Interviewer:
How about in general the '60s scene in L.A.?
ZAPPA: Well, the '60s scene in L.A. was
interesting from a sociological standpoint
because it took so long for the rest of the world
to discover what was going on here.
There had been what was described as a freak scene
in Los Angeles established for well over a year
before there was any national coverage that something
was going on here that was very different
than even San Francisco or anyplace else
in the country.  It was special.
And the driving force behind this particular
sociological development was a guy named Vito,
who was a painter/sculptor, who was the, let's call
him the boss of, let's call it a cult of people
who were just weird and liked to be weird and
would dress weird and every night they would go out
and they would dance weird, and people looked at it
and said, well, that's pretty weird,
I think I'll do that, too,
and it just kept growing and growing.
Vito was in his 60s then, and he was out
just flailing all over the place every night.
And um. . .
I came in from Cucamonga, which is where
I was living before I moved to Hollywood,
and saw this and went, whoa,
this is definitely quite unique.
And I watched it develop and I watched all these
different strange hairstyles and clothing styles
and all this stuff happen, and I saw more and more
people doing it and I saw them gathering at
Ben Frank's and at Canter's and the Whiskey A Go-Go
and the Trip and they were walking up and down
Sunset Strip and it was quite a highly
developed thing, like a circus every night.
Finally, a year and a half later, it was either Time
or Newsweek did a--, an article on unisex hairdos and they
had a photograph of a guy that we knew as Beatle Bob,
eventually to become known as Buffalo Bob, who had
a kind of Prince Valiant haircut and wore velvet
jackets, and they had a photograph of him
and it was like this shocking thing,
that a man had hair that looked sort of unisex.
And that's, you know, the first time that I
knew of that there was any national coverage
that there was anything going on in Hollywood.
And eventually, the real estate developers
of Hollywood put an end to it.
They complained to the police that these people
with these strange hairdos and clothes were reducing
their property value along Sunset Boulevard,
something had to be done about it,
because they were walking up and down the street.
And so, they started to have these round-ups.
The sheriff's department would come to Hollywood
nightly with these buses for carrying prisoners and
without any kind of due process just round people up,
total harassment, herd them onto these buses,
take them downtown and release them.
It was just, you know, to harass you to keep you
from going to the Sunset Strip.
And eventually, that was fairly successful.
They did put a little fear into the people there.
There were some tense moments with that policy.
But the real way they killed the scene in Hollywood
was to talk to the club owners and threaten them
to make them stop hiring those kinds of bands
which attracted that kind of clientele.
And by that time, they had virtually destroyed
whatever scene was developing in Hollywood
and that's when we moved to New York.
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Transcription by
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