“The manner in which people consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables or using it for wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie,” visionary composer, bandleader, musician, and social critic Frank Zappa wrote in his 1989 autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book. “It’s consumed that way without any regard to how or why it’s made.”
The “how” and “why” of Zappa’s eccentric, eclectic, at times subversive music could fill volumes of musicological texts and endless pages of online fan forums. His uncompromising and for the most part non-commercial catalog can pose a real challenge for the uninitiated. Yet scouring this treasure trove of experimental music can be richly rewarding.
For three decades, Zappa—who died in 1993 from prostate cancer—worked the fringes of the cultural landscape as a pop-music insurgent, concocting a potent brew of (sometimes incongruously) mixed musical styles, humor, and scorching social commentary that mocked what he saw as the vapid nature of middle-class social values. He was as comfortable quoting passages from Igor Stravinsky, as he did in the masterful soap-opera– inspired suite “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” from 1967’s brilliant Absolutely Free, as he was crafting doo-wop parodies for his 1950s-style rock ’n’ roll revival project Ruben & the Jets, exploring cutting-edge jazz fusion, or tendering the hit-disco- spoof “Dancing Fool.” He embraced absurdity, and displayed a dada artist’s sly wit, once telling the New York Times that he thought people took popular music far too seriously. Yet, Zappa—a contrarian who straddled musical camps and mocked his audience’s supposed mundane sensibilities while catering to their prurient interests—devoted his life to what he preferred to call “serious writing,” a textured blend of rock, blues, psychedelia, R&B, jazz, avant-classical, and even music-hall styles, all tightly arranged or orchestrated, though often incorporating improvisational sections played by an ever-shifting roster of talented virtuoso musicians.
Zappa was an underground artist who enjoyed mainstream success. He reveled in the notion that his recordings had little or no commercial value, though several of his later albums reached Billboard’s Top 40 chart and the 1982 single “Valley Girl” climbed into the Top 20. And he was a committed advocate of freedom of artistic expression. He even testified before Congress in opposition to then– Vice President Al Gore’s wife Tipper and her lobbying group the Parent’s Music Resource Center in their successful bid to put parental warning labels on albums. Zappa dismissed music critics who failed to understand his motives, rock fans who lacked the curiosity to listen to his recordings, and classical audiences that refused to sit through his contemporary classical works.
Now, for the first time in years, his complete musical output is newly available. Last year, the Zappa Family Trust regained control of Zappa’s music (formerly on the Barking Pumpkin label) and inked a deal with Universal Music Enterprises. Since July 31, Zappa’s extensive catalog of 60 recordings, much of it out-of-print since the 2003 acquisition of Rykodisc by Warner Music, has been remastered and reissued on the Zappa/Universal label in batches of 12 albums each month (no vinyl, no plans for unreleased material).
In August, iTunes released the catalog online in MP3 and ALAC formats. Zappa loathed the degradation of digitalized music, but reissuing his work on iTunes will offer generations to come easy access to the music of one of rock’s few true innovators.
Zappa Invents Himself
To grasp the depth of Zappa’s music, first and foremost, you must consider his lifelong pursuit of avant-garde music, ranging from classical to jazz to rock. His catalog is remarkably cohesive, fitting within the context of what Zappa called the project/object, in which a recurring theme, character, song, suite, or jazz symphony (or project) was part of a larger object. “Rembrandt got his ‘look’ by mixing just a little brown into every other color—he didn’t do ‘red’ unless it had brown in it,” Zappa explained in his autobiography. “The brown itself wasn’t especially fascinating, but the result of its obsessive inclusion was that ‘look.’”
Zappa’s fascination with experimental music began at an age when most kids are just discovering the innocence of rock ’n’ roll, and his childhood experiences had a big impact on his music and philoso- phy, especially his mistrust of authority. Born into an Italian-American household in Baltimore, Maryland, four days before Christmas in 1940, Frank Vincent Zappa also shared Greek and Arab ancestry. His father, Francis Vincent Zappa, was a chemist who worked for the U.S. Army at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, a chemical warfare facility that stored deadly mustard gas. There is con- jecture that the younger Zappa may have been contaminated by mustard gas, but there’s no record of that. Still, Zappa— who grew up just a mile away from the site—was a sickly kid.
In 1952, his family moved to California, in hopes of improving their son’s health, eventually settling in El Cajon, on the outskirts of San Diego. As a child, he had built small bombs from repurposed gunpowder extracted from 50-caliber bullets. But in Southern California his interests turned from bomb making to music making. At 12, he started playing drums in a school band. His interest in avant-garde music developed shortly afterward. After buying an album that included French-born composer Edgard Varèse’s percussion-laden avant-classical work Ionisation, Zappa became obsessed with the 20th-century classical works of Varèse, Stravinsky, Webern, and the Egyptian-born electronic-music pioneer Halim El-Dabh. At 15, after the family moved to Los Angeles County, Zappa phoned Varèse at his home in Greenwich Village in New York City to express his love of Varèse’s music—the money for the phone call was a birthday present from his mother, who had started to appreciate her son’s musical interests.
At Antelope Valley High School Zappa met fellow student Don Vliet, who later would become known as Captain Beefheart; the two budding musicians shared an interest in blues and experimental music. And it was in high school that Zappa would write, arrange, and conduct his first avant-classical work. In 1961, Zappa moved to the Latino neighborhood of Echo Park, near downtown L.A., and began gigging with his own band, the Blackouts. He quickly made a name for himself as a bohemian— in 1963 Zappa appeared, with short hair and in a suit and tie, on comedian and jazz pianist Steve Allen’s syndicated TV show, performing freewheeling sounds played on a Schwinn bicycle. In 1964, he launched his own L.A.-based Studio Z, where he scored and recorded music for low-budget films. He got into trouble with the law when police deemed one of those films to be pornographic, and received a six-month suspended sentence following a misdemeanor conviction (he served 10 days in county jail).
The following year, Zappa teamed up with singer Ray Collins, drummer Jimmy Carl Black, and bassist Roy Estrada to form the Soul Giants, a band that would eventually become the Mothers. In 1966, producer Tom Wilson (who had produced such Columbia artists as Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel) heard the Mothers play “Trouble Every Day,” a driving, grittty folk-blues song with churning guitar lines and lyrics inspired by the poverty and racial strife that had exploded into the 1965 Watts riots. On the basis of that song, he landed them a deal in March of 1966 with Verve Records, which assumed the Mothers were a folk- rock band with blues pretentions. Verve/ MGM officials soon asked that the band to change its name to avoid offending anyone. Little did they know what Zappa would unleash in the recording studio.
The 1960’s Essential Album: Freak Out!
“Freak Out! was a sign of things to come,” says Zappa biographer Ben Watson in the 2009 British film documentary Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: In the 1960s. “In some ways, Frank Zappa simply remade this record again and again throughout his life. If you take as the key to the record a confrontation between errantly rubbishy pop music and extremely arcane classical avant- garde music, then that’s what every Frank Zappa record, in fact, does.”
How did the always-ambitious Zappa come to regard his debut album? He dismissed Freak Out! as sounding like a bunch of demos. This landmark double album, conceived as the first rock concept album, was released in July 1966, a month before the Beatles unveiled their psychedelic masterpiece Revolver, and a full year before Sgt. Pepper’s. (Paul McCartney has noted its influence on Sgt. Pepper’s.) On the sprawling Freak Out!, Zappa lays down his marker with groundbreaking music that blurs the boundaries of rock and pop, song and sound collages, jazz and classical (one entire side featured the jumpy, mostly instrumental jazz-rock of the threatening “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet: An Unfinished Ballet in Two Tableaux”). The album, which mocked social mores and challenged the status quo, also includes Zappa’s only outright protest songs: “Trouble Every Day” and “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” the latter an uncharacteristically non- apologetic comment on the younger generation’s yearning for change.
Sure, 1967’s Absolutely Free, on which Zappa hurled a torrent of satirical barbs at the middle-class, is funnier, its song forms more exploratory and its conceptual themes more defined; 1968’s Top 40 hit We’re Only in It for the Money offers a scathing indictment of the hippie counterculture and parodies the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, as well as the sophisticated avant-jazz of “The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny”; and his 1968 solo album Lumpy Gravy (in which Zappa conducts the 50-piece Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, a group of session musicians) features far more complex atonal structures and orchestral arrangements. For that matter, 1969’s Hot Rats would close the decade by spawning the catchy and hugely popular FM-radio staple “Peaches in Regalia.”
But Freak Out!, a storm warning that signaled the turmoil of the decade, answered the question: What if Lenny Bruce had a rock band? Indeed, it’s hard to understate just how earthshaking Freak Out! was at a time when the Beach Boys had the No. 1 pop single with the feel- good hippie anthem “Good Vibrations,” and the Fab Four were still wading hip-deep in the acoustic folk-rock of “Nowhere Man.” Zappa’s bitter contempt for the middle class and the ominous guitar-and-bass intro to his blistering paean to paranoia “Who Are the Brain Police?” still hold up today. That track stands as a harbinger to Black Sabbath and its heavy-metal progeny and heralds a far more malevolent—and mature— brand of rock that Zappa would help foment in the decade ahead.
The 1970’s Essential Album: The Grand Wazoo
The 70s found the prolific Zappa at the height of his compositional powers and exploring a host of new studio techniques. He released 1973’s Over-Nite Sensation (with Tina Turner and the Ike- ettes in an uncredited role as backup singers), which generated the catchy “Montana” and “Dinah-Moe-Humm,” and 1974’s Apostrophe (with the iconic “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”). The decade also spawned the minimalist rock parody of 1976’s Zoot Allures and the 1979 hit album Sheik Yerbouti (boasting the Grammy-nominated single “Dancin’ Fool” and such shamelessly sophomoric spoofs as “Jewish Princess” and the Peter Frampton send-up “I Have Been in You,” all of which rivaled Weird Al Yankovic’s novelty tunes). Also in 1979 Zappa released the popular—and raunchy—rock opera Joe’s Garage, the first installment in a three-record set and the first of many Zappa albums to repurpose his guitar solos.
Throughout the decade, Zappa also continued to hone his orchestral chops. He issued two albums of classical works with the London Symphony Orchestra and a third performed by the Pierre Boulez InterContemporain Ensemble. L.A. Philharmonic music director Zubin Mehta invited him to perform with the orchestra on what would become the 1971 soundtrack to the surrealist film 200 Motels (the soundtrack also includes segments performed by the Royal Philharmonic).
Meanwhile, the dissolution of the 1960s Mothers had freed the forward thinking Zappa to stretch out creatively, adding such jazz and rock heavyweights as George Duke, Aynsley Dunbar, and Ernie Watts to the lineup. In 1972, after an audience member punched Zappa and pushed him into an orchestra pit during a concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London, causing serious injuries, Zappa convalesced in a wheelchair by crafting the big-band jazz-fusion album The Grand Wazoo (in addition to Just Another Band from L.A. and Waka/Jawaka). While Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, Weather Report, Return to Forever, and other fusion giants tapped funk or Latin rhythms or reached for spiritual heights, Zappa took the title track of The Grand Wazoo into uncharted, darker Wagnerian territory. He endowed “For Calvin (and His Next Two Hitch-Hikers)” with jagged jazz rhythms juxtaposed by a spacey ambiance, while the gorgeous “Blessed Relief” reveals a gifted composer and arranger enamored with straight- ahead jazz. This woefully underrated instrumental album didn’t make the pop charts, but fed fresh musical ideas to a growing cadre of underground rock fans eager to embrace Zappa’s rising status as a cult hero and poses the question: What if Frank Zappa had settled in as a jazz artist?
The 1980’s Essential Album: Jazz from Hell
In 1981, after an uncharacteristically quiet year, Zappa launched his Barking Pumpkin label with the double-live album Tinseltown Rebellion, needling the punk-music scene and reworking his older songs. He also released three much- anticipated albums that gave his fans a shot of his skilled axe-slinging abilities: 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. But it was 1982’s Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch that delivered Zappa’s most mainstream hit, “Valley Girl,” which featured his daughter Moon Unit on vocals. These releases offer a glimpse of the tsunami of ideas that Zappa unleashed on the pop world in what, for him, was an otherwise relatively quiet decade.
And then along came Jazz from Hell. This less commercial, but critically acclaimed, 1986 solo outing finds Zappa relying on a synclavier keyboard and computer processing on songs that can be daunting (“Damp Ankles”), politically inspired (“The Beltway Bandits”), or tantalizingly melodic (“St. Etienne”). The album garnered a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance by an Orchestra, Group, or Soloist (only the stunning closing track, “St. Etienne,” sports a band).
The 1990’s Essential Album: The Yellow Shark
In failing health and unable to tour or record, Zappa began releasing live material and outtakes, including his You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series and a preemptive box set called Beat the Boots. In 1991, due to illness, he missed a New York performance of Zappa alumni, but the following year flew to Germany to perform a work commissioned by the Ensemble Modern. The recording’s stellar instrumental music ranged from a string
quartet to larger ensemble works, and from new music to a medley of Zappa classics. The Yellow Shark is classic Zappa, spotlighting his composer and arranger credentials, and seamlessly integrating his musical prowess and outrageous sense of humor. Case in point: “Welcome to the United States,” in which the ensemble blends a jazz-in-the-Weimar Republic sensibility with a narration based on the application form for a U.S. visa. There also are orchestral versions of synclavier tunes from Jazz from Hell, a striking piano duet of “Ruth Is Sleeping,” a wildly inventive take on “Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America, 1992,” and an orchestrated medley of such mid-career songs as “Uncle Meat” and “Dog Breath Variations.” The album deftly displays the influences of Varèse and Stravinsky and the many other stylistic roads Zappa tread throughout his long career—it’s the culmination of a musical journey that knew no bounds. The Yellow Shark— which depicts a gaunt and graying Zappa on the cover—was released just a month before Zappa’s untimely death at age 52.
The 2000’s and Beyond Essential Album: FZ: OZ
Recorded at a 1976 concert in Sydney, Australia, FZ: OZ captures a seldom- recorded four-piece back-up band performing early versions of “Canard Toujours,” “Filthy Habits,” and “The Illinois Enema Bandit,” as well as a reggae version of “Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance,” along with extended versions of other popular Zappa songs. Also check out 2003’s 5.1 surround-sound DVD-audio Halloween, a compilation of live recordings from a 1978 concert series at the Palladium in New York City. Zappa’s fretwork is amazing and he’s joined by the phenomenal Indian violinist Lakshminarayana Shankar, a co-founder of the legendary fusion group Shakti.
