Frank Zappa i

BACKGROUND:

For many years, I avoided writing about rock ‘n’ roll.

I certainly listened to a lot of it—how could you miss it in those days? But my ties to jazz back then were almost matrimonial in intensity, allowing no infidelities, no quickies in the sack with other genres, not even sultry flirting by the water cooler.

But the deeper truth was that I had no clue how to write about rock music.

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One of my guiding tenets as a writer is that every subject dictates a different prose style. I had picked up that crazy notion back in my college days, when I saw how literary critic Hugh Kenner took on the persona of the different authors he wrote about—Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Eliot, etc. With each of his books, he radically transformed his own way of writing. Every subject, as he saw it, dictated its own terms of engagement.

I found that idea appealing—and later tried to apply it in my own work. When I started to write about non-jazz subjects, I worked hard to reinvent every aspect of my writing style—cadence, metaphor, tone, syntax, even down to the smallest details of the text.

A comparison will convey exactly what I’m describing.

Here’s the opening paragraph of my book Delta Blues, where I altered almost every aspect of my writing style to match the requirements of Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Delta region of Mississippi is an expansive alluvial plain, shaped like the leaf of a pecan tree hanging lazily over the rest of the state. Stretching some two hundred and twenty miles from Vicksburg to Memphis, it is bounded on the west by the Mississippi River, and extends eastward for an average of sixty-five miles, terminating in hill country, with its poorer soil and different ways of life, and the Yazoo River, which eventually joins the Mississippi at Vicksburg. For blues fans, this is the Delta, although geologists will remind us that it is not the proper delta of the Mississippi River, which is found where the mighty currents flow into the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans.

Now compare that with the opening paragraph of my West Coast Jazz book, which required a very different writing style, one that effectively matched the neon-and-pavement vitality of SoCal in the 1950s and 1960s.

Los Angeles has no true neighborhoods—instead its distinctive cultures stretch out horizontally along specific streets. Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Strip, Mulholland Drive, Olvera Street, Rodeo Drive, La Cienega—these are to Southern California what Greenwich Village and Soho are to New York. They are Los Angeles’ linear neighborhoods, its criss-crossing geometry of local colors. Each of these Southern California streets boasts a unique sensibility, one that defies city limits and zoning laws—a Sepulveda, a La Cienega might cut through a half-dozen separate townships without losing its special aura, although a couple blocks on either side of these thoroughfares city life collapses back into the faceless anonymity of cookie-cutter car culture. Travelers from other parts of the globe, faced with this specifically West Coast phenomenon, can see only urban sprawl—looking for village geography, they miss the stories encrusted alongside the pavement, the flora and fauna of the LA city street.

Unlike the Mississippi Delta, where the landscape is so pervasive, nature in LA merely warrants a cynical comparison in that concluding phrase.

And, a final example—here’s the opening of my book Healing Songs, where I needed to capture both the emotional power of therapeutic music as well as the clinical scrupulousness of a medical subject.

Stop for a moment, and consider the rhythm within. Your heart pulsates at roughly the same tempo as Ravel’s Bolero, an insistent seventy-two beats per minute, some thirty-eight million times during the course of a year. Twenty thousand times each day, you inhale and exhale, mostly oblivious of the process. Each day, your body’s circadian rhythms run through a repeating cycle, with pulse rates and blood pressure rising upon wakening and temperature increasing during the day, declining at night. Even your hours of sleep are comprised of repetitive cycles of around ninety minutes duration. Your endocrine and immune systems run through their own diurnal cycles. Cholesterol, stomach acid, blood sugar, hormones—all ebb and flow at predictable points during the day. Your body, like a musical instrument in an orchestra, must synchronize its performance to the contrasting and complimentary rhythms surrounding it.

You can see what I’m saying.  The writing style adapts to the subject matter. At least, that’s how I try to practice my craft.  

These were all well and good, perhaps. But I still couldn’t figure out how to write about rock music.

And the more I thought about it, the harder it seemed. I wanted to write in a way that captured the grandiosity and titanic ambitions of the music, but also its shallowest moments of posturing and pretense. I dreamed of sentences big enough to fill a rock stadium, but also with the quiet authority of a backstage pass. I wanted to write with blunt honesty, but also do full justice to the magical mystery moments at the heart of the rock experience. I wanted to do all these things, and put it down in print.

Could I pull it off? Was it even possible?

I was determined to find out. So I started writing an entire book of essays on rock and pop. I even had a tentative title: Unpopular Essays on Popular Music. And I wrote, and wrote—day after day, for months.

And I failed.

I just couldn’t bring this book to completion. I wrote hundreds of pages, and decided not to publish any of it.

The final breaking point came with a long essay on Frank Zappa—which I struggled over interminably. I am typically immune to writer’s block, but I simply couldn’t finish the Zappa essay. I had met my match, and it was a scowling, frowning man with unkempt facial hair.

This gnarly Zappa essay was supposed to be the centerpiece of the book. It would showcase my new way of writing—custom-made for rock music in general and Frank Vincent Zappa in particular. Instead, this elongated essay came close to destroying me as a music critic.

So I put it aside, and returned to jazz and more comfortable topics. I found my groove again, and it’s no exaggeration to say I was a writer reborn and rejuvenated. I wrote a book called The Jazz Standards, which got positive reviews and sold well. I felt like a hit single spinning at a crisp 45 rotations per minute. Life was good, and Microsoft Word was my friend once more.

But the notion of the failed Zappa essay never stopped haunting me. It was a lasting reproach embedded in my hard drive—both the one in my computer and the one in my head. I felt I had come close to delivering something special, and that if I had kept at it, I might have overcome all the obstacles, or at least discovered my voice, my own personal way of addressing the genre that had defined my generation.

On rare occasions, I showed parts of the Zappa essay to others—only tiny sections, because there was no finished whole. They loved these little fragments, and expressed mystification that I hadn’t published the entire piece. They always wanted to see the rest. But there was no rest to this story. That merely added to my frustration and self-reproach.

Feelings of guilt forced me to return periodically to this failed experiment, and tinker with it—again and again, over a period of many years. And it slowly came together. When I finally put the finishing touches to that gnarly Zappa essay, I realized that nothing I had ever written in my entire life had taken so long to complete.

Instead of celebrating, I just breathed a sigh of exhaustion.

I share it here, but with some trepidation. I’m still hesitant to make any claims for it—so I’ll simply call it “An Experiment in Rock Criticism.” At least I broke out of my writer’s block, and found a way of dealing with this strident genre. For better or worse, I could move on.

It’s a longish piece, and I will share it in three installments. Below is part one.

    Frank Zappa glossy publicity photo from 1970 (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) The Gnarly Frank Zappa Essay (Part 1 of 3) An Experiment in Rock Criticism

by Ted Gioia

The scowl should have told us immediately. The perpetual frown, matching the semi-circular arc of the bushy mustache, made it clear that this was no party, no summer of love orgy. And in case you might have missed the point, the wry face was under-pinned by another thick brush of whisker below, as if to emphasize the implied criticism, like your home room teacher underlining the grammar mistakes in your last term paper. No performer, since Miles Davis came of age as the anti-Satchmo, glared more often, more penetratingly than Frank Zappa. Read this face, and it proclaimed clear and certain disapproval. Your dad couldn’t match that dour look, even after seeing your latest report card, the dent in the fender of his Oldsmobile, or the newest Mothers of Invention record—Weasels Ripped My Flesh or Hot Rats, let’s say—desecrating his hi-fi turntable, the rotating altar intended for Sinatra, Dorsey, and the original Broadway cast of Oklahoma. If looks could kill, they would look like Frank Zappa. 

Bang! Bang! Shoot! Shoot!

What was Zappa frowning at? Well, it hardly mattered. There was so much to disapprove of in the Johnson-Nixon-military-industrial-complex-repressive-computer-punchcard atmosphere. Take your pick:  the Vietnam War, the Andy Griffith Show, go-go boots, genuine naugahyde, Reader’s Digest condensed books, leisure suits in pastel colors, Tupperware parties, lava lamps, Bobby Sherman’s picture on the cover of Sixteen magazine, you name it. Something had to burn, baby, burn—a draft card, a bra, the whole freaking dean’s office. Who could blame Zappa for frowning. We would have smiles enough after the revolution. 

Zappa was the real deal—or so we ardently hoped. Dali had promised liberation. Robbe-Grillet had promised liberation. Schoenberg had promised liberation. But Zappa delivered. The avant garde, the progressive movements in art were supposed to break through the tired and emaciated paradigms of the past, and open up our sensory paths to brave, new feelings, recharge our central nervous system with a jolt of the latest juice. But too often they did nothing of the kind. The various –isms—surrealism, serialism, solecisms, spoonerisms, you name it, were just . . . well, boring us most of the time. They put us to sleep, when we wanted to be awake like never before. 

Zappa never anesthetized his listeners, even when performing major surgery on their sensory organs. You could accuse him of many things—bizarre or outrageous things, even—but never of boring us. In an era in which the best rock music was always surprising us, offering the wonders of a White Album, a Pet Sounds, or Dylan going electric at Newport, no one pushed the “Aha!” further than Zappa. Every new Mothers of Invention album promised to blow out the subwoofers of your mind with something never heard before, not just pushing the envelope but tearing it to tatters with the draft card still inside.

The various ingredients were, of course, quite familiar: doo-wop, industrial noise, scatological humor, contemporary classical music, electric guitars, souped-up keyboards, energy jazz, the four food groups (as personified by Uncle Meat, Suzy Creamcheese, Duke of Prunes, and Electric Aunt Jemima, and others of their ilk), and the chords to “Louie Louie,” to name a few. But the way they were mixed together defied all conventional expectations. Hendrix promised liberation. Clapton promised liberation. But Zappa delivered, not just using his guitar as the ultimate slash-and-burn weapon but blasting gnarly monologues and illicit lyrics—the F-word on a 1960s Verve album, really?—that seemed ready-made for inclusion on the banned substances list.

You owned many albums, but you would still keep those Zappa platters at the back of the fruit box even if they weren’t sorted in A-Z order. Those were the ones Dad was least likely to confiscate, imprecate, mutilate, eradicate. Put up the Archies instead at the front, a sacrificial lamb for parental cross-the-Cambodian-border incursions.

    Zappa street graffiti in Belgrade (Sadko Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons)

How did Frank Zappa prepare for this world-beating career? His formal education consisted mostly of moving from high school to high school—by the age of 15, Zappa had attended six different institutions of mid-level education. He later tried two different junior colleges, none of them adding much to his body of knowledge. “My formal education is a little skimpy,” he later admitted. “What I know is mostly from reading books I got out of the library.” His constant school-hopping did, however, leave one lasting mark. "I didn't have any friends,” Zappa once explained to the Washington Post. “I developed an affinity to creeps, and I've surrounded myself with them ever since."

In time these stragglers, creeps, and desperadoes morphed into something that vaguely resembled a rock and roll band. “These Mothers is crazy,” proclaimed the liner notes to Zappa’s debut album Freak Out! “You can tell by their clothes. One guy wears beads and they all smell bad.” You could tell even more by their music. The opening bars of the first track are vaguely reminiscent of the Stones “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which had shaken up the scene the previous year. But Zappa merely uses this to set the stage for the uncompromising weirdness of “Hungry Freaks, Daddy.” Where other mop-tops would follow with a huggy-kissy love song, the Mothers then launched into classic Zappa-frown-scowl mode with “I Ain’t Got No Heart,” which takes us to “Who Are the Brain Police?” perhaps the most eerie and unsettling rock piece one could find in July 1966, when Freak Out! was presented for consumption to a Middle America still trying to come to grips with long haired boys brandishing electric guitars. By the time listeners got to “It Can’t Happen Here,” the word collage paean to paranoia on side two, they must have been reeling in Kansas. 

Few got that far, however, or heard much of Freak Out! It took six months before the Mothers’ debut album staggered on to the estimable Billboard chart at #139. It peaked at #130. Then disappeared from view.

What was the respected Verve label—which had built its reputation on Ella Fitzgerald and swing-to-bop jazz—doing with these unkempt dropouts who couldn’t sell vinyl or write a sweet hit single? Parent company MGM had been played for fools. That was no surprise—these were the same industry tyros who thought popular music began and ended with Connie Francis, and when they finally decided to get involved with the British Invasion, made a sucker bet on Herman’s Hermits, while shrewder competitors backed Beatles and Stones. 

But if MGM lacked vision, record producer Tom Wilson, who brought the Mothers on his date with the label, knew what he was doing. Wilson was a newcomer to MGM, but had already produced artists as diverse as Bob Dylan and John Coltrane, and around this same time signed the Velvet Underground. His advocacy led to a $2,500 advance for the Mothers of Invention, and a surprising commitment to release a double album for an unknown band, at a time when even established stars were limited to a single platter at the musical buffet. Wilson wanted to test the limits, and with Zappa and the Mothers he found the perfect vehicle for doing this. 

That said, the Mothers were never quite as out-of-control as their image conveyed. Zappa always demanded top-notch musicianship, and the various units of his band invariably boasted some remarkable, if little known, accomplishments. Few fans would guess, for instance, that Don Preston had gigged with jazz legend Elvin Jones for a year, had toured with Nat King Cole, and not only played the synthesizer, but had actually built one in 1966. Or that Bunk Gardner once performed on bassoon with the Cleveland Philharmonic. Or that Ian Underwood whose father was President of U.S. Steel, had music degrees from Yale and Berkeley. 

Zappa, of course, had none of these credentials. His last institutional affiliation had been with the San Bernardino county jail—where the young guitarist was locked up on an obscenity charge. The legal offense: Zappa had used his recording equipment to make a party tape of suggestive sounds, in response to a request from a supposed used car dealer who turned out to be an undercover cop. Jail time in San Berdoo may not look like much on the curriculum vitae, but at least Zappa got a song out of it.

She lives in Mojave in a winnebagoHis name is Bobby, he looks like a potato.She's in love with a boy from the rodeoWho pulls the rope on the chuteWhen they let those suckers go.He's a slobberin' drunk at the Palomino.They give him thirty days in San Ber'dino.

Truth to tell, Zappa wasn’t much of an outlaw. He’d never kill a man in Reno, not even in self-defense. Instead Zappa’s formative experiences had revolved around everything drab and pedestrian in 1950s California. He grew up in Lancaster, a hot-baked flatland community in the Mojave Desert, almost two hours from downtown Los Angeles. This was not Hollywood and Vine or even Pico and Sepulveda—only non-descript houses, a small main street, a Denny’s coffee shop, Edwards Air Force Base, and some aerospace companies supported by the military-industrial complex. It’s all too fitting that even when Zappa was incarcerated it was in San Bernardino, a community that makes the middle-of-nowhere seem somewhere by comparison. If other artists spend their careers in a quest for authenticity, Zappa went in the opposite direction. He was our poet laureate of the phony, the plastic, the fake, and benighted—a prophet of those inauthentic souls who somehow, in a depressing SoCal variant on the beatitudes, had inherited the Earth, or at least the toasted badlands due north of LA.

Here one finds the roots of Zappa’s fascination with the banal and commonplace which figure so prominently in his music. El Monte Legion Stadium, Holiday Inn, Ralph’s supermarket, Chicken Delight, the shopping centers of the San Fernando Valley (where she just bought some bitchin’ clothes), and TV dinners by the pool: These were to Zappa, what hot surfing spots were to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. In point of fact, Zappa mentions just as many SoCal locales in his songs as Wilson does in “Surfin’ USA,” but instead of La Jolla and Redondo Beach, Zappa is singing about Pacoima, Encino, and other centers of landlocked mediocrity.

You can laugh—even the name Pacoima sounds funny or embarrassing, like some kind of dermatological problem. Doctor, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a raging case of Pacoima. [I lift up my shirt] Just take a look at this. But these were Zappa’s sources of inspiration, what a madeleine was to Proust or a skyscraper to King Kong. His attention was drawn inevitably to simulacrums, to whatever was most shallow in the most vainglorious corner of the world.

And even as rising fame gave Zappa access to the more overtly glamorous side of the entertainment industry, he brought his cynicism and outspokenness with him. Every institution from the Grammy Awards to that august deliberative body known as the US Senate was subject to his disdain. And finally when the powers-that-be wanted to give him honors and accolades, as increasingly was the case late in his life, Zappa refused to show any deference in return. 

Consider the grand moment when Zappa was invited to give a keynote speech to the American Society of University Composers (ASUC). In the text of the talk, later published as “Bingo! There Goes Your Tenure,” Zappa sets the ground rules in his opening remarks:

“I do not belong to your organization. I know nothing about it. I'm not even interested in it—and yet, a request has been made for me to give what purports to be a keynote speech.

“Before I go on, let me warn you that I talk dirty, and that I will say things you will neither enjoy nor agree with.

“You shouldn't feel threatened, though, because I am a mere buffoon, and you are all Serious American Composers.

“For those of you who don't know, I am also a composer. I taught myself how to do it by going to the library and listening to records. I started when I was fourteen and I've been doing it for thirty years. I don't like schools. I don't like teachers. I don't like most of the things that you believe in—and if that weren't bad enough, I earn a living by playing the electric guitar….

This is Zappa at his most deferential.

He concludes his talk with the recommendation that the organization change its name from ASUC to “WE SUCK.” I am sorry to report that they did not take his advice.

But I’m running ahead of myself. Ready or not, we must return to the 1960s and take up the thread of our story.

Zappa’s follow-up project for MGM, Absolutely Free, embraced these themes of suburban despair as suitable subjects for rock rebellion, especially in the performances of “Plastic People” and “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.” But the strongest part of this acerbic album may have been the strangest:  Zappa’s series of surreal compositions devoted to fruits and vegetables.

Despite its unpromising name, “The Duke of Prunes” boasts one of Zappa’s best melodies, as he himself must have realized, since he would later reuse its theme in other settings. It appears midway, for instance, in his piece “Music for Electric Violin and Low Budget Orchestra,” where it is played with surprising tenderness by Jean-Luc Ponty. It also shows up, in an ethereal orchestral version, in his mid-1970s project, eventually released under the name Läther.  “Call Any Vegetable” also stands out. It is, to be honest, one of the best call-and-response rock pieces I have heard, and even the lyrics rise above their apparent inanity when you realize that the song isn’t really about lettuce and rutabagas. “People who do not live up to their responsibilities are vegetables, Zappa later explained. “I feel that these people, even if they are inactive, apathetic, or unconcerned at this point, can be motivated toward a more useful sort of existence. I believe that if you call any vegetable it will respond to you."

If Zappa could find this much symbolic resonance in detritus from the grocery produce section. . . . well, one wondered, what would he achieve when he tackled a meatier subject? Fans unfortunately had to wait two years before Zappa and the Mothers of Invention released Uncle Meat. In the meantime, they contented themselves with Lumpy Gravy, where Zappa took the unconventional role—especially within the rock culture of 1967—of orchestra conductor, still a low-budget ensemble, perhaps, but a much larger one, impressively dubbed by the composer as the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra. This was followed by the Mothers of Invention release We’re Only in It for the Money, Zappa’s ostensible response to Sgt. Pepper’s. Here the derisive man with too much facial hair was finally broaching the “big” themes of the counter-culture movement: peace and love, hippies, police brutality, conflict between generations.

But those expecting social advocacy from Zappa were bound to be disappointed. It may very well be impossible to say what, if anything, Zappa advocated here, but it was fairly obvious what he disliked—pretty much everything! Sure, cops and parents are pilloried. This was the ‘Sixties, after all. But Zappa now made clear that he despised hippies even more than the establishment. 

“Who Needs the Peace Corp?” drips with sarcasm while depicting the life of a peace-lovin’ flower child. (“I’m really just a phony but forgive me ‘cause I’m stoned.”) A range of other targets, from politicians to American womanhood, get their share of abuse. Although the music is occasionally gripping, for example on the spirited anthem “Mother People,” the lyrics are mostly a downer—but that was the intended effect. While everyone else was applauding Sgt. Pepper’s and the groovy atmosphere of love, peace, and rock ‘n’ roll, Zappa saw them as just more targets for satire. The lightest, brightest part of the album is the inside cover parody of the famous Sgt. Pepper’s cut-and-paste celebrity line-up.

Fans were now getting a closer glimpse of this unusual rock star. That frown, they were starting to realize, was not a pose, but the sign of Zappa’s ingrained scorn for everything, anything, and mister in-between. Maybe he was even a nihilist, straight from the pages of Turgenev. . . .

[At this point, I’m interrupted by a parent’s voice from the back row: That guitarist ain’t no hippie. He’s a Nietzschean Übermensch and recklessly laying the shameful foundation for the rise of Derrida. . . .]

Me (from the podium): “Hmmm. I see you folks are getting restless and a bit unruly. It must be time for an intermission. Let’s take five. Also don’t forget that I have books and T-shirts in the back for sale. . . .” [The rest is drowned out by grumbling, mumbling crowd noises.]

Fifteen minutes later, after things have settled down, and the unruly parent has been removed by security, I resume. . .

That’s part one

Fans were now getting a closer glimpse of this unusual rock star. That frown, they were starting to realize, was not a pose, but the sign of Zappa’s ingrained scorn for everything, anything, and mister in-between. Maybe he was even a nihilist, straight from the pages of Turgenev. We had thought that Zappa would offer us an undiluted quaff of ‘Sixties liberation, but in fact he had much more in common with our Dad than we had ever realized. (“We were so sure it couldn’t happen HERE.”)

In a strange twist, the Mothers were the first to discover his uncanny resemblance to fathers. Zappa was a strict taskmaster, demanding practice and perfection from his employees. You might even call him a martinet, a hardass, a workaholic—as his huge body of recordings testifies. Somehow he’d gone from Freak Out! to control freak while we weren’t looking, obsessed with creating more and more music rather than indulging in the permitted excesses of the rock scene. 

Zappa not only scorned drugs himself—the exact opposite of the public’s image of him—but disapproved of his musicians’ use of mind-altering substances. And with regard to. . . hmmm, sex. . . Well, listeners should not be misled by the explicit lyrics and Zappa’s apparent obsessive interest in the varieties of copulative experience. More to the point is the attitude of ridicule and sarcasm with which he treats the subject. You keep doing that buddy, and you’ll come down with a bad case of Pacoima. If it wasn’t for the borderline (or, let’s admit it, way-across-the-border) obscenity, one might even think him a prude. For the record, Frank Zappa eventually celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary with wife Adelaide Gail Sloatman—quite an achievement for any rocker, but especially for one who died at age 52.

You might even write a business book with some ridiculous name such as Frank Zappa’s Management Techniques. Rock stars rarely have their own act together, but none matched Zappa as a drill sergeant for new rock recruits, whipping the bandmates into shape, kicking their butts the moment they fell out of line. In a ranking of musicians with intimidating stares, he’s up there with Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, and Ludwig van Beethoven. And though he usually had some of the best musicians in the rock world on his payroll, he never hesitated to complain about their limitations, point out their mistakes, and give out compliments in the smallest of doses.

Yet the music itself offered a chastisement even more biting than anything Zappa could say in words. These were tough songs to play, and many rock “legends” would have been given permanent maternity leave from the Mothers after the first week on the road. But this was a strange kind of complexity, one that coexisted with the simplest building blocks of music.

Zappa mocked rockers who released track after track based on ii-V vamps—he sarcastically called it the “Carlos Santana secret chord progression.” Yet Zappa himself loved soloing over just two juicy chords, or even less, say a drone in 4/4. Then again, it was often hard to tell what, in the Zappa universe (Zappaverse?) was parody and what was genuine self-expression. Sometimes it seemed like Frank didn’t differentiate between the two.

And the moment you thought Zappa was pursuing a personal vision of garage band jams or camp-for-camp’s-sake, he would throw out something jagged, dissonant, and full of shifting meters—such as “The Little House I Used to Live In”—19 mind-blowing minutes of music recorded in the late 1960s. Can you even call this rock? Hippies are advised to head for the hills, and find one of those bomb shelters people were building back then. There weren’t enough joints in all of Berkeley to make this music seem mellow.

By the same token, Zappa dug those minor pentatonic licks with the enthusiasm of a first year student at Berklee. But this was misleading, too, because he could switch gears in a heartbeat and embark on some ridiculously convoluted piece of musical acrobatics, or even veer into the furthest reaches of the avant-garde.

Jazz pianist Paul Smith once described a recording session where Zappa grew frustrated at how poorly the hired musicians were playing his complex scores—so he made up a new aleatory composition on the spot. He put the session players in a circle and sat on a chair in the middle, from which he would point randomly at a musician, who would then make a noise on an instrument. Yet on a different day, Zappa would be just as likely to take the whole squad and force them to play 12-bar blues in every key. The only constant in his routine was that there was no constant routine.

I’ve heard rock musicologists (I’ll admit it—I made up that term) debate endlessly whether Zappa is more partial to Lydian or Mixolydian modes. Hey, whatever floats your boat. But I’m not going down that rabbit hole, because the real essence of Zappa’s music wasn’t the individual ingredients, rather the juxtapositions. He was deliberately pursuing a postmodernist cut-and-paste ethos before anyone else in rock, and almost anyone in academia. This inventive Mother was like a matchmaker who pairs up incompatibles in zany marriages for a sadistic TV reality show—only with Mr. Z. it was sounds not singles who ended up in deviant intercourse for the voyeuristic audience.

Above all, Zappa’s music stood out for its freedom—that was his genuine F word. From a purely technical point of view, you could analyze the musical freedom, the polyrhythms and odd metrics and bar-crossing acrobatics. The free fluidity of the superimpositions is what makes this guitarist burn, baby, burn. But it went hand in hand with Zappa’s stylistic freedom, which acknowledged no boundaries. Even the quirkiness of his guitar technique, all those strange picking and finger sounds, add to the overall effect. Frank Zappa played wrong and made it sound righteous.

But he needed to find musicians who could keep up with the boss. The end result of all of this was a push for what organizational experts call peak performance. And more often than not, Zappa achieved it. By any measure, he was one of the great bandleaders of his era—with an emphasis on the word leader. Yet few of his fans would have guessed it. Some probably even thought he was just another hippie on acid.  

A few onlookers, however, were starting to sniff out the truth. Zappa had promised Dionysian liberation, but at a far deeper level he drew his energy and stage presence from the Apollonian control-and-command toolkit. In the Freudian drama, he ought to be cast as the punishing Father of Prevention, not the warm-and-fuzzy Mother of Invention. Even rock fans without psychoanalytical training were now comprehending that the satirical nihilism of We’re Only in it for the Money was a poor fit with the peace-and-love ambience of the era.

Maybe even Zappa realized it. In any event, he put his Nietzschean will-to-power sensibilities on the backburner for a short spell—although they would eventually take over as the dominant element of his worldview. In the interim, Zappa explored an impressive range of expressive mediums in the closing years of the 1960s. He moved masterfully from the doo-wop inspired sounds of Crusing With Ruben and the Jets to the surreal soundtrack to the movie-that-almost-wasn’t Uncle Meat. He shifted gears from the philharmonic aspirations of King Kong to the jazz-rock inflected masterpiece Hot Rats. And he still found time to launch the counterculture careers of Captain Beefheart—serving as producer for Trout Mask Replica, arguably the strangest album of 1969 (no small claim, that)—and Alice Cooper, among others.

Oh, don’t let me forget: Zappa also took a stab at writing TV commercial music, and won a Clio Award in the process.

This was an era of tremendous expansion in rock music, but no one was engaged in a more extreme land grab than Frank Zappa. Uncle Meat and Hot Rats rank among Zappa’s finest efforts, and gave notice of his growing interest in other cutting-edge developments from jazz-rock fusion to musique concrète. The former album, from 1969, is a wholly satisfying project, even without the cinematic accompaniment Zappa intended. His guitar work takes on an accomplished flamenco fluidity in “Nine Types of Industrial Pollution,” and “Ian Underwood Whips it Out” is even more daring, an indecent exposure of free jazz, as pleasing as it is unexpected on a rock album. On “Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague,” Zappa plays one of his standard tricks, combining a luscious, yearning melody with suburban lyrics of quiet desperation, but he returns to the same thematic material on his short but excellent “The Dog Breath Variations.” Perhaps the most surreal interlude is a live snippet from the Royal Albert Hall, where Zappa enlists band member Don Preston to play the venue’s venerated pipe organ—a behemoth dating back to 1871 and once the largest in the world—in an atonal arrangement of “Louie Louie.” In the aftermath, even stiff British upper lips were now bent in a grimace at the mention of Mr. Z’s blasphemous name.

Did Zappa have no sense of decency? The short answer is no.

But Hot Rats aims even higher, and is a genuine masterpiece of jazz-rock fusion. Check out the band’s chops on “Peaches en Regalia.” That piece was so jazzy it even found its way into The Real Book, the canonical compilation of lead sheets that educated the next two generations of rising jazz stars—and a private club of sorts where no other rocker gained admission. The extended version of “The Gumbo Variations” from this same album, a sixteen-minute excursion into high energy jazz-rock, is another major statement, and a sign of how far Zappa was willing to travel beyond familiar rock formulas. The cohesion of the rhythm section on this track stands out, and the solos are impressive—Ian Underwood’s tenor sax solo is major league work, not your typical rocker trying on a pair of over-sized jazz shoes. Zappa himself generates so much smoke-and-flames here, I’m ready to break out the fire extinguisher in the glass display case. 

On the basis of these end-of-the-decade projects alone, Zappa was establishing himself as the biggest risk-taker of all the rockers in this turbulent age. One could only echo Lester Bangs, writing for Rolling Stone, who announced at the time: “If Hot Rats is any indication of where Zappa is headed on his own, we are in for some fiendish rides indeed.” Another critic, trying to explain the paradoxical qualities of this music, offered up this thumbnail assessment: Hot Rats “could appeal to a child as easily as it could a stoner, a rocker, or a fan of the avant-garde.”

Despite all this, Zappa had never enjoyed even one honest-to-goodness hit single, not even a deep track that got into regular rotation at the more free-wheeling FM stations. It wasn’t as if he didn’t try. Zappa released ten singles in the 1960s and not one of them made the charts in the US—or any other country as far as I can tell. His album sales were little better. His albums from the 1960s are praised to the skies nowadays, but none climbed any higher than number 30 on the estimable Billboard ranking, and most failed to reach the top 100. Hot Rats, now an acknowledged classic, peaked out at number 173 on the Billboard top 200. Even in the tiny subgenre of vermin music, it couldn’t match the sales of “Theme Song to Ben.”

This is the context in which we need to view Zappa’s decision, in the early 1970s, to dig more deeply into jazz. Didn’t he know this was career suicide for a rock star? Of course he did—he famously quipped that “jazz is the music of unemployment.” And he had already tasted the bitter fruits himself when he collaborated with French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty on a pathbreaking fusion record back in 1969—complete with liner notes by Leonard Feather and produced by Richard Bock, who had made his name promoting Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan back in the 1950s. In the aftermath, Zappa complained to a journalist: “It’s ignorance. The public is not ready to listen to long instrumental things. They can’t hear them.”     

Undaunted, Zappa now embraced jazz-rock with the vengeance of a Las Vegas loser hoping to defy the odds at the craps table. These explorations delivered no jackpots, but did result in two very underrated recordings, Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, both released in 1972. Their impact at the time was negligible—fulfilling Zappa’s caustic views of the listening public. But the sad truth is that jazz insiders were just as skeptical of Zappa as parents, ministers, and the plastic people he once sang about. This was the golden age of jazz-rock fusion, but only musicians who came out of the jazz side of the equation were getting praised in the prevailing narrative. So if you asked a jazz devotee to list the leaders of the fusion movement, you would hear about Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin, and Wayne Shorter, among others. But why not Frank Zappa or Joni Mitchell or Steely Dan or Blood, Sweat and Tears? Those latter artists were just as much fusion stars as the former, but were strangely denied even a tiny dose of jazz street cred at the time.

In all fairness, everyone was having trouble keeping up with Zappa at this juncture in his career. He seemed to be everywhere during the latter days of the Nixonian empire, except perhaps where big money is made on the music scene. Even a single album such as Weasels Ripped My Flesh, released in 1970, would cover more ground than any critic could traverse. “Anything goes” said one reviewer, and “aggressively bizarre” griped another.

Such confusion was understandable. If you peered under the hood of his music at this juncture, you would see the most unlikely assortment of moving parts—Luciano Berio, boogie woogie, Eric Dolphy, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, Neal Hefti, Claude Debussy, “Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, Edgard Varese, and others equally incongruous spark plugs—firing the pistons of his rock ‘n’ roll engine. In a few years, this mix-and-match aesthetics would get legitimized and academicized (and ultimately lobotomized) under the rubric of Deconstruction with a capital D. But at the end of the 1960s, only a few bohos in Paris knew about all that, and apparently they weren’t buying many copies of Weasels Ripped My Flesh. This was Zappa’s tenth album, and he should have serious tailwinds to his career by now, but it peaked out at number 189 on the estimable Billboard chart.

Who could see Zappa clearly now? Maybe not even Frank himself.  

But, as the 1970s would prove, Zappa’s ears were getting bigger—metaphorically speaking, that is (physically, they had always been humongous, but usually well hidden under a tangle of hippie hair). He could hear what he wanted, and often what he wanted was well beyond the conventional range of rock. A handful of newer bands were experimenting with the use of horn sections, and Zappa himself had been using sax and trumpet ever since his first album, but now he wanted to push ahead in this direction, showing that the use of reeds and brass required no artistic compromise, no betrayal of the spirit of the Chicago seven in favor of the seven-piece Chicago band, who had started out with deep jazz roots but gradually devolved into purveyors of pop fluff for AM radio. Zappa performances such as “Big Swifty” or “Cletus Awreetus-Awrightus” were almost exemplary in their anti-Steely-Dan ethos, their recondite insistence on pursuing the muse within, rather than the audience out there. 

But Zappa didn’t really hate his fans. It’s true that he often worked to please himself in the recording studio, but different rules applied onstage in front of a large audience. There his genuine skills of showmanship took charge. Sometimes he came across as a punishing Freudian father figure who talked dirty and told bad jokes—but there must have been something in the zeitgeist or youth culture that sought out precisely that ungainly formula. In any event, Zappa possessed undeniable stage presence that even the largest auditorium could not dilute. And as a result, his live recordings would eventually emerge as the focal point for his creative juices—something few fans might have suspected until the release of his Fillmore East concert album in 1971.

This is one of Zappa’s finest moments—and I’m not surprised that it reached the top forty on the estimable Billboard chart, which was a big deal for this artist, or at least the label honchos at Reprise. But unleashing unhinged cathartic energies in a densely-populated enclosed space could come at a high price. Audience reaction at a Zappa concert was sometimes unpredictable or even dangerous. On a number of occasions, the music-making ended in riots or other unexpected events. 

Six months after the Fillmore East date, Zappa lost much of his equipment in a fire set off mid performance by a fan who apparently shot a flare gun at the ceiling. Just a few days later, Zappa was attacked by a member of the audience who pushed him off stage, causing serious injuries – including fractures, a crushed larynx, and leg and back problems. In the aftermath, he had to use a wheelchair and stopped touring for most of the next year. When he returned to the stage in late 1972, he wore a leg brace and showed a noticeable limp.

As if poor sales of jazz-oriented albums and physical disabilities weren’t bad enough, Zappa now found himself enmeshed in legal problems. He sued his former manager Herb Cohen, who sued him back. His record labels got drawn into the battle, with funds frozen and Zappa losing access to his MGM recordings for a period. After having escaped from the MGM lion’s den, Zappa had set up his own production company but still relied on Warner Bros. for distribution. However, this relationship also soured over the course of time. To get out of his contract, Zappa had to deliver four albums to Warner Bros., which he did by drawing on a mish-mash of tracks from various sources. These were later released by the label in censored versions, and more litigation ensued.

The situation got so bad that Zappa showed up on radio station KROQ in Pasadena one day in December 1977, and played his Läther music, then embargoed because of Warner’s lawsuit, and invited fans at home to make their own pirate recordings of it. With all the legal kerfuffling, the music itself was almost a footnote. The final Warner Bros. projects were issued without Zappa’s oversight and final approval in 1978 (Studio Tan) and 1979 (Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites). These were largely ignored except by his most devoted fans. It didn’t help that Zappa had no interest in promoting releases from his courtroom opponent. 

Seeking an escape from this legal minefield, the rock star now launched another indie label, called Zappa Records. His first release Sheik Yerbouti proved the wisdom of this move—it eventually sold over two million copies, and gave a second wind to a career that, just a few months before, had been floundering. Zappa was now focusing more on the comedic elements in his music, but was as controversial as ever. “Bobby Brown,” a misanthropic story song about a cute boy with fetishistic tastes, was a sizable hit in Europe, even rising to the top ten in Germany, but most US radio stations found it too obscene for American listeners. According to one account, Zappa was so puzzled by the track’s success in northern Europe that he considered hiring an anthropologist to study the phenomenon.

From this point on, Zappa’s biggest paydays usually came from his clowning and satirical songs. Yet he resisted this pigeonholing at every turn. As boss of his own label he was determined to showcase his instrumental and compositional skills. In a series of 1981 releases—Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar, Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar Some More and Return of the Son of Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar—Zappa lived up to the promise of the album titles. Here he drew on tapes of live performances, isolating sections of pieces or interludes that showcased his prodigious guitar chops.

On many of the strongest tracks—such as “five-five-FIVE,”  “Beat It With Your Fist” and “Why Johnny Can’t Read”—he is matched with unrelenting energy by drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, who is every bit as dazzling as his boss. Colaiuta had languished in lounge bands before Zappa auditioned the 22-year-old in 1978. At that first encounter, Colaiuta performed Zappa’s notoriously difficult composition “The Black Page”—and, no, you don’t need to be Itzhak Perlman to guess that the name derives from the large number of tiny notes on the staff—a piece that only Terry Bozzio had previously mastered, but which Colaiuta played by heart. Even more than the sheer number of notes, the rhythmic subdivisions here would thwart many world class percussionists, but Colaiuta delighted in precisely these high speed mathematics of hide and stick.

Zappa was equally willing to hire a hotshot guitarist, even one who could challenge his own pre-eminence, as demonstrated by the addition of Steve Vai to the band. Like Colaiuta, Vai grew up in an Italian-American household where he immersed himself in music at a young age, later attending the Berklee College of Music. You might think that Vai’s precocious guitar chops were what grabbed Zappa’s attention, but in fact it was his skill at transcribing music that made the first connection. Zappa had been impressed by the teenager’s transcription of the aforementioned “The Black Page” and hired Vai to put various other tracks down on paper. But the newcomer’s ability to play ‘impossible’ or ‘stunt’ guitar parts (as Zappa described them) soon earned him a spot in the band. During his stint from 1980 to 1983 Vai made a lasting mark not only on Zappa’s work, but on the entire rock scene, where he earned respect as a guitar hero in his own right, even while working in the shadow of a legend on the same instrument.

Zappa was in the midst of his last great creative period—in the late 1980s he would shift gears, focusing more on compilations, reissues, and retrospectives than actual new projects. But even with these stellar bands, sales and reviews fell short of what they deserved. His ambitious rock opera Joe’s Garage was called out by Rolling Stone for its “cheap gags” and “musical mishmash,” although the reviewer couldn’t deny its “profound existential sorrow.” Another critic called the work “thin and thrown together.” (On the other hand, Vinnie Colaiuta’s contribution was later chosen by Modern Drummer as one of the 25 greatest drum performances of all time.) The release made a brief appearance in the estimable Billboard Top 100, peaking at number 27.

Zappa was surprisingly indecisive at this stage. Or maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise given that he was now middle-aged and still had never enjoyed a single radio hit in the US, despite a devoted cult following and sold-out shows. He planned a triple-album of live tracks called Warts and All, but scrapped the project at the last moment—explaining that it was unwieldy. Zappa then decided to release a single album called Crush All Boxes, but that also fell by the wayside. Over time, many of these tracks were released, but in compilations that made Zappa seem less like an active bandleader, and more like the carnival curator of his own archival works.

Then, out of nowhere, Zappa enjoyed a hit—the only one of his long career. . . .

Then, out of nowhere, Zappa enjoyed a hit—the only one of his long career.

Everything about “Valley Girl” was bizarre. It wasn’t just that Zappa had waited until his forties to get into the top 40. Or that he was still fretting about the Valley from the safety of his Laurel Canyon home. Even stranger than these was the fact that the former Mother now drew on his role as a Father to get into heavy radio rotation.

The inspiration behind the song was his 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit Zappa—yes, she was born during the space race, to be more precise, roughly six weeks before the Apollo 4 mission. (Her younger brother, who landed on terra firma soon after Neil Armstrong’s small step missed all that hubub, and thus received the less historic name of Dweezil, etymology uncertain.* But it does rhyme with weasel.) Zappa was fascinated by the slang and vocal inflections his daughter used on the phone with her friends—with all the characteristics that would later get called “Valleyspeak” or “Valspeak.”

[*Correction: Several Zappophiles have reached out to me explaining that Dweezil was named after one of his mother’s toes, specifically the pinky of an undetermined foot. So it’s more precise to say that the etymology of Gail’s toe’s name remains uncertain. It also rhymes with weasel.]

Encino is, like, so bitchin'There’s, like, the GalleriaAnd, like,All these, like, really great shoe storesI, like, love going into, like, clothing stores and stuffI, like, buy the neatest mini-skirts and stuffIt's, like, so bitchin''Cause, like, everybody's likeSuper-super nice. . . .

They hadn’t invented “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day” back then, but that didn’t stop him from taking his verbose offspring to a recording studio late one night. Here he asked her to recreate her distinctive patter in a freeform monologue. Dad added a guitar riff and simple refrain.

You might think this was just one more Zappa laugh at the expense of San Fernando Valley residents. But now in the 1980s mainstream Americans across the land were ready to laugh with him. He had his first (and last) top 40 single, but that hardly does justice to the impact of “Valley Girl.” The song inspired sociologists, linguists, and cultural commentators of various stripes, leading to jokes and stereotypes at one extreme, and peer-reviewed academic scholarship on the other.

Even worse, people still talk like this. And not just in the Valley.

Of course, these linguistic tics were hardly new or unnoticed—surfers and skateboarders far away from the Valley had been speaking like that during my LA childhood. The word grody even shows up in the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night back in 1964—and perhaps derives from the Middle English groti (slimy, muddy). But it took Zappa’s song to define these concepts as Valley Talk for everyone else. 

Our proud father would enjoy one more taste of crossover fame, and it wouldn’t require a guitar or any musical instruments. Instead he had to do battle with other parents—emerging as an ardent proponent of free speech in the face of expanding attempts to censor song lyrics in the mid-1980s.

Zappa took this cause seriously. Perhaps he even welcomed it. In any event, he finally had a target worthy of his satirical talents—a skill previously focused primarily on suburban angst of the lowliest sort along with various shallow simulacrums of modern life. In his new guise as political activist, he could take on both church and state, even showing up to confront the US Senate in historic testimony from 1985.

But there was a self-interested angle here. At the same time he was setting himself as the public nemesis for the parents’ group aiming to censor popular music, Zappa was in the midst of a negotiation to release his catalog on the Rykodisc label. The financial value of this deal—as well as in the eventual sale of most of the Zappa catalog to Rykodisk in 1994—would have been considerably lessened in a more restrictive environment. The terms of the latter transaction were never announced, yet the label had recently completed a $44 million corporate restructuring, and it was easy to conclude that a not insignificant portion of this capitalist lucre was destined for the Zappa estate. 

No genuine Zappa fan wants the bad words bleeped out, so he needed to keep them unbleeped. The result was a rare “Mr. Zappa Goes to Washington” intervention.

Yet it would be unfair to accuse Zappa of merely mercenary motives. His anger and zeal were so intense, his self-righteousness at such a high pitch, that only a deep emotional commitment to the cause could explain it.  To be fair, Zappa had suffered more from censorship than any rock star of his day, even going back to his incarceration at age 23 in San Bernardino.

His later fame hardly mitigated his problems—Zappa’s whole career was littered with recordings that got shelved, lyrics that got changed, concerts that got cancelled. Even the name of his band resulted from the fear of public backlash: Executives at MGM refused to believe that any self-respecting deejay would play a band called the Mothers, and their squeamishness led to the happy compromise of the Mothers of Invention. (Zappa’s later, oft-quoted quip:  “Out of necessity, we became the Mothers of Invention.”)

The built up frustrations of a whole career spent in these battles raged to the surface when Zappa learned about the machinations of the Parents Music Resource Center, an activist group determined to clean up the airwaves and vinyl grooves of America. Tipper Gore led the attack, ostensibly as a concerned parent, but perhaps even more calculatedly as the spouse of a future Presidential candidate. Gore had awakened from her dogmatic slumber after listening with her daughter to the Prince song ”Darling Nikki” from the Purple Rain soundtrack. In conjunction with several other “Washington wives”—most notably Susan Baker, Pam Howard, and Sally Nevius—Gore launched the PMRC in May 1985.  The group pressured media and retail businesses to join in their crusade, and their efforts led to the initiation of Senate hearings in September 1985 on the so-called “porn-rock” issue. 

What’s the craziest rock photo of all time? You punks can brag all you want about Sid Vicious’s mugshot or Paul Simonon slamming his guitar into the stage at the Palladium. Yawn! For my money, nothing gets more surreal than seeing Frank Zappa testifying before the US Senate. How did he even get through security and into the building.

Rock is a gnarly music. Zappa was a gnarly artist. But nothing gets gnarlier than this.

Zappa was one of a handful of rock stars to testify in this highly charged setting. He was perhaps a less sympathetic advocate for the cause of free expression than John Denver, who also appeared before the committee, and whose woeful tale of mis-interpretations of his song “Rocky Mountain High” as a pro-drug anthem were bound to appeal to Middle America. Zappa, in contrast, was caustic and scornful, raring for a fight. 

In his prepared statement, he staked out his ground.  “The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years dealing with the interpretational and enforcemental problems inherent in the proposal's design.” Zappa also took the fight to the people in appearances on the TV show Crossfire, where he debated opponents, and showed a level of conviction and sincere eloquence—on at least this issue – that had rarely surfaced in his cynical and irony-laden recordings.

But Zappa the artist was not asleep at the wheel during this period of political activism. He even integrated extracts from the Senate hearings into his recording “Porn Wars,” featured on the release Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention. It was hard to escape the conclusion that Zappa was thriving in the face of this unexpected opposition from the Washington wives. Like a TV wrestler, he needed a colorful opponent to get his own juices running, and now that he found one, he was determined to make the most of it. Tipper Gore may not have been the boogeyman, and was a poor stand in as the American Joseph Goebbels, but Zappa had to take his adversaries as he found them. And as an artist who required an attack point, even Tipper was a godsend.  

After 1984 Zappa mounted only one substantial tour—a worldwide jaunt in 1988 that provided material for Broadway the Hard Way (1988) Make a Jazz Noise Here (1991), and The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life (1991). You could view these as his last hurrahs as an active bandleader. But it wasn’t clear that he even needed a band anymore. He continued to pursue opportunities as a classical composer, and when Zappa discovered the synclavier, a $200,000 system that created an infinite variety of sounds via a Macintosh user interface, he seemed to have reached his personal Nirvana, a round-the-clock orchestra in his own home, which charged no overtime and never went into rehab. For his 1986 release, Jazz from Hell, Zappa relied solely on the synclavier, and earned a Grammy for the impressive results. 

And there was so much stuff still sitting on the shelf. The full scope of what Zappa achieved during his decades of relentless touring was not made clear until the late 1980s, when he began releasing material from his archives—a project that continued long after his death. Eventually six double disk releases were issued with the Zappa imprimatur under the name You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, usually abbreviated by devotees to YCDTOSA—more than 12 hours of music released between 1988 and 1992. Many of the tracks dated back more than twenty years, and in aggregate provided an awe-inspiring career retrospective of Frank Zappa’s life and times.

Here the relentless, uncompromising, unsentimental essence of Zappa’s character proved its value. Over a period of decades he made unreasonable demands on his musicians, and they repeatedly rose to the occasion. On YCDTOSA, we hear various editions of his band tackle this music, and the treats are everywhere: a 24 minute version of “King Kong; a whole concert from Helsinki in 1974; Captain Beefheart enacting “The Torture That Never Stops” for nine heart-beefing minutes; from the blues to Boulez, all is digested and regurgitated, combined in strange new hybrids.  

How could he top this? We would never find out.

In 1990, Zappa learned he had prostate cancer. Although he had experienced some symptoms for years, and undergone various medical tests, doctors failed to make a proper diagnosis until it was too late. There would be no reprieve from this death sentence, but in his final months Zappa continued to push ahead with his composing and archival releases.

You can see how ill he is in his last TV interview, not just in his appearance but perhaps even more in his subdued, chastened attitude—although he continued to smoke cigarettes in front of the camera. "To me, a cigarette is food," he once explained. "Tobacco is my favorite vegetable."

At this final stage, Zappa had somehow grown into a respectable figure in the culture. When his concert work The Yellow Shark was performed in Frankfurt in September 1992, the esteemed composer received a 20-minute standing ovation—but that would be his last public appearance. He lived just long enough to see that work released on as album on November 2, 1993. "Frank governs with Elmore James on his left and Stravinsky on his right,” enthused Tom Waits, who has named The Yellow Shark as one of his favorite albums.

But one month later, Zappa was dead—finally succumbing on December 3, 1993, a few days short of his 53rd birthday. Fans were prepared, at least as well as they could be. Zappa had always been bluntly honest, and that brutal truth-telling even extended to his medical situation. We knew his days were numbered, although it was still a blow when we heard the news.

In a peculiar move, Zappa was buried in an unmarked grave, somewhere on the grounds of Westwood Memorial Park—by some accounts in the plot next to actor Lew Ayres. In death as in life, he keeps his fans guessing, and at a safe distance. I suspect this was Zappa’s own decision, one last taste of misanthropy from an artist who had always bypassed the sugary love songs of his contemporaries in favor of something more biting and sardonic. Or maybe we should call it tough love. In any event, his audience had loved him in return, despite all the frowns and scowls from the auditorium stage.

They still do. Many years have now gone by, and Zappa’s renown has not diminished, not even by the tiniest black mark on that dense black page. If anything, he is taken more seriously in jazz and classical circles than he was during the prime of his career. And in the rock world he is safely ensconced among the short list of guitar legends, the Z name mentioned in the same breath as the wickedest masters of his instrument.

Yet I’m still not sure we have come to grips with Zappa’s legacy, even after all these years. I talk to various people about him, and it’s almost as if each is describing a different musician. I laud him as the great postmodernist of American popular culture, a raunchier, hipper alternative to Jean Baudrillard. But many of my friends have no patience with that kind of talk—for them Frank  Zappa is a master of cool rock licks, or a purveyor of prickly avant-garde music, or a Barnum-esque showman for the masses, or some kind of pop culture anti-hero. For one camp, he is a satirist plain and simple, while others listen to the same songs and describe them as scatological low-brow humor. One person will tell me that Zappa is more a composer than a rock star. The next will insist that he’s more of an improviser than a composer. A third person will say his real talent was as a provocateur, and all the musical stuff was just a sideline. I’ve even met people who merely quote his put-downs and quips, and haven’t actually listened to the albums. 

He was all those things, and probably some others too. Maybe we will never figure Mr. Zappa out. But did he ever expect that? It’s no coincidence that one of his favorite rock riffs, “Louie Louie”—he made sure all his bands could start playing it at the drop of a hat—was a song that became famous because no one could agree what it meant, although everyone knew that it was nasty and dangerous. Zappa’s whole career was like that—four decades of leaving people puzzled, unsettled, insulted, and vaguely threatened—but still asking for more. He didn’t give a flying beefheart whether we understood, he just wanted us to listen.

And that, most assuredly, we will continue to do.

But there ought to be a monument, too, or even several of them. And screw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress can suck eggs. And the same goes for all those other pretentious attempts at rock respectability. Mr. Zappa deserves something different.

In short, he ought to be celebrated at all the banal, plasticized places he commemorated in his songs. Face it, that’s where they need him most.

So let’s give Zappa a commemorative plaque at the Pacoima Holiday Inn. Let’s erect his granite likeness facing down the San Bernardino County Jail. Spray paint his image on walls in El Monte and Cucamonga and the “really good part of Encino.” Name a street after him in Van Nuys, a grody park bench in Lancaster, a fire hydrant in Canoga Park. Let’s cast him in bronze at the Sherman Oaks shopping mall, with Frank’s hand pointing to those bitching clothes.

Those are where he belongs, not the Grammy Museum or some Hall of Fame in Cleveland. He belongs among the Valley Girls and plastic people and shallow SoCal sellouts of all denominations. He belongs there to chastise and castigate. He belongs there to cast a scornful eye. He belongs there to make those weasels feel vaguely uneasy, just as he did during his lifetime. And, yes, he belongs there also because those are precisely the places where our frowning, scowling bard of banality will feel most at home.

 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-gnarly-frank-zappa-essay-part