Back in 1975, I was 14 and was invited to travel to the USA to Beverly Hills in Los Angeles California, where a friend of my parents lived.
At 14 I was already a keyboard freak, and shortly after my arrival, I said to my kind host with my sweetest teenage voice, "Take me to a music store!"
So here we are, cruising in an American car with American air conditioning to an American music store. Maybe you should know at this point that I was quite excited about the idea of going to an American music store because at that time, new gear, like new records, appeared every day in the states and arrived in France only six months later. Yes, I forgot to say, I'm French.
In fact I didn't go there to buy something, just to put my hands on some new gear and dream.
"Hi I'm David. Where are you from? France, Wow! And blind too? You want to meet Stevie Wonder?" At that moment I had the feeling the American dream could be something real, so I swallowed my teenage pride and said, "nothing at all". No, that's not what I said, I just said nothing. I'm not going to talk about Stevie right now but it's just the way it started. The very same week I met Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and Frank Zappa, three of my idols. Ain't that a dream?
So that night, David drove me to a rehearsal studio where Frank Zappa and the Mothers were soon going to arrive. When we went through the door there was soul music playing and no chair around. So I sat somewhere on the floor in a semi-Yoga like position and wondered what on earth was I going to say to the great master when he came.
And then a few minutes later, I heard the soul music fade and a big guy took me by the hand and said: "Hi I'm Frank."
Well, this guy didn't leave me enough time to think! I just was not ready! So for the next half an hour only two things came out of my stupid teenage mouth.
The first one was:
"Hi, I'm Jean-Philippe and I'm French”, to which he replied:
“Well, good for you".
Why the hell didn't I tell him I was going to be the best keyboard player in the world?
Then he took me about ..5 yards.. away from where I was sitting before and left me there. So I sat back in the same semi-Yoga like position.
He then took his guitar and played a slow theme that I had never heard before and that sounded like very interestingly dissonant arpeggios made with layers of minor sevenths, or something like that. Then I said to myself: "Say something! Come on! Frank is here, just a few feet away from you, say something!" and that's how came out the second stupid phrase from my intimidated teenage mouth. I said:
"Which phaser are you using?"
He replied with a tender, smiling but slightly astonished voice as if my question had fazed him a little: "A Mutron".
That was it for me. I thought I would have liked him to say something like: "Are you more interested in equipment than music?", yes, that would have started an interesting conversation. But then he had some work to do.
After this, the band came and they rehearsed "I'm so cute", (Hey, that reminds me of me!), in a version which was not totally mature yet. It didn't have this punkish feel like the album version, it was slower and the bass was doing a riff that went "tadada, tadada, tadada da da", with huge glissandi on the neck. That was fun, and I especially liked the part when he said "Come on guys, this little rat over there he wants to hear the song".
Then, you know, we said goodbye and David and I went to another place leaving them to their work and that's the end of the story.
Well, not quite. A few years later I went to a Zappa concert in Paris and I was quite surprised when the band started playing an instrumental piece where both keyboardists played alternative solos, each time with different sounds, and Frank described very precisely what equipment each musician was playing on. I don't know if it's me who triggered this funny little episode but it sounded like it.
I didn't try and go backstage. Maybe I should have, but did it really matter? I didn't become the best keyboard player in the world and I can't read music anyway so I wouldn’t have had a chance to be in his band, but I met one of my idols and that was fine.
The next thing I knew, one of the vendors in the store came to me and said