The night Frank Zappa was arrested for making a sex tape and “conspiracy to commit pornography”
In 1965, Frank Zappa found himself in cuffs, but in true Zappa fashion, his arrest carried with it a wild backstory. As stories with the mercurial musician often do, it all started with a chance encounter with a fan after a show in Chicago.
During this time, Zappa was delving into experimental music, incorporating elements of avant-garde, jazz, doo-wop, and classical music into his compositions. His eclectic approach to music earned him a reputation as a fearless boundary-pusher in the industry. However, in his formative years, Zappa was struggling.
Zappa had not yet released any full-length material with The Mothers of Invention, and after his divorce from his first wife, he threw himself entirely into his music. Whether he was at Studio Z in California or performing at club shows in the evenings, his dedication was unwavering. However, on one infamous occasion, while playing with a blues trio at a Latin club in Ontario, California, events would take a dramatic turn for the worse.
The gig, by all accounts, wasn’t Zappa’s finest hour, with the audience reportedly much more captivated by the four go-go girls onstage dressed in fishnet stockings than his sonic musings. Following the show, Zappa was approached by someone he believed to be a used car salesman, who offered him $100 dollars for an audiotape of the musician making love. It was too much money for Zappa to turn down at that point in his life. Little did he know, however, that the person was actually an undercover cop and he’d been snared by a trap.
The artist thought he devised a genius ploy to earn himself the $100 dollar bill by enlisting the support of one go-go girl, Lorraine Belcher. He then stayed up most of the night manufacturing this tape, which included the use of fake bedsprings, squeaks and grunts. He also overdubbed a musical background and said he spent hours cutting the laughs out of the recording.
The following day, when Zappa was about to hand over the tape, he found himself arrested for conspiracy to commit pornography, and the police then stripped his studio of all documented material. To make matters even worse, the media were tipped off about the incident, leading to the following day’s The Daily Report to say: “Vice Squad investigators stilled the tape recorders of a free-swinging, a-go-go film and recording studio here Friday and arrested a self-styled movie producer”.
Zappa had enough money from royalties from the song ‘Memories of El Monte’, which he had co-written for the Penguins, to bail out Belcher. However, he was too short on cash at the time to fund an adequate defence, so Zappa instead pled contendere and served ten days of a six-month sentence, with the rest being suspended.
Tee musician learnt a lot from his short period spent in the prison system and would later say: “You can’t appreciate what a jail is and what goes on there unless someone sticks you in one. In a way, I guess I have to thank Detective Willis and the evil machinery of the San Bernadino legal system for giving me a chance to see, from that perspective, what the penal system is like in this country, and… how ineffectual and how stupid it is.”
Almost as stupid as spending all night pretending to have sex with a go-go dancer. Frank Zappa was one of a kind.
