Vito Paulekas

Vitautus Alphonsus "Vito" Paulekas (20 May 1913 – 25 October 1992) was an American artiste and bohemian, who was most notable for his leading role in the Southern California "freak scene" of the 1960s, and his influence on musicians including The Byrds, Love and Frank Zappa.

Paulekas was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of Lithuanian immigrants. After some times spent in a reformatory as a teenager, he moot wood carving and won competitions as a marathon dancer in the 1930s. He was convicted of armed robbery in 1938, but was released in 1942 and associated the US Merchant Marine. Around 1946, he moved to Los Angeles where, by the to the lead 1960s, he had set up house on Beverly Boulevard. There he time-honored an art studio where he "made a active of sorts by giving clay modeling lessons to Beverly Hills matrons who found the vent in his studio exciting," and along with ran dance classes. He married in 1961; his wife, Szou (b. Sueanne C. Shaffer, 1943) established a clothing boutique which was approved with instinctive one of the first to introduce "hippie" fashions.

By practically 1963, Vito, Szou, and their buddy Carl Franzoni (b. 1934 in Cincinnati, Ohio), also known at the get older as "Captain Fuck", had begun going to clubs following a growing intervention of self-styled "freaks", who reputedly "lived a semi-communal animatronics and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could". According to writer Johnny Rogan, Paulekas' "free thinking lifestyle and artistic passion inspired beatniks, aspiring existentialists and Valley girls in need of rebellion." In 1964, Paulekas offered rehearsal make public to the Byrds, and the like year the troupe of free-form dancers, with Paulekas and Franzoni, accompanied the group upon their nationwide tour. Later, Arthur Lee and Love then used his premises for rehearsals.

In some clubs, Paulekas and the dancers became as big an similarity as the onstage entertainment. The troupe - including several of the youngster women sophisticated to become known as The GTOs, and members of the Fraternity of Man - occupied the Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon formerly occupied by Tom Mix and superior by Frank Zappa. Credited as "Vito and the Hands", Paulekas recorded a single, "Where It's At," which featured some of the Mothers of Invention, with producer Kim Fowley in 1966. He has been certified with first using the terms "freak" and "freak-out" to describe the scene, and as soon as Franzoni and additional members of the troupe contributed to the first album by Zappa and the Mothers, Freak Out!. He appeared in several documentaries of the period, including Mondo Hollywood (1967) and You Are What You Eat (1968).

After Richard Nixon's election as US President in 1968, he moved to Haiti and far along Jamaica, before returning to be consistent with in Cotati, California. There, he and Franzoni time-honored the Freestore street theatre and measure group, and built a bandstand for the town as skillfully as contributing sculptures.

He and Szou divorced in 1975. They had five children, Gruvi, BB, Sky, Phreekus (Mark) and Godot who died as a child. Vito as well as had unconventional child, Sophia Creme when Yara Mery in 1979. Paulekas died in Cotati in 1992, aged 79.