Biography
Jeff Simmons spent years anchoring the bass chair in Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. He also cut one scarce solo album on Zappa’s Straight label, the 1970 underground favorite Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up. Seattle-born and Seattle-raised, Simmons first drew regional notice as lead singer and guitarist in Indian Puddin’ & Pipe, a Pacific Northwest psychedelic outfit that signed in 1967 with Matthew Katz’s San Francisco Sound imprint. Katz, the notoriously predatory manager behind Moby Grape, It’s a Beautiful Day, and further San Francisco psych acts, wrote contracts that let him field any lineup under a band’s name at any time or place of his choosing; he eventually transferred the Indian Puddin’ & Pipe name to a competing Seattle group formerly called the West Coast Natural Gas. With no legal options left, Simmons and his original colleagues—guitarist Peter Larson, bassist Phil Kirby, and drummer Albert Malosky—returned home, renamed the band Easy Chair, and issued a one-sided, self-titled debut on the Vanco label in 1968. After yet another change, to Ethiopia, the musicians opened for the Mothers of Invention in Seattle and shared a bill with Wild Man Fischer, Alice Cooper, and the GTOs at Bizarre Records’ celebrated “Gala Pre-Xmas Bash,” held at Santa Monica’s Shrine Exhibition Hall in early December 1968. Zappa soon persuaded Ethiopia to move to Los Angeles and teamed them with producers Jerry Yester and Val Zanofsky. When those sessions yielded nothing solid, the band split, yet Zappa immediately handed Simmons a two-album contract on Straight. The first release, a largely instrumental score for the little-seen biker picture Naked Angels, consists of extended acid-fuzz guitar excursions. It was followed at once by Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up, a more traditionally structured psychedelic work that Zappa produced under the pseudonym LaMarr Bruister. The record drew scant notice beyond Zappa devotees, after which Simmons joined the Mothers of Invention for their late-1970 album Chunga’s Revenge. He departed during the making of Zappa’s 200 Motels film but rejoined for later titles such as Waka/Jawaka and Roxy & Elsewhere. In the 1980s he moved back to Seattle and led several local groups, among them the Backtrackers and Cocktails for Ladies. He also completed an unpublished memoir titled I Joined the Mothers of Invention…for the FBI and, in 2005, issued Blue Universe, his first new solo recordings in thirty-five years.
Albums
