Frank Zappa Teaches Steve Allen to “Blow the Bicycle”
Long before Howard Stern fans would call shows to yell “Bababooey”, before Jay Leno, before Johnny Carson, there was Steve Allen… with a beardless and deadpan-funny Frank Zappa goofing on Steve and his studio audience with two bicycles, two drumsticks and a bow.
Welcome to the Tonight Show, circa 1963:
This got me Googling around and there’s a story called Zappa’s Bike by the show’s talent coordinator. Here’s an excerpt:
The rules for my job were simple. Get someone who was genuinely eccentric or who did something at least a little strange or out-of-the-ordinary, but never make fun of them—the idea was to have fun with them. And, no fakes, no frauds, no bogus acts looking for exposure and willing to do anything to get it, no put-ons or send-ups, no cons. Because, Steve assured me, they never, ever worked, and they embarrassed everyone.
Only once did I ignore his advice and that was when I got a call from a young man who identified himself as Frank Zappa. He said he wanted to teach Steve how to “blow bicycle.” “Blow bicycle,” I repeated.
“Yeah, you know, like, the bicycle is a musical instrument.”
I thought it was a dumb idea, and a bad joke besides, and I felt somewhat uncomfortable about the caller’s use of the jive vernacular (knowing that Steve had provided a jazz piano in recordings by Beat Generation poets), but for some reason I asked Frank to come in and a couple of days later he arrived with his old Schwinn. He was wearing a black suit (all three buttons buttoned), a white shirt, and a black knit tie. Still in his early 20s—and years before he became a pop music icon who bridged the gap between classical music and rock—he looked like a small town bank teller trainee.
He put his bike on its kick-stand in the lobby of the Hollywood theater where we video taped the show and plucked the spokes as if they were the strings of a harp, pitter-pattered on the seat as if it were Buddy Rich’s tom-tom, and, removing the hand-grips, blew across the hollow chrome handle bars, creating the sounds of a wind instrument. He then played a short, improvisational piece and upon its completion, stood waiting for my reaction.
I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “You didn’t like it?” he said, seeming genuinely wounded. “I can play another song.”
We talked. I was sure it was a gag, but I couldn’t get him to admit it, and I thought that might be the key to his pulling it off. At that point in his life, he had no album or club date to promote, so I suspected he wanted to appear on the show for the $235 that was paid every “performing” guest. Yet he seemed so damned serious. I also had to admit that what I’d heard was musical. Still, I worried about incurring Steve’s wrath, so I told Frank I’d call the next week.
Concerned about failure, over the weekend I hatched a plan that I thought might guarantee chaos if not hilarity, and out of the mayhem some laughs. On Monday, I called Frank and asked, “How would you like to conduct a bicycle symphony?”
I explained that we’d fill up the television stage with bicycles—two-wheelers like the one he brought in with him for the “audition,” tricycles, unicycles, those Victorian ones with the big front wheels, bicycles-built-for-two, everything we could find in the big “property houses” that delivered props to the Hollywood studios. The whole stage would be crowded with bicycles, I said, and Frank could do whatever he wished with them.
Go read the rest.
A bit of personal trivia, in the early 1980’s, my aunt attended a Zappa concert that was honoring the composer Edgard Varèse. Zappa had a handwritten composition of his own and when my aunt, who was permitted backstage as one of the concert’s “semi-officials” recognized that the irreplaceable single manuscript had been mistakenly abandoned in a portfolio case, she held on to it and made arrangements to meet Frank in person. This is NOT the kind of property one trusted to delivery staff. Later that week, she hand-returned the manuscript.
No, it was not the score he played on the Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1963.
Caveat… if your musical tastes run closer to Mozart than to Varese, you may not appreciate Zappa’s music. However, if you’re a Zappa fan, you can already hear hints of the kinds of sounds that would become regular parts of his music for the next 25 years.
Got a funny celebrity bike story? Comment!
Categories: Humor, Trivia
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Watch it on YouTube!