After a while, Frank's wife got upset. She knew he was not faithful to her, but she didn't appreciate it being thrown in her face.

So Zappa prevailed on Ruth and Ian Underwood, musicians in his band, to put Nigey up. Ruth was Nigey's closest friend at the time anyway. Nigey had also played guitar and sang in the band. So she was welcome to sleep on Ruth and Ian's couch. (Years later, when Ruth and Ian were splitting up, Ruth came and lived with us.)

One night she got in a fight with Ruth about something or other, and spent a couple of nights sleeping in her car. That's when I met her.

It happened that just before she came over to visit me I had read her cover story in the magazine where we both wrote. I fell in love with her writing. It was a biting, sarcastic and witty profile of a would-be rock star. So when we met in the editor's office the next day, and I was introduced to her, I fell all over myself propositioning her, suggesting she come up to my place.

She did.

I guess it was because she was hungry. I opened a can of mushroom soup, which she devoured. I had some kind of meat leftovers in the refrigerator. After she was happily gorged, we went up to my bedroom -- which was up a creaky flight of stairs to a attic bedroom in a woodsy house in Laurel Canyon. We lay down side by side, and with little discussion, made love. It seemed so simple and easy. It also felt something different than just passionate. It was incredibly comforting. I think for both of us. Ultimately, we became inseparable.

I was ashamed of being so enchanted with a 19-year-old woman. But Nigey was different. She was so precocious, so bright, so interesting to talk with, so much fun, I easily forgot she was more than 10 years younger. I didn't feel that much difference between us at all. Mentally she seemed to be a wise old woman, and physically she was a young woman with great sexual appetites.

There was a rub, of course. She was still madly in love with Zappa, and would sometimes sneak away to see him.

Zappa approved of Nigey and me and seemed to like me quite a bit. We argued about music. He was impressed by who my uncle was (Yehudi Menuhin) because Zappa wanted approval from the old European school -- desperately, even if he constantly belittled the tradition.

I asked him what he would do with his electric instruments if the power went out. "Turn on the generators," he smirked.

I was trying to make a point about the primacy of acoustic instruments, but it was ignored -- by both Zappa and Nigey.

Sometimes Nigey's parroting of Zappa's musical views irritated me a lot.

Perhaps my feeling was influenced by the thought that she still made love to him from time to time.

But I, too, had come from the wild '60s, full of bohemian bacchanals and orgies. I liked the show of pulchritude that was around Zappa -- so much the hallmark of Rock 'n Roll mythology.

When we got together, I'm sure that Nigey was also impressed with my being related to Yehudi Menuhin. In the '60s Yehudi made a series of records with sitarist Ravi Shankar called "East Meets West," and they were very popular. Nigey had studied with Shankar.

When I got a contract to write about the Menuhins, Zappa's band came through London. Ruth called. We got tickets, went to the concert, and then got on the band bus.

We got in a conversation with Jean Luc Ponty, the electronic violinist. Nigey told him who my uncle was. He knew Yehudi's Bartok, which is indeed some of his best work. I asked him if I wasn't right to suspect that the electronics took away a lot of the essence of the instrument. Absolutely, he said.

He conceded, frankly, that playing an electric violin reduced all the subtle nuances of the instrument to something kind of akin to a tinny, radio broadcast.

He said he gravitated to the electric violin just because of that. He said he knew he lacked something as a violinist, and the electric violin hid these shortcomings.

Nigey and I stayed together for many years, and we wrote a number of books and magazine articles together. She wrote about Mark Twain and Alfred Jarry and, with me, a book about Los Angeles history.

Nigey always took her music more seriously than her writing, which she tossed off so easily she was sure it had no real value. She was wrong.

Only once had we had contact with Zappa since the early '70s. We edited the old Jewish paper, the B'nai B'rith Messenger, then one of the city's pioneer papers. Nigey is Greek and Irish without a hint of Semite in her. But she was a crackerjack editor.

Zappa was having his war in the '80s with Tipper Gore, wife of the vice president, about her involvement with an anti-rock 'n roll group that thought the music was satanic.

The Messenger got involved because it turned out that the group Gore was involved with was also anti-Semitic. I talked with Zappa a few times because on this story we were working with him. He asked me if we both wanted to come up to his house for dinner, for old time sake.

For different reasons, we both said no. When he died, though, I think Nigey rued that decision. His influence had stayed with her all those years, if not in body certainly in spirit.

Lionel & Nigey

While Nigey was a facile and humorous writer who is a lot of fun to read, her real love was always making a record. During all the 25 years we were together, she was working on it. At one point she went into the studio with some other musicians and recorded a version of Reinventing the Wheel. She performed live, and I actually sang with the group which was called Hog Heaven. I was Maurice, the sleaze bucket, and a fairly successful one at that. Women would always come up and ask for my phone number and give me theirs.

When she sent me her CD, I realized she had finally completed the thing she was trying to do. Here in Los Angeles she worked with Victoria Berding, who is a theatrical singer of real talent, and Candy Zappa, Frank's sister, who is no slouch at the blues, either.

But she really found her match in John Tabacco in Long Island, and it's in his studio she's been happily recording the Reinventing the Wheel CD. Tabacco became fascinated when he read about how her plans for an album produced by Zappa never materialized. From her description, he figured out that the material would be kind of a melding of Zappa, Bartok and country western swing -- which were her roots.

Nigey liked to describe herself as "white trash," certainly compared to my background. Her family were dispossessed cattle people from Arizona who fell on bad times during the Great Depression. So she felt a great connection to western swing. Once when she was tapped to sing and play a concert with Patsy Montana at the Gene Autry Museum in Griffith Park, she said it was an amazing thing for her to be doing. She only wished her grandmother, who had revered Montana who used to sing with Gene Autry, had lived to see it.

Nigey is not a great singer or even a great instrumentalist. She plays guitar and keyboards, but primarily she is a composer and impresario -- all true of Zappa as well. And here she has something special. I told her when I wrote back that I thought she had finally succeeded in doing what she had been trying to do as long as I knew her. And that was make a record of the music she kept hearing in her head.

Like any composer, she wanted an orchestra to play her music. Frank let her once conduct his band in a rendition of one of her earliest pieces.

A lot of people have tried to do what Zappa did, since his death, but when I heard Nigey's CD, I decided she may well be the best to carry on his tradition.

She plays with styles seamlessly, from pop to reggae, existential cowboy blues, sophisticated operatic house to avant garde bizarre bossa nova to straight ahead blues and big band swing. She melds them together into her own larger sound, wherein she uses the different styles like the raw material for her own music, sort of like Bartok did with folk music.

I'm not sure I would compare her to Bartok, but Nigey has some quite incredibly brilliant moments and they are there on the CD. Her love of Frank Zappa is apparent right from the beginning, with "Please Help Me Get To The Bottom Of It All". It's a quick beautiful mantra that seques into a more comical, loopy work entitled "Tit-Elation."

Victoria Berding sings this, and like Victoria herself, who I introduced to Nigey, the material is intimate and luscious and just plain lusty from the beginning. A swingy bass clarinet riff, with Nigey doing some of her best keyboard work, ensue, followed by a deliciously FZ inspired guitar solo by ex-Zappa sideman Mike Keneally. "It's Just A Black Guitar" features Nigey collaborator John Tabacco on lead vocal. Nigey writes the lyrics about myths about electric guitar players. Anyone who's ever been in a music store will quickly recognize the kind of cacophony that invariably dwells in the guitar section. There is a lot of that sound in this tune, intentionally, of course.

Candy Zappa sings her brother's classic, "Anyway The Wind Blows," and then comes "Just Another Third Rate Clown," a swipe at Mike Davis, a then-Los Angeles writer who Nigey once had dealings with and came to intensely dislike. "He's a radical fart - a brilliant upstart," she writes. This song went through many permutations. It was originally called, "Just Another Third World Town" with lines such as "I may not be smart, but at least I'm all white" sung to what sounded like a drunken Mexican marimba street band.

I remember that the song in its original version made some literal-minded people uncomfortable, but when it was played on radio station KPFK, the radical left-wing station in Los Angeles, most people understood it for what it was.  Candy does one of her best solos on "Messin' In The Kitchen," a piece that sounds right out of the Ś40s, with a cheesy big band arrangements, and Nigey doing some real nice blues slide guitar work. Yes, messin' in the kitchen is full of double entendres, and makes mouth watering erotica in its own way.

The voice you hear interspersed throughout the album is that of author David Walley, who wrote the basic Zappa biography, No Commercial Potential. Walley was always hurt that Zappa, who had extended himself when he was gathering material for his biography, made snide remarks about it. Lennon and Walley hung out with Zappa about the same time, so there is a lot of resonance to their mutual Zappa obsessions. They know well their hero's feet of clay, but that only adds to the enjoyment of it all.

In the end, like most everyone on this recording, all bow to Zappa like they were bowing to mecca.

Nigey also was a biographer of Zappa, although a different kind than Walley, so they have a lot to talk about. And on this CD they do, that's an almost constant refrain. Walley provides the punctuation with a sinister laugh as "Can You Do It?" begins. Berding's operatic training from her Midwest upbringing shows here, and with some beautifully jazzy chords, she belts out the song. As usual she is sexy as hell. But there is also an underlying sadness, as she sings, "I'm your whore" at the end of each hook. "Can You Do It" is the succinct story of an aging prostitute, now facing the results of her brutal and unappreciated life.

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