneath serve as virtual human cattle to landlord or financier above.

What moves a Russell, is not the desire to exploit, as much as it is to have the status of an exploiter. What moves a Wells, or a Henry A. Kissinger, is, similarly, the passion to be a lackey, rather than live in a world where lackeys do not enjoy the privileges accompanying patronage by an oligarchy. There is, as the cases of the public sexual advocacies of both Russell and Wells attest, something Freudian, or similarly debased, in the proximate motivations of these despicable types of Englishmanand others like them. Indeed, the entirety of empiricisms history, is a history of degraded eroticism. Not merely strange sexual appetites, although those abounded; but, erotic in the more inclusive sense of placing the sense-perceptual experience of intense pleasure-pain at the highest rank of motivating passion. Exemplary, is the smell of homosexual rape in the slaves subjection by the master. It is not by our objective interests, but, by our motives, our passions, that we are ruled.

Russells referenced expostulation, It is difficult to feel at home in a world of ... American supremacy, sums up the point adequately. The kind of republican society represented by the U.S. in its best moments, is a kind of society in which a Russell loses his desire to live. Thus, he must destroy that kind of society. It is that simple a motive. Wells wishes to be a butler to a Russell; a world without Russells, Milners, and so on, is a world which gives a Wells no pleasure, a world in which he would not care to live. He, too, must destroy that kind of society.

The British oligarchys horrid fascination with the persistence of the American Revolution, impelled that oligarchy to look at this phenomenon more deeply. Rather than simply attempting to crush the existing United States, it reckoned that it must uproot the seedling, destroy the seed, and salt the fields, such that this planet might be secured against new growth of such an undesirable plant, at last, and forever. To accomplish that, Britain must eliminate the existence of the institutions upon which the existence of modern European civilization depends. It must turn back the clock of history, accordingly. It must eliminate the nation-state, to return to a kind of global Pax Romana, or a world government approximating that. It must eradicate forms of economy which depend upon the development of the cognitive processes of the general population. It must create a world ruled by the horses posteriors depicted by Swifts satire, a world in which the illiterate masses are kept amused, as Wells proposed, and as Newt Gingrich admirer Lord William Rees-Mogg has implicitly proposed, by rutting with one another in bushes and ditches, when they are not fully occupied with menial chores of a sort which a virtual beast might accomplish.

So, the one-time partners of Lincolns legacy, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and so on, were put against one anothers throats, in World War I. Not sufficient. Some nations, among the victors, survived! Worst of all, the hated U.S.! Try again, put Hitler into power in Germany, and soon, we shall have another wonderful war on the continent! Not good enough; the victor nations still exist. Try nuclear-fission weapons; and pit the biggest victors, the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., against one another, With we Brits managing both sides in the middle. Stalin is a bother; as Russell said, during that period, that is a medical problem, which can be solved accordingly, that we might deal on better terms with those successors whom we think we have waiting in the wings. Russells discussion-partner Khrushchev will cooperate. We shall bring the powers to their knees, in sheer terror of going to the brink of total nuclear warfare! Then, they will beg for world government. Then, we shall win.

So, beginning 1964, young university students of increasingly doubtful literacy, began to imitate the rutting Yahoos of Swifts fable, in the corridors, basements, and bushes of the campuses. Some challenged then, What about reality? The voices from bushes retorted, We dont go there! One might have imagined that he heard Wells giggling from his grave: In a world where pressure on the means of subsistence was a normal condition of life, it was necessary to compensate for the removal of traditional sexual restraints, and so my advocacy of simple and easy love-making had to be supplemented by an adhesion to the propaganda of the Neo-Malthusians.

To understood how the images associated with the 19011928 writings of the lackey publicist H.G. Wells, could have become, as they did, the prevalent characteristics of belief among the university student population of the 19641972 interval, we must understand how modern European civilization works. In other words, we must identify the mechanisms by means of which a chiefly unsuspecting population is so subtly encumbered, even suddenly, with a new mind-set, that it is, afterward, scarcely aware of the fact, and might even deny vehemently that its mind-set has undergone an induced change to such effect. To understand that, we must discover how to discover how modern European civilization works. In other words, we are obliged to examine history in the same way we ought to study any branch of physical science.

Decades ago, the present writer, then engaged in consulting to various branches of industry, was struck by the implications of something which most relevant business managers and their consultants appeared, to him, at that time, simply to take for granted as a cruel fact of business life. In a time when the rudiments of successful industrial society were rather widely known, one of the most interesting, and important facts respecting production, was the fact that it was possible to foresee, even years in advance, a general change in popular taste for products and product-designs. We, whose treatment of the productive processes themselves must take into account the fact of changing consumer tastes, must ask ourselves, how was it possible, that the business executives who planned the new designs of products to emerge even a specific number of years later, could effectively foresee what public tastes would be. During the writers early adulthood, this was the characteristic problem of manufacturing garments; the distinctive feature of the rise of power of Wall Streets General Motors over the industrial philosophies of Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler, was General Motors emulation of the New York garment center. How, for example, did we foresee, what typical women, in identified social strata, would prefer, as a style change, not only months, but even years ahead. What does this phenomenon say about the human mind, the opinion-making of those customers? What does this tell us about the manipulability of public opinion generally?

This same question bears upon the ability of the British to foresee the induced changes in cultural-paradigm which they, and their confederates brought about with the hegemonic trends among the university student populations of 19641972. It was not quite as simple a matter as shortening skirt-lengths almost to the hips; but, as H.G. Wells would have been greatly pleased to observe, there was a connection.

As one might recognize, from study of my writings on the function of time-reversal in physical-economic processes, this question, which I have just summarized, touches upon the most profound and important philosophical questions respecting mankinds efficient relationship to nature. The question thus posed by industrial experience, is simply a reflection of a much larger domain: What is history? Not history as chronology, or chronology enhanced by mere academic commentary upon commentary, but living, real history, as history makes itself. To render comprehensible a valid representation of the connection between Wells of 19011928 and the university Baby-Boomer population of 19641972, the following summarized considerations are indispensable.

When some among us were children and adolescents, the raw idea of history made its impact on our awareness in chiefly two ways: the living genealogy in which our own existence is situated, and the antiquity of the process of emergence and development of the language we use. In the present writers time, and for earlier generations, these two impressions converged upon one another to relatively strongest effect about the time we approached adolescence, and were exposed, in that time to not only foreign languages, but to the importance then attached to the study of both Latin and Classical Greek. The timing of the appearance of that effect upon our young selves, had to do with our developing sense of the evolution of modern mathematics and physical science out of origins more than two thousand years earlier. The attempt to put together, in some coherent way, these three considerations: genealogy, language, and the transmission of a developing body of scientific ideas, is the rudimentary basis for a modern study of human history.

The point of this, is the urgency of freeing mankind from our species, unfortunately, commonly displayed habit, of blindly following current changes in public opinion, a habit of viewing opinions impressed upon us, in our role as victims, as unchallengeable, sacred gifts of pagan gods, of some Hegelian or Savigny Weltgeist, Zeitgeist, or, for the case of the most pitiable class of dupe, the populist, the Volksgeist. Is there some comprehensible principle of Reason, which we might observe as the underlying metric of a science of history? Is there a comprehensible ordering-principle underlying what a Socratically self-critical, well-informed mind might wish to identify as history?

Of course there is; that is the subject-matter to which the present writer has devoted the principal amount of his adolescent and adult life: the nature of human progress as measurable in the human species often successful efforts at increasing power over the universe. In other words: measurable in the sense of those subjective processes of valid discovery of new principle, by means of which mankind increases our species per-capita power over the universe. This led this writer, relatively early in adult life, to focus his lifes efforts on enhancement of an admired Leibnizs discoveries in the science of physical economy. However, economy is only a facet and reflection of the more general process of practice of ideas, a practice of mankinds total relationship to the universe, a total relationship which the realities of physical economy best typify. From this vantage-point, one may identify what ought to appear to be rather obvious clues to those mechanisms, by means of which the influence of a 19011928 publicist might have become the prevailing ideology among a university student population of 19641972.

As most of the present writers published work on physical economy and related matters, emphasizes this, mankinds relationship to the universe, and to our species itself, bears no similarity to that of any other living species. The distinctiveecological, if you willrelationship of man to the universe, is mans increasing power, as a species, over that universe. This power is located in the manner in which the properly developed, sovereign, innate cognitive potentials of the individual human mind, discover new, valid principles of the universe, both physical principles, and the principles which govern this remarkable subjective potential of the individual human cognitive processes themselves. In short, history is a history of orderable sequences of discovery and practice of ideas, in Platos specific, anti-empiricist sense of idea.

For us, as members of European culture, we must first master the history of our own culture, as from the inside. Only after we have applied the Socratic method to smoke out the hidden, usually perverse assumptions underlying our own, naive beliefs, have we established the intellectual foundations for examining the process of history in a more general way, the competence to pass judgment upon cultures not our own, that competence which is typical of a true science, capable of judging everything. The beginning of that initial subject-matter, European civilization, is the emergence of Classical Greek culture, as typified by the passage from Homeric epics through Solon, through the great Classical tragedians, and through the foundations for modern civilization supplied by Plato and the following century or two of his Academy after him. The essence of this process of initial internal development of European civilization, is the Greek image of Prometheus, as that image is typified by the work of Aeschylus.

Classical Greek culture, thus viewed, is a process of freeing the Greeks from submission to the assumed power of pagan gods, a process of freeing mankind, as an idea of mankind, from any notion that the human species is anything but the noblest, most beautiful existence within all known Creation. There is a connection, of this sort, between the Ulysses of the Odyssey and the Prometheus of Aeschylus Prometheus Bound. Aeschylus Prometheus is prepared to endure immortal torment, for the sake of keeping secret the forecastable, self-induced doom of Zeus and his fellow-gods of Olympus, a secret which Prometheus keeps, so that the noble human species might at last be freed from the rule over their minds by those evil pagan gods.

So, as it is written in Acts 17:2223, the Apostle Paul comes to the place in Athens dedicated to the Unknown God. Paul speaks:

Thus, Jesus Christs mission was expressed, as the establishment, in practice, for the first time in all known human existence, of a universal equality and oneness of all mankind, an equality rooted in no lesser consideration, than the fact each man and woman is made the noblest creature in the universe, because made in the cognitive image of God, a creature, by nature, beloved of God, to exert dominion in this universe. The Christian Apostles takeover of the richest contributions of Classical Greek culture, as Christianitys most suitable garment for its continuing mission in this world, and the fight of Christianity against that Rome which the Apostles knew as variously Babylon and Whore of Babylon, is the central feature of European civilizations unfolding history since the day the Apostle Paul stood upon the Athens hill.

However, until the Fifteenth-Century aftermath of the 14391440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council of Florence, there existed no form of society consistent with such a Christian principle. Over ninety percent of the population of each nation lived in the estate of human cattle, or in the debased, oligarchical status of brutish human-cattle-herders. Man in the image of God had no recognized rights under Diocletian or his followers of Byzantium or feudal western Europe. The principle which, to date, the Leibnizian Preamble of the U.S. Constitution represents with an exceptionally good approximation, exemplifies what the founders of the Council of Florence intended by their sponsorship of the first approximation of a Christian form of society, the France reconstructed under Louis XI.

That is to say, a form of society in which the accountability of the state for the promotion of the natural rights of all persons, as persons, was, for the first time in feudal history, placed above, and in opposition to the feudal rights of the land-owning and financier oligarchs and their lackeys. Since Louis XI lacked the power to eliminate the oligarchs, he placed himself as representative of the sovereign-state, above them, and thus, by virtue of the sovereign states accountability for principle, made the sovereign state under his reign an efficient agency for that Christian principle, in opposition to the pagan principle intrinsic to feudal forms of society.

That is to imply the corollary point, a point which we may be certain Frances Louis XI would have acknowledged as a measure of his reigns uncompleted work. The essential problem of modern European civilization, is that it has yet to free itself from the institutional heritage of what the Christian Apostles rightly named Whore of Babylon, the Latin imperial, bureaucratic Rome of Augustus Caesar: from the pagan form of state bureaucracy. Here lies the key to the transmission of Wells fantasies of 19011928 into the behavioral code of university students of the 19641972 period of cultural paradigm-shift.

This, as codified by Diocletian, persisted as the evil inherent in Byzantium. This Roman imperial bureaucratization is expressed, by intent, as the permanent civil-service bureaucracy of the British Crown. It is a tradition of imperial corruption by bureaucracy, which an Anglophile spawn of the Confederacy, President Grover Cleveland, fostered, in the abused name of reform, for the United States. It is the rot within our republican institutions, an imitation of the British permanent, civil-service bureaucracy, which has degenerated into the ruling U.S. Federal bureaucracy and judiciary of today.

This continuing role of bureaucracies, and bureaucratized judiciaries, in imitation of the principle of Augustus Caesars Roman imperial bureaucracy, is a crucial, pervasive flaw in the existing institutions of modern European civilization, world-wide. The kernel of the problem of administrative practice so ordered, is the existence of systems of rules which acknowledge no principle, but have, rather, the nature of the terms of a commercial contract, or what some terribly misguided theologians and others identify as a covenant.

This, of course, is directly opposed to all Christian principle, as Pauls celebrated I Corinthians 13 exemplifies the working point. The quality which identifies the person as in the image of God, is identified by Plato, and by the Apostle Paul as agap. Agap is expressed, in Plato, as the passion for truth and justice, as the governing cognitive principle, the informed quality of passion which guides ones cognitive processes and will for action. So it is with the Apostle Paul and the Gospel of John.

When a body of law is informed by this passion, we may speak of natural law. By natural law we should signify the impact of an efficiently served agapic passion for man, as a sacred life of a being made in the cognitive image of God, a view of mans nature which must inform the cognitive processes of administration of society, especially those functions associated with justice. It is that conception of man, which is to be served in all legislative and other conflicts respecting positive law: Does this decision coincide with those requirements which an agapic notion of the individual person implicitly imposes upon the society as a whole.

The crucial feature of Lincolns strategy, was the rapid development of the basic economic infrastructure and agro-industrial potential of the region under his command, while annihilating the adversarys economic-military capability for continuing to deploy effective war-fighting capabilities.

This was Abraham Lincolns conception of the law, as expressed in his Presidency, in all leading matters. No such conception is to be found in representatives of the philosophy of government among his oligarchical adversaries of that time: none among the followers of John Locke, such as the southern slave-owners; none among those New York bankers in the spirit of the Bank of Manhattans treasonous Aaron Burr, Martin van Buren, or treasonous August Belmont; none, among the New England families of the British East India Companys opium-trafficking tradition. Lincolns central point of concern was to ensure the existence and durability of those qualities of institution, especially of sovereign nationhood, without which human freedom, and natural human rights can not exist. This notion of essential institutions was governed by the Christian notion of natural law, of agap. Among his oligarchical opponents and rivals, there was no principle, only cognitively sterile commercial contracts, mere covenants.

Read the original:

Today's Nuclear Balance of Power: The Wells of Doom - Executive Intelligence Review (EIR)

May 1968: early morning in the sprawling, 18-room log cabin on the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Drive where the famous freak-out artist Frank Zappa lives. Outside, finches and sparrows are chirping and the sun is burning off the first-light smog; inside, though, the atmosphere is still blinded and dark, the air choking with cigarette smoke.

As usual, Zappa has been up all night working at the piano and desk that dominate the enormous main living area, swivelling in his chair from desk to piano and back again as he composes his masterpieces, one after the other, while guzzling strong black coffee and chain-smoking the cigarettes that have been his only drugs since he was 11 years old.

Now Frank is sleeping. As are most of the other people who share the house with him: his English secretary Pauline Butcher, his former girlfriend Pamela Zarubica, his recording engineer Dick Kunc, designer Cal Schenkel, tour manager Dick Snork Barber, and Mothers Of Invention band members Ian Underwood and Jim Motorhead Sherwood. Then there are those non-residents, famous and not-so, sleeping in various nooks and crannies, or just stretched out in front of the huge stone fireplace, beneath the 14-candle chandelier.

The only person up at this hour is Zappas 23-year-old wife, Gail, who tiptoes around the bodies with their eight-month-old baby daughter, Moon Unit, under her arm.

Life was complete chaos, Gail told Classic Rock in 2012. One time I said to Frank: That guys been here for three days and I dont even know who he is! He said: Dont worry about it. Then youd run into [teenage groupie] Miss Mercy with a stick of butter peeled like a banana that shed just be eating. Oh, and a rocknroll band would arrive in the middle of the night and just walk in; there were no locks on the door. It was just insane.

Going into the kitchen, where there is no floor (I dont know what happened, it just disappeared!), Gail hunts for whatever food might be left to make breakfast. The stove is on a platform so high that she has to reach up to put on the frying pan. The hardest part, though, is that Gail cant just drive to the store to buy food. We didnt have a car. If we had to get groceries, I hitchhiked, she says. I went right out the back door with my thumb out and went down to the market. I did the laundry that way too! Id have Moon on one hip and laundry on the other I mean, it sounds insane, but those things had to be done.

Nothing must keep Gails husband from his work. For he is not just any rock musician, but a composer. And, as he explains in his semiautobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book: A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Pauline Butcher, Franks former secretary, speaking from her home in Singapore, recalls her boss as a formidable man. He made it very clear he shouldnt be interrupted if he was working. And from the minute he got up to the minute he went to bed, he would be working. We would not dare to go near him. He would raise his head from his desk or the piano and think about what you had said to him, and give you a very short, swift answer to make it clear that you were not welcome.

As Zappa told an early interviewer: The lifestyle that I have is probably neither desirable nor useful to most people.

Nor, a cynic might add, was the music he composed. But then Frank Zappa neither lived his life nor made his music to please most people. He did so to please himself. And anybody who expected to remain in his orbit would have to come second to that.

Ask anyone now, 30 years after his death from prostate cancer in 1993, who Frank Zappa was and they might describe any number of people. Not just a rock star, but an avant-garde jazz musician, a classical composer, a filmmaker, a writer, satirist and university lecturer. Zappa was the guy John Lennon said hed always wanted to meet; he was the record label entrepreneur who signed Captain Beefheart and produced his greatest work, Trout Mask Replica; the mentor who Alice Cooper now calls the original shock rocker.

And that was just in his late-60s Log Cabin period. By the time he died, at the age of 52, Zappa had also become a pioneer of computerised electronic music, a campaigner for voter registration, and the personal hero Vaclav Havel wished to designate as Czechoslovakias cultural liaison officer with the USA. Others will simply recall him as the guy who gave his kids funny names like Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen; a man who, when asked once whether he feared giving his children unusual names might cause problems for them in later life, replied: Itll be their last name that gets them into trouble.

For me, Frank Zappa was the most intimidating person I ever interviewed. But that was in 1984, long after his empire had been built, his rule established. I was there to talk to him laughably, I now realise about rock music, and Frank had never been interested in that. Pauline Butcher recalls: He listened to the blues and classical. He did not play any rocknroll whatsoever none. He loved Stravinsky, Varse, Bartok They were the main ones.

I think he was unusual probably from the time he was born, said Gail in 2012, speaking on the phone from the kitchen of the house she and Frank lived in for nearly 25 years. I think that he came pretty much full-blown the way that he was. I dont think you can change yourself so radically. I think he just was a person who was very interested in freedom. He was a patriot and he was a composer. Just a strange combination.

Certainly as a child he was different. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, four days before Christmas in 1940, Frank Vincent Zappa was the eldest of four kids to a French- Italian mother, Rose Marie, and a father, Francis Vincent Senior, a Sicilian immigrant of Italian, Greek and Arab ancestry. At home, Frank spoke mainly Italian, learned from his grandparents; at school he spoke Yankee-doodle-dandy.

His father was a mathematician and scientist working for the US defence industry, so the family moved around. This included a spell in Florida during Franks infant years, before settling back in Baltimore, where his fathers new job at the Edgewood Arsenal Chemical Warfare facility meant there were always gas masks around the place, waiting to be pulled on quickly in the event of accidents. Mention of germs and germ warfare would later infiltrate Franks music.

He was a sickly child, stricken by bouts of asthma and endless ear, nose and throat complaints. When the family doctor inserted pellets of radium into his nostrils to combat sinusitis, it so traumatised him that nostril references and nasal images would also surface regularly in his adult work.

When he was 12 the family left Baltimore for good, moving down to Southern California, where Frank seniors work took him to posts in Monterey, Claremont and El Cajon, before finally settling in San Diego, where Frank junior attended Mission Bay High School and where he joined his first band, The Black-Outs, as a drummer.

Pauline Butcher, who met Zappa in London in September 1967 before going to work for him, says she thinks his thing was affected by going to so many schools when he was young. He ended up being with all the drop-outs and the people that werent popular at school. I think that stayed with him the rest of his life. He related to the underdog and the people who were outside the mainstream.

A walking contradiction, he was a serious-minded teenager who composed his first orchestral work when he was 14, wrote precocious letters requesting meetings with his heroes Igor Stravinsky, who lived in California, and Edgard Varse, who lived in New York. (Varse agreed to a meeting, then cancelled.) Yet he spent most of his free time listening to doo-wop records and watching monster movies, cruising all night in a car with his only friend, another high-school outsider named Don Van Vliet, later renamed and mentored by Zappa as Captain Beefheart (something the Captain, himself a mass of weird contradictions, never quite forgave him for).

But if the teenage Zappa was nerdish and unpopular, what hardened and turned him into the unforgiving, controlling personality that characterised everything about his adult life was an incident that took place when he was 21. By then Zappa was the proud owner of a little five-track facility in Cucamonga, which hed bought with the fee hed received for scoring a B-movie cowboy flick called Run Home Slow. Thus, in a typically oddball way, began Zappas career as a composer and producer. Early success included a doo-wop number for The Penguins, titled Memories Of El Monte (for which hed received 75 cents), and Grunion Run, the B-side of a novelty single called Tijuana Surf which went to No.1 in Mexico.

He was awaiting royalties for that when, in 1962, a middle-aged man offered to pay him $100 to make a party tape for the guys early-60s code for a porn tape. Hardly high art, but 100 bucks would go some way to financing his next dreamed-of project, a movie hed written called Captain Beefheart Vs. The Grunt People. So the following evening, Frank and a girlfriend recorded themselves bouncing around on a squeaky mattress, making Ooh and Aah sounds and trying not to laugh. There was nothing funny, though, when the middle-aged John turned out to be one Detective Willis, and Zappa was sentenced to six months in jail for peddling pornography.

He eventually served only 11 days in jail, with the remainder reduced to probation, but it gave him enough of a criminal record to not be eligible to be drafted to Vietnam. The rest was all downhill, according to those that knew him. He was left with a permanent sense of injustice. Worse, he was left with a morbid fear of the police, a condition that led both to his outlawing of drug use in his presence, and his bitter mistrust of authority figures and institutions.

He was so terrified of being arrested, says Butcher. If the police had come and found drugs in the house, then he would have been thrown into jail as well and he couldnt have gone through another experience like that. Its never been totally explained what happened to him there, but there are some implications that he was sexually abused because he had long hair.

By the mid-60s, at a time when the clean-cut Beatles were still regarded as a threat to the nations youth, Zappa was every straight-thinking Middle- Americans nightmare writ large: long hair, Zapata moustache, thrift-store clothes and an apparent dislike of hot baths of cold showers. But he knew his days of being the lone freak, as he later put it, of the small town he lived in were numbered. He just needed a vehicle to transport him to the next level.

No man is an island not even Frank Zappa. And he would need the help of other like-minded solitaries to help free him up to do what he wanted to do. Enter the most talented, misunderstood, repulsively attired yet aptly named group in the rocknroll pantheon: the Mothers Of Invention. Betraying some of the bitterness that would understandably come to characterise many of the former Mothers memories of their association with Zappa, their original bassist, Roy Estrada, once put it: Frank joined us, we didnt join him.

That is true but only to a point. They were known as the Soul Giants when Zappa joined as guitarist in 1965, along with vocalist Ray Collins Zappa had released a couple of his songs under monikers like The Heartbreakers and Baby Ray & The Ferns. They were a talented but unadventurous weekend bar band playing covers at a club called The Broadside in the downtrodden Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. Zappa, the Sagittarian fire sign with a brain like a planet, was about the change all that.

I suggested we develop our own stuff and try to get a record contract, Zappa later recalled. The leader at that time, a guy called Davey Coronado, said: No way. Because if you learn original stuff, the bars wont hire you. So he quit. And he was right. We stayed together, changed our name to the Mothers, and we did get fired.

No band was ever gonna be big enough for Frank Zappa to share leadership in. Fortunately, the mid-60s was a fast-paced musical melting pot where the music business was already midway through its transformation from single-oriented pop to album-oriented rock. When Tom Wilson producer of Bob Dylans earliest albums and original musical mentor to the Velvet Underground caught an early Mothers Of Invention gig on Sunset Strip, he thought he saw a progressive rock and blues outfit not unlike The Doors and Love, then also making baby steps into the scene. Signing the Mothers to the MGM-Verve label, he had no idea what he was in for once Zappa got the band inside a proper recording studio.

Despite being briefly considered as a producer for The Doors, Zappa viewed fellow Angelino acts like The Doors and Love as glorified hippies, which he considered a very conformist group, with an established uniform, vocabulary and lifestyle. The Mothers were something else: they were freaks. Hence the title of their first album: Freak Out!

A double album released at a time (June 1966) when single albums were still mainly comprised of hits and filler, Freak Out! was an anomaly on every level, even in a year that saw the release of game-changers like the Beach Boys Pet Sounds and The Beatles Revolver. From its inner gatefold sleeve comprising various boxes of thank-yous and credits including names like Carl Franzoni (aka Captain Fuck, self-styled leader of the LA freak scene), Suzy Creamcheese (a fictional catch-all groupie that would crop up on several subsequent Mothers albums), Kim Fowley (on hypophone), even ex-wife Kay (credited for inspiring Anyway The Wind Blows) Freak Out! seemed built to confuse all but the already metaphorically, at least freaked out.

Tom Wilson was credited with production, but soon handed over control as everyone finally did to Zappa. Wilson got a good inkling of what he was in for after Eric Burdon, who Wilson had hired Zappa to produce a couple of tracks for, described the experience as like working with Hitler. When Zappa hit the producer up for $500 to bring in as many freaks as he could find from the Strip to record the free-form musical malaise that comprised side four, The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet (described by Zappa on the sleeve as Unfinished Ballet In Two Tableaux, the first titled Ritual Dance Of The Child Killer), Wilson simply paid up. Life was too short for this kind of shit.

Not unexpectedly, Freak Out! was not a hit. Yet its message outstripped sales to such a degree that the names Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention became synonymous throughout the album-buying world with a musical mien that belonged not to the narrow enthusiasms of the chartbuying public, but to the new rock cognoscenti; the ones who listened not just to Jimi Hendrix and The Doors but also to John Coltrane and John Cage, maybe Bartok and Stockhausen too.

As Melody Maker noted in its belated review of Freak Out!, published in March 1967: Throwing off their social chains, freeing themselves from their national social slavery and realising whatever potential they possess for free expression the Mothers Of Invention toss the moral code aside like spare sugar lumps. That is, theyre sending up American society, advocating free love, nay, advocating freedom already.

Sales of the album may not have jumped significantly as a result, but word of mouth spread like wildfire, and six months later the Mothers were headlining Londons Royal Albert Hall.

The true musical identity of the Mothers, though, was not really established until their second album, Absolutely Free the first to feature keyboard player Don Preston and sax player Bunk Gardner. Frank and I both had the same record collection, Preston remembers now, from his Hollywood home. But Id already been playing outside music for a few years. We didnt play jazz or classical, we improvised to unusual things.

The most unusual being the bicycle which Preston (who also claims to have invented the Moog synthesiser) taught Frank to play. Joining Zappa, whom hed known since the early 60s, Preston was a natural fit. I was just overjoyed to be able to do that kind of material and have an audience listen to it, instead of just doing it in my garage, he says. At that point, Preston recalls, there was little separation between band and band leader. He was a lot of fun to be around and hang out with, he says now.

Recorded in just four days in November 1966 and released four months later in March 1967, and billed as the first and second in A Series Of Underground Oratorios (side one and side two to you and me), Absolutely Free set the template for everything Zappa would record during what is now regarded as the classic Mothers period, from 1966 to 1970. Seemingly free-form jazz-influenced rock although actually minutely annotated neoclassical music using mainly electric instruments was interwoven with extracts of off-the-wall taped conversations, lewd commentary, and a sense of the absurd that bordered on sinister.

The Mothers musical ethos was best embodied on Zappas first real masterpiece, on side two, Brown Shoes Dont Make It. Ostensibly a blues-acid-rock-pantomime-groove-laden satire on suburban America, with Captain Beefheart growling in the background, it switches suddenly into a third-person narrative about a sleazy government official fantasising about screwing a 13-year-old girl, rocking and rolling and acting obscene. None of which really conveys the dizzy sense of watching a theatrical production crumble before your eyes, revealing only the actors, naked, learning their lines. And failing.

For the first six months after Preston and Gardner joined, the band rehearsed for eight hours a day, seven days a week. There were strict rules: if you were sick, you could be asked for a doctors note or lose a days pay. Preston describes the band as democratic, although it was always clear who was in charge.

Zappa had already begun staying at a different hotel from the rest of the band. Drummer-cum trumpeter Jimmy Carl Black later recalled: The Mothers were into sex, drugs not heavy drugs and rocknroll.

Zappa, by contrast, was only into one of those things. He had been curious enough to watch while Ray Collins dropped acid, and not impressed enough to try it himself. Zappas only known drug foray, smoking 10 joints in one sitting, just left him with a sore throat, he said. And he certainly didnt like rocknroll.

But when it came to sex, and taking advantage of the newly announced permissive society, Frank was right there at the cutting edge. Hed already been married (to his teenage sweetheart Kay Sherman) and divorced before the Mothers. Now he revelled in those aspects of the freak scene that included groupies, fuck buddies and one-night stands. Even when he was shacked up with Pamela Zarubica, it wasnt unusual for her to come home and find Frank in bed with different girls. Because of their open relationship, outbreaks of crabs were common, as was getting the clap. Indeed crabs would later inspire several Zappa classics, such as Toads Of The Short Forest.

His second wife, Gail who had spent her formative years in London, as part of the same social scene as The Beatles and the Stones had also for a short time been a groupie. And an excellent groupie too, Frank boasted in interviews. It didnt matter to me that she had slept around with other beat men.

Yet Pauline Butcher says he had a more traditional outlook on marriage. He didnt think the marriage would last if Gail had outside sexual partners. He had outside women, but not to the extent that he would leave Gail or break up his family.

Gail, a blonde-haired beauty, had met Frank in early 1966. He had the clap and crabs, the latter venturing as far north as his hair. She married him a year later, on the heels of his first European tour. Speaking to Classic Rock in 2012, she described Frank as incredibly stable at home. But of course, all that changes when hes on the road and, from a wifes point of view or from a girlfriends point of view, you have all the occupational hazards that rocknroll can present to you. All I can say is that the secret to not killing yourself over stuff like that is you stay focused on what it is that you want for yourself in your life.

Zappa sang about sex endlessly, in every permutation and situation he could conceive of. Sometimes it was puerile (Penis Dimension), sometimes it was profound (America Drinks And Goes Home), but it was always there somewhere. Proto-feminism at play, perhaps? Or just a more clever form of male chauvinist pigdom? When Zappa told Rolling Stone he found the work of knob-modelling groupies Cynthia and Dianne Plaster Caster artistically and sociologically really heavy, no one knew if he was joking. Later he hired Cynthia to become a full-time babysitter for Gail, a role she proved very good at.

Meanwhile, back at the coal face, the divide between the Mothers and their leader grew even wider when Verve failed to pick up the option for the bands next album, and Zappas street-smart manager, Herb Cohen, used the loophole to negotiate a much better deal for Zappa that included the formation of his own production company, through which he would control the release not just of all future Mothers Of Invention albums but also his own solo projects and those of any other artists he chose to sponsor. Those who were there say that this marked a key staging point in Zappas transformation from band leader to group dictator.

Zappa was always the leader, but we all had equal responsibilities, says Don Preston. By the time we reached the Log Cabin, Zappa was the main guy; he was the man. It felt more isolated.

The shift became complete with the release of Zappas first solo album, Lumpy Gravy, released in August 1967, just five months after Absolutely Free. At this point things got really complicated. And they stayed that way for the rest of his life.

Put as simply as possibly, Lumpy Gravy went from being an orchestral work performed by a group of session players he named the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, to a drastically re-edited strand in a larger production called No Commercial Potential, which itself comprised a further two albums, both credited to Frank and the Mothers: Were Only In It For The Money (released in March 1968) and Cruising With Ruben And The Jets (December 1968).

While none of the albums sounded remotely like the others, according to Zappa it was all one album. He claimed that he could cut the master tapes into different running orders and it would still make sense. It was, he explained, part of his project/object concept: each album was a different project but all the albums combining to make a bigger object.

While one of the related albums Cruising With Ruben And The Jets, a set of doo-wop songs corralled into a concept album about a fictitious group called Ruben & The Jets baffled critics to the point of irritation, the other two remain among the finest works to bear either the Zappa or Mothers imprimaturs. Indeed Lumpy Gravy remained one of Zappas personal favourites. Working around the clock in the studio with a full orchestra at his disposal and state-of-the-art 12-track recording facilities, Zappa was in his control-freak element. He drove everyone crazy, says Preston, making us do 28 takes of the simplest little bridge.

But it was the next Mothers album, Were Only In It For The Money, that really sealed the deal here in the UK. An alternative-universe take on The Beatles Sgt Pepper, complete with hilariously mocking sleeve and a cameo from a stuttering Eric Clapton, it was one of the most incisive and unforgiving satires on the whole so-called 60s movement.

Everybody else thought they were God! Zappa said of The Beatles. I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group. Perverse to the last, he let it be known he preferred The Monkees.

By now Zappa was living in a small, third-floor apartment in New York with his new wife, Gail, then pregnant with their first child. It was at this point that drummer Arthur Dyer Tripp III joined the Mothers. Tripp had performed solo concerts of the works of John Cage and Stockhausen heavyweight stuff, considering the height of drummer-related sophistication had entailed Ringo Starr singing _Yellow _Submarine. Tripp had just finished a two-year stint playing with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and he was ready for anything.

Frank was continuously on the prowl for new ideas and inspirations, Tripp says, speaking from his home in Mississippi, so just about anything we discussed was used. To be associated with a guy who basically favoured anything goes, but at a high level, was heaven for me. I shared Franks counter-culture, anti-mainstream philosophy, and in those days we made fun of everything.

Tripp recalls Zappa being ill at ease in social situations. He tended to feel comfortable only when he was in control of the subject matter, and its direction, says the drummer.

It was a world away from how Zappa was seen by his fans. When Jimi Hendrix dropped by the New York apartment to say hi, instead of the crazy scene he had envisaged, he found Gail and Frank making supper. That didnt stop him getting up and jamming with the Mothers on stage that night, though Zappa left him to it, sitting in the stalls to watch Jimi play. It was also in New York that he appeared in an episode of The Monkees, playing Mike Nesmith, while Nesmith, dressed as Zappa, played him. (He was also in The Monkees movie Head, playing Davy Joness mentor, while leading a talking bull.)

He was a precociously intelligent man in a business which is not necessarily filled with a lot of intelligent people, and he stood out, observes Pauline Butcher. He worked out he wasnt a pretty boy like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he didnt play their kind of music, he didnt even like it, and if he was going to get himself heard he was going to have to do something radically different. He went out of his way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in womens clothes. All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.

By the time the extended Zappa family had moved back to Los Angeles in 1968, being radically different was hardly a stretch. He and Gail rented a log cabin in Laurel Canyon once owned by 20s cowboy movie star Tom Mix for $700 a month. Frank dubbed it Freak Central. The Canyon had been transformed from a rundown, overgrown semi-wilderness by musicians looking for cheap places to hang out and get high, to play their music beneath the bird-of-paradise plants, thickets of pepper trees and pines.

It was here that the Zappa mythology that had begun to build in New York now rose to a whole new, stupendously far-out level. Visitations by rock royalty were daily occurrences. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull turned up, followed later the same night by members of The Who, followed even later by Captain Beefheart, aka Zappas old school friend Don Van Vliet. They finished the evening jamming in the basement on Be Bop A Lula. (Beefheart complained that Jagger gave him a dud mic to prevent him being overpowered vocally.) Eric Clapton stopped by the next night, but Frank was unimpressed, complaining that he wasnt the jamming type.

Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick was another visitor. In her autobiography, she describes the Log Cabin as like a trolls kingdom. Fuzzy-haired women lounged in long antique dresses, and naked children ran to and fro while Frank sat behind piles of electronic equipment discussing his latest ideas for orchestrating satirical hippy rock music openly [making] fun of the very counter-culture he was helping to sustain.

Then there were the wannabes and hopefuls. When Larry Fischer, a 24-year-old escaped mental patient, jailed at 16 for trying to knife his mother, turned up to sing Frank a song, Zappa signed him to his new Bizarre label and recorded a double album with him, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer. Zappa continued to mentor Fischer (described as something not entirely musical) until he threw a glass jar at Moon, at which point Gail put her foot down and Fischer was permanently ejected. A more successful newcomer Zappa signed to Bizarre was the Alice Cooper Band, a group of reprobates who dressed in womens clothing and sang songs called Earwigs To Eternity and B.B. On Mars.

Id seen Zappa play at Thee Experience club in LA, Alice recalls now. One night it was Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix, all jamming. Then Frank gets up and does an imitation of each one of them! Then he takes off and starts playing his own riffs, and those other guys just stood there, like, What?! Cos this guy was doing stuff that they had never seen before. Even Jimi Hendrix. Frank gave Hendrix his first wah-wah pedal and showed him what it was.

When one of the Log Cabin regulars told Frank of this band that every record label in LA had turned down, he asked to see them. The following morning, at seven oclock, they were on his front lawn, bashing out their strangely unlovely set.

We got our times wrong. Wed heard he wanted us there at seven, we figured he meant seven in the morning, says Alice. But we played five songs that were two minutes long and had, like, 25 changes in them, and he sat there and he listened. Then he looked at me and said: I dont get it. I dont get what you just did. And then we played another one for him that did the same thing. And then another, and another. They were like if you took an ELP prog piece and condensed it to two minutes. And he just kept going: I dont get this! I said: Is that bad? He said: No. The fact I dont get it is why Im signing you.

Arguably the most infamous of all were The GTOs, the group of teenage groupies that Zappa took under his wing. They originally called themselves the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, until the night they turned up at the Cabin naked except for bibs and giant nappies, their hair up in pigtails and all sucking lollipops. A delighted Frank insisted they dance on stage with the Mothers that night. And that they change their name to The GTOs.

GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously, Girls Together Only, Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Often, and any number of similar acronyms. The GTOs would get dressed up every night to go dancing, cos there was safety in numbers, said Gail Zappa in 2012. They wore these wild outfits [and], they would also get in the Whisky free so they could dance. Cos for a while they were the entertainment.

In the GTOs there was Miss Cinderella, Miss Christine, Miss Pamela, Miss Mercy and Miss Lucy (plus, at different intervals, Miss Sandra and/or Sparky). Having proved themselves by appearing on stage at several Mothers Of Invention shows as dancers and/or backing vocalists, in November 1968 Zappa put them on a weekly retainer of $35 each. People just got off on them, recalls Alice Cooper. They were a trip.

When Zappa produced their sole album, Permanent Damage, in 1969, he got Rod Stewart to sing on the track The Ghost Chained To The Past, Present, And Future (Shock Treatment). Jeff Beck and Nicky Hopkins also appeared on the record, conducted by Frank.

And did Zappa enjoy any extra perks from the job? Pauline Butcher is emphatic that he did not. He wasnt interested in The GTOs on a groupie level, she says. He wasnt a sexual predator at all. He didnt lunge after anyone. He didnt come across as a dirty old man-type of thing. He was not like that. He was far too laid-back.

Why should he, when he and the Mothers were thronged by groupies at every gig they played? Again, Butcher is defensive on the subject. He only had these women on the road because he was highly sexually charged, I suppose, and he just needed an outlet for his sex. But the fact is, Zappa wrote more songs about groupies and sex in general including taped conversations with groupies discussing their various conquests than any other artist before or since.

One time when Zappa went back to play in London, Pauline, who had stayed behind in LA, got tickets for the show for a friend of hers. She went to the club afterwards where he was, she recalls. And Frank said to her: Im looking for a fuck. Are you available? She said: No, Im married. He said: Well, does that make any difference? He would get very grumpy if he didnt get any groupies. And then Gail would have to fly out and sort him out.

Nevertheless, both Gail Zappa and Pauline Butcher insist he was a different man at home. When it came to personal and professional relationships with women, Zappa could be nurturing, inspiring even.

The main thing was, he listened to what I had to say, says Butcher. This, in 1967, 68, was revolutionary to me. It was just so unusual for me, [for him] to listen and take seriously what a woman had to say. He treated me like an equal. Which was extraordinary.

If so, she was the exception. From here on in, Zappa rarely, if ever, treated anyone like an equal. By the time he came to record what was officially his second solo album, Hot Rats, in the summer of 1969, the transformation was complete. Frank Zappa was the Mothers, and the Mothers were whatever Frank Zappa wanted them to be. In this case, that meant a collection of jazz-leaning orchestral rock with an extra twist of post-psychedelic savagery.

Opening track Peaches En Regalia, despite its compositionally complex parameters, would become the most instantly recognisable Zappa track of his career the All Right Now of the freak generation. Willie The Pimp featured typical Zappa outsiders such as Captain Beefheart on vocals and Don Sugarcane Harris recently bailed by Zappa from jail after his latest drug bust on violin. Willie would also become an unlikely term in this context, but nonetheless true a real crowd pleaser. Violinist Jean Luc Ponty plays on It Must Be A Camel, and a young, uncredited Lowell George also features.

Although the album didnt even break the US Top 100, it became Zappas only Top 10 hit in the UK and would go on to become one of his biggest-selling album worldwide. Not that Frank gave a shit. Or at least he said he didnt. Within weeks of its release, he had officially broken the Mothers up.

Pauline Butcher says that the first night she arrived at the Log Cabin, in May 1968, he told me that he wanted to break up the Mothers. All the way through the band, he said this. There was another crisis about a month later, and he was gonna break up the band then. And then Ian Underwood said he would rehearse the band, and that started the lifelong habit of Frank always having someone else in the band rehearse the band, and learn the parts before he joined them, because he hadnt got the patience.

Zappa himself put it more bluntly: How long can you be enthusiastic about music as an art form, never mind music as a business, when it involves other people that you have to rely on, and they piss on your shoe? he said. Why do you have to put up with that? The more I can rely on myself, the better I like it.

Whatever ones views on Frank Zappa his music, his personal politics, his attitude to women and fellow band members by the end of the 1960s he had become as significant a figure in rock culture as almost anyone else one might wish to make similar claims for. He would re-form the Mothers Of Invention in the summer of 1970, when the expediency of filling venues on a lengthy tour demanded. He would even record more music with them. But as Don Preston says: By then we were just hired musicians. And he made a film featuring some of them: 200 Motels; as dreary, incoherent and interminably tedious as any of the other truly awful wacky movies of the period only more so.

Mostly, though, Frank Zappa would go on to become Frank Zappa. Which meant many, many more great albums though none, it has to be said, ever quite so daring, seemingly impromptu and alive with the gung-ho spirit of the times as the ones he made with The Mothers Of Invention.

In 1969, the Zappas finally moved out of the Log Cabin and into a more conventional home, still in Laurel Canyon but this time with doors that had locks. They would live there together for the rest of Franks life. On the door leading to the basement where he worked was a sign: Dr Zircons Secret Lab In Happy Valley. What came out of that lab over the next near quarter of a century will likely be argued over for centuries to come. There were 62 albums live, studio, rock, jazz, orchestral, singles, doubles, trebles released during his lifetime, a further 35 original works released posthumously, plus 13 compilations and box sets at last count, and god knows how many bootlegs.

He was driven by the stimuli around him, said Gail Zappa in 2012. Everybody else, if you were in a rocknroll band you were typically sitting around getting stoned and bumping into each other while you write their songs. Frank was clearly a band leader and didnt tolerate that kind of behaviour in a working environment. So I dont think he was suffering in any major way, other than not being able to get any exposure on the radio or television or anything like that.

She added Frank once complained of a boring life, because all he did was work. He just wrote dots on paper, but he used to talk about connecting the dots which really speaks to what he did in terms of music and what he did in terms of social commentary. You know what she means, even if you dont. Just like her husbands music.

The term musical genius is so overused as to be obsolete. Yet its difficult not to draw on it when it comes to the story of Frank Zappa.

I would say yes, he was as long as you put the word musical there, says Don Preston. If he was a genius hed still have the first band together and wed all have been making millions of dollars, like the Grateful Dead. But a musical genius? Yes, absolutely.

This article originally appeared in Classic Rock #178.

Originally posted here:

People thought the Beatles were God. That's not correct: the ... - Louder