Since I was a teen, I've loved "Billy the Mountain," a 25-minute, side-long epic anti-war parable from the Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention album Just Another Band from L.A., recorded live in 1971 at the Pauley Pavilion at UCLA.
The piece (it's too long and episodic to be called a song) cites a ton of places in Southern California. As a confirmed native East Coaster, I figured I'd finally educate myself about the geography of this piece of music that I've been happily listening to all these years.
The story opens this way:
Billy the Mountain and his wife Ethel, a tree, are "residing between lovely Rosamond and Gorman"
Rosamond and Gorman, California are pretty obscure places but Zappa knew the area very well: he went to high school in Lancaster, which is about fifteen miles due south of Rosamond. A small city in the Antelope Valley of the western Mojave Desert, Lancaster is only about 50 miles north, as the crow flies, from downtown Los Angeles — but between Lancaster and LA stands the Angeles National Forest; I'm sure it's a world away from Tinseltown.
Forty miles almost due west of Rosamond, Gorman is in the extreme northwest corner of Los Angeles County, on the Golden State Freeway section of Interstate 5, one of the state's most heavily traveled highways, linking southern and northern California and points north. It's such a small town — about 15 homes — that the US Census doesn't bother to break out population figures for it. But it's the site of a popular rest stop, and Zappa might well have been familiar with it from touring from Los Angeles up to San Francisco or San Jose.
Given his placement between Rosamond and Gorman, Billy would be part of the Tehachapi mountain range, which runs northeast, starting at Gorman. The Tehachapi range separates the San Joaquin Valley to the northwest and the Mojave Desert to the southeast and is one of the traditional boundaries between northern and southern California. The peaks in the range are from approximately 4,000 to 8,000 feet, so Billy is a pretty big boy.
And since Billy is part of the Tehachapi range, Ethel would probably be a black oak (Quercus kelloggii), Coulter pine (Pinus coulteri), incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens), or a white fir (Abies concolor), or possibly a quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides).
One day, a man in "a checkered double-knit suit" driving a Cadillac Eldorado "leased from Bob Spreen, where the freeways meet in Downey" drives up to where Billy is and hands him a royalty check for all his appearances on postcards.
At the time, the city of Downey, about 13 miles southeast of downtown LA, was centered around aviation and aerospace manufacturing, and perhaps best known as a place you drove through to get from Pasadena to Long Beach, or from LA to San Diego.
The Bob Spreen auto dealership would have been just south of the intersection of I-605 and I-5, at 10686 Studebaker Road. There's still a dealership at that location: Honda World. It's about an hour and a half drive north by northwest on I-5, through Glendale and Santa Clarita, past the Castaic Lake Recreation Area, to where Billy was, and then a long walk, followed by a very steep hike, from the nearest road.
Billy is overjoyed at this windfall and announces to Ethel that they're going on vacation in New York, but first a stop in Las Vegas.
I'm not sure how quickly a mountain can travel but it would take a human being anywhere from three and a half to four and a half days of continuous walking to cover the 250 miles or so northeast from Rosamond to Las Vegas, depending on the route. Billy and Ethel seem to have avoided roads and braved the very rugged and hilly terrain in the Mojave Desert.
Billy and Ethel's route runs straight through Edwards Air Force Base, the famous installation about 18 miles east of Rosamond, and Billy levels it. When news gets out about the destruction of Edwards Air Force Base, a TV announcer claims that Billy and Ethel have been linked to "drug abuse and pay-offs as part of a San Joaquin Valley smut ring!" And then there is an extended litany of towns involved in a "recent narcotics crack-down."
The TV announcer is a parody of conservative Los Angeles newscaster George Putnam, a pompous, homophobic fellow who was the model for the Ted Baxter character on the popular '70s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
The San Joaquin Valley is a vast section in the middle of California, north of Los Angeles County, that is a major agricultural center. Several of the biggest cities there — Stockton, Modesto, Fresno, Visalia, and Bakersfield — have historically suffered from high crime rates.
The places listed in the narcotics crackdown — Torrance, Hawthorne, Lomita, Westchester, Playa del Rey, Santa Monica, Tujunga, Sunland, San Fernando, Pacoima, Sylmar, Newhall, Canoga Park, Palmdale, Glendale, Irwindale, Rolling Hills, Granada Hills, Shadow Hills, Cheviot Hills — basically comprise a grand tour of the eastern side of Los Angeles County, from Palmdale in the north down to Rolling Hills in the south.
The crackdown will, the announcer nonsensically notes, "...avert a crippling strike of bartenders and veterinarians throughout the Inland Empire."
The term "Inland Empire" was apparently invented by real estate developers, so the definition varies, but the Inland Empire is basically western Riverside County and southwestern San Bernardino County, just east of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The Inland Empire area is home to massive industrial distribution centers, and is one of the least educated areas of the state, with one of the lowest average annual wages in the country.
Zappa had a strong Inland Empire connection: in the early '60s, he learned how to engineer recordings at Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga (now called Rancho Cucamonga). It was where the Surfaris recorded the classic "Wipeout." Zappa bought Pal in 1964 and renamed it Studio Z, although it closed the following year due to municipal construction. You can hear some of Zappa's recordings at that studio on the compilation Cucamonga.
Billy and Ethel have apparently made a U-turn and, instead of heading to Las Vegas, have passed through Glendale, in Los Angeles County, which Billy has "leveled." In response, Jerry Lewis hosts a telethon "to raise funds for the injured and homeless in Glendale." Unfortunately, on top of all the destruction, Billy has caused a fissure that releases "the pools of old poison gas and obsolete germ bombs [in]... the secret underground dumps right near the Jack in the Box on Glenoaks."
The joke about "the injured and homeless in Glendale" is that Glendale was a stereotypically vanilla, mediocre place.
There is a Jack in the Box at 1200 W. Glenoaks Boulevard in Glendale, although I can't verify that this is the location that the song refers to. But Glendale really does have what the US military calls Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) that contain toxic or radioactive waste. It's perhaps worth noting that Zappa's father was a research scientist who worked at a chemical warfare facility. The Zappa family lived so close by that they kept gas masks in their home in case of an accident.
A "freak tornado" comes through and blows all the poison gas to Watts.
Watts, 14 miles due south of Glendale, and much farther away in many other respects, is a predominantly Black, low-income neighborhood of Los Angeles that had been the scene of a massive, nearly week-long riot several years earlier, in the summer of 1965, in response to chronic police brutality. Plus ça change.
The line about poison gas is a prescient dark joke about environmental injustice, as poor, inner city neighborhoods such as Watts tend to be disproportionately plagued by pollution, resulting in things like dramatically higher asthma rates; indeed, residents of Watts can expect to live 12 fewer years than their neighbors in Bel Air, 25 miles northwest.
The blowhard square TV newscaster returns to announce, "We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist..."
Heavily conservative in 1971, Orange County is a huge suburb southeast of Los Angeles; the minister could well be the televangelist Robert Schuller, then the host of the widely viewed Hour of Power TV show, who built the 2,248-capacity "Crystal Cathedral," designed by iconic architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, in 1968 in the Orange County city of Garden Grove.
"It was right outside of Columbus, Ohio when Billy received his notice to report for his induction physical."
It's unclear how Billy and Ethel got from Glendale to Columbus, Ohio, almost 2,000 miles to the east by northeast. Maybe they had resumed their journey out to New York. But even the narrator concedes that he may have misunderstood Billy's whereabouts.
Billy had to undergo an induction physical because this was during the Vietnam War, when young men were drafted and then had to have a physical to determine whether they were fit to kill people.
At one point the narrator mentions "City of Industry."
City of Industry is a real place. Like most of the locations in "Billy the Mountain," it's in Los Angeles County, on the eastern side, in the San Gabriel Valley. It's so named because it's almost entirely industrial: although it's twelve miles in area, it has only 264 residents, according to the 2020 census.
A fellow named Studebaker Hawk ("fantastic new superhero of the current economic slump") is dispatched to stop Billy's rampage and convince him to show up for his induction physical. Hawk is apprised of the news that Billy has somehow traveled all the way from Columbus, Ohio to El Segundo, California, which he has destroyed.
Studebaker was an American automobile manufacturer that had a line of sporty models called the Hawk: the Golden Hawk, the Sky Hawk, the Power Hawk and the Flight Hawk. The Hawk line went out of production in 1963.
El Segundo is in Los Angeles County, about 15 miles south by southwest of downtown LA. It's on the Pacific Ocean, the northern border is LA Airport, and its neighbor to the south is Manhattan Beach.
The Spaniards didn't name it El Segundo — Standard Oil did, because in 1911 it became the site of their second California refinery. El Segundo is still the site of the largest producing oil refinery on the West Coast, as well as a nearby wastewater treatment plant, which explains the town's nickname, “El Stinko.” Another pall over the town is its extensive racist past, which was still very much in force in 1971, something a Southern California audience would have picked up on immediately. Old folks may remember how the Fred Sanford character on the '70s sitcom Sanford and Son regularly ripped on El Segundo.
Hawk springs into action. His first step is to get some "big large, unused cardboard boxes" from "the back of the Broadway at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine."
That's the historic Broadway Building in downtown Hollywood, with its famous neon sign on the roof that says "The Broadway Hollywood." At the time, the building housed the Broadway Department Store, so it would have been a great place for Hawk to find cardboard boxes.
Then he needs to buy some maple syrup, some aluminum foil and "a pair of blunt scissors," so he goes to "Ralph's on Sunset."
There is still a Ralph's (a Southern California supermarket chain) on Sunset at 7257 W. Sunset Boulevard. That's probably the location Zappa was referring to since it's a five-minute drive west of the Broadway Building.
Hawk rigs up some wings with the cardboard and aluminum foil and coats his thighs with maple syrup, attracting a large swarm of flies which carries him into the air. He eventually catches up with Billy and Ethel and stands on "the edge of Billy the Mountain's mouth" and orders him to report for his induction physical. Billy just laughs at this, dislodging Hawk, who tumbles off his mouth, 200 feet down into "the rubble below." The end.
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Note: some of the facts in this piece are straight from Wikipedia. I won’t properly research and fact-check this thing unless and until I get compensated for it. In the meantime: you get what you pay for.
Politely offered corrections accompanied by credible supporting sources are very welcome.
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