A fabled character in the musical theater of Frank Zappa is a fictional fan named Suzy Creamcheese. She is heard on the early albums by the Mothers of Invention, beginning with the 1966 debut, Freak Out. Several times she’s asked, “Suzy Creamcheese, what’s got into ya?”
Suzy never answered the question. But what got into Frank’s oldest child, Moon Unit, and the lengths to which she has gone to be free of it, is closely chronicled in her new memoir, Earth to Moon. The book is dedicated to Frank, someone named Jett (believed to be the daughter of Hank Williams Sr.), and “for me.”
Its epigraph is by the 17th-century poet Mizuta Masahide: “Since my house burned down I have a better view of the moon.”
People used to say that Frank, an enthusiast of the scatological (see “Illinois Enema Bandit”), once ate poop on stage. He didn’t. But Moon was surely fed a lot of crap growing up, “spoon fed,” she writes. Earth to Moon makes clear that she has decided the browbeating and emotional abandonment ends with her. The book catalogs the odd and caustic currents that permeated the Zappa family home in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood (now owned by Georgia May Jagger, daughter of Mick). There, on Woodrow Wilson Drive for some 30 years, lived composer/guitarist Frank, his long-suffering wife, Gail, and their children: Moon, now an author and yoga teacher; Dweezil, a guitarist who tours to keep his father’s music before the world; the podcaster Ahmet; and Diva, said to be knitting a mile-long scarf she calls “Emilio.”
At home, the golden rule never wavered: Your father is a genius. Do not bother him. Even if all you want is a little attention, a kind word, or a hug from a guy who — when he is home at all — works all night and sleeps all day. Especially stay away if he’s in the bedroom of his basement studio having sex with a groupie, several of whom moved in during Moon’s early childhood, and upon whom Gail puts her half-baked curses.
There’s one scene in the book that is unfathomable, at least to me, the father of two daughters and no prude.
In an early chapter, Moon wonders why her mother — always “Gail,” never “Mom” — is being “extra nice” to me. “Maybe because my daddy is home again … or maybe the niceness is because the braless lady my daddy was sleeping with in the basement finally went back to New Zealand for good.”
Of the fallout from her father’s chronic infidelities, Moon writes: “The hate Gail feels never goes away.” Like the slime that Zappa said oozes out of our TV sets, Mama Z’s vile emotions spill over everyone, Moon in particular.
The now 56-year-old’s life has run on parallel tracks, one atop the other: the foundation of a childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of emotional and psychic abuse, followed by hard-earned healing.
According to the book, the abuse was never physical (Gail was a screamer, not a hitter, “my first bully,” Moon writes) or sexual — though she saw a lot of naked people in the house making lots of icky sounds, including her parents. The sex parade made her feel unsafe and confused — as a child, she wore a pacifier around her neck for years — a sensation she describes as “wiggly.”
To rise above this, she labored on a more difficult track: decades of “working my ass off” through meditation, yoga, therapy, herbal teas, and motherhood. Daughter Mathilda Plum Doucette Zappa, born on Frank’s December 21st birthday, is now 19.
“How do you heal?” she writes. “You make a decision. Mine is this: no more bullies allowed.”
Along the way, every now and then, the universe seems to wink in Moon’s direction, letting her know she is on the right path, to keep going. While working for VH1, in the mid-1990s, Moon interviews singer/songwriter k.d. lang on air. It flops.
It is “stilted and tense and lame,” writes Moon. “Halfway through, k.d. is so harsh with me that I have an out-of-body experience imagining myself at home … cheering for how she destroys the lame interviewer. Except the interviewer is me!”
When the camera is off, Lang leans in and asks Moon, “What are you doing?”
It’s a big question, a don’t waste your life kind of question. Years later, a new neighbor moves into the house across the street — the old Carole King house — from the one Moon acquired for herself.
“I cut some roses from ‘my’ garden and put them in a mason jar for her,” writes Moon. The neighbor turns out to be k.d. lang, at whom Moon smiles then says, “Thank you for waking me up.”
• • •
I’ve been following Frank Zappa since he released Over-Nite Sensation, in 1973, when I was a sophomore in high school. I later interviewed him about his Baltimore roots, in part to clear up wide and varied falsehoods about what side of town he grew up on. It was the west side and then only until he was 6 and his father got a job researching meteorology and metallurgy at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, in suburban Baltimore.
“I remember it was one of those rowhouses,” said Frank, when we met in New York, in 1986. “There was an alley in the back and down the alley used to come the knife sharpener man — you know, a guy with the wheel. And everybody used to come down off their back porch to the alley to get their knives and scissors done.”
The first song that seized me was Dirty Love: “I only got one destination and that’s your dirty love.…” Such lyrics — is there anything more subtly filthy than “poodle bites/poodle chews it”? — and lewd antics have always been part of the Zappa lore. But there’s one scene in the book that is unfathomable, at least to me, the father of two daughters and no prude.
While in New York chasing acting work, somewhere around 18 years old, Moon meets a cute drummer in a heavy metal band. Constantly in search of a kind soul — someone to love and love her back — Moon gives him her phone number. The guy, married with a couple of kids, invites Moon to visit him on the road.
The drummer, Moon writes, says that he will get her a separate room. “It’ll be fun. You can just visit as my friend.”
“‘As your friend…‘ I say back, stressing the word ‘friend.'”
“Yeah, I think of you as a friend. Aren’t we friends?”
The invitation amplifies everything she hates about her father’s philandering. It makes her feel wiggly. Unsure of what to do, she goes into her parents’ bedroom — where Gail and Frank are naked in bed — for advice.
She asks, “Can I go on tour with a married heavy metal drummer?”
They cheer and Moon says she “recoils when they say in unison, ‘Go! It’ll be fun.’”
Moon again: “I have been invited to go on tour with a married man, but we are just friends, so … go?”
Frank’s only question: “He’s paying right?”
Moon goes. She gets pregnant, has an abortion, stops taking the man’s calls, and continues her long search for love and acceptance.
By the early 1990s, Frank was dying of prostate cancer, which took him in 1993. The chapters about his sickness and death are perhaps the most touching in the book. Moon adores him, he is her hero.
The chapters tend to be short, and No. 49 is titled “December 1993,” the date of Frank’s death. He died on the 4th, two weeks before what would have been his 53rd birthday.
With Gail and all four kids at his bedside, Moon says, she leaned in and whispered, “‘Daddy, I am with you. You are safe because I love you. I’m so proud to be your daughter. I’m so glad I look like you. You are the most important person in my life and I will always love you forever.’ We all have a hand on his thin, failing body.”
His passing leads to legal entanglements, manipulated and perpetrated by Gail, who kept her husband’s will from the children. The machinations, suits, and countersuits have wrecked the Zappa kids’ relationship to this day.
Gail died in 2015. Once, near the end, after changing her mother’s diaper and cleaning her up, Moon writes this: “‘Do you forgive me?’ [Gail] blurts, looking pained, a featherless bird with patches of soft tufts for hair.”
“‘Yes,’ I say, ‘of course I do.’ I stroke her hair with deep affection.”
Just a few moments before, Moon recalls her mother — who she describes in the passage as “Gail the destroyer,” saying, “What if you were always this nice?”
“‘I am this nice,’ I say through tears.” ❖
Rafael Alvarez writes from Baltimore, where every day he passes a statue of Frank Zappa — a gift to the musician’s hometown from a fan club in Vilnius, Lithuania — in front of his neighborhood library.
