Night of the Un-Dead

The butterfly king spread his leopard-print wings and the lights went dim above him. Frank Zappa appeared behind Dweezil, who had assembled with the rest of the band, glittering like metal objects under the white stage lights. The acrid scent of cheap reefer drifted to the upper section of the Beacon Theater. A house full of silver-haired ghosts of a different age settled in for a three-hour show.

On Halloween, the boundary between reality and un-reality was breached here, in the famed concert venue on Broadway at West 74^th St.

Outside the hall, the city was overrun with midget goblins and immature devils, scampering up and down brownstone staircases in search of candy, in sight of mom and dad. Vulgarity stripped of its malice; innocence in horns.

Inside, that distinction dissolved. In the bathroom on the top floor, where the urinals are flush with the wall and there are no courteous divisions, a disheveled fellow was self-ingratiating. I got the hell out of there.

In the theater, the edifice above the stage looked like wrought iron in the darkness. A dingy red glow came from behind. Then the senior Zappa appeared on stage, an analog projection of the ghost whose vocal track was set on top of live music. Old Zappa, young Zappa. Dead, un-dead.

Zappa’s music is precision off-kilter. Elevator xylophone melted into heavy-metal riffs. Adam Wallitt, sitting to the side, asked if he could sit on my left. “I’m a little deaf,” he said.

“At this moment,” I said after a thick rhythm crested, “so am I.”

Wallitt looked at me plainly. Either he didn’t hear or it wasn’t funny.

He could hear the high notes, he explained, but not the low ones. This seat, closer to the center section, was better. I heard, in the aural melee, the shuffling consonants of his speech.

Devon Stein moved into the seat next to Adam. Stein had gotten the tickets for tonight’s show, Zappa Plays Zappa, Dweezil’s musical project to cover his father’s original music. Stein gave two tickets to Josh Gould, who spared one for me.

The scenes behind Dweezil appeared to be from Zappa’s movie, “Baby Snakes,” according to Stein, a steadfast Zappa fan. “Baby Snakes” was filmed at Frank Zappa’s 1977 Halloween concert at the Palladium Theater in New York City.

Dweezil sank into a long groove. The guitar climbed high on a singular, twisting note. Tiny finger movements, invisible from up here, transgressed an unholy line between organic and unnatural. Wallitt whistled while he stood. It struck me, the dead playing with the living, the deaf hearing music, the un-vulgar goblins running amok outside and the horrific vulgarity of the third-floor men’s room. It came together during that long guitar scream. The silver students of the seventies music scene, smoking their last joints. This was a graveyard. A dying scene on the day of the dead.; an entire culture on its way out.

After a couple of hours, a sonic landscape resolved: rectangular ships adrift on paper waves. The Beacon took on the appearance of a womb, a circular fold of smooth muscle encircling the ceiling, pulsing and erotic in the shifting dark. A hypodermic stalactite, ostensibly some sort of chandelier, hung down from the center of that fearsome, orgasmic roof. The air was thick with smoke and it was becoming easier to imagine that Frank had never died of prostate cancer in 1993.

After 11 p.m. the stentorian riffs neared their close. Frank appeared, after a long respite, on the screen again. Viscous guitar and scenes from twenty years ago, Dweezil playing dad’s music dressed in what appeared to be pajamas, Frank behind him in a billowing red blouse and tight red pants. Even from beyond the grave, Frank exuded a musky sexuality.

The band came to its close. The members, some from the original band, bowed and faded into backstage. I readied to leave.

“Frank’s been dead fifteen years already, “said Gould, standing above me.

“Not tonight,” I said, seeing that boundary crumble and dissolve. “Tonight, he’s alive again.”