Trouble Every Day For Frank Zappa’s Former Flame

October 14, 2014 By Mary Reinholz

Frank Zappa’s onetime mistress wants to release a new album, but first she’ll have to overcome a failed fundraiser and — worse still — a bureaucratic nightmare of the sort that Zappa surely would’ve lampooned.

Nigey Lennon was 12 when she first discovered Zappa’s Freak Out!. She was 15 when she sent him a demo of her own music and was surprised to receive an invitation to meet with him to discuss it at Bizarre Records. She was 17 when he hired her as a guitarist for his 1971 tour to promote his film, 201 Motels. Lennon was still a minor when Zappa — 30 and married at the time — seduced her in Berkeley, according to her book Being Frank: My Time With Frank Zappa.
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Tags: Arts + Culture, frank zappa, nigey lennon, nigey rolfe, real id law

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Nightclubbing | The Offs

February 1, 2013 By Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

LP cover.

Looking back at the cover of the L.P. that The Offs released in 1984, we didn’t remember that Jean-Michel Basquiat had designed it. But the image of their lead singer, Don Vinyl, face down, his bicep glistening with the tattoo of a .45 pistol — that we had not forgotten.

We recall Don coming to our apartment the day he got the ink, his arm still red and a little bloody. “Paul Simonon is getting the same one!” he told us, excitedly. It was the summer of 1981 and everyone in the East Village was getting tats, even The Clash. Bob Roberts, The Offs’ saxophonist — and also a tattooist — had done the work for both.
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Tags: alejandro escovedo, bill hawk, bob roberts, bob steeler, boston, danny degorio, dead kennedys, don vinyl, electric hot tuna, fenway park, frank zappa, jean-michel basquiat, jello biafra, mabuhay gardens, nightclubbing, paul simonon, punk rock, ratt, san francisco, the clash, the offs, true believers