Frank Zappa and the And 9781409433378, 9781409433385, 9781315583068

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures, Music Examples and Table
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
General Editor’s Preface
Introduction The Big Note, Xenochrony and All Things Contextual: Frank Zappa and the And
1 Zappa and Horror: Screamin’ at the Monster
2 Zappa and his Cultural Legacy: Authorship, Influences and Expressive Features in Frank Zappa’s Movies
3 Zappa and Religion: Music is the Best
4 Zappa and The Razor: Editing, Sampling and Musique Concrète
5 Zappa and Satire: From Conceptual Absurdism to the Perversity of Politics
6 Zappa and Resistance: The Pleasure Principle
7 Zappa and the Story-Song: A Rage of Cultural Influences
8 Zappa and Technology: His incorporation of Time, Space and Place when Performing, Composing and Arranging Music
9 Zappa and the Freaks: Recording Wild Man Fischer
10 Zappa and Modernism: An Extended Study of ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’
11 Zappa and the Avant-Garde: Artifice/Absorption/Expression
12 Zappa and Mortality: The Mediation of Zappa’s Death
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Frank Zappa and the And

Paul Carr

An Ashgate Book

FRANK ZAPPA AND THE AND

This publication is dedicated to the memory of David Sanjek (1952–2011)

Frank Zappa and the And

Edited by PAUL CARR Glamorgan University, UK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Paul Carr 2013 Paul Carr has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents A ct, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Frank Zappa and the And. -- (Ashgate popular and folk music series) 1. Zappa, Frank--Criticism and interpretation. I. Series II. Carr, Paul. 782.4’2166’092-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frank Zappa and the An d / edited by Paul Carr. pages ; cm. -- (Ashgate popular and folk music series) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3337-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-3338-5 (ebook) 1. Zappa, Frank--Criticism and Interpretation. I. Carr, Paul, 1959— ML410.Z285F72 2012 782.42166092--dc23 2012026996 ISBN: 978-1-409-43337-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-58306-8 (ebk)

For Deb, Harriet and Rory. I love you all.

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Contents List of Figures, Music Examples and Table   List of Contributors   Acknowledgements   General Editor’s Preface   Introduction

Paul Carr   

ix xi xv xvii 1

1

Zappa and Horror: Screamin’ at the Monster   Richard J. Hand

2

Zappa and his Cultural Legacy: Authorship, Influences and Expressive Features in Frank Zappa’s Movies   Manuel de la Fuente

3

Zappa and Religion: Music is the Best   Kevin Seal

4

Zappa and The Razor: Editing, Sampling and Musique Concrète   67 James Gardner

5

Zappa and Satire: From Conceptual Absurdism to the Perversity of Politics   Nick Awde

6

Zappa and Resistance: The Pleasure Principle   Claude Chastagner

103

7

Zappa and the Story-Song: A Rage of Cultural Influences   Geoffrey I. Wills

117

8

Zappa and Technology: His incorporation of Time, Space and Place when Performing, Composing and Arranging Music   Paul Carr

9

Zappa and the Freaks: Recording Wild Man Fischer   David Sanjek

17

33 49

85

133 149

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10

Zappa and Modernism: An Extended Study of ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’   Martin Knakkergaard

11

Zappa and the Avant-Garde: Artifice/Absorption/Expression   Michel Delville

185

12

Zappa and Mortality: The Mediation of Zappa’s Death   Paula Hearsum

201

Bibliography   Index  

167

217 235

List of Figures, Music Examples and Table Figures 2.1 Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931)   2.2 Uncle Meat (Frank Zappa, 1987)  

39 39

Music Examples 10.1 ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ – bars 47–50 10.2 ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ – bars 53–54 and 57 10.3 ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ – bars 85–92

174 175 176

Table 10.1 Form Chart of ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’

179

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List of Contributors Editor Paul Carr is Head of the Division of Music and Sound and Reader in Popular Music Analysis at the ATRiuM, University of Glamorgan, in Cardiff. His research interests focus on the areas of musicology, widening access, the music industry and pedagogical frameworks for music related education, publishing in all of these areas. He is also an experienced performing musician, having recorded with artists as diverse as The James Taylor Quartet (Get Organized 1989), The Jazz Renegades (Freedom Samba 1990) and American saxophonist Bob Berg (A Certain Kind Of Freedom 1990). Current projects include research into the live music scene in Wales, virtuality in popular music performance and forensic musicology work for major international record companies. Contributors Nick Awde is an independent writer, musician and artist based in London. He is a critic and feature writer for The Stage, and the author or editor of more than 50 books, including Mellotron: The Machine and the Musicians that Revolutionised Rock (2008). He wrote the lyrics and music for the satire Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Musical (1994), and, with Chris Bartlett, the comic play Pete and Dud: Come Again (2006). With his band Desert Hearts he creates albums (Close to the Edge B/W Rocket Man/Meryl Streep, 2010) and shows (A Christmas Carol Unplugged (starring Noddy Holder of Slade), 2011). Claude Chastagner is Professor of American Popular Culture at Montpellier University, France. He specialises in rock, and the music of ethnic communities in the United States (bhangra, zydeco, conjunto…). His publications include La Loi du rock (Climats, 1998) ‘“The Parents’ Music Resource Center: from Information to Censorshp’” (Popular Music, CUP, 1999), De la culture rock (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011) and La Contre-culture américaine des années soixante (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). He has also recently acted as Visiting Professor at the University of Texas several times. Michel Delville teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liège, where he directs the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poétique Appliquée. He is the author of several books including J.G. Ballard (1998), Hamlet & Co (2001; with Pierre Michel), Frank Zappa, Captain

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Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (2005; with Andrew Norris), and The American Prose Poem, which won the 1998 SAMLA Studies Book Award. He has also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary art. His most recent book, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the AvantGarde, was published by Routledge in 2009. As a musician and composer, he has recorded and toured with The Wrong Object, douBt, Elton Dean, Harry Beckett, Chris Cutler, Tony Bianco, Annie Whitehead, Alex Maguire, and many other jazz and rock musicians. Manuel de la Fuente is an assistant professor in Media Studies at the University of Valencia (Spain). His research deals with areas of Popular Culture and the analysis of the impact of new technologies in the media. He has carried out research visits at the universities of Virginia (USA), Paris 12 and Geneva. In 2006 he published the book Frank Zappa en el infierno. El rock como movilización para la disidencia política (Frank Zappa in Hell. Rock Music as Mobilization for Political Dissidence) in which he analysed the social and political meanings of Frank Zappa’s work in the Reagan era. James Gardner is a freelance composer, broadcaster, performer and lecturer based in Auckland, New Zealand. He co-founded the group/remix team Apollo 440, leaving in 1993 in order to concentrate on notated music. In 1996, after moving to New Zealand, he established the ensemble 175 East, which he directed until 2010. In 2001 he made a series of five hour-long programmes on Frank Zappa for Radio NZ Concert, going on to make numerous other shows on a variety of contemporary composers. He lectures on twentieth-century music history and music technology at Unitec and the University of Auckland. Richard J. Hand is Professor of Theatre and Media Drama at the University of Glamorgan, Wales UK. The founding co-editor of the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (Intellect), his major publications include Terror on the Air: Horror Radio in America, 131-–52 (McFarland, 2006), Octave Mirbeau: Two Plays (Intellect, 2012), The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions (Palgrave, 2005) and Victory: The Play and Reviews (Rodopi, 2009). He is the coauthor of The Radio Drama Handbook (Continuum, 2011), Grand-Guignol: the French Theatre of Horror (University of Exeter Press, 2002) and London’s GrandGuignol and the Theatre of Horror (University of Exeter Press, 2007). Paula Hearsum was a music journalist who is now a Senior Lecturer in popular music and journalism at the University of Brighton. Her academic research interests and published work interrogates the relationship between journalism and the representation of the deaths of musicians. Her published work also includes the biography, Manic Street Preachers: Design for Living (Virgin: 1996).

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Martin Knakkergaard is head of Music Studies at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. His research interests are primarily within the two fields of Music Technology and Music and Media. Besides an on-going project on analytic approaches towards non-referential music, he has in recent years turned towards musicological questions of a more fundamental nature, specifically Music and Time and Music and Numbers. He is also editor of the Danish dictionary of music, Gads Musikleksikon (2003 and 2005), and is currently editing Danish Musicology Online (2010–13). Kevin Seal sings, writes and performs with the band Griddle, whose albums include Klimty Favela (2006) and Live From Bohemian Grove (2011). He has appeared on recordings by Michael Zapruder, Java and Non-Vrbl, and is an organiser of the Occupy Oakland protest movement. Seal also works for the US internet radio provider Pandora, where he hosted The Musicology Show, producing several hundred concert videos, musician interviews, and features about songwriting and recording. A protégé of musicologist Austin Caswell, his academic fascinations include the study of the concept album as narrative, mental health and music, the intersection of rock and politics, and music therapy. David Sanjek was Professor of Popular Music at the University of Salford between 2007–2011. From 1991 to 2007, he was the Director of the BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.) archives in New York City. Affiliated with the company’s Corporate Relations department, David oversaw the documentation of the company’s history as well as their current presence in the music industry as a pre-eminent performance rights society. He also served as its representative to a variety of private and governmental organisations, including the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian. David published widely on Popular Music, Media Studies and Copyright Law, in addition to acting as a consultant for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Centre for Black Music Research and The Rhythm and Blues Foundation. Geoffrey Wills is a former professional musician and clinical psychologist. His research interests focus on the psychology of creativity and he is the author of a large-scale study of occupational stress in professional popular musicians, published by Sage in 1988 under the title Pressure Sensitive. His frequently-cited study of mental health in a group of eminent jazz musicians appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2003. Other research interests include the interactions of jazz, rock and classical music, and he has been a contributor to International Musician magazine and the Zappa-related website United Mutations.

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Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to thank Jesus Christ – the author of all things good. I would also like to acknowledge the support that Ashgate have provided regarding both the facility to write about the subject matter and their on-going advice – it was very much appreciated. I also need to thank the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan for giving me the time and space to complete the book, with the Theatre and Media Research Group led by Professor Richard Hand deserving particular gratitude. Finally, a big thank you to the contributors, who worked so hard not only during the formulation of their chapters, but also throughout the lengthy editing process – Thank You!

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General Editor’s Preface The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. A relativistic outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and dissolution of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural context, reception and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat away at the status of canonical composers and categories of high and low in music. A need has arisen, also, to recognize and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new genres, to engage in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes authenticity in music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of free, individual expression. Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series presents some of the best research in the field. Authors are concerned with locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context, and may draw upon methodologies and theories developed in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology. The series focuses on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is designed to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco, whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary or traditional. Professor Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds, UK

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Introduction The Big Note, Xenochrony and All Things Contextual: Frank Zappa and the And Paul Carr

Composer, guitarist, film maker, satirist and political activist, of all the prominent rock musicians to emerge during the mid 1960s, Frank Zappa (1940–1993) is arguably the most complex and prolific. During his 27 years in the public eye (1966–1993), Zappa released over 60 official albums between the inaugural The Mothers of Invention recording Freak Out!1 and Civilization Phaze III,2 a figure that does not include numerous bootleg recordings, or the ‘official’ posthumous releases made available by the Zappa Family Trust.3 This inexhaustible creativity is complemented by unusual eclecticism, with Zappa being one of the few rock musicians to interface with both high and low culture on a regular basis, a process in which he freely juxtaposed otherwise disparate musical styles (such as doowop, reggae and musique concrète) within the same compositions and albums. Besides a tendency for implementing this artistic freedom via his much quoted maxim, ‘anything, anytime, for no reason at all’,4 Zappa also progressively crossreferenced his own music, that of other composers, and popular culture at large throughout his career, providing a range of what Roland Barthes described as obvious and obtuse meanings for his audience.5 For example, Absolutely Free6 alone has allusions to ‘Louie Louie’,7 Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring,8 Petrushka,9

  The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966).   Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). 3   Via the Vaulternative and Zappa labels. 4   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 163. 5   Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (London, 1977). 6   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, Verve, V6-5013 (1967). 7   The Kingsmen, ‘Louie Louie’, Wand, WND 143 (1963). Quoted between 0:06–0:16 of ‘Plastic People’. 8   Between 0:00–0:07 and 0:16–0:21 of ‘Amnesia Vivace’. 9   Between 1:29 and 2:07 of ‘Status Back Baby’. 1 2

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and The Soldiers Tale,10 ‘Duke Of Earl’,11 ‘Baby Love’,12 Holst’s The Planets Suite,13 and Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’,14 and ‘White Christmas’,15 all of which simultaneously depict obvious genre synecdoches, in addition to more obtuse relationships between signifier and signified, what Barthes describes as the third meaning. He commented: I do not know what it’s signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name, but I can see clearly the traits, the signifying accidents of which this – consequently incomplete – sign is composed.16

This process of course has a particular resonance with instrumental music, whose commentators have noted long-standing concerns regarding the relationship of abstract sound to language-based concepts and descriptors. Edward Hanslick’s (1825–1904) then controversial belief that ‘instrumental music cannot represent the ideas of [emotions such as] love, anger and fear’17 were reiterated over one hundred years later by Michel Imberty, who stated: The musical signifier refers to a signified that has no exact verbal signifier … musical meaning, as soon as it is explained in words, loses itself in verbal meanings, too precise, to literal: they betray it.18

It is important to note that Hanslick in particular was not asserting that musical structures could not impart extra-musical meaning, but that they ‘can [only] express the various accompanying adjectives and never the substantive, [for example] love itself’.19 Zappa himself appeared to have a clear belief in the semiological power of music, describing the process as Archetypical American Musical Icons in his 10

  Between 1:25 and 1:32 of ‘Soft Cell Conclusion’.   Gene Chandler, ‘Duke of Earl’, Eric Records, 171 (1962). Quoted between 0:46 and 1:00 of ‘Amnesia Vivace’. 12   The Supremes, ‘Baby Love’, Motown, M-1066 (1964). Quoted between 1:11 and 0:47 of ‘The Duke Regains His Chops’. 13   Between 0:08 and 0:26 of ‘Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin’. 14   Between 0:47 and 0:54 of ‘Soft Cell Conclusion’. 15   Between 0:00 and 0:02 and 1:50 and 1:52 of ‘Uncle Bernie’s Farm’. Although checked for accuracy, all cross-references were obtained from the web site Globalia. Refer to Anonymous 5, ‘Musical Quotes’ (2012), at http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/quotes.html [accessed 1 March 2012] for details. 16  Barthes, Image Music Text, p. 53. 17   Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful (Indiana, 1986), p. 11. 18   Michel Imberty, quoted in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (New Jersey, 1987), p. 9. 19  Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, p. 9. 11

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biography, incorporating them to put what he described as ‘a spin on any lyric in their vicinity’.20 Regarding the intended impartation of meaning, he stated: The audience doesn’t have to know, for example, who Jan Garber or Lester Lanin is to appreciate those textures – the average guy is not going to say “Hey, Richie! Check this out! They’re doing Lester!” He knows what that style means. He’s groaned over it in old movies on Channel 13 for years.21

When discussing the incorporation of a similar, albeit less pervasive, practice in Ice Cube’s ‘When Will They Shoot’,22 Robert Walser outlines how Ice Cube ‘is in a dialogue with these artists, their contexts, [and] their audiences’, assuming ‘of his listeners a certain kind of cultural literacy’.23 This comment not only resonates with Zappa’s acute awareness of his audiences’ musical knowledge, which he used as a semiotic horizon to not only signify meaning, but to re-signify musical materials. As indicated in a recent essay in Contemporary Theatre Review, Zappa would often ‘accentuate the light entertainment of otherwise serious pieces by superimposing frivolity over the original text’,24 resulting in compositions such as Also Sprach Zarathustra25 and ‘La Donna è Mobile’26 becoming detached from their original meaning, as parts of a musical bricolage. This juxtaposition of low and high art occurred not only via overt quotation, but also more subliminally in pieces such as ‘Fountain of Love’27 and ‘Status Back Baby’,28 both of which incorporate fragments of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring29 and Petrushka respectively.30 In addition to attacking the seriousness of high art, Zappa is quoted as regarding the introduction of Stravinsky into his early work as ‘a get acquainted offer’,31 seemingly using these gestures as tasters for the more avant-garde experiments 20

  Ibid.   Ibid., p. 167. 22   Ice Cube, The Predator, Island, 57185 (1992). 23   Robert Walser, ‘Popular Music Analysis: Ten Apothegms and Four Instances’, in Allan F. Moore (ed.), Analyzing Popular Music (Cambridge, 2003): pp. 16–38, at 31. 24   Paul Carr, ‘An Autocratic Approach to Music Copyright?: The potential negative impacts of restrictive rights on a composers legacy: The case of the Zappa Family Trust’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 21/3 (2011): pp. 302–16, at 305. 25   A tone poem by Richard Strauss composed in 1896. Referenced between 2:24 and 2:35 of ‘Wet T-Shirt Nite’, from Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act 1, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979). 26   From Verdi’s Opera Rigoletto (1851). Referenced between 3:43 and 4:05 of ‘Catholic Girls’, from Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act I. 27   The Mothers of Invention, Cruising With Ruben & the Jets, Verve, V65005 (1968). 28   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free. 29   A ballet by Igor Stravinsky composed in 1913. 30   A ballet by Igor Stravinsky composed between 1910 and 1911. 31   Robert Shelton, ‘Son of Suzy Creamcheese’, The New York Times, (25 December 1966), p. 12. 21

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he was to introduce later in his career. Indeed when one reflects on the processes highlighted above, Zappa’s practices resonate somewhere between the ideals of Paul Hindemith’s notion of Gebrauchmusik,32 and the elitist musical snobbery outlined by Milton Babbitt in his 1958 essay ‘Who Cares if You Listen’, where the complexity of Babbitt’s tonal language is seen to call for an ‘increased accuracy from the transmitter (the performer) and activity from the receiver (the listener)’ in order for the work to be ‘communicated’.33 It is important to point out that musical references to Zappa’s own work are also prevalent, with indicative examples including ‘Help I’m A Rock’,34 ‘Dog Breath, In The Year Of The Plague’,35 and ‘Lonely Little Girl’,36 in addition to his final album Civilization Phaze III,37 which merges music from the early 1990s with material from Thing-Fish,38 The Perfect Stranger,39 and Lumpy Gravy.40 Although this practice could be regarded as self-plagiarising, Zappa considered it as similar to the re-emergence of characters in novels; he commented: When a novelist invents a character. If the character is a good one, he takes on a life of his own. Why should he get to go to only one party? 41

This reference is an interesting one, with Zappa’s practices arguably having a similar impact to Modernist literature such as James Joyce’s novel Ulysses,42 T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land,43 or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,44 which has been noted by Erikson and Smith for its ability to ‘swallow up not only surrounding pages   Although Hindemith was not addressing popular music, the ideal of Gebrauchmusik was that all people of the world could listen to and be moved by one music. 33   Milton Babbitt, ‘Who Cares if You Listen’, in Elliot Schwartz and Barney Childs (eds) Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York, 1998): pp. 243–50, at 245. 34   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. Note the inclusion of the short segment of ‘Who Are The Brain Police’ (from the same album) between 2:02 and 2:08. 35   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre Records, 2024 (1969). Note the studio manipulated extract (at 2:30) from Zappa’s second pre The Mothers of Invention movie score – Timothy Carey, The Worlds Greatest Sinner, Frenzy Productions (1962). 36   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in It for the Money, Verve, V6-5045 (1968). Note the extract of ‘How Could I be Such A fool’ (from Freak Out!) between 0:45 and 0:58. 37  Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. 38   ‘Amnerika’, on Frank Zappa, Thing Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKC074201 (1984). 39   Frank Zappa, Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger, EMI, DS-38170 (1984). The track ‘Beat The Ripper’ includes samples of ‘The Perfect Stranger’. 40   Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6-8741 (1968). 41   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 139. 42   James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris, 1922). 43   Lawrence Rainey, (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, (New Haven, 2005), p. 258. 44   Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York, 1973). 32

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but surrounding books, [in fact] whole surrounding oeuvres’.45 Although Zappa is probably referring to the capacity of popular literature figures such as James Bond and Sherlock Holmes to live beyond their initial introduction, many of his texts do allude inwardly to his own music, and outwardly to political, cultural and religious practices, as well as other compositions, musical styles and genres. Although this overt cross-referencing process could be sarcastically regarded as a means of manipulating the music business, facilitating what Ben Watson describes as ‘a neurotic response to mass culture: the transformation of consumer into collector’,46 it also has the impact of making the intended meaning and classification of Zappa’s work unusually problematic: for example, albums such as London Symphony Orchestra Vol.147 and Hot Rats48 are classified as Rock/ Pop by the All Music Guide,49 despite their explicit classical and jazz leanings.50 Additionally, depending on where one accesses Zappa’s music chronologically, this constant recursion of musical and cultural material has the potential of instigating a psychological Russian Doll effect on the listener, often prompting the close examination of not only his musical influences and past/future catalogue, but also the extra-musical meanings that he is referring to. As the intended meaning of specific Zappa recursions (such as Zircon Encrusted Tweezers, vacuum cleaners, or the song ‘Louie Louie’51) and more generic topics such as religion and sex are so open to debate, they have become an important aspect of Zappa fandom. As witnessed in websites such as Zappateers 52 and Idiot Bastard Son,53 discussions concerning the more formal aesthetic aspects of Zappa’s oeuvre are complemented with an esemplastic quest for a unified extra-musical meaning, ranging from explorations of music known to have influenced him, to the obsessive tracking of semiological clues. 45   Zak Smith and Steve Erickson, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (New York, 2007), p. vii. 46   Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York, 1993), p. 227. 47   Frank Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 1, Barking Pumpkin, FW38820 (1983). 48   Frank Zappa, Hot Rats, Bizarre, RS6356 (1969). 49   Refer to Anonymous 6, All Music (2012), at http://www.allmusic.com/ [accessed 1 March 2012]. 50   This verifies Auslander’s perspective (paraphrasing Keith Negus), when stating that the ‘way rock fans describe their music is principally ideological, not stylistic’. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York, 1999), p. 81. 51   The Kingsmen, ‘Louie Louie’. 52   Refer to Anonymous 7, Zappateers (2012), at http://www.zappateers.com/ [accessed 1 March 2012]. 53   Refer to Andrew Greenaway, The Idiot Bastard Son (2012), at http://www.idiot bastard.com/ [accessed 1 March 2012].

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Regarding Zappa’s personal conceptual positioning of music, he was clear that all of his creative output was unified by a philosophy he entitled The Big Note. In a 1968 article he wrote for Life Magazine, he stated: Everything in the universe is composed basically of vibrations – light is a vibration, sound is a vibration, atoms are composed of vibrations – and all these vibrations just might be harmonics of some incomprehensible fundamental cosmic tone.54

As outlined by Delville and Norris, the Big Note concept resonates strongly with the discoveries of Nobel Prize winners Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, who discovered three years earlier (in 1965) that a residual sound related to the Big Bang was still apparent in the universe, and that this sound was judged to be vibrating at approximately 4080 megahertz, slightly flatter than B in equal temperament tuning.55 Zappa’s Big Note also has some resonance to Pythagoras’ belief that music serves as a reflection of the inherent sounds produced by the solar system, a philosophy continued by Plato in Timaeus,56 (where the Demiurge fashions the universe in a way that according to Jamie James is ‘explicitly musical’57 ) and The Myth Of Er,58 where he envisaged the resonance inherent in the orbit of the earthly planets to constitute a single harmonious scale. As outlined by Plato’s pupil Aristotle in De Caelo, one of the few authentic accounts of Pythagorean philosophy: the motion of bodies of that size must produce a noise, since on our earth the motion of bodies far inferior in size and in speed of movement has that effect. Also, when the sun and the moon, they say, and all the stars, so great in number and size, are moving with so rapid a motion, how should they not produce a sound immensely great? 59

Richard Norton also suggests that this phenomena was reflected in medieval thought by Boethius (who regarded ‘musica mundane, the music of the spheres, as that perfection which the true musician should seek to reflect in his own music, as part

  Frank Zappa, ‘The Oracle has it all Psyched Out’, Life Magazine (28 June. 1968),

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p.84.

  Refer to Michel Delville and Andrew Norris, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism (Cambridge, 2005), p. 2. 56   Plato, ed. Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato Vol. 3 (London, 1931), pp. 380–515. 57   Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres (London, 1995), p. 46. 58   From ‘The Republic’. See Plato, Benjamin Jowett (ed.), The Dialogues of Plato Vol. 3, pp. 341–437. 59   Aristotle, ed. William Ross, John Smith, The Works of Aristotle Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1930), p. 290. 55

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of the vast celestial order’60), in the Renaissance by Francino Gaforio (1451–1522) and in the sixteenth century by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who believed the sound of the universe could be heard ‘only by the Being that animated the sun’.61 This essay is not suggesting that Zappa’s music incorporated a mystical Pythagorean/Platonic dimension – where the results of his creativity would be regarded as a metaphysical representation of the eternal. However, his practice of developing individual compositions over many years (discussed below) does resonate with a musical-perdurantist perspective: where musical works are seen to exist atemporally – obtaining their ontological status from what Caplin and Matheson describe as a ‘fusion of performances’62 – with individual performances being regarded as ‘temporal parts’ of an ongoing musical work.63 Although this position has been challenged by academics such as Julian Dodds, who argues for the consequent ‘impossibility’ of ‘hear[ing] the work in its entirety’,64 the sheer number of bootleg recordings currently available via BitTorrent sites alone make the realistic placement of Zappa closer to the perdurantist position than usual.65 Regardless of whether Zappa was aware of these philosophical positions or not, it is apparent that not only his compositions, but his entire creative output is littered with a web of fractal logic, where consistent patterns are apparent between single tracks, entire albums and public performances, in addition to non-musical materials such as press interviews and cover art. The cover of Over-Nite Sensation66 represents an indicative example, and can be regarded as a painting inside of a painting, which is itself a painting of a mirror. The reflection in the mirror is of a hotel room, which graphically depicts Zappa’s perception of the life of a touring musician, with indexical signifiers such as underwear, band publicity, suitcases and flight tickets, combined with more subliminal phallic symbols such as a penis-like fire hydrant, a vagina-shaped grapefruit, and a semen-dripping water hose. This direct and subliminal attention to explicit content in particular has the capacity to facilitate one to ask who is

60   Richard Norton, Tonality in Western Culture: A Critical and Historical Perspective (University Park and London, 1984), p. 95. 61   Ibid. 62   Ben Caplin and Carl Matheson, ‘Defending Musical Perdurantism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 46/1 (2006): pp. 59–69, at 66. 63   Ibid., p. 68. 64   Julian Dodd, ‘Types, Continuants, and the Ontology of Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 44/4 (2004): pp. 342–60, at 353. 65   Due to Zappa’s differentiation between individual instances of songs and their ongoing refinements (as discussed below), this position is more appropriate than musicalendurantism – which proposes that each version of a piece of music is wholly present at each performance/recording. 66   Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation, DiscReet, MS2149 (1973).

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looking in the mirror – almost in a Kierkegaardian sense.67 Does the meaning relate exclusively to Zappa and his band members, or as outlined in a 1973 Go Set article, is Zappa ‘the distorted mirror through which we experience ourselves and the neurotic perverted society that man has created’?68 As discussed in selected essays in this volume, this dialogic balance between the meaning of Zappa’s work being extraneous or personal in nature is one of the principle factors that make his work so appealing. In order to further conceptualise his creative practice, Zappa developed the terminology Project and Object to describe the difference between the completed work of art and the ongoing process of redefining it, clearly considering individual works of art as being in a constant state of development. He commented: Project/Object is a term I have used to describe the overall concept of my work in various mediums. Each project (in whatever realm), or interview connected to it, is part of a larger object, for which there is no technical name.69

This course of action is similar to the Works and Texts continuum described by Joseph Grigely, who asserts that a text is ‘constantly undergoing continuous and discontinuous transience as it ages’70 and how artworks have ‘multiple texts’, with the meanings we create being a ‘direct product of the textual spaces we enter and engage in’.71 This is certainly the case for Zappa, whose portfolio has numerous examples of compositions progressively developing over the entire time he recorded music. Examples range from single pieces such as ‘A Pound For A Brown On The Bus’ and ‘Legend Of The Golden Arches’,72 both being obvious variations on the same creative materials, to entire albums such as ThingFish,73 which includes rearrangements of pieces from earlier albums such as Sheik Yerbouti,74 and Them Or Us.75 This perdurantistic process of developing texts into 67

  Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) adopted a similar technique as Zappa when encouraging his readers to question their preconceptions of ‘truth’. Concisely speaking, it is suggested that both used irony, often depicted in story form, to encourage their audience to deconstruct prior assumptions. It is also interesting to note that both often used aliases/third parties/pseudonyms (such as ‘Billy The Mountain’ or ‘Joe’ in Zappa’s case, or Johannes Climacus or Constantin Constantius in the case of Kierkegaard) to depict their positions, rather than presenting their ideologies directly. 68   Anonymous 1, ‘Zappa Tour’, Go Set (26 May. 1973), p. 3. 69   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 139. 70   Joseph Grigely, Textuality: Art ,Theory, and Textual Criticism (Michigan, 1995), p. 1. 71   Ibid., p. 3. 72   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat. 73  Zappa, Thing-Fish. 74   Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501 (1979). 75   Frank Zappa, Them Or Us, Barking Pumpkin, SVB074200 (1984).

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ever evolving works has also continued in the performances and recordings of countless tribute bands that have emerged since Zappa’s death, a phenomena that has often resulted in litigation by the Zappa Family Trust.76 These tribute bands range from those that aim to replicate Zappa’s music faithfully,77 to those that adapt his music into new directions,78 with both practices not only perpetuating his Project/Object philosophy, but also resonating with Eco’s belief in the aesthetic value of ambiguity of meaning, via what he described as the Open Work.79 Writing just prior to The Mothers of Invention’s inaugural release, Eco commented: The work of art is a fundamentally ambiguous message, a plurality of signifieds that coexist within a single signifier … today, this ambiguity is becoming an explicit goal of the work, a value to be realised in preference to all others.80

The final important inter-textual process that Zappa employed is his self-titled Xenochrony,81 a studio technique he incorporated to horizontally fuse often unrelated tracks recorded in incongruous times and places. After initially experimenting on Captain Beefheart’s ‘The Blimp’,82 Zappa continued to employ the technique on albums such as Lumpy Gravy 83 and Sheik Yerbouti,84 with Joe’s Garage85 arguably representing the most interesting example, where all of the guitar solos aside from ‘Watermelon in Easter Hay’86 are transported from other recordings. As indicated in my own essay in this collection, this technique has the capacity of simultaneously combining otherwise incongruent times, places and spaces, adding another dimension to his tendency toward self-reference. 76

  See Carr, ‘An Autocratic Approach to Music Copyright?   For example Bogus Pomp, The Grandmothers and Project/Project. 78   For example The Ed Palermo Big Band and Le Bocal lean toward Jazz, while the The Omnibus Wind Ensemble and Ensemble Ambrosius focus on various classical influences. In the case of the latter, the instrumentation is that of a baroque ensemble. 79   Although not describing it as an open work, Zappa is quoted by Barry Miles as gaining a ‘certain amount of satisfaction’ from people who arrive at ‘grotesque interpretations’ of his music. See Barry Miles, Frank Zappa: A Visual Documentary (London, Omnibus, 1993), p. 42. 80   Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, 1984), p. 66. 81   Meaning ‘Alien Time’, with an etymology deriving from the Greek words Xenos (strange or alien) and Chronos (time). 82   Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica, Straight, STS 1053 (1969). 83  Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. 84  Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 85  Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act 1, and Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). 86  Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act 1. 77

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As Zappa’s music is constructed in such a way to at times ignore conventional notions of linear time, it is suggested that any analysis of his musical output should place a particular emphasis on the synchronic nature of his texts. Barthes describes these multi-layered narratives as ‘intergrational’ in nature, asserting that ‘a unit belonging to a particular level only takes on meaning if it can be in integrated in a higher level’.87 Barthes’ precedence of the intergrational over what he describes as the more linear ‘distributional’88 has a particular resonance with Zappa’s creative practices, in addition to the potential meaning of his texts. His Big Note and Xenochronic concepts in particular encourage the listener to engage with his music ‘vertically’: comparing specific sound objects to similar or identical practices that have occurred elsewhere; considering the impact of what sounds like twentiethcentury classical music being composed by a rock musician; or pondering the result of two otherwise incongruous styles or sounds that don’t (but somehow do) belong together. As an additional example, something as seemingly trivial as the Patricia The Dog character as portrayed on the covers of Them Or Us,89 Francesco Zappa 90 and The Perfect Stranger 91 can for the Zappa fan link to or from songs such as ‘Stink-Foot’,92 ‘The Poodle Lecture’93 or ‘Cheepnis’,94 all of which feature dogs as their subject matter and have their own arrangements on subsequent recordings. These images and songs in turn have the potential to suggest higher levels of ontological significance such as ethical concerns (cruelty to animals, treating pets as children, bestiality), or in the case of ‘Cheepnis’95 1950s Horror Movies. When looking specifically at The Perfect Stranger,96 which is partially conducted by Pierre Boulez, it is also interesting to examine the other semiological references of the album cover. For example the pervasive practice (in the classical music tradition) of placing a composer’s surname alongside the conductor is adhered to, and represents (to this author at least) an exclusivity between creator and a single interpreter. This is essentially a signifier that encourages one to consider the work as high art, with value not necessarily being impacted by listeners’ reactions. In this instance though, it is  interesting to note how the  written text of the Zappa cover has irregular lines that intentionally resemble handwriting, in effect bridging the gap between mechanical/automated and manmade reproduction, something that resonates strongly with Zappa’s DIY and anti-authoritarian philosophy. As  Barthes, Image Music Text, p. 86.   Ibid. 89  Zappa, Them Or Us. 90   Frank Zappa, Francesco Zappa, Barking Pumpkin, ST74202 (1884). 91  Zappa, The Perfect Stranger. 92   Frank Zappa, Apostrophe (’), DiscReet, DS2175 (1974). 93   Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol.6, Rykodisc, RCD10091/92 (1992). 94   Frank Zappa, Roxy and Elsewhere, DiscReet, DS2202 (1974). 95   Ibid. 96  Zappa, The Perfect Stranger. 87 88

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part of the Boulez Conducts series, Pierre Boulez interprets the work of a range of composers such as Webern, Mahler and Stravinsky, and aside from musical content, the CD covers leave one with no doubt of the high art value of the products. For example when examining the cover of Boulez Conducts Webern, Vol. 2,97 signifiers such as the pose of Boulez himself; the ‘traditional’ looking logo of the record label; the positioning of the armchair98 and the above mentioned textual juxtaposition of conductor and composer, all unequivocally indicate high art. It is also fascinating how the straight lines of the writing on these covers contrast strongly with the more ‘freeform’ style employed on The Perfect Stranger.99 According to Middleton,100 popular music analysis has a tendency to focus on connotative as opposed to denotative meaning. He terms this connotative– denotative dialogic as secondary and primary forms of signification, and regards the latter, ‘in the sense it is used in linguistics [to be] rare in music’,101 quoting animal noises in The Beatles’ ‘Good Morning’102 or the motorbike noises in The Shangri-Las ‘Leader of the Pack’103 as indicative examples. Regarding the practices of quotation, stylistic allusion and parody as sub-categories of primary signification, these processes are seen to have the capacity to refer to music from both inside and outside the artist’s own repertoire. Using The Electric Light Orchestra’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’104 as an indicative example of outsidequotation, and the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’105 as an instance of self-quotation, Middleton provides a useful context to the much more pervasive use Zappa made of these devices outlined earlier. Examples of stylistic allusion include ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’106 and The Beatles’ White Album,107 both of which provide interesting isolated counterparts to entire albums such as Cruising with Ruben & the Jets108 (1950s Do-Wop), or indeed allusions to composers such as Varèse and Stravinsky in Zappa’s orchestral repertoire. Middleton regards his final form of primary signification, destructive parody, to be even ‘less frequent [than   Pierre Boulez, Boulez conducts Webern, Vol. 2, Deutsche Grammophon, 244580 (1995).  98   Which Barthes would regard as a semiological object.  99  Zappa, The Perfect Stranger. 100   Richard Middleton, Studying PopularMusic (Buckingham, 1990). 101  Middleton, Studying PopularMusic, p. 220. 102   The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capital, 4XAS 2653 (1967). 103   The Shangri-Las, The Dum Dum Ditty, Blue Cat, BC 117 (1964). 104   Which quotes the opening of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. 105   The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which uses a short extract of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. 106   Procol Harum, Procol Harum, A&M, SP-4373 (1967), which has an obvious allusion to Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’. 107   The Beatles, The White Album, Apple, SWBO-101 (1969), which Middleton regards as a compendium of pop styles. 108  Zappa, Cruising With Ruben & the Jets.   97

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quotation and stylistic allusion]’ but considers it ‘fundamental to the work of Frank Zappa’,109 and although he mentions no examples by name, he is correct in regarding the technique as an important part of Zappa’s idiolect. As indicated earlier, Zappa had a tendency to trivialise otherwise serious pieces of music in some of his compositions, and acknowledged American satirist Spike Jones as an influence on this process.110 Additionally, Zappa would ‘destructively’ allude to a range of personalities in his lyrics, ranging from parodies of musicians such as Bob Dylan111 and Al Di Meola,112 to ex-presidents such as John F. Kennedy,113 Richard Nixon114 and Ronald Reagan,115 to more generic phenomena such as rock band folk law,116 or corrupt televangelists.117 It is apparent that Middleton’s secondary signification (connotation) can arise as a result of individual or combinationary primary significations, a process Zappa intentionally propagated via his Big Note, Project/Object and Xenochronic philosophies. Indeed in the sleeve notes of You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3,118 Zappa effectively discusses the means through which combinations of primary meanings can result in secondary signification. When providing a list of rationales for his cut and paste techniques while compiling the six-part You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series, he asks two significant questions. Firstly, ‘is there some “folkloric” significance to the performance?’ And secondly, ‘will it [the inserted section of audio] give “Continuity” clues to the hard-core maniacs with a complete record collection?’119 Taking Zappa at his word, the terminology Conceptual Continuity has become the means through which many Zappa fans describe their tracking of denotative meanings, and as outlined by Middleton, the connotations associated with these meanings are ‘in theory, of infinite size’.120 Regarding the interrelationship of primary and secondary signification in music, Nattiez provides a useful model which negotiates what he describes as the poietic (the process of how the music is constructed), the esthetic (how the  Middleton, Studying Popular Music, p. 220.   Refer to Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 172. 111   Refer to ‘Flakes’, on Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 112   Refer to ‘Peaches III’, on Frank Zappa, Tinseltown Rebellion, Barking Pumpkin, PW237336 (1981). 113   Refer to ‘Plastic People’, on The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free. 114   Refer to ‘Dickie’s Such An Asshole’, on Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988). 115   Refer to ‘Reagan at Bitzburg’, on Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. 116   For example ‘Mudshark’, on Frank Zappa, The Mothers – Fillmore East, June 1971, Bizarre, MS2042 (1971). 117   For example ‘When The Lie’s So Big, on Zappa, Broadway The Hard Way. 118   Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3, Rykodisc, RCD10085/86 (1989). 119   Taken from the sleeve notes of Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3. 120  Middleton, Studying Popular Music, p. 232. 109 110

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music is interpreted) and the immanent (the material reality of the music).121 This continuum between the means of construction and its subsequent reception ‘do not necessarily correspond’122 according to Nattiez, and in the case of Zappa, it is apparent that many casual listeners would not notice the numerous clues he embeds into his music. Additionally, as noted by Nattiez, ‘the listener will project configurations upon the work that do not always coincide with the poietic process’, continuing, the listener ‘may have other ideas about what constitutes the work’s themes’.123 This comment has resonance to the work of not only Umberto Eco as outlined above, but also Michel Foucault124 and Roland Barthes,125 both of whom questioned the authority of the author when considering the meaning of a text. Additionally, Douglas Hofstadter describes the autonomy of the listener to interpret a text as follows: When a system of ‘meaningless’ symbols has patterns in it that accurately track, or mirror various phenomena in the world, then that tracking or mirroring imbues the symbols with some degree of meaning – indeed, such tracking or mirroring is no less and no more than what meaning is.126

This publication does not intend to postulate a unified interpretive code, either between authors, or between authors and readers, but a range of analytic reactions to pertinent contextual areas related to Zappa’s oeuvre. As outlined by John Blacking, the ‘sound may be the object, but man is the subject; and the key to understanding music is the relationships existing between subject and object’.127 Taking Zappa as the ‘subject’, the book intends to ultimately explore this relationship. The publication comprises an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars and industrial practitioners whose collective aim is to present the reader with an appreciation of the ontological depth of Zappa’s idiolect, by directly relating the man and his music to selected cultural, aesthetic, social, technological, historical and musicological factors. Subject matters range from Zappa’s interface with the avant-garde, to his displays of resistance, to his use of the Story-Song,

  Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music.   Ibid., p. 17. 123   Ibid. 124   Michel Foucault, ‘What Is An Author?’, in James Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method, And Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York, 1999), pp. 205–222. 125  Barthes, Image Music Text. 126   Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (London, 1980), p. xxi. 127   John Blacking, How Musical Is Man (Seattle and London, 1974), p. 26. 121 122

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to death itself, with chapters sequenced in such a way to comply with his artistic preference – non-chronologically.128 As stated in a number of the essays, Frank Zappa’s personae and music are full of contradictions, with dialectics such as low–high art, notated–improvised, controlled–open and serious–frivolous being important contributions toward the ontological depth of his idiolect. However, it is proposed that one of the most fascinating and understated contradictions of Zappa’s legacy is his perception regarding the potential longevity of his music. He commented: … after I am dead and gone, there is no need to deal with any of this stuff [his music] because it is not written for future generations and it is not performed for future generations, it is performed for now. Get it while it’s hot you know, that’s it.129

In typical Zappa fashion, this comment contrasts strongly with his ongoing practice of Project/Object, in addition to remixes of albums from his early catalogue such as Cruising With Ruben & the Jets,130 We’re Only in It for The Money131 and Lumpy Gravy.132 In congruence with Beethoven, who, according to Nicholas Cooke, attempted to interest a number of publishers toward the end of his life ‘in the idea of formulating a complete and authoritative edition of his works which would rectify the mistakes in existing editions’,133 these processes and recordings do indicate an intention on Zappa’s part to canonise definitive versions of his compositions: to negate what he described as ‘the human element’.134 As verified in the maxim he borrowed from Edgard Varèse, and included on the covers of all his early recordings – ‘The present day composer refuses to die’:135 it is important to note that Zappa first and foremost considered himself a composer. Although his music is unlikely to ever enter the mainstream of popular music, with Zappa-influenced artists such as Mr Bungle, Jaga Jazzist, John Tabacco and Hans Annellsson themselves being confined to the periphery of public consciousness, he would be thrilled to see his music performed, recorded, broadcast and reappropriated today

128

  The one exception to this is Paula Hearsum’s chapter on death, which is situated as the final chapter. 129   ‘There Is No Need’, on Frank Zappa – The Making of Freak Out! Project/Object, Zappa Records, ZR 20004 (2006). 130   Frank Zappa, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets, Verve, V6-5005X (1968). 131   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in It for the Money. 132  Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. 133   Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 1998), p. 29. 134   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 155. 135   David Walley, No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (New York, 1996), p. 28.

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by countless tribute acts,136 music festivals,137 Zappa dedicated podcasts,138 and ongoing celebrations, such as the annual Frank Zappa Day (in his hometown of Baltimore) and the seventieth birthday celebrations at The Roundhouse in London in 2010. Like these dedications to Zappa’s legacy, it is hoped that this book will in some small way become part of his ongoing Conceptual Continuity.

136

  For a detailed discussion on Zappa tribute acts, see Carr, ‘An Autocratic Approach to Music Copyright?’. 137   Such as Zappanale in Bad Doberhan, Germany, The Yellow Snow Festival in Larvik, Norway and Zappaween in Saint Petersburg, Florida. 138   For example Scott Parker, Zappacast (2012), at http://zappacast.podomatic.com/ [accessed 3 March 2012].

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Chapter 1

Zappa and Horror: Screamin’ at the Monster Richard J. Hand

When looking at the link between horror and music in general what might spring to mind most immediately is the nineteenth-century Gothic tradition as epitomised by Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain (1867) and Camille SaintSaëns’ Danse Macabre (1872) through to later works such as Béla Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1918). Alternatively, we might think of horror movie soundtracks from Bernard Herrmann’s paradigmatic score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho,1 John Carpenter’s own compositions for his early films or Goblin’s work for Dario Argento’s movies. When it comes to considering the links between horror and popular music we might think of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s novelty song ‘Monster Mash’,2 the high Gothic camp of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show (1973) and its subsequent film adaptation,3 the appropriated horror iconography prevalent in many examples of the heavy metal genre or the specific image customised by groups such as Kiss and individuals such as Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie. One of the pre-eminent ‘horror music’ icons in popular culture is Alice Cooper, who developed a neo-gothic image not least through legendary stage performances which deployed macabre illusions as a complement to the rock songs. Alice Cooper was, in fact, ‘discovered’ by Frank Zappa, his first three albums being recorded on the Bizarre label. Discovering Alice Cooper notwithstanding, Zappa may seem a surprising figure to associate with horror, and yet it is a profound relationship. Throughout his career, Zappa reveals a recurrent interest in popular horror culture which is manifest in his achievements as a creative force of performance, composition and production. Gigs of Horror Zappa was very much a live performer who, for much of his career, thrived on touring and stage performances and used recordings from these events for numerous album releases, including the seminal You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series. Although Zappa could be a natural showman, almost stepping into stand-up comedy mode on occasion, his relationship with his audiences could   Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho, Universal Pictures (1960).   Bobby “Boris” Pickett, ‘Monster Mash’, Deram, 844147-2 (1962). 3   Jim Sharman, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Twentieth Century Fox (1975). 1 2

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be complex and ambiguous. This was partly because of the unpredictability of the crowd, especially in Europe: one thinks of the insurrectional atmosphere Zappa encountered in the Berlin concert of 1968; the increasing antagonism he detected on each successive tour of the UK meaning that he could only reach the conclusion that ‘Hate lives there’;4 and the concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London (10 December 1971) in which Zappa sustained serious injuries when he was assaulted by a spectator.5 Aside from the perils and menaces of the concert and the crowd, anecdotal evidence suggests that Zappa could be a temperamental performer. The academic and Zappa fan Dave Kenyon recalls how in 1970s UK concerts Zappa could be an ebullient performer engaging in repartee with the audience in one gig and, on another occasion, personify indifference by performing with his back to the audience throughout the concert.6 However, for Zappa, so evidently an artist committed to live performance for much of his working life and yet paradoxically sometimes alienated by it, there is one particular category of concerts that seem to have acquired a special – and gratifying place – for him: the Halloween concerts. In US popular culture, the place of horror is most implicit in Halloween festivities. From the neighbourly ‘trick or treat’ of children, seasonal haunted attractions, to horror movie nights (and occasionally film premieres) arranged for 31 October, Halloween-Horror has become a distinctive form of Americana which is increasingly becoming global. Although providing a seasonal opportunity to dress up as a monster, a legitimate night for children to stay up late and gorge on candy with a valid excuse to play pranks and exploit fears, at its heart Halloween has a saturnalian function. In principal, the modern Halloween is a carnivalesque celebration in a Bakhtinian sense: perceived authority and the social hierarchies that keep society in order are subverted and even profaned through playful disorder and hilarity.7 In the case of Halloween festivities, the rational world of everyday life is challenged by the iconography of horror, the grotesque, the taboo and the supernatural and by feasting, merry-making, consuming and costuming: the energies of the suppressed voices in society and within ourselves can be given legitimised expression. In the case of Zappa, the Halloween concerts provided an especially compelling context for saturnalian activity with a context that emphasised the carnivalesque dynamics of performance, music and audience. The first notable Halloween concert Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention performed was before they even had a record contract: on 31 October 1965, the Mothers played The Action nightclub in Los Angeles where, quite bizarrely, a highly intoxicated John Wayne was having a night out and decided to attack   Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa (London, 2003), p. 257. 5   Itself occurring a few days after the near catastrophe of the fire during Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s appearance at the Montreux Casino concert in Switzerland (3 December 1971), mentioned in Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’. 6   Kenyon in correspondence with the author, September 2011. 7   Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington,1984). 4

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Zappa’s hat. It was not an auspicious start to Zappa’s Halloween concert career. Indeed, it was seven years before Zappa would be in concert on 31 October with a performance at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1972. This concert was the beginning for Zappa of an explicitly Halloween event not least because it featured as special guest ‘Zacherley’ (John Zacherle) – the legendary television horror host – who judged the costume competition. Zappa’s very early song ‘Dear Jeepers’ (1963)8 was a clear pastiche of Zacherley’s 1958 novelty horror single ‘Dinner with Drac’.9 A review from The Free Aquarian (November 1972) by Greg Carannante provides a fascinating insight into the Passaic gig.10 At the outset of the review, Carannante makes it clear that ‘Zappa, though in good spirits, did not really rise to the occasion’ and yet, somewhat paradoxically, the music represented ‘yet another step in the evolution of Zappa genius’.11 Zappa is seen as taking his music all too ‘visibly serious’ (this is neither the first nor the last time Zappa will be accused of this) which ‘did not contribute much to what could have been one hell of a crazy concert’.12 Carannante argues that the presence of the cult horror figure Zacherley and ‘hundreds of dayglo painted and outrageously costumed freaks’ served to turn ‘a concert into a special occasion’ which he likens to ‘a Betty Boop cartoon’.13 He offers a tribute to the audience: ‘Those that bothered to dress for the occasion should know that they made the show’.14 These were early days in the evolution of the Zappa Halloween concert series but clearly signal what was to come: an audience-centred carnival of frivolity, humour and meticulously performed music. In the following year – 1973 – Zappa held a Halloween concert in The Auditorium in Chicago. However, the first of Zappa’s overt Halloween concerts took place in 1974 when he appeared at the Felt Forum in New York City. An institution thus came into being: Zappa returned to the same venue for Halloween concerts in 1975 and 1976. In 1977 Zappa moved to The Palladium in New York City for a series of concerts from 28 to 31 October 1977. Zappa would return to celebrate Halloween at the Palladium in 1978, 1980 and 1981, the latter being broadcast live as an MTV special. The following year, 1982, Zappa did not perform a concert on Halloween but did present the première of his movie The

  Available on Frank Zappa, Rare Meat: Early Works of Frank Zappa, Del-Fi, 204105 (1994).  9   John Zacherle, ‘Dinner with Drac Part 1/Dinner with Drac Part 2’, Cameo, C130 (1958). 10   Greg Carannante, ‘Halloween… At the Capitol: A Postscript’, The Free Aquarian (November 1972), reproduced at http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/72/10/31_Passaic_NJ_ US_Capitol_Theatre [accessed 18 January 2012]. 11  Ibid. 12  Ibid. 13  Ibid. 14   Ibid. Emphasis added.  8

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Dub Room Special15 at the Ritz Theater in New York City: it is a concert film featuring performances from the 1981 Palladium Halloween concert. As well as introducing the movie Zappa also held a costume contest, in which the winners received a holiday in Las Vegas. In 1984 Zappa performed his last Halloween concert, returning to the Felt Forum for the occasion. Some of the New York Halloween concerts have been valuably documented in Zappa’s films such as the aforementioned The Dub Room Special! and also Baby Snakes,16 which principally features material from the 1977 Palladium Halloween concerts. The digitally mastered Audio-DVD Halloween17 features performances from the 1978 Palladium Halloween concert and includes footage that is particularly interesting as it closely documents the performers, the audience and their interaction. As Foggy G says in one of the many fan pages detailing Zappa’s work: Frank played some great shows in his time, but never did he perform a run of shows as insane and inspired as the 6 shows he played at the tail end of October 1978.18

In short, there was not one but several peaks to Zappa’s eclectic and evertransmuting career, and the 1978 live Halloween concerts are one of them, being part of a tradition in New York which witnesses the United States’ (if not the world’s) largest Halloween celebrations. Zappa was obviously aware of this tradition, prompting journalist Charles Frick to comment in a 1995 issue of The Aquarian: ‘There used to be a time when you could count on three things for sure: death, taxes and Frank Zappa playing New York City on Oct. 31st’.19 In the same article, long-time collaborator Ike Willis verifies the importance that Zappa placed on Halloween in New York City, stating: New York was never just another night on the tour. Frank would put it to us like, Okay, look we’re heading into New York City and it’s Halloween, act accordingly. We always tried to have something a little special for the New York crowd.20

Zappa was, in the true sense of the word, a spectacular performer. He never went in for the bombastic Spinal Tap-style light and laser shows: rather, above all   Frank Zappa, The Dub Room Special!, Honker Home Video (1982).   Frank Zappa, Baby Snakes, Intercontinental Absurdities (1979). 17   Frank Zappa, Halloween, DTS Entertainment, DTS-1101 (2003). 18   Foggy G, ‘Hobnoblin’ with the Goblins: The Halloween ‘78 Files’ (2012), at http:// members.shaw.ca/fz-pomd/turtlestew/goblin.htm [accessed 6 January 2012]. 19   Charles Frick, ‘SAINT ZAPPA, HALLOWEEN IDYLL’ (25 October 1995), at http://home.online.no/~corneliu/aquarian.htm [accessed 6 January 2012]. 20  Ibid. 15

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in the Halloween concerts, Zappa combined musical virtuosity with quasi-standup comedy and a commitment to audience participation. Zappa’s Halloween was a saturnalian event with the spectators, in best Halloween tradition, not merely participants but performers in their own right. In the Baby Snakes sequences that document the 1977 Halloween concert,21 we see that some (but certainly not all) of the audience wear costumes, face paints and masks yet all participate in a unified carnival mood. From the band to the public, the diverse array of costumes include Popes, dominatrixes, men wearing female uniforms, phallic nose glasses, men with inflatable sex dolls and so on. Overall, we have a very real sense of a Bakhtinian ‘carnival-grotesque’. The carnival-grotesque sense of liberating metamorphosis in Zappa’s concerts did not begin in the 1970s. In, for example, the 1968 Royal Albert Hall concert22 documented in the 1987 Uncle Meat movie23 and the Ahead of Their Time album,24 we witness the one-off performance of Progress?, an Absurdist play featuring members of The Mothers of Invention. In Zappa’s account: [While] the three talented members of the group attempt to perform The Prologue, Don Preston, in a villain’s cape and top-hat, sneaks onstage, interrupting their trio with a loud blast of modern electronic music. During this musical section, Don Preston, chemically altered via macrobiotic snack consumption, is transformed into a Phantom of the Opera-like monster. While members of the robot combo hiss and boo him, he sneaks around behind the stage set-up, planning a terrible revenge for the rejection of his electronic music. He pounces on the unsuspecting Underwood in the midst of his rapturous piano solo, strangles him, throws him to the floor, and takes his place on the bench.25

The film documentation reveals the keyboardist Don Preston’s ‘transformation’ into his ‘Dom De Wild’ alter ego (arguably more Jekyll and Hyde than Phantom of the Opera) while, later, bassist Roy Estrada appeared dressed like a Pope with metal breasts distributing birth control pills from a bucket: an event of the monstrous and the subversive. Despite Zappa’s authoritative control it is worth noting that with Progress? Zappa comments ‘although the plot was my idea, each band member was responsible for generating his own dialog’.26 The Bakhtinian carnival has the power to transform and mutate and liberate. Zappa’s Halloween concerts have a sense of a good time to be had by all, but this is ostensibly only achievable by incorporating the participation of, as the  Zappa, Baby Snakes.   As this major performance took place on 25 October 1968 it could arguably be legitimately counted as one of the Halloween concerts. 23   Frank Zappa, Uncle Meat, Honker Home Video (1987). 24   The Mothers of Invention, Ahead of Their Time, Rykodisc, RCD 10559 (1993). 25   Taken from the sleeve notes of, The Mothers of Invention, Ahead of Their Time. 26  Ibid. 21 22

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subtitle of the Baby Snakes movie puts it, ‘People Who Do Stuff That Is Not Normal’.27 Of course, one might associate these factors – especially in the 1970s era – with drug culture. On the contrary, Zappa was vehemently and genuinely anti-drugs, famously dismissing band members who used narcotics and stating in his biography, that some people ‘use drugs as if consumption bestowed a “special license” to be an asshole’.28 For Zappa the carnival should not be drug-induced but an event of collective celebration, music and laughter. On You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6 29 there is a short track called ‘NYC Halloween Audience’: the sound of this track – the music, if you will – is the wild audience recorded at the Palladium on 31 October 1981. There are just a few lines of dialogue that emerge against the white noise of the crowd: Crazed Fan: Yeah! Zappa, Zappa! FZ: What? I’m supposed to kiss her? Okay. Just calm down there for a minute. It’s only Halloween… Crazed Fan: Zappa! Yeah! FZ: Alright. Crazed Fan: Play the guitar! Play the guitar! FZ: No, thank you. Alright, let’s get back to entertainment here. Are we tuned up? Crazed Fan: Yeah! We never left! We never left!

It is an amusing piece of anthropological documentation: the celebration of Halloween; the reference to kissing captures the sexual aspect to the carnivalesque season; and while Zappa’s ‘are we tuned up’ is for the band, the crazed fan’s response is evidently of the Timothy Leary ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ variety.30 Significantly, the New York City Halloween audience becomes a title in its own right: the uproarious melody of the saturnalian crowd is a song. The Halloween audience establishes a frenzied introduction to the second disk of You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6. Zappa’s subsequent editing and arrangement of the live concert recordings is typically eclectic, aligning material from the ‘200 Motels Finale’ (Recorded at UCLA in 1971), to three performances recorded in 1988 at separate venues (‘We’re Turning Again’, ‘Catholic Girls’ and ‘Crew Slut’). However, it is evident that Zappa’s overriding intention is to compile the ‘perfect’ Palladium Halloween concert: tracks 3 (‘Thirteen’), 4 (‘Lobster Girl’) and 11 (‘Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance’) were all recorded during Halloween  Zappa, Baby Snakes.   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989). Emphasis as per original. 29   Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6, Rykodisc, RCD10091/92 (1992). 30   This phrase, which became one of the mottoes of the hippy movement, was first used by counterculture guru Timothy Leary at a 1967 mass gathering of hippies in San Francisco. 27 28

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1978; 7 (‘Alien Orifice’) and 15 (‘Strictly Genteel’) are from Halloween 1981; 10 (‘Tryin’ To Grow a Chin’) was recorded during Halloween 1977. The large number of Halloween recordings makes it clear that Zappa is attempting an example of October 31 Conceptual Continuity. Lyrics of Horror Zappa is (in)famous for his use of the sexually explicit and the obscene. The voyeuristic characteristics of compositions such as ‘Dinah-Moe Humm’31 and ‘The Torture Never Stops’32 (frequently played at the Halloween concerts) can be interpreted as misogynist and can lead to a debate as to whether Zappa is deploying his habitual irony, or is revealing aspects of his personal character.33 The theme of sexuality – and the issue of sexism – is prevalent in Zappa’s most direct song about Halloween: the reggae-based ‘Goblin Girl’.34 This ‘portrait’ song describes a young woman from ‘da mystery world’ who is costumed as a black and green goblin for a Halloween party. The lyrics explain how women tend to dress like witches or queens at Halloween but another option is the best: ‘When they’re a goblin/There ain’t a problin’ because goblin girls ‘can gobble it all’. The song is essentially a prolonged double entendre, punning on ‘goblin’ and ‘gobbling’ (a slang term for fellatio). Although a song about oral sex may be offensive to some, it can also be seen as a celebration of sex and sexuality which is laced in with the carnival-grotesque mood of Halloween. The song celebrates disguise and the transformative and fetishistic potential of the masquerade which brings people from ‘mystery world(s)’: perhaps this creates a depersonalised anonymity but it can also create something supernatural, beyond worldly limitation. Disguise and sexual pleasure is something which goes beyond race and boundaries (‘Goblin Girls/From every land’): the goblin girl is something magical, perhaps mythical, emerging from a realm beyond mundane reality and the ‘normal’. On the other hand, if we reject a carnivalesque reading the song objectifies women as an instrument of fellatio. If ‘Goblin Girl’ focuses on a female being, ‘Zomby Woof’35 is about a male monster. While the ‘Goblin Girl’ is beautiful and obliging, the masculine ‘Zomby Woof’ is a far more menacing figure. The narrative is subjective, conveyed in firstperson. The narrator tried to sleep on an antique bed some three hundred years   Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation, DiscReet, MS2149 (1973).   Frank Zappa, Zoot Allures, Warner Bros. Records, 2970 (1976). 33   For a discussion of Zappa’s strategic anti-essentialism see Paul Carr and Richard J. Hand, ‘“Twist’n frugg in an arrogant gesture”: Frank Zappa and the Musical-Theatrical Gesture’, Popular Musicology Online (2008), at http://www.popular-musicology-online. com/issues/05/carr.html [accessed 17 January 2012]. 34   Frank Zappa, You Are What You Is, Barking Pumpkin, PW2-37537 (1981). 35  Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation. 31 32

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ago, but like the fateful beds in Wilkie Collins’ ‘A Very Strange Bed’ (1852),36 M.R. James’ ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ (1904)37 or Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Inn of the Two Witches’ (1915),38 the experience is to be far from rejuvenating. The bed makes the narrator’s spirit do a ‘midnite creep’ and he will never sleep again. The monster the narrator has become crosses categories: it is partly a ‘zomby’ (the living dead zombie) but also a ‘woof’ (a lycanthropic werewolf   ). The account of the monster paints a picture of distortion with his one huge fang, his one oversized foot and the threat that he might raid the dormitory and ‘snatch you up screamin’ through the window all nekkid/An’ do it to you on the roof’. The fang is an icon of vampires or werewolves but its single status suggests something phallic. The reference to a deformed foot is an autobiographical moment on Zappa’s part: the 1971 Rainbow Theatre assault distorted Zappa’s legs (Zappa also refers to this in ‘Dancin’ Fool’).39 Michel Delville and Andrew Norris explore anthropomorphisation in Zappa by reading ‘Penguin in Bondage’40 in relation to H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau,41 a pioneering example of science fiction about experiments into accelerating – and reversing – evolution.42 Moreau’s insane idealism creates monstrous beasts in transition between animals and humans while the shipwrecked man Prendrick becomes Moreau’s next unethical experiment when he attempts to regress him back to animal state. Wells uses his novel to explore ideas of Darwinian evolution but the themes of metamorphosis and transformation are central to horror culture as a whole. In exploring anthropomorphisation, Delville and Norris contest that: Zappa is also a monster; a producer of shocking generic mixes and a transgressor of permitted aspirations, whose addiction to pure research is also a programme of ceaseless self-re-creation.43

By implication, Zappa’s ‘monstrosity’ lies in his potent and profound commitment to (self)adaptation and hybridisation and it is interesting how he engages in autobiographical mirroring (whether conscious or not is irrelevant),

  Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel and Other Stories (London, 2006).   Montague Rhodes James, Collected Ghost Stories (Oxford, 2011). 38   Joseph Conrad, Collected edition of the works of Joseph Conrad Volume 15 (Dent, 1955). 39   Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501(1979). 40   Frank Zappa, Roxy & Elsewhere, DiscReet, DS2202 (1974). 41   H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London, 1896). 42   See Michel Delville and Andrew Norris, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 150–52. 43   Delville and Norris, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism, p. 152. 36 37

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not least when he makes himself the transforming and distorted monster that is the ‘Zomby Woof’. The most significant motif within the narrative of ‘Zomby Woof’, however, is sexual violence. It is unclear what caused the transformation while the protagonist lay down on the bed, except that in the morning he has a ‘zomby woof behind the eyes’ which is ‘as evil as you could be’. The fact that the bed is antique taps into a recurrent trait in horror stories: the object is old, hence possibly haunted or cursed, and it brings the values and terrors of the past into the present. To give one example from countless possibilities, one is reminded of the ‘mirror’ episode in Dead of Night 44 in which the mild-mannered owner of an antique mirror is gradually transformed into a misogynist psychopath because the object is possessed by its earlier, lady-killing owner. Although the antique bed in ‘Zomby Woof’ was not a forum for sexual activity, it has turned the seventeenth-century sleeper into a longlived monster, a predatory figure of sexual menace who will violate and kidnap dormitory ladies. As Kevin Courrier writes, the song conflates two traditions: it presents ‘carnal desire out of Howlin’ Woof (…) sprinkled with horror-movie references that spice up the trashy aspects of the American kitsch that Zappa serves up’.45 In these respects, ‘Zomby Woof’ draws on a tradition of popular blues music which can be macho and aggressively heterosexual. At the same time, the song celebrates popular horror culture and its melodramatic traditions of ‘damsels in distress’ and monstrous villains. To emphasise horror as a form of melodrama in performances of the song, Zappa uses ‘Mysterioso Pizzicato’; this musical cliché, also known as ‘The Villains Theme’, is synonymous with early cinema, cartoons and pantomime and was apparently first transcribed by James Bodewalt Lampe in 1914.46 ‘Mysterioso Pizzicato’ is an example of what Zappa describes as ‘Archetypal American Musical Icons’.47 As outlined in the introduction of this volume, this is a recurrent technique in the Zappa oeuvre whereby well-known tunes are incorporated into his compositions. Writing on the technique, Zappa states: I can put sounds together that tell more than the story in the lyrics, especially to American listeners, [who are] raised on these subliminal clichés, shaping their audio reality from the cradle to the elevator.48

These ‘Musical Icons’ can create mood and effect. In the case of ‘Zomby Woof’ it emphasises the song’s melodramatic horror. Other examples in Zappa’s work   Alberto Cavalcanti et al., Dead of Night, Ealing Films (1945).   Kevin Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa (Toronto, 2002), p. 253. 46  See http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/songs/Mysterioso_Pizzicato.html [accessed 6 January 2012]. 47   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 166. 48   Ibid., p. 171. 44

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include the use of the theme tune from the popular television series The Twilight Zone 49 composed by Marius Constant. This familiar tune instantly creates a sense of the weird and uncanny. Zappa uses it in numerous songs, including live versions of ‘Pygmy Twylyte’,50 ‘Tinsel Town Rebellion’51 and ‘Jesus Thinks You’re a Jerk’.52 He frequently incorporated it, as we shall see, into live performances of ‘Honey, Don’t You Want a Man Like Me?’53 This narrative song describes a mundane yet fraught sexual encounter: a couple meet at a singles bar and following dancing, flirtation and dinner they end up at her home. If this follows the clichéd pattern of a one-night stand, the male character will be disappointed because, we are told, she does not kiss him. It is at this point in several performances that The Twilight Zone theme starts to be played. The man is furious at the refusal of this ‘lousy bitch’. In some versions, The Twilight Zone theme continues into the next verse where we hear that the man describes the woman as a slut, pig, whore, bitch and cunt and she leaves in a ‘petulant frenzy’. The Twilight Zone theme indicates how the formulaic one-night stand culminating in direct sexual encounter has gone awry and thus becomes ‘uncanny’. Although this failure takes us into a Twilight Zone of twisted reality, the theme tune disappears and the cliché reasserts itself: while the man makes a phone call the woman – like the obliging Goblin Girl – performs fellatio on him. In the versions of ‘Honey, Don’t You Want a Man Like Me?’ included on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3 54 (recorded in New York City in August 1984) and You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6 (Maryland, 23 March 1988), Zappa replaces the word ‘cunt’ with ‘Republican’. This politicisation to the tune of The Twilight Zone theme recurs in ‘Rhymin’ Man’,55 one of Zappa’s most overtly political songs which is simultaneously one of his most complex ‘Musical Icon’ compositions (at least 12 other ‘Icons’ are included within this short song). ‘Rhymin’ Man’ is Zappa’s uncompromising critique on the US Democrat politician Jesse Jackson: Zappa, in using ‘Musical Icons’ so ruthlessly, is perhaps making a statement about the shallow clichés and opportunism of mainstream politics. Specifically, in using The Twilight Zone theme, Zappa endeavours to construct a mood of alienation, distrust and peril to underscore his discussion of contemporary politicians. It is certainly interesting how Zappa uses the sinister tones of The Twilight Zone theme within critiques of both Republican and Democrat politics composed/performed during the mid to late 1980s, a period when Zappa himself toyed with the idea of standing for President.   Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, CBS (1959–64).  Zappa, Roxy & Elsewhere. 51   Frank Zappa, Tinseltown Rebellion, Barking Pumpkin, PW237336 (1981). 52   Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988). 53   Frank Zappa, Zappa in New York, DiscReet, 2D 2290 (1976). 54   Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3, Rykodisc, RCD 10081/82 (1988). 55   Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way (1988). 49 50

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Epics of Horror In Zappa’s cavalcade of monsters, alongside goblin girls, zomby woofs and unscrupulous politicians, there are also examples of more epic visions, including an interest in the truly gargantuan creatures from monster movies. ‘King Kong’56 is one of Zappa’s key compositions and by the time it appears on Uncle Meat,57 it has become a work as gigantic as the monster it is a tribute to. The similarly long version on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 358 is a hybrid of various concert performances of the track between 1971 and 1982 and is given lyrics of sorts with the frequently repeated words ‘Blow-job! Bidet! Jambon!’ which capture planes of the Bakhtinian lower body material stratum: genitalia, anuses, mouths; devouring phalluses, exposing the nether regions, swallowing ‘ham’. The taboo is not just revealed but shouted out again and again: stimulation, consumption, digestion, bodily function brings forth regeneration. In this example, ‘King Kong’ is a monster in its etymological sense (coming from the French montrer): it is shown and de(monstr)ated. Zappa also celebrates enormous monsters for being ‘bad’ in their cinematic incarnations. In a profile of Zappa’s son Ahmet (‘named after a giant pterodactyl that would have ravaged the world if the Japanese film director Ishiro Honda hadn’t destroyed it in 1957’59), we are told: Frank … had a whimsical side, manifested in a love of monster movies. Ahmet … has vivid memories of watching and laughing at monster movies with Frank. ‘He loved how bad they were, all the cheesy outfits’.60

This is corroborated by Zappa’s widow Gail, who wrote in February 2006: FZ was a fan of the fabulously cheezy and utterly cheap (cheepnis) [and] he loved the spongey meteoroids and the zippered monster suits and even the zippered and spongeoid dialog and plot lines – and of course, in some cases the fantastic musical themes.61

If ‘King Kong’ celebrates the taboo power of blowjobs, bidets and jambon, Zappa can also find a regenerative force to celebrate in ‘cheap’ monster movies: the power of costume, of transformation that is not taken too seriously (but is all the   Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6-8741 (1968).   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre Records, 2MS 2024 (1969). 58  Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3. 59  Slaven, Electric Don Quixote, p. 206. 60   Sharon Krum, ‘Family: Interview with Ahmet Zappa’, The Guardian (29 July 2006), at http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/jul/29/popandrock [accessed 22 January 2012]. 61   Gail Zappa in email correspondence with the author, February 2006. 56 57

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more liberating for that) – the same spirit of the carnival-grotesque that infuses the Halloween gigs. The ultimate example of this is the song ‘Cheepnis’,62 an epic song celebrating ‘spongeoid’ movies and the experience of movie-going (once again, the all-important sense of collective audience). On the Roxy & Elsewhere album version, Zappa opens with a speech to the audience: Let me tell you something, do you like monster movies? Anybody? I love monster movies, I simply adore monster movies, and the cheaper they are, the better they are. And cheepnis in the case of a monster movie has nothing to do with the budget of the film, although it helps, but true cheepnis is exemplified by visible nylon strings attached to the jaw of a giant spider… 63

This celebration continues at length before launching into the song. The opening lyrics are about the audience, consuming the quintessential movietheatre food (i.e. a hot dog) and then watching a Hollywood film, thus placing the spectator at the forefront of the event. Zappa’s fantasy movie begins and so does spongeoid deconstruction which focuses on the ill-fitting costumes (whether the creature outfits or simply regular clothes), stereotypical characterisation, strings that operate the monsters, and rocks made of cardboard. All these inadequacies are most appositely summed up in the phrase, ‘The Zipper from the Black Lagoon’, Zappa’s allusion to one of the most paradigmatic titles of the B-movie era: The Creature from the Black Lagoon.64 Although Zappa’s fantasy-film is ludicrously substandard in quality and preposterous in content, at the same time, as Kevin Courrier writes, ‘Cheepnis’ is a ‘tour de force tribute to the cheap sci-fi films of the 50s’.65 Zappa develops the story of his virtual, paradigmatic ‘movie’ in which Frunobulax, the gargantuan poodle, runs amok destroying trees as if they were ‘bonsai’d ornaments on a dry-wobble landscape’. Zappa is playing a game of (dis)illusion: the trees snap ‘like’ bonsai plants on a wobbling landscape because that is exactly what they are. The gender of Frunobulax is not specified – the creature is described using the great pronoun of science fiction ‘It’ – but it is presumably feminine. Certainly, the troops express the urgency to prevent the monster reproducing which implies a female metabolism. Perhaps Frunobulax is androgynous and self-replicating? We are also told that Frunobulax has ‘a great big slimey thing… a great big hairy thing’. One assumes that this is a reference to its enormous genitalia but whether masculine or feminine is unclear, although it perhaps is more aligned to the abjection of the vagina dentata (‘toothed vagina’). In fact, if we look at one of Zappa’s unrealised projects we get a clearer picture of Frunobulax and its function. ‘Cheepnis’ was originally featured in Zappa’s 1972 science-fiction  Zappa, Roxy & Elsewhere.   Taken from the opening of ‘Cheepnis’, Zappa, Roxy & Elsewhere. 64   Jack Arnold, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Universal Studios (1954). 65  Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 262. 62 63

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musical Hunchentoot.66 Although this project never saw the light of day, Zappa had a clear vision for Hunchentoot with a detailed sense of orchestration and design. The musical revels in the structure and motifs of B-movie sci-fi with an authoritative quasi-scientific narrator and an emphasis on the papier-mâché props and effects, sci-fi paradigms and surrealistic playfulness. The narrative features the seven-and-a-half feet tall Drakma, the evil Queen of Cosmic Greed, who plans to invade planet Earth. The eponymous character Hunchentoot is a gigantic spider and Drakma’s love slave. Inevitably, Zappa pushes what is invisible or deeply latent in 1950s B-movies into the spotlight. For example, Hunchentoot’s penis is created by a fur-covered slinky which ‘sproings’ onto the stage. Reading the extant script of Hunchentoot we attain a greater context to Frunobulax: if the musical play had been realised audiences would have seen Colonel Khadaffi pumping up a poodle-faced mutant cocktail waitress with concrete from a hose between his legs until the monstrous Frunobulax squishes her creator. Hunchentoot becomes a pimp and transforms Frunobulax into a ‘Space-Whore’ with a line of male punters awaiting their turn. Zappa envisioned that this extraordinary scene would happen to the accompaniment of or rather in and through ‘Cheepnis’.67 As the song draws to a close, the lyrics locate the heart of pleasure in watching cheap horror movies, which is the experience of laughing until you are on your knees and if this does not happen to us, the song states we are to be pitied. What this reveals is how Zappa adores monster movies but it is not for a fear effect but for the liberating power of laughter. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that ‘Cheepnis’ is not simply about laughable movies and neither is it a ‘nostalgia trip’, celebrating a safe, quaint and outmoded cultural form of the past. In the ‘story’ of this imagined film the authorities state they may have to resort to ‘Nuclear force’ to stop Frunobulax. Nuclear technology is ubiquitous in 1950s B-movies as both the creator and destroyer of monstrosity. However, the National Guard also consider using napalm. Although napalm was used in the Second World War, Korean War and other conflicts it was to become synonymous with US military action during the Vietnam War (1955–1975). In fact, Zappa was being authentic to B-movie culture: towards the end of Tarantula,68 the authorities call in the air force with rockets and napalm which succeeds in annihilating the gargantuan arachnid. For Kevin Courrier, however, when the lyrics mention napalm we are taken away from the B-movie into the contemporaneous world of the ‘modern horror of the Vietnam War, a conflict that continued to rage under Richard Nixon’.69 In other words, buried in Zappa’s world of hilarity and disillusion is the horror of contemporaneous warfare and the alienating context of contemporary politics. It could be argued that Zappa is placing a core of authentic horror in the absurd world of ‘cheapness’. It 66   Although unpublished, the entire script of Hunchentoot can be found at Frank Zappa, Them Or Us (The Book), (Los Angeles, 1984): pp. 184–253. 67  Zappa, Roxy and Elsewhere. 68   Jack Arnold, Tarantula, Universal Studios (1955). 69  Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p.263.

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is reminiscent of ‘The Dummy’ (1976), an episode of Nigel Kneale’s television drama Beasts,70 in which an actor in an overtly ‘spongeoid’ monster costume has a psychotic breakdown in a television studio and becomes homicidal. For Kneale and Zappa, real horror peaks out from beneath the laughable sponge, a tumour within the humour like a worm in an apple or the human psyche’s ever-present Todesangst. Hunchentoot reveals that Zappa’s passion for monster movies extended to him aspiring to make his own. It is not an isolated case. In 1964, Zappa wrote the screenplay for a feature film Captain Beefheart vs. The Grunt People and would revise the script in 1969. It was the project with which he created the name ‘Captain Beefheart’ for Don Van Vliet and his ‘Ideal Cast’ included Don Preston as well as Grace Slick and Howlin’ Wolf. As can be seen in an extant copy of the 1969 revised script,71 Captain Beefheart vs. The Grunt People is an attempt at a B-movie sci-fi epic, with Beefheart as a narrator-character scripted to be as idiosyncratic as Zappa in the role of the ‘Central Scrutinizer’ narrator in Joe’s Garage, Acts I, II and III.72 When asked in a 1969 interview about the screenplay, Zappa explains the ‘Grunt People’: … they’re these people on the moon, who wear these clothes which are like burlap bags with fish and garbage sewn on them. They are the villains of the story, but turn out to be the victims of a government agent. It’s a little warped – just enough to retain clarity…, like a mirror that makes your arm look a little larger.73

Captain Beefheart vs. The Grunt People was being developed to be filmed in Studio Z, and also in 1964 Zappa began some work on what would have been a pioneering ‘rock opera’: I Was A Teen-age Malt Shop, a fantasy narrative the title of which alludes to one of the quintessential and abiding B-movie titles: I Was A Teenage Werewolf (Gene Fowler Jr., 1957).74 I Was A Teen-age Malt Shop was to remain an unrealised project, but like Captain Beefheart vs. The Grunt People and Hunchentoot, Zappa would perform songs that he planned to use within the narrative as stand-alone works. The B-movie world of cheap horror and science fiction is never far away in Zappa’s other attempts at more sustained narratives, most notably the completed epics Joe’s Garage Acts I, II and III and Thing-Fish.75 Joe’s Garage is a vision of   Nigel Kneale, Beasts, ITV (1976).   Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart VS. The Grunt People (1964), at http://www. beefheart.com/zigzag/gruntpeople/index.html [accessed 1 January 2012]. 72   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act 1, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979) and Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). 73   Pete Frame, ‘A Fine Madness’, ZIG ZAG (31 October 1969), at http://www. freewebs.com/teejo/argue/madness.html [accessed 22 January 2012]. 74   Gene Fowler Jr., I Was A Teenage Werewolf, AIP (1957). 75   Frank Zappa, Thing-Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKC074201 (1984). 70 71

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dystopia where we witness the rise and fall of the protagonist, an ‘average Joe’ and Zappa’s Everyman. Joe finds a passion and talent for music and his success takes him through the disillusionment and cynicism of the music industry and its impact on one’s personal life. However, the work is dominated by the ‘Central Scrutinizer’, a narrator of repressive ideology representing the hegemonic regime, trying to persuade us that music causes ‘big trouble’. Distinctly a precursor to Queen and Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You,76 a satirical projection of a future in which rock music is banned, Joe’s Garage combines the moral narrative of William Hogarth’s series of engravings A Harlot’s Progress (1733) or The Rake’s Progress (1735) with the twentieth-century dystopian visions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World 77 or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.78 As such, Zappa’s threealbum narrative is a science fiction moral musical, charting the consequences of bad decisions and desperate desires not dissimilar to Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s Little Shop of Horrors (1982), the musical theatre adaptation of the 1960 Roger Corman B-movie. The ultimate horror in Joe’s Garage is perhaps the disastrous sexual encounter with Cy-Borg and Gay-Bob, the two robots designed for sexual fulfilment (and commoditisation) by L. Ron Hoover and the First Church of Appliantology. For Joe, the zenith of orgasmic pleasure destroys the robot and he is arrested. Although it seems to be an accident, it is probably a honey entrapment in this paranoid nightmare, and calculatedly removes the guitarist Joe from society before ‘rehabilitating’ him and making him a mindless drone in a muffin factory where the narrative draws to an entropic close. More aligned with the narratives and iconography of popular horror is Zappa’s mock-musical Thing-Fish.79 The work is a complex deconstruction of the Broadway musical theatre form, in which the ingredients of the genre are subverted. Zappa’s musical is a work about the rise of AIDS – which Zappa sees as a government created disease: the gay AIDS sufferers are all African-Americans (like the victims in the scandalous Tuskegee syphilis experiment). The men are all dressed as nuns in a provocative allusion to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical The Sound of Music (1959) and its subsequent film adaptation80 while numerous icons of musical theatre appear, albeit as the living dead fit for the popular horror genre: There is a Peter Pan Zombie, a Hello Dolly Zombie, an Oklahoma Zombie and an Annie Zombie (with her zombie-dog). … The Zombies silently re-enact the ‘GREATEST MOMENTS’ from their famous shows.81

76   Christopher Renshaw, We Will Rock You, Queen Theatrical Productions, et al. (1992). 77   Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London, 1932). 78   George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London, 1949). 79  Zappa, Thing-Fish. 80   Robert Wise, The Sound of Music, Twentieth Century Fox (1965). 81  Zappa, Thing-Fish.

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The world of the Broadway musical is given hybridity with the world of another American popular genre, horror. In so doing one is reminded of the dancing zombies in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video,82 but in Zappa these monstrous creations are used to promote an anti-Republican conspiracy theory and, of course, to induce laughter. Zappa is very much in the tradition of Nietzsche, who says: it is ‘Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay.’83 Zappa also uses Thing-Fish to satirise contemporaneous ‘yuppie’ culture. The two protagonists are Harry and Rhonda, the ultra-straight yuppies who have wandered into the wrong Broadway show, who fulfil a similar function to Brad and Janet in Richard O’Brien’s musical theatre B-movie homage The Rocky Horror Picture Show 84 and undergo a similar initiation into sexual liberation, a journey which is as destructive for their bourgeois identity and values as it is rejuvenating for them as individual sexual beings. Conclusion Frank Zappa draws his cultural influences from an extremely diverse range of sources. Whether interested in the complex musical heritage of Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky or his playful use of Archetypal American Musical Icons, Zappa brings allusion and reference into an eclectic system of interplay. Zappa also has a passion for American popular culture beyond music: this includes traditions and forms associated with ‘horror’ such as Halloween, monsters and B-movies. Whether it was the saturnalian tradition of his Halloween gigs; the theme of the uncanny and metamorphosis within individual songs; or the development of sustained, epic narratives, the place of horror in its broadest sense can be seen as an essential element to his oeuvre, employed for the purposes of communal celebration, socio-political satire, or outright unbridled laughter.

  John Landis, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Epic (1983).   Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (London, 1883), p. 36. 84  Sharman, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 82 83

Chapter 2

Zappa and his Cultural Legacy: Authorship, Influences and Expressive Features in Frank Zappa’s Movies Manuel de la Fuente

Introduction Throughout his career in music, Frank Zappa showed a constant interest towards audiovisual media as a tool for reflecting his expressive ideas. In his autobiography, Zappa writes how he managed to compose the score for his first movie (Run Home Slow)1 before releasing his first official LP Freak Out! 2 in 1966.3 The order of these events proves that his relationship with movie-making is not a mere extension of his work as a music composer, but an independent entity. Zappa also discusses how the purchase of his first recording studio was not only for musical activities, but also for making cheap films. His interest in moviemaking was so serious, that Zappa declared that if he had found a producer for his first projects in cinema, he would never have played rock music.4 In fact, Zappa produced eight full-length movies between the years 1971 to 1988, namely 200 Motels,5 Baby Snakes,6 The Dub Room Special!,7 Does Humor Belong in Music?,8

  Ted Brenner, Run Home Slow, Joshua Productions (1965).   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966). 3   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 43. 4   Jerry Hopkins, ‘Mother’s Day Has Finally Come’, Rolling Stone (1969), at http:// wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/Mother%E2%80%99s_Day_Has_Finally_Come [accessed 10 October 2011]. 5   Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer, 200 Motels, United Artists (1971). Unless otherwise noted, all discussion in the chapter refers to this film. 6   Frank Zappa, Baby Snakes, Intercontinental Absurdities (1979). 7   Frank Zappa, The Dub Room Special!, Honker Home Video (1982). 8   Frank Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?, Picture Music International (1985). 1 2

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Video from Hell,9 Uncle Meat,10 The Amazing Mr. Bickford11 and The True Story of 200 Motels.12 This is not a common case in the world of rock. Although many rock artists have appropriated cinema as part of the creative idiolect, it is rare to see these artists making films throughout a prolonged period like Zappa. It is also noticeable that there is often a stark contrast between the commercial failure of these ventures and the success of their careers in the music industry. One of the most striking examples is Bob Dylan, director of two movies, Eat That Document (1972)13 and Renaldo and Clara (1978).14 The first one is a documentary which is regarded as a ‘failure’ due to its lack of distribution – a problem that Zappa faced for his second movie, Baby Snakes,15 which led him to explore video format and mail order distribution. The second film was considered as being too long and pretentious by specialised press. These two experiences resulted in Dylan giving up his career in cinema.16 In the case of The Beatles, we find another problem, in a group that was very prolific musically, but could not transfer this success into a filmic career after the two movies directed by Richard Lester, A Hard Day’s Night 17 and Help! 18 The potential of these two films was interrupted with their subsequent projects: a TV movie that received bad reviews (Magical Mystery Tour 19 ), an animated film in which they only appeared in a final short sequence (Yellow Submarine 20 ) and a documentary on their final steps as a group (Let It Be).21 More recent examples also show this distance between a successful career in music and problems in distributing film works. The movies directed by Prince, for instance, are oriented to video format only (titles such as 3 Chains O’ Gold 22 ), despite his position as one of the best-selling contemporary pop artists. The exceptionality of Frank Zappa’s case lies in his perseverance in building a prolonged career making movies, which encouraged him to find new ways for shooting, editing and distributing his films. After experiencing many difficulties in the financial process of filmmaking in his two first movies, he decided to move   Frank Zappa, Video from Hell, Honker Home Video (1987).   Frank Zappa, Uncle Meat, Honker Home Video (1987). 11   Frank Zappa, The Amazing Mr. Bickford, Honker Home Video (1987). 12   Frank Zappa, The True Story of 200 Motels, Honker Home Video (1988). 13   Bob Dylan, Eat that Document, Pennebaker Associates (1972). 14   Bob Dylan, Renaldo and Clara, Lombard Street Films (1978). 15  Zappa, Baby Snakes. 16   Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited (New York, 2003), p. 463. 17   Richard Lester, A Hard Day’s Night, United Artists (1964). 18   Richard Lester, Help!, United Artists (1965). 19   The Beatles and Bernard Knowles, Magical Mystery Tour, Apple/BBC (1967). 20   George Dunning, Yellow Submarine, United Artists (1968). 21   The Beatles and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Let It Be, United Artists (1970). 22   Prince, 3 Chains O’ Gold, Warner (1994).  9

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completely to video format, commencing with his third production, The Dub Room Special! 23 Since then, Zappa worked as a filmmaker in search of an independent creative process, with the assistance of his newly built recording studio (named Utility Muffin Research Kitchen) and his video production company – Honker Home Video. Despite his productivity, Zappa’s work as a filmmaker has not been accompanied by extensive academic study, a problematic fact considering his creative output can be perceived not only in music, but also in film. The complexity of Zappa’s creativity has already been pointed out by some authors. For instance Carr and Hand argued the prevalence of a duality that could be understood when considering factors such as his constant juxtaposition of high and low culture – ‘Is the music Rock, Jazz, Classical? High or low art? Controlled or open? Improvisatory or notated? Serious or frivolous? Complex or simple? Elitist or vernacular?’24 It is proposed that Zappa prevails amongst these contradictions with a work that is coherent because of an individualist nature that took him to move in an artistic borderline, in a new space placed between mainstream and underground culture, refusing to belong completely in rock or the orchestral world. These factors constitute a distinctive feature in his movies, which often challenge preconceived rules and regulations that can potentially be restrictive for an artist’s creativity. This chapter intends to discuss some of the features that define Zappa’s filmmaking style and the way it impacts his consideration of cinema as a tool for social mobilisation. Technology, Authorship and Subjectivity After several attempts at directing films, Zappa finally premiered 200 Motels in 1971. Produced by United Artists, the movie dealt with the problems that a rock group has to face when on tour: musicians only concerned with smoking dope and having sex with groupies or the feeling of boredom at having to perform in towns that are very similar. Centerville, the fictional town in the film, is the representation of any given small locality in the United States, with ‘churches, liquor stores [and] a rancid boutique’.25 At the same time, the context presented in 200 Motels portrays a society where the government has built a concentration camp for musicians in order to avoid demonstrations of dissidence. The process of shooting 200 Motels reveals the first feature that can be settled as elusive in Frank Zappa’s cinema: his reflection on format – on technology. The film was shot and edited on video and transferred to 35 mm after completing postproduction for its exhibition in theatres. This process was innovative at that time,  Zappa, The Dub Room Special!   Paul Carr and Richard J. Hand, ‘“Twist’n Frugg in an Arrogant Gesture:  Frank Zappa and the Musical-Theatrical Gesture”’, Popular Musicology Online (2008), at http:// www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/05/carr.html [accessed 10 October 2011]. 25   ‘Centerville’, on Zappa and Palmer, 200 Motels. 23 24

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as co-director Tony Palmer claimed in one of the last Zappa’s films, The True Story of 200 Motels 26 when he came to describe it: Essentially what we do is to record the whole operation on colour videotape. The colour videotape has three primary colours, red, green, and blue. And the old Technicolor process had also three primary colours, red, green, and blue. So we put two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together and said, “Aha”. … So we began to experiment with transferring colour tape.27

Apart from Palmer’s statements, Zappa himself explained in this documentary that he had felt attracted by video format because it made the technical process cheaper (the film cost $679,00028 ) and also easier and faster to handle, being filmed in seven days and edited in eleven. In 1979, Zappa finished his second movie, Baby Snakes,29 with the focus now oriented not on rock bands’ tours, but the celebration of the concert. We can see Zappa’s group performing at the Palladium Theatre (New York) in 1977, combined with a presentation of the work of Bruce Bickford, an animator who provides images of Zappa’s fantasy world with clay figures. An overall concept of the composer’s imagery is offered to the viewer with this mixture of animation and representation on stage, in a similar manner to 200 Motels, where certain sequences, such as the animated ‘Dental Hygiene Dilemma’,30 complete his vision of the world. Problems associated with distribution experienced by Zappa when exhibiting Baby Snakes31 forced him to circulate the film himself via video format. This resulted in the option for domestic format now not only being a matter of production, but also distribution, and from that time on Zappa would completely orientate his work towards video for both production and editing. That’s how he exposed his fascination with the facilities of this technology in his third film, The Dub Room Special! (1982).32 On this occasion, in the sequences where he appears with the workers at the company Compact Video, Zappa explained the step forwards in video editing while mixing performances from two separate concerts (held in 1974 and 1981) and presenting them as a new work mostly conformed by a collection of the tracks of those shows. The Dub Room Special! 33 might be considered as the last film of a trilogy, which is essentially an analysis of Zappa’s creative processes when making music: touring (200 Motels), live concerts  Zappa, The True Story of 200 Motels.   Ibid. 28   As explained in Zappa, The True Story of 200 Motels. 29  Zappa, Baby Snakes. 30   ‘Dental Hygiene Dilemma’, on Zappa and Palmer, 200 Motels. 31  Zappa, Baby Snakes. 32  Zappa, The Dub Room Special!. 33   Ibid. 26 27

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(Baby Snakes 34) and editing (The Dub Room Special! 35). In the same way that Zappa made many records by editing material that was previously recorded on stage and on tour, he would apply this system to his films, which were often compiled with footage from different media and times and places. This orientation to domestic video format undoubtedly contributed in condemning Zappa’s films to obscurity. We must be aware of the social and cultural supremacy of cinema over television, a problem that had already been detected by André Bazin in an interview with Roberto Rossellini and Jean Renoir in the fifties.36 However, domestic video created the possibility for the work to exist. Although being independent from studios in the cinema industry meant experiencing economic problems (such as finding financial support or distribution), it also allowed Zappa a more direct communication with his audience by declaring his opinions without any kind of censorship. In his movies, Zappa expresses his opinions on the same topics he expounds in his records: music industry, politics, anti-drugs statements, etc. And we find here that the liberty he achieved in his movies from the eighties resulted in a very important feature: his intention for subjectivity. Frank Zappa’s films deal with Frank Zappa. The director narrates his experiences as a musician as well as his artistic ideas and even his dreams (as shown in the sequence of the lads and the nun in 200 Motels). This narration tends to convert his own experiences of what is normal in the rock lifestyle into what they should be. Thus, when he introduces the viewer to the problems that usually emerge when a rock group is touring, he is attempting to depict how rock groups really are. When he shoots a concert, we are watching what Zappa considered the standard of how rock performances should be: with humour, critical lyrics, audience participation and the artist’s opinion on the social and political context. Zappa’s subjectivity appears not only overtly, but also via an alter ego, who strategically depicts Zappa’s opinions. So, in 200 Motels, the director himself defines the central subject of the movie (‘Touring can make you crazy’) in the voice-over – but the character of Larry the Dwarf appears dressed like Frank Zappa and gives the composer’s opinions on politics and the music industry. Through this way of presenting his subjectivity, Zappa exposes how the inner mechanisms of the record industry manipulate ideologies such as the mythology of ‘sex, drugs and rock n’ roll’. So, he decided this would be a target for his creative subject matter along with the criticism of what he considered other cynical forces of authority, such as the government, right-wing lobbies or the Republican party. Life as a musician is often not as glamorous as the media industries portray, and it is proposed that Zappa intended to destroy any preconceived ideas via uncomfortable realism.  Zappa, Baby Snakes.  Zappa, The Dub Room Special!. 36   André Bazin, ‘Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini y la TV’, in Joaquim Romaguera and Homero Alsina (eds), Textos y manifiestos del cine. Estética. Escuelas. Movimientos. Disciplinas. Innovaciones (Madrid, 1998): pp. 545–55, at 548. 34 35

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This is why he would never hide the inner processes of making a movie, with images of cameras, microphones and even actors rehearsing in front of the camera placing Zappa’s work very close to the new wave and underground movements of the seventies. As outlined in an edition of the Zappa fanzine The Rondo Hatton Report,37 filmic influences in Zappa’s work reach both expressive levels, as in his music: high culture (Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky in music, Dziga Vertov and avant-garde movements in his cinema) and popular culture (for example, doo-wop or sci-fi movies). He even quotes classic movies, like the scene in Uncle Meat 38 where Don Preston emulates the mad scientist Dr. Jekyll in the film by Rouben Mamoulian39 drinking the liquid that will turn him into a monster. The frame of the film by Mamoulian (Figure 2.1) is reproduced in Zappa’s (Figure 2.2), with both images depicting a front shot of a scientist working in his laboratory, looking with a nervous laugh at a glass filled with a foaming substance that he is holding in his right hand. At the same time, he uses narration effects (repetitions, association of ideas, symbolisms, some construction patterns, etc.), which are trademarks of avant-garde films in the twenties such as Battleship Potemkin40 and Man with a Movie Camera.41 The influence of Vertov and avant-garde films should not be surprising for several reasons: for the direct link between these films and Western underground cinema in the seventies42 and the respect that Zappa had for the Dadaist movement.43 In this combination of elements from such different influences, Zappa tries to articulate a filmic discourse to deconstruct cultural and political actions that (as we will see below) interfere in individual rights. Construction of Identities and the Mythology of Rock Uncle Meat 44 is one film that Frank Zappa took years to finish, having been conceived in the late sixties, but not completed until 20 years later. It was made 37   Manuel de la Fuente, ‘Author/Recipient Relationships in FZ’s Movies’, The Rondo Hatton Report, 1 (2009), at http://www.rhreport.net/archive/2009-12-21%20archive.pdf, pp. 9–13 [accessed 8 November 2011]. 38  Zappa, Uncle Meat. 39   Rouben Mamoulian, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Paramount Pictures (1931). 40   Sergei M. Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin), Goskino (1925). 41   Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom), VUFKU, (1929). 42   Duncan Reekie, Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (London, 2007). 43   As remarked by Ben Watson, ‘Frank Zappa as Dadaist: Recording Technology and the Power to Repeat’, Contemporary Music Review, 15/1–2 (1996): pp. 109–37. 44  Zappa, Uncle Meat.

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Figure 2.1

Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931)

Figure 2.2

Uncle Meat (Frank Zappa, 1987)

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as ‘The Mothers of Invention movie’, and this is the way the film starts its credits and concludes. Whereas the complete title of 200 Motels is more accurately Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels,45 Uncle Meat 46 was a long awaited project that deals with and belongs to The Mothers of Invention. However, the delay in filming the Uncle 45   A fact that Howard Kaylan confirmed in the final scene of the movie when stating – ‘After all … it’s Frank’s movie. We’re the Mothers, but it’s still Frank’s movie’. 46  Zappa, Uncle Meat.

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Meat video results in more complexity, as it is portraying a collective that has been disbanded for many years. Hence, Didier Mervelet concludes that this complexity results in ‘a never-finished non-movie’,47 compounded by three distinct plots: the first described as simply ‘Zappa filming Zappa filming’.48 For example, in the first sequence, the viewer can see Zappa giving instructions to his cameraman while he is deciding on how to shoot the different elements that must appear in the scene. There is another moment where Zappa is being filmed while he is speaking on the telephone about artistic decisions for his movie. As a consequence, the viewer is constantly placed in the same position as the filmmaker: directing the movie, acting in front of the camera or being spied while he is working on the elaboration of the film. The second plot outlined by Mervelet criticises the music industry, portraying the efforts carried out by a musician in order to ‘get commercial’. Mervelet describes it as follows: [it’s] the political thriller … A musician called Biff Debris played by Don Preston needs a hit single to reach the youth market and thus change the world. Biff becomes obsessed with ‘getting commercial,’ gets old and is then played by Stumuk. … Unfortunately, he fails to achieve his objective.49

The third plot is depicted as the love story between Phyllis Altenhaus and Biff Debris. She works as an operator who is watching a video of a music performance in 1968 and falls in love with Debris, who appears in the video. Years after they meet each other, a relationship is formed, and they live ‘happily ever after’. The complexity of the narrative is also compounded by the sources used in the movie. It is in Uncle Meat 50 where Zappa the filmmaker is closer to Zappa the music composer. As with many of his records, which were based on the reelaboration of both studio and live recordings (often from different concerts and years), in this movie we also find footage from 1968, 1970 and 1982, juxtaposed against each other. This allowed Zappa to complete Uncle Meat 51 by following his initial plan – of reflecting on the existence and validity of his music over the course of time.52 As he did in 200 Motels, Zappa explores in Uncle Meat 53 the separation between documentary and fiction. It is important to note that this distinction is just 47   Didier Mervelet, ‘La dérive Uncle Meat’, The Rondo Hatton Report, 1 (2009), at http://www.rhreport.net/archive/2009-12-21%20archive.pdf, pp. 26–9, at p. 26 [accessed 8 October 2011]. 48   Ibid., p. 27. 49   Ibid. 50  Zappa, Uncle Meat. 51   Ibid. 52   Jay Ruby, ‘Interview, Frank Zappa’, Jazz & Pop, 9/8 (1970): pp. 20–24, at 22. 53  Zappa, Uncle Meat.

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a mere rhetorical artefact, due to the circumstance that shooting a documentary also implies the filmmaker’s subjectivity. This is a factor that Zappa negotiates skilfully by encouraging the viewer to question if what they are watching is really happening or a fictional recreation. Did he record, for instance, his musicians’ conversations as Ringo Starr’s character (disguised as Frank Zappa) does in 200 Motels? Is it normal for a rock group like the one Zappa describes in Uncle Meat 54 to be obsessed with having a song at the top of the charts? But the final message that Zappa seems to emit in Uncle Meat 55 has to do with the difficulties (even the impossibility) of making a career in cinema as an independent artist away from the studios. Assuming that the film took him 20 years to make, and with distribution being limited to domestic video sold by mail, the filmmaker is aware of two facts: that the final results are widely different from the first script (since he had been adding footage throughout the years) and that the film is condemned to a minority of audiences. It is therefore obvious that, being his most audacious movie (in terms of structure and narrative), at least Zappa shows himself to be an independent creator, who uses all the material at his disposal to reflect on his job as a director and, at the same time, to present an allegory of the tensions an artist (the character played by Don Preston) has to come up against to have his work released. The artistic independence that Zappa experienced when making Uncle Meat 56 is the antithesis of the restrictions of 200 Motels. This is outlined in The True Story of 200 Motels,57 a 60-minute documentary about the origins, shooting and editing of his début as a director. The film is very critical of co-director Tony Palmer, United Artists and the producers. While the viewer sees interviews from 1971 where everybody declares it is going to be a great movie, Zappa superimposes subtitles where he establishes a clear distance between the official discourse and the real problems that occurred during the production process. For example, while Tony Palmer is explaining technical details, a subtitle emerges on the screen: ‘At one point during production, Mr. Palmer demanded that his name be removed from the credits of  “200 MOTELS”, out of concern for his career’.58 Or at the sequence where producer Jerry Goode says he is amused by the ‘creative aspects’ of the film, another subtitle reveals that this confession is pure fiction. In this subtitle, Zappa even quotes the real producer’s words: ‘In order to balance the film budget, Mr. Goode ordered that all original video master tapes be erased and sold as used stock’.59 Cinema is used in this case as a way for presenting what the filmmaker considers the true facts of his fight against the industry. Zappa builds his identity 54

  Ibid.   Ibid. 56   Ibid. 57  Zappa, The True Story of 200 Motels. 58  Zappa, The True Story of 200 Motels. 59   Ibid. 55

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as a creator confirming his image in music: a man who claims his independency of the mainstream industry, who attacks all the powers he perceives as dangerous for the right of free speech and who uses his sense of humour to deliver and contextualise his often controversial opinions. A message of independence for going against the political and social powers is also apparent in The Amazing Mr. Bickford (1987).60 In this video, Zappa gathers scenes of the clay animation by Bruce Bickford accompanied by orchestral music from his previous records The Perfect Stranger 61 and London Symphony Orchestra Vol. I.62 The different clips by Bickford and Zappa make a sort of collage of American society, showing sexual and violent scenes (in some cases, racial tensions) with the intention of catching the viewer’s eye and questioning the conservative construction of the United States in the eighties. Cinema as a Tool for Social and Political Action In 1979, Frank Zappa released the albums Joe’s Garage Acts I, II & III 63 that dealt with a story about a society where music has been forbidden. These works would turn out to be a prophecy regarding the immediate worry that the musician was about to fight: the so-called ‘conservative revolution’ embodied by Ronald Reagan in the United States. His arrival in the Oval Office entailed a decline in social politics and civil rights achieved in the previous decades, and also laid down new discourses and political practices such as the application of a conservative sense of morality, neoliberal measures in economy and the control of media and cultural products.64 Zappa knew perfectly the politics of Reagan from his period as Governor of California, from 1967 to 1974, and considered the Reagan administration to be a critical moment for his country. As a result, Zappa decided that his work would be more explicitly oriented to an ongoing critique on the political climate in America during the 1980s. His direct naming of politicians, lobbyists, social agents and situations (such as sexual and political scandals) would appear throughout his albums and movies in those years. As has been pointed out by Lowe, the political sense of Zappa’s work in the eighties comes ‘after several years of beating around

 Zappa, The Amazing Mr. Bickford.   Frank Zappa, Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger, Emi, DS-38170 (1984). 62   Frank Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra Vol. I, Barking Pumpkin, FW 38820 (1983). 63   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act I, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979) and Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). 64   For a complete study of these discourses and practices, see Michael Weiler and W. Barnett Pearce, (eds), Reagan and Public Discourse in America (Tuscaloosa, 1992). 60 61

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the bush (or chipping around the edges) of direct political critique’.65 In Frank Zappa en el Infierno. El Rock como Movilización para la Disidencia Política (Frank Zappa in Hell. Rock Music as Mobilisation for Political Dissidence),66 a study of these actions as a part of his overall work was developed: not only his songs of records, but also his media appearances, his testimony in the US Senate in 1985 (and in other legislative chambers, such as the Maryland State Legislature in 1986), his writings, his tours and his concerts. The peak of Zappa’s passion for encouraging his audience to participate in social change would arrive during his 1988 tour, when he urged young people to vote in the US presidential election to be held at the end of that year. For that purpose, he carried (with the aid of several pro-voting organisations) registration forms to the concert halls. It is also well known that one of his opponents was the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), a lobby made up by wives of prominent senators, congressmen and executives from Washington DC. The intention of the PMRC was to create a rating system for rock music records similar to that already existing in the cinema industry,67 evaluating their supposed sexual or violent content and thus creating a very toxic atmosphere where extreme right-wing demonstrations against the recording industry (with radio stations blacklisting pop artists and scenes of public record burnings) became the norm.68 Zappa focused his albums and concerts during the eighties on fighting against the political tendency personified by the PMRC – of establishing a censorship system for the record industry. This opposition would be clearly exposed in the songs from albums such as Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention69 or Broadway the Hard Way.70 In addition, he also attacked this right-wing political environment in his films. In the mid-eighties, when the public debate between Zappa and the PMRC was a constant event in the American media, he released two videos with political content, in which he used his sense of humour to make fun of the Republican Party and its lobbies. The first one, Does Humor Belong in Music? (1985),71 borrowed its title from a question Zappa was asked in the film: his response being – ‘I think so, it belongs   Kelly Fisher Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa (London, 2007), p. 167.   Manuel de la Fuente, Frank Zappa en el Infierno. El Rock como Movilización para la Disidencia Política (Madrid, 2006). 67   In order to know how the rating system works in cinema and its implications in distribution, see Frédéric Martel, Mainstream. Enquête sur cette culture qui plaît à tout le monde (Paris: 2010). 68   For a detailed account of the impact of the PMRC on freedom of speech, see Claude Chastagner, ‘The Parents’ Music Resource Center: from Information to Censorship’, Popular Music, 18/2 (1999): pp. 179–92. 69   Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203 (1985). 70   Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988). 71  Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. 65

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in everyday life – unless the Republicans want to take it away’.72 The election of this title clarifies the intention of the movie (a critical and humorous perspective of American society in the eighties), to address a wide range of themes, ranging from the music industry (in live concert songs that can be seen in the film such as ‘Tinsel Town Rebellion’73), to the social stereotypes encouraged by the media (‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’74 and ‘He’s So Gay’75), to songs like ‘Honey, Don’t You Want A Man Like Me?’,76 in which the character of the boy, after being refused by the girl, insults her by calling her a bitch, a whore, a slut, a pig … and a Republican! The structure of the video is made from the inclusion of parts of interviews and conferences by Zappa where he briefly presents topics that resonate with the themes outlined above. Regarding, for example, his opinion when asked about politics, he looks directly at the camera and replies: The first thing you do whenever Ronald Reagan is speaking on television – turn it on and turn the sound down, and put your child in front of the set and point to him and say: If he asked you to get into a car, offers you candy, or tells you to go and fight in Nicaragua, tell him, no.77

With this combination of song and satirical comment, Zappa vindicates the social value of his political lyrics that were a part of his work, stating in his autobiography, ‘Apart from the snide political stuff, which I enjoy writing, the rest of the lyrics wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the fact that we live in a society where instrumental music is irrelevant’.78 To him, a record, a movie, or even an interview, were ways to channel his ideas, and he came back endlessly to the notion of composition when he had to detail this thought: Composition is a process whereby elements are organized into structure determined by the composer … If I make a film, that is a composition; it’s a matter of organizing visual elements, behavioural elements, textural elements and space and time elements, the same way as I would organize notes on a piece of paper.79

Zappa’s defence of his job as a ‘social commentator’ also becomes obvious in Does Humor Belong in Music?80 In the recorded concert, the group chooses a curious 72

  Ibid.   Ibid. 74   Ibid. 75   Ibid. 76   Ibid. 77   Ibid. 78   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, p. 185. 79   Michael Bloom, ‘Interview with the Composer’, Trouser Press, 7/47 (1980): pp. 18–22, at 22. 80  Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. 73

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‘secret word’,81 namely ‘Let’s mine the harbour!’82 Zappa’s group introduces this sentence in songs such as ‘He’s So Gay’83 and ‘Be in My Video’,84 communicating a feeling of humour and sometimes shock to the audience. The phrase refers directly to Reagan’s administration: in January of 1984, the Sandino harbour in Nicaragua was bombed as a part of an act of sabotage. The International Court of Justice in The Hague condemned the American administration, but Reagan refused to recognise the court’s ruling. Reagan consequently remains the only President of the United States found guilty by the World Court, a fact that justifies the importance of Zappa’s criticism. If in Does Humor Belong in Music?85 the criticism towards the political scenario in America is perceptible, in his next movie, Video from Hell (1987),86 Zappa focuses on a specific item that constituted the main point of his actions against Reaganism: censorship. Conceived as a collection of video-clips and short extracts of the next audio-visual projects he had in mind (some of them would never be completed), the film is a very discouraging portrait of the United States in the Reagan era. At the beginning of the movie, after the footage of ‘G-Spot Tornado’, Zappa himself clarifies the title: ‘Things in America can be from hell. Right now we have a president from hell, and the National Security Council from hell, so we should add Jazz from Hell  also’.87 This joke about ‘Reaganism as hell’ is used to cross-reference the album Jazz From Hell,88 but, of course, can be extended to the movie itself. The most important part in Video from Hell 89 is the final section, where it earns its title. As a final sequence, Zappa shows a nearly seven-minute, edited version of his testimony at the Maryland State Legislature in 1986. The terms of Zappa’s debate with the delegates of the State Senate is similar to his prior confrontation with the senators in the PMRC hearing, although the bill that Maryland was trying to pass was more specifically related to fines and even prison for the people who promoted artists belonging to the category then called ‘porn rock’. In the video, Zappa makes fun of the bill and classifies it as a form of censorship. Although it can be read in a subtitle that the bill did not pass, the viewer is also advised about the dangers of the wave of censorship that has emerged in America during the Reagan administration. 81   The ‘secret word’ was a formula Zappa used with his musicians where he repeated a new word or expression in selected concerts, in order to have fun and to give each performance a unique flavour. 82  Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. 83   Zappa, ‘He’s So Gay’, Does Humor Belong in Music?. 84   Zappa, ‘Be in My Video’, Does Humor Belong in Music?. 85  Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. 86  Zappa, Video from Hell. 87   Ibid. 88   Frank Zappa, Jazz from Hell, Barking Pumpkin ST-74205 (1986). 89  Zappa, Video from Hell.

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With Does Humor Belong in Music?90 and Video from Hell,91 Zappa exposed what remained hidden in the official discourse of the media agenda. In a context where people were celebrating the yuppie culture of the eighties, he produced songs that criticise that ‘tinsel’ society, expressed ideas that are rather different from the public opinion and showed the videos that people did not have easy access to in Reagan’s society. His responsibility as an artist (and a filmmaker) was to offer information that would not appear in mainstream media. That is how he defined this life’s work: being a ‘social commentator’, and this is exactly what he offers in his movies. Conclusion Despite the sparse academic interest that Frank Zappa’s movies have received until now, the expressive features he showed in his eight full-feature films prove his intention of developing a career in movie-making. Features such as a permanent reflection on the inexistent boundaries between documentary and fiction, the use of new formats that would establish new patterns for creating and distributing films, or the explicit subjectivity of the filmmaker in the movies, were the ways in which Zappa exposed his ideas on culture and society. In fact, the impact of the society where an artist develops his/her work remains an important ethical consideration, and much can be acquired from Frank Zappa’s anti-establishment position – not only in his discourse and records, but also in his movies. Zappa expressed his point of view by reinforcing the messages in his films with those in his music. While his work between 1966 and 1979 explored his views on society through his relationship with the record industry, this trend evolved when he started explaining society from his opinions and experiences with politics. At that point, Zappa’s professional career clashed with the political context in the United States. On one hand, the musician gained his autonomy and independence from labels (such as Warner Brothers) with the construction of his own studio, entitled the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan’s arrival in the White House was perceived by Zappa as a strong political force against individual autonomy. In those years, Zappa changed his perspective for social action: the aim was not to deconstruct rock mythology the way the media industry present it,92 but to make people aware of the interference that certain lobby groups (such as the National Rifle Association or the Moral Majority) were attempting against the Constitutional rights of the United States.

 Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?.  Zappa, Video from Hell. 92   As he had done in his first movie and as he was doing in Uncle Meat. 90 91

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He persisted on this idea in his records during the eighties, and in movies such as Does Humor Belong in Music?93 or Video from Hell.94 The technical improvement of his work as a filmmaker is also evident in his output from this decade, showing an artistic evolution from his first movies such as 200 Motels or Baby Snakes.95 It is in this period when he becomes more audacious in shooting and editing his films, a factor that can be perceived in his reflection of expressive tools such as the conscience of using documentary and fiction as a way to reveal industrial and political manipulations. Or in the mixture of several graphic and video resources (such as animated movies, photographs and TV programmes) trying to catch peoples’ attention and make them respond to the social context. These technical and authorial experiments show how Zappa became more and more involved in filmmaking, and researching new composition solutions. In this sense, the different narration levels that make up a film like Uncle Meat 96 remain an example of Frank Zappa’s skills as a filmmaker. Zappa’s work can be regarded as a conscious example of how rock culture can establish a reaction and opposition against the social and political forces that are willing to control cultural dissidence. By naming directly the political agents that are responsible for this control in his records and films, Zappa’s work reveals its orientation of unveiling the intentions of these agents, which are usually hidden from public attention. The actions with which Zappa became involved during his last years reinforce this artistic idea – his contribution toward creating the Rock the Vote movement in 1990 (documented by Waldman97 ) and his collaboration with the post-Communist Czech government of Václav Havel are some of the important examples that confirm this interest. It is therefore proposed that Frank Zappa’s movies are not a secondary aspect in his oeuvre, but a very important one, since they directly contribute to the understanding of the meanings of his life’s work. Video and cinema were used to not only distribute his new songs to audiences, but also to portray and convey his political convictions (such as his testimony before the delegates of Maryland in Video from Hell 98 ). In essence, his films offer a statement of his existence as a composer, in addition to validating the relevance of his artistic and political ideas for present composers and filmmakers.

 Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?.  Zappa, Video from Hell. 95  Zappa, Baby Snakes. 96  Zappa, Uncle Meat. 97   Tom Waldman, We All Want to Change the World. Rock Music and Politics from Elvis to Eminem (Lanham, 2003), p. 249. 98  Zappa, Video from Hell. 93 94

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Chapter 3

Zappa and Religion: Music is the Best Kevin Seal

In the mythology Frank Zappa built throughout his work, he depicted religion as pure folly. Followers of religion appear as judgmental and gullible dupes, with religious leaders displayed as malevolent hypocrites. Yet throughout compositions such as ‘Watermelon in Easter Hay’1 and ‘Sofa No. 2’,2 Zappa presents hints of the infinite. Is his take on a divine creator as cynical as his approach to zealots and patchouli-scented mystics? This essay intends to illuminate Zappa’s opinions of Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, and Eastern religions, and to demonstrate his view that music serves as a more valid means of spiritual communication than that which any organised religion can provide. After outlining Zappa’s position on religion, the essay will place particular emphasis on the texts of One Size Fits All,3 Joe’s Garage,4 You Are What You Is,5 and Broadway the Hard Way,6 and will examine the ways in which Conceptual Continuity and his Big Note theory resonate in the intersection of science and faith. The themes and totems that wind through Zappa’s 627 albums touch on concepts of belief and transcendence, but do so in ways that straddle satire, reportage and inquiry. Zappa described his writing as ‘journalistic’,8 but texts such as We’re Only In It For The Money 9 and Joe’s Garage Acts I, II & III 10 also resemble epic screenplays. Whenever an opinion emerges, the listener faces the challenge of   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979).   Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, One Size Fits All, DiscReet, DS 2216 (1975).  3  Ibid.  4   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage, Act I, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979) and Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III.  5   Frank Zappa, You Are What You Is, Barking Pumpkin, PW2-37537 (1981).  6   Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988).  7   This number includes 30 studio recordings and 32 authorised live recordings released before Zappa’s death. As indicated in the introduction to this volume, the Zappa Estate has subsequently sanctioned numerous additional releases after his death.  8   David Sheff, ‘The Playboy Interview’, Playboy Magazine (May 2 1993): pp. 55–73, at 55.  9   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in it for the Money, MGM Verve, V6-5045 (1967). 10  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts I and Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III.  1  2

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determining whether it is the view of a character, the misdirection of an unreliable narrator, or the philosophy of the composer himself. According to Carr, Zappa is an observer who maintains a distance from the subject matter, with his strategic anti-essentialist stance making it problematic to presume knowledge of his ‘true’ opinion.11 This ambiguity is ever-present, yet the recurrence and refraction of the many themes enable listeners to patch together their own understandings of Zappa’s spiritual opinions. A Catholic Childhood and a Sceptical Adulthood In the 1930s, Zappa’s father, Francis, taught history at a Jesuit Catholic college in Baltimore, Loyola University. Young Frank attended a Catholic school only briefly, but continued to accompany his family in attending church services until the age of eighteen.12 He described his mother, Rosemary, as a devout Catholic, and as an adolescent, he himself considered entering the priesthood. Zappa never divulged much detail about this time in his life, but he described his earliest memories as ‘going to church all the time and kneeling down a lot’.13 He talked about his teenage departure from the church as a realisation that ‘the mindless morbidity and discipline was pretty sick’,14 also connecting Christian institutions with centuries of conquest and murder. Years later, he would ask BBC interviewer Nigel Leigh, ‘How many people died from the Kama Sutra as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?’15 According to Courrier, Zappa felt that the closed-mindedness and puritanical repression of the United States were linked to the dogma of Christianity, and that ‘the whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil’.16 Zappa also believed that the story of Adam and Eve painted knowledge and information as evil: if eating fruit from the tree of knowledge damned the original humans, then the lesson of the Garden of Eden is that ignorance is the path to salvation.17 At the start of Zappa’s major-label recording career, his sceptical approach to organised religion caused some rancour within his band. Shortly after the release of Freak Out!,18 The Mothers of Invention held a meeting which, according 11

  Paul Carr, ‘Make a Sex Noise Here: Zappa, Sex and Popular Music’, in Dietrich Helms and Thomas Phelps (eds), Thema Nr. 1: Sex und Populare Musik (Bielefeld, 2011), pp. 135–49. 12   Kevin Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa (Toronto, 2002). 13   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 18. 14   Sheff, ‘The Playboy Interview’, p. 62. 15   Matthew Collings (Presenter), BBC2 Late Show Special Broadcast (December 17, 1993), at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV1YaBxhewE [accessed 5 January 2012]. 16  Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, pp. 23–4. 17   See Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 24 for more details. 18   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966).

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to Zappa, nearly resulted in his ejection from the group. In his autobiography, Zappa recalls Ray Collins encouraging him ‘to go [to] Big Sur and take acid with someone who believes in God’.19 That statement is certainly as much a response to Zappa’s avoidance of drugs as to his avoidance of religion. In the psychedelic California of the mid to late 1960s, some people viewed a refusal to take LSD as non-participation in the revolution of consciousness. Zappa avoided LSD altogether, and after having smoked marijuana ‘on maybe ten occasions’, he swore off cannabis as well from 1968 on.20 Zappa’s refusal to partake in hallucinogenic experimentation helped make his complex arrangements, disciplined rehearsals and intense work ethic possible, but his anti-drug stance came as a surprise to many of his contemporaries, both musicians and fans. According to Slaven, when Zappa first came to London in 1967, a denizen of the Middle Earth at the Roundhouse nightclub offered him a chunk of hashish, with Zappa reportedly not only refusing the offer, but having never seen the substance before, asked what it was.21 His nonparticipation in drug culture only added to the outsider perspective Zappa brought to his lyrics, though he was far more critical of religious fundamentalism than he was of hippie mysticism. Within the ranks of Zappa’s group, further conflict over religion arose in 1977, when singer Ray White quit due to his objections over lyrical content, which offended his sensibilities as a devout Christian.22 In later years, Zappa became even more outspoken in his scepticism regarding the role of Christian fundamentalism in the United States. A 1985 conversation with Canadian presenter Terry David Mulligan yielded this statement of belief: I don’t believe there is a Hell … I don’t see any evidence that there is a real Devil. I don’t see any evidence of a lot of the claims that are made by people who belong to these frenzied little sects and cults and fundamentalist organizations – who are entitled to their belief, so long as it doesn’t turn into law. That’s my main objection to this. They don’t have the right to interfere with my belief that there is no Hell. Okay? And that’s one of my favourite points, and I’m willing to argue and fight for the right to continue to believe that there is no Hell.23

In a 1986 roundtable discussion on the CNN programme Crossfire, Zappa responded to a claim by Washington Times writer John Lofton that his lyrics, as well as the lyrics of other rock musicians, threatened their families:

  Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 79.  Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, pp. 106–7. 21   Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa (London, 2003), p. 108. 22   See Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 299 for more details. 23   Terry David Mulligan (host), ‘Backtrax Frank Zappa Tribute’, Much Music Network (1994), at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u5xX0FRUsM&context=C3cdb828ADOE gsToPDskI9GRwl9_L-1y1BNmmLtnCt [accessed 5 January 2011]. 19

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Could I make a comment about National Defence? The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It’s moving America toward a fascist theocracy. And everything that’s happened under the Reagan Administration is steering us right down that pipe.24

Three years later, with the publication of his autobiography, Zappa wrote extensively on his fear that religion was seeping into the US government, particularly in regard to his dealings with the Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC), whose case he claimed was ‘based on a hodgepodge of fundamentalist frogwash and illogical conclusions’.25 Zappa also revealed the papers he filed in the state of Alabama to found his own religion called C.A.S.H: the Church of Secular Humanism. Among the Tenets of the Faith in Zappa’s founding documents was an assertion ‘that any belief in a deity or adherence to a religious system that is theistic is discouraged (but not forbidden), because of its emphasis on the unseen and transcendent’.26 Commentary on Catholicism in the Recordings In Zappa’s recorded output, aside from Eric Clapton joking that he ‘can see God’ while pretending to be on acid in ‘Are You Hung Up?’,27 the first explicit reference to organised religion arrived with ‘Strictly Genteel’ from the finale of 200 Motels.28 As the film draws to a close, Theodore Bikel leads the chorus and orchestra in a sung prayer, requesting that the Lord ‘have mercy on the people of England, for the terrible food these people must eat’.29 The lyric continues and passes from character to character: Bikel asks the Lord to bless the movie; the chorus pleads that God help the rednecks, police officers, drug addicts and alcoholics; Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan harmonise in their request that the Lord ‘have mercy on the hippies and faggots and the dykes and the weird little children they grow’;30 the whole ensemble expresses its shared hope that everybody is able to find satisfying sex this weekend. There is no clarification as to whether or not the characters are appealing to a Christian God in their prayers, but the slow 3/4 cadence of the music and the deliberate pacing of the syllables in quarter-note intervals evokes the sound of a Christian hymn. As the song reaches its conclusion, the tone shifts from benediction to complaint, as the musicians and cast members express anger at the control that their autocratic boss, Frank Zappa, exerts over their actions and over the movie as a whole. The effect is that of a cynical splash of water in the   Robert Novak (host), CNN Crossfire (March 28, 1986).   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, pp. 148–59. 26   Ibid., pp. 168–9. 27   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in it for the Money. 28   Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer, 200 Motels, United Artists (1971). 29  Ibid. 30  Ibid. 24

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face of sentimentality, as the ostensibly well-intentioned prayers of the people are overridden by the reality of their servitude to their employer. The appearance of Apostrophe (’)31 in 1974 brought with it the characters of St. Alfonzo and Father O’Blivion. After suffering blindness at the hands of Nanook, the character of the fur trapper seeks recuperation at the Catholic parish of St. Alfonzo, only to find that Father Vivian O’Blivion is adding his own semen to the pancakes he feeds to the parishioners.32 Zappa contrasts the sacred (the lyric includes the Latin phrase ‘Domine vobiscum et cum spiritum tuo’,33 which translates as ‘The Lord be with you and with your spirit’) with the profane (‘He slowly stroked it’ and ‘was delighted as it stiffened and ripped right through his sock’34 ), and in doing so, accuses a Catholic priest of sexual misconduct. Zappa’s depiction of a priest with aberrant sexual proclivities arrived several years before such cases began to surface in US courts: the first major Catholic sex abuse case, in which Father Gilbert Gauthe pleaded guilty to charges that he molested young boys, began with Gauthe’s indictment in 1984.35 Zappa plays Father O’Blivion as surreal humour, but the characterisation of the sexually misbehaving priest is nonetheless a prediction of the scandals that would surface in the Catholic Church in later years. In March of 1979, Zappa issued Sheik Yerbouti,36 which became the biggestselling album of Zappa’s career, and contained the song ‘Jewish Princess’. The song does not address Judaism as a religion, but expresses lust for a particular ethnic and cultural stereotype, as Zappa sings ‘I don’t want no troll, I just want a Yemenite hole’.37 The Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith filed a protest with the FCC to ban radio airplay, and demanded an apology from Zappa, who refused to apologise, resulting in an uproar that caused the song to receive attention from the press and airplay on California radio stations.38 Shortly after the song’s release, Zappa returned to the studio to record ‘Catholic Girls’,39 a song expressing similar lustful appreciation, but of a stereotype rooted in the Roman Catholic tradition in which he had grown up. Arriving in stores only six months after ‘Jewish Princess’,40 ‘Catholic Girls’ also avoided questions of religion and faith, and focused on sex and promiscuity.

  Frank Zappa, Apostrophe (ʼ), DiscReet, DS 2175 (1974).   See Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 265 for more details. 33  Zappa, Apostrophe (ʼ). 34  Ibid. 35   Gwen Filosa, ‘Scandal in the Catholic Church: Early Warnings Ignored’, The Cincinnati Enquirer (April 29, 2002). 36   Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ 2-1501 (1979). 37  Ibid. 38   See Slaven, Electric Don Quixote, p. 268 for more details. 39   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage, Act I. 40  Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 31 32

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Joe’s Garage, Act I,41 however, presents some interesting implications in its approach to Christianity. Throughout the three acts of the album series, Zappa repeatedly calls out the names of the fellow musicians on the recording who had grown up in the Catholic church: Warren Cuccurullo and Vinnie Colaiuta. And while he described the album’s libretto in the liner notes as merely ‘a stupid story about how the government is trying to do away with music’,42 the lyrics and liner notes provide an intriguing satirical perspective on religion while contributing to Zappa’s Conceptual Continuity. Given that the main characters in the story are called Joseph and Mary, it is difficult to resist speculation that the plot of the recording is an off-kilter satire of the Nativity Story. Rather than happening in ancient Bethlehem, the romance of young Joe (voiced by Ike Willis) and Mary (voiced by Dale Bozzio) happens in a near-future, more totalitarian version of the United States. It is a frame story, as Frank Zappa narrates this object lesson in the role of the authoritarian Central Scrutinizer, and he presents this narrative as a cautionary tale intended to deter would-be musicians and other delinquents who might be tempted to express themselves in song. Act I begins with the character of Joe as a teenager, playing his guitar in Canoga Park, California. A neighbour calls the police to complain about the noise, causing the police to arrest Joe, and in a blurring of church and state, a counsellor at the police station informs the boy to ‘stick closer to church-oriented social activities’.43 Meanwhile, Mary arrives in the story via the introduction to ‘Catholic Girls’,44 as the Central Scrutinizer tells us that Joe and Mary met weekly at the church club, where they would ‘hold hands and think Pure Thoughts’.45 Mary misses their appointed date on one occasion, as the young would-be virgin is instead performing fellatio on a club bouncer in exchange for a backstage pass to see the band Toto.46 It is less than ten minutes into Act I, but already Joe and Mary are separated, never to reunite. The Immaculate Conception fails to occur, Mary becomes a touring groupie who enters wet t-shirt contests, and Joe contracts gonorrhoea from another woman. In Act II, Joe continues his search for spiritual sustenance, and explores Scientology.47 The mystical advisor L. Ron Hoover diagnoses Joe as a latent appliance fetishist, and encourages him to seduce a Roto-Plooker, which is part Germanspeaking vacuum cleaner, part magical pig robot. Joe serenades the Roto-Plooker in

 Zappa, Joe’s Garage, Act I.  Ibid. 43   ‘Joe’s Garage’, on Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act I. 44  Ibid. 45   ‘Catholic Girls’, on Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act I. 46   The band’s name as spelled in the liner notes, ‘Toad-O’, is a reference to the Los Angeles-based rock band Toto, who had released their self-titled debut album 11 months before the debut of Joe’s Garage Act I. 47   In the text, Zappa refers to ‘The First Church of Appliantology’, but the satirical target is the Church of Scientology. 41

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German with the song ‘Stick It Out’,48 and manages to lure the porcine machine to bed. The significance of the magical pig in Zappa’s Conceptual Continuity reaches back to his 1971 live shows with Flo and Eddie, and the original appearance of the ‘Sofa’ suite,49 which is a story about the creation of the universe. In this story, Zappa describes the ‘Good Lord himself’50 who is relaxing one day, having a good time with his dog, Wendell. He shines a light down from Heaven to observe the universe – which at that time consisted of nothing more than a portly maroon sofa. He admires the sofa, and acknowledges that He and His dog could use a good sofa, but that it needs a floor. So He approaches the celestial corps of engineers with a request, and speaks in German, ‘because that is the way He talks whenever it’s heavy business’.51 He asks that they ‘give unto me a bit of flooring’.52 Once the floor arrives, He puts down His cigar, and decides to enjoy the afternoon with His dog, His girlfriend, and His girlfriend’s assistant: a magical pig named Squat. God announces that He wants to make a home movie, and suggests that His girlfriend have sex with the magical pig. On His new PA system, He broadcasts His girlfriend’s voice as she says, ‘Fuck me, swine, until my orchestra blows dark gas, sparks shoot out, and nebulas are revealed, along with sheets of fire, and sheets of fried water, sheets of drywall and roofing…’53 The rest of the universe is thence created. ‘Stick It Out’54 first appeared in the context of Zappa’s creation myth, but in Joe’s Garage,55 the song appears as a satire of Scientology, a religion that employs electronic devices such as E-meters to measure the extent to which a person has overcome spiritual challenges.56 Joe’s odyssey continues with his imprisonment, and from his cell in Act III he sees a vision of Mary in the song ‘Packard Goose’,57 and she says the following: Information is not knowledge Knowledge is not wisdom Wisdom is not truth Truth is not beauty Beauty is not love Love is not music Music is THE BEST

 Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III.   Frank Zappa, Beat the Boots II, Rhino, R1 70372 (1992). 50  Ibid. 51  Ibid. 52  Ibid. 53  Ibid. 54  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II and III. 55  Ibid. 56   See L. Ron Hubbard, Understanding the E-meter: A Book on the Basics of How an E-meter Works (Los Angeles, 1982), pp. 5–20. 57  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II and III. 48 49

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Here, in seven lines, in a refutation of John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn,58 we have what may be the closest Frank Zappa ever came to a statement of his spiritual philosophy. According to Courrier, in a materialist world in which information can be wrong, knowledge may be misapplied, and attempts to behave wisely may not lead to any objective truth, music can be transcendent.59 Governments may control the flow of information; a search for beauty may only reveal the fickle and shallow limitations of physical attraction; a reliance on romantic love to provide happiness and fulfilment is a certain recipe for pain;60 language can lead to misunderstanding and manipulation. According to Zappa however, music exists both on a higher plane and a lower plane, in the subliminal and the supraliminal, in our rhythmic heart rates and in the mechanical reality of air molecules moving through space.61 Zappa would argue that music is the poetry that transcends words, and music is the pure expression that resists the power dynamics of the church or the state. Given the difficulty present in ascertaining the sincerity of any opinion Zappa expresses, due to his strategic anti-essentialist stance, it is also fair to say that ‘music is the best’62 may not be a sincere statement of his belief. This is a vision of the (non) Virgin Mary, seen by a character played by Ike Willis who may or may not represent Zappa himself, as told to us by Zappa’s unreliable Central Scrutinizer narrator. Is this a moment of philosophical clarity in the midst of a musical bloated with blasphemies, lewd sex talk and bitterness over music criticism? Or does it have no more significance than Joe’s request that the magical pig does not ‘get no jizz upon that sofa’?63 There are reasons to believe that the ‘music is the best’ line carries more weight than the rest of the Joe’s Garage libretto. In his autobiography, Zappa draws specific attention to this phrase, and uses it as a means of discussing what music is – his answer: ‘anything can be music, but it doesn’t become music until someone wills it to be music’.64 Additionally, earlier live performances of ‘Packard Goose’65 included the following words after ‘music is the best’: ‘however denied/whenever it’s tried/a lever/is never/forever’.66 An ambiguous lyric, certainly, but one that conjures both Zappa’s fascination with 58   Claire Tomalin, Poems of John Keats (London, 2009). The ode closes with the lines, ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” / that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’. 59   See Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, pp. 339–40 for more details. 60   See Slaven, Electric Don Quixote, p. 57 for more details. 61   See Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 91 for more details. 62   ‘Packard Goose’, on Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II and III. 63   ‘Stick It Out’, on Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II and III. 64   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 79. 65  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II and III. 66   Jason Gossard, ‘We’re Only in it for the Touring’, 2011, at http://members.shaw.ca/ fz-pomd/turtlestew/index.htm [accessed 9 December 2011]. This web document, archived at the Zappa fan site ‘The Planet of My Dreams’, includes transcriptions of live recordings of Zappa’s bands from 1968 to 1988, including multiple versions of ‘Packard Goose’ from the fall tour of 1978.

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time and physics and his assertion that Joe’s Garage is a ‘story about how the government is trying to do away with music’.67 On the 1988 tour, the line signalled a turn in the arrangement of ‘Packard Goose’.68 After the utterance of ‘music is THE BEST’,69 the band progress into an excerpt from Stravinsky’s ‘Royal March’ from l’Histoire du Soldat, then into a theme from Bartok’s third piano concerto, before returning to ‘Packard Goose’. 70 The next track of Joe’s Garage, ‘Watermelon in Easter Hay’,71 is Joe’s final imaginary guitar solo before he quits music altogether, and as outlined in the introduction of this volume, it is the only solo on the album that is not transplanted via Xenochrony.72 The accompaniment for Zappa’s guitar is an electric piano and sitar ostinato of nine notes: C, A, E and G in a descending line, then an ascending E, B, F, B and D. The chords which are outlined in this melody are A major seventh (for the descending section), then E major ninth omitting the third (for the ascending), broadly constituting the IV and I of E major. In theoretical terms, IV–I is a plagal cadence, also colloquially entitled the ‘Amen cadence’ due to its frequent use as the final Amen in hymns and other religious music. These nine repeating notes imply a repetition of the plagal ‘Amen’ throughout ‘Watermelon in Easter Hay’, conjuring the notion of spiritual uplift present throughout the history of western music. It is impossible to declare with certainty that Zappa intended this repeating cadence to imply an extended ‘Amen’, but such a joke would be in keeping with the satirical nature of the album’s text. Commentary on Evangelism in the Recordings Following Joe’s Garage Acts II & III,73 and indeed throughout his music of the 1980s, Zappa turned his attention to the rising tide of evangelical Christianity in the United States. You Are What You Is74 features a medley of songs that explicitly examine religion’s effect on politics: ‘The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing’, ‘Dumb All Over’ and ‘Heavenly Bank Account’.75 The lyric, ‘Moses, Aaron ʼn Abraham, they’re all a waste of time’,76 appears in the first of the trilogy, effectively   ‘The Central Scrutinizer’, on Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act I.  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III. 69  Ibid. 70   Frank Zappa, Make A Jazz Noise Here, Barking Pumpkin, D2 74234 (1991). The Stravinsky and Bartok excerpts appear on that album’s live recording of the 1988 tour, but appear following ‘City of Tiny Lights’. 71  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III. 72   See Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 340. 73  Zappa, Joe’s Garage, Act I. 74  Zappa, You Are What You Is. 75  Ibid. 76   ‘The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing’, on Zappa, You Are What You Is. 67 68

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distancing Zappa from Judaism as well as Christianity, while ‘Dumb All Over’77 references Islam with ‘the good book says, “It’s gotta be that way” but their book says, “Revenge the crusades with whips and chains and hand grenades”’.78 Zappa exposes the sentiments of peace and non-violence in the Bible and the Koran as hypocritical by attaching the notions of revenge and coercion as central to both texts. ‘Heavenly Bank Account’79 shames an unnamed but well-connected religious leader for duping his born-again followers, explaining that ‘it is easy with the Bible to pretend that you’re in show biz’.80 Broadway the Hard Way 81 gets specific and calls out individuals, with explicit denunciations of Pat Robertson in ‘When the Lie’s So Big’, the Reverend Jesse Jackson in ‘Rhymin’ Man’, Jimmy Swaggart in ‘Murder By Numbers’ and ‘What Kind of Girl?’, and the Praise The Lord (PTL) television ministry power couple of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in ‘Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk’. In the last of these, Ike Willis and Eric Buxton describe the details of Jimmy Swaggart’s admission that he solicited a prostitute for sex, Jim Bakker’s marital infidelity, and Pat Robertson’s tax evasion and reliance on family connections to avoid combat duty in Korea. While the arrangement of ‘Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk’82 flows through melodic quotes from ‘Dixie’,83 ‘The Old Rugged Cross’,84 theme from The Twilight Zone,85 and that oft-repeated Zappa trope ‘Louie Louie’,86 the litany of accusations paints these religious leaders as not only hypocrites and liars, but as ambitious would-be censors attempting to attain positions of power in the US government.87 The song’s placement at the end of the set cues the most direct and literal call to action Zappa ever committed to tape: just as the song and set end, he encourages his fans to visit the voter-registration booth in the lobby of the concert

 Zappa, You Are What You Is.   ‘Dumb All Over’, on Zappa, You Are What You Is. 79  Zappa, You Are What You Is. 80  Ibid. 81  Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way. 82  Ibid. 83   Daniel Decatur Emmett composed ‘Dixie’ in the 1850s, and it first came to use in blackface minstrel shows. The song, sometimes referred to as ‘I Wish I Was In Dixie’, became associated with the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and to many people, ‘Dixie’ continues to represent the culture of the antebellum South. 84   George Bennard composed ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ in 1912. Bennard was an evangelical Methodist, and the gospel song became well known in the US in the decades that followed. Many well-known singers have recorded versions of the song, including Elvis Presley, Mahalia Jackson, and the duo of Johnny Cash and June Carter. 85   Bernard Herrmann composed the theme music for the science-fiction television series The Twilight Zone, which premiered in 1959. 86   The Kingsmen, ‘Louie Louie’, Wand, WND 143 (1963). 87   Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way. 77 78

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hall, an act he was to implement throughout the American part of the Broadway the Hard Way tour. Throughout all of these instances, Zappa is critical of three elements: greedy and manipulative preachers, believers who ‘got their minds all shut’,88 and the fact that these religions have such a weighty and unwelcome impact on US politics. Each of these songs refers either to Washington or to Zappa’s belief that ‘you can’t run a country by a book of religion’.89 More than anything else, these songs advocate the separation of church and state, and warn of the erosion (or nonexistence) of that barrier. The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution support this separation, initially advocated by Thomas Jefferson during the founding of the country. When considered more generally, these positions link to Zappa’s views on freedom of speech, also addressed in the First Amendment. Zappa referred frequently to the First Amendment, and famously stated on national television in 1985, ‘I have four children, and I want them to grow up in a country that has a working First Amendment’.90 From his warnings about the return of concentration camps and penal colonies on ‘Concentration Moon’ and ‘The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny’,91 to his paranoid take on television’s government-sponsored mind control on ‘I’m the Slime’,92 Zappa rallied against any challenge to free thinking and free expression. The same applied, without exception, to his stances on religion, spirituality, and certainly televangelists. Zappa created a televangelist character when he reinterpreted ‘The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing’ for his musical, Thing-Fish,93 and in this 1984 recurrence, the song takes place in the Quentin Robert De Nameland Video Chapel of Economic Worship, as the Ensemble sings, ‘Is all de Mammies really wrong, if we’s wandrin’ aroun’ wit’ de nakkin on?’.94 When Quentin first appeared in ‘The Adventures of Greggery Peccary’,95 he was a sleazy, money-grubbing philosopher who declared that ‘Time is of affliction’ and that ‘the eons are closing’;96 in Thing-Fish’s ‘Clowns On Velvet’,97 Quentin is a televangelist, much like Swaggart and Bakker. In both cases, he uses an age-old religious ploy to raise money: by exploiting peoples’ fear that the world is ending, and that time is running out.

  ‘The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing’, on Zappa, You Are What You Is.   ‘Dumb All Over’, on Zappa, You Are What You Is. 90   Maria Shriver (interviewer), CBS Morning News (September 18, 1985), at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD1DI2SntFI [accessed 5 January 2012]. 91   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money. 92   Frank Zappa, Apostrophe (ʼ). 93   Frank Zappa, Thing-Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKCO74201 (1984). 94  Ibid. 95   Frank Zappa, Studio Tan, DiscReet, DSK 2291 (1978). 96  Ibid. 97  Zappa, Thing-Fish. 88 89

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In the wrong hands, language (or the fear of language’s failure) and time (or the fear of time’s end) can both be manipulated as tools of control. Zappa, ever the champion of freedom, resists any form of institutional control. When in the hands of a religious leader, time (e.g. the timelessness promised in eternal life, or the creationist notion of a 6,000-year-old planet) and language (e.g. the dazzling Latin of a Catholic mass, or born-again evangelists speaking in tongues) are particularly dangerous tools. As for language, Zappa considered it to be at odds with music. Lyrics are language, of course, but as discussed in the chapter by Manuel de la Fuente, Zappa put little stock in lyrics – his own or anyone else’s. By his own admission, he liked writing words about politics, but aside from that, he would have preferred his songs to remain instrumental. However, as he wrote, US audiences love their singers, so if an American composer expects to feed himself, ‘he’d better figure out how to do something with a human voice plopped on it’.98 When it came to the positions of religious leaders, though, Zappa argued that these charlatans’ threats of cataclysmic urgency and their language of apocalypse and hellfire were tools they used to gain power and influence. Commentary on Eastern Religions in the Recordings Zappa stated his opinions clearly on the Abrahamic traditions of Western faiths, particularly in his later years. But what of the Eastern religions, which arguably gained more interest in English-speaking countries after George Harrison played sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’?99 Zappa had at least a passing familiarity and interest in Zen Buddhism,100 and admitted the following in a 1967 interview: I was interested in Zen for a long time. That’s what got me away from being a Catholic, fortunately. But it’s my observation that Eastern religions are wonderful if you are living anywhere but the United States. The best they can do for you here is, uh, give you a certain feeling of calm, if you can practice meditation and abstinence by yourself, away from everything else that’s happening. The real goal of Eastern religion, with mystical experience and all of that, those aims are difficult if not impossible to achieve in an industrial society. And I think that most of the people who claim to have made satori someplace in the States today really gotta be pulling your leg. And I think that that sort of enlightenment bears very little relationship to the amount of chants that you can sing.101

  Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 185.   The Beatles, Rubber Soul, Capitol Records, ST-2442 (1965). 100  Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 23. 101   Anonymous 2, East Village Other (1967), at http://afka.net/Articles/1967-03_ IT.htm [accessed 5 January 2012].  98  99

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The following spring, he released ‘Who Needs the Peace Corps?’102 written from the satirical perspective of a stoned ‘phony hippie’ who buys beads, feathers, bells and ‘a book of Indian lure’103 and goes to San Francisco in search of spiritual communion with the psychedelic bands. Ten minutes later on that album, ‘Absolutely Free’104 ridicules the out-of-body experience (‘Discorporate and come with me; shifting, drifting, cloudless, starless, velvet valleys and a sapphire… flower power sucks!’105). Zappa compares the listing of mystical elements with the index of Santa’s reindeer, and encourages the acid-addled hippie to ‘escape from the weight of your corporate logo’.106 He may encourage them to leave their bodies, but the implication is negative: avoid idealism, avoid otherworldly distractions, and avoid the dross that the media feeds you about San Francisco musicians living communally. ‘Cosmik Debris’107 treads similar ground six years later. The ‘Mystery Man’ offers the state of enlightenment, nirvana, at a ‘nominal service charge’,108 and Zappa refutes it, encouraging him not to waste his breath. Holistic medicines, crystal balls, swamis, gurus and ‘Mumbo Jumbos’ are all dismissed. The narrator steals the Mystery Man’s pocket watch and rings, and informs him that his ‘ol’ lady has just gone down’.109 As the song (and the first side of Apostrophe(ʼ)110 ) reaches its conclusion, the last words are ‘Om shanti, om shanti, om shanti’.111 Just as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land 112 ends with ‘shantih shantih shantih’,113 Zappa conjures the mantra which concludes the Upanishads, translated as ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’.114 Zappa appears to deny Hinduism and Buddhism in one five-minute pop song, but does the narrator represent the composer, or is the narrator merely a philistine jewellery thief? Again, his strategic anti-essentialist stance shrouds the listener’s ability to parse genuine opinion. A playful reference to Zen appears later that year in the improvised sketch ‘Dummy Up’.115 After Jeff Simmons tries to seduce Napoleon Murphy Brock to smoke a college degree, Simmons tells him that ‘you get nothing with your college   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money.  Ibid. 104  Ibid. 105  Ibid. 106  Ibid. 107  Zappa, Apostrophe (ʼ). 108  Ibid. 109  Ibid. 110  Zappa, Apostrophe (ʼ). 111  Ibid. 112   Rainey, Lawrence (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven, 2005), p. 258. 113  Ibid. 114  Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, p. 260. 115   Frank Zappa, Roxy & Elsewhere, DiscReet, 2DS 2202 (1974). 102

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degree’,116 to which Brock replies, ‘Well, if you get nothing, well, that’s what I want’.117 Zappa ends the track by commenting, ‘A true Zen saying: Nothing is what I want – the results of a higher education’.118 The exchange mocks university study as well as Zen practice, but the fact that Zappa is commenting on fellow musicians Simmons and Brock – rather than on a fictitiously named character – lends an affectionate tone to the scene. The following year’s studio recording, One Size Fits All,119 is rife with spiritual and cosmological connotations. Parts of the creation story from the aforementioned ‘Sofa’120 suite are mutated into the instrumental ‘Sofa No. 1’121 and the album’s final song, ‘Sofa No. 2’.122 The latter includes lyrics in English and German, and reads as a quasi-spiritual variation on the ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ section of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’.123 The narrator begins, ‘I am the heaven, I am the water’,124 and eventually calls himself the clouds, and labels himself a Chrome Dinette. ‘Ich bin hier und du bist mein Sofa’,125 he repeats, which translates as, ‘I am here, and you are my Sofa’. As this song is a permutation of Zappa’s creation myth, the narrator here is God addressing his sofa. Ben Watson traces the choice of ‘sofa’ to ‘Ein Sof’,126 a Hebrew phrase in the Kabbalah which refers to God before He produced any spiritual realm; Ein Sof is the divine origin and infinite, which would make this a chicken-and-egg duality, God addressing the origin of God. Zappa defined his self titled Conceptual Continuity to Bob Marshall with the Hermetic words, ‘As above, so below’,127 and this expression of microcosm and macrocosm would certainly apply here. Simon Prentis applies this to One Size Fits All 128 as a whole and the song ‘Andy’ in particular, suggesting that Zappa intended the song’s repeated references to ‘Andy de vine’ to be heard as ‘and the divine’, making the song an apostrophe to God.129 The cover art for the album supports the notion that this album is about God, as Cal Schenkel’s illustration is from the 116

 Ibid.  Ibid. 118  Ibid. 119  Zappa, One Size Fits All. 120  Zappa, Beat the Boots II. 121  Zappa, One Size Fits All. 122  Ibid. 123   Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855), p. 39. 124  Zappa, One Size Fits All. 125  Ibid. 126   Ben Watson, Frank Zappa:The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York, 1993), p. 95. 127   Simon Prentis, ‘As Above, So Below: One Size Fits All’, from Actes Intermediaires de la 3eme Conference Internationale de Zappologie (July 14, 2008), p. 34, at http://www. killuglyradio.com/storage/ICEZ-3-draft_2008.pdf 128  Zappa, One Size Fits All. 129   Simon Prentis, ‘As Above, So Below: One Size Fits All’, pp. 33–38. 117

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perspective of a cigar-smoking creator placing constellations and planets – as well as his sofa – onto the canvas of the night sky. Details relating to cosmology abound: the first letters of the album title, OSFA, form an anagram of ‘sofa’,130 ‘Inca Roads’131 satirises the notion that aliens landed in the Andes and built pyramids, and ‘Can’t Afford No Shoes’132 addresses the Hare Krishna movement with the declaration that ‘Chump Hare Rama ain’t no good to try’.133 Years later, Zappa took aim at Hare Krishna in ‘The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing’134 with the line, ‘Is Hare Rama really wrong if you wander around with a napkin on’, which mutated in Thing-Fish135 into ‘Is all de mammys really wrong if we’s wandrin’ aroun’ wit’ de nakkin on’.136 So Zappa dismisses the mantras of Shantih Shantih in ‘Cosmik Debris’137 and Hare Rama elsewhere. But aside from its use as a mantra, what of the notion of the Om as the tone of creation in Hinduism and Buddhism, the sacred sound with which the universe began, and with which all energy resonates? In the Book of Genesis, God created the heaven and the earth in the beginning, but in Hinduism and Buddhism, the universe starts with the sound of ‘Om’, as a big bang changed energy into matter. Whether intended or not, the Big Note theory in Lumpy Gravy 138 and Civilization Phaze III 139 has an arguable parallel to the idea of ‘Om’. Spider Barbour – following Zappa’s direction and notes – explains that the universe is ‘made of one element, which is a note, a single note’.140 Atoms are vibrations of that note; light is a vibration of the Big Note. One danger in attaching the idea of ‘Om’ to the Big Note theory is that Zappa himself supported a theory of time that clashes with any Hinduist or Buddhist notion of an origin sound. Zappa’s clearer implication is that he denies mysticism and Eastern religions of all stripes, particularly if a ‘nominal service charge’141 is ever requested. Zappa told The Simpsons creator Matt Groening that he believed time to be a spherical constant, and that ‘everything is happening all the time, and the only reason why we think of time linearly is because we are conditioned to do it’.142   Greg Russo, Cosmik Debris: The Collected History and Improvisations of Frank Zappa (Floral Park, 2006), p. 120. 131  Zappa, One Size Fits All. 132  Zappa, One Size Fits All. 133  Ibid. 134  Zappa, You Are What You Is. 135  Zappa, Thing-Fish. 136  Ibid. 137  Zappa, Apostrophe (ʼ). 138   Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6-8741 (1968). 139   Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). 140  Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. 141  Zappa, Apostrophe (ʼ). 142   Don Menn, Matt Groening, ‘The Mother Of All Interviews Part 2’, Guitar Player, May 1994, p. 87, at http://www.afka.net/mags/Best%20of%20Guitar%20Player.htm [accessed 5 January 2011]. 130

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All actions occur concurrently. As music is a manipulation of time, Zappa’s work with Xenochrony reflects this belief: if ‘everything is happening all the time’,143 then chronological order is irrelevant. Similarly, the date of a given concert loses relevance, as does the sequential moment at which a musical performance occurs. It’s all part of one unified work, one massive opera144 that began in 1966 and continued until Zappa’s death 27 years later. As above, so below. Conclusion So where does this leave us, as our fingers pore over the dense fabric of Zappa’s Conceptual Continuity? In Joe’s Garage,145 the fallen Catholic and lapsed Scientologist Joe abandons music to work on an assembly line, and elsewhere, those who pursue spiritual answers find themselves the subject of ridicule; if Zappa believes in no spiritual philosophy, does he at least believe in science? At various times in his career, Zappa spoke or wrote about science with reverent language, and showed tremendous respect for scientists. While Zappa made consistent efforts to blur the sacred and the profane, and never hesitated to lampoon anything considered sacred, he held science in high regard. He dedicated The Real Frank Zappa Book not only to his family, but also to Stephen Hawking and Ko-ko.146 Hawking’s most famous work, A Brief History of Time,147 appeared one year before Zappa’s autobiography. In it, Hawking questions the necessity of God: With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws … So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Looking again at the Big Note concept, we can see resonances with Hawking’s work, but in a more pronounced sense with string theory. For Zappa, all events in time are happening at once; all beings in the universe are manifestations and vibrations of one note. This Conceptual Continuity would line up well with the 143

 Ibid.  Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 8. 145  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act I and Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act II & III. 146   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 5. Koko is a gorilla who has learned 2,000 words of spoken English. She is known for using American Sign Language to communicate, and has been living in San Francisco Zoo since her birth in 1971. Given Zappa’s appreciation for communication that transcends language, an interest in the science of interspecies dialogue would make sense. 147   Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York, 1988), p. 141. 144

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suggestion of string theory: electrons and quarks are not zero-dimensional objects, but one-dimensional oscillating lines. For an electron to move back and forth between two points, in layman’s terms, it is vibrating. This also brings us back to Mary’s assertion that ‘music is the best’.148 If music is superior to love, and to beauty, and to truth, what does that mean in terms of Zappa’s theory, which could be described as resonant concurrence, that everything is happening at once and vibrating simultaneously? Marshall McLuhan would say that the means of expression would answer that question. The medium is the message,149 and Zappa’s medium is not only music, but the medium of the Conceptual Continuity itself. By linking every piece he composed into an endlessly self-referential and edgeless fabric, Zappa expressed his theory that all events in time happen simultaneously. Much as all physical beings are vibrations of one note, all of his songs are part of the same Project/Object, the same interwoven, all-encompassing album/opus, which conductor Joel Thome describes as adding up ‘to one extraordinary opera’.150 We therefore have three primary assertions of belief: that music is the best, that everything in the universe is a vibration of a note, and – be it by means of Conceptual Continuity, or of the concurrent nature of events in time – that everything and everyone is connected. While, whether in jest or in straight-faced challenge, Zappa systematically refutes each of the world’s primary religions, he nevertheless lets these assertions of connectedness carry through his work, and through his Conceptual Continuity, or what we might call resonant concurrence. And while, much like Stephen Hawking, he appears to deny the existence (or necessity) of a creator, he does not deny that there is a unifying force or energy, to which some might attach the word ‘God’. In Zappa’s writing and compositions, that force of the infinite, of the sublime and exalted, of the best, is music. If there is any need to ascribe a name to that force, that name would not be God, but rather, Music. After all, if confronted with the question, what religion are you?, Zappa would reply, ‘Musician’.151

  ‘Packard Goose’ on Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III.   Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964). 150  Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 8. 151   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 244. 148 149

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Chapter 4

Zappa and The Razor: Editing, Sampling and Musique Concrète James Gardner

Frank made albums with a razor blade, which was one of his tools as a composer. There’s a billion edits across that catalogue.1

It seems significant that Civilization Phaze III,2 the last album Frank Zappa completed, ends with ‘Waffenspiel’, one of the ‘purest’ pieces of musique concrète he composed. Given that Zappa worked on the album right up to his untimely death in 1993, it is easy to read ‘Waffenspiel’ as the resigned leave-taking of an organising intelligence. There is a sense of the composer quietly withdrawing, leaving the assembled sounds of car-washing, dogs and birds in the foreground; gunfire and thunder in the distance, and silence at the close. Civilization Phaze III continually refers back to Zappa’s first solo album, Lumpy Gravy 3 – recorded 25 years earlier – and shares with it the voices of the ‘piano people’, about whom more later. But there are other resonances too. In ‘Waffenspiel’, the slamming car door that signals the arrival of The Reaper suggests links to ‘whereupon the door closes violently’4 – the peremptory ending of ‘A Little Green Rosetta’ – and to Samuel Beckett’s radio play Embers: ‘(Violent slam of door. Pause). […] Slam life shut like that!’.5 The dogs’ utterances in the piece certainly bring to mind a whole pack of canine references in Zappa’s own songs,6 but they also hark back to the barking hounds at the end of ‘Caroline No’, the final track on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.7 The   Gail Zappa quoted in Phil Alexander, ‘Keeper Of The Flame’, Mojo, 122 (2004), p. 55. 2   Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). Unless otherwise noted, all discussion in the chapter refers to this album. 3   Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6-8741 (1968). 4   Taken from ‘A Little Green Rosetta’, on Frank Zappa, Läther, Rykodisc, RCD 10574/76 (1996). 5   Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers (London, 1959), p. 25. 6   See the introduction of this volume for some additional examples of canine Conceptual Continuity. 7   The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, Capitol, T 2458 (1966). 1

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passing plane that closes ‘Waffenspiel’ recalls the one in the background of the ‘bush recording’ of ‘Hair Pie: Bake 1’ from Captain Beefheart’s Zappa-produced Trout Mask Replica.8 And so on. Indeed ‘Waffenspiel’ can be read so neatly and conveniently as the valedictory summing up of a dying artist that it is hard to believe that in a ‘pre-release’ version of Civilization Phaze III, it appeared at the end of the first disc, not the second, thus about halfway through the whole work.9 Surprising it may be, but it does serve to illustrate that Zappa was still shuffling his material at the eleventh hour and that the scenario (and titles) attached to the individual pieces were typically ad hoc rather than part of some grand architectonic plan.10 The idea of raw material awaiting organisation is at the heart of Zappa’s process. Organising Stuff This materialist notion of composition was shared by Zappa’s ‘idol’,11 the composer Edgard Varèse, who famously referred to his music as ‘organized sound’.12 Similarly, Zappa viewed composition as ‘a process of organization, very much like architecture. As long as you can conceptualize what that organizational process is, you can be a ‘composer’—in any medium you want […] Just give me some stuff, and I’ll organize it for you. That’s what I do’.13 During the nineteenth century, the nature of that stuff – and how it could be organised – underwent a profound change with the advent of photography, film and sound recording. From then on, the physical material available for organisation could – as captured reality – represent the world with greater fidelity, but it could also be organised, shaped and manipulated in new ways. While photography and film rapidly harnessed the creative potential offered by new technologies, recorded sound took longer, thanks largely to the refractory   Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica, Straight, STS 1053 (1969).   This ‘pre-release’ version is discussed in detail at Anonymous 9, ‘Civilization Phaze III – Pre Release Version’ (2012), at http://lukpac.org/~handmade/patio/weirdo/ cpiiiunreleased.html [accessed 9 January 2011]. 10   As outlined in the introduction to this publication, Zappa consistently claimed that his entire oeuvre formed a coherent whole which he entitled The Project/Object. It was first propounded publicly in the following press release: ‘Hey Hey Hey, Mister Snazzy Exec!’, Circular, 3/2 (1971). 11   Frank Zappa, ‘Edgard Varèse, Idol of My Youth’, Stereo Review 26/6 (1971), pp. 62–3. 12   For example: Edgard Varèse, ‘Organized Sound for the Sound Film’, The Commonweal, 38/8 (1940), pp. 204–5. 13   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p.139 [emphases in original].  8

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nature of the early recording media. Editing and manipulating sound on phonograph cylinders, gramophone discs or magnetic wire was physically very difficult. Sound recorded on optical film was, however, more amenable to editing or direct creation, and a number of pioneering sound montages were made in this fashion. Working with Disc and Tape Despite the practical difficulties and technical limitations of manipulating and layering sounds recorded on disc, creative breakthroughs were nevertheless made. Les Paul’s 1948 hit ‘Lover’14 was an unprecedented construct of multiplyoverdubbed15 electric guitars, some playing back at half or double speed, and the sound that Paul established with this record would be hugely influential. During the same year in Paris, Pierre Schaeffer, working as an engineer for French Radio, created his five Etudes de bruits16 (studies in noise). These first examples of what Schaeffer called ‘musique concrète’ were made from edited and manipulated disc recordings of trains, percussion instruments, piano sounds, spinning saucepan lids, sound effects records and so on. As Thom Holmes notes: Schaeffer’s original use of the term concrète was not intended to denote a kind of sound source at all but only the concept of the sound object as the driving principle behind the creation of the music [That is, as opposed to notated pitches and rhythms to be realised instrumentally]. A concrète sound could come from any source, natural or electronic. In practice, musique concrète came to refer to any work that was conceived with the recording medium in mind, was composed directly on that medium, and was played through that medium as a finished piece.17

The biggest breakthrough in recording technology came in the late 1940s with the commercial availability of reliable high quality tape recorders. Unlike phonograph discs and wire, magnetic tape could be finely cut, easily spliced and its frequency response was much wider than other media. Although a number of composers – not least Varèse – had for decades eagerly awaited the ability to work directly with sound (thus bypassing the limitations of notation, acoustic instruments and their performers), it was only with the advent of tape that this started to become a practical possibility. For the first time, composers could construct permanent works that could be replayed identically, could build these by working directly with any recorded sound, and create imaginary sonic 14

  Les Paul, ‘Lover/Brazil’, Capitol, C 15037 (1948).   That is, few guitars overdubbed very many times rather than many different guitars overdubbed. 16   Pierre Schaeffer, L’Œuvre Musicale, INA–GRM, ina c 1006–09 (1990). 17   Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music and Culture (New York, 2008), pp. 47–8. 15

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events, environments and artificial balances that would be impossible in the real world.18 Furthermore, through its editing and manipulation, tape allowed the reordering of time and the instantaneous travel from one date-stamped acoustic space to another. In the musique concrète method employed by Schaeffer and his colleagues in Paris, the material generally preceded the structure: the starting point was the ready-made sounds on tape which were then physically manipulated and edited empirically in the studio until the work was complete. If the work was notated at all, a score or plan would be produced post hoc – the score was not an abstracted a priori prescription. This was in contrast to the working method of the elektronische Musik composers toiling at the studios of Northwest German Broadcasting in Cologne. Rather than proceeding from recorded sounds, they used serial principles to specify how sound complexes would be created, using only preciselycontrolled, electronically-generated constituents. Musique concrète was viewed as ‘fashionable and surrealistic’,19 assembled haphazardly. However, while the ideological divide between Cologne and Paris was real enough – and often presented as a kind of aesthetic Cold War – in practice it was neither as partisan nor long-lasting as often portrayed. Comedy Music Zappa certainly drew on the ideas and sound worlds of pioneers such as Schaeffer, Cage and Stockhausen, but while ‘serious’ composers may have had a monopoly on the theoretical and conceptual aspects of electronic sound, tape manipulation and collage, they certainly did not monopolise its practice. It took little time for the pop music world to exploit the humorous potential of tape manipulation and the rapid collaging of recognisable sonic material. There were novelty acts such as The Singing Dogs (1955)20 – the recorded barks of four dogs made to ‘sing’ songs such as ‘Oh! Susanna’ and ‘Jingle Bells’– as well as the varisped voices of The Chipmunks, who had a series of hits starting with ‘The Chipmunk Song’21 in 1958. In 1956 Buchanan and Goodman also had a comedy smash with ‘The Flying Saucer’,22 using short excerpts of 18 recent hits spliced into a spoof ‘alien invasion’ narrative. By the time Zappa began his own tape experiments in the late 1950s, then, the ‘serious’ and ‘comedy’ uses of tape manipulation were well established, and it is 18   See Paul Carr’s essay in this collection for a more thorough discussion on how otherwise ‘impossible’ musical events can become realised via recording technology. 19  Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, p. 61. 20   The Singing Dogs, ‘Oh! Susanna’, RCA Victor, 47–6344 (1955). 21   The Chipmunks, ‘The Chipmunk Song’, Liberty, F-55168 (1958). 22   Buchanan and Goodman, ‘The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 & 2)’, Luniverse, 101 (1956).

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to both of these cultural ancestors that Zappa’s tape work can trace its lineage. By 1960 he had some experience as a tape editor, having spliced, for example, the ‘field recordings’ that he had already amassed on borrowed or hired tape recorders. Zappa continued the practice of collecting such ‘field recordings’ as raw material for collages on his albums throughout his career. Zappa and Musique Concrète Musique concrète is mentioned in a biographical ‘factoid’ about Zappa that crops up all over the internet. This routine association between Zappa and musique concrète derives, in fact, from relatively few of his works, but those few did happen to appear in a crucial period during which his critical reputation and (counter-) cultural credentials were being established. Thus they carry a greater significance than they would have if they had appeared a decade later. Already on Freak Out!,23 the first Mothers of Invention album, Zappa planned and recorded sound ‘objects’ designed to be spliced in later, and the album can be viewed as a recording studio construct despite containing a high proportion of relatively straightforward songs that the band could play live. ‘Who Are The Brain Police?’,24 for example, is assembled from three distinct, separately recorded sections.25 Additionally, ‘The Return of The Son of Monster Magnet’26 consists mostly of vocal and percussion improvisations that were ‘listened to, sifted through, [with the] the choicest noises [being] picked out, edited together and superimposed on a basic rhythm track’.27 Radical editing is also evident on the second Mothers album Absolutely Free 28 with the album’s masterpiece, ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’29 being – apart from its musical merits (as outlined in Martin Knakkergaard’s chapter) – a tour de force of editing, shifting rapidly between musical styles and acoustic spaces. Discussing the effect of tape splicing on instrumental composition, musicologist Jonathan Kramer notes that: The aesthetic of discontinuity has spread far beyond tape music. Composers of tape music carry this aesthetic back into their instrumental writing, and even

  The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966).  Ibid. 25   A short section from the second of these is unexpectedly spliced into ‘Help I’m A Rock’, a later song on the album. 26   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 27   Sleeve notes from: Frank Zappa, The MOFO Project/Object, Zappa, ZR20004 (2006). The quote comes from an interview with WDET radio, 13 November 1967. 28   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, Verve, V6-5013 (1967). 29  Ibid. 23 24

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composers with no interest in electronics have been struck by the power of spliced discontinuity.30

While Kramer was thinking about art music, this was no less true for The Mothers, and the fast editing style employed by Zappa on the earliest albums was soon transferred to the live medium, as he revealed in a 1967 interview: KOFSKY: Are there a lot of splices on Absolutely Free? I thought I detected places where there were very abrupt changes, and it hadn’t been like you paused and changed tempo, but that you’d spliced one part into another. Am I right about that? ZAPPA: Oh, yeah. There was a lot of editing. Since that time, we’ve adjusted our playing so we can sound like we’ve been edited. I like that effect.31

It was, however, the next two releases that sealed Zappa’s association with musique concrète and radical editing. Opening We’re Only In It For The Money 32 with the track ‘Are You Hung Up?’ Zappa sets out his stall immediately: in the space of just a few seconds, we are presented with a montage of Eric Clapton’s tape-delayed and slowed down ‘er… er’, bursts of high-frequency tones, varisped interjections and an apparently eavesdropped conversation. Immediately a ‘concrète’ atmosphere is created, and one with the scent of satire. After 26 seconds we cut to engineer Gary Kellgren threatening – in a tape-delayed whisper – to ‘erase all the tape in the world’, reminding us that what we are listening to was created on tape and that as he speaks, Zappa is in the control room, ‘listening to everything I say’. The track ends with drummer Jimmy Carl Black greeting us and announcing that he is ‘The Indian Of The Group’. In this way, ‘Are You Hung Up?’ functions as a tightlypacked ‘concrète’ overture to the album’s relatively conventional satirical songs. Yet even these songs are ruptured: Kellgren and Black suddenly burst into ‘Concentration Moon’; ‘Harry You’re a Beast’ is interrupted by snorks and celesta; ‘The Idiot Bastard Son’ cuts to a tangle of voices and snorks, and concludes with more Kellgren. A 38-second shard of Lumpy Gravy 33 slices into ‘Mother People’ and ‘What’s The Ugliest Part Of Your Body? (reprise)’ unravels into ‘Chipmunk’ voices. Indeed throughout the album the vocals are more often than not severely varisped, creating, in conjunction with the jump cuts, a stylised cartoonish

  Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘New Temporalities in Music, Critical Inquiry, 7/3 (1981): pp. 539–56, at 544. 31   Frank Kofsky. ‘Frank Zappa: The Mothers of Invention Part 1’, Jazz & Pop, 6/9 (1967): pp. 15–19, at 17. 32   The Mothers Of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money, Verve, V6-5045 (1968). Unless otherwise noted, all further discussion in the chapter refers to this album. 33  Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. 30

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ambience that serves to throw the ‘straight’ vocal of ‘Mom & Dad’ – the album’s (and perhaps Zappa’s) most poignant song – into telling relief. Having drawn attention to the quasi-parodic feel of Zappa’s ‘concrète’ works, perhaps it is more accurate to take a wider view of these pieces, particularly those on We’re Only In It For The Money, Lumpy Gravy 34 and Uncle Meat 35 as a kind of immanent critique, to do with the traditional aesthetic limits of the musical worlds in which Zappa operated. The ‘authentic’ and consistent ‘concrète’ texture of ‘Nasal Retentive Calliope Music’36 deftly morphs into an excerpt of surf music in the way 1950s tape pieces by Stockhausen, say, would never do. It is, moreover, immediately followed on the album by the scurrilous ditty ‘Let’s Make The Water Turn Black’.37 Lumpy Gravy: A Special Case Accounts of the genesis of Lumpy Gravy 38 – as well as detailed analyses of its contents – may be found elsewhere,39 but a brief summary may be in order. In late 1966, Zappa was approached by Capitol Records producer Nick Venet who wanted to record Zappa’s orchestral music. Although Zappa was signed to MGM as an artist, Venet persuaded him that his contract did not prevent him working for other labels as a composer or conductor, so recording sessions with many of LA’s top studio players duly took place in February and March 1967. However MGM then threatened legal action, which prevented the resulting album’s release. During the year-long standoff that followed, Zappa completely reorganised the work, splicing in all manner of old and new musical and spoken material. The original Capitol version of Lumpy Gravy (dubbed ‘Primordial’ by the Zappa Family Trust) was given its first official release in 2009 on the Lumpy Money project/object,40 This ‘primordial’ version of Lumpy Gravy reveals that even before Zappa’s radical overhaul of the album during the legal battle, tape manipulation and ‘distancing’ effects were already in place. Examples include the 34

 Ibid.   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre Records, 2MS 2024 (1969). 36   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money. 37  Ibid. 38  Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. Unless otherwise noted, all discussion in this section of the chapter refers to this album. 39   See Jonathan Bernard, ‘From Lumpy Gravy to Civilization Phaze III: The Story of Frank Zappa’s Disenchantment’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 5/1 (2011), pp. 1–31, James Borders, ‘Form and the Concept Album: Aspects of Modernism in Frank Zappa’s Early Releases’, Perspectives of New Music, 39/1 (2001), pp. 118–60, and Román García Albertos, ‘What’s On Lumpy Gravy?’ (2001), at http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/misc/ Lumpy_Gravy.html [accessed 7 January 2012]. 40   Frank Zappa, Lumpy Money, Zappa, ZR20008 (2009). 35

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‘sped up’ passages in ‘Sink Trap’,41 and the studio musicians’ spoken exchanges at the beginning of ‘Let’s Eat Out’42 and at the end of ‘Gum Joy’.43 It is also clear that Lumpy Gravy was built up from ‘units’: discrete recorded modules that were specifically designed to be spliced together, just like the ‘objects’ on Freak Out!.44 This is not just a question of trainspotting: it means that very early on – and probably at the outset – Zappa did not intend Lumpy Gravy to be merely a naturalistic recording of his notated acoustic ensemble music. It was, rather, designed to be an assemblage, using structural rather than remedial edits, and one that also included a reflexive commentary on the nature of its production by the inclusion of the musicians’ comments at the session. The version of Lumpy Gravy released by MGM/Verve in May 1968, however, is even more clearly a product of recording technology. It makes no pretence of being the unmediated document of a live performance of a notated musical score. Significant additions to the ‘Capitol version’ include the voices of the ‘piano people’ recorded in Apostolic Studios in Autumn 1967. According to Zappa: One day I decided to stuff a pair of U-87 [microphones] in the piano, cover it with a heavy drape, put a sand bag on the sustain pedal and invite anybody in the vicinity to stick their head inside and ramble incoherently about the various topics I would suggest to them via the studio talk-back system.45

Hours of this material were recorded and squirreled away for future use, and heavily edited passages of this vocal ‘rambling’ appear throughout the album, functioning as a pseudo-narrative thread. Zappa consistently cited Lumpy Gravy as his favourite album. Once, when asked why, he answered ‘Because the idea of it is just off the wall, to chop up dialogues and rhythms and stuff, and edit that together to an event. It’s more of an event than it is a collection of tunes’.46 It is certainly the album that most thoroughly embraces the ‘aesthetic of discontinuity’47 and may be seen to represent the peak of Zappa’s ‘musique concrète’ style.

41

 Ibid.  Ibid. 43  Ibid. 44   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 45  Zappa, Civilization Phaze III sleeve notes. 46   Steve Vai and John Stix, ‘Zappa: And Then...’, Guitar For The Practicing Musician, 3/7 (1986): pp. 50–53, at 53. 47   Kramer, ‘New Temporalities’, p. 544. 42

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Juxtapositions and Schisms Self-taught and pragmatic, Zappa had little time for academic or ideological arguments like the one between the Paris and Cologne studios, mentioned earlier. It is odd, or perhaps ironic – that he alludes to this very distinction in the We’re Only In It For The Money sleeve notes: All the music heard on this album was composed, arranged & scientifically mutilated by Frank Zappa (with the exception of a little bit of surf music). None of the sounds are generated electronically – they are all the product of electronically altering the sounds of NORMAL instruments.48

Regardless of the theoretical and ideological differences that lay behind the schism between musique concrète and elektronische Musik, it remains the case that almost all of the electroacoustic music from this formative period was assembled by splicing together short – often very short – sections of different sounds. Generally speaking it is the rapid juxtaposition of heterogeneous material that gives works of this period their characteristic 1950s electronic music texture, as much as the provenance of the sound sources. Ironically it was precisely the disjunct nature of the earliest musique concrète – imposed by technical limitations – that Schaeffer himself found frustrating. He stated – ‘As long as I only have two of four shellac players, with which I can only realise approximate junctions, I will remain a terrible prisoner of a discontinuous style, where everything seems cut off with an axe’.49 Zappa was very aware of the important part that editing played in his own recordings and was eager to point out that at least as far as the earlier albums were concerned the editing was not simply remedial. Rather it was, for him, an integral part of the composing process: The editing technique is an extension of the composition because, as I have so much to do with the actual production of the records, as a composer it gives me a chance to exert even more control on the musical material from start to finish. … Then, after I’ve got that onto a piece of quarter-inch tape, I can examine it, chop it up, integrate it with non-musical material or material not produced with musical instruments, and include that material which would otherwise be considered as noise or environmental bullshit into the musical structure, and use that as rhythmic counterpoint or as actual musical material as was done in

  The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money sleeve notes.   Daniel Terrugi, ‘Technology and musique concrète, the technical developments of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and their implication in musical composition’, Organised Sound, 12/3 (2007): pp. 213–31, at 216. 48 49

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Lumpy Gravy. To call that ‘editing technique’ sounds like somebody sat there and cut out all the mistakes.50

At the time, Zappa was unique in the rock world by virtue of his holistic view – and technical grasp – of the composing/recording process, and the heterogeneous nature of his material coupled with his recording skills made his oeuvre more ambitious and wide-ranging than that of almost all art music composers. Perhaps the only comparable contemporary figure was record producer Teo Macero, who constructed much of Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way 51 and Bitches Brew 52 albums by radically editing, looping and modifying material drawn from hours of jamming. For the Love of Editing Zappa continued to amass vast quantities of live and studio recordings and although by the end of August 1969 he had disbanded the original Mothers, he was soon promising a large retrospective box set: The History and Collected Improvisations of the Mothers of Invention.53 First billed as a 12-disc set, this scrapbook-like project would have been assembled from the archival pool, editing studio and live work from many different years together. In 1970, two discs from this projected set were released in their own right: Burnt Weeny Sandwich54 and Weasels Ripped My Flesh,55 both of which feature a huge variety of material edited into bricolages. The remaining ten discs were not released in their original form but some of their material ended up on Zappa’s six-volume live retrospective series You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, released between 1988 and 1992. As early as 1968, Zappa was already looking back on his output as: [A]ll one album. All the material on the albums is organically related, and if I had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order, it would still make one piece of music you can listen to. Then, I could take that razor blade and cut it apart and reassemble it a different way and it would still make sense.56   Barry Miles, ‘ZAPPARAP: Miles talks to Frank’, International Times, 63 (1969): pp. 9, 20, at 9. 51   Miles Davis, In A Silent Way, Columbia, CS 9875 (1969). 52   Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, Columbia, GP 26 (1970). 53   Details of this unreleased project can be found at Anonymous 10, ‘The History and Collected Improvisations of the Mothers of Invention’ (2012), at http://www.lukpac. org/~handmade/patio/weirdo/unreleased.html#historyandcollected [accessed 4 October 2011]. 54   The Mothers of Invention, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Reprise, RSLP 6370 (1970). 55   The Mothers of Invention, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Reprise, RSLP 2028 (1970). 56   Jerry Hopkins, ‘The Rolling Stone Interview: Frank Zappa’, Rolling Stone, 14 (1968): pp.11–14, at 11. 50

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At the time of this statement, he had released just four albums, but he could easily be talking about the dozens that lay in the future. It is clear from many interviews that Zappa found pleasure in the editing and splicing process itself, as The Mothers of Invention keyboardist Don Preston confirmed: ‘[H]e was a compulsive editor. I saw him three months after an album was released, put that same album together and re-editing [sic] the album when it’s not even going to come out. He used to sit there and edit anything’.57 It may be helpful to distinguish at least two categories of editing practice in Zappa’s work. First, there are obvious ‘radical’ or ‘structural’ edits that do not purport to represent real-world real-time events. These may occur within the boundaries of one album track or at the interstices of two tracks (‘grouting’). Second, there are ‘remedial’ edits: ‘invisible mending’ edits that either fix mistakes or compile the best takes. These are meant to be seamless and inaudible, presenting the listener with the impression of a continuous real-time event or musical performance. This has, of course, been a standard procedure in the recording of most types of music for decades. Remedial edits are not meant to be audible, but in interviews Zappa would typically draw attention to them. This might be in order to highlight the technical difficulty of his compositions or point out the apparent shortcomings of the players, but in either case he would flaunt his editing skills. Discussing the title track from Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch,58 he asked: ‘Do you know how many edits there are in ‘Drowning Witch’? Fifteen! That song is a basic track from 15 different cities. And some of the edits are like two bars long’.59 Commenting on the performance of the London Symphony Orchestra, he said: ‘They made so many mistakes, and played so badly on [‘Strictly Genteel’60], that it required forty edits (within seven minutes of music) to try to cover them’.61 Zappa’s editing skills were confirmed by engineer Mark Pinske: ‘I think we had about 1,000 edits,’ Pinske recalls of the [LSO] remix sessions. ‘We were counting them at one point – we got up to like 900 – and we decided that counting them was ridiculous. But [Zappa] could edit like nobody could. When I first started with him, I was afraid to pick up a razor blade. Now, I could put a breath into a vocal or take a breath out. I was just privileged to be able to have learned from somebody like that’.62   Billy James, Necessity is... The Early Years of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (London, 2001), p.79. 58   Frank Zappa, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, FW 38066 (1982). 59   Tom Mulhern, ‘“I’m Different”’, Guitar Player 17/2 (1983): pp. 74–8, 82–4, 86, 89–90, 93, 96, 98–100, at 100. 60   Frank Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 2, Barking Pumpkin, SJ-74207 (1987). 61   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p.156. 62   Chris Michie, ‘You Call That Music?’, Mix Online (February, 2003), at http://mixonline. com/recording/interviews/audio_call_music/#online_extra_title [accessed 9 January 2012]. 57

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Cutting Into the Present ‘Excentrifugal Forz’63 is a track in which the splice functions as a ‘time machine’. Just 93 seconds long, it is a minor work yet one that encapsulates many aspects of Zappa’s editing practice, and it demonstrates the density of allusions that are packed into his music. When Zappa’s vocal re-enters after an audible splice, it has reverse reverberation added to it. This is perhaps the nearest audio metaphor to anticipating the future, as the reverberation precedes the sound that created it; in other words, cause follows effect. In a sense we are ‘hearing the future’ before it happens. In the lyric, Zappa consults the character Pup Tentacle to ‘[F]ine out How the future is Because that’s where he’s been’ and mentions ‘The time he crossed the line From LATER ON to WAY BACK WHEN’.64 The ‘line’ here is in fact the splice: immediately after this lyric we cut to a 1967-type snippet of ‘concrète’ tape manipulation which transports us to ‘way back when’65: from 1974 to the 1972 jam session of the following track. The idea of the razor edit as an instrument of divination recalls William Burroughs’s comment on his cut-ups: ‘When you cut into the present the future leaks out’.66 Leather Conversations While Zappa was prevented from releasing new material by a dispute with Warner Brothers and his former manager Herb Cohen,67 he made a number of informal relatively low-tech recordings and also took solace in editing, ‘gluing those little pieces of tape’ to make ‘Curse of The Knick-Knack People’, a ‘sound object’.68 Unable to release it, Zappa used the track as a show-opening tape during his next tour. This is likely to have been the time when Zappa assembled an as-yet-unreleased tape composition that drummer Terry Bozzio recalls hearing around 1978: [F]rank got onto an editing trek and spent days & nights cutting sometimes just 1” long pieces of tape into what was used in part on [Läther] … you would hear music, sounds & dialogue from the 60’s mixed w/ anything he wanted to cut it together with, up to material from the very day before. sometimes just the silent   Frank Zappa, Apostrophe (’), DiscReet, DS2175 (1974).   Ibid. Capitalization and underlining as in original lyric sheet. 65  Ibid. 66   William S. Burroughs, ‘Origin And Theory Of The Tape Cut-Ups’, Break Through In Grey Room. Sub Rosa, 006 008 (1986). 67   This resulted in an unusually long gap between Zappa releases, from November 1976 to March 1978. 68   Den Simms, Eric Buxton and Rob Samler. ‘They’re Doing The Interview Of The Century – Part 2’, Society Pages, 2 (1990): pp. 16–38, at http://www.afka.net/ articles/1990-06_Society_Pages.htm [accessed January 9 2012]. 63 64

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ambience of 6 different places in time and space would zip by in some ‘varying tape hiss white noise rhythm’ he had cut them to. i recall it being maybe 45 min. long… this abstract composition of seemingly unrelated pieces of tape that cohesively worked together[.]69

According to Bozzio, he, bassist Patrick O’Hearn and engineer Davey Moire were recorded like the Lumpy Gravy ‘piano people’ for the ‘leather conversation’ that appeared as ‘grouting’ on Sheik Yerbouti,70 Shut Up ʼn Play Yer Guitar71 and Läther:72 [Z]appa came up w/ the idea & concept of putting people under a mic’d, blanket-covered grand piano, w/ a sandbag depressing the sustain pedal to add an ambient “piano string” reverb to the sound of the voices […] then he just let us go and talk & improvise hopefully comedic material, in this dark, tent-like atmosphere. i remember it feeling like we were little kids who were hiding in a “fort” we had built.73

The ‘pedal-depressed panchromatic resonance’74 is less evident here than on Lumpy Gravy, yet one might speculate that Zappa set up this session with a view to constructing a late-1970s sequel to that album. Be that as it may, snippets from this ‘leather conversation’ were spliced into Sheik Yerbouti where they first appear in the 33-second ‘concrète’ composition ‘What Ever Happened To All The Fun In The World’ alongside slivers of percussion and speeded-up orchestral music. This track and the similar ‘We’ve Got To Get Into Something Real’ bookend the live guitar solo ‘Rat Tomago’. Brief grouts join ‘Bobby Brown’ to the instrumental ‘Rubber Shirt’ and that track to another live guitar solo ‘The Sheik Yerbouti Tango’. Side two of the original vinyl release was the most formally balanced instance of Zappa’s macro- and micro-editing since Burnt Weeny Sandwich.75 Shut Up ʼn Grout Yer Guitar The notion of presenting excerpted guitar solos as compositions in their own right was one that Zappa would exploit from this time on. The first flowering of this 69

  Terry Bozzio in personal e-mail communication with the author, 10 May 2011.   Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501 (1979). Unless otherwise noted, the remaining discussion in this section of the chapter refers to this album. 71   Frank Zappa, Shut Up ʼn Play Yer Guitar, Barking Pumpkin, W3X 38289 (1981). 72  Zappa, Läther. 73  Ibid. 74   ‘Evelyn, A Modified Dog’ on, Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, One Size Fits All, DiscReet, DS 2216 (1975). 75   The Mothers of Invention, Burnt Weeny Sandwich. 70

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idea came in the shape of the Shut Up ʼn Play Yer Guitar set,76 where most of the album’s tracks are grouted with ‘leather conversation’ material. Zappa saw these links as qualitatively different from the spoken interjections on Lumpy Gravy. In an interview with Guitar World, he commented: GW: Why did you include those voice segues? FZ: Because I tried the album [Shut Up ʼn Play Yer Guitar] … I edited it together with no vocal texture in it and I thought it was flat. I think it needed just a vocal distraction to set you up for the next thing, because one solo after another after another with no interruption is – to me it wasn’t dynamic enough. GW: Was that why you had those conversations and weird sounds on Lumpy Gravy? FZ: No. That was the composition on Lumpy Gravy. In this case, it just served as punctuation, just to give your ears a chance to stop hearing a fuzz tone for a minute and hear another texture and then it set you up for the next thing. It just – it’s structural.77

A Shift of Emphasis One does not have to subscribe to the view that the early Mothers albums were Zappa’s best to acknowledge a clear difference between the albums he released between 1966 and 197078 and those that came later. Musically, there was a general shift away from the interrupted collage forms towards suites of intricately arranged songs. It may be, as Jonathan Bernard suggests, that Zappa ‘regarded the quirky, jump-cut, crazy-quilt style of Lumpy Gravy as passé, or technologically primitive, or simply a naïve phase that he had gone through at an earlier point in his development’.79 In addition, Zappa’s early idealistic ambitions to create a kind of electric rock/chamber music/concrète hybrid was all but abandoned and the

 Zappa, Shut Up ʼn Play Yer Guitar.   John Swenson, ‘Frank Zappa: The Interview’, Guitar World, 3/2 (1982): pp. 34–5, 37–8, 40, 45–6, 48–9, 72–3, at 49. Please note that the emphasis in italics is the author’s. Given this rationale, it is curious that there is no such ‘grouting’ in Zappa’s two later albums of excerpted guitar solos: Frank Zappa, Guitar, Zappa, CDD Zappa 6 (1988) and Frank Zappa, Trance-Fusion, Zappa, ZR 20002 (2006). 78   That is, from Freak Out! to Weasels Ripped My Flesh. 79   Bernard, ‘From Lumpy Gravy to Civilization Phaze III’, p. 23. 76

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acoustic ensemble music and rock band strands in his work tended to be separated out into distinct arenas.80 During the 1970s, then, Zappa leaned away from the rapid, disruptive editing style of the early Mothers albums towards longer structural edits that occupy a position somewhere between the ‘radical’ and ‘remedial’ edits described earlier. A relatively early example of this is ‘Inca Roads’,81 where a (trimmed) live guitar solo from a concert in Helsinki was spliced into an LA TV show rendition of the same song recorded a month earlier. The edit is not seamless, yet it does not draw attention to itself either. Much more audacious structural edits can be found on the live You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series. For example, ‘Montana’82 cuts between 1973 and 1984 performances; ‘Black Napkins’83 jumps between 1976 and 1984, and, as outlined in Paul Carr’s chapter in this publication, ‘Lonesome Cowboy Nando’84 leaps a remarkable 17 years from 1971 to 1988. Obviously, edits between such different band line-ups, using different instruments and equipment – and recorded so far apart in time and space – are going to be clearly audible, yet there is enough musical continuity for the cracks to be papered over by the ear and for the flow to be maintained. Zappa had, of course, been constructing his band albums in a similar manner for many years, and relatively few are ‘pure’ studio albums. Most – even when not presented as live albums per se – incorporate substantial amounts of live material that has usually been heavily edited and overdubbed.85 This method of working seems to have changed the way he mixed and selected the live source material, and from the late 1970s it appears that for Zappa the seamlessness of edits at the service of musical discontinuity started to take priority over the rapid and obvious sonic rupture of the earlier years. Thus, by 1984, he was saying: I like the idea of making my tapes, no matter what they are, so they’re intercuttable with one another. It’s less distracting to the listener. He can follow 80

  Two articles that deal in detail with this aspect of Zappa’s development are: Arved Ashby, ‘Frank Zappa and the Anti-Fetishist Orchestra’, The Musical Quarterly, 83/4 (1999), pp. 557–606, and Jonathan W. Bernard, ‘The Musical World(s?) of Frank Zappa: Some Observations of His “Crossover” Pieces’, in Everett, Walter (ed.), Expression in PopRock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays (New York, 2000). 81   Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, One Size Fits All. 82   Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 4, Rykodisc, RCD 10087/88 (1991). 83   Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6, Rykodisc, RCD 10091/92 (1992). 84  Ibid. 85   Notable examples include Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Frank Zappa, Tinseltown Rebellion, Barking Pumpkin, PW237336 (1981), and Frank Zappa, Them Or Us, Barking Pumpkin, SVB074200 (1984).

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an album’s conceptual continuity better if he doesn’t get that drastic shock when the tone of things changes. The shock should be the idea of one type of music juxtaposed on another type of music, not the fact that the high hat [sic] suddenly jumps to the left.86

Enter the Synclavier In 1983, Zappa purchased a Synclavier digital music system, which enabled him to program music that would be played back with superhuman rhythmic accuracy. At first, the instrument was capable of generating only synthesised timbres but by the time Zappa was working on the Synclavier pieces on Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention 87 the instrument was capable of digital sampling. Yet where a younger Zappa might have fully exploited the possibilities for concrètestyle collages that sampling afforded, the Zappa of the 1980s focused his attention on building a library in which instrumental samples predominated: My main goal for building up my sample library is to have as much of a variety of realistic sounds of orchestral instruments as I can get […] Because the space noises and all that weird stuff seems to be very easy to do. And the music that I like to write was originally intended for real instruments. I do like the way that they sound. Only I don’t enjoy hearing them played with the wrong rhythm or out of tune. That’s why I’ve concentrated on real instrument samples.88

This change of priorities seems to reflect a shift in his compositional thinking as he moved further away from his stated aesthetic position of 1969, when he was keen to incorporate ‘that material which would otherwise be considered as noise or environmental bullshit into the musical structure’.89 Fifteen years later, the ambit of this material had shrunk: ‘My interest in electronic instruments is to get accurate performances of pitches, rhythms, and harmony – which are what I think music ought to be made out of’.90 The ‘ought’ here is surprising as it appears to rule so much out: it would be troubling coming from the composer of Lumpy Gravy if he obeyed his own enjoinders more consistently. The conservatism is nevertheless disappointing:

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  Steve Birchall, ‘Modern Music Is a Sick Puppy: A Conversation with Frank Zappa, Part One’, Digital Audio 1/2 (1984): pp. 43–9, at 49. 87   Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention. Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203 (1985). 88   Alan di Perna. ‘Megabytes at Barking Pumpkin’, Keyboards, Computers & Software, 1/2 (1986): pp. 22–5, at 25. 89   Miles, ‘ZAPPARAP’, p. 9. 90   Birchall, ‘Modern Music Is a Sick Puppy’, p. 48.

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Since my compositions are made out of pitches, melody, and harmony, I choose familiar sounds that are easy to identify with from the real world. That way, you can concentrate on what the music is about, rather than on the science fiction nature of the machine.91

One notable exception to the general absence of non-instrumental sounds in Zappa’s Synclavier work is ‘Porn Wars’,92 a 12-minute ‘concrète’ collage in which original Synclavier material and Zappa’s testimony to a senate hearing93 are joined by multiple layers of the assembled Senators’ voices – quoting the very lyrics that they found so objectionable – all sampled and played back at various comical speeds – as well as the familiar snorks and an interjection from the 1967 ‘piano people’. Lumpy Gravy Redux Zappa had been talking about a ‘second instalment’ of Lumpy Gravy since at least 1984,94 and referred to a ‘sequel’ in 1987.95 Working primarily on the Synclavier, Zappa went back to the 1967 piano people and created new speech collages from this material, interspersing it with new Synclavier compositions that included samples from a vastly increased library as well as Ensemble Modern improvisations and newly-recorded (1991) ‘piano people’. The centrepiece of the resulting album, Civilization Phaze III, was the 18-minute ‘N-Lite’,96 Zappa’s most complex and sophisticated Synclavier composition on which he claimed to have been working for some ten years. Despite the preponderance of conventional instrumental timbres, ‘N-Lite’97 can be seen as the culmination of Zappa’s ‘concrète’ work in that it draws on a vast array of kaleidoscopically-changing high-gloss sounds that had been assembled empirically, working directly with the sound sources.

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 Ibid.  Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention. 93   The Record Label Hearing at the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, 19 September 1985. As noted elsewhere in this publication, Zappa was arguing against the Parents Music Resource Center who wanted the music industry to develop a ratings system for lyrics. 94   Charles Amirkhanian, ‘KPFA-FM Radio Interview’ (17 May, 1984), at http://www. archive.org/details/AM_1984_05_17 [accessed 4 October 2011]. 95   Rick Davies, ‘Father of Invention’, Music Technology, 1/4 (1987): pp. 42, 45, 48–50, at 45. 96  Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. 97  Ibid. 92

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Conclusion And this goes some way to explain why so much of his work takes the form of rambling, shambling ad hoc assemblages, loosely held together with post hoc narrative threads. Thus such never-quite-properly-realised extended musical works as Thing-Fish98 and Hunchentoot,99 the film projects Uncle Meat 100 and 200 Motels,101 and the Them Or Us quasi-screenplay.102 Such unrealised projects pale beside the vast scope and number that Zappa did manage to complete of course, but he was uncharacteristically self-critical – indeed rather self-pitying – about what he perceived to be his ‘failures’: I would say that my entire life has been one massive failure. Because I don’t have the tools or wherewithal to accomplish what I want to accomplish. If you have an idea and you want that idea to be done a certain way and you can’t do it, what do you have? You have failure.103

It is, perhaps, the voice of a man whose creative ambitions were thwarted by lack of funding, personnel and – most catastrophically – by the rapid and unexpected advance of a terminal disease, that we perceive at the end of Civilization Phaze III,104 yet another work that – pace the Zappa Family Trust – seems to have been abandoned rather than fully realised.105 Whether the project/object is regarded tragically as an artist’s reach exceeding his grasp or affirmatively as a vital, Gargantuan, Schwitters-like Merzbau, it remains, as Gary Steel put it (with Zappa’s approval) ‘a heck of a thing to comprehend’.106

  Frank Zappa, Thing-Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKC074201 (1984).   Although unpublished, the entire script of Hunchentoot can be found at Frank Zappa, Them Or Us (The Book), (Los Angeles, 1984): pp. 184–253. 100   Frank Zappa, Uncle Meat, Honker Home Video (1987). 101   Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer, 200 Motels, United Artists (1998). 102  Zappa, Them Or Us (The Book). 103   Steve Lyons and Batya Friedman, ‘Frank’s Wild Years: From “Louie The Turkey” To The London Symphony: The Frank Zappa Interview Part 2’, Option, March-April 1987: pp. 64–9, at 69. 104  Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. 105   See, for example, Todd Yvega’s comments (‘Frank rarely regarded any composition as completed’) in the sleeve notes to Frank Zappa, “Feeding the Monkies at Ma Maison”, Zappa, ZR20012 (2011). 106   Gary Steel, ‘Father of Invention’(2004), at http://garysteel.blogspot.com/2004/07/ frank-zappa.html [accessed 7 January 2012]. Originally published in the NZ Listener, 22 April 1991.  98  99

Chapter 5

Zappa and Satire: From Conceptual Absurdism to the Perversity of Politics Nick Awde

Humour is a driving force throughout the oeuvre of Frank Zappa, a unifying element integral to his lyrical and instrumental music, films and corporate image. Indeed, while comedy is a genre that does not always travel beyond national or even the narrowest of social circles, Zappa’s humour proved no obstacle in helping his work transcend international boundaries,1 finding ready partners in the art, protest and civil rights movements that grew out of post-war society in North America and Europe. Humour, specifically satire, was the force that propelled Frank Zappa from conceptual comedian to social commentator to ‘perverse’ politician. The vast majority of Zappa’s tracks stand up to scrutiny in this respect – even across a recorded repertoire of more than 60 official albums it is remarkably hard to identify ‘duds’ since context shifts with time and one must constantly revise appreciation of any given track.2 This chapter intends to provide an overview of Zappa’s humour and, identifying the principal satirical elements therein, to offer pointers towards placing him within the American comedy spectrum. It shall also note formative effects of his upbringing, the socio-historical context of comedy in post-war popular music, comic influences, and the changing effects of the times in which Zappa worked and his ability to adapt to them. Collectively, these will contribute towards a preliminary definition of his legacy. Demolishing the Walls between High and Low Culture Zappa has been hailed as a maverick and he proudly considered himself an outsider. Yet no lone voice in the wilderness could have sustained his mainstream impact without recourse to a vocabulary accepted by the majority. In fact his ability to assimilate both the social and artistic sides of popular culture was prodigious,

1

  This is particularly unusual for satirists, bound as they are by the coded minutiae of their own societies. Many (possibly most) world-class satirists have not enjoyed Zappa’s fortune in being even physically recognised beyond their shores. 2   There are arguably no ‘serious’ tracks (i.e. those devoid of comic elements) in the Zappa canon.

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often prompting accusations that he was a recycler of other’s ideas. Paul Carr addresses this issue when stating: Although Zappa’s portfolio has to be considered one of the most original in the rock canon, it is apparent that he consciously and freely incorporated elements of his own and more importantly other composers’ music throughout his career, in both live and recorded environments. During this borrowing process Zappa would refer to his earlier works in a variety of explicit and subliminal ways, at times actually including previously recorded materials in new compositions.3

In observational comedy (and classical composition) there is a well-recognised fine line between inspiration (or homage) and plagiarism and yet, while Zappa even recycled and self-plagiarised his own comic material (see below), ‘almost everything he wrote with a storyline was based on fact. He was an observer of human nature.’4 Zappa’s context hence derives not only from music but also from the prevailing politics and mores of the day, the cultural strides made in post-war America, particularly the cultural acceptance of comedy as it pushed society’s limits. He emerged during the protest song era, and interfaced with many of its leading lights, while the field had already been cleared for his own satirical statements thanks to the First and Fifth Amendment trials in the late 1950s of Allen Ginsberg’s beat poem ‘Howl’5 and the book and film versions of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.6 Then, of course, there were the monumental court battles of stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce that helped define obscenity versus free speech, inspiring Zappa to adopt Bruce’s mantle after the comedian’s untimely death in 1966 and to become, like his satirical godfather, ‘concerned … with “almost every moral issue that there is” – religion, civil rights, sex relations’.7 By its very nature satire can rapidly become antiquated but Zappa in the main transcended the restrictions of time. Indeed, at first glance not all of his material seems to have stood the test of time, much of it sustained ostensibly by the nostalgia of his fanbase (and academics). For non-Americans, Zappa’s critiques of TV evangelists and US Senate hearings may not hold the attention as they

3   Paul Carr, ‘An Autocratic Approach to Music Copyright?: The Potential Negative Impacts of Restrictive Rights on a Composer’s Legacy: The Case of the Zappa Family Trust’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 21/3 (2011): pp. 302–16, at 303. 4   Gail Zappa, quoted in Barry Miles, Frank Zappa (New York, 2004), pp. 285–6. 5   Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco, 1955). 6   See D.H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Florence, 1928), and Marc Allégret’s film, L’Amant de lady Chatterley, Orsay Films/Régie du Film (1955). 7   Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen testifying for Bruce at his 1964 obscenity trial in New York, quoted in Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon (Naperville, 2002), p. 252.

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should, but more socially-oriented attacks such as ‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’,8 ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’,9 ‘Valley Girl’10 and Joe’s Garage11 are satirical evergreens that reinvent themselves according to changing times and attitudes. Even the political critiques mentioned, boosted by a reading of the context of their times, can come to comic life today. Such universality owes much to the fact that ‘Zappa’s music demonstrates an understating of both high and low culture and an acknowledgement of the relationship(s) between the two; throughout his work Zappa moves to abolish these differences, challenging his audience as well as educating them.’12 This is compounded by Zappa embodying a rare instance of political and social satire combining in equal measure. Zappa’s ability to interpret his world derived from his upbringing. Indeed the artistic worldview that underpinned the Zappa brand also mapped his personal set of values. As outlined in his autobiography,13 his family and formative years established the template for the expressive resistance that would become the bedrock of moral references for this very European American. Both parents were of (mostly) Italian immigrant stock and indelibly Mediterranean Catholic in home culture – Italian was spoken in the Zappa household. Economically and socially the family lived an impoverished educated lower middle-class existence as Zappa Senior’s job as a chemist in the US defence industry moved them across the continent.14 Frank was born in wartime suburban Baltimore in 1940 – giving him a lead over the baby-boomers that followed – and his high-school years were eked out in backwater municipalities in California where his sense of being the odd-one-out was mitigated by the fact that there were many other students from similarly transient backgrounds (e.g. collaborator Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart). Fertile grounds one might say for the breeding of a comedian – in Zappa’s case, a satirical comedian. The post-war America in which he grew up was the impetus for the conformist American Dream, the world of Malvina Reynolds’ ‘Little Boxes’.15 The ‘can-doit’ masses were rewarded with the security of the nuclear family, with credit and   Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501 (1979).   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, Verve, V6-5013 (1967). 10   Frank Zappa, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, FW38066 (1982). 11   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act I, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979), and Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). 12   Kelly Fisher Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa (London, 2007), p. 15. 13   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989). 14   Further background material on the dynamics of the Zappa household may be found in Patrice ‘Candy’ Zappa, My Brother Was a Mother: A Zappa Family Album (Los Angeles, 2003). 15   Written in 1962, the folk political satire was a hit for Pete Seeger the following year. See Pete Seeger, ‘Little Boxes’, Columbia, 4-42940 (1963).  8  9

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employment, the new affluence keeping the nation in thrall to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant corporate males, a favoured target of Zappa’s. As consumerism and culture exploded throughout North America and Britain, cutting-edge humour emerged as the natural successor to rock’n’roll, possible only after comedy’s metamorphosis from saccharine gagsmithery (e.g. Bob Hope) into aggressive satire. This crucial step was facilitated by the baby-boomers who had matured from pioneering teenagers to experimental young adults poised for post-vaudeville/ music hall entertainment. Just as the late 1940s marked the point when music first escaped the establishment’s control and hence came to be deemed dangerous, similar seeds were sown for comedy (i.e. the ‘new rock’n’roll’) a decade later. The counterculture cross-fertilised this transition – indeed Zappa’s The Mothers of Invention was known as a ‘counterculture’ band. Born therefore at the right time if not exactly the right place, Zappa was again a rare creature in straddling the rise and fall of both music and comedy over a 30-year career. Zappa as a comic creator is a subject to which he often alluded, but generally when discussing specific works rather than his philosophy. Nevertheless, he confirms himself as a meticulous satirist who with each album added observation and characters to construct an entire comic universe that formed a recognisable base from which to attack defined long-term targets. For example, he explains the imagery in ‘Would You Go All the Way?’16 as harking back to the 1950s, when ‘monsters played a very important part in the culture of our country, and a lot of my humour revolves around that sort of thing’.17 Such seemingly throwaway references in Zappa’s work thus embody deeper cultural triggers: ‘Machines don’t decide to say things like “We’re Beatrice”18 in precisely the “wrong” place in the middle of a song and make people laugh.’19 He even links performances of instrumentals such as ‘Peaches en Regalia’20 directly to creating that comic universe: To see Ike Willis pretending to be Count Floyd21 for one or two beats in the middle of all that is something I find enjoyable – and then, just to make sure that you didn’t miss it, when the melody repeats the next time, it stops just a little bit longer and he says, ‘Whoooo-oo, whoooooo-oooo!’ Of course it’s mega-stupid. That’s why I like it.22

  Frank Zappa, Chunga’s Revenge, Bizarre, MS2030 (1970).   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 132. 18   An advertising tagline for 1970s US conglomerate Beatrice Foods. 19   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 173. 20   Frank Zappa, Hot Rats, Bizarre, RS6356 (1969). 21   A vampire TV host who howled like a werewolf, played by Joe Flaherty in Canadian comedy sketch show Second City Television (SCTV) (1976–1984). 22   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 168. 16 17

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However, Zappa could display ambiguity on his lyrical content, for example when discussing ‘The Dangerous Kitchen’:23 I don’t have any pretensions about being a poet. My lyrics are there for entertainment purposes only – not to be taken internally. Some of them are truly stupid, some are slightly less stupid and a few of them are sort of funny. Apart from the snide political stuff, which I enjoy writing, the rest of the lyrics wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the fact that we live in a society where instrumental music is irrelevant – so if a guy expects to earn a living by providing musical entertainment for folks in the USA, he’d better figure out how to do something with a human voice plopped on it.24

From the evidence of his actions rather than such cynical rhetoric, Zappa envisioned his satire in active theatrical terms, although again strewing disclaimers: Some critics have said that what I do is a perverse form of ‘political theater’. Maybe 20 or 30 per cent of my lyrics go in that direction – the rest of my activities might be more accurately described as ‘amateur anthropology’.25

This ‘political theatre’ is key to his storytelling success, following Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in balancing words and music, in the spirit of Brechtian dialectical (epic) theatre where ‘it is most important that one of the main features of the ordinary theatre should be excluded from [epic theatre]: the engendering of illusion’.26 Here there is to be no emotional payback from climactic catharsis; instead comedy, song, music, choruses and recited stage directions are deployed to stimulate the audience into thinking for themselves, and so to take a critical stance of the actions presented. Warily, Zappa distanced himself from any direct influence: I’m not a Brecht fan because I don’t know that much about what he does; but people keep saying that, so maybe it’s true. I’ve read hardly any of his stuff. I’ve heard The Threepenny Opera – like half of it one time – couldn’t sit through the rest.27   Frank Zappa, The Man from Utopia, Barking Pumpkin, FW38403 (1983).   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 185. 25  Ibid., pp. 142–3. The fact that Zappa was also an avant-garde composer was not antipathetic to being a comedian since most modern composers of his ilk express humour in their work, e.g. John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Island Records, ILPS 9309 (1974). 26   Bertolt Brecht (trans. John Willett), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London, 1978), p. 122. 27   Frank Kofsky, ‘Frank Zappa Interview’ (1968), at http://www.science.uva. nl/~robbert/zappa/interviews/Kofsky.html [accessed 16 January 2012]. 23

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But that confrontational European ethos typified by Brecht had evidently found a natural home within Zappa’s work, as he then admits the possibility to ‘galvanize people into some kind of action’.28 The goal was not to become a thorn in society’s side but, as with Brecht, Zappa’s success was intentionally bound up with creating a jolt of recognition of social injustice, to inspire ideas for change. Another ideological dimension claimed by Zappa was that of dadaist/absurdist. Tellingly, Chapter 14 of The Real Frank Zappa Book bears the title ‘Marriage (As a Dada Concept)’,29 and he later comments on the origins of the name of his production company: Intercontinental Absurdities (founded 1968) is a company dedicated to Dada in Action. In the early days, I didn’t even know what to call the stuff my life was made of. You can imagine my delight when I discovered that someone in a distant land had the same idea – AND a nice, short name for it.30

The evidence however is that Zappa’s dadaist/absurdist proclivities were merely a vehicle for his critical onslaught based on satire, an ancient and consistent art form which, in the West, is found remarkably unchanged from its Graeco-Roman roots, especially ingrained in modern Italian society (cf. Milan’s Serate Bastarde) and its culture-proud diaspora (cf. stand-up Scott Capurro).31 But in the US satire is nurtured via other cultural channels within White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Jewish, African-American, Hispanic, Asian or Redneck families, meaning that as an Italian-American Zappa enjoyed a head start. Although it can be a hard road, since satire is intended to make fun of human vice or weakness, it often has the intent of correcting or changing the subject of the attack.32 As Zappa himself conceded: ‘The person who stands up and says, “This is stupid”, either is asked to behave or, worse, is greeted with a cheerful “Yes, we know! Isn’t it terrific!”.’33 He elaborated more directly: It never mattered to me that 30 million people might think ‘I’m wrong’. The number of people who thought Hitler was ‘right’ did not make him ‘right’. The same principle should be applied to anyone who has an individualistic attitude. Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?34 28

 Ibid.   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, pp. 243–59. 30   Ibid., p. 255. 31   Although the American stand-up is not purely Italian in background, he exhibits a classically strong moral force under his extreme taboo-breaking act and, pertinently, he has translated successfully to the UK. 32   Thus Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is as satirical as Joe’s Garage: Act I. 33   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 239. 34   Ibid., pp. 226–7. 29

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One has only to review the career of Zappa’s hero Lenny Bruce to appreciate how the weapon of satire can backfire even in the hands of an expert practitioner. Taboos are taboos for good reason, and as discussed below defending oneself against the indefensible is a specific pitfall for the satirist. Certainly songs such as ‘The Groupie Routine’,35 ‘Crew Slut’,36 ‘Road Ladies’37 and ‘Dirty Love’38 ostensibly leave little room for subtlety, but they are also moral tales delivered through the context of the rock’n’roll life led by Zappa and his band. Satire ordains defecation, urination and procreation as the great levellers – we are all the same under our trappings and no one can therefore be above the law. And although it is the area of sex where Zappa is especially not always without fault, one must consider the context of contemporary popular music, where many commonly accepted songs deal with love and/or sex at various levels of exposition. They occupy prominent cultural space in most societies, so is it surprising or shocking that Zappa’s subject matter reflects this? Part of his reputation, after all, rested on being the king of the anti-love song. Satirists face the constant challenge of parsing and confronting what mainstream society deems acceptable, and even when getting this right they may still see their words taken out of context. Speaking directly to his audience, Bruce publically aired the problem: ‘I don’t know if you folks understand what the word “obscene” means. It means that I make you horny. Now, may I ask you, does the word “motherfucker” make you horny? If it does, you’re in pretty bad shape.’39 Stand-up George Carlin, another satirist indebted to Bruce’s legacy, provided a solution: I’m a great believer in context. I say you can joke about anything. Baby rape is a very difficult subject to do three or four minutes on, but if you created a context – and that includes not only the context you’ve created for the jokes but your bigger context, too; your act, the persona they know when they buy a ticket – if that’s all in place, you can … let’s call it a ‘get by’ with it. You’re still gonna turn off some people, but they’ll be right back for the next piece of material. I believe you can joke about anything.40

Still, the debate continues, as Barry Miles observes:

  Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore Vol. 1, Rykodisc, RCD 10081/82 (1988). 36  Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act I. 37  Zappa, Chunga’s Revenge. 38   Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation, Discreet, MS2149 (1973). 39   Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon (Napperville, 2002), p. 115. 40   Paul Provenza and Dan Dion, ¡Satiristas!: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs and Vulgarians (New York, 2010), p. 343. 35

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It is difficult to assess Zappa’s more blatantly sexist works: was he really just following in the footsteps of his mentor Lenny Bruce … until the words had been drained of their offensive meaning? There was certainly a conscious intent on Zappa’s part to do just this, but unconscious factors seemed to get in the way.41

And yet, as Carr points out, ‘Zappa remains one of the most extraordinary and far-reaching figures in popular music to have explored sex in the analysis of the human condition in all its cruelty, comedy and potential for the expression of freedom.’42 Put in a wider social context, Zappa ‘can be considered part of the 1960s generation that celebrated sexual liberation to the soundtrack of the emerging rock genre.’43 The Three Ages of Zappa Zappa’s operational concept of Project/Object meant that his life and work form a single creative act best analysed as chronological segments44 since its linear development bears a direct correlation to changes in society. Throughout runs a clear humour spectrum from social commentary to pure satire to ‘perverse’ politics (when instrumental music splits from lyrics), personified by (and overlapping) the roles of Conceptual Comedian, Social Commentator and ‘Perverse’ Politician. Conceptual Comedian (1966–1969) Despite the immense volume of social commentary in Zappa’s first albums with The Mothers of Invention, Zappa was to all practical purposes a conceptual comedian. Even if the satire was already perfectly formed in his own mind, as a band The Mothers of Invention were still finding their way in the developing modern music industry. Much of their potential audience needed to be gently eased into things – serious rock was after all a new concept: Most of the stuff that I did between ’65 and ’69 was directed toward an audience that was accustomed to accepting everything that was handed to them. I mean completely. It was amazing: politically, musically, socially – everything.   Miles, Frank Zappa, p. 285.   Paul Carr, ‘“Make a Sex Noise Here”: Frank Zappa, Sex and Popular Music’, in Dietrich Helms and Thomas Phelps (eds), Thema Nr. 1: Sex und Populäre Musik (Bielefeld, 2011): pp. 135–49, at 136. 43  Ibid., p. 136. 44   Note that Zappa’s conceptual progression between albums can be somewhat haphazard, their physical production dictated more by necessity than invention. Note too that much material was released or recycled significantly later than actually recorded – his film work is particularly problematic in this respect. 41 42

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Somebody would just hand it to them and they wouldn’t question it. It was my campaign in those days to do things that would shake people out of complacency, or that ignorance and make them question things.45

But Zappa had not yet made this a two-way conversation. Lacing social observations with instant ‘in-yer-face’ comic gratification was a useful method to attract and sustain attention and thus build a wider following. The conceptual side of Zappa’s comedy lies in the fact that everything he produced was multi-levelled while not always seeming obvious or even useful at the time. On the band’s 1966 debut Freak Out!,46 subject matter undoubtedly influenced the selection of ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’ as the opener. This is a stop-start rollercoaster through a welter of musical styles to reinforce the image of ‘Mister America’ strolling past the vapid institutions of his great nation while the chorus promises a bright future for ‘the left-behinds of the Great Society’.47 Similarly vapid aspirations are attacked in Uncle Meat’s ‘Cruising for Burgers’,48 a 15-line paean to white middle-class male teenagers and their rites of passage, complete with an intentionally pretentious dreamy outro. In both cases, however, form ultimately eclipses content for all the vitriol, unlike ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’,49 a full-blown satire that sets a blueprint for other classics to come. Episodic and dramatic, it is a pure piece of whirlwind theatre, oddly un-rock’n’roll, that demands attention in a distinctly Brechtian manner. The nation’s conformist youth are urged to ‘Be a jerk – go to work’ before the narrator follows them to their nirvana, City Hall, where pillar of society Fred daydreams about adulterous sex with his underage girlfriend. But the mere existence of such songs at this time was a provocative statement in itself, as Zappa observed: ‘I get kind of a laugh out of the fact that other people are going to try to interpret that stuff and come up with some grotesque interpretations of it. It gives me a certain amount of satisfaction.’50 Social Commentator (1969–1984) The notoriety as a ‘smut peddler’ grew but so did Zappa’s reputation for consummate musicianship and songcraft. Rest assured, the absurdist titles and musical in-jokes remained, but as the music increased in stature so did the satire   Billy James, Necessity Is…: The Early Years of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (London, 2005), p. 91. 46   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, 5005 (1966). According to Zappa: ‘It wasn’t as if we had a hit single and we needed to build some filler around it. Each tune had a function within an overall satirical concept.’ (Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, pp. 65–80. 47   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 48   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre, MS 2024 (1969). 49   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free. 50   Barry Miles, Frank Zappa: A Visual Documentary (London, Omnibus, 1993), p. 42. 45

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with conceptually complete albums such as Joe’s Garage.51 But that did not dispel his (admittedly minor) problem of credibility, namely that every great satirist tends to be comfortably plugged into the hub of the very society they are pillorying – Aristophanes, Hogarth, Twain, Cook – giving them the legitimacy of High Art, the imprimatur of the Hated Establishment. The single ‘Dancing Fool’,52 for example, was a surprise hit because it was a ‘safe’ social commentary, unfettered by scabrous scatology or political savaging. As US satirist Paul Krassner complained, ‘there are so many comedians who are great at their craft, but choose to go with the flow instead of being on the crest of any wave … They follow opinion; they don’t really care to lead it.’53 Given his track record, Zappa could be forgiven his lapses, certainly after creating Hogarthian epics such as ‘Billy the Mountain’,54 an operetta as much a statement on the state of popular music as on the state of the nation, combined in a showcase of satire like a Zappa ‘Waste Land’.55 Ostensibly the tale of a mountain who comes into some money and sets off on holiday with his girlfriend only to have a confrontation with a superhero, it lyrically and musically tilts at conservative America while the epic tapestry of the arrangements disguises the barbs. Not so, however, with ‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’,56 which picks up on the celebrated insecurities of 1967’s ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’57 as alphamale star student Bobby is traumatised by a sexual encounter with lesbian feminist Freddie, subsequently becoming a ‘sexual spastic’ and converting to a gay lifestyle. Controversy is provoked once more through its perceived sexism and homophobia, but in reality the fear derives not from his creator but from Bobby himself, the ‘cutest boy in town’ and embodiment of the American Dream who dreams of date rape. ‘Perverse’ Politician (1984–1993) The upheavals of the 1980s did not sap Zappa’s energies, rather the contrary, as he concentrated on the political stage. Times had changed and social satire shifted to politics as Reaganomics replaced the idealism of the 1960s and activism of the 1970s. The new economic order affected everyone – indeed, Zappa, like many other musicians, now found it hard to make a living from touring. Even before his political period, he was spending more time in the studio, his albums increasingly  Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act I, and Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III.  Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 53   Provenza and Dion, Satiristas!: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs and Vulgarians, pp. 23–4. 54   The Mothers, Just Another Band from L.A., Reprise, 144179 (1972). 55   Rainey, Lawrence (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven, 2005), p. 258. 56  Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 57   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free. 51

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concept-like to the point of pure drama, although, given their uncompromising content and language, it was unlikely that Joe’s Garage: Acts I,58 II & III 59 and Thing-Fish60 would be taken seriously in the idiom. As befits any artist’s mature/ late period, Zappa narrowed his satirical focus and started naming names – Ronald Reagan, Peter Frampton, Richard Nixon. This over-specificness ran the risk of rapidly dating the material and restricting it to a home audience since such figures were hardly comic universals like ‘Billy the Mountain’61 or ‘Bobby Brown’.62 Indeed, by his own admission, the off-the-road Zappa spent many hours daily watching CNN,63 a politicised channel designed for his nemesis Middle America. His usual comic universe mostly abandoned, Zappa eschewed his comedian’s hat for that of avant-garde composer. The titles and motifs of his ‘classical’ music continued to reflect his trademark humour, but without the wordsmith there were few clues for where that humour was directed. As if by design, in 1989, a year after the release of Zappa’s last studio album of original songs, Broadway the Hard Way,64 the satirical yet mainstream The Simpsons started broadcasting primetime to the nation – Matt Groening, creator of America’s longest running scripted series, is famously vocal in acknowledging his debt to Zappa. Meanwhile, Zappa created pieces for the Synclavier and orchestras, lambasted fellow composers, compiled collages from the vaults, and found himself in demand as a ‘mobile political conscience’. He became, for example, something of an ambassador in the crumbling Soviet Bloc (in Czechoslovakia he was revered, like Brecht, as a great artist of the people), and a political commentator and campaigner at home – notably fighting the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and encouraging voter registration. However, Zappa’s political aspirations ultimately were limited since a satirist, even when part of the Establishment, needs to be free to pillory anyone in power regardless of affiliation, an exercise leached of credibility if that satirist is a paid-up member of the process. Satire continued as a vehicle for his moral and political messages, but it was increasingly not to the taste of all.65 It can certainly be argued that in the USA Zappa’s words first grabbed the audience, followed by the music, while it was the opposite in Europe where he was welcomed as a pioneer of jazz fusion. According to Ben Watson, Hot Rats66 was so popular in Europe because of its ‘professional,  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act I.  Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III. 60   Frank Zappa, Thing-Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKCO74201 (1984). 61   The Mothers, Just Another Band from L.A.. 62  Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 63   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 349. 64   Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988). 65   On Zappa as social critic, Barry Miles (Frank Zappa, pp. 107–8) provides further insight on his shift and loss of comic focus from the Jewish tradition of mocking liberal pieties to lambasting right-wingers in power. 66  Zappa, Hot Rats. 58 59

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straight-ahead sound’,67 adding that it was a hit because there was ‘no musique concrète, no live chaos, no Suzy Cheamcheese, no nonsense’.68 Indeed, 16 years later, for the original release of Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention,69 Fisher Lowe notes how ‘Zappa created about an album and a half worth of material and decided that the European release did not need a 12-minute composition about a US Senate hearing [‘Porn Wars’], so that song was left out and others included.’70 Certainly, in ‘Porn Wars’ his attack on the PMRC before the US Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation Committee is overspecific and angry, over-egging the satirical thrust in a collage of congressional hearing soundbites and Zappa aphorisms that carry little resonance for those who were not party to the struggle. At 12-plus minutes, the ‘song’ is best absorbed via the accompanying public information-style video, or the chapter of the same name in his autobiography,71 a more revealing experience where Zappa’s speech, if somewhat belaboured, drips with an irony wasted on the lawmakers (and the song). More successful songs on the album include venomous onslaughts against the hippies of yesteryear and the kids of today with ‘Turning Again’ – ‘an almost petulant attack on 60s revivalism’72 – and unionised musicians with ‘Yo Cats’. The subsequent Broadway the Hard Way73 features a high-profile hit-list from Ronald Reagan to Michael Jackson with a slew of adulterous evangelists in between. Including such titles as ‘Dickie’s Such an Asshole’, ‘Jesus Thinks You’re a Jerk’ and ‘Rhymin’ Man’, if not subtle, this is arguably Zappa’s most satisfyingly political oeuvre, albeit at some cost of accessibility. Further Comic Elements in Zappa’s Humour Although not included within the main focus of this chapter, it is useful to note other dimensions of Zappa’s use of humour. Due to the restrictions of time and budget,   Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York, 1993), p. 161. 68   Ibid. Aside from the political opaqueness, it should also be noted that English was not as widely understood in Europe as it is now. 69   Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203 (1985). 70   Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa, p. 195. 71   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, pp. 261–91. 72   Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa (London, 1997), p. 261. But the recurrent accusation of meanness misses the fact that the trait goes with the job (cf. Peter Cook’s evilness to Dudley Moore, his comic partner, friend and muse, in their Derek and Clive routines). Unusually, despite the barbs in his material and proving an often prickly interviewee, as a performer Zappa was the consummate entertainer – again finding parallel with Bruce. 73  Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way. 67

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his manipulation of comic imagery and action in films such as 200 Motels74 and Baby Snakes75 was hit-and-miss, resulting in a string of flawed masterpieces. More consistent success rested in arresting images such as the Toilet Posters76 and the extensive gallery of album covers, particularly those with Carl Schenkel-produced artwork/packaging, such as We’re Only in It for the Money.77 Zappa’s non-verbal humour is also expressed through musical puns, quotations and slapstick, a large proportion of which fulfilled a satirical purpose. ‘The Adventures of Greggery Peccary’78 is a classic Zappa epic built around such aural puns and in-jokes, e.g. the line ‘slowly aging very hip young people’ is accompanied by a musical quote from Herbie Hancock’s own jazz-fusion epic ‘Chameleon’,79 and later the theme from family sitcom My Three Sons80 emerges during the honkytonk piano section. ‘Musically, the song seems to blend the art-rock ideas of “Billy the Mountain” with the avant-cartoon music of “Manx Needs Women”.’81 At every level of Zappa’s music running jokes abound. In addition to adding a comic dimension they also serve to frame the often disparate pieces, favoured motifs being poodles, tweezers, leather/läther,82 quotes from ‘Louie Louie’83 and Suzy Creamcheese. But the ultimate running joke was on Zappa, literally. While he did not play on his Mediterranean ethnic roots in his material, he did so unashamedly in the depiction of his image. His (now trademarked) moustache was both iconic and ironic in statement, a flippant/sinister Zapata outgrowth that stuck up a middle finger at the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant psyche – as close to a threatening afro or Black Power fist as his ethnicity permitted.84 The significance of the moustache was confirmed by the fact that, publicly at least, it was never shaved off.   Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer, 200 Motels, United Artists (1971).   Frank Zappa, Baby Snakes, Intercontinental Absurdities (1979). 76   Otherwise known as Phi Zappa Krappa (1967). 77   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in It for the Money, Verve, V6-5045 (1968). 78   Frank Zappa, Studio Tan, DiscReet, DSK 2291 (1978). 79   Herbie Hancock, Head Hunters, Columbia, KC32731 (1973). 80   An innovative US TV series that ran from 1960 to 1972. 81   Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa, p. 137. ‘Manx Needs Women’ appears on Frank Zappa, Zappa in New York, DiscReet, 2D 2290 (1978). 82   Recorded conversations that appeared in fragments across several albums. For a fully reconstructed transcript see Anonymous 8, ‘Leather’ (2012), at http://globalia.net/ donlope/fz/songs/Leather.html [accessed 17 January 2012]. 83   Although written by Richard Berry in 1955 and first released in 1957 (Richard Berry and The Pharaohs, ‘Louie Louie’, Flip Records, 321 (1957), a later version by the Kingsmen (The Kingsmen, ‘Louie Louie’, Wand, WND 143 [1963]) was subject to an FBI investigation for obscenity that ended without prosecution. 84   It should be noted that Italian-Americans and other ‘ethnics’ only entered the mainstream in the early 1970s thanks in the main to contemporary films from Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese – cf. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the SexDrugs-and-Rock ʼNʼ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York, 1999). 74 75

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Zappa therefore stood out in his home nation because, though a product that only a melting pot such as America could nurture, his nature was highly European, particularly in intellectual outlook. The ‘classical’ influences he channelled from an early age were overtly European yet, tellingly, they looked to America, as exemplified by his idol, the Italian/French composer (and sometime dadaist) Edgard Varèse who became a US citizen yet continued to work on both sides of the Atlantic. Logically, Zappa’s sense of the avant-garde was also European, and he collaborated with musicians from across the continent. Indeed, his interest was more than reciprocated from Europe, where his earthy scatology and political tilting posed no obstacle to his being hailed as a ‘serious’ artist, an appraisal that continues to be problematic in his own land. Europe provided formal American satire with its roots, in the main a direct continuation of the British tradition, starting with British-born Ebenezer Cooke’s The Sotweed Factor,85 followed by such giants as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. By the turn of the twentieth century, art forms had expanded with prosperity and the voice of the satirist became diffused (as later it would do after the socio-economic explosion of the late 1980s), the epicentre migrating from literary intellectualism to popular literature and the performing arts. Early twentieth-century examples include L. Frank Baum’s Oz series,86 after which the most innovative satirists tended to be Jews who were proud to keep their European influences active: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator 87 was a daring and stunning statement, while the post-war breakthrough came with Mad magazine,88 Lenny Bruce (fl. mid-1950s–mid-1960s), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22,89 and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.90 The true milestone was stand-up comedian Bruce, the spark for the satirical continuum that guaranteed Zappa his comic context. Satire bred satire when Zappa set out to combine his music with recordings of the late Bruce – known as the Our Man in Nirvana project. However, this was 1967, the year when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.91 Zappa was stung by claims in the press of it being the first concept album, when the honour belonged to

  Ebenezer Cooke, The Sotweed Factor (London, 1708).   Published from 1900 onwards. 87   Charlie Chaplin and Wheeler Dryden, The Great Dictator, United Artists (1940). 88   Launched in 1952, the magazine is still published today. Its founding team were mostly Brooklyn Jews. 89   Joseph Heller, Catch 22 (New York, 1961). 90   Stanley Kubrick, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Columbia Pictures (1964). 91   The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, PCS-7027 (1967). 85 86

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Freak Out!,92 released in June 1966,93 and he instead wrote We’re Only in It for the Money,94 a satirical, part-parody response released by The Mothers of Invention in early 1968, topped by Carl Schenkel’s grotesque re-creation of Sgt. Pepper’s seminal cover. Tantalisingly, all that survived of Zappa’s original collage is the distorted ‘Don’t come in me, in me!’ that tails off ‘Harry, You’re a Beast’,95 a nod to the seminal Bruce routine ‘To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb’.96 Both Bruce and Zappa had found a natural home in America’s counterculture network which catered equally for new comedy, music, literature and politics. This was an influential environment that encouraged experimentation and stimulated the growth of a profitable alternative performance circuit, pioneered by coffeehouses such as Herb Cohen’s The Unicorn in Los Angeles. The venues and their curious customers were considered to be a sufficient threat to public morals that the authorities started a crackdown in the early 1960s – it was policeinstigated disturbances around L.A. coffeehouses that provided much inspiration for the writing of Freak Out! 97 Bruce made his name here as did Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, and so it was logical that their paths would cross.98 Indeed, even though not personally close, there was a clear resonance in their outlooks, while professionally the pair played the same bill once (Bruce’s last performance) and shared Cohen as manager. When Bruce died of an overdose, Zappa delivered a eulogy at the funeral. Of Bruce’s countless comic successors, in many ways it was Zappa who was the rightful heir to his throne. In terms of humour Bruce was undeniably Zappa’s principal influence – and the latter’s material, exposition and moral positioning within society parallel Bruce’s own methodology and code. While the influence of members of Zappa’s own bands, particularly Ike Willis who was very much a muse, demands further documentation, it was inspiration rather than influence that came from other comic sources, a balance of the wave of ‘alternative’ and political stand-ups such as Carlin and Dick Gregory, and popular national fare such as Amos ’n’ Andy, My Three Sons, Second City Television and Saturday Night Live. Aside from his friendship with Captain Beefheart, it is similarly hard to identify Zappa’s musical comic influences, although he occasionally alludes to earlier artists such as bandleader Spike Jones, who had a string of mainstream

  The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!.   Although Paul McCartney later acknowledged the influence of Freak Out!, in reality Sgt. Pepper was not a true concept album. 94   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in It for the Money. 95   Ibid. 96   Lenny Bruce, To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb, Knitting Factory, 3019 (2000). 97   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 98   Pamela Zarubica (as Suzy Creamcheese) recalls that she and Zappa, when still an unknown, shared the same diner as Bruce and Phil Spector for a while in the mid 1960s. 92

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semi-satirical hits such as ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’99 and ‘All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth’100 which blended lyric and instrumental humour.101 This gap should not be surprising since Zappa was the creator of a unique fusion of humour and music, producing an unparalleled and prolific body of satirical work that few in America before or since have matched in consistency or prominence. Randy Newman has had his moments, peaking with Good Old Boys,102 so too Warren Zevon with incisive songs such as ‘The French Inhaler’103 and ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner’.104 Needless to say, none embraced the full range of satire as Zappa, with the notable exception of George Clinton and Parliament/ Funkadelic, although here the satirical message was soon lost to the music. Other ‘safer’ exponents of the cutting edge of humour in American popular music include the dadaistic Monks (American ex-GIs based in 1960s West Germany), and 1970s/1980s bands such as the Residents, Devo and Talking Heads who took the pulse of ‘Americana absurdum’. Many such artists have stated their admiration for Zappa’s humour but identifying distinct elements within their own work is problematic. A high-profile example is Weird Al Jankovic, who is often reported as being influenced by Zappa and yet his presumed satirical message is overwhelmed by parody. Songs such as ‘Like a Surgeon’105 and ‘Smells Like Nirvana’106 may raise a smile but neither will challenge the intellect nor impress with virtuoso musicianship (ironically Jankovic’s songs feature top session players with state-of-the-art production). Artists as diverse as System of a Down, Primus, Todd Rundgren, John Zorn and George Winston have acknowledged Zappa’s influence but it is their vision rather than their material that reflects this humour-wise or musically. Conclusion Identifying Zappa’s humour, its forms and context, is key to mapping the wider complex legacy of this complex artist. Zappa himself offered few answers, preferring that Brechtian ideal of getting people to laugh and letting them work out why afterwards. According to Kelly Fisher Lowe:   First released in 1942, available on Spike Jones, The Wacky World of Spike Jones, Pair, PDC2-1216 (1988). 100   First released in 1948, available on Spike Jones, It’s a Spike Jones Christmas, Rhino, R1-70196 (1988). 101   A squib in Zappa’s autobiography entitled ‘Does Humor Belong in Music?’ ends with a dedication to Jones (Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, pp. 171–2). 102   Randy Newman, Good Old Boys, Reprise, REP54022 (1974). 103   Warren Zevon, Warren Zevon, Asylum, R11060 (1976). 104   Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy, Asylum Records, K53073 (1978). 105   Weird Al Jankovic, Dare to Be Stupid, Scotti Bros, SCT26523 (1985). 106   Weird Al Jankovic, Off the Deep End, Rock’n’Roll, FZ-4033 (1992).  99

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… ample evidence exists that Zappa did not want the role of cultural critic and that it was, perhaps, thrust upon him (in part because of his outspoken nature and his inability to refuse an interview). It is debatable whether or not Zappa wanted the role of public critic.107

He was not seen to formally embrace the idealism of Jonathan Swift, and the idea that ‘what Zappa did in his music was to test democracy’ is overstated.108 That his humour did affect and influence others on many levels is widely recognised, yet compiling concrete documentation remains a challenge. As we have seen, Zappa’s humour constantly adapted to maintain its relevance and yet it emanated from a highly personal and only partially revealed vision, meaning that his comic legacy has been essentially one of spirit rather than technique or material, i.e. the imparting of ‘attitude’. Viewed this way, Zappa’s logical peers were not comedians or musicians but those who similarly integrated satire in often unexpected ways into their art and whose influence transcends that art: cartoonist Robert Crumb, writer Philip K. Dick and artist Andy Warhol.109 Collectively, there exists a vast body of analysis detailing their own multi-levelled creativities and influence, and one hopes that the mapping of Zappa’s legacy will take inspiration from this and so counter the impression today that his cultural presence struggles to stay alive. Understanding Zappa the satirist is critical to understanding Zappa the musician and will help resolve the problem of whether he left separate legacies. Certainly, when viewed as ‘attitude’, his humour has travelled not only beyond physical and mental boundaries but also its main vehicle of music. Further research is required therefore to create an independent body of work to quantify this, which is also sure to establish Matt Groening as his direct comic heir, just as Zappa inherited the spirit of Lenny Bruce.110

  Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa, p. 12.   Kevin Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Frank Zappa (Toronto, 2002), p. 327. 109   Like Zappa, Crumb and Warhol owed much to their Catholic upbringing (Dick was raised as a likewise complex Episcopalian). 110   An imbalance which it is hoped this article and volume helps identify and redress. For an informed insight into the present and future challenges of developing Zappa’s legacy, reference should be made to Carr, ‘An Autocratic Approach to Music Copyright?. 107 108

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Chapter 6

Zappa and Resistance: The Pleasure Principle Claude Chastagner

Artists are in a privileged position to voice the grievances of the silent, helpless, anonymous citizen. They can articulate the disapproval of objectionable legislation, obnoxious leaders, insufferable social policies, or ruthless economic plans. They can testify in court against censorship, write paeans to the rainforests, organise concerts to fight famine, or persuade people to register to vote. I am obviously alluding to the much publicised actions of artists like Sting, Bob Geldof, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, George Harrison, R.E.M., and many others, including Franz Zappa. There are so many ways to disagree with one’s contemporaries, and so many reasons to do it. However, Sting’s or Bob Geldof’s agendas were probably different from Frank Zappa’s when he testified against censorship in popular music at the Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC) Senate hearing in 1985, or when he wrote ‘don’t forget to register to vote’ on the sleeve of his Fillmore East, June 71 album.1 As a rule, rock musicians have opted for two main strategies, which have by now become quite familiar. One is overt protest, in the form of rebellious anthems, crowd-arousing slogans, angry riffs, or defiant postures. This has been the case with some late 1960s bands (from Country Joe and the Fish to Jefferson Airplane), numerous punk bands, among them, most prominently, The Clash, and more recently groups such as Rage Against the Machine, The Agitator, or Lethal Bizzle. The other has been to devote oneself to a cause, organise and federate fellow artists, and raise money and consciousness by staging worldwide events. Frank Zappa is a stranger to both, with few of his songs relying on straightforward rebellious riffs, save in a tongue-in-cheek manner, and lyrics rather meant to make people think, laugh, or frown, than yell slogans. Likewise, Zappa was never concerned by charity rock, though he often opposed the advocates of censorship. Zappa, however, could easily stand as protest incarnate. His pedigree is indeed irreproachable: 10 days in jail in 1964 for what was considered pornographic recordings, the patronage of Václav Havel, his public indictment of the PMRC agenda, etc. His lyrics often read as violent satires of Middle America,2 scathing

  Frank Zappa, The Mothers – Fillmore East, June 1971, Bizarre, MS2042 (1971).   ‘Concentration Moon’, on The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in It for the Money, Verve, V6-5045 (1967). 1 2

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attacks on all kinds of religious bigotry,3 rednecks,4 and televangelists,5 while his compositions have consistently challenged moral and musical norms, including those of rock music.6 Hence his iconic rebellious status, which in the seventies and eighties stretched behind the Iron Curtain. At the same time, Zappa, who defined himself as a ‘practical conservative’,7 was a staunch opponent of drug consumption,8 a ferocious critic of Flower Power and the New Left,9 a fully-fledged entrepreneur, fighting against copyright piracy, and a ruthless, almost tyrannical bandleader, collaborating with the most established representatives of classical music and the avant-garde, such as the London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain, or Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern. So, what can be made of Frank Zappa? Was he an artiste engagé, fighting for a cause? Or should we write him off as a non-achiever in terms of political and social commitment, an egocentric whose main ambition was the recognition of his talent as a composer? And if so, how come so many fans have been able to see in him a leader, a role model, a figurehead in their fight against the Establishment, and in their attempt to disengage themselves from the expectations of consumer society? Neither openly rebellious, nor compliant, Frank Zappa’s ambiguous attitude could best be defined as resistance. Indeed, ambiguity is at the heart of resistance. As Yves-Charles Grandjeat writes: Even artists who have adopted indisputable attitudes of resistance, also display strands of conformity. Even those whose targets are conspicuous evince a considerable degree of ambiguity … For if the resisting individual refuses to be dragged onto his opponent’s field, and be absorbed by his logic, he must nevertheless be heard by him, and those who support him, in order to obfuscate

  ‘Jewish Princess’, on Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, SRZ-2-1501 (1979) or ‘Catholic Girls’, on Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III, SRZ21502 (1979). 4   ‘Harder Than Your Husband’, on Frank Zappa, You Are What You Is, Barking Pumpkin, PW2 37537 (1981). 5   ‘Jesus Think You’re a Jerk’, on Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988). 6   Suffice it to mention songs like ‘Bobby Brown’ (Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti), for their gross sexual allusions, or Frank Zappa, Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger, Emi, DS-38170 (1984) for one of his most extreme incursions outside the realm of rock music. 7   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 315. 8   ‘Cosmik Debris’, on Frank Zappa, Apostrophe (’), DiscReet, DS2175 (1974). 9   ‘We’re Turning Again’, on Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203 (1985). 3

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his message and subvert his power … Such ambiguity is eventually the main difficulty, but also, the main interest of adopting a posture of resistance.10

This chapter aims to probe the nature of Frank Zappa’s resistance, its objective, and its potential effectiveness. For, ultimately, an essential, nagging question has to be addressed: what is the point of resisting? The Specifics of Resistance In a theoretical chapter that opens Resistance Through Rituals, John Clarke et al. note: ‘Negotiation, resistance, struggle: the relations between a subordinate and a dominant culture, wherever they fall within this spectrum, are always intensely active, always oppositional …’11 Unfortunately, and despite the presence of the word in the title of their opus, there is remarkably no clear definition of what the authors mean by resistance. They rather seem to use the term interchangeably with struggle, or opposition. Similarly, Paul Corrigan and Simon Frith outline how to transform ‘resistance into rebellion’,12 but little distinction is made between the various forms the relations between subordinate and dominant social groups take. Likewise, other authors indiscriminately resort to resistance or various concepts such as protest, rebellion, confrontation, contestation, or even revolution, without clarifying the specificity of each of these closely related, yet distinct terms. Thus Simon Frith claims that ‘part of the resistance displayed by consumers of popular culture has been seen in their reinterpretation and creative appropriation of massmarketed products’,13 while John Fiske reminds us that the culture of everyday life has often been described ‘through metaphors of struggle or antagonism: strategies opposed by tactics, the bourgeoisie by the proletariat; hegemony met by resistance, ideology countered or evaded’,14 and in her preface to Alex Edelstein’s Total Propaganda, Katharine E. Heintz-Knowles writes that ‘consumers make their own meanings from texts presented in the mass media, regardless of the intent of the producer. So the audience has always had the power of resistance’.15 Resistance is thus a much used, or misused concept, with little attention paid to its specifics, or worse, to the difference between strategies of resistance implemented by artists, and what is usually understood by ‘resisting consumers’.   Yves-Charles Grandjeat (ed.), Le Travail de la résistance dans les sociétés, les littératures et les arts en Amérique du Nord. (Bordeaux, 2009), pp. 17–21 (Translated by author). 11   Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London, 1993), p. 43. 12   Hall and Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals, p. 238. 13   Simon Frith, Sociology of Rock (London, 1978), p. 189. 14   John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston, 1989), p. 47. 15   Alex Edelstein, Total Propaganda: From Mass Culture to Popular Culture (Mahwah, 1997), p. xiii. 10

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Resistance, however, holds a specific position between strategies of negotiation on the one hand, and the various forms of overt disagreement on the other. Neither violent rebellion nor collaboration, resistance explores a third possibility, and strives for an intermediary position, in the interstices between these more familiar, but less subtle, responses. Resisting individuals, from Henry David Thoreau to Barry Lopez16 or Mark Hollis,17 may try to change their worlds, but not necessarily by putting up a fight, or resorting to confrontational tactics. Their resistance rather implies withstanding pressure, and refusing to comply. Such practices though, have led to misunderstandings because of their ambiguity, and as a result have been differently appraised. Contrary to the impeccably militant The Clash, Crass, or Chumbawamba, more ambiguously resisting individuals such as Pete Townshend or Damon Albarn have been criticised both by the advocates of overt opposition, for being compromised or co-opted, and by the proponents of more conciliatory stances, for being futilely, and unnecessarily zealous. Yves-Charles Grandjeat claims that the artists: whose names history retains are those who have been able to imagine and communicate their vision of alternative worlds, by being off-centre, against the grain, in a space of radical difference … Their resistance, precisely, cultivates uncertainty. They do not affirm so much as they destabilise and question.18

Zappa, along with Bob Dylan or Neil Young, is one in a not-so-long line of musicians who have broken through established modes of representation and subverted them, have destroyed a few moulds, and untangled themselves from constraining traditions. But radical difference can indeed be disconcerting. By asserting their independence, they risk estranging themselves from their public. Audiences may consequently find it difficult to grasp their message, and engage in their universe. They may even denounce their radical difference and their questioning as a form of violence. For difference generates as much repulsion as fascination. It challenges our assumptions and convictions in ways we may find unbearable. Hence the misapprehension these artists have fallen prey to: though carefully avoiding inyour-face criticism, they have been indicted for being bad examples, misguided gurus, or dangerous ringleaders.19 However, it is proposed that resistance really has nothing to do with being a guru, or an example to follow. True resistance results from personal positions, which were never intended as behavioural models. It is generated by the decisions of individuals who never had but themselves in mind when they spoke out and never conceived themselves as ringleaders: it is   See for instance Barry Lopez, Resistance (New York, 2005).   A member of the British band Talk Talk. His positions were made particularly visible after he withdrew from the music business in the 2000s. 18  Grandjeat, Le Travail de la résistance, p. 16 (Translated by author). 19   See for instance Seth Rogovoy, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet (New York, 2009). 16 17

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only by accident, against his will, that the resisting artist becomes a figurehead. To return to an artist already mentioned, Bono, precisely because of his eagerness to become a symbol of resistance, and to lead his fans/followers onto the path of moral righteousness and political correctness, can hardly be taken as a paragon of resistance, being often dismissed, on the contrary, as a fraud, or an immature ‘eager beaver’, whose rash actions could even worsen the situation in Africa.20 At the risk of incurring the wrath of many readers, one could add quite a few names to a list of genuinely committed, but overacting artists, from John Lennon and Michael Stipe, to Bob Geldof and Zach de la Rocha. On the other hand, the politically involved, but more discreet Robert Wyatt is probably closer to establishing a ‘cult’ following, and becoming an example of genuine resistance. True resistance does not imply enticing anyone to do anything (seize power, take arms, screw the system); true resistance is first and foremost the affirmation of an irreducible autonomy. Artists cannot be held responsible if someone in the audience chooses to emulate their quest for freedom and elects them as their role models. Joseph Tabbi, in his afterword to William Gaddis’ Agapē, Agape, writes that ‘the single voice that emerges out of competing voices and constraining media’ expresses much more than a hopeless and vain struggle ‘against commodification by the capitalist machine’.21 Tabbi makes it clear that an artist like Gaddis ‘does not fool himself into imagining that he can oppose his art’s power to the power of the material world’.22 Rather, the artist can articulate and coordinate his singularity ‘with the vast systems and structures that … shape our world’.23 Resisting, i.e., living in the interstices between open rebellion and co-optation, is one of the manifestations of such articulation. It implies expressing a personal representation of the world, which may, in turn, prompt us to ‘fashion new images of ourselves within that world’,24 and lead us onto the path of resistance. Resistance Through Humour To explore Frank Zappa’s strategy of resistance, we shall paradoxically turn to what may seem at first like one of his less ‘resisting’ pieces, a gross, sexually incorrect sketch, ‘Do You Like My New Car/Happy Together’,25 sometimes called ‘the groupie routine’, that Zappa performed on stage from the early 1970s to   See for instance Paul Theroux, ‘The Rock Star’s Burden’, The New York Times (15 December 2005). 21   Joseph Taddi, Afterword, in William Gaddis, Agapē Agape (New York, 2003), p. 107. 22   Ibid. 23   Ibid. 24   Ibid. 25   The two interlinked tracks were recorded live in New York’s Fillmore East on 5 and 6 June 1971 and appear on Zappa, The Mothers – Fillmore East, June 1971. Unless otherwise indicated, all further references to either of these songs refer to this recording. 20

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December 1977. The term ‘groupie’ applies to those young girls who offer sexual gratification to whatever rock musician happens to be playing in their town, and groupie folklore is a recurrent feature in Zappa’s work. According to Paul Carr, it is ‘one of the most pervasive themes that Zappa revisited’,26 as if he was trying to ‘encapsulat[e] the zeitgeist’27 of the late 1960s–early 1970s, the years of the groupies. More than songs, ‘Do You Like My New Car/Happy Together’ are in fact a partly improvised playlet, with singer Howard Kaylan in his own role, and the rest of the band incarnating provincial groupies. Unashamedly pandering to the most vulgar forms of pleasure by resorting to crude, vulgar jokes on sexual matters, it fits beautifully the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity by appealing to our prurient interests. In choosing these songs, we entertain the hope that such apparently vulgar pieces of entertainment may, better than more obviously committed tracks, contain and reveal the essence of Zappa’s resistance. ‘Do You Like My New Car’ relies on several concurrent techniques, as outlined below: 1. The use of vulgar and sexual terms that position the song on the verge of pornography: For example, ‘hole’, ‘rock off’, ‘clit’, ‘dick’, ‘shoved up and down a donkey’s ass until he can’t come’, ‘bend over and spread ’em’, etc.28 One should also note a few attempts at a Rabelaisian confluence of food and sex,29 complemented by a couple of sonorous eructations.30 2. The inversion of sexual identities, with male musicians (here Howard Kaylan) playing the part of young women. However, they do it without altering their voices, and trying to sound more feminine by adopting a higher pitch. This in itself is a breach of the conventions followed by female impersonators,31 and is a measure of the extent to which Zappa departs from traditional forms and does not pay heed to verisimilitude. 3. Lack of adherence to conventional musical codes: rock concerts do not usually include such long, spoken passages during which the musical accompaniment is reduced to a few muted, repetitive chords, and a discreet 26

  Paul Carr, ‘“Make a Sex Noise Here”: Frank Zappa, Sex and Popular Music’, in Dietrich Helms and Thomas Phelps (eds), Thema Nr. 1: Sex und Populäre Musik (Bielefeld, 2011): pp. 135–49, at 142, an article which provides a thorough analysis of Zappa’s dealings with sexual topics. Carr highlights to what extent Zappa had an almost anthropological perspective on rock musicians’ sexual behaviour. 27   Ibid., p. 143. 28   As of today, however, the record is still sold without the infamous RIAA ‘parental advisory/explicit lyrics’ sticker Zappa devoted so much time and energy to fight. 29   As exemplified by Volman’s line ‘the enchilada with a pickle sauce shoved up a donkey’s ass’. 30   Presumably by Frank Zappa himself. 31   Think, for instance, of the shrill-sounding ladies played by the cast of Monty Python in their Flying Circus programmes, or Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder, Some Like it Hot, Ashton Productions (1959).

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rhythmic pattern on the drums. In fact, the piece sounds more like cabaret or vaudeville, though the rest of the show is more in line with traditional rock music. 4. Blurring of genre distinctions: the musical accompaniment of both tracks blends two theoretically incompatible musical forms. On the one hand, atonal or dissonant sounds that accompany passages in ‘Do You Like My New Car’ such as the ‘bullet’, the ‘monster’, and ‘I can’t stand it’, all of which portray Frank Zappa’s lifelong interest in Edgard Varèse and ‘serious’ contemporary music. On the other, closing the sketch, an innocuous and vapid (though catchy) pop tune, ‘Happy Together’, a worldwide hit by The Turtles in 1967,32 performed here by the two formers singers of The Turtles, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, now members of Frank Zappa’s band under the pseudonyms of Flo and Eddie (for contractual reasons). Besides, not only are the two genres juxtaposed and offered consecutively to the same audience, which is in itself unusual, but the conventionally romantic lyrics of ‘Happy Together’ are also collocated seamlessly with the obscene words mentioned above, to the effect of creating a jarring, but arresting contrast. 5. Irony and satire. Zappa’s targets include not only, as could be expected, middle-class tastes and values, but also the idiosyncrasies of the rock world: a. Middle America is the most obvious butt of Zappa’s irony, with its tedious suburbs and undistinguished farmlands, and its bored, teenage girls, desperate for any kind of action, be it with second-rate rock stars. The question that gives the song its title, ‘do you like my new car?’, refers to the hideous Gremlins33 their dads offer them for graduation, which fail to alleviate the dullness of their lives. Theirs is a plastic, superficial, and provincial America, both fascinated and repelled by the City, Hollywood, its rock stars, and their hits (or better still, their ‘bullets’, with the obvious sexual connotation attached to the term). b. The verbal mannerisms used by teenagers are also satirised by Zappa, something he pursued in 1982 with the hit ‘Valley Girl’34 co-written with his daughter Moon Unit, in which they lampooned the spoiled, upper-middle-class San Fernando Valley teenagers, and their Valspeak. c. Eventually, the rock industry gets its share: endless touring, life on the road, fast, noncommittal, sexual gratifications, the quest for the monster hit rather than meaningful music, as well as the hypocrisy of both rock musicians (‘would I lie to you just to get into your pants?’), and their groupies (‘we are not groupies!’). The satirical impact is all the stronger

32

  The Turtles, ‘Happy Together’, London Records, 7L-6030-A (1967).   A trendy, but rather ridiculous model of cars manufactured in the 1970s by the American Motors Corporation. 34   Frank Zappa, Ship Arriving To Late To Save A Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, FW 38066 (1982). 33

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since Zappa creates an effet de réel35 by referring to actual musicians such as Bobby Sherman, Jimmy Greenspoon (of Three Dog Night), Robert Planet [sic], Elton John, and Roger Daltrey. However, all of these practices raise a major question: to what extent are they really satirical? Should we not take them at face value, as an example of Zappa’s grossness and lack of political correctness? Irony and satire reveal a sense of purpose, the intent to criticise follies and vices, and reform people. True, some of Zappa’s comments are so scathing as to amount to sarcasm, with the sacrificial undertones implied by the Greek roots of ‘sarcasm’: to tear flesh. But the song is so indiscriminate in its targets that it is difficult to consider it as a regular piece of satire, with its concomitant denunciatory and moralistic tenor (regardless of the fact that even if we did, satire, as an unambiguous, univocal strategy would not fall into the definition of resistance previously given in this chapter). Taken together with the use of transgressive techniques, Zappa’s reformist streak rather amounts to a prank, the pure pleasure of making fun, of going as far as possible, of showing an utter lack of respect, and building one’s own, complex mix of strategies no one else would or could emulate. Indeed, Zappa’s ultimate, overarching strategy seems to be humour: Frank and his musicians have decided to have a good laugh. The tracks sound like pure entertainment, a comic routine based on sexual, misogynistic clichés, as is often the case with stand-up comedians for instance. The intended purpose seems to be easy, immediate, unclean fun. However, humour is an elusive quality. Its impact depends on the audience’s response: something is humorous to the extent that someone finds it so. This is even truer of the various forms of transgression Zappa uses: sexual incorrectness, vulgarity, or downright meanness36 more than laughter, may provoke disapproval or castigation. Humour is a most personal thing. Contrary to the postures of protest and rebellion used by Zappa’s contemporaries in a rather interchangeable fashion, humour was (and still is), a rather infrequent commodity in rock music. Most songs resorting to humour are novelty ones aiming at purely comical effects. As early as the Forties, Spike Jones and his City Slickers established a tradition whose influence can clearly be heard in The Chipmunks, with, for example, ‘The Chipmunk Song’,37 or in later songs such as ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!’ by Napoleon XIV,38 and of course in Frank Zappa. Another source of inspiration closer to surrealism and the nonsensical mood of nursery rhymes can be traced in the work of The Beach 35

  A concept developed by Roland Barthes roughly translated as ‘reality effect’.   As for instance when Howard Kaylan says ‘Roger Daltrey [the often derided lead singer of The Who] never laid a hand on me’ to which Mark Volman retorts ‘It’s obvious to see why’. Zappa, The Mothers – Fillmore East, June 1971. 37   The Chipmunks, ‘The Chipmunk Song’, Liberty, F-55168 (1958). 38   Napoleon XIV, ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-haaa!’, Eric Records, AR 195 (1966). 36

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Boys, on Smiley Smile particularly,39 or on Pink Floyd’s first album,40 or even in The Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’,41 and ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’.42 Being one of the very few to use humour on a regular basis may already be an indication of the nature of Zappa’s resistance, of the interstice he has chosen to proffer a personal representation of the world. One frequent ingredient of Zappa’s humour is his unexpected musical (less frequently verbal) quotes, such as, in our case, the ‘Happy Together’ snippet. Paul Carr, in a recent clever paper on tribute bands covering Zappa’s music, details some of these (not always legal) borrowings, and to what extent they stand as ‘examples of Zappa implementing his First Amendment rights’.43 Indeed, from this unusual perspective, the practice of humour can also be construed as a form of resistance, and a claim to free speech. For Michel Delville and Andrew Norris, Zappa rejects ‘the “no pain, no gain” theory of aesthetic pleasure’.44 Obviously, quite a few members of the audience do not need any kind of pain to enjoy themselves as much as Zappa does, and relish both his crude, unbridled jokes, and the catchy little ditty (‘Happy Together’) that closes the passage. Could we conclude then, that all pain set apart, this sketch is pure pleasure, deprived of any strictly satirical intent, that it must be taken as immediate, first degree entertainment? That the distance between the satirical text and the behaviours it targets has vanished, which is a common predicament with satire? That it is impossible to identify clearly Zappa’s attitude, and distinguish between revelling in vulgarity and using it as a weapon, or a target? Admittedly, Frank Zappa’s positions regarding American society and its figures of authority are clear. On numerous occasions, in interviews as well as on stage, in courtrooms as on records, he has vilified his contemporaries’ practices, opinions, and tastes. However, by integrating into his music the behaviours that he denounces elsewhere and adopting them himself (declaring for example that ‘the single most important development in modern music is making a business out of it’45), he introduces a degree of ambiguity. As David Wragg put it, ‘by labelling all his whole work as “entertainment”, Zappa appears … to have identified himself

  The Beach Boys, Smiley Smile, Capitol, ST-09001 (1967).   Pink Floyd, The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, Tower, ST 5093 (1967). 41   The Beatles, ‘Yellow Submarine’, Capitol Records, 5715 (1966). 42   The Beatles, ‘You Know My Name’, Apple Records, 2764 (1970). 43   Paul Carr, ‘An Autocratic Approach to Music Copyright?: The Potential Negative Impacts of Restrictive Rights on a Composer’s Legacy: The Case of the Zappa Family Trust’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 21/3 (2011): pp. 302–16, at 304. Incidentally, Carr’s article reveals how, in a blatant case of dramatic irony, the Zappa Family Trust, by trying to prevent tribute bands from performing, contradicts one of Zappa’s lifelong practices. 44   Michel Delville and Andrew Norris, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (Cambridge, 2005), p. 146. 45   Florindo Volpacchio, ‘The Mother of All Interviews: Zappa on Music and Society’, Telos, 87 (1991): pp.124–36, at 125. 39 40

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with the operations of the culture industry’.46 He adds: ‘It is thus difficult to see how he can be both the object of the culture industry and the agent of its potential transformation’.47 Pleasure being, according to Fredric Jameson, inextricably connected to entertainment, it cannot lead to a critical attitude. Endorsing Adorno’s positions, Jameson further claims: ‘Pleasure [amounts to a] flight from any last thought of resistance’.48 So, is that it? Is there too much pleasure and fun in Zappa’s music to make it an act of resistance? Is this yet another case of the intellectuals’ rejection of the sensuous Susan Sontag bemoaned when she famously called for ‘an erotics of art’?49 Must we choose between ‘thought’ and ‘pleasure’, the former including the possibility of politically mature positions, the latter being understood by its detractors as either childish escapism into socially inert forms of sensuality, or a typically feminine withdrawal from commitment?50 A Personal Space But what if it were precisely the quest for immediate, easy pleasure that gave Zappa’s music all its meaning, all its density? Could not pleasure be in itself a form of resistance? Do we have to decide where and who is the real Zappa, the good Zappa? Must we eschew the entertainer, the ribald, the scatologist? Is there room only for a politically, socially, and musically committed Frank? There are several levels of response to these inquiries. In the first place, one could question the effectiveness of puritanical and sententious radical dissent and utopias in their opposition to easy-going, sensual entertainment. Individuals’ lives may have been changed by radical militancy, but whatever global impact it may have had has yet to be assessed. Why not try alternative strategies, the disenchanted (or the lucid) may suggest? Why not experiment with other forms of détournement and sabotage? Why not fight back by means of an enormous, farcical roar of laughter, along with Tzara or Jarry? Why not have pleasure? Further, the notion of Conceptual Continuity developed by Zappa gives a changing perspective to his buffooneries. If, as indicated in the introduction of this book, its basic meaning refers to Zappa’s compositional approach, and the fact that all his albums and concerts are interconnected and parts of a global œuvre, Conceptual Continuity also includes extra-musical elements. Zappa’s comments,   David Wragg, ‘“Or any art at all?” Frank Zappa meets critical theory’ Popular Music, 20/2 (2001): pp. 205–22, at 208. 47   Ibid. 48   Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno: Or, the Persistence of Dialectic (New York, 1990), p. 146. 49   Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1966), p. 14. 50   Neil Nehring has written a beautiful defence of anger and emotion as politically effective tools. See Neil Nehring, Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy (New York, 1997). 46

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attitudes, and various involvements outside the realm of music are also part of the overall picture. ‘It was all one’, claims Barry Miles.51 His philosophy has thus to be interpreted through the lens of his histrionics, but they, in turn, must be juxtaposed with his politics for a better understanding and appraisal. Zappa has positioned himself in the interstice between pleasure and commitment, comedy and satire. Or rather, he has carved a place for himself in both. And it is precisely the pleasure he derives from being simultaneously serious and entertaining, an erudite and a buffoon, that signals his resistance. Zappa’s resistance consists in being as much in the avant-garde as in pop music, in articulate, social criticism as in vulgarity. His resistance consists in unfettering himself from any kind of codes, be it those of show business, the Moral Majority, or the New Left, and in avoiding the pitfalls of elitism and populism by belonging to both. Zappa’s resistance could thus be defined as a form of subversion and infiltration, with the risks it implies: when asked ‘Suppose I try and infiltrate, what is there to prevent me from being corrupted?’, Zappa answered: ‘There is nothing’.52 So that ultimately, his line of resistance suggests that a song like ‘Do You Like My New Car’ should not be dismissed as a coarse, contemptible piece of trash, but on the contrary should be appreciated for its potent, satirical content. But is this still too narrow and priggish a perspective, giving too much emphasis on a hidden content, crediting the song with a message that would have to be decoded? After all, ‘Do You Like My New Car’ is not a cipher. It is a contemptible piece of trash, and coarse fun, a moment of politically incorrect entertainment, with the potential of inducing gross pleasure. We should not put too much sense and meaning into it. ‘Do You Like My New Car’ should be appreciated for what it is, not for what it could be; we should enjoy whatever pleasure we may derive from it, taking in our stride its coarseness, while trying, though not too hard, to understand how, in the process, the song has become an example of Zappa’s (but also our) resistance. For, up to now, we have considered resistance only from the perspective of the artist, the production end of the communication process. What happens at the other end, at the level of reception? How efficient are Zappa’s strategies? What power lies in the laughter they induce? And ultimately, what is the point of resisting? These questions imply that we reconsider and question how we see ourselves as members of an audience, and users of cultural products. A simplified version of the issue would yield two main possibilities: we can either see ourselves as the passive, manipulated objects of the mass marketed popular culture identified and decried by the Frankfurt School, or as the relatively autonomous consumers depicted by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, capable of withstanding the onslaught of the entertainment industry, and diverting its products to our own benefit. The first possibility embraces a rather pessimistic postmodern stance denying any possibility to transform life, and escape the hegemonic forces   Barry Miles, Zappa: A Biography (New York, 2004), p. 383.   Ibid., p. 192.

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that shape and constrain it, while the second settles on a more optimistic approach, underscoring the potential empowerment of popular culture’s audiences. If we examine our reactions to the various strategies of resistance Zappa has employed, from gross humour to the blending of genres, the issues become much more concrete. Must we shun an innocuous ditty such as ‘Happy Together’, and the many songs in the same vein he wrote or covered, because they are too compromised, too commercial, too much aligned with the entertainment industry? Or should we endorse only his most elite, avant-garde productions, his incursions into musique concrète, jazz, or experimental electronica? Which would work best as a piece of resistance? And what are we to make of the fact that in a single work like ‘Do You Like My New Car’ he is offering both simultaneously? In other words, as David Wragg phrased it: ‘How can a genuinely popular music stave off the machinations of the culture industry? How could a genuinely avant-garde music “reach down” to commodified listeners?’53 The same Wragg, incidentally, reminds us that ‘Zappa’s identification of the realities of the capitalist markets puts into question … the affirmative accounts of popular music by fashionable radicals’.54 Despite their ambiguities and limitations, the Brechtian strategies (obvious, in-your-face, constantly reminding the listener of their artificiality) implemented by Zappa in ‘Do You Like My New Car’ make the task easier for the audience. Through exaggeration, amplification, excess, they deconstruct the mimetic illusion, and prevent the listener from erring, either by condemning Zappa for sexism or vulgarity, or by reading too much meaning into his pranks. Zappa does seem to adhere to the pleasure principle he displays, he does seem to enjoy his misogynistic, sexual, demeaning jokes, he does seem to relish titillating his masculine (and, so it seems, feminine) public.55 However, from the perspective of the listener, he is ultimately indifferent as to whether Zappa believes or likes what he is doing on stage, whether he is being satirical, poking fun at us, or revelling in his crudeness. For what we defined as an act of resistance consists first and all in taking possession of a personal space, and defining an individualised relation to the world, regardless of the nature of the said space and relation. And the space Zappa grabs for himself, even if we utterly dislike it, or precisely because we may utterly dislike it, is the most powerful, the most subversive, the most joyous enticement to seize our own. ‘Do You Like My New Car’ spells out his politics, which could read like: I do not need you to endorse, nor imitate what I do; I will even do my best not to be endorsable; but start working on your own space too. Resistance thus raises the issue of mimetic behaviours, on which so much of rock music is based, and requires an explicit rejection of mimetic patterns, whether it be following the model (the artist) or its subjects (the audience). Resistance is 53

  Wragg, ‘“Or any art at all?” Franz Zappa meets critical theory’, p. 220.   Ibid., p. 219. 55   See for instance the response to ‘Titties and Beer’, a similar song, also recorded live, on Frank Zappa, Zappa in New York, DiscReet Records, 2D 2290 (1978). 54

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not a collective movement, nor a class or an age group statement. It has nothing to do with shouting slogans, or raising fists. Resisting is an individual action, the acquisition for oneself of actual or symbolic time and space. It is the choice to act according to one’s own tastes, whatever they are. The only role model Zappa can play is to prompt an active, personal appreciation of music, be it only because his musical tastes may challenge ours, because his cultural eclecticism and his questioning of aesthetic norms constitute a reaction against the uniformity and standardisation required by the entertainment industry.56 The more puzzled or outraged we are by his pranks, the closer we get to setting our own agenda, and delineating a personal space. Conclusion ‘Resisting norms’, claims Marc-André Gagnon, ‘does not mean toppling a given norm to replace it with a “better” one; it means ensuring the greatest possible creative freedom’.57 Zappa’s politics, as exemplified in a musical production such as ‘Do You Like My New Car’, does not offer any specific agenda, any explicit suggestions of what new norms should replace defective ones. His resistance is built on flexible, practical strategies that not only shun overt opposition, but do not offer any alternative, or any advice.58 They just display a personal relationship to the world. In a 1990 documentary, Zappa declared what can be considered as the clearest manifesto of his aesthetic resistance: The whole body of my work is one composition and that’s what music should be. You should be able to organize any kind of sound and put it into your music, so I wound up with a style of music that has snorks, burps, and dissonant chords, and nice tunes and triads, and straight rhythms and complicated rhythms, and just about anything in any order … And the easiest way to sum up this aesthetic would be: anything, anytime, anyplace, for no reason at all.59

56

  Rémi Raemackers claims that thanks to Frank Zappa, ‘20th century music threw away norms’. As such, he adds, ‘he incarnates the ultimate form of resistance’. See Rémi Raemackers, One Side Fits All. Clés pour une écoute de Frank Zappa (Monaco, 2003), p. 166 (Translated by author). 57   Marc-André Gagnon, ‘Frank Zappa, un intellectuel spécifique’ Conjonctures, 29 (Spring-Summer 1999): pp. 119–44, at 140 (Translated by author). 58   One needs to qualify this assertion though by reminding the reader that throughout the 80s, Frank Zappa was sufficiently irked by President Reagan’s government to give political advice to his fans, suggesting that they should vote, and making it easier for them by setting up registration booths at the door of his concerts. 59   Henning Lohner, Frank Zappa – Peefeeyatko, WDR 3 (1991).

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Gilles Deleuze, as Nathalie Gatti underscores,60 provides an apt model to appraise Zappa’s form of resistance. Indeed, nibbling at different genres, simultaneously entertaining and challenging his audience, and rolling back the limits of good taste and propriety, Frank Zappa can be seen as performing the ‘modest events’ which for Deleuze define resistance and renew our belief in the world: To believe in the world is what we want most; we have completely lost the world, we have been deprived of it. To believe in the world consists in fostering events, however modest, that elude control, as well as generating new spaces, however limited in size or volume … It is at the level of each of these attempts that the capacity to resist or, on the contrary, to submit to authority can be assessed.61

With modest events like ‘Do You Like My New Car’, Frank Zappa generates new spaces. Does he renew our belief in the world? The point is not to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ his pranks, his humour, his musical challenges; it is not to hail them as a call to arms, denounce them for their vulgarity, or dismiss them as a vain provocation. It is not even to enjoy them, though, of course, they have to be enjoyed, and their entertaining, diverting nature is at the heart of Zappa’s politics. The point is to use his music to define a personal space: change the course of our daily lives, alter our relationship to our environment and other people, and determine our response to authority and power. We have been led to believe that revolt requires clearly identified postures, that rebellion implies indisputable political commitments, that social struggles must be based on unambiguous moral principles. Zappa breaks the norm. He offers ambiguity. He offers resistance: pornography and humour, transgression and pleasure. In 1970, Zappa declared to the Dutch filmmaker Roelof Kiers: ‘I think we inspired some of the people who like what we do to get a little bit looser, a little bit more devious, as I said before about progress not being possible without some sort of deviation. We need a few deviants’.62 Songs like ‘Do You Like My New Car’ may very well be the kind of deviation we need to become a little bit more devious.

60   Nathalie Gatti, ‘Frank Zappa, l’esthétique d’un nomade’, Circuit: musiques contemporaines, 14/3 (2004). 61   Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972–1990 (Paris, 1990), p. 239. 62   Roelof Kiers, Frank Zappa, VPRO TV (1970).

Chapter 7

Zappa and the Story-Song: A Rage of Cultural Influences Geoffrey I. Wills

Introduction The era in America after World War II was an especially rich one with regard to cultural phenomena. In the area of music, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky had moved to the USA, and were wielding considerable influence. Charles Ives was finally achieving recognition after his second symphony was premiered by Leonard Bernstein in 1951. In jazz, the bebop experiments of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie had emerged, as had the orchestral innovations of Stan Kenton, Boyd Raeburn and Claude Thornhill. In cinema, the 1940s created the bleak atmosphere for film noir, while in the 1950s a fear of Communism was obliquely reflected in a wave of science-fiction movies such as The Thing from Another World 1 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.2 American art made a worldwide impact with abstract expressionism, as did American literature with the Beat writers. Comedy was also transformed by a group of satirical stand-up comics, such as Shelley Berman and Lenny Bruce, not to mention the emergence of rock ʼn’ roll. This was the era in which Frank Zappa grew up and, sponge-like, he soaked in all the cultural influences around him, stored them, and ultimately regurgitated them in an original synthesis. This chapter will focus on one approach that Zappa used to present his synthesis, namely the story-song. It will attempt to make parallels between themes in his work and those in the wider area of American culture. It will also examine the way that Zappa developed the trade-mark sound of his voice to frequently present these story-songs. It is fascinating to ponder the manner in which Zappa arrived at his synthesis, but study of the numerous books written about him seems to reveal few clues. Writers appear to be content to discuss and analyse the work without considering how it might have come about. How and why was Zappa able to assimilate influences and to present them in an original way? Why was it that, despite being interviewed innumerable times, he avoided discussing many of his most important influences and simply tended to reiterate that he was inspired by rhythm and blues 1   Christian Nyby and Howard Halks, The Thing from Another World, Winchester Pictures Corporation (1951). 2   Don Seigel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Allied Artists Pictures (1956).

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and the music of Edgar Varèse? Why did he leave a treasure-trail of clues to his work that represents a veritable cornucopia of specifically American cultural genres, and which, as yet, no-one has completely clarified? In order to answer these questions it is helpful to view Zappa from a psychological perspective. Zappa as a Classic Example of the Creative Personality It is interesting that, during exactly the same post-World War II period when Zappa was absorbing cultural influences and developing his talents, a number of eminent American psychologists, including Anne Roe, Abraham Maslow, Raymond Cattell and Donald Mackinnon, were all, in their own ways, developing theories of creativity and the exceptional creative personality.3 From their theories, a composite picture of the creative personality emerged. He or she was someone who may have had an unhappy childhood with episodes of illness, who was an indifferent student at school while still being of high intelligence, and who preferred to work in isolation, thinking through problems alone. Nevertheless, he or she could interact socially in a forceful manner and be stubborn and competitive, exhibiting a number of talents and intuitively perceiving the deeper meanings inherent in situations. Rules were disregarded, and good impressions made on others were not a preoccupation. Although Frank Zappa would have dismissed the theorising of these psychologists, he fitted their profile with uncanny accuracy. Donald Mackinnon,4 in a classic study of highly creative architects, showed how creative personalities use intuitive perception, which is an indirect perception of the deeper meanings inherent in phenomena and situations. The average person, on the other hand, instead of using intuitive perception, simply centres his or her attention on existing facts. But the creative personality ‘looks expectantly for a link or bridge between that which is given and present and that which is not yet thought of, focusing habitually upon possibilities’.5 This is exactly what Zappa did, and it enabled him, for instance, to combine the influences of Varèse and rhythm and blues, Beat literature and pop songs, and Sprechstimme and jazz. His particular creative abilities allowed him to absorb and re-combine the cultural influences to which he was exposed. He was aware, for example, of the music of Spike Jones from the age of seven6 and undoubtedly radio, TV, movies, comics and books continued to feed his imagination. There are indications of these influences, for instance, in the list of names in the sleeve notes to Freak Out! 7: actors like

  Philip Ewart Vernon (ed.), Creativity (Harmondsworth, 1970).   Donald Mackinnon, ‘The Personality Correlates of Creativity: A Study of American Architects’, in Vernon, Creativity, pp. 289–311. 5   Ibid., p. 300. 6   Barry Miles, Zappa: A Biography (New York, 2004). 7   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966). 3 4

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Herman Rudin, from the TV series The Untouchables,8 and Charles Middleton, from the movie serial Flash Gordon,9 are mentioned, as are science-fiction writers like Cordwainer Smith. When interviewed, Zappa did not discuss many of his influences because life had taught him to be wary. For the keen observer, he left clues that he was culturally omnivorous: for instance, in an interview with Frank Kofsky10 he mentioned listening to Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, and few people are aware that he was a good friend of the famous movie composer David Raksin, who felt that Zappa was a remarkable and interesting man.11 But Barry Miles12 describes how, when Italy declared war against America during the Second World War, those, like Zappa, of Italian heritage were regarded as enemy aliens. As a youth Zappa’s appearance was the antithesis of the image of the all-American boy: he told Kurt Loder13 that when he was eleven, he weighed about 180 pounds, had big pimples and a moustache. To add to Zappa’s feelings of insecurity, his father had caused his family to move home 11 times by the time that Zappa was aged 18. His supposed antipathy to jazz may have been caused, at least in part, by being rudely rebuffed by Miles Davis in 1961.14 Thus, Zappa had good reason to be cautious in his dealings with the world. He only fed interviewers the information he wished them to know. The Zappa Voice and its Relationship with American Culture Among the many unique characteristics that Frank Zappa possessed, one of the most distinctive was his voice, especially after his larynx was damaged when an audience member knocked him off the stage at the Rainbow Theatre in London in December 1971. One has only to think of his narration on numbers like ‘DinahMoe Humm’15 or ‘Montana’16 to note that his voice is a laconic, insinuating

  Quinn Martin, The Untouchables, ABC TV (1959–1963).   Ford Beebe, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Universal (1940). 10   Frank Kofsky. ‘Frank Zappa: The Mothers of Invention Part 1’, Jazz & Pop, 6/9 (1967), pp. 15–19. 11   See Bruce Duffie, ‘Composer David Raksin: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie’ (1988), at http://www.kcstudio.com/raksin2.html [Accessed 13 September 2011]. 12   Miles, Zappa, p. 10. 13   Kurt Loder, Bat Chain Puller: Rock & Roll in the Age of Celebrity (New York, 1990), p. 108. 14   See Robert O’Brian, ‘It Just Might be Frank’, Rock Bill, 3/29 (November 1984), pp. 14–15, 18–19. 15   Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation, DiscReet, MS2149 (1973). 16   Ibid.  8  9

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baritone. Nigey Lennon referred to it as being ‘ironic, detached, yet somehow lubricious’,17 and she found the ‘timbre of his voice almost painfully erotic’.18 There is, nevertheless, a ring of familiarity in the sound. Groucho Marx exemplifies this vocal style with his deadpan, sarcastic, surreal delivery. Take, for instance, his exchange with Esther Muir in A Day at the Races,19 when he asks her if she likes gardenias. She says ‘I adore them. How did you know?’ He replies ‘I didn’t, so I got forget-me-nots. One whiff of this and you’ll forget everything’.20 This is not a million miles away from, for instance, Zappa’s interaction with the female protagonists on ‘Dinah-Moe Humm’ or Camarillo Brillo’.21 Like Marx, Zappa assumes the role of the wisecracking adventurer who humours a rather grandiose woman, while slyly letting his audience in on the joke. Orson Welles also epitomises the sound of The American Voice in his many memorable movie speeches, none better, perhaps, than in The Third Man:22 ‘In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock’.23 Here is the apotheosis of the laconic, insinuating baritone. However, the 1950s provide the main points of reference for the Zappa voice. In this era a new, hip breed of performer emerged: in this company one would have to include Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Victor Borge, Tom Lehrer, Shelley Berman, Ernie Kovacs and Ken Nordine. Irrespective of the content of their routines, they were all recognisable by the timbre and quality of their voices, which were often deep, resonant, measured and ironic in tone. Foremost in this respect, perhaps, were Buckley24 and Bruce,25 who, significantly, both had records released on Zappa’s labels. The above-listed performers also specialised in a twisted form of humour that influenced Zappa: Borge describing the character in the Mozart opera who stabbed herself ‘between the two big trees’,26 Lehrer having the urge to poison pigeons in the park,27 Bruce imitating Count Dracula telling his children to ‘shut up and drink your blood’.28 Zappa even bore a resemblance to Kovacs in some of his photos. For instance, there is a picture of Kovacs wearing a top hat, his head tilted   Nigey Lennon, Being Frank: My Time with Frank Zappa (Los Angeles, 1995), p. 35.   Ibid., p. 42. 19   Sam Wood, A Day at the Races, MGM (1937). 20   Ibid. 21   Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation. 22   Carol Reed, The Third Man, London Films (1949). 23   Ibid. 24   Lord Buckley, A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat, Straight, STS 1054 (1969). 25   Lenny Bruce, The Berkeley Concert, Bizarre/Reprise, 2XS 6329 (1969). 26   Victor Borge, ‘A Mozart Opera by Borge’, Caught in the Act, Columbia, CL-646 (1955). 27   Tom Lehrer, ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, Lehrer Records, TL-202/202S (1959). 28   Lenny Bruce, ‘Enchanting Transylvania’, Interviews of our Times, Fantasy, 7001 (1958). 17 18

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on one side, with an ironic expression on his face, that is reminiscent of the picture of Zappa on the back cover of Lumpy Gravy.29 Of special note, though, is Ken Nordine. Born in 1920, Nordine worked in TV in Chicago, in a show called Faces in the Window,30 reading stories by authors like Poe and Balzac. He also worked in commercial radio and did thousands of advertisements.31 He came to prominence with his albums Word Jazz32 and Son of Word Jazz33 on which, in his suave baritone, he recounted often-unnerving stories while frequently assuming the persona of someone teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown. One story, ‘The Vidiot’34 is about a man who is addicted to TV, and may have been an inspiration for Zappa’s ‘I’m The Slime’.35 Another story, ‘Smerd’,36 is about a political candidate addressing a crowd, and one is reminded of the introduction to ‘Plastic People’.37 Moreover, the beat poetry of ‘Junk Man’38 brings to mind Zappa’s surreal narration on ‘Muffin Man’,39 and when Zappa says ‘I injured the fur trapper’ on ‘Nanook Rubs It’,40 he sounds like Nordine saying ‘I punish my right hand’ in his piece ‘I Used To Think My Right Hand Was Uglier Than My Left’.41 The effectiveness of these recordings was enhanced by the work of sound engineer Jim Cunningham, whose use of reverb, delays and tape loops brings to mind parts of Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy.42 For instance, it is worth comparing the first ‘sound painting’ on ‘Sound Museum’43 with the section of Lumpy Gravy that follows Spider saying ‘Bit of nostalgia for the old folks!’44 Interestingly, many of the above-mentioned artists, like Bruce and Buckley, had an affiliation with jazz. Nordine worked with the Chico Hamilton group. Zappa must have acknowledged this, if only tacitly. The voice that he assumed was essentially the voice of the hipster-cool, unruffled, always one step ahead.

  Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6-8741 (1968).   David Waters, Faces in the Window, WMAQ-TV (1953). 31   Andrea Juno, ‘Ken Nordine’, in Valhalla Vale and Andrea Juno, Incredibly Strange Music Volume II, (San Francisco, 1994), pp. 70–85. 32   Ken Nordine, Word Jazz, Dot, DLP-3075 (1957). 33   Ken Nordine, Son of Word Jazz, Dot, DLP-3096 (1958). 34   Nordine, Word Jazz. 35   Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation. 36   Ken Nordine, Next!, Dot, DLP-3196 (1959). 37   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, Verve, V6-5013 (1967). 38   Nordine, Son of Word Jazz. 39   Frank Zappa, Bongo Fury, DiscReet, DS 2234 (1975). 40   Frank Zappa, Apostrophe(ʼ), DiscReet, DS2175 (1974). 41   Nordine, Son of Word Jazz. 42   Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. 43   Nordine, Word Jazz. 44   See ‘Part One’ of Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. From around 3:49. 29

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Zappa and the Story-Song The Story-Song in Classical Music Much of Zappa’s repertoire consisted of musical stories, often with narration, and it is worth examining the inspiration for these. In the classical sphere, an example that immediately springs to mind is The Soldier’s Tale (1918), by Igor Stravinsky. The story is about a soldier who, returning home, meets the Devil and is persuaded to exchange his violin for a book which holds the secrets of wealth and success. Zappa played the part of the Devil in a performance of the work at the Hollywood Bowl in 1972,45 and his song ‘Titties and Beer’,46 featuring a confrontation between a biker and the Devil, was directly inspired by it. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (1936) provides another classical example that Zappa would undoubtedly have been familiar with. It featured a colourful cast of characters, each with their own memorable theme, and became familiar to American audiences after forming one of the sequences in the Disney movie Make Mine Music.47 Its humour, drama, striking music and cartoonesque quality would all have struck a sympathetic chord with Zappa. Bela Bartok was a composer admired by Zappa, as can be seen by the appearance of the theme from Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto on Make a Jazz Noise Here.48 In the context of the classical story-song, Bartok’s three stage works, Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), The Wooden Prince (1914–1917) and The Miraculous Mandarin (1918–1919) are all important. They have intricate scenarios containing elements of violence, sexuality, magic and the supernatural, and the influence on Zappa can be seen in songs like ‘The Torture Never Stops’.49 The Story-Song in Popular Music Twentieth-century American popular music has a rich history of the story-song genre, often containing a strong element of humour. ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’ by Frank Crumit50 is an early example. It tells of a fight to the death by a Russian and a Turk (shades of Nanook and the fur trapper in ‘Nanook Rubs It’), and was made into an MGM cartoon in 1941 with the title Abdul the Bulbul-Ameer.51 The work of Phil Harris also repays investigation. Harris (1904–1995) was a singer, songwriter, jazz musician and comedian, probably best remembered today 45   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 116. 46   Frank Zappa, Zappa in New York, DiscReet, 2D 2290 (1978). 47   Robert Cormack, Make Mine Music, Disney (1946). 48   Frank Zappa, Make a Jazz Noise Here, Barking Pumpkin, D2 74234 (1991). 49   Frank Zappa, Zoot Allures, Warner Bros. Records, 2970 (1976). 50   Frank Crumit, Mountain Greenery, ASV, 5001 (1994). 51   Hugh Harman, Abdul the Bulbul-Ameer, MGM (1941).

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as the voice of Baloo in Disney’s The Jungle Book.52 He was a pioneer of radio comedy and made a series of very successful records, key examples of which, from the 1940s and 1950s, are ‘That’s What I Like About The South’, ‘Woodman Spare That Tree’, ‘44 Sycamore’ and ‘The Thing’.53 Harris sang his zany and hugely popular material using a sort of hip Sprechstimme, and the character Mabel in ‘44 Sycamore’ sounds as though she could be a distant relative of the heroine of ‘Camarillo Brillo’.54 Jimmy Durante (1893–1980) was a performer who worked in a similar vein, in movies, radio, and with a series of popular comedy records. His song ‘I’m The Guy Who Found the Lost Chord’ (1947),55 with its mock air of mystery and drama, contained a line that might have caught Zappa’s attention: ‘What kind of piano is this? No apostrophes!’56 Another classic of the American story-song genre is ‘El Paso’ by Marty Robbins.57 It has a compelling narrative and excellent musicianship, and was a major hit on both the country and pop music charts. If nothing else, it would have provided Zappa with material to lampoon in such songs as his unreleased ‘Streets of Fontana’, which he performed in his early twenties around 1963 with Ray Collins.58 Children’s Records When Zappa was growing up in the 1940s, a number of popular children’s records were regularly featured on the radio. One such was ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’,59 released in 1948: it tells the story of a little boy who hates learning to play the piano until the piano starts talking to him and turns him into a virtuoso player. There is an uncanny, haunting quality to the sound of the piano’s electronically treated voice and it could be considered as a forerunner to the voice of the Central Scrutinizer in Joe’s Garage.60 ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ was written by Alan Livingston, narrated by Verne Smith and had music by Billy May. Was Sparky an inspiration for ‘Greggery Peccary’?61 When Zappa states that ‘a Peccary is a little white pig with a white collar’62 he obliquely echoes Verne Smith intoning ‘Sparky was a little boy, just   Wolfgang Reitherman, The Jungle Book, Disney (1967).   Phil Harris, Phil Harris at his Best, Empress, RAJCD 914 (2001). 54   Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation. 55   Jimmy Durante, ‘I’m The Guy Who Found the Lost Chord’, MGM Records, 2006318 (1964). 56   Ibid. 57   Marty Robbins, ‘El Paso’, Columbia, 4-41511 (1959). 58   See Dan Oullette, ‘Frank Zappa Interview’, Pulse Magazine (August 1993), at http://home.online.no/~corneliu/pulse.htm [accessed 5 February 2012]. 59   Alan Livingston, ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’, Capitol, DC-78 (1948). 60   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act I, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979) and Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). 61   Frank Zappa, Studio Tan, DiscReet, DSK 2291 (1978). 62   Ibid. 52 53

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about your age’.63 It is as though Zappa had the ability to retrieve a memory from his bank of cultural references, paraphrase it, and then fit it into his current project. As outlined in the introduction of this volume, there was Conceptual Continuity, not only within Zappa’s body of work, but also between his work and that of others. Another popular record in this genre was ‘Tubby the Tuba’,64 released in 1945 and narrated by Danny Kaye. Again, there is the engaging combination of narrative coupled with dramatic orchestral music. The sequence in which the French horns call ‘Here he comes! Here comes Signor Pizzicato!’65 is echoed by Zappa in ‘Greggery Peccary’66 when he exclaims ‘Here he comes again!’67 And it may not be stretching the imagination too much to consider Tubby the Tuba as a forerunner of ‘Billy the Mountain’.68 Again, one has the sense of Zappa paraphrasing from his cultural reference-bank, and turning an inanimate object into a living creature. Stan Freberg An artist openly acknowledged as influential by Zappa was Stan Freberg. The latter was a comedy writer, performer and sophisticated pop satirist who had a string of hits in the 1950s on which he parodied songs like ‘The Great Pretender’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’69 or TV shows like Dragnet.70 Using a story-song format, Freberg’s records would feature scenarios where, for instance, a hapless pop singer would find himself in conflict with a cynical studio musician, and, according to Freberg,71 his parodies upset a number of performers, including Johnny Ray, Harry Belafonte, The Platters and Lawrence Welk. Zappa was not unlike Freberg in this respect, and he stated that, as a child ‘I used to give puppet shows using Stan Freberg records in the background’,72 and later, no doubt inspired by Freberg, he parodied artists like Bob Dylan,73 David Bowie,74 Michael Jackson75 and The Bee Gees.76 63

  Livingston, ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’.   Danny Kaye, ‘Tubby the Tuba’, Brunswick, OE 9022 (1945). 65   Ibid. 66   Zappa, Studio Tan. 67   Ibid. 68   The Mothers, Just Another Band from L.A., Reprise, 144179 (1972). 69   Stan Freberg, Stan Freberg: Capitol Collector’s Series, Capitol, CDP 7 91627 2 (1990). 70   Ibid. 71   Stan Freberg, It Only Hurts When I Laugh (New York, 1988). 72   Miles, Zappa, p. 22. 73   ‘Flakes’ on Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501 (1979). 74   ‘Tinsel Town Rebellion’ on Frank Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?, EMI, CDP7 46188 2 (1986). 75   ‘Why Don’t You Like Me’ on Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988). 76   ‘Inca Roads’ on Frank Zappa, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, Barking Pumpkin, D2 74233 (1991). 64

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Spike Jones Spike Jones (1911–1965) played drums from the age of 11, and in the 1930s he worked on many radio shows, including those of Al Jolson and Bing Crosby. From 1941 to 1955 he and his band The City Slickers recorded for RCA Victor, performing surreal, satirical arrangements of popular songs featuring cowbells, whistles, gunshots and zany vocals. Among their hits were ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’, ‘Cocktails for Two’, ‘Chloe’ and ‘My Old Flame’.77 According to Miles,78 Zappa was a fan from the age of seven, and Jones’s influence on him is obvious. ‘St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast’,79 for instance, is like a twisted version of Jones’s ‘Cocktails for Two’,80 and the latter’s version of ‘The William Tell Overture’81 was quoted regularly by Zappa’s 1982 and 1984 bands.82 Soprano Nelcy Walker’s voice on ‘Dog Breath, In the Year of the Plague’, for instance when she sings ‘Fuzzy Dice, Bongos in the Back’83 is reminiscent of Aileen Carlisle’s vocal on Jones’s ‘The Glow Worm’.84 The hilarious voices that were a feature of Jones’s records arguably influenced vocal exchanges like the one on ‘Inca Roads’85 between George Duke, Napoleon Murphy Brock and Zappa. Also of note is the short movie that Jones made for theatrical release of ‘Cocktails for Two’,86 with a sequence featuring three band members wearing dresses and wigs, and bearing a strong resemblance to Zappa and The Mothers on the cover of We’re Only In It For The Money.87 The Dream-Story Zappa’s story-songs have a fantastical, dream-like, even nightmarish, quality. Sometimes they are dreams, as with ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’ (‘Dreamed I was an Eskimo’).88 Like dreams, they suddenly veer without warning from one situation to another. For instance, the blinded fur trapper in ‘Nanook Rubs It’89 trudges across the tundra and suddenly finds himself at St. Alfonzo’s Pancake   Spike Jones, The Best of Spike Jones, RCA, 07863 (1992).   Miles, Zappa, p. 19. 79   Zappa, Apostrophe(ʼ). 80   Jones, The Best of Spike Jones. 81   Ibid. 82   ‘King Kong’ (1982) and ‘Keep It Greasey’ (1984) on Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3, Rykodisc, RCD 10085/86 (1989). 83   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre Records, 2MS 2024 (1969). 84   Jones, The Best of Spike Jones. 85   Frank Zappa, One Size Fits All, DiscReet, DS 2216 (1975). 86   Jones, The Best of Spike Jones. 87   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money, Verve, V6-5045 (1968). 88   Zappa, Apostrophe(ʼ). 89   Ibid. 77

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Breakfast. When the biker returns home after his encounter with the Devil in ‘Titties and Beer’90 he finds that his girlfriend Chrissie is there, even though the Devil has just blown her over a cliff. Perhaps it has all been a dream? This is Ben Watson’s conclusion.91 In ‘Stinkfoot’92 the protagonist wakes from a feverish sleep, having dreamed that he has been swimming with sharks, and is exhorted to venture into the night to find the equally nightmarish ‘Place of Imaginary Diseases’.93 In ‘Excentrifugal Forz’,94 Zappa describes a dream inspired by 1950s TV programmes and monster movies. In his dream he is flying in his space craft, which he has named the Excentrifugal Forz, accompanied by two companions, Korla Plankton and Pup Tentacle. According to Watson, Plankton is actually Korla Pandit, the Hammond organ-playing Godfather of Exotica who had a TV show on Los Angeles station KTLA starting in 1949,95 and, in tune with this, ‘Excentrifugal Forz’96 has a swirling, other-worldly sound. When Zappa looks out of the porthole of his craft and sees that ‘the clouds are really cheap’97 he is referring to the clouds that frequently appeared behind Pandit in his KTLA TV shows. As Pandit states in his interview with Valhalla Vale,98 these were created by his wife, an artist who worked on Walt Disney’s Fantasia.99 There is an irony in the suggestion that Zappa could play the blues with Pandit, in his bejewelled white turban, since the music of the latter was the ultimate in un-bluesy schmaltz. Blues guitar and exotic organ is a dream-like juxtaposition. There is a further irony in the fact that, although Pandit professed to have been born in New Delhi, the son of an opera singer and a Hindi Brahmin, he was actually an African-American from St. Louis, Missouri, named John Redd.100 Zappa’s other companion in his space craft, Pup Tentacle, is a time-travelling creature whose small feet turn into tentacles when he travels back in time. He probably resembles a pup tent, like the monster described in ‘Cheepnis’.101

  Zappa, Zappa in New York.   Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York, 1993), p. 341.   92   Zappa, Apostrophe(ʼ).   93   Ibid.   94   Ibid.   95   See Ben Watson, The Complete Guide to the Music of Frank Zappa (London, 1998), p. 62.   96   Zappa, Apostrophe(ʼ).   97   Ibid.   98   Valhalla Vale, ‘Korla Pandit’, in Vale and Juno, Incredibly Strange Music, pp. 112–21.   99   James Algar, Fantasia, Disney (1940). 100   See R.J. Smith, ‘The Many Faces of Korla Pandit’, Los Angeles Magazine, 46/6 (2001), pp. 73–7. 101   Frank Zappa, Roxy and Elsewhere, DiscReet, DS2202 (1974).   90   91

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Perhaps the apotheosis of the Zappa-narrated dream-story-song is ‘Zomby Woof’.102 Zappa wakes from a deep sleep and tells us about the Zomby Woof, which is, simultaneously, two different things. Firstly, it is the matter (woof is, literally, a type of fabric) which encrusts his eyes after he has been sleeping a zombie-like sleep of the dead. This is the sleep dirt which formed the inspiration for a Zappa album title.103 Secondly, it is his memory of a nightmarish sex fiend who might be Zappa’s dream alter-ego, but who is portrayed in the song by Ricky Lancelotti. The Zomby Woof has a large fang and odd-sized feet, and attacks college girls in their dormitories. He appears to be a metaphorical cousin of Howlin’ Wolf and his song ‘Evil’.104 The song is topped off by one of Zappa’s typically brilliant arrangements, with complex rhythms (the introduction, for instance, features four bars of 3/8 and two bars of 5/8) and unusual chord voicings to which marimbas and violin contribute strongly. There is a strong tradition of the dream-story in American culture, in literature, film and music. The 1924 Buster Keaton movie Sherlock Jr.105 is the first major example in American cinema: a young cinema projectionist falls asleep and walks into the movie that is playing. He assumes the identity of young Sherlock Holmes, walks through a dream world and solves a crime. In the movie of The Wizard of Oz106 Dorothy wakes to find that her journey to Munchkinland and the Emerald City has been a dream. In a 1977 interview107 Zappa, when speaking about the American government, referred obliquely to the section in the movie where Toto the dog pulls back a curtain to reveal that the wizard is a con-man who operates levers and speaks into a microphone. Zappa said: At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.108

Other influential American movies featuring dreams include Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound,109 Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland 110 and Dr. Seuss’s The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.111 The latter resembles ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’112 in that   Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation.   Frank Zappa, Sleep Dirt, DiscReet, DSK 2292 (1979). 104   Howlin’ Wolf, ‘Evil’, Chess, 1575 (1954). 105   Buster Keaton, Sherlock Jr., Metro (1924). 106   Victor Fleming, The Wizard of Oz, MGM (1939). 107   Jim Ladd (host), ‘Zappa on Air’, Nuggets, no.7 (Broadcast April 1977), at http:// wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/Zappa_On_Air [accessed 5 February 2012]. 108   Ibid. 109   Alfred Hitchcock, Spellbound, Selznick (1945). 110   Clyde Geronimi, Alice in Wonderland, Disney (1951). 111   Roy Rowland, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., Columbia (1953). 112   Livingston, ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’. 102 103

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it concerns a little boy who hates his piano lessons and falls into a dream. Dr. Terwilliker, the villainous piano teacher, is a classic Zappa-type character, and the surreal dream settings could easily have been an inspiration for Zappa’s film 200 Motels.113 Extremely significant in relation to Zappa’s work is Invaders from Mars114 in that it encompasses both the dream and the science-fiction genres. Zappa was familiar with this movie, according to his brother Carl in an interview with Vladimir Sovetov.115 A little boy is awakened one night and sees a flying saucer land nearby. Martians take over the local inhabitants, including his parents. He wakes to find that it has all been a nightmare and then everything starts to happen again. The audience is left wondering whether it is a recurring dream or a premonition of a real event. The book Naked Lunch by William Burroughs116 consists of a series of druginduced, sexually explicit hallucinations and it is interesting to speculate whether the sequence in which Johnny extracts a candiru fish from Mary’s body with his callipers was an inspiration for Zappa inspecting Dinah-Moe Humm with his zircon-encrusted tweezers.117 Zappa was, of course, familiar with Naked Lunch and read ‘The Talking Asshole’ section from the book at the Nova Convention in 1978. Zappa and Literature Zappa said that books ‘make me sleepy’,118 but Nigey Lennon, in an illuminating conversation with Bob Dobbs in 1995,119 described Zappa’s reading habits at the time that she knew him, and from her description he was actually a keen reader, but was embarrassed about appearing to be overly literate. She noted that Franz Kafka was one of Zappa’s favourite writers, and he had read everything that Kafka had written. He also enjoyed the work of William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, and, according to Lennon, he could almost recite Pynchon’s novel V.120 from memory. Lennon felt that, in reading these books, Zappa was attempting to understand the control mechanisms that operated in society. Certainly, Zappa acknowledged his liking for Kafka, and in the sleeve notes to We’re Only In It For The Money121 he exhorted his listeners to read Kafka’s story

  Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer, 200 Motels, United Artists (1971).   William Cameron Menzies, Invaders from Mars, Twentieth Century Fox (1953). 115   Vladimir Sovetov, ‘Carl Zappa Internet Interview’ (2004), at http://www.arf.ru/ Misc/carl_int.html [accessed 15 September 2011]. 116   William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York, 1962). 117   Zappa, Overnite-Sensation. 118   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 9. 119   Dobbs, in communication with the author, September, 2011. 120   Thomas Pynchon, V. (Philadelphia, 1963). 121   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money. 113 114

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‘In The Penal Colony’.122 More clues to his reading habits are given in the list of names in the sleeve notes to Freak Out!123 It seems helpful, therefore, to look at Zappa’s story-songs in relation to the books that he read. Kafka’s works, for instance his book The Trial,124 describe a world in which the individual struggles in a repressive and controlling society. This is Zappa’s world-view, reflected perhaps most clearly in his albums Joe’s Garage125 and Thing-Fish,126 where the individual is reduced to a state of apathy by the machinations of government, and becomes a philistine consumer. The Beat writers of the 1950s rebelled against the conventions of society, and Zappa was especially enamoured with the work of William Burroughs, as has been previously mentioned. Burroughs’s work represented the most surrealist, avantgarde aspects of Beat fiction and the outrageous, scatological nature of Naked Lunch127 caused its American publication to be delayed until 1962. Its dreamlike, fantastic scenarios influenced Zappa, as did its sexual explicitness. In the latter regard, it is not unlikely that Zappa was also familiar with the work of a forerunner of the Beats, Henry Miller, whose book Tropic of Cancer,128 although it first appeared in 1934, was only published in the United States of America in 1961. Miller felt that America was an ‘air-conditioned nightmare’ and a ‘huge cesspool’.129 Zappa has been frequently criticised for the sexually explicit nature of his work,130 but the precedents were set by writers like Miller and Burroughs. The books of Thomas Pynchon are about ‘the dislocation of mind and meaning in a modern multiverse which renders intelligence helpless in the face of the very powers it has released’.131 V.132 contains two separate stories, one about Benny Profane and his friends the Whole Sick Crew, the other about Herbert Stencil. The former ‘yoyo’ their way through life, while the latter is on a quest to locate a meaningful pattern in the world. In this sense, it is not unreasonable to make a comparison with 200 Motels,133 where Zappa is the questing Stencil character, while his band are like the Whole Sick Crew, yo-yoing randomly from one gig and town to the next. And Pynchon’s penchant for giving his characters outlandish 122   Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London, 1949). 123   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 124   Franz Kafka, The Trial (London, 1937). 125   Zappa, Joe’s Garage. 126   Frank Zappa, Thing-Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKCO74201 (1984). 127   Burroughs, Naked Lunch. 128   Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Paris, 1934). 129   Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (Oxford, 1992), p. 149. 130   See, for instance, Kelly Fisher Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa (London, 2007), pp. 133–4. 131   Bradbury, The Modern American Novel, p. 219. 132   Pynchon, V. 133   Zappa and Palmer, 200 Motels.

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names like Benny Profane and Pig Bodine is reflected in Zappa names like Officer Butzis and Sy Borg. Three of the authors referred to on the Freak Out! list, Cordwainer Smith, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Shekley, were science-fiction writers, demonstrating Zappa’s longstanding interest in this genre. Another name on the list, Eberhard Kronhausen, is especially notable. With his wife he worked as a counsellor, film maker and curator of erotic art, and wrote the best-selling book The Sexually Responsive Woman.134 In 1963 they made the short movie Psychomontage No. 1.135 Stewart Home says that: The film cuts between shots of animal sexual activity and amorous human subjects. Towards the end, the Kronhausens up the ante with some almostexplicit scenes of a woman getting fresh with a dog.136

One wonders, therefore, whether Zappa read the book and saw the movie, and used them as inspiration for the song ‘Dirty Love’.137 Zappa and Cartoons There is a cartoon-like quality in Zappa’s story-songs, and it is possible to trace specific influences. For instance, in Walt Disney’s Music Land,138 the Land of Symphony is separated from the Isle of Jazz by the Sea of Discord. The members of the two communities, who all have musical instruments for bodies, are at war, firing volleys of musical notes at each other: the Symphony people blast Richard Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries (1856) at the Jazz people, who retaliate with Paul Whiteman-type big band jazz. This brings to mind Zappa’s story in the sleeve notes for The Grand Wazoo,139 where the army of Mediocrates of Pedestrium uses a barrage of ditties to fight Cletus Awreetus Awrightus and his big band, who counter-attack with a shuffle. Zappa’s stories also bring to mind Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes, and one can trace a direct line, say, from a cartoon like Bugs Bunny Rides Again,140 featuring Yosemite Sam riding through the desert on a miniature horse, to the quintessential surrealism of Zappa riding along the borderline of Montana on his   Phyllis Kronhausen and Eberhard Kronhausen, The Sexually Responsive Woman (New York, 1964). 135   Phyllis Kronhausen and Eberhard Kronhausen, Psychomontage No.1, Grove Press (1963). 136   Stewart Home, ‘Antony Balch Night at the BFI’ (2009), at http://stewarthomesociety. org/blog/archives/tag/eberhard-kronhausen [accessed 17 September 2011]. 137   Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation. 138   Wilfred Jackson, Music Land, Disney (1935). 139   Frank Zappa, The Grand Wazoo, Bizarre, MS 2093 (1972). 140   Friz Freleng, Bugs Bunny Rides Again, Warner Bros. (1948). 134

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pigmy pony in the moonlight, picking floss from where it grows on the dental floss bushes with his zircon-encrusted tweezers. And it is interesting to watch Porky In Wackyland,141 (remade as Dough For The Do-Do142) and then listen to ‘The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary’,143 where Zappa unfolds a similarly incidentpacked, zany story about a little pig and, like Looney Tunes composer Carl Stalling, creates an ongoing stream of musical styles, quotations and melodies. Porky In Wackyland even has someone saying ‘It can happen here’, reminiscent of ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ on Freak Out!.144 Strip cartoons no doubt played a part in the Zappa mindset. One wonders if Zappa was familiar with the Robert Crumb cartoon on the cover of the Spring, 1969, edition of Helicon,145 in which a smiling mountain reaches out of a TV set and grabs a watching girl, exclaiming ‘C’mere kid!’ while a man looking through the window says ‘That ol’ devil mountain still grabs ʼem!’ Perhaps the ol’ devil mountain was an inspiration for Billy? Conclusion This chapter has highlighted an important aspect of the work of Frank Zappa, namely the story-song. This form is a recurring feature in his oeuvre, and an attempt has been made to show how he drew on a variety of cultural influences to create it. Narrative themes in the works of European composers like Stravinsky, Bartok and Prokofiev offered an important contribution but, crucially, the indelible impressions made by the American genres of popular music, comedy, radio, cinema and literature were paramount. In creating his story-songs, Zappa achieved a subtle Conceptual Continuity between his own work and that of previous artists. Like Frank Crumit, Phil Harris, Jimmy Durante and numerous others, he was an archetypal American storyteller. Like Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce, he presented the persona of the hipster. And, like his predecessors, he created his own unique voice. In this chapter, the sonic qualities of that voice have been elucidated. Why did Zappa create in his own particular way? If one places him in the context of psychological studies of the creative personality, certain answers present themselves. He had all the key traits, and fitted the classic profile. And, like Greggery Peccary pursued by a rage of Hunchmen, Zappa was pursued by a rage of cultural influences.

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    143   144   145   142

Robert Clampett, Porky In Wackyland, Warner Bros. (1938). Friz Freleng, Dough For The Do-Do, Warner Bros. (1949). Zappa, Studio Tan. The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. In Robert Crumb, Odds & Ends (New York, 2001).

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Chapter 8

Zappa and Technology: His incorporation of Time, Space and Place when Performing, Composing and Arranging Music Paul Carr

Frank Zappa’s ability to amalgamate popular music styles alongside musique concrète, electronic, and serial techniques make him a fascinating case study on the interdisciplinary roles of performer, composer, arranger and producer. One of the earliest musicians to consistently experiment with fusing these skill bases, his resultant stylistic fusion is also arguably one of the most prolific and original in the history of popular music. Using these factors as creative mediums, Zappa can also possibly be considered the only rock musician to consciously and consistently engage with time, space and place throughout his entire career, having a compulsive fascination with ensuring his entire life’s work was considered part of his Big Note philosophy, with many of his performances, compositions, arrangements and productions being part of an overarching Conceptual Continuity.1 The resultant music often incorporates countless semiological clues alluding to factors such as his politics, sexual tendencies and musical influences, and this chapter proposes to examine how Zappa pushed the boundaries of studio technology to develop compositions, (re)arrangements and (virtual) performances of his work, while creatively engaging with time, space and place. After presenting an overview of his interface with technology throughout the 1960s, the essay will progress to analyse albums such as Sheik Yerbouti 2 and the You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series (1988–1992), cumulating with his work on the Synclavier during the late 1980s and early 1990s with albums such as Jazz From Hell 3 and Make a Jazz Noise Here.4

1

    3   4   2

Refer to the introduction of this volume for an overview of both of these philosophies. Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501 (1979). Frank Zappa, Jazz From Hell, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74205 (1986). Frank Zappa, Make a Jazz Noise Here, Barking Pumpkin, D2 74234 (1991).

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Zappa’s Use of Technology Prior to The Mothers of Invention When Frank Zappa entered the international music scene in 1966 with the inaugural The Mothers of Invention album Freak Out!,5 he was already an experienced jobbing musician. Although having earned a living up to this point as a performer, songwriter, and film composer, the purchase of his colleague Paul Buff’s Cucamonga studio on August 1 19646 appears to be a pivotal factor regarding his transition from a practitioner who engaged with these paradigms separately, to one who adopted a more interdisciplinary autonomous approach to music making. Zappa acknowledged his debt to Buff, stating: He showed me how to work the stuff and I went from being kind of an incompetent commercial artist to a full time obsessive overdub maniac, working in this studio.7

Kevin Courier describes the control room of Buff’s Pal Recording Studio as consisting of an eight channel Presto mixing desk, a Hammond spring echo unit and a Rek-O-Kut lathe (for acetates), but more importantly, a purpose built 5-track half-inch tape machine, at a time when the industry standard was mono.8 The practice of developing his art alongside technology was to continue for the rest of Zappa’s life; when asked to what extent his music had developed in tandem with technology, he replied ‘right along with it’.9 He continued: There have been a number of items where I bought the prototypes and used them right away in recordings, like the Syn Drums, for example. The guy who invented these things brought them over and showed them to me and I bought ʼem right away and started incorporating them into the arrangements.10

During his tenure with Buff between 1960 and the purchase and conversion of his studio into what was to become Studio Z, Zappa recorded a number of commercial singles, most of which were recorded in 1963 in collaboration with Buff. According to Greg Russo, compositions and productions included a number of novelty records that were licensed to small California labels, with records they

  The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966).   This date was confirmed via email correspondence with Buff , who also verified that Zappa actually took over the studio in late 1963.  7   Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of Frank Zappa (London, 2003), p. 35.  8   Kevin Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa (Toronto, 2002).  9  Slaven, Electric Don Quixote, p. 284. 10  Ibid.  5  6

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could not licence being released on Buff’s Emmy record label.11 From this period, productions such as ‘Speed Freak Boogie’ (1962)12 and ‘Charva’ (1962)13 are particularly interesting examples of Zappa’s early solo ventures into production technology, with the former featuring multiple overdubs combined with half speed recording and the latter highlighting Zappa’s multi-instrumental skills, performing piano, bass and drums simultaneously. This practice was continued on a 1963 version of ‘Any Way The Wind Blows’,14 which features Zappa playing all instruments in what is essentially a demo of the version to appear on Freak Out!15 three years later. When considering Zappa’s work with Buff from this period, it appears to be reminiscent of what Edward Kealy entitles the ‘Entrepreneurial Mode’ of collaboration.16 This is depicted as a ‘fluid and open’ partnership, allowing, ‘an interchange of skills and ideas among musicians, technicians and music market entrepreneurs’,17 and is seen to be the precursor of what the author describes as ‘The Art Mode’ of collaboration, where the artist develops a ‘natural interest in the craft of sound mixing as a means of artistic expression’.18 A feature of this mode also excludes so-called middlemen who represent the commercial interest of record companies, leaving the musicians and composers to make the creative decisions, a factor that results in ‘work previously considered merely technical [becoming] artistic’.19 If this is true, then the Buff/Zappa relationship can be regarded as a development of producer/musician partnerships such as that made famous by Norman Petty and Buddy Holly, which was described by David Laing as combining ‘within themselves … the role of song writer, musicians, lead, backing vocalists, and record producer’.20 This dialogic relationship was verified by Holly’s bassist Joe Mauldin, who stated ‘we were all producers on those records. No one person was actually the beginning or the end of production’.21 A recent interview conducted with Paul Buff confirmed the entrepreneurial nature of his collaboration with Zappa. When asked about their working practices he stated:   Greg Russo, Cosmic Debris: The Collected History and Improvisations of Frank Zappa (Floral Park, 2006). 12   Frank Zappa, Mystery Disc, Rykodisc, RCD10580 (1998). 13   Frank Zappa, The Lost Episodes, Rykodisc, RCD40573 (1996). 14  Ibid. 15   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 16   Edward R. Kealy, ‘From Craft To Art: The Case of Sound Mixers and Popular Music’, in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (London, 1996), pp. 207–20. 17   Ibid., p. 213. 18   Ibid., p. 214. 19   Ibid., p. 215. 20   David Laing, The Sound of Our Time (London, 1969), pp. 97–8. 21   Mark Cunningham, Good vibrations: A History of Record Production (London, 1998), p. 43.  11

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The cross-influence was about equal. Zappa knew very little about recording or electronics, but obviously was a budding genius. I knew little about music and my genius such as it was, was in electronics.22

When commenting on their compositional approach, he continued: There were many co-written things in those days, mostly yet to be released.23 There were no rules or official designations of who did what or who was in charge. Titles and credits didn’t count for much.24

According to Buff, Zappa ended up in the studio by himself doing the same sort of experimentation in the control room and studio, and consequently presented an early example of Kealy’s ‘Art Mode’, described as the ‘integration of the sound of studio technology with the musical aesthetic of popular music’.25 After purchasing Studio Z, Zappa shortly ran into financial problems after he was thrown into San Bernardo County Jail for recording an illegal sex tape.26 As the contents of the studio were confiscated as part of the a court order, many of Zappa’s early recordings were lost, but it seems that Buff’s experimental philosophy in a recording studio, in addition to his ability to compose idiomatically and release independently had an impact on Zappa, who also understood and later realised the financial and creative benefits a self-sufficient cottage industry such as this combination precipitated. The Development of Zappa’s Technical and Creative Approach After the closure of Studio Z, Zappa was to increasingly use tape editing as a compositional tool in addition to developing the business side of his career, forming Bizarre Records and its subsidiary Straight in 1968 with manager Herb Cohen in an attempt to assist increased creative control. In addition to producing and releasing music by non-conformist artists such as Lenny Bruce, Alice Cooper, Wildman Fischer, Girls Together Outrageously and Captain Beefheart, Zappa’s The Mothers of Invention and solo ventures continued in earnest throughout this period, with

22

  Buff, in correspondence with the author, October 2009.   Many of these tracks have subsequently been released by Crossfire Publications as part of a download only, multi-volume series of recordings made by Buff during the late 1950s to early 1960s. Refer to Greg Russo, Crossfire Publications (2012), at http://www. crossfirepublications.com/ [accessed 12 March 2012] for details. 24   Buff, in correspondence with the author, October 2009. 25  Kealy, On Record, p. 214. 26   Refer to Billy James, Necessity Is…..:The Early Years of Frank Zappa and the Mothers (London, 2005), p. 22. 23

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recordings such as Freak Out!,27 Absolutely Free,28 We’re Only In It For The Money 29 and Uncle Meat 30 all incorporating technology to formulate compositions and virtual performances. Davies uses the terminology virtual performance to distinguish between that of live and studio creativity, with the latter involving ‘the electronic manipulation and sculpting of sound to achieve effects that, typically cannot be achieved live’.31 He continues to present the two constituent parts of virtual performance, by asserting that ‘no continuous performance event of the kind that seems to be represented on the disk need take place and the performance occupies an aural space unlike any present normally in the real world’.32 This philosophical position has also been adopted by academics such as Moore33 and Zak, with the latter describing the recorded track as ‘something quite distinct, both conceptually and practically, from a recording of a live performance’.34 When interviewed regarding the process Zappa employed during the mid to late 1960s, ex Zappa sideman Don Preston commented: During Absolutely Free for example, some songs would consist of between 30– 40 independent takes, and each one would have to be attempted several times, as not all of the band members read music.35

This process is particularly apparent in early pieces such as ‘Plastic People’ and ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’,36 both of which are obviously constructed through multiple takes to produce a unified piece. It appears that Zappa was using the technical and human resources at his disposal, and incorporating them in the most appropriate way to formulate his creative requirements, which at the time were possibly proving problematic to realise in a live environment. As Preston states, the majority of the early The Mothers of Invention members did not read music, so multiple attempts at short sections of these pieces was a prudent way to document his advanced musical ideas. It is interesting to note that pieces such as ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’37 sound like they could be performed live on the surface,

  The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!.   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, Verve, V6-5013 (1967). 29   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in It for the Money, Verve, V6-5045 (1967). 30   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre Records, 2MS 2024 (1969). 31   Stephen Davies, Themes on the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 2003), p. 37. 32  Ibid. 33   Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text (Aldershot, 2001). 34   Albin Zak, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Los Angeles, 2001), pp. 34–5. 35   Preston in correspondence with the author, June 2009. 36   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free. 37  Ibid. 27 28

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and indeed were frequently played live later,38 often attempting to emulate what was originally created in the studio. This process is alluded to by Philip Auslander, who discusses the irony of mediatisation that results in live events being modelled on the ‘very mediatised representations that once took the self same live events as their models’.39 Later in his career, Zappa would consistently combine the musical skills of selected musicians with studio technology to develop this principle, not only performing live versions of recorded tracks, but also combining live and studio performances into a unified piece. This is particularly noticeable during pieces such as ‘The Dangerous Kitchen’,40 which combines at least two live locations spliced together with a studio recorded Steve Vai guitar transcription of Zappa’s improvised vocal line. On the same album, Vai was also given the task of transcribing a difficult Sprechstimme vocal line on ‘Jazz Discharge Party Hats’, which Zappa dutifully placed onto a live backing track recorded at Southern Illinois University in November 1980, and this is typical of the way Zappa used Vai during the early to mid 1980s. Although Zappa may not have intended to perform these versions live, the recordings create an illusion of what appears to be an impossible display of musicianship, and in doing so engages the listener in the dual process of immediacy and hypermediacy. In the same way that the technologies of movie-making in a film such as Jurassic Park 41 facilitate viewers’ experience of a visual world that is not possible, by embracing both the realism of the viewing experience and the technology making it possible, Zappa’s integration of live performance and studio technology invites the listener to consider how seemingly immediate-sounding performances are in fact mediated, and more importantly how these events are made real.42 As outlined by Bolter and Grusin, the process of hypermediacy ‘acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible’,43 and this is an apparent joy for Zappa considering the transparent way he reveals the multiplicity of his creative processes. An indicative example of this transparency is apparent on the sleeve notes of You Can’t Do That 38   This is verified on a number of bootlegs. For example Frank Zappa, Stadio Comunale, Bologna, Italy,30 August 1973 and Frank Zappa, Parc Du Penfield, Brest, France, 19 March 1979. 39   Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York, 1999), p. 10. 40   Frank Zappa, The Man From Utopia, Barking Pumpkin, FW38403 (1983). 41   Steven Spielberg, Jurassic Park, Universal Pictures (1993). 42   Zappa’s involvement with the early quadraphonic format on Frank Zappa, OverNite Sensation, DiscReet, MS2149 (1973), and Frank Zappa, Apostrophe (ʼ), DiscReet, DS2175 (1974) can be considered another indicator of his intention of using technology to facilitate as realistic a listening experience as possible. The importance of realism is also manifested in the fastidious way he progressively edited the imperfections in his early catalogue during the 1980s. 43   Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Massachusetts, 1999), p. 33.

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On Stage Anymore Vol.1,44 where Zappa verifies that the performances were ‘not chronological’, but that ‘any band from any year can be (and often is) edited to the performance of any other band from any other year – sometimes in the middle of a song’.45 This exposition of the creative process was also apparent within the recording of We’re Only in It for The Money,46 which according to Moorefield contains periodic snapshots of producer Gary Kellgren’s whispered dialogue concerning the making of the record.47 In addition to using technology to create studio performances that sound as if (at least on the surface) they could be played live, Zappa’s more pervasive practice included the juxtaposing of otherwise incongruent live versions of the same piece in what can be considered a virtual live performance. This ontological shift from using the recording studio as a mimetic means of fabricating reality, to one which facilitates pseudo-reality is described by Moorefield as the difference between the ‘illusion of reality’ and the ‘reality of allusion’,48 where the producer is ‘not replicating the natural world’, but ‘transforming it into something else’.49 Although this transformation process came to a head with the six-part You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series (1988–1992), ‘Little House I Used To Live In’, ‘Holiday In Berlin, Full Blown’,50 and ‘Toads Of The Short Forest’51 are all interesting early examples of Zappa combining numerous ensembles to form what is essentially a utopian live performance, which combines various times, spaces and places, in addition to straddling the divide between the immediacy that live music precipitates, and the hypermediacy of its construction process, as outlined above. Although the edits on these performances were crude compared to his later standards, they do provide a methodological foundation of fusing live instrumentation with sounds only available through studio technology.52 Although the majority of this series focuses on Zappa’s perception of a ‘perfect’ gig which links individual live performances from incongruent times and places, it is interesting how a number of specific tracks in the series actually include juxtaposed bands who played with

  Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 1, Rykodisc, RCD 10081/82 (1988). 45   Taken from the sleeve notes of Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol.1. 46   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money. 47   Virgil Moorefield, The Producer As Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music (Cambridge, 2005). 48   Ibid., p. xiii. 49   Ibid., p. xv. 50   The Mothers of Invention, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Reprise, RSLP 6370 (1970). 51   The Mothers of Invention, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Reprise, RSLP 2028 (1970). 52   For example, in the case of ‘Holiday in Berlin Fully Blown’, note the double speed tuned percussion (between 2:20 and 2:56 ) leading into the live guitar solo (Recorded at the Ark in Boston in 1969). 44

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Zappa many years apart. Examples include ‘Lonesome Cowboy Nando’,53 which combines a performance recorded in the summer of 1988 in Genoa, Italy, with one recorded 17 years earlier in UCLA Los Angeles, and ‘King Kong’54 which amalgamates the Flo and Eddy band of 1971 with musicians circa 1982. Regarding ‘Lonesome Cowboy Nando’, it is noteworthy that Zappa is the only constant factor in both 1971 and 1978 recordings, with the remixed version alternating time zones on numerous occasions,55 with ‘modern day’ Zappa alternating lead vocals with a 1971 incarnation of Jimmy Carl Black. As the original vocalist from 200 Motels,56 Black gives the recording an air of authenticity, despite technology being the mediating force, and it is also fascinating to appreciate how Zappa juxtaposed variations in tempo and timbre musically. In Pop Music: Technology and Creativity, Timothy Warner discussed how pop music has a greater tendency than rock to use technology to develop what he calls ‘the modified repetition of musical ideas between pieces’.57 Although the author is specifically focusing on sampling, he also comments on how pop uses ‘sounds from existing multi track recordings which are then rearranged and modified to create new and often radically different versions of the same piece’.58 Zappa, a socalled rock musician, arguably the greatest exponent and unappreciated antecedent of this practice, employed his self-titled studio technique Xenochrony alongside his Project/Object philosophy to implement this process.59 Although mainly used to import guitar solos from live performances into studio projects, Zappa also used Xenochrony with other instruments to fuse time, place and space. For example, the track ‘Rubber Shirt’,60 incorporates an 11/4 bass part extracted from a performance in Gothenburg in 1974, with a 4/4 drum part recorded in 1976 in studio conditions. When listening to the piece, it is fascinating how the two instruments sound like they are performing an intricate polyrhythmic two-part dialogue in real time, as opposed to unintentionally communicating through time, space and place. To quote Zappa, ‘all of the sensitive, interesting interplay between the bass and drums never actually happened …’61 The album also features a more typical use of the technique, with ‘Rat Tomaga’ and ‘The Sheik Yerbouti Tango’ both featuring   Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6, Rykodisc, RCD10091/92 (1992). 54   Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol.3, Rykodisc, RCD10085/86 (1989). 55   These can be highlighted as follows: 00–1.05 Genoa, 1.06–2.26 UCLA, 2.27–4.42 Genoa, 4.23–End UCLA. 56   Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer, 200 Motels, United Artists (1971). 57   Timothy Warner, Pop Music: Technology and Creativity - Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution (Aldershot, 2003), p. 10. 58   Ibid., p. 11. 59   Refer to the introduction of this volume for an overview of both techniques. 60  Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 61   Taken from sleeve notes of Sheik Yerbouti. 53

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guitar solos originally used in live versions of ‘The Torture Never Stops’ and ‘The Little House I Used To Live In’ respectively.62 Further Thoughts on Zappa’s Use of the Recording Studio In addition to using technology as a creative medium, Zappa’s working practices can be seen to concur with Paul Théberge’s hypothesis that technology has facilitated a studio environment where producers are driven by economic efficiency and technical control, and as a result ‘enter directly into musical practice’.63 Although Zappa was first and foremost a music practitioner who then entered into production, the interrelationship of technical control and economic efficiency became central themes in his quest for producing his art. Regarding the latter, he stated When a tour is over, the band is free to go out and do whatever other things they can get in their spare time. I don’t keep them on a salary all the time – I can’t afford them. So the best way to do music is by typing it in, pushing the button and listening to it play back correctly.64

This was a process he was able to engage in more profoundly after installing the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen in the basement of his home, his second personal recording studio, with its installation in 1979 coinciding with his artistic independence, having successfully purchased his entire back catalogue from Warner Brothers.65 In terms of technical control, as noted by Whiteley et al., the ‘centricity of the recording studio in the whole compositional process often blurs the distinction between artist and producer’,66 but in Zappa’s case this process is accentuated, not only through his manipulation of time, space and place, but in his overt display of portraying himself as observer. This is apparent in the inclusion of his production instructions in pieces such as ‘Have You Heard Their Band?’,67 where Zappa’s detached voice intersects the dialogue of the piece, prompting the central character to respond, ‘It’s this funny voice, and he keeps telling us all these 62   According to the sleeve notes of the album, both were recorded at Deutschlandhalle, Berlin, February 15, 1978. 63   Paul Théberge, ‘The Sound of Music: Technological Rationalization and the Production of Popular Music’, New Formations, 8 (1989): pp. 99–111, at 101. 64   Rick Davies, ‘Father of Invention’, Music Technology, 1/4 (1987): pp. 42, 45, 48– 50, at 48. 65   This was Zappa’s second litigation case with a major record company, his first being CBS in the late 1960s. 66   Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett, Stan Hawkins, Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity (Aldershot, 2004), p. 16. 67   Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994).

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things, and I [pause], I just thought that before we had just thought of these things’.68 A similar process is apparent in his movies 200 Motels 69 and Uncle Meat,70 both of which depict him as detached from that main narrative, with movie camera in hand directing the cast. As outlined by Steve Jones,71 the recording studio itself can facilitate political power in terms of decision making, and in Zappa’s case, his use of the recording studio (and the movie lens) can be seen to accentuate the controlling gestures he regularly implemented during live performance. Zappa initially used studio technology to create ‘virtual studio performances’ and to a lesser extent ‘virtual live performances,’ by using both his musicians and emerging technology as creative tools. Most importantly, he also used technology to remediate or rearrange his music within his Project/Object philosophy, or more subliminally within the repetitions of Conceptual Continuity. These paradigms enabled him to manipulate time, space and place in an unusually consistent manner.72 As technology developed, so did his ability to fuse studio and live environments in innovative ways, with Sheik Yerbouti 73 and Joe’s Garage74 representing interesting comparisons. While the former was largely developed by building studio overdubs onto live concert backing tracks, the studio-based latter incorporated Xenochronic guitar solos from a range of live concert environments, onto studio based backings. These albums confirm that by the late 1970s Zappa was able to create music from both live and studio commencement points, with both combining Moorefield’s allusion of reality and reality of allusion paradigms. Do Zappa’s Creative Practices make him an Anti-Realist? It is important to note that Zappa often created a tension between the reality of his narratives and the anti-realistic way the music was conceptualised and constructed. For example, pieces such as ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’,75 ‘Plastic People’,76 and ‘Jazz Discharge Party Hats’77 all discuss Zappa’s personal perspective of the 68

 Ibid.   Zappa and Palmer, 200 Motels. 70   Frank Zappa, Uncle Meat, Honker Home Video (1987). 71   Steve Jones, Rock Formation: Music Technology and Mass Communication (Newbery Park, 1992). 72   His song ‘Time Is Money’ (from Frank Zappa, Sleep Dirt, DiscReet, DSK 2292 (1979)) combines his perception of time with economic efficiency perfectly when stating ‘Time is money, But space is a long long time’. 73  Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 74   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act 1, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979) and Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). 75   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free. 76  Ibid. 77  Zappa, The Man From Utopia. 69

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world, and on the surface level foreground the realities of everyday life. However, when experimenting with studio technology on texts such these, Zappa can be seen to be abandoning realism, in effect establishing what Susan Strehle describes as a ‘quantum universe’, where ‘space and time aren’t separate, predictable, and absolute paradigms’.78 Strehle is speaking primarily about literary art, and proceeds to assert how ‘critics regard all contemporary writers who have abandoned realism as having abandoned reality at the same stroke’.79 This begs the question: do Zappa’s studio experiments make him an anti-realist? When asked to describe a stereotype of the record-buying public, Zappa utilised the metaphor of a typical fan called ‘Debbie’ to illustrate his views. He commented: [She is] not very bright. She dreams of kissing an All American Boy. She loves songs with lyrics about sweet boys and girls that dance or go to the beach. These songs have to be sung by hip, flashy boys that look like Mister Ken. That’s how Debbie thinks, and it’s to her tastes that the hit parades are being fine-tuned.80

Zappa then goes someway to providing an answer regarding his artistic intentions regarding realism. When asked ‘who are you’?, he continued: I’m the ugly kid from the neighbours that wants to look under her dress, reads books late at night and makes music himself in his garage. I’m also the little kid in the parable of The Emperor’s New Clothes who is the only one to see through the emperor and shout that the emperor is actually naked.81

As discussed in this essay, although Zappa’s technological processes often reveal an ontological framework that opposes realism, he is at least equally preoccupied with providing a mimetic and truthful account of the world as he perceived it, and both of these parameters are pervasive in his life’s work. Like Strehle’s account of contemporary novelists, Zappa does not make a choice between his art and actuality, but pursues both simultaneously. Zappa’s music can be seen to combine process and product and anti-realism and reality, with the combination having the potential to make the listener initially more uncertain, but eventually more involved.   Susan Strehle, Fiction in the Quantum Universe (Chapel Hill, 1992), p. x.  Ibid. 80   This quotation is originally taken from a Belgium magazine Humo (See Anonymous 11, Humo. Be: The Wild Site (2012), at http://www.humo.be/ [accessed 13 March 2012]) in December 1993, shortly after Zappa’s death. It was translated into English by Jurgen Verfaillie, and placed on his Zappa tribute website Kill Ugly Radio shortly afterwards. See Jurgen Verfaille, ‘My Epitaph: Anything, Anytime, Any Place, For No Reason At All’ (1993), at http://www.killuglyradio.com/features/articles/my_epitaph_anything_anytime_ any_place_for_no_reason_at_all.php [accessed 27 February 2012]. 81  Ibid. 78 79

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The Rise of the Synclavier In addition to his more overt studio-based compositions, Zappa’s studio skills also permeated his orchestral pieces. When discussing ‘Bogus Pomp’,82 in a recent thesis Allan Wright alludes to how the piece is largely ‘derived from film-music and other inserted material, all of which was initially engineered in the mixing studio’.83 This ‘inserted material’ includes remnants of his film 200 Motels,84 in addition to transcribed elements of The Mothers Of Invention 1968 performance at the Royal Albert Hall. Although the production of this track is overtly achieved through notated means, as with the entire London Symphony Orchestra Vol.185 and London Symphony Orchestra Vol.2 86 recordings, it is also the result of intensive studio editing to disguise imperfections such as out of tune instruments, incorrect notes, and lack of rehearsal.87 Towards the end of the 1980s, problematic band personnel factors prompted Zappa to stop touring and focus more on the Synclavier as a means of composition and production. Having had numerous issues with the poor performances of his classical repertoire in particular over many years due to what he described as the human element,88 this machine enabled him to compose music that was as complex as his imagination dictated, without the issues of large orchestral fees or negative artistic attitudes. When questioned about the machine’s high price tag, his response of ‘I could have bought two of these machines for what the LSO [London Symphony Orchestra] album cost me’89 is according to Ben Watson indicative of Zappa, like any employer ‘replacing troublesome employees with machinery, relishing the chance to offend those who sentimentalise the “human element” in art’.90 The work he produced with the Synclavier in many ways resonates with his hero Edgard Varèse’s 1936 liberation of sound lecture, which documented the composer’s desire for machines to compose music that went beyond the abilities   Frank Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 2, Barking Pumpkin, SJ-74207 (1987). 83   Allan Wright, ‘Frank Zappa’s Orchestral Works: Art Music or Bogus Pomp?’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007), p. 42. 84   Zappa and Palmer, 200 Motels. 85   Frank Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 1, Barking Pumpkin, FW38820 (1983). 86  Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 2. 87   This is rationalised by Zappa in the sleeve notes of Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra Vol.1. 88   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989). 89   John Diliberto, ‘Frank Zappa and His Digital Orchestra’, Electronic Musician, 2/9 (September 1986), at http://www.emusician.com/news/0766/frank-zappa-and-his-digitalorchestra/145782 [accessed 12 February 2012]. 90   Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics Of Poodle Play (New York, 1993), p. 458. 82

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of human performance.91 In Zappa’s case, his work with the Synclavier at least partially achieved that aim. Both Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger 92 and Francesco Zappa93 focus on classical pieces, and although the sound palate is limited in the latter in particular, the technical and timbral requirements of pieces such as ‘Jonestown’94 and ‘Love Story’95 would prove problematic if played exactly by musicians in live performance, due to their technical complexity. The Perfect Stranger 96 comprises three live pieces conducted by Pierre Boulez and four Synclavier pieces, and this gesture is a signifier that Zappa considered this technological medium to be of artistic equality. This practice continued on Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention,97 which for the first time combines more rock-focused studio and live recordings with Synclavier-generated pieces. Although his sound palette is still limited, pieces such as ‘H.R.2911’ are beginning to combine complex melodies and rhythms with a greater variety of timbre, mixing orchestral textures with idiosyncratic traits such as the infamous Zappa snork.98 The album also features attempts at combining live performers with computergenerated sounds, a technique he was to explore in greater depth on subsequent albums, and an important development in his fusing of performer, producer, composer and arranger roles. Aside from the live band featured on ‘St Etienne’, Jazz From Hell 99 is essentially a solo Synclavier album, and as evidenced in its title track, begins to provide an insight into the possibilities of combining sampled and originally constructed sounds, with otherwise ‘impossible’ rhythms and melodic lines. Unlike the seemingly ‘impossible music’ Bennett outlines when discussing Les Paul’s experiments of the early 1950s,100 Zappa progressively blurs the distinction between human and automated performance. In 1988, Andrew Goodwin regarded this process as ‘the most significant result of the recent innovations in pop production’,101 and considered it responsible for both a ‘crisis  91   Edgard Varèse, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (London, 2004), pp. 17–21.  92   Frank Zappa, Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger, EMI, DS-38170 (1984).  93   Frank Zappa, Francesco Zappa, Barking Pumpkin, ST74202 (1984).  94  Zappa, Boulez Conducts Zappa.  95  Ibid.  96  Zappa, Boulez Conducts Zappa.  97   Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers of Prevention, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203 (1985).  98   A vocal snorting sound which is featured on numerous Zappa recordings.  99  Zappa, Jazz From Hell. 100   Hilton Stith Bennett, ‘Notation and Identity in Contemporary Popular Musicʼ, Popular Music, 3/1 (1983), pp. 215–34. 101   Andrew Goodwin, ‘Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction’, in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (London, 1996): pp. 258–73, at 263.

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in authorship’ and a lack of authenticity in performance.102 In Zappa’s case, it is noticeable how his Synclavier-based Jazz from Hell 103 won a Grammy for best instrumental performance, and his computer albums in general were embraced by his fans, despite the lack of authenticity rock audiences normally associate with computer-based works. Indeed when asked about the potential of synthesisers to detract from the humanity in music, Zappa responded: People who worry about that are worried about their own image as a person performing on the instrument. In other words, the instrument is merely a subterfuge in order for the musician to communicate his own personal, succulent grandeur to the audience which to me is a disservice to music as an art form.104

When comparing human and automated elements of both the compositional process and performance, Zappa raises a number of issues in his autobiography. Considering the Synclavier as a means through which he could realise music that was otherwise ‘impossible (or too boring) for human beings to play’,105 he continues to discuss how the technology was used for ‘writing blocks of complicated rhythms, and having them executed accurately by groups of instruments’.106 This of course was one of the main issues he had with both the early The Mothers of Invention recordings, and the performance of his orchestral music, but with the Synclavier, ‘the little guys inside the machine play them with one-millisecond accuracy – every time’.107 Regarding composition, he considered the machine as a facilitator to enable him to be his ‘own conductor, controlling the dynamics or any other performance parameter’.108 Most importantly, it is viewed as a means through which an audience can hear a work in its ‘pure form, allowing them to hear the music, rather than the ego problems of a group of players who don’t give a shit about the composition’.109 It is difficult to ascertain how many of these comments are rationally considered as opposed to emotional responses, as he continues to juxtapose the positive improvisational skills of musicians against factors such as laziness, drunkenness, personal problems and habits of missing rehearsals due to sickness.110 These factors are of course elements of the human condition that Zappa celebrated anthropologically for many years, and he closes his rant confusingly by stating ‘if I had to choose between live musicians or 102

 Ibid.  Zappa, Jazz From Hell. 104  Slaven, Electric Don Quixote, p. 286. 105   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 172. 106  Ibid. 107   Ibid., p. 173. 108  Ibid. 109  Ibid. 110  Ibid. 103

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La Machine, I must admit, from time to time I’m almost tempted to opt for the human element’.111 Conclusion Had Zappa’s life not been cut short in 1993 due to prostate cancer, it is interesting to consider how his computer-generated music could have merged with live performance, and how this technology could have added a new dimension to his manipulation of time, space and place. His 1988 release Make A Jazz Noise Here112 is arguably the best indication of this, with ‘When Yuppies Go To Hell’ combining live/sampled drums with Synclavier harmonies and vocal effects. These mainly digital domains progress into a live atonal brass theme, which is merged with Synclavier-generated vocal sounds followed by an extended trumpet solo with band backing. Sections where live musicians merge with the computer are particularly interesting, with Chad Wakerman’s analogue and electric drum kit providing particular ambivalence regarding the human–automated divide. This album was recorded during his infamous final tour in 1988, and in some ways acts as a statement of how computer technology would become his principle form of expression over the remaining years of his life. This point is ironically accentuated via the album’s artwork, with the front cover depicting a small live venue in the desert called ZAPPA’S, which is possibly an indexical signifier of the type of venues he started his career in. The back cover depicts a sign next to the venue stating ‘last chance to hear live music’. How true this statement was, considering this was his final tour. Although on first listening it appears that the opposing live/ computerised paradigms of ‘When Yuppies Go To Hell’113 is achieved live, once again the details on the album sleeve reveal otherwise, it being compiled from various performances, with mainly improvised sessions based on the piece ‘Pound For A Brown’,114 copied and pasted from various German, English and American venues between February and May 1988. In some respects, this process of manipulating time, space and place through celebrating and distorting what appears to be live performance is a continuation of what Zappa implemented at the start of his career, and it is proposed this process was apparent from Freak Out!115 to Civilization Phaze III.116

111

 Ibid.  Zappa, Make a Jazz Noise Here. 113  Ibid. 114   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat. 115   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 116  Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. 112

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Chapter 9

Zappa and the Freaks: Recording Wild Man Fischer David Sanjek

No one ever accused Frank Zappa of lacking a sense of humour. Most people would characterise the thrust of Zappa’s wit as being, amongst other things, snarky and sarcastic. Throughout his career, he conducted himself like an equal opportunity tweaker of taboos and remained convinced that whatever a person’s ideological disposition, all of us potentially can succumb to the batons of those forces of coercion that Zappa dubbed the ‘brain police’.1 This predilection to interrogate authority potentially met its match when the composer found himself figuratively attached to the establishment: for the first time, he was in a position to call his own shots, rather than simply be an employee of a recording company. In 1968, Zappa left Verve Records and signed a new distribution deal with Warner Brothers/Reprise, one of the pre-eminent companies then and now. Whereas Verve seemed to perceive Zappa as nothing more or less than a marketable reversion from the mainstream, his new employers appeared to believe the composer could potentially disengage from his long-time ‘no commercial potential’2 rallying cry, without emptying his material of the idiosyncrasies that made it stand out from the work of his contemporaries. Furthermore, an inevitably attractive portion of the contract permitted Zappa to operate two boutique labels that the corporation would promote and distribute; the recordings would feature solo material by the composer as well as the ensemble efforts of Zappa’s band, The Mothers of Invention, in addition to performances by other artists he appreciated and wished to produce and promote. One can only imagine that his choice of names for the concerns reflects Zappa’s recognition of the inescapable ironies embedded in his situation. He named the first, inaugurated in 1968, Bizarre, and the other, initiated the following year, Straight. Not only did the titles evoke his appreciation of his potentially disjointed affiliation with the major players in the record industry, but they also echoed the antagonistic energies unleashed throughout much of society during this tumultuous period. Like a   See ‘Who Are The Brain Police’, on The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966). 2   Based on rejection letter from Dot Records prior to The Mothers of Invention securing the deal with Verve, this phrase was much used by Zappa. Its first occurrence appears to be on the sleeve notes of The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 1

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number in his audience, Zappa recognised that the country had fragmented along ideological fault lines that appeared incapable of reconciliation. The pressure cooker of polemical contention revealed a society just barely under control, such that when any excess amount of enthusiasm, whether emerging from the right or the left, became unhinged, the consequences could be lethal. The bashing of protestors on the streets of Chicago during the democratic convention or the brutalising of the audience at the Altamont Speedway during the appearance of the Rolling Stones reinforced Zappa’s admonition that there was, as the title of a song on Freak Out!3 indicated, ‘trouble every day’ amongst us and we placed ourselves at risk whenever we endeavoured to test the limitations of those opportunities when we inhabit the sphere embodied by the title of The Mothers of Invention’s second album: Absolutely Free.4 This cauldron of colliding claims to authority resonates through the grooves of the material released during the short shelf-lives of these companies, 1968–1972, and most certainly applies to a number of the initial releases during the first full year of activity. The most notable include the following: Lenny Bruce’s pivotal piece of political satire, The Berkeley Concert;5 the initial release of Alice Cooper, Pretties for You;6 the seminal, ground-breaking work of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica;7 a notably spacey contribution by two veterans of the Folk Revival, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester: Farewell Aldebaran;8 live tapes of the unique monologist, Lord Buckley: A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat;9 Tim Buckley’s jazz-inflected extension of his hitherto relatively conventional song writing: Blue Afternoon;10 and the unique effusions of the gender-challenging GTO’s (Girls Together Outrageously): Permanent Damage.11 Zappa’s biographer Barry Miles compares the idiosyncrasy and eventual commercial incapacity of many of these recordings with the work Zappa escorted into the marketplace from his independently operated Studio Z in the earlier part of the decade. ‘He knew then’, Miles writes, ‘what the commercial culture wanted – surf records, ‘answer’ records that played on the ideas of the current hits, novelty records – but he always skewed them so much they were too weird to be chart hits’.12 Now that he had ensconced himself in the precincts of the mainstream music business, Zappa seemed equally if not even more unable or unwilling to commit uncritically to accepted industrial parameters. Whether Zappa liked it or not, the cumulative  3

 Ibid.   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, Verve, V6-5013 (1967).  5   Lenny Bruce, The Berkeley Concert, Bizarre/Reprise, 2XS 6329 (1969).  6   Alice Cooper, Pretties For You, STS 1941 (1969).  7   Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica, STS 1053 (1969).  8   Judy Henske and Jerry Yester, Farewell Aldebaran, STS 1052 (1969).  9   Lord Buckley, A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat, STS 1054 (1969). 10   Tim Buckley, Blue Afternoon, STS 1060 (1969). 11  GTOs, Permanent Damage, STS 1059 (1969). 12   Barry Miles, Zappa: A Biography (New York, 2004), p. 174.  4

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Bizarre and Straight discographies manifest a virtually wilful abrogation of commerciality. Minimal sales of virtually every release other than the Mothers material or Zappa’s solo efforts certified the limited population of the privileged public that felt themselves drawn to the composer’s irregular roster. Can You Tame A Wild Man? However, one could argue that the most taboo-breaking, uncommercial and outright disturbing item in the entire catalogues of both labels has to the be the initial 45 release on Bizarre and its subsequent accompanying double album. On 10 September 1968, ‘The Circle’ backed by ‘Merry-Go-Round’ appeared,13 followed on 28 April 1969 – just a week after the unleashing of The Mothers of Invention’s Uncle Meat 14 – by An Evening With Wild Man Fischer.15 Bizarre indeed, these were the works of a paranoid, schizophrenic, manic depressive street performer, familiar to Zappa and many other residents of or visitors to Los Angeles, who set forth his podium most often on the stimulus-saturated blocks of the Sunset Strip. Larry ‘Wild Man’ Fischer was a California native, born in Los Angeles in 1945, who had been twice institutionalised in 1963 and 1965 by his mother as a result of what she believed to be nonconformist behaviour and physical threats to family members. Subsequent to his second incarceration, Fischer was ignominiously abandoned by his family and took to the pavements as a means of uninsured survival as well as a platform for his self-penned repertoire. As the community about him had historically nurtured idiosyncratic talents, he hoped against hope that he might achieve a credible career in the music industry. The songs contained on his inaugural 45 single epitomise certain salient characteristics of Fischer’s entire repertoire. Whereas some artists undergo a process of evolution and their career can be subdivided into separable peaks and valleys, Fischer emerged altogether whole. His output did not so much advance as accumulate. Its generating principles were few and simple: rudimentary lyrics that accompanied repetitious but often memorable melodies. There is little of the avantgarde or the extreme in his material. In fact, were you to consider the titles of his works and scan a set of transcripts of the lyrics, you could easily mistake it for the more routine fodder that emanated from the Brill Building in the earlier portion of the decade. How far is the following from something like ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, written by the prolific and prodigiously successful Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich,

13

  Wild Man Fischer, ‘The Circle’/’Merry-Go-Round’, Bizarre/Reprise, 0781 (1968).   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre Records, 2MS 2024 (1969). 15   Wild Man Fischer, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer, Bizarre/Reprise, 2XS 6332 (1969). All further discussion in this essay refers to this recording. 14

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originally recorded by the Exciters in 1963 and re-recorded as a hit by the British band Manfred Mann in 1964?16 Fischer’s ‘Merry-Go-Round’ opens: C/mon let’s merry go, merry go, merry go round! Boop boop boop! Merry go, merry go, merry-go-round! Boop boop boop! Me and you can go merry go round! It’s very easy, just go up and down!17

If the words have a convincing familiarity and conventionality, then Fischer’s delivery of them, on the other hand, is indisputably something else altogether. He challenged routine forms of rhythm and vocal timbre as a matter of course, for he alternatively screeched and exuberantly exclaimed his lyrics, all to a tempo that possessed as shaky a hold on established time signatures as was his grasp on mental balance. Typically, he would enunciate the first word of each line with maximum emphasis, as though he were simultaneously grabbing the listener about the throat and emphatically exercising a claim to his own identity. In addition, the titles of many of the songs reinforce the circularity and repetition of their structures and lyrics. Much like, sans medication, Fischer could not escape from the domination of his mental condition, the songs themselves initiate a simple pattern and then ride it out mercilessly until either Fischer, or the listener, grows exhausted and moves on to the next item in his repertoire or the next performer on the pavement. Fischer fascinated Zappa. In his mind, too many members of the counter culture only presumed themselves to be out of the ordinary, yet evidenced a kind of cookie cutter similarity. Those Zappa designated as freaks possessed, instead, a genuine degree of singularity and in some cases a sui generis generosity that exercised itself regardless of the expectations and reactions of society at large. Consequently, Zappa committed to what Ben Watson describes as the paradoxical gesture of purporting to make a recording artist out of someone who lacked, if not outright abandoned, any pretence to conventional musical skills.18 Zappa accepted Fischer on his own terms and did not present him or his repertoire as a stunt or a gag. In doing so, he deviated from the artist’s contemporaneous appearance on the popular comedy series Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, where Fischer occupied the position of a musical punchline.19 16   The Exciters, ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ United Artists, 662 (1962), Manfred Mann, ‘Do Wah Diddy diddy’ Ascot, AS21257 (1964). 17   ‘Merry-Go-Round’, on Fischer, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer. 18   Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). 19   Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In appeared on NBC Television from 1968 to 1973. Wild Man Fischer was not alone in being treated in this manner. Other artists lampooned on the programme include the Holy Modal Rounders and Tiny Tim. The Holy Modal Rounders originated as an acoustic duo, featuring Peter Stempfel and Steve Weber. They performed a

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Zappa documents Fischer’s repertoire lavishly, both live on the street and in the studio, in some cases a cappella and in others accompanied by overdubbed musicians. Though the result was antithetical to the commercial agenda of the Top 40, someone would have to dismiss the material on its own terms, for the recording provided a compelling and elaborate depiction of the kind of individual who would, only a short number of years later, be honorifically tagged as an outsider artist. Fischer’s stage name, unfortunately, amounted to something more than a metaphor, as he proved unable to moderate his behaviour during the course of an argument with Zappa in his home. Descriptions vary as to the cause, but the outcome included his probably unintentional but undeniably successful minor injury of Zappa’s infant daughter Moon Unit. That episode evaporated their association, and more than likely contributed to the lack of digital packaging of Fischer’s material produced by Zappa, as it remains out of print and the original vinyl exorbitantly expensive. Subsequently, his career fell into abeyance, as he more or less disappeared off the scene, a recurrent event in the course of Fischer’s turbulent life. In 1975, he began to frequent the newly opened Rhino Records store and his spontaneously composed ode to the establishment became something of a theme song for the enterprise and, soon thereafter, the first 45 single released by the company label – eventually one of the most respected and successful reissue concerns. Rhino subsequently released three LPs by Fischer, though each sold in exponentially smaller numbers: Wildmania,20 Pronounced Normal 21 and Nothing Scary (1983).22 The second and third recordings were overseen by the novelty duo Barnes & Barnes, which included former child actor Billy Mumy and whose commercial claim to fame was 1979’s single ‘Fish Heads’.23 Their song achieved success in large part through the auspices of the broadcaster Dr. Demento (aka Barry Hansen) whose syndicated radio programme celebrated the obscure and the odd. This outlet provided Fischer with one of his very few dependable avenues for public promotion as well, though the focus of the formatting underscored his peculiarity at the expense of his other ascertainable accomplishments. Fischer’s erratic mental health and recurrent episodes of crippling paranoia put the kibosh on any efforts at something even resembling a career, and a sequence mixture of spirited original songs along with traditional pieces from the folk repertoire, all delivered in an exuberant manner that little resembled the typically sedate style of the Folk Revival. When they appeared on Laugh-In, the group had taken on electric instruments and included the celebrated playwright Sam Shepherd as drummer. Tiny Tim was a unique vocalist and performer of the classic American songbook of Tin Pan Alley. Dressed in ornate suits brought in thrift shops, he sang in a trilling falsetto. 20   Wild Man Fischer, Wildmania, Rhino, RNLP 00001 (1979). 21   Wild Man Fischer, Pronounced Normal, Rhino, RNLP 021 (1980). 22   Wild Man Fischer, Nothing Scary, Rhino, RNLP 022 (1983). 23   Barnes and Barnes, ‘Fish Heads’, Loomania,101/102 (1979).

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of residences in flea-bag establishments in danger prone neighbourhoods routinely kept him potentially in harm’s way. Few associates could retain their affinity for or friendship with him over protracted periods of time, although some of his allies, like Mumy, figured out ways to overlook the illness and applaud the artistry. Two young filmmakers, Josh Rubin and Jeremy Lubin, were able to establish a similar bond, and released a poignant portrait of the aging artist, Derailroaded: Inside the Mind of Wild Man Fischer.24 While it admiringly chronicles his career, it never shirks from depicting his crippling mental illness or the havoc he could wreck on his own life or that of others. If a viewer unfortunately cannot imagine Fischer as anything other than a joke, the episode in which Rubin filmed the performer experiencing a debilitating instance of paranoia might all too readily reduce them to tears. The final sequences of the documentary illustrate how age and other circumstances further delimit Fischer’s options and force his family to find a permanent residence for him that incorporates routine psychiatric medication, something he often avoided, or possibly forgot, when living on his own. Larry ‘Wild Man’ Fischer died of heart related ailments in that residence on 16 June 2011. Due to its commercial unavailability, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer has become something of a repository for the accolades of aficionados and the opprobrium of ill wishers to this day. The inquisitive for the most part must confront the recording as something of a rumour, although it is possible, at the behest of some dedicated individuals, to read a detailed transcript, complete with stage directions, of its contents. Still, nothing can replace the sonic irreducibility of Fischer; the tenor and the torment of his personality have to be heard to be understood, and potentially appreciated. Frank Zappa’s interaction with Wild Man Fischer was brief and, like virtually every other individual that fell into his orbit, complicated. Nonetheless, we owe it to him that there exists a permanent record of the man in the first place or that he has a continuing reputation that might conceivably outlast him. The remainder of this essay will examine this recording in more detail and, specifically, raise three issues that are central to its complexity and incomparability. First, there is nothing random or one-off about the release. Zappa frames Fischer in a quite deliberate manner. Each of the four sides incorporates a separate and distinct point of view, and the gatefold design brings along visual and written material that augments the repertoire in revealing ways. What does Zappa achieve through this process; what does he reveal about this seemingly simple, possibly simple minded individual, or has he corralled him into a framework that conceals far more than it conveys? Second, how does Fischer’s repertoire relate to and, in some ways, comment upon Zappa’s contemporaneous release, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets?25 How can one compare, and to what end contrast, the simultaneous parody of and paean to doo-wop in Zappa’s recording to the songcraft and performance style 24   Josh Rubin, Derailroaded: Inside the World of “Wild Man” Fischer, Ubin Twinz Productions (2005). 25   The Mothers of Invention, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets, Verve V65055 (1968).

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pursued by Fischer? Did Zappa commit himself to both projects during the same stretch of time as a portion of his investigation of that musical subgenre, one that he equally admired and abhorred? Third and last, how does the final track on An Evening With Wild Man Fischer 26 complicate all that precedes it, wherein Fischer addresses himself to the man behind the glass in the recording studio and, during the course of a dialogue, temporarily erases the boundaries between his persona and his personal life, thereby breaking down what one might call an acoustic fourth wall? By making brief but surely vivid reference to his experience of adolescent incarceration, does Fischer at the least rejigger the predominantly upbeat tenor of the recording and, more to the point, remind the listener in no uncertain terms of the price he had paid to create his repertoire, whether one wishes to regard it as art or the addled warblings of another damaged soul? Framing an Outsider The durability of a number of Frank Zappa’s recordings arises out of more than the music alone. From the start of his ascendance in the recording industry with Freak Out! in 1966,27 he routinely employed the packaging of recorded sound as a platform for communication in forms not limited to the acoustic. While it might be something like an act of terminological overkill, Zappa can be said to have aspired to reanimating Richard Wagner’s ambitious conceit of the Gesamtkunstwerk: the total work of art. For instance, more than one consumer (myself included) initially chose to sample the material contained on Freak Out! 28 specifically on the basis of the eye-catching images on the cover, and then went on to peruse and become equally if not more possessed by the information contained in the gatefold interior. As much as he created the groundwork for a fan base with this release, Zappa also initiated the fascination on the part of a number of those individuals with some of the artists referred to in this interpolated material, most particularly one of Zappa’s idols and primary influences: the venturesome concert composer Edgard Varèse. Zappa collaborated in these endeavours quite frequently with artist/designer Cal Schenkel. A number of the images created by Schenkel that appear on the covers of Zappa’s discography have become virtually totemic – once seen, who can forget the self-abusive shaving motif on Weasels Ripped My Flesh29 – and this practice carried over to much of the product on Bizarre/Straight. Perhaps the most memorable instance is the indelible images of the musicians on Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica.30 The fish-faced portrait of the lead vocalist on the cover can easily compete with the shaving image for certifiable  Fischer, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer.   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 28  Ibid. 29   The Mothers of Invention, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Reprise, RSLP 2028 (1970). 30   Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica, Straight, STS 1053 (1969). 26 27

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visual longevity. It captures one’s attention in and of itself as well as by virtue of the elements that it conveys of certain characteristics of Beefheart’s repertoire: the joining together of seemingly disjointed phenomena; a surreal disposition toward communication; and a skewed though sensitive attitude toward the non-human denizens of our environment. This utilisation of a variety of means of communication carries over to the presentation of An Evening with Wild Man Fischer, in that the cover and gatefold employ visual and written material to augment what is conveyed in the content of the grooves. The interior endeavours to achieve two ends: to present a brief for his artist by Zappa himself and to offer Fischer the opportunity to indicate what position he occupies in the popular music hierarchy of the day. Recognising that he must broach not only the issue of Fischer’s lack of audience recognition but also the roadblocks he must surpass in order to find sympathetic listeners, Zappa makes the following pitch: ‘Please listen to this album several times before you decide whether or not you like it or what Wild Man Fischer is all about. He has something to say to you, even though you might not want to hear it’.31 Nothing in this injunction constitutes excessive or exploitative pleading, but it does stress Fischer’s undeniable authenticity as well as acknowledge that his repertoire and its delivery cannot be soft-pedalled as easy listening. A longer statement appears on the back cover in an attempt to solicit public attention. More to the point, it makes reference to the psychological complexities of Fischer’s biography in order to situate his material and subdue any knee jerk rejections of its oddity: Wild Man Fischer is a real person who lives in Hollywood, California. He used to be very shy. He didn’t have any friends. One day he decided to be more aggressive. He would write his own songs and sing to people and tell them he wasn’t shy anymore. When he did this, everyone thought he was crazy. His mother had him committed to a mental institution twice.32

Emphasising the genuineness of Fischer’s personality, the emotional impetus of his musical endeavours, the familial price he paid for engaging in their performance and the legal consequences of his creativity builds up a distinct and complex case even before a consumer removes the album’s shrinkwrap. By comparison to the commercially successful, though thoroughly comic apostrophe to mental illness ‘They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-haaa!’ by Napoleon XIV (aka Jerry Samuel),33 which broke the Top 10 of the singles charts in 1966, it reinforces that these recordings may raise a smile but are not in any way meant to be a put-on or a gimmick. Fischer’s observations in the gatefold amplify this brief: the reproduction of a hand-written chart indicates where Fischer places   Taken from the sleeve notes of Fischer, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer.  Ibid. 33   Napoleon XIV, ‘They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-haaa’, Eric Records, AR 195 (1966). 31 32

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himself in a self-defined hierarchy of contemporary performing artists. Comically, he distinguishes himself, along with the Beatles, at the top of the defined scale, although he self-critically appears in the earlier demarcations, simultaneously indicating that his ascent parallels his acquaintance with and eventual production by Frank Zappa. Zappa frames Fischer’s repertoire in a deliberate and schematic fashion on the two LPs, as each side features a separate and distinguishable element of the material. The first side can be considered a melange, as it incorporates live recordings, by Dick Kunc, made in front of the Whiskey A Go Go and the Hamburger Hamlet on the Sunset Strip along with some studio material. The last track brings in local scenesters and taste makers Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley,34 who testify to the artist’s singularity. The second side wholly incorporates a capella studio performances as does the third, though with occasional instrumental overdubs and, in one case, ‘The Taster’, a full-scale back-up band. The fourth and final side includes another accompanied song, ‘Circle’, but dwells upon the life history of the performer. In addition to a capsule autobiography, which alternates between spoken word and spirited song, Fischer more than once directly addresses Zappa behind the window of the control booth, and us on the other side of the speakers. One track, ‘Why I Am Normal’, specifically addresses his notion of normality; another, ‘Balling Isn’t Everything’, of sexuality; a third, ‘Circle’, conventional instrumentation and the last, ‘Larry Under Pressure’, which will provide the focus of the final section of this essay, the most painful elements of his past. The range of material, forms of presentation, sites of recording and modulating states of selfdefinition reinforce the degree to which Zappa wished to convey a rounded and revealing image of this complicated individual. As a consequence, we gain access to an array of emotions and attitudes, ranging from cocky to confused, spirited to sanguine, effervescent to antagonistic. If Fischer’s diagnosis indicated that a wide range of mood swings could be expected from him without forewarning or premeditation, Zappa does not attempt to avoid or elude any of those emotions, however disturbing, annoying or audience-inhibiting they might be. There does remain the matter of the album’s cover, and the unavoidably problematic photographic portrait of the artist. Taken by Henry Ditz, it illustrates Fischer with an over exaggerated demented look on his face, holding a long kitchen knife at the throat of an elderly female figure with a sign about her neck labelled ‘Larry’s Mother’. It is hard to isolate an untroubled response to this presentation, for it encourages one to crack up and to cringe simultaneously. The fact that this is a parodic reconstruction – the woman is not Fischer’s actual parent – does not diminish the feeling that it could be thought to mock mental illness as well as matricide; furthermore, it potentially undermines if not eradicates any sympathy Zappa wishes to build up for Fischer as well as approaches tearing asunder the documentary intentions of the recording. And yet, one can, potentially, equally argue 34   The former a club owner and DJ of note and the latter a songwriter, recording artist, occasional record producer and musical gadfly.

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that the photograph grapples with the ludicrous nature of Fischer’s upbringing and incarceration by turning those sombre memories into potential punchlines. If Mrs Fischer could imagine no other response to her son’s misplaced exuberance than physical isolation and eventual ostracism, then can one blame him for consenting to transforming that pain into something equivalent to a psychiatric sitcom? Furthermore, in 1968, was there a range of options for Zappa and Fischer from which to choose in order to deal with these issues other than keeping them at arm’s length altogether or condemning them to fuel for simple-minded mirth? Somehow, the photograph has its laugh and holds forth the potential horror of the matter at one and the same time. In order to further contextualise the photograph and its potential interpretation, consider the comparable experience the popular comedian Jonathan Winters endured with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He suffered a nervous breakdown as his career was taking off in the late 1950s and spent eight months in a private mental hospital. Subsequently, on his second live recording, The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters 35 he transposed the unsettling events into a Kafkaesque cartoon, though delivered in language many would consider persuasively upsetting without losing its absurdist aura. Winters refers to having ‘left the mothership’ and taken on the persona of ‘John Q from outer space’.36 He speaks of giving his therapists ample ammunition for diagnoses, yet eventually acknowledges the advisability of keeping such proclivities under control, pharmaceutically or otherwise, so as to avoid the need ‘to go back to the zoo’.37 Clearly, audiences at the time would not be ready for an out-and-out confessional on Winters’ part and could only accommodate this form of coded language. Similarly, when Ken Kesey, two years later in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,38 took issue with the penal dimensions of the mental health establishment, that had to be in a fictional guise. The radical therapist Thomas Szasz may have published his groundbreaking diatribe The Myth of Mental Illness 39 the same year that Winters released his recording, yet one imagines most in the public were not comfortable in treating the subject as either a myth or a reality, but wished, instead, to keep it behind locked doors or at arm’s length. How deeply things had changed by 1968 remains a matter for conjecture, yet Fischer, and one imagines Zappa, seemed to presume more of them would respond to someone’s mental imbalance when the matter was not the subject of a diatribe or an unmodulated confession.

35   Jonathan Winters, The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters, Verve MGV, 15009 (1960). 36  Ibid. 37  Ibid. 38   Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York, 1962). 39   Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York, 1961).

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How Dada Is Doo-Wop? One cannot help but wonder what factors, other than simple fascination, drove Zappa to seek out Fischer and record him at this point in his career. Arguably, one might situate An Evening With Wild Man Fischer alongside its contemporaneous project by the producer, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets.40 As was stated earlier, Zappa possessed a distinct and sharp sense of humour, and he equally put forth a strong and deliberately framed set of opinions on any number of topics. Some of those observations display a virtually epigrammatic dimension such that they have acquired a life of their own, even for those who do not know they originated with Zappa. One certainly is what would seem to be his pretty much wholesale renunciation of an entire musical genre, as outlined in the phrase ‘Jazz isn’t dead; it just smells funny’.41 That declaration stands out amongst Zappa’s customarily unconflicted characterisations of musical forms. He was not a man who hid his opinions under a barrel, and unprepared interviewers could be taken back by the agenda of attitudes that he could unleash, often without prevarication. One of those opinions concerned his conflicted but nonetheless confident admiration of doo-wop. He was said to possess an immense collection, over 7,000 items, of 45s from the period of the subgenre’s heyday, and Barry Miles42 records Zappa’s being genuinely awestruck when he visited the miniscule and technologically near-prehistoric studios in which the Penguins recorded ‘Earth Angel’.43 It was, in fact, just that uncomplicated directness and simplicity he appreciated about the genre. Miles comments that while Zappa never languished in nostalgia, he appreciated how the material constituted ‘the archetypal music of teenage innocence’ as well as the manner in which it encapsulated ‘the raw, creative expression of young black America’.44 At the same time, Zappa never endeavoured to overinflate either his affection for doo-wop or endorse its often underwhelming compositional dynamics. In fact, one of the attractions for him was what Ben Watson regards as a deliberate abandonment of virtuosity and emphasis instead upon ‘deliberate dumbness’.45 For all his own aggressive intensity, Zappa sometimes condoned if not commended sheer fun, abject silliness. Watson quotes Zappa as having remonstrated, ‘Everybody wants to be taken seriously – my art, my craft, my whatever it is. Who gives a fuck? Let’s have a good time’.46 Admittedly, Zappa never appeared to conceive of fun in an altogether unproblematic manner, and it must be said that the side of his consciousness that relished complexity had to shut its ears, so to speak, when it absorbed such abjectly rudimentary compositions.   The Mothers of Invention, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets.   ‘The Be-Bop Tango’, Frank Zappa, Roxy & Elsewhere, DiscReet, DS2202 (1974). 42  Miles, Zappa: A Biography, p. 196. 43   The Penguins, ‘Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine)’, Dootone, 348 (1954). 44  Miles, Zappa: A Biography, p. 196. 45  Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. 123. 46  Ibid. 40

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One can point to the confirmation of this position through some of the pieces from the doo-wop canon that Zappa appeared to revere, either through performing them himself or indicating his affection for them in other contexts. A number of these performances occurred during or just subsequent to his association with Wild Man Fischer. Certainly, key amongst them is Richard Berry’s ‘Louie, Louie’.47 The abject joy that emanates from Zappa as he instructs Don Preston to play the melody on the Royal Albert Hall’s magisterial pipe organ, as heard on Uncle Meat,48 testifies to his loyalty to the genre as well as his glee in seeing the hallowed halls of the venue ‘contaminated’ by these shoddy sonorities. Shortly thereafter, he opens and closes Burnt Weeny Sandwich49 with cover versions of two obscure doo-wop performances: ‘W-P-L-J’ by the Four Deuces50 and ‘Valarie’ [sic] by Jackie and the Starlites.51 However, one recording that he particularly admired sums up the coexistence of a virtual absence of artistic standards along with a miraculous, even if inexplicable, presence of artistry: the equally obscure ‘Rubber Biscuit’ by the Chips.52 Zappa played this track during a quest DJ session in 1968 and referred to it in a 1969 interview with Barry Miles as amongst ‘the weirdest of the weird things’.53 The piece highlights ensemble singing of nonsense syllables with rudimentary instrumental backing, occasionally interrupted by the declaration of outright non sequiturs, such as ‘The other day I ate a ricochet biscuit. Well, it’s the kind of biscuit that’s supposed to bounce off the wall back in your mouth. If it don’t bounce back, you go hungry’.54 Zappa dedicated an entire recording as homage to this material in the 1968 release of Cruising With Ruben & the Jets.55 Recorded during December 1967 and February 1968, it amounts to ‘more than recreations’, Zappa stated; ‘they’re careful conglomerates of archetypal clichés … it was an experiment of cliché collages’.56 The gatefold design included a description of the contents as ‘greasy love songs & cretin simplicity’, yet the other side of Zappa’s perspective on the genre is reflected by the added proviso, ‘we really like this music’.57 The 13 tracks allude to elements of doo-wop, yet constitute original material, leaving the uncanny yet 47

  Richard Berry, ‘Louie Louie’, Flip Records 321 (1957).   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat. 49   The Mothers of Invention, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Reprise, RSLP 6370 (1970). 50   4 Deuces, ‘WPLJ’, Music City Records, 790 (1956). 51   Jackie and the Starlites, ‘Valarie’, Fury Records, 1034 (1960). 52   The Chips, ‘Rubber Biscuit’, Josie Records, 803 (1956). 53   Barry Miles, ‘Frank Zappa Interview By Barry Miles’ (1969), at http://wiki.killugly radio.com/wiki/Frank_Zappa_Interview_By_Barry_Miles [accessed 12 February 2012]. 54   The Chips, ‘Rubber Biscuit. 55   The Mothers of Invention, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets. 56  Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. 122. 57   The Mothers of Invention, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets. 48

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pleasurable sensation of existing in a kind of acoustic echo chamber with some 45s of the previous decade emanating imperceptibly out of the atmosphere. Consequently, while neither Zappa nor Watson or Miles use this language, it might be advisable to characterise the recording as an act of pastiche, in the sense with which Richard Dyer defines the form as ‘a kind of imitation that you are meant to know is an imitation’.58 That implies if not necessitates the possession of some form of musicological competency on the part of the audience, certainly their awareness of the original repertoire as well as how Zappa has intertwined and interwoven those elements with his own compositions.59 That necessity of such a self-aware auditor for such overtly simple music might well become wearying for some listeners, and can therefore be thought of as an element of the strategy on Zappa’s part that Paul Sutton has characterised as the instigation of an ‘annoyed listener’.60 By this designation, he alludes to the demands that Zappa makes on his audience as well as how he requires that those individuals question, and conceivably reconfigure, their musical categories. In their intentional simplicity, a cappella delivery and unrepentant absence of irony, one can hear how Wild Man Fischer’s songs conjured up for Zappa, amongst other things, some of the dynamics he appreciated and wished to preserve in the doo-wop canon. Fischer’s material possessed the kind of deliberate abandonment of complexity and virtual transparency of form that much of doo-wop strives to achieve. Also, it is not hard to recognise in Zappa’s glee over the wacked constitution of a track like ‘Rubber Biscuit’61 an analogy with the off-kilter qualities so abundantly manifested by Fischer. Similarly, Zappa may well have expected, albeit unreasonably, that an audience could be able to intuit these parallels and engage with Fischer’s work through the avenue of its predecessors in doo-wop. Even if the recording more often than not foregrounds the independently unusual, even intimidating (for many) excesses of Fischer’s delivery, someone who could appreciate the Chips’ ‘Rubber Biscuit’ might not fail similarly to enjoy Fischer. At the same time, Zappa had to recognise, and perhaps worry about, the degree   Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London, 2007), p. 1.   Admittedly, that skill set may well have been in short supply at the time of this release, and one has to imagine that it has only further evaporated in the interim until today. Zappa comments upon that skill set integrated into Cruising With Ruben & The Jets in his autobiography: ‘I conceived that album along the same lines as the compositions in Stravinsky’s neoclassical period. If he could take the forms and regulations of the classical era and pervert them, why not do the same with the rules and regulations that applied to doo-wop in the fifties?’: Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 88. 60   Paul Sutton, ‘Bogus Stomp and Bourdieu’s Paradox: Zappa and Resentment’, in Ben Watson and Esther Leslie (eds), Academy Zappa: Proceedings of the First International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology (London, 2005): pp. 99–108, at 104. 61   The Chips, ‘Rubber Biscuit’. 58

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to which he pushed, quite possibly beyond the boundaries of discretion, the aptitudes of an annoyed listener in the instance of this recording. As has been the case subsequently for those performers contained, or perhaps ghettoised, by the designation ‘outsider’ artist, Fischer, and his confederates, require that one attend to any notion of aesthetic categories with a most accommodating set of parameters. If the contents of Fischer’s material may appear superficially to be mindless, attendance to those works requires, paradoxically, a particular kind of mindful deliberation. Such simple pop structures can easily deflect an audience’s eagerness to affirm their identity with the performer as well as their expectation that such music would encourage a kind of unreflective immediacy. Far from it, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer has clearly proven an ability to annoy and frustrate an indeterminate number of individuals. Larry Fischer may not have wished to be shy anymore and, therefore, wrote these songs, even though they have the undeniable ability to make most listeners eager to shy away, quickly. The Cost of Resurrecting The Past Finally, the fourth side of An Evening With Wild Man Fischer 62 arrives, if the listener has not already abandoned the effort of assimilating the entire recording, and Zappa makes a choice as producer that manages in the very last moments of the material potentially to re-frame and re-articulate Fischer’s personality and how the listener might choose to respond to his repertoire. If Fischer has not altogether annoyed or otherwise discomfited his audience up to this point, the final track of the recording possesses the potential to do just that, and more. While Zappa has strenuously endeavoured not to subordinate Fischer to the form of a cartoon, as was the case with his appearance on Laugh-In, he has not attempted to offer any evidence for the listener to construct something along the lines of a diagnosis. In other words, he situates the performer as a unique instance, even if he doesn’t render that instance cheaply comic or conveniently controllable. Yet at the same time, why Fischer has chosen to engage in a certain kind of behaviour and what biographical circumstances stimulated his creativity remains unexamined. Those parameters are now suddenly going to be explored, and their consequences elevated in the listeners’ consciousness. Heretofore, aside from the references on the jacket cover, nothing has alluded to the actual status of Larry Fischer’s mental health. Admittedly, during the course of the live sessions incorporated on sides one and three, auditors on the street laughingly refer to Fischer, again and again, as insane, and, understandably, the performer responds in kind by objecting to such a characterisation. And yet, for anyone otherwise intimately acquainted with his biography, these episodes amount to nothing more than adolescent levity, the kind of routine and unintentional dismissal of someone’s sanity that pervades the vocabulary of many young 62

 Ibid.

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people. The repetition of the address does not, in fact, seem to put into question the performer’s state of being as it constitutes a kind of serial punch line. Such is the case until the fourth and final side of the recording. Fischer himself initially alters the terms of the discourse in the overtly autobiographical ‘The Wild Man Fischer Story’,63 wherein he details, albeit in a comically heightened manner, the events that culminated in his two hospitalisations, his expulsion from the family home, and his hazardous residence on the streets of Los Angeles. Many of the details come across as caricatures, yet the framework remains, and the anger and abandonment as well. Fischer concludes the narrative in suspension, raising the various options that face him in the future, though with emphasis upon his hope that music specifically can provide an egress from the potential stalemate. The final lines reprise the first verse of ‘Merry Go Round’,64 as though to infer that this song may prove to be his ticket to sanity and security. We come then to the exchange that Zappa chooses to hold back until the end, and uses to bookend the performance, the note on which this evening concludes. No evidence exists of when the dialogue took place during the course of the recording process, but, whatever the case, these become the last words. The piece is entitled, ‘Larry Under Pressure’: WMF: We almost through? FZ: Why? Don’t you like to make records? WMF: [long pause] Uh … yes … but I have been under strain lately, unexplainable strain, y’know, I’m nervous lately … FZ: Larry, you were telling me about some songs that you did where your voice changes a lot? WMF: My voice does some weird changes when I am younger but I mean like I told you Frank, I told you this year I’m only in it for the money. But don’t forget Frank, no matter how happy I was in ’61 and ’62 I was committed to back-to-back mental institutions – I was raised with the fact that I was crazy, I was raised with the fact that I had to sleep with old men who pissed and shit on the floor, I was raised that you’re crazy, you’ll always be crazy and I never dug that – I can’t be happy anymore when I sing, that’s the main reason, the fucking bastards, they’re all fucking bastards, Frank! Are you ready for that? I’m trying to get myself back to where I was in ’61 and ’62 if I can – FZ: Start by smiling.

 Fischer, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer.  Ibid.

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WMF: This isn’t ’61 or ’62, Frank, it’s ’68, have I made a mistake? Yes, yes, No, no. Yes, yes. No, no. Yes, yes. No, no. Yes! Yes!. NO! NO! YES! NO! Yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes? Please, yes. No. Yes, yes. No no no no no no no. They’re fighting each other, it’s like a disease, Frank! [sighs] [Long pause] FZ: Wanna take a break? [Long pause] WMF: [trailing off into the background] You got me thinkin’ about the past, Frank … 65

If anyone has allowed themselves the position of distancing themselves from Larry Fischer by making light of his musical skills or his adopted persona, that posture becomes extremely difficult to retain by virtue of this exchange. Specifically, Fischer’s drawing upon those memories of incarceration that he wishes to make public seem sufficient to indicate the extreme damage not simply to his self esteem but to his physical safety. If the listener has not yet figured out what the perky, seemingly senseless lyrics he has written allows him to keep at a distance, then the references to those incontinent old men answers the question. His complete loss of temper immediately thereafter; his condemnation of those he feels have condemned him to some category outside a healthy society; his heart-felt urge to return, if only in his imagination, to a time before he had been diagnosed; the manic-depressive shifts of mood as to whether his motives are genuine: all these revelations ought to annoy a listener unless they can self-consciously constrict their own nervous system so to remain unperturbed. Zappa may well have had the ambition to create a kind of engaging and informative, potentially entertaining, field recording of this unusual individual, but the choice to incorporate this exchange gives the listener the necessary ammunition to recognise the penalties that accompany such undeniable individuality. On occasion, during the earlier portions of the recording, some listeners might have considered the possibility that Zappa was using Fischer as nothing more than bait for consumers. However, his incorporation of the revelation of the back story behind his public persona reinforces that An Evening With Wild Man Fischer challenges us not only to consider the appropriate parameters of acceptable composition and performance but also the price to be paid for remaining an outsider. And if the songs themselves have not annoyed or upset a listener by this point, these revelations should accomplish that end. The balance sheet of Larry Fischer’s experience becomes a different sum altogether by virtue of their inclusion.

 Fischer, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer.

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Purging the Triple Pep To conclude, it bears attention that one of the most telling pieces of information Josh Rubin and Jeremy Lubin incorporate in Derailroaded: Inside the Mind of Wild Man Fischer 66 concerns the term the performer used for the particularly manic state he occupied when he performed: the ‘triple pep’.67 It was his way of characterising the condition of self-prescribed intensity that would, more than likely, be characterised medically as an extreme manic state. One imagines Fischer was able to encourage this set of circumstances though his decision not to take any prescribed medication. In other words, he made the choice to jeopardise his mental health and physical well being in order to succeed in his musical ambitions. The fleeting exhilaration of appearing before the public and sharing his songs superseded in his mind some degree of untroubled existence. However, when circumstances became so untenable that Fischer was no longer able to care for himself, his family facilitated his transfer into a congenial and supportive medical facility. Subsequently, his needs were seen to on a regular basis rather than being a matter of serendipity. The routine administration of care incorporated a regime of medications such that any further performing was definitely out of the question. Fischer experienced a baseline of dependable mental and physical security. He did not, however, experience the kind of public attention lavished upon Frank Zappa during his unfortunate, and premature, demise, from prostate cancer. Nonetheless, for Fischer, undeniably, the ‘triple pep’ had been extinguished. Even merry go rounds grind to a halt, eventually.

 Ruben, Derailroaded.  Ibid.

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Chapter 10

Zappa and Modernism: An Extended Study of ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ Martin Knakkergaard

Introduction Frank Zappa is an outstanding figure in Western musical, cultural and even political life of the twentieth century, with a musical legacy of extraordinary stylistic breadth and complexity. His musical universe comprises an abundance of styles and genres across historical, artistic and musical boundaries, yet still constitutes an intellectual whole, a cohesive musical oeuvre that can rightfully be acknowledged as Modern. Modern not just in its everyday sense, but also ideologically, it contests tradition, resists norms, neutralises the morally good and functionally useful, and insists on staging the dialectic continuum between secrecy and scandal.1 Taking the collage-composition ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’2 as an exemplar, this article weaves a mosaic of analyses, ranging from strictly structural, to purely discursive and hypertextual, constructing the case that Zappa’s work, rather than being a wild profusion of styles, is instead a highly coherent and stringently complex work of meaning. It is an oeuvre in which subtle correspondences between music styles, titles, lyrics, texts and more, critically reflect central aspects of modern culture and human life in a psychological, sociological as well as philosophical exposition. In addition to a close reading of the primary text and citations of other artists’ work, the article includes references to much of Zappa’s discography and aims to point out how the musical coding in Zappa’s work takes on a decisive modernistic role in an almost Adornian sense, expressing the historical necessity of complexity and opposition.

1   Jürgen Habermas, ‘Die Moderne – Ein unvollendetes Projekt’, in Jürgen Habermas (ed.), Kleine Politischen Schriften I–IV (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), pp. 444–64. 2   The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, Verve, V6-5013 (1967). A slightly rearranged live version was released on Frank Zappa, Tinsel Town Rebellion, Barking Pumpkin, PW237336 (1981), whose last part – as opposed to the original – matched the piano score published in 1973 (see later). Unless otherwise noted, all discussion refers to the 1967 instance of the song.

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Preamble It could – as for example Berger3 and Lowe4 have done – seem relevant to understand the work of Frank Zappa as an early manifestation of postmodernism in popular music: his music is unmistakably eclectic, incorporating ‘elements of free jazz; modern composers like Ellington, Varèse, Stravinsky, and Stockhausen; late fifties doo-wop; guitar-dominated jazz-rock fusion of the seventies; and his own brand of social and political satire and outrageous humour’.5 As such, it conforms to a general notion of postmodernism as disloyal to any specific idea or practice, in addition to being open towards a reservoir of styles, each of which, regardless of their historic anchoring, can be combined to enable different forms to stand out in their heterogeneity. However, Zappa’s work is loaded with ideological and political implications ‘using every musical ingredient he could find to undermine nostalgia’.6 This supports Ben Watson’s understanding that Zappa must be regarded as a modernist artist in the perspective of Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics,7 in as far as he, in line with Marx and Freud, had a strong materialistic perspective, did not believe in metaphysics of any kind, was hostile towards religion, and was convinced that human reason is capable of understanding and changing the world and the human mind.8 The body of Frank Zappa’s work bears witness to an extraordinarily erudite approach towards musical composition. Musical means and compositional techniques are chosen for specific aesthetic impact that often deepens and supports textual elements such as titles, lyrics, introductions etc. Zappa’s approach endows his work with a patina of the cunning and intentional, of intellectual stigmata. There is a clinical distance, a sense of the academic and learned, of irony and arrogance but also of reason and purpose that is fundamentally inconsistent with the core of not just popular music in general, but also with much of the music that falls under the classical tradition.9 Instead of merely offering the listener an aesthetic object for immersion, reassurance and identification, Zappa’s work challenges its audience to critical

  See Arthur Asa Berger, The Portable Postmodernist (Oxford, 2003), p. 49.   See Kelly Fisher Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa (London, 2007), p. 37. 5   Peter Lavezzoli, The King of All, Sir Duke. Ellington and the Artistic Revolution (New York, 2001), p. 93. 6   Kevin Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa (Toronto, 2002), p. 13. 7   Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main, 1966). 8   See Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York, 1993), p. xiii. 9   See discussion in Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. 415 and p. 421. 3 4

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reflection. It is not just for what Zappa entitled ‘entertainment purposes’.10 His musical concoctions are laced with an acidity and detail that prevent musical immersion or passive sexual submission, instead requiring the listener’s full and active attention. Zappa’s aesthetics are filled with details that are deeply associated with Western music and art, seeking to fulfil artistic demands identified by the avant-garde since at least the second part of the nineteenth century. As such, it consistently bears the hallmark of the modernistic artefact, aiming to take part in cultural and political processes by engaging in dynamic interaction with the ethics and knowledge of a given time. However, this attribute poses quite a paradox as Zappa never expressed high hopes for modern culture nor did he, according to Watson, expect anything but stupidity from its citizens:11 ‘Zappa believed we were Dumb All Over’.12 Thus it is hard to believe that he himself saw his work as a vital part of modernistic discourse. On the contrary, with his often quoted credo: ‘Anything, Any Time, Anywhere – for No Reason at All’13 he seemed to renounce all associations with any ideological – or other – discourse entirely. Despite Zappa’s renunciation of an explicit ideology, his music is imbued with an implicit modernist philosophy that derives, in part, from his idiosyncratic magpie approach to composition and, in part, from his distrust of ideology: ‘I use the formula to make fun of itself’.14 Nevertheless, the following analytical disquisition will discuss how Zappa consistently turns, regardless of his credo, to modernistic approaches and techniques in order to infuse his music with increased depth and dimensionality, an ambiguity and dialectics that demand an alert listener. By examining the constitutive elements of every section of ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ against a mainly cursory reading of the textual content, the chapter will examine how both lyrics and spoken text interact and support each other in pursuit of the modernistic aesthetic. In the Cesspool of Excitement It is apparent that Zappa’s music covers an enormous spectrum of musical styles and genres and the extensive blend of these is a compositional idiom particular to Zappa, a manifestation of his artistic approach – what Kountz describes as a ‘serious effort at synthesis’.15 The often oratorically organised suites and collage  Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 185. 11   See Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. 354. 12   Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 55. 13   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 163. 14   James Riordan, ‘Frank Zappa. Formula Perfecto’, Musician’s Guide, 8 (1977): pp. 27–31, at 31. 15   Peter Kountz, ‘Frank Zappa and the Enterprise of Serious Contemporary Music’, Popular Music & Society, 4/1 (1975): pp. 36–51, at 38. 10

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compositions such as ‘The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary’,16 ‘Drowning Witch’17 and ‘When The Lie’s So Big’,18 stand out as musical sculptures composed of a large variety of styles and genres with often just a few structural bridges. This bears similarity to a film music aesthetic whereby elements of musical collage are individually anchored in a particular dramatic episode but where each element embodies the drama so accurately that the musical style and genre become significant elements of expression themselves. As such, the affiliation between style/genre and the drama implicit in the lyrics gains significance equal to, or even anticipating, the treatment of the concrete musical material. As noted elsewhere in this publication, Zappa’s music refers to traditions that depend upon generative principles themselves, based on representation and on the notion of the note as the primary constructive element. His preoccupation with the note is evident already in his use of the Big-Note19 as metaphor for (his) music and, even in his experiments with what he described as ‘numerical dust’,20 he focused on the delimited event, the note as the primary building material.21 Except for his work within the framework of musique concrète, present since the very first recordings, and for some of his electronic pieces, primarily released on Jazz From Hell 22 and Civilization Phaze III,23 Zappa did not explore beyond standard Western notational and tonal/atonal systems.24 The identity and nerve of his music are engraved into the material as nucleus themes, motifs and throughcomposed complexes that maintain identity and particularity even when subject to transformation and variation. Thus, examining implications of the musical structure is required when analysing his compositions to comprehend how the complex expressiveness of the music is achieved. A deeper understanding of his aesthetics, however, cannot emerge by identifying the structural implications alone. Zappa’s music tends towards the polymorphic and it would be impossible to reveal the global core of it through local, structural observations alone.25   Frank Zappa, Studio Tan, DiscReet, DSK 2291 (1978).   Zappa, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, FW 38066 (1982). 18   Frank Zappa, Broadway The Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1989). 19   See David Walley, No Commercial Potential, The Saga of Frank Zappa, Then and Now (New York, 1980), p. 122. 20   At 23:10 of Henning Lohner, Frank Zappa - Peefeeyatko, WDR 3 (1991). 21   See Michel Delville, Andrew Norris, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism (Cambridge, 2005), p. 5. 22   Frank Zappa, Jazz From Hell, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74205 (1986). 23   Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). 24   See Don Menn, Matt Groening, ‘The Mother Of All Interviews Part 2’, Guitar Player (May 1994), at http://www.afka.net/mags/Best%20of%20Guitar%20Player.htm [accessed 28 November 2011]. 25   Some of Zappa’s work is, however, very economical in terms of musical material, see for instance Martin Knakkergaard, ‘Cruising for Burgers. Om kød og kødelighed i 16

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This deliberate stylistic heterogeneity and consequent lack of clearly identifiable similarities in musical structure across Zappa’s oeuvre begs an approach to musical analysis that focuses beyond the search for structural similarity to the quest for stylistic differentiation: musematic inspired analysis serves this need precisely.26 As a semiotics, the museme theory, broadly speaking, presupposes a cultural discourse inside which a museme, the smallest meaningful musical unit, in comparison to other musemes can be understood as a symbol or metaphor which, by established cultural practices, signifies real world references. In its strict form, the museme theory requires that the extra-musical meaning be tested ‘through commutation or what Philip Tagg describes as ‘hypothetical substitution’.27 This element is not explicitly included in the following analysis which instead relies on subjective considerations and deductions. Since the metaphoric element in Zappa’s work is almost too dense, practically mocking the very idea of the metaphor, the notions of the allegory and the metonym seem generally more relevant, leaving space for Zappa’s predilection for the composite fable. Through its constitution as a blend of contrasting expressive means, much in the same sense as Brechtian epic theatre, the allegory becomes a dialectical panopticon through which Zappa exposes his projections and views. In Barthes’ notion of the writable text, ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’,28 and the reader takes part in constructing the text, ‘writing’ the text while reading. Zappa’s music challenges the listener to take part in its construction and to forge links between different means that are not pre-connected and which do not necessarily belong to the same expressive categories. The writable text in Zappa’s case is an indication of idiosyncratic preferences in the same way that the text obtained by reading the modern hypertext is a manifestation of choices made by the reader. The difference is that the audience does not get to undertake the first reading, but initially only gets to look over Zappa’s shoulder. The text has already been re-written by Zappa functioning not just as the reader of objects that are embedded in his work but also as his own reader. The need for this composite and subjective analytical approach derives from the fact that Zappa’s aesthetics is a dichotomy holding the principal two meanings aesthetics can assume in present-day vocabulary: a technical or material approach, how an artefact is constructed, and an intentional or phenomenological Frank Zappas Uncle Meat’, Akademisk Kvarter/Academic Quarter, 01 (2010): pp. 61–71, at http://akademiskkvarter.hum.aau.dk/pdf/vol1/Martin_Knakkergaard_Vol1.pdf [accessed 3 January 2012]. 26   See for instance Philip Tagg, ‘Fernando the Flute: Analysis of affect in an ABBA number which sold more than 10.000.000 pressings and was heard by over 100.000.000 people’, DMT, 3 (1979), pp. 125–56. 27   Philip Tagg, ‘Introductory notes to the Semiotics of Music’,1999, at http://tagg.org/ xpdfs/semiotug.pdf [accessed 28 November 2011], p. 38. 28   Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London, 1977), p. 148.

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approach, how an artefact is perceived. In Zappa’s case this dichotomy evolves into a dialectics that permeates virtually all elements of his oeuvre, pointing to the existence of a unique, but very spacious, methodology. Brown Shoes Don’t Make It With its 22 sections, each with a different stylistic provenance, the collage composition ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ is an exemplar sans pareil of this heterogeneity. The composition is a satire on American petite bourgeoisie, their idea of the cosy, nuclear family and ‘the people who run the governments’29 exemplified by the power-seeking, highly alienated local politician City Hall Fred’s paedophiliac dreams. The musical setting and its performance are presented with all the surprising brute rudeness of an email written in uppercase letters. Although it is difficult to ascertain if the piano score for ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’, complete with tempo, section titles and character remarks, and its descriptions were developed uniquely for the Frank Zappa Songbook,30 this analysis will use the satirical and even hyperbolical section titles as headings. Some of the section titles are quite ambiguous and, taken together, eclectic in their terminology. Nevertheless, they do provide descriptors of both the form of the piece and clues to Zappa’s probable stylistic intentions. Boogie Shuffle – Moderato – Tempo I (shuffle) ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ opens with a little tripartite form (A–B–A) that serves as an introduction or a narrator’s prologue to the entire piece.31 Section A, entitled Boogie Shuffle,32 is built exclusively of repetitive figures, with the backing being composed of ostinatos (performed by guitar and bass in unison) whose formal design places the section within the blues influenced rock idiom of the time. The melody consists of a simple two-part rhythmic motif that combines a single pitched vocal on F with an unpitched half shouted vocal – a Sprechstimme around C. The two pitches – root and fifth – are maintained consistently in the same significant rhythmic pattern throughout the whole section. The vocal lines also function as an ostinato  and are placed in such a way that they act as an antiphonal call to the chord-ostinato. As a whole, Section A takes on a rhythmic,

  Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 116.   Frank Zappa, The Frank Zappa Songbook Vol. 1 (Los Angeles, 1973). 31   Please refer to Table 10.1 below in order to reference a snapshot of CD timings and bar numbers. 32   Bars 1–14; [A] 0:00; [T] 0:00. [A] indicates start time positions with reference to the production released from 1967; [T] indicates similar references to the live-version released in 1981. 29 30

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almost mechanical character, leading to a theatrical effect, a musical imperative constructed to underline the text: ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’. Almost all elements of Section B, entitled Moderato,33 contrast sharply with the A Section. While the tonality of the latter is centred around F Dorian, the former begins a tritone away in C major. The rhythmic character is changed from a swing-based boogie shuffle to straight eighths, in a significantly slower tempo. Additionally, the rhythmic-melodic motifs are replaced by a cantabile melody, though still tied up in a simple identifiable motif. Finally, the setting is changed radically from the strictly ostinato-built, clear-cut voice complex to the soft and fluid accompaniment of broken chords. As was the case in Section A, the form is closely linked with the text: The pseudo-classical Singspiel-like setting: a smooth melody – constructed of a single one-bar motif – accompanied by broken chords, evokes the sense of a peaceful scenario, an almost chamber-like atmosphere of the homely cosiness and innocence, which are echoed in the opening lyrics: ‘TV dinner by the pool’. However, the succeeding bar’s movement from C to D and the unison doubling of the melodic motif indicate a turn from simple satire on the bourgeois family, unified in its material paradise, to an ambiguous and more suggestive position: ‘Watch your brother grow a beard’ – and two bars later: ‘You’re O.K. – He’s too weird…’ Through simple development of the one-bar motif mentioned above, now in the key of A, Zappa supports and sharpens the satire whilst simultaneously creating a line that with great intensity leads up to the concluding peak of Section B. The pompous, almost sinister character is achieved by the sudden change from the delicate broken chords to a majestic parallel organum setting, which, except for the use of parallel fifths, in character and sonorous quality is close to the recurring ‘Promenade’ from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.34 Emphasis on the passage is further strengthened by the false ending that comprises a return to the A section’s tonality of F minor, but Zappa desists from the inherited lack of conflict and installs a four-bar insert starting in B,35 before returning to Section A. Along with the substantial increase in tempo, this disposition gives the insert the flavour of an agitated recitative, a powerful enhancement of the text: ‘Smile at every ugly – shine on your shoes and cut your hair’. This four-bar insert closes in F major, with a clear cadence (F–C–F) forming a hard return to the F minor of the final A section. This section is constructed similarly to the first section except that the motifs are modified in accordance with the lyrics. The latter approach leads to a double-caricature, in which the metaphorical finger is pointed towards the protagonist: ‘Be a jerk’, and, ecstatically falsetto, ‘And go to work’. 33

  Bars 14–27; [A] 0:20; [T] 0:22].   Modest Mussorgsky, Pictures At An Exhibition, Suite for Piano, 1874. 35   Bars 24–7; [A] 0:47; [T] 0:51. 34

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Moderate Waltz The lyrics of the initial tripartite form end with: ‘Do you love it, do you hate it? There it is the way you made it – (belch)’.36 The prologue is thus terminated with a colon, leaving the impression that the following section, Moderate Waltz,37 will bring clarification. However, this section’s harmonic outline is surprisingly ambiguous, largely due to the incongruence between the B → C harmonic framework and its bass line. The melody though, is oriented unambiguously around B through the persistent and heroic fourth motif F → B supporting the functional connotations of Dominant → Tonic. Example 10.1  ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ – bars 47–50

Source: Transcription from The Frank Zappa Songbook Vol. 1, Copyright © 1973 Frank Zappa Music, Inc. and Munchkin Music Co. Los Angeles, Calif, p. 14.

The melodic peaks coincide with the alternations to C♯ revealing how Zappa carefully (re) designs the peaks in accordance with the – implicit narrator’s – lyrics again: In the first occurrence, ‘hunger’ is stressed by the appoggiatura, endowing it with the character of a sigh, a Seuftzer supporting lament. It is also important to note how the appoggiatura is prolonged and as noted in Example 10.2, the first note (F) is repeated on the 3rd beat stressing the importance and power of the ability to ‘Make your laws’. Finally, the phrase ‘Hidden away’ gains a closing and dense, almost covert, character by the sudden use of a triplet, that repeats the first note – F. In the second part of the Moderate Waltz section38 the focus on a tonal centre, ambiguous or not, is almost suspended. The passage is harmonised by means of a note-by-note principle, working vertically rather than horizontally, suspending 36

  Bars 38–9; [A] 1:10; [T] 1:18.   Bars 43–92; [A] 1:22: [T] 1:25. 38   Bars 59–68; A: 1:49; T: 1:54. 37

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Example 10.2  ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ – bars 53–54 and 57

Source: Transcription from The Frank Zappa Songbook Vol. 1, Copyright © 1973 Frank Zappa Music, Inc. and Munchkin Music Co. Los Angeles, Calif., p. 14f.

most of the implicit tension typically associated with harmonic work, with the effect that each syllable of the lyrics is accentuated separately. Underneath the Sprechgesang of the lyrics ‘walk and drool’, the chord density increases from five to six notes, implying an atonality that contrasts with the modal melody and thus illustrating the essential restlessness of the narrator. The sonorous quality of the last two phrases of the Moderate Waltz section39  resembles that of Messiaen’s harmonic writing albeit, compared to Messiaen’s 7th mode, Zappa uses a tone too many. Messiaen’s Modes of Limited Transposition lead to a ‘static harmony, where the chords are not driving the music forward, but induce and maintain certain musical modes’.40 Similarly, Zappa produces a freeze-frame effect (but whether he was familiar with Messiaen’s compositional strategies in 1967 is another question). Clear Your Throat – Sprechgesang A two bar 4/4 rhythmic insert in clusters, Clear Your Throat,41 marks the end of the Moderate Waltz section and leads to the entry of a new scene. This Sprechgesang section42 is in a Schönberg or Webern-inspired style with relatively clear serial succession. The accompaniment (see Example 10.3) is made up of two contrapuntal voices, each containing all 12 tones (each tone occurs at least twice), while the melody is confined to just 10 different tones. As shown in Example 10.3, the structure is almost entirely made up of simple three-tone motifs. The similarity between these motifs in terms of both interval and rhythm suggests that just one subject (a) forms the foundation of all other motifs. The (b)-motif has the same contour (non-inverted) as (a), the same rhythmic form (only diminished), and the same number of notes. Additionally, there is a similarity regarding intervals, as the last note of the motif forms a dissonant second interval with one of the preceding notes. Regarding the (c)-motif, the contour is similar to (a), but smoothed and inverted, and again the number of notes are identical. Even though the three motifs are all part of the background, it is tempting to claim that 39

    41   42   40

Bars 66–8; [A] 2:02; [T] 2:08. Poul Borum and Erik Christensen, Messiaen – en håndbog (Egtved, 1977), p. 43. Bars 69–70; [A] 2:07; [T] 2:14. Bars 71–92; [A] 2:13; [T] 2:20.

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they constitute the building blocks that make up this layer, a feature reminiscent of Varèse’s ‘Density 21.5’.43 It is also noteworthy that the use of both real and tonal motif imitation44 suggests that Zappa’s approach to 12-tone technique is characterised by a contrapuntal freedom, indicating a somewhat liberal approach towards serial organisation not unlike Berg or Bartòk. The melodic line is liberated from the backdrop’s serial procedure and is pseudo-sequentially organised around yet another motif (e), which at first appears to differ significantly from the other motifs but proves to be a derivative of the (a)-motif. Disregarding the extension of the motif with a fourth note, (e) shows similarity in terms of interval to (a), except that the second tone is transposed down an octave. Example 10.3  ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ – bars 85–92

Source: Transcription from The Frank Zappa Songbook Vol. 1, Copyright © 1973 Frank Zappa Music, Inc. and Munchkin Music Co. Los Angeles, Calif., p. 16.

  Edgar Varèse, Density 21.5, 1936.   The distinction between real and tonal imitation derives from the treating of the theme in polyphonic forms such as fugues. Real imitation implies that the interval proportions of the theme are unaltered even though that theme has been transposed to another degree. Tonal imitation, however, implies that the inner intervals are altered in order to comply with the new key. 43

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Comparing the compositional progression thus far with the concurrent development of the lyrics, it is striking that musical trends do not take place in an isolated fashion. The lyrics have been transformed from the tripartite form’s – two-sided – introductory level, to the Moderate Waltz reflection on general characteristics of City Hall lives. They gradually change to a more local and detailed description of the scene, revealing the psychological implications of these characteristics. Simultaneously the musical background is changed from a rock musical expression to a musical aesthetics characterised by idioms whose relation to serious music is evident. The Moderate Waltz section, however, already shows a remarkably close correlation between text and music: where the text speaks of world, the music preserves tonality, but as soon as the content of the lyrics changes from a general/global situation to the more specific/local – the Office – the music loses its tonal centre, although retaining a certain modality. Finally, as the lyrics start dealing with the psychological drives behind the facade of the City Hall mind – they are mirrored by atonality. There are two different explanations for this strategy. Zappa might be speculating on the broad public’s generally alienated attitude towards serious contemporary music, aiming to achieve a spontaneous idiosyncratic reaction towards everything the City Hall mind stands for. However, by using these modern techniques to accompany the suggestive lyrics about ‘a dream of a girl about thirteen’ (see Example 10.3), Zappa also manages to excite a dialectic field of tension endowing the passage with a seriousness and importance that overrules its surface of plain satire and mockery. Slow Shuffle Zappa continues the dream of the City Hall mind in the subsequent sections. The Slow Shuffle45 resembles the initial Boogie Shuffle structurally in the first five bars – this time with a hint of big-band swing. The tonality of this section qualifies as poly-modal, as the bass/guitar ostinato is loosely centred around A major and the keyboard ostinato unfolds around G Mixolydian, with F in the melody not relating directly to either of the two. This element of pan-tonality is supported by the musical description of the woman’s shriek or howl, ‘She squealed for a week’, where all 12 notes appear in four successive quintuplets.46 The pan-tonality matches the closure of the previous section thereby limiting the contrast. However, the structural setting in the continuation47 demonstrates a tendency towards specific tonalities – respectively A and B – which seem to correspond with the lyrics’ perversely intimate qualities: ‘back in the bed his teen-age queen’. These lyrics combine with the subsequent chamber music45

  Bars 93–101; [A] 3:03; [T] 3:00.   Bars 97–8; [A] 3:15; [T] 3:17. 47   Bars 99–100; [A] 3:21; [T] 3:23. 46

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like instrumental section (mainly a string quartet) to conjure a fiercely satirical comment on the idealised notion of family. The picture of domestic bliss is completely torn apart in the next bar.48 The lyrics’ reckless vulgarity – ‘is rocking and rolling and acting obscene’ – is almost surpassed by the music: sneered Sprechgesang with a backing composed of a vamp – F → Dm → B → C – (on keyboards) and a strongly contrasting (dissonant) ‘pseudo-vamp’ (on bass and guitar) – G → E → C → A. The passage is carried out in a violent sforzando and the effect is one of hyper-excitability, an abandon that symbolises the primitive, brutish and perverse instincts smouldering in the City Hall mind. Fast Motown The excitement continues undisturbed into the Fast Motown section: ‘Baby, baby’49 in A Mixolydian. Again ostinato technique governs the section and the bass/guitar riffs symbolise the ‘teenage queen’ that rocks and rolls in bed. The ostinato, which has a striking similarity to that used by the Spanish pop group Los Bravos, in their 1966 hit ‘Black Is Black’,50 is interrupted from bar to bar, by tutti clusters in quavers. The context gives these strongly emphasised clusters an unmistakably associative pumping character – heavy – light – heavy – light, etc, – with the auditory result being – Baby, Baby, pumping – pumping – pumping – pumping. Ballad Rock As a humorous comment, textually and musically, Zappa now introduces a Ballad Rock section in the careless meter of 6/8.51 This section is essentially a sing-alongsong resembling a German Bierstube event in which both melody and harmony moves untroubled around C (mixolydian), with the melody line as tonal centre and the voicing as parallel chords (C, Dm, Em, Dm, F, G, F, Em, Dm, Em, C, Dm, C, B, C, D9, E9). Once again the setting is the perfect accompaniment to the lyrics: ‘And he loves it, he loves it, it curls up his toes. She bites his fat neck and it lights up his nose. But he cannot be fooled, old City Hall Fred, she’s nasty, she’s nasty, she digs it in bed’. Grandioso ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ could have ended with the earlier Ballad Rock section. Instead, a whole new part emerges,52 with an entirely instrumental, 48

    50   51   52   49

Bar 100; [A] 3:26; [T] 3:28. Bars 102–9; [A] 3:28; [T] 3:31. Los Bravos, ‘Black Is Black’, Press Records, 45 PRE 60002 (1966). Bars 110–17; [A] 3:41; [T] 3:42. In reality this part turns up just about in the middle of the whole piece.

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almost joyful section.53 As the title suggests, the section is (pseudo) pompous with a constant fanfare-like character achieved by tremolo violins, continuous rolls in timpani marked especially by the anacruses in the trumpet line. The tonality is highly ambiguous and polytonal, but, after a short rhythmically dense passage, the section comes to rest in an expansive cadence to C major: IIb5b9 → Isus9add11 → VIb9 → Iadd9,54 a formula not too far away from romantic harmony of the late nineteenth century and thus a highly appropriate setting to sustain the opulence of the petit-bourgeois scene. To claim that this is pure functional harmony would be going too far, but the compositional expression here – and similar harmonic features in later sections – suggests that Zappa flirts with functionality in order to induce associations of conservative western European culture. Table 10.1

Form Chart of ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’

Parts Section Scenes A

Section Bar

Boogie Shuffle Moderato Faster (recitative) Tempo 1 (boogie shuffle) Moderate Waltz [Texture Change] – (clear your throat) – (Sprechgesang (2)) Slow shuffle Fast Motown Ballad Rock Grandioso Tempo di Cocktail Lounge Tempo di Beach Boys No tempo Corny Swing Slow – relaxed time – strict time – (reprise) Slower Fast as possible (fraudulent dramatic section)

B C D

E F

G

H

Total

53

  Bars 118–28; [A] 4:04; [T] 4:05.   Bars 126–7; [A] 4:18; [T] 4:18.

54

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Time 1

Time 2

1967 Recording

1981 Recording

1 14 24 28 43 59 63 69 93 102 110 118 129 137 146 147 163 165 167 169 174 178

0:00 0:21 0:47 0:56 1:22 1:49 2:07 2:13 3:03 3:29 3:43 4:04 4:29 4:53 5:13 5:34 6:06 6:13 6:21 6:31 6:46 7:08

0:00 0:22 0:51 0:56 1:25 1:55 2:14 2:21 3:01 3:31 3:44 4:05 4:30 4:53 5:10 5:29 5:58 6:04 6:12 6:22 6:32 6:45

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7:30

7:15

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Tempo di Cocktail Lounge Via a simple ascending scale the piece hesitantly progresses into yet another comic section.55 Again, Zappa chooses a popular musical expression which by its use of jazz harmonies and somewhat difficult melodic leaps, forms a distinctly American Songbook style. The stylistic expression conveys the text: ‘Do it again, and do it some more, that does it by golly, it’s (she’s) nasty for sure’, but after only four bars the setting begins to dissolve by the repetition of ‘nasty, nasty, nasty’.56 The immediate effect is a highlighting of the lyrics leading up to a Sprechgesang spot, which confidentially addresses the listener with the text: ‘Only thirteen and she knows how to nasty’.57 Tempo di Beach Boys Zappa again resorts to popular musical expressive means in a short rounded Tempo di Beach Boys section,58 a pastiche on the Beach Boys’ ‘Little Deuce Coupe’59 with the morally indignant text: ‘She’s a dirty young mind, corrupted, corroded. Well, she’s thirteen today and I hear she gets loaded’ – the tension between the slap-happy musical style and the lyrics once again being evident. Ballad Rock, Tempo di Cocktail Lounge and Tempo di Beach Boys are all sections in which Zappa mainly uses straight popular musical forms of expression. Comparing this observation with the respective lyrics – and the text in general – it is striking that the use of popular musical styles coincides with the text’s most humorous or hilarious satires. City Hall Fred’s infantile arousal and lasciviousness becomes far more satirical through the affinity between text and music than by the text alone. No Tempo The Tempo di Beach Boys section concludes with a small intermezzo No Tempo60 that starts with a brief atonal, pointillist construction of one and a half bars’ length after which an unaccompanied,61 dreamlike (Kafkaesque) dialogue occurs: ‘If she were my daughter I’d… What would you do daddy?’ – repeated three times.

55

  Bars 129–36; [A] 4:29; [T] 4:30.   Bar 133–4; [A] 4:41 ; [T] 4:42. 57   Bars 135–6; [A] 4:47; [T] 4:48. 58   Bars 137–45; [A] 4:52; [T] 4:53. 59   The Beach Boys, ‘Little Deuce Coupe’, Capitol, 5009 (1963). 60   Bars 146–50; [A] 5:13; [T] 5:10. 61   In the 1981 version the dialog is accompanied by semi–electro–acoustic and pointillist sounds and ‘Daddy’ is replaced by ‘Frankie’. 56

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Corny Swing The lyrics of the subsequent Corny Swing section62 form a response to the little girl’s question above: ‘Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup and strap on here again, Oh, baby…’63 The musical setting is kept entirely within an early 1930s swing style with blues and ragtime connotations. It is thus in line with the strategy of the previous section and the musical setting stands out as a humorous ironic dressing of the lyrics turning the scene into an allegory that reveals a hedonistic carelessness typically associated with the decadence of upper-class life between the two World Wars. Slow With the Slow64 section the closure of the entire piece commences – lyrically and dramatically, as well as musically. The melodic material maintains a certain jazzlike character, while the harmony changes from traditional triads in the Corny Swing section (concluding in B), to a series of chords that, although sustaining a sense of B, have a much freer relation to conventional harmony. The Slow section switches from the swing feel (Relaxed time) of the previous section, to straight quavers (Strict time)65 supporting the separation of the melody line and the accompaniment into different tonalities, respectively, C major (with a single chromatic addition) and B major (as a camouflaged circle of fifths). The following two-bar passage is a small slightly slower reprise of the Moderato part of the very first section,66 but here the D, instead of progressing to C, is reinterpreted into the dominant of G which is substituted by a false ending in E minor thus blurring the notion of C as a tonal centre. Slower Whereas the lyrics in the previous section have a slightly sentimental touch, almost a metaphorical sigh at having to leave the dream: ‘Time to go home, Madge is on the phone, got to meet the Gurneys and a dozen gray attornies [sic]; T.V. dinner by the pool, I’m so glad I finished school’,67 the Slower section becomes sharper in its satirical portrayal of City Hall Fred’s smugness, hereby directly warning about Fred’s corrupt nature and potential abuse of power. The pathos of the lyrics – ‘Life is such a ball, I run the world from City Hall’ – is highlighted by the ridiculous, pompous musical setting: a stepwise descending 62

    64   65   66   67   63

Bars 147–62; [A] 5:34; [T] 5:29. Bars 147–62; [A] 5:34; [T] 5:29. Bars 163–4[A] 6:06; [T] 5:58. Bar 165; [A] 6:14; [T] 6:04. Bars 167–8; [A] 6:22; [T] 6:12. Bars 163–4; [A] 6:06; [T] 5:58.

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melody accompanied by parallel chords, underlines the serenity of the passage just as the sudden trembling in the lower frequencies of the music68 corresponds to the melody’s heroic, masculine close: a fourth-note leap follow by a five-note leap.69 Again there is a circling around C as tonal centre and again no confirmation of a regular authentic cadence – as the passage otherwise sounds determined to attain. In contrast the passage concludes with the relative minor of C – Am9. Fast As Possible Despite the otherwise finale-like quality of the slower section, yet another section, Fast As Possible,70 is added. A hectic ostinato passage in 5/8, repeated four times which, has B (the rival to C) as centre. The passage completely destroys the pathos of the previous section and works, as does the Ballad Rock section described above, as a comment on the preceding section. The tenor of the section is like an agitated reference of ‘Danses des Adolescentes’ from Stravinsky’s Sacre Du Printemps.71 In the score as well as on the Tinsel Town recording72 the section culminates in fermatas with implications of harmonic moves that can be regarded as conclusive in either C or B. The number of dissonances prevents either tonic concluding in a traditional sense and the continuation73 fosters no solution. Although the sequence of chords in the next two bars – B superimposed on B–F dyad and C superimposed on B–F dyad – leans towards a cadence in C it dissolves, quietly, into G major in an almost impressionistic intermezzo made of simple triads and a single naïve motif comprising all degrees of the G major scale.74 The intermezzo confirms the tonal undertones while not providing any solution to the conflict, the tonal dualism, between C and B. Neither does the final chord which, much like the chords of the ‘Danses des Adolescents’, is built of two simultaneous chords: E7(add13omit3) and D. Zappa chooses to let the composition be undecided or unresolved: Brown Shoes Don’t Make It…

68

  Bars 172–3; [A] 6:42; [T] 6:30.   Bar 171; [A] 6:40; [T] 6:28. 70   Bars 174–7; [A] 6:45; [T] 6:32. 71   Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps, 1913. 72   Bar 178; [A] 7:08; [T] 6:45. On the 1967 version the concluding passages of the score are replaced by a fairly compact sound mass made up of ‘“God Bless America”, “The Star-Spangled Banner” and one or two other patriotic songs … all at the same time’ (Zappa quoted in Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 117) and an up-tempo boogie backing. 73   Bar 180; [T] 6:52. 74   Bars 182–7; [T] 6:59. 69

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Final Remarks The musical artefact ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ is an extraordinary event even in the context of Zappa’s extensive oeuvre. Its form is additive in a radical sense. New sections are added like tableaus or scenes as a function of the dramatic plot. As this analysis – or subjective reading – shows, the musical setting and structural implications shift drastically from section to section. They bring together expressive means and generative techniques inspired by and collected from a plethora of styles and genres, to accommodate the intentional implications of the work – ‘there’s just so many different kinds of musical formulas that you can use. They’re all valid. They are all worthwhile to experiment around with … in the service of the lyric that you’re saying’.75 The whole compositional apparatus provides the launch pad for the critical satire to deepen out social, ideological and psychological aspects of the narrative and the situations depicted. Lyrics to pieces like ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ were the exception when Zappa confessed that ‘[a]part from the snide political stuff, which I enjoy writing, the rest of the lyrics wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the fact that we live in a society where instrumental music is irrelevant’.76 To claim that the piece ‘stays fairly rooted in basic blues’77 as Lowe does, is, as shown, misleading. Instead it is a complex aggregation of expressive means that has an uncompromising stance. It establishes a theatrical form not far removed from Brechtian epic theatre in its use of Verfremdung, as the composition’s musical setting is designed to widen, to comment, and to distance, rather than merely to support and accompany the lyrical contents. Ben Watson claims that ‘Frank Zappa’s pursuit of modernism is intuitive rather than theoretical’,78 and, unlike for instance Brecht, Zappa was never interested in any kind of cultural radical uprising or modernist agitation – the closest he ever got to this was probably his insistent fight for freedom of speech at the Senate hearings in the 1980s.79 Nevertheless, despite his disavowal of any ideology, Zappa’s approach must be identified as modernist, not just because ‘[t]he art of connecting apparently antithetical styles and items usually seen or experienced in radically different contexts has long been a feature associated with the international avant-garde’80 and its rebellion against false rationality is seen as a hallmark of modernism. More important, as this analysis suggests, is that his approach implies seriousness and intentionality, a dedicated effort to evoke alertness towards oppression and manipulation in modern society – or maybe 75

  Riordan, ‘Frank Zappa. Formula Perfecto’, p. 31.   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 185. 77   Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa, p. 41. 78   Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. xvii. 79   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 263 ff. 80   Delville, Norris, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism, p. 2. 76

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just to mirror his own concerns. Rather than just being intuitive, and despite his striving toward transcendence, modernism is immanent in Zappa’s psyche – as he himself is a product of history and culture. What Zappa described as the overall concept of his work using the term Project/ Object 81 was actually a strategy that resembled the unresolved work of art – the work in progress and one of the early signs of modernist trends in the twentieth century – and Zappa’s provocative artistic style honoured the Adornian negative identification of modern art. To quote Adorno – ‘What the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn’.82

  Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 139.   Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1997), p. 19.

81 82

Chapter 11

Zappa and the Avant-Garde: Artifice/Absorption/Expression Michel Delville

In an oft-quoted passage of his poem-essay ‘The Artifice of Absorption’,1 former Language poet Charles Bernstein, one of the most influential representatives of the post-war American avant-garde, writes that ‘a poetic reading can be given to any piece of writing; a “poem” may be understood as writing specifically designed to absorb, or inflate with, proactive- rather than reactive-styles of reading’.2 ‘Artifice’, he adds, ‘is a measure of a poem’s intractability to being read as the sum of its devices and subject matters’.3 Bernstein’s target here is the so-called ‘voice’ poem, which he considers as ‘based on simplistic notions of absorption through unity, such/as those sometimes put forward by Ginsberg (who as his work shows/ knows better, but who has made an ideological commitment to such simplicity)’.4 Bernstein’s attacks against the voice-based poem can be usefully extended to the study of popular music, which perhaps more than any other musical genre relies on the immediacy and transparency of voice as both the origin and the spontaneous vehicle of feeling and self-expression. More specifically, in the context of this essay, Bernstein’s definition of artifice also urges us to reconsider Zappa’s experimental poetics within the history of contemporary radical art, raising the issue of the relationship between alternative, underground pop culture and the avant-garde while simultaneously questioning the boundaries that allegedly separate experimental music from mainstream music. Zappa’s music and lyrics, far from committing themselves to simple notions of unmediated self-expression, rely on complex strategies of manipulation and disfigurement which include the use of various forms of collage, close-miking, bruitism, sped-up cartoon-like voices, found spoken material, rehearsal and backstage conversations, etc. Such techniques of disfigurement are bound to make Zappa’s songs sound foreign and, to extend Bernstein’s metaphor, ‘impermeable’ not only to mainstream audiences but also to his most devoted fans. The latter’s eagerness to follow the meanders of Zappa’s cultural and intertextual labyrinths is often defeated by the sheer complexity and elusiveness of the composer’s dense allusiveness and his private 1

    3   4   2

Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Harvard, 1992), p. 9. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 38–9.

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system of references. As Christophe Den Tandt recently argued, another, even more fundamental difficulty encountered in the consumption and study of popular lyrics is that they are ‘expected to function in a way that can withstand, literally or figuratively, high levels of background noise: they are poems performed in material contexts characterised by sonic mayhem, audience distraction, mindaltering substances, uncontrolled commercial reappropriation-conditions that seem indeed highly constraining for lyrical poetry’.5 From this perspective, it would be tempting to conclude that rock lyrics can be consumed primarily as gesture, based on the assumption that most rock audiences do not understand (or misunderstand) many of the words that are being sung on record or during a performance. As Den Tandt rightly suggests, however, this does not mean that rock lyrics should not be considered outside their performative dimension: ‘approaching rock lyrics as poetry is not a gesture exclusively tied to the necessities of academia: song-books of Dylan’s texts – in some cases, pirated, custom-made transcriptions – have been published on a regular basis from the 1960s’.6 This is clearly the case with Zappa’s lyrics, which have been amply transcribed and disseminated on paper and on the web and have become the subject of endless speculation on the part of thousands of fans who are not remotely associated with academia and whose blogs reflect a genuine fascination with the diverse meanings that can be attributed to the songs in the context of Zappa’s now famous concept of Conceptual Continuity.7 Now, what can a popular song or, say, a jazz-rock instrumental piece, absorb or be impermeable to? And to what extent do Zappa’s music and lyrics subordinate subjectivity to ‘composition’ and, ultimately, make use of ‘absorptive means towards antiabsorptive ends’?8 This essay will attempt to answer some of these questions while examining Zappa’s ambivalent position towards the historical avant-garde. Zappa and the Avant-Garde A quick look at the pantheon of influential figures listed in the original Freak Out! 9 sleeve notes reveals only a few names associated with the historical avantgarde and its various ‘–isms’. Amongst the 179 figures listed by Zappa, the names of Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Silvestre Revueltas, Yves Tanguy, Roland Kirk, James Joyce, Mauricio Kagel, Luigi Nono, Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Edgar Varèse, Cecil Taylor, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Salvador Dali, emerge 5   Christophe Den Tandt, ‘Dylan Goes Electric: Inventing a Lyrical Idiom for the Postmodern Distraction Factory’, in Michel Delville and Christine Pagnoulle (eds), Postwar American Poetry: The Mechanics of the Mirage (Liège, 2000): pp. 213–16, at 214. 6   Ibid. p. 214. 7   Please refer to the Introduction of this volume for a synopsis of this philosophy. 8   Bernstein, A Poetics, p. 30. 9   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966).

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as the few names that can be considered as truly representative of contemporary artistic experimentalism. The importance of the Freak Out! list is, of course, very relative, as Zappa himself acknowledged that he couldn’t ‘say that he’d ever read anything by Joyce all the way through’.10 In fact, there is no reason not to believe that Zappa’s list wasn’t first and foremost a prankish exercise in name-dropping, especially as regards the non-musical examples he cites. More generally, Zappa confessed not to read many books. In his short introduction to his public reading of William Burroughs’s ‘Talking Asshole’ episode from The Naked Lunch11 at the Nova Convention on 2 December 1978, Zappa sounds a bit defensive and feels the need to warn his audience that his position as an artist clearly lies outside literary circles. He commented: Hiya. How you doin’ tonight? Alright, um, as you know, I’m not the kind of a person that reads books, I’ve said this before many times, I’m not fond of reading. But, I do, I have in the past made exceptions, and uh, one of these exceptions was this part of the, the book that, I’m sure you know, called Naked Lunch, and I’ve received permission to read the part about the Talking Asshole. So…12

Zappa’s self-confessed reluctance to reading books – whether it is truthful or not – is part of a broader anti-intellectual stance, an attitude displayed not only in several statements pronounced against official college education and the academy but also expressed in songs such as ‘Dummy Up’,13 in which he sneeringly observes that ‘the college degree is stuffed with absolutely nothing at all’ shortly after commenting: ‘Jeff Simmons tries to corrupt Napoleon Murphy Brock by showing him a lewd dance and suggesting that he’d smoke a high-school diploma’.14 As for his inclusion of a few Surrealist-related figures in the Freak Out! list, one should probably not underestimate the influence of Dali’s aesthetics on Zappa’s work even though his most surrealistically free-associational lyrics, such as ‘Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch’15 or ‘The Dangerous Kitchen’16 seem more indebted to Godzilla films and Pop Art, respectively, than to Dali’s peculiar brand

  Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York, 1993), p. 545. 11   William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (New York, 1962). 12   Various Artists, You’re A Hook. The 15 Year Anniversary Of Dial-A-Poem (1968– 1983), Giorno Poetry Systems, GPS 030 (1978). 13   Frank Zappa, Roxy & Elsewhere, DiscReet, DS2202 (1974). 14   Ibid. 15   Frank Zappa, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, FW 38066 (1982). 16   Frank Zappa, The Man from Utopia, Barking Pumpkin, FW 8404 (1983). 10

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of pictorial Freudianism.17 Barry Miles’s biography relates an intriguing but failed encounter between the two artists who briefly met after Eve Babitz18 had arranged a meeting at the King Cole Bar at the St Regis restaurant: They drank green chartreuse and Frank explained who the Mothers were. He was about to go to a rehearsal and Dali said he would like to watch. They arranged to meet at the Balloon Farm, but unfortunately Herb Cohen was having trouble with the club’s management and the Mothers were locked out. When Dali and his wife Gala pulled up in a taxi, Frank, Eve and the Mothers were all sitting outside on the steps.19

Eve Babitz continues: When it turned out positively that they weren’t going to let us in … Dali and Gala dejectedly got another cab and went back to the St Regis … and Frank went back to the Hotel Albert or wherever he was staying to argue with the fucking management who had ruined something that was very delicate and could only happen once. Dali and Zappa alone together in a big empty room with musical instruments.20

Whatever one makes of this anecdote, it is Dali’s Dadaist allegiances, rather than his surrealist visual works, that would seem to ally him with Zappa, at least on a conceptual level.21 Unlike the other, pseudo-avant-gardist connections mentioned above, the spirit of Dada seems to have had a significant influence on Zappa’s work, one which was repeatedly acknowledged by the composer himself. One of the most memorable expressions of the anti-aesthetics of Dada in Zappa’s career was the Duchampian disfiguring of Mona Lisa in a 1970 poster advertising a Mothers of Invention show in Boston. On a less superficial level, Zappa’s production company Intercontinental Absurdities was originally ‘dedicated to Dada in Action’22: ‘In the early days’, Zappa recalls in The Real Frank Zappa Book, ‘I didn’t even know what to call the stuff my life was made of. You can imagine my delight when I discovered that 17   For a discussion of Dali’s and Zappa’s food aesthetics, see Michel Delville and Andrew Norris, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 100–102. 18   Who is still remembered for her nude pose with a fully-dressed Marcel Duchamp for the famous 1963 Julian Wasser ‘chess game’ photograph. 19   Barry Miles, Frank Zappa (London, 2004), p. 138. 20   Ibid. 21   The same applies to Zappa’s friendship with Eve Babitz, which indirectly connects him with Duchamp and the New York branch of Dada. 22   Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 255.

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someone in a distant land had the same idea – AND a nice, short name for it’.23 In his last published interview, Zappa’s more forceful acknowledgment of the legacy of Dada on his work suggests that his relationship with the cultural avant-garde is characterised as a way of life rather than an (anti-) aesthetics per se: I’ve always appreciated dada and I keep trying to get Ahmet to read about it, because that’s him in the flesh, he’s a genetic carrier of that particular gene that has been pretty much bred out of the species. It’s like Stravinsky says, it’s not enough to want, you have to be. There are people that wish they were dada but they’ll never make it. He [Ahmet] doesn’t even know what it means, but he exudes it.24

Zappa’s insistence that his son Ahmet is carrying the genes of Dada, that he ‘is’ Dada, is symptomatic of his instinctive approach to the historical avant-garde. His allegiance to Dada is above all an act of self-definition. It is also a way of paying tribute to a movement which sought to integrate art into life, a tendency which is exemplified by his continued fascination with found text and sonic collage and which climaxed in the mixed-media, Cabaret Voltaire-like happenings and concerts performed during The Mothers of Invention’s six-month residency at the Garrick Theater from March to September 1967. Collages and Happenings So what exactly is Zappa’s connection to the avant-garde? And how can we make sense of the oeuvre of a musician whose production has straddled many genres and registers while questioning the big pre-postmodern divide separating high and low culture? If we go beyond the anecdotal and consider avant-garde art as the product of a collaborative process comprising groups of artists organised around manifestos, Zappa can hardly be positioned within the legacy of a particular ‘–ism’. This obvious fact spares zappologists from the necessity of engaging in a discussion of the controversies surrounding the various definitions and redefinitions of the historical and theoretical avant-gardes. More fundamentally, however, Zappa’s ongoing commitment to a radical aesthetics which aims to reintegrate art into the praxis of life (which is entirely in tune with, say, Peter Bürger’s definition of the historical avantgarde) and develop alternative forms of expression which address the complexities of the production and consumption of music places him in a long line of marginal figures whose lowest common denominator is a capacity to combat the illusion of an unproblematic, transparent and unmediated relationship to artistic expression. 23   Ibid. For a full-length analysis of Zappa’s Dadaist connections, see Ben Watson, ‘Frank Zappa as Dadaist: Recording Technology and the Power to Repeat’, Contemporary Music Review, 15/1–2 (1996), pp. 109–37. 24   Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. 547.

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While Zappa’s neo-Dada happenings at the Garrick Theater celebrated the artist’s penchant for anti-cultural, disjunctive, nonsensical and anarcho-theatrical forms of expression,25 it is Zappa’s many uses and appropriations of collage (whether or not of the Xenochronic variety), one of the main conceptual and practical tenets of Cubism, Surrealist and other historical ‘–isms’, which stands out as his most powerful connection with vanguardist praxis. Examples of musical, textual and visual collages abound in Zappa’s oeuvre, most notably during The Mothers of Invention period, a group Zappa disbanded in 1969 and whose official recordings take us from Freak Out! 26 (1966) to Burnt Weeny Sandwich27 (1970). To various extents, the albums released by Zappa and The Mothers of Invention between 1966 and 1970 combine collage experiments with conventional pop songs, fragments of orchestral pieces, electronic noises and spoken word, often in the form of found poetry based on dialogues generated by members of the band although often prompted by instructions provided by Zappa himself. They also make use of sound manipulation techniques ranging from close miking (which was to become a trademark of Zappa’s later lead vocals) to various forms of tape warping, splicing and editing which, all in all, contributed to countering (or exposing) the ‘absorptive’ seamlessness of melody, the horizontal dimension of music, which the composer was so fond of deconstructing and disfiguring while defeating his audience’s aspiration toward plenitude, unity and self-containedness. By developing a poetics of dislocation and fragmentation that undermines the conventions of what Bernstein identifies above as the simple, transparent lyrical idiom, Zappa inevitably draws attention to the parts rather than the whole, which can only be apprehended through various forms of conceptual continuity, foregrounding the basic structural units that make up a song or an album, the workin-progress rather than the end result of the composition. This process also draws attention to sound as sound rather than the purveyor of emotions or something to be strummed or hammered into shape via instruments and notes. Zappa’s music thus appears to be entirely consistent with the high modernist paradigm of the work-in-progress, which blurs the boundaries between artistic production and consumption by enacting a mise-en-abyme of the compositional process while 25   Paul Carr and Richard J. Hand convincingly argue that ‘not only was Zappa renowned for being a highly theatrical performer and artist but one of the key distinguishing features in his work is a preoccupation with narrative and it is through the consideration of narrative that we are most able to conceptualise his work as Musical Theatre’. See Paul Carr and Richard J. Hand, ‘Frank Zappa and Musical Theatre: ugly ugly oʼphan Annie and really deep, intense, thought-provoking Broadway symbolism’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 1/1 (2006): pp. 41–56, at 41. In the context of Zappa’s relationship with the contemporary avant-garde, the composer’s opposition to political and musical kitsch, added to the dominance of ugliness identified by Carr and Hand as a crucial feature of his subversive poetics places him in a tradition of self-consciously ‘degenerate’ artists. 26   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 27   The Mothers of Invention, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Reprise, RSLP 6370 (1970).

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foregrounding the materiality of sound and music. This notion can also be related to Zappa’s ideas about composition itself, which he describes as ‘a process of organization, in any medium you want’28 while describing music as an assemblage of ‘unsuspecting air molecules’ resulting in the ‘decoration of fragments in time’:29 Music, in performance, is sculpted into something. SOUND is ‘ear-decoded data’. If you purposefully generate atmospheric perturbations, you are composing.30

Following his description of music as a kind of ‘air sculpture’ Zappa likens his work as a whole to a kind of sonic Calder-like mobile, a mechanical apparatus employing ‘a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and releases – in some ways similar to Varèse’s aesthetic’31 and liable to create ‘Anything, Any Time, Anywhere – for NO reason at All’:32 A large mass of any material will ‘balance’ a smaller, denser mass of any material, according to the length of the gizmo it’s dangling on, and the “balance point” chosen to facilitate the danglement. The material being ‘balanced’ includes stuff other than the notes on the paper. If you can conceive of any material as a ‘weight’ and any idea-over-time as a ‘balance’, you are ready for the next step: the ‘entertainment objects’ that derive from those concepts … If a musical point can be made in a more entertaining way by saying a word than by singing a word, the spoken word will win out in the arrangement – unless a nonword or a mouth noise gets the point across faster.33

Spoken Words and Mouth Noises Zappa’s vindication of the irreducible physicality of the compositional process is thus indissociable from his fascination with the possibilities of the spoken word, a fascination which also stresses the importance of the performing body in his sound experiments. And, indeed, his music has capitalised on the possibility that the spoken word, or even the nonword or the mouth noise may surpass the sung lyric in its capacity not only to be entertaining but also to become the focal point of the arrangement itself. As the signifier wins out over the signified, the speaking, whispering, screaming body itself becomes the site of endless manipulations, disfigurations, intoxications and disfiguration. This process is implicitly addressed 28

    30   31   32   33   29

Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 162. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 163.

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in such songs as ‘Your Mouth’34, ‘Baby Take Your Teeth Out’35 and ‘Charlie’s Enormous Mouth’,36 all of which enact the de-contextualisation and (literal) disfigurement of the mouth as the organ of (self-)expression into a ‘hole’ whose functional uses include speaking, eating and providing sexual gratification (‘Your mouth is your religion. / You put your faith in a hole like that? / You put your trust and your belief / Above your jaw, and no relief / Have I found’37). In addition to expressing Zappa’s distrust of the transparent, expressive voicebased song, ‘Your Mouth’38 returns us to his conversion of words and mouth noises into so many compositional units destined to be balanced against each other in his air sculptures. Zappa’s manipulation of vocal elements thus appears central to a discussion of his collage aesthetics and his work’s ‘intractability to being read as the sum of its devices & subject matters’,39 to return to Bernstein’s definition of ‘artifice’. In the Civilization Phaze III liner notes Zappa relates an episode from the following experiment involving a pair of Neumann microphones placed in a piano during The Mothers of Invention’s 1967 recording sessions: … we spent about four months recording various projects (Uncle Meat, We’re Only In It For The Money, Ruben and The Jets and Lumpy Gravy) at APOSTOLIC STUDIOS, 53 E. 10th St. NYC. One day I decided to stuff a pair of U-87’s in the piano, cover it with heavy drape, put a sand bag on the sustain pedal and invite anybody in the vicinity to stick their head inside and ramble incoherently about the various topics I would suggest to them via talk-back system.40

The dialogues later developed into ‘a vague plot regarding pigs and ponies, threatening the lives of characters who inhabit a large piano’.41 Some of them found their way into the Lumpy Gravy 42 album where they were laced with various sound effects, electronic noises and orchestral music. Others provided the basis for the plot of Zappa’s posthumous Synclavier opera, Civilization Phaze III.43 Zappa’s unorthodox use of the prepared piano as a means of creating what he calls in ‘Evelyn, A Modified Dog’44 a ‘highly ambient domain’ for the recording

34

    36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   (1975). 35

Frank Zappa, Waka/Jawaka, Bizarre/Reprise, K 44203 (1972). Frank Zappa, Them Or Us, Barking Pumpkin, SVBO74200 (1984). Frank Zappa, You Are What You Is, Barking Pumpkin, PW2-37537 (1981). Zappa, Waka/Jawaka. Ibid. Bernstein, A Poetics, p. 9. Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). Ibid. Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6–8741 (1968). Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, One Size Fits All, DiscReet, DS 2216

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and transformation of semi-spontaneous dialogue45 is only one example of the experimentation with spoken material which has characterised Zappa’s work, from the orgasmic screaming of ‘Help I’m a Rock’,46 to the numerous closemiking performances that dominated Zappa’s singing style in the 1970s and early 1980s, or the sophisticated collage of sampled and electronically processed quotes from the Parents Music Resource Centre Senate house hearing in ‘Porn Wars’.47 More often than not, what these experiments have in common, besides the use of various cut-up-inspired method and technical treatments of sounds, is a desire to create a documentary narrative of life on the road that moves ‘beyond mere rock ʼn’ roll into the dangerous realm of social anthropology’ and offers listeners ‘the chance to participate vicariously in the touring world of the early 1970s’.48 This is particularly true, of course, in such recordings as 200 Motels,49 Uncle Meat 50 and Playground Psychotics,51 in which members of The Mothers of Invention are responsible for generating their own dialogues around ideas provided by Zappa. The transformation of dialogue into ‘vocal noises’52 in such tunes as ‘Help I’m a Rock’53 and ‘The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet’54 – with their revolutionary use of electronics, electric feedback, belching, animal noises, percussions and avant-garde vocals – blurs the institutional line that separates Zappa’s freak music from the aesthetics of musique concrète, Schönbergian Sprechgesang, or the visceral sound poetry of Henri Chopin. The Post-Mothers of Invention Years Had Zappa given up on music after The Mothers of Invention were disbanded he would have been remembered primarily as a prankish continuator of the spirit of neo-dada collagist and saboteur. It is true that Zappa’s post-Mothers of Invention productions, from 1969 onwards (Hot Rats55 is clearly a major landmark in this development), and especially after the release of Waka/Jawaka,56 were dominated 45   The heightened resonance results from the vibrations of the strings reacting to the sound waves created by the speakers. 46   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 47   Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203 (1985). 48   Frank Zappa, Playground Psychotics, Rykodisc, RCD 10557/58 (1995). 49   Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer, 200 Motels, United Artists (1971). 50   The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre Records, 2MS 2024 (1969). 51   Zappa, Playground Psychotics. 52   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 59 53   The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out! 54   Ibid. 55   Frank Zappa, Hot Rats, Bizarre, RS6356 (1969). 56   Zappa, Waka/Jawaka.

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by a desire to explore, develop and deconstruct – often in a satirical fashion – the structures and conventions of established jazz, blues and rock genres and subgenres. To a large extent, Zappa’s subversive strategies were displaced from a structural level (the paratactic and disjuncted narratives and the truncated manipulations of sound sequences) to a more generic and thematic dimension largely dominated by musical and lyrical pastiche and parody. Clearly, Zappa’s production from the mid-1970s onwards is generally marked by a gradual abandonment of technical experimentation to the benefit of a more humorous and ironic stance which earned him a reputation as a writer of humorous songs and a political satirist.57 Zappa’s post-Mothers of Invention career could be accused of departing from the radical aesthetics of the radical avant-garde and of veering away towards anti-modernist tonality and postmodern eclecticism while remaining ferociously rebellious and oppositional in his social commentary on a variety of issues, ranging from conservative politics, censorship and feminism to drug abuse, fashion and political correctness. However, nothing is further from the truth, and it would be a mistake to argue that Zappa abandoned or started to neglect sound and vocal manipulation techniques in the early 1970s. As outlined in the chapter by James Gardner in this publication, examples of ‘grouting’ can be found on albums such as Sheik Yerbouti58 and Shut Up ʼn Play Yer Guitar,59 not to mention the Xenochrony of Joe’s Garage’.60 Other, no less prominent examples include ‘the digital musique concrète of the aforementioned “Porn Wars”’61 and ‘the compendium of dislocational devices in Civilization Phaze III 62 as examples of Zappa’s continued interest in collage and tape/track-editing techniques. From the perspective of the historical avant-garde, the bridging of popular and avant-gardist technique which continued to characterise Zappa’s post-Mothers of Invention productions points to the importance of historical precedents of a popular avant-garde, from Italian Futurism to Dada, Charlie Chaplin and beyond. As the previous sections of this essay have shown, the resistance of Zappa’s music to simple, transparent ‘absorption’ does not limit itself to the technological manipulation of sound and voice. Zappa’s lyrics in themselves rank amongst the most unusual experimental texts produced in the course of the twentieth century. The wealth of Zappa forums and discussion blogs to be found on the web testifies to a desire to try and explain the unexplainable, speculating about the most obscure   After all, Zappa’s only major hits were ‘Valley Girl’ (on Zappa, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch) and ‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’ (on Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501 (1979). These are the songs that gave him some exposure to a wider and unsuspecting mainstream audience. 58   Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. 59   Frank Zappa, Shut Up ʼn Play Yer Guitar, Barking Pumpkin, W3X 38289 (1981). 60   Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act 1, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979) and Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). 61   Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention. 62   Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. 57

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references contained in Zappa’s songs as if his music was a musical Finnegans Wake,63 a huge symphony à clef and a cornucopia of semantic ambivalence and ambiguities. Because of the sheer wealth of private references and in-jokes contained in his songs, many of Zappa’s lyrics have so far proved rather resistant to critical analysis. The narrative and imagistic strategies displayed in Zappa’s songs have generated a wealth of proactive references and impermeable materials that have created a need for hardcore fans to know everything about the furthest ramifications of Zappa’s manifold conceptual continuities. In the last analysis, for Zappa, as for Bernstein, opacity and non-absorption are not ends in themselves, nor do they ‘necessarily mean nonentertaining’.64 Rather, they prepare the ground for ‘a more powerful (‘souped-up’) absorption’ characterised by ‘opaque & nonabsorbable / elements, digressions & / interruptions’.65 Thing-Fish and the Language of Elves and Mammy Nuns In 1984, with the release of Thing-Fish,66 Zappa’s anti-illusionist fight against the ‘transparent’ lyric took the form of a brand new language which seemed to represent to him a synthesis of a Joycean and… a Tolkienish Revolution of the Word. In his last interview, Zappa describes Thing-Fish67 as ‘a major work’ and compares it to J.R.R. Tolkien’s invention of imaginary languages in The Lord of the Rings:68 FZ: Well, you know it’s like Tolkien. OTL: [Horrified] Like Tolkien? FZ: Yeah, to invent a whole language – Thing-Fish’s dialogue doesn’t grow on trees. Nobody of any species really talks that way. OTL: Yeah. Yeah. FZ: It’s not as good as Tolkien but … OTL: Ah, come on – it’s much better than Tolkien! Maybe I’m a bit too close to Tolkien, that literary tradition, it doesn’t excite me.

63

    65   66   67   68   64

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London, 1939). Bernstein, A Poetics, p. 65. Ibid. Frank Zappa, Thing-Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKCO74201 (1984). Ibid. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London, 1954).

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FZ: He suffered a lot – who’s that bastard who used to attack him all the time? He went to that private club and there used to be this one guy who’d be drunk all the time and lay on the couch, just ridicule and shit?69

One can see why the thought of Zappa’s indebtedness to a Catholic ‘sub-creator’ of imaginary linguistic realms such as Tolkien horrified Ben Watson.70 One can also see why Watson, as a Marxist-Leninist, dutifully dismisses The Lord of the Rings as one of the worst kinds of apolitical, conservative and escapist avatars of post-WWII fantasy literature. However antipodal the influences of Joyce and Tolkien may seem, however – from an aesthetic, political and a religious perspective – they can be usefully related to Zappa’s search for a musical and textual language which is not indebted to any specific vanguardist model but reveals, instead, one of the most basic, even candid aspects of Zappa’s commitment to conceptual continuity, which he saw as a way of building an autonomous world peopled by sonic and textual ‘creatures’ that had never been heard before on the face of the earth. Such a project exceeds all traditional categories surrounding the experimental and the mainstream, the absorptive and the non-absorptive, the theoretical and the practical, the conservative and the subversive. Whatever one makes of Zappa’s statement that the dialect ‘that doesn’t grow on trees’71 spoken by the characters in Thing-Fish72 owes more to Tolkien’s philological elvish languages than to Joyce’s verbi-voco-visual multilingualism, we know that its most direct source of inspiration was Tim Moore’s character Kingfish in the ‘Amos & Andy’ series.73 But contrary to the original character of the TV show, which veered dangerously in the direction of the minstrel show tradition, Zappa’s uncompromising satire of mainstream white culture in Thing Fish74 restores the dignity of a pseudo-negrocious dialect that literally dis-figures the conventions of the popular song, generating a complex network of semantic disruptions and phonetic turbulences, as in the negro-spiritual spoof ‘Brown Moses’75 – one of the album’s most culturally and linguistically challenging songs:76   Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. 550.   In expressing his admiration for The Lord of the Rings, Zappa seems to have gone as far as reading Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter’s accounts of the Inklings group and their Oxford pub meetings. 71   Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. 550. 72   Zappa, Thing-Fish. 73   For a book-length account of the history of the Amos & Andy radio series, see Elizabeth McLeod, The Original ‘Amos ʼnʼ Andy’: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928–1943 Radio Serial (New York, 2005). 74   Zappa, Thing-Fish. 75   Ibid. 76   Zappa, Thing-Fish. At the level of content, ‘Brown Moses’ deals with many different themes including child neglect, Eurocentrism (Brown Moses himself stands as a reminder to white Christians that the characters from the Bible were dark-skinned people) 69

70

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Thing Fish77 is Zappa’s Finnegans Wake and his Lord of the Rings, an opera that takes us to the imaginary periphery of the English language, dissolving familiar words in uncanny combinations of sound and sense into a constructivist festival of words-in-freedom and zany micro-linguistic events. Thing-Fish sounds like nothing else in the history of contemporary music, an extraordinary achievement which transcends Zappa’s previous attempts to create ‘a new language’, demands to be taken seriously and threatens to render any discussion of Zappa’s connections to any particular form of artistic experimentalism practically irrelevant. From the Synclavier to the Ensemble Modern One major turn in the development of Zappa’s collage aesthetics occurred with his discovery of the Synclavier in 1982. At the time when Zappa acquired it, the Synclavier was one of the first tape-less digital working stations combining the functions of synthesizer, samplers and a multitrack recording system. The possibilities afforded by digital editing provided Zappa with a cornucopia of ideas, resources and connections, all aimed at growing, linking and (re)discovering new ways of articulating the notion that composition is a process which is likely to produce ‘Anything, Any Time, Anywhere – for NO reason at all’.78 Before Zappa started to use the Synclavier, an earlier version of the working station had already appeared in 1978 and the machine had already been used by other musicians and music producers such as Tony Banks of Genesis and film score composer Patrick Gleeson. Zappa, however, was one of the very few artists – outside of the circle of electronic music composers and performers – who produced whole pieces composed and performed on the Synclavier. In Jazz from Hell 79 the uncanny, poetic appearance of the repressed ‘gestural’ dimension of music on Zappa’s live solo ‘St Etienne’, the only song performed by Zappa’s band on the album, already adumbrated the later mixed experiments of Civilization Phaze III 80, in which Zappa’s electronic compositions are laced with recorded performances of the Ensemble Modern. A similar mix of the spontaneous and the controlled, composition and improvisation (and another interesting avatar of the gestural aspects of his music), occurred when Zappa decided to use the Ensemble Modern ‘like an instrument’ as part of an experiment in what Todd Yvega terms ‘directed improvisation’.81 Zappa’s attempts to teach the members of the Ensemble Modern to respond to and the corruption of the Church (eventually Brown Moses’ own morality is questioned as he seems more interested in money and gin than in the baby’s fate). 77   Zappa, Thing-Fish. 78   Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 162. 79   Frank Zappa, Jazz from Hell, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74205 (1986). 80   Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. 81   Frank Zappa, Everything Is Healing Nicely, Zappa, UMRK 03 (1999).

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hand signals and gestures instead of relying on traditional notation amounted to confronting them with the paradoxical nature of a directed composition that incorporates the unpredictable and the accidental, a strategy that allies him with Stockhausen and other experimental orchestral composers making use of spatial notation and/or unorthodox conducting techniques. Zappa’s former bands were used to his idiosyncratic conducting style but they were mostly rock, blues and jazz improvisers who experienced no difficulty in responding spontaneously to his instructions. The challenge Zappa had to face while directing the Ensemble Modern was of course that they were all classically trained musicians with little or no inclination towards and/or training in free improvisation. By urging classical musicians to respond off-the-cuff to his instructions – and even though some of these conducting experiments were not always as successful as others in creating the impression that the pieces sound like written compositions – Zappa must have felt that he was finally getting the best of both worlds: at last, he could work with excellent sight-reading musicians who could play his most complex electronic compositions and were willing to improvise and play individual solos while the rest of the orchestra vamped, a strategy used rather successfully in ‘Roland’s Big Event/Strat Vindaloo’.82 It has to be noted that this idea strongly differs from the more customary collaborations between popular music bands and orchestras which more often than not used the classical orchestra as a means of fleshing out the music while the rock or jazz band members remain the sole improvisers. Conclusion If the avant-garde artist’s many postures can be said to include the figures of the revolutionary, the dandy, the anarchist, the aesthete, the technologist and the mystic,83 Zappa’s art and public persona do not really seem to fit any of these models, except maybe for that of the ‘technologist’. More basically, Zappa never rejected past models or sought to live up to the cult of originality as an act of self-creation that characterises the modernist avant-garde. On the contrary, his music has not ceased to re-appropriate a wide range of existing styles and registers (ranging from blues-rock and gospel to orchestral music, jazz and doo-wop), an attitude which, on a superficial level, would seem to place him in the camp of postmodern eclecticism, a mode of composition whose powers of assimilation are themselves often associated with the death of the avant-garde. Richard Murphy has argued that: Postmodernism has frequently been seen … as a phenomenon which is neither totally new nor a movement constituting a radically innovative stylistic   Zappa, Everything Is Healing Nicely.   Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (London, 1985), p. 157. 82 83

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breakthrough, but rather as the attempt to reconfigure in contemporary terms some of the questions already faced by modernism and the avant-garde.84

When referring to other postmodernist theorists, such as Fredric Jameson, Zappa’s compositions, which incorporate nearly all existing aesthetic genres and registers, cannot be credited with having developed a unique or personal style, a feature Jameson identifies with the high-modernist ‘collective ideals of an artistic or political vanguard or avant-garde’.85 Another, less conventional perspective could lead us to a reassessment of Zappa’s achievements as a composer and a political agitator which would return us to the maximalist model developed elsewhere, a style which comes closer to baroque and grotesque modes of representation than to any theoretical models pertaining to modernism or postmodernism.86 One of the features which distinguishes Zappa’s genre-jumping eclecticism from Jameson’s description of postmodernism as a conceptual space where subjectivity and originality dissolve into the all-neutralising powers of pastiche is precisely his resistance to depthless and neutral models of expressivity. Nowhere is this more striking than in his guitar solos, whose voices are immediately recognisable and, indeed, substantiate and actualise Jameson’s notion of a pre-postmodern style, ‘in the sense of the unique and the personal’ and the foregrounding of ‘the distinctive individual brush stroke’.87 Such a resistance to the neutral, affectless realms of Jamesonian postmodernism is noticeable not only in Zappa’s radical social, political and cultural critique. As we have seen, it is also salient in his extension of collage techniques to non-musical, non-artistic material, as well as in his commitment to the notion that musical works have an existence that exceeds the sum of their parts and in his use of composition and the performing, speaking or singing body as a platform for an investigation of the uncontrollable, the unpredictable and the excessive in art production and consumption.

  Richard Murphy. Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge, 1999), p. 4. 85   Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, 1991), p. 15. 86   Michel Delville and Andrew Norris, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism, pp. 1–21. 87   Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 15. 84

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Chapter 12

Zappa and Mortality: The Mediation of Zappa’s Death Paula Hearsum

The need for rituals throughout dying and death transcends cultures, religions and time. It is an innately human response to aid making sense of this part of the life cycle by turning to both words and music – funerals, for instance, use both. As Zappa was a verbally articulate and outspoken musical performer, the mediation of his dying and death offers a potent possibility to examine the perception of his musical legacy through his obituaries and coverage of his death. They yield more than data and statistics, offering a dual reflection: both how Zappa is held within the musical arena as well as a societal snapshot of views on death. This chapter explores the extent to which journalistic coverage, through the examination of Zappa’s dying and death, reflects and shapes the reality of a life-lived and sheds light on social views of death culturally and historically. The chapter will also examine the social functions of journalism’s coverage of Zappa’s death through news and obituaries, sample broadsheet and music press articles, in addition to considering the utilisation of news values and ideologies that create our collective memory of his legacy. Zappa’s famous quotation to Rolling Stone, about the music press, was indicative of his position on the role of the media in general and music journalists specifically: Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.1

Whilst his opinion of journalism was often less than favourable, it is questionable whether he would find the irony that his death and continuing legacy has been documented for posterity within the press. Popular music’s more generic relationship with the subject of death has been extensively intertwined – not only in terms of its content but also within the statistical spike that forms the basis of the ‘live fast, die young’ cliché which journalists use as a metaphoric device. The desire and increasing curiosity for a critical insight into the mediation of this final rite of passage is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon in terms of academic 1   Frank Zappa, in Linda Botts (ed.), Loose Talk: The book of quotes from the pages of Rolling Stone Magazine (New York, 1981), p. 74.

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engagement. Through an analysis of the news articles of Zappa’s last years living with prostate cancer and his obituaries, the chapter will seek to demonstrate how a life is renegotiated in the re-presentation of a particular type of death and how that, in turn, is a reflection of society. The Form of an Obituary as a Journalistic Discourse Obituary writing is a discursive practice as old as newspapers themselves. As a mediated form of writing, embedded within a social institution, what they offer is a way of exploring a snapshot of society. This section will contextualise obituary writing as a journalistic form and refer to the role of the press as gatekeepers. It will also consider why Zappa is held within a cultural proximity to the readers of the obituaries and suggest what role the consumption of the piece of journalism plays in our collective memory. It will conclude with a consideration of the discourses at play underpinning the coverage of his cancer before he died. The Obituary Obituary writing may often be structurally formulaic, for instance, typically focused around a life lived rather than the death itself. However, when the person is a musician and the death not from old age, the attention has a tendency of shifting to the death. It is worth noting that in newspapers, there is usually a dedicated space, editor and pool of freelance writers, whereas death covered in the music press is more ad hoc, often straddling news items, features and ‘specials’, with writers chosen for their knowledge of the artist rather than their obituary skills. Journalism’s goal is to inform and entertain readers and obituary writing is a form of journalism that, at its best, is both credibly informative and engagingly written. Gatekeeping It is also important to note that obituary writers also function as gatekeepers to a legacy, cherry picking a person’s life for pertinent key moments. For instance the Guardian’s obituary in 1993 was quite dictatorial about what should be remembered by the public about Zappa: He was a confusing, often contradictory figure who will be remembered initially for his outrageous image back in the sixties and seventies: his rock band, The Mothers of Invention, his campaigns against rock music censorship, and his more recent dips into international politics as cultural liaison officer to the West for the new Czech government.2 2   Robin Denselow, ‘The Father of Invention: Obituary of Frank Zappa’, Guardian, 7 December 1993, p. 18.

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Obituaries such as this make judgment calls on what a person ought to be remembered for and what that might mean to those left behind. All this, often within 1,500 words and by their very nature, sometimes with the pressure of a deadline unknown in advance make them ripe artefacts for academic interrogation. Nigel Starck, a prolific researcher in obituary writing suggests The best obituaries … avoid the voice of mourning … and they deliver society’s first verdict on a life lived … obituary writers offer an appraisal of their subjects in much the same way that newspaper critics evaluate films … for their readers.3

The Journalism Studies concept of ‘gatekeeping’ is pertinent on a basic choice level. When considering that just over 150,000 people die daily worldwide,4 it is apparent that choices were made as to why Zappa’s life was deemed worthy of media coverage, both mainstream and the music press, on those days following his death. Those judgment values, selections and editing processes were driven by considerations of newsworthiness. Using Galtung and Ruge’s systematic articulation of 12 newsworthy criteria as benchmarks,5 it is interesting to note how they resonate with Zappa’s legacy and character, arguably increasing the likelihood of his death being covered by many UK and American broadsheets, as well as the music press. The way in which each would then shape their editorial coverage was dependent on house style and audience and adds another layer of cultural gatekeeping to the equation. Collective Memory This creation of a ‘collective memory’, Fowler’s sociological research suggests,6 is part of a ritualisation of death, and does not necessarily create a non-contentious repository of knowledge. Whilst there are no overarching rules for all periodicals to cover, they do have a conflicting role as both ‘contributors to democratisation … [and] also guardians of the cultural canon’.7   Nigel Starck, ‘Obituaries’, in Bob Franklin (ed.), Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism. (London, 2008): pp. 87–96, at 91. 4   See Anonymous 4, US Census Bureau (2012), at http://www.census.gov/population/ international/data/idb/worldvitalevents.php [accessed 18 February 2012]. 5   Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge ‘The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers’, Journal of Peace Research, 2/1 (1965), pp. 64–91. The 12 criteria, explored through the analysis of this chapter, are Frequency; Threshold; Unambiguity; Meaningfulness ‘Familiarity’ (a) cultural proximity and (b) relevance; Consonance; Unexpectedness; Continuity; Composition; Reference to elite nations; Reference to elite persons; Personalisation; Negativity. 6   Bridget Fowler, The Obituary as a Collective Memory (London, 2007). 7   Bridget Fowler, ‘Collective Memory and Forgetting: Components for a Study of Obituaries’, Theory, Culture & Society. 22/53 (2005): pp. 53–72, at 110. 3

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Kitch alludes that if we know a famous person through the media then it is inevitable that our mourning occurs in the same medium and that ‘the public mourning of famous people, a process led by and centered in the news media, is a logical and useful function of journalism’,8 whereby the words become ‘transformed into myth and memory’.9 Using Schudson’s concept of the ‘cultural flashpoint’10 she argues journalism can offer to fill the liminal space between the death itself and ‘reincorporation’ as fans come to terms with the death,11 understood within Zappa’s own framework of Conceptual Continuity as fans seek connectivity through his work or ongoing interpretations of his music though tribute bands. Cultural Proximity One pertinent factor here is that as a musician Zappa maintained a close connection to his audience through his media presence. By knowing Zappa’s music intimately and his articulation of it through press articles, our perceptual proximity to the composer is increased so that even though the vast majority of readers of Zappa’s demise would not have known him personally, they may have felt they had known him musically. Journalistic discourses of terrorism identified by Nossek and Berkowitz’s harness ‘cultural proximity’12 to connect the reader to the story even if only pseudo-socially. They commented: One of the strategies that journalists adopt to successfully manufacture news is to tap into usual, typical and well-known cultural narratives … based on narrative conventions that are culturally resonant for themselves and their audiences.13

Being drawn to read obituaries also connects to personal resonances, which can be threefold: we are interested in the specific person (Zappa), what they are known for (his music) or because we simply like reading obituaries. Bearing in mind any agendas at play and any critiques of this model, the sheer speed at which obituaries may need to be constructed emphasises the acceptability of a draft of history that journalists are ascribed and from which historians may concurrently both undermine and draw on. As Zappa’s illness was public knowledge, it is reasonable to suggest that his obituary was already partly written.

 8

  Carolyn Kitch, ‘A News of Feeling As Well As Fact: Mourning and Memorial in American Newsmagazines’, Journalism. 1/2 (2000): pp. 171–95, at 172.  9   Ibid., p. 172. 10   Michael Schudson, Watergate in American History: How We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct the Past (New York, 1992). 11   Kitch, ‘A News of Feeling As Well As Fact’, p. 173. 12   Hillel Nossek and Dan Berkowitz, ‘Telling “our” story through news of terrorism’, Journalism Studies, 7/5 (2006): pp. 691–707, at 693. 13   Nossek and Berkowitz, ‘Telling “Our” Story Through News of Terrorism’, p. 692.

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As outlined by Zelizer, the Associated Press alone has around 1,000 pre-written obituaries,14 and it is likely Zappa’s was one of them. Zappa and the Representation of Living With Cancer Whilst the recent unexpected deaths of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston opened the journalistic gates for speculation and judgement, death through protracted illness like Zappa’s demanded a more revered approach. This is indicative of a socially accepted adherence to a hierarchy of types of deaths made visible within journalistic nuances used. Typically a death through cancer evokes more empathy than a self-induced death. A richer understanding would, as Gee suggests, be clearer by undertaking a language-based discourse analysis whereby meaning is understood within context.15 Therefore, we can consider the journalistic language used around Zappa’s death to be a microcosm of contemporary societal views. Some illnesses, pertinently here cancer, are so powerfully destructive that the only way to linguistically discuss them is within the metaphoric military language of a battle.16 Therefore Zappa’s illness from the announcement of his cancer to his death was ‘fought’, ‘lost’ and not ‘won’ or ‘beaten’. In an interview conducted with Zappa only a few months before he died he agreed that ‘the minute somebody tells you you have cancer, your life changes dramatically, whether you beat it or you don’t … It’s a fucking battle’.17 The cancer warfare discourse as a metaphorical literary device goes beyond a journalistic shortcut to structuring the way we understand the world, but also acts to make the journey between the writer’s idea and the reader’s understanding of it clearer. Whilst Seale’s examination of cancer within the sporting framework unearthed metaphors of ‘struggles’,18 Clarke’s findings, when examining media portrayal of breast, testicular and prostate cancers, found a dual edged theme of a ‘victim’ of cancer who has the possibility of becoming a ‘hero’: ... the heroes of these stories were often celebrities who had done their part for increasing the visibility of prostate cancer. Among the celebrities mentioned were … singers Harry Belafonte, and Frank Zappa.19   Joe Strupp, ‘Obits find new life’, Editor & Publisher, 139/1 (2006), pp. 44–8.   James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (London, 1999). 16   See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. (London: 1994). 17   David Sheff, ‘The Playboy Interview’, Playboy Magazine (May 2 1993): pp. 55–73, at 72. 18   Clive Searle, ‘Sporting Cancer: struggle language in news reports of people with cancer’, Sociology of Health & Illness, 23/3 (2001): pp. 208–329, at 309. 19   Juanne Clarke, ‘A Comparison of Breast, Testicular and Prostate Cancer in Mass Print Media (1996–2001)’, Social Science & Medicine, 59 (2004): pp. 541–51, at 547–8. 14 15

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Kitch intimates that it is this very same construction that journalists perform which is also one of a public ritual via commemorative journalism. It allows the publication to bring the deceased closer to the reader. For Zappa, notoriously a man of the people through his public political allegiances and campaigns, and whose cause of death was through a male-relatable disease, the coverage of his death allowed for themes of ‘ordinariness’ to emerge within the sample outlined below, as well as noting his prominent position as a celebrity. Our cultural dis-ease with the specific disease of cancer can be viewed as part of a wider discomfort with death itself and the way we experience it – particularly when that experience is mediated. Whilst bearing in mind issues around the construction of masculinity, and demasculinisation, in relation to prostate cancer20 and as the most common cancer in men particularly over the age of 65 years, that Zappa was relatively younger adds a further dynamic to the coverage. Dipping this lightly into Becker’s conceptual pot of ‘transference heroics’21 suggests that overcoming our fear of death necessitates the identification of heroism. In this case, our hero is Zappa, whose lost cancer battle against mortality will live on through the identified legacy of his music which might include sales of previously released albums, posthumous releases and the ongoing references to him in the future. The obituaries collectively signal particular contributions as the pinnacle legacies of his career. Whilst posthumous fame may cynically be felt to be manipulated by marketing strategies to drive backsales catalogues, even intimated in Time Magazine’s obituary of Zappa as a ‘shrewd career move’,22 the felt ongoing living presence of a dead musician through their cultural artefacts requires further explanation. It is not a straightforward supposition to suggest that a fear of death is a cultural marginalisation of it. On the contrary, there has been an emerging, complex desire and captivation for increasingly detailed coverage of death. These intimacies are paralleled in academic considerations shifting in focus over the years from the domain of ‘Stars’ to celebrity culture. This is not new but merely an increase in mediated visibility – from Foucault’s examination of the spectacle of public executions in the 1670s23 to the current debates around televised and virally circulated executions24 and assisted suicides, an audience’s fascination with death has inevitably been present. There are enduring journalistic narratives around the coverage of types of death, which continually draw our attention (illness, suicide, murder) and have been over-reported compared to death from old age which does not seem to have 20

  See Juanne Clarke, ‘Prostate Cancer’s Hegemonic Masculinity in Select Print Mass Media Depictions (1974–1995)’, Health Communication, 11/1 (1999), pp. 59–74. 21   Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York, 1973), p. 155. 22   Michael Walsh, ‘The Duke of Prunes: Frank Zappa 1940–1993’, Time Magazine, 10 December 1993, at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979871,00.html [accessed 25 February 2012]. 23   Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, 1975). 24   For instance the execution of Saddam Hussein (2006).

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the same viewing attraction. In terms of negative news values, the growing morbid interest in media portrayal of deaths has been typically deconstructed through content analysis of TV news. Therefore, a desire to consume such content is viewed as a negative trait, although Zuckerman and Litle’s approach reframed it as a curiosity about morbid events which are within a normal behavioural range.25 This may account for the continual online circulation of ‘last interviews’ conducted by journalists such as Zappa’s aforementioned interview in Playboy, seven months before his death where he denied his illness had influenced his musical output.26 Whilst acknowledging that adding a visual element in examining a televised interview with Zappa a few months before he died requires us to consider the spectacle of observing the dying process itself, the reference to this interview is to shed light on an interviewer’s line of questioning as journalist. Jamie Gangel gives a knowing nod towards Zappa’s inevitable death, the forthcoming media coverage of it and Zappa’s potential legacy: JG: How does Frank Zappa want to be remembered? FZ: It’s not important. JG: Not important at all? FZ: No. JG: Want to be remembered for the music? FZ: It’s not important to even be remembered. I mean, the people who worry about being remembered are guys like Reagan, Bush. These people want to be remembered. And they’ll spend a lot of money and do a lot of work to make sure that remembrance is just terrific. JG: And for Frank Zappa? FZ: I don’t care.27

25   Marvin Zuckerman and Patrick Litle, ‘Personality and Curiosity About Morbid and Sexual Events, Personality and Individual Differences, 7/1 (1986), pp. 49–56. 26   Sheff, ‘The Playboy Interview’. 27   Frank Zappa and Jamie Gangel, Today Show, 14 May 1993, at http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=UDYzuwG-gOE&feature=related [accessed 18 February 2012].

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Zappa’s Death and its Journalistic Coverage Whilst not complete, the spread of newspapers and magazines examined does offer an illustration of how Frank Zappa was held in the publicly mediated domain and what the UK deemed socially and culturally important to document in the early 1990s.28 Most obituaries were published within the week of his death, so whilst not always exclusive in terms of a news scoop, all quality papers were seen to cover his death and meet the value of recency. So whilst typical obituary features such as his upbringing, early musical output, marriages and family are covered, what emerged in the research were also six key themes that are of particular pertinence to this essay. Musical Distinctiveness and Legacy Justifying any obituary inclusion which vies for our increasingly fought-for reading time, an obituary needs to frame the socially renowned profession of the deceased to such an extent that the choice clarifies why we should remember this particular musician over any other at that point in time. Therefore themes of uniqueness and contribution are often made apparent for Zappa – ‘distinctive guitarist’,29 ‘innovatory force’,30 ‘many hailed him as a genius’,31 ‘one of the great innovators of popular music’,32 a ‘maverick within popular music and an outsider among classical composers … distinctive guitarist’.33 The fact that his obituary was included in the Daily Telegraph ‘Entertainers’ collection of obituary pieces is also indicative of another selection process.34 The sub-theme of the sheer number of musical genres his work touched also occurred with notions such as ‘prolific’35 and ‘innovatory’36 – the non-exclusivity of an associated genre making the journalistic task of pinning him down all the more challenging:

28   The sample included all UK broadsheets and a small sample of American quality papers for comparison along with a selection of UK and USA music magazines. 29   Jon Pareles, ‘Frank Zappa, Musical Iconoclast, Guitarist and Restless Innovator, Dies at 52’, New York Times, 7 December 1993, p. 9. 30   Anonymous 3, ‘Frank Zappa Obituary’, The Times, 7 December 1993, p. 21. 31   ‘Frank Zappa Obituary’, Daily Telegraph, 7 December 1993, in Hugh Massingberd, The Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries: Entertainers (London: 1997): pp. 311–17, at 312. 32   Denselow, ‘The father of invention’, p. 18. 33   Pareles, ‘Frank Zappa’, p. 9. 34  Massingberd, The Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries, p. 312. 35   Andy Gill, ‘Obituary: Frank Zappa’, The Independent, 7 December 1993, at http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-frank-zappa-1465925.html [accessed 18 February 2012]. 36   Anonymous 3, ‘Frank Zappa Obituary’, p. 21.

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One of the great innovators of popular music of the past 25 years, a composer and performer whose prolific output spanned – and often collided with – rock music, jazz, avant-garde orchestral work and satire.37

A substantial number of articles suggested that whilst Zappa was admired he didn’t necessarily ‘inspire critical consensus’.38 In terms of magnitude, Zappa’s output was considered ‘unprecedented, and remains … unrivalled’39 with fans having been left a ‘huge legacy’40 in size and ‘in breadth’.41 Across all articles highlighting pinnacles of musical achievement, time with The Mothers of Invention was inevitably included, with a significant number wryly including their Beatles parody We’re Only In It For The Money,42 particularly in the UK newspapers that gravitated towards references to UK artists. Personality The notion of parody as a theme was visible in excerpts that examined Zappa’s ‘obstreperous and delightfully barking mad spirit’43 which was deemed to be ‘too intelligent to be part of an ambience’44 and who had stood as ‘the last wild man of rock’.45 Zappa was, almost without exception, typically personified as using humour in his work. This element of the personality news value was explicated as either uncomplicatedly ‘witty’,46 having ‘acerbic wit’,47 or more commonly as noteworthy for his observational ‘satire’48 (a term which reappeared across most UK and USA broadsheets), indicating an intellectual and political bent to his humour. Building on previous unique qualities it was also easy to see how these elements combined when explicating his distinctiveness, which Gill describes as a ‘renegade spirit even by the nonconformist standards of the late sixties counterculture’.49

37

  Denselow, ‘The father of invention’, p.18.  Massingberd, The Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries, p. 312. 39   Michel Gray, ‘Frank Zappa 1940–1993’, Daily Mail, 7 December 1993. 40   Edwin Pouncey, ‘Francis Vincent Zappa: 1940–1993. An Appreciation’, New Musical Express, 18 December 1993, p. 19. 41   David Stubbs, ‘Frank Zappa R.I.P’, Melody Maker, 18 December 1993, p. 5. 42   The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money, Verve, V6-5045 (1967). 43   Anonymous 3, ‘Frank Zappa Obituary’, p. 21. 44  Ibid. 45   Gray, ‘Frank Zappa 1940–1993’. 46  Ibid. 47   Gill, ‘Obituary’. 48   Pareles, ‘Frank Zappa’, p. 9. 49   Gill, ‘Obituary’. 38

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Shock Value In being able to exemplify how an audience would remember Zappa through his public performances, the majority of obituaries examined gave lurid and colourfully illustrative examples as to why he was so distinctive – several well known stories were retold: the dismemberment of the doll on stage by marines at the Garrick Theater shows of 1969, his lost legal suit against the Royal Albert Hall after they cancelled his shows in 1975,50 his pornography charges from when he was in his twenties or explicit recordings of the 1960s. The memorable stories retold in the obituaries are inevitably ones that also contained the previously discussed news values and inevitably would have been reported in the news sections of the same papers. Political Legacy In a connected thematic, that of retelling newsworthy stories, two particular political stories of Zappa’s were much discussed in both UK and USA articles. The underlying purpose of restating an older story, when held within the confines of an obituary, has the purpose of examining the effectiveness of the first event, which appears to be a journalistic way to measure someone’s legacy. In this case, the stories emerging were of Zappa’s political campaigning: that is, what did these specific acts achieve or what should they be remembered for? The first was with the Parents Music Resource Centre51 and testifying to the Senate Committee. Once more his eloquent lucidity with the issues is mentioned and he is described as ‘by far the most articulate music-business opponent of the Washington Senators wives PMRC’52 and to emphasise his importance, typically that ‘he played a big role in the campaign against the censorship of rock lyrics’ whereby he gave a ‘witty but angry speech’53 being so committed to the issue: Mr Zappa worked against efforts to censor popular music. He testified before a Senate subcommittee in the 1985 hearings on ‘porn rock’ and repeatedly tangled with those who advocated warning labels on albums, a tactic he compared to ‘treating dandruff by decapitation’.54

A second political moment, and often connected to this in terms of position within the obituaries, took place five years later: his involvement with the last Czechoslovakian President, Vaclav Havel, who had invited Zappa to Prague to discuss him potentially taking on a role of cultural ambassador – this was covered, 50

  Gill, ‘Obituary’.  Massingberd, The Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries, p. 312. 52  Ibid. 53   Denselow, ‘The Father of Invention’, p. 18. 54   Pareles, ‘Frank Zappa’, p. 9. 51

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not surprisingly, more by the newspapers than the music press, because the newspapers would have previously covered the changes in Czechoslovakia on a political level which the music press did not. British Proximity Part of the reasoning for examining some American quality newspaper obituaries was to compare the use of proximity in the writing with UK press when covering an American artist. What emerged was the finding of British (sometimes Englishcentric) hooks – not always positive ones – but certainly the use of supporting a geographical connection. A parallel can be made here with the contemporary obituary coverage of Elvis in the UK in 1977, which alluded to Presley’s brief touchdown at Prestwick Airport in 1960. Even 30 years after his death the proximity narrative re-emerged when Tommy Steele’s ‘secret tour’ with Elvis around London was leaked.55 Zappa’s non-favourable UK connections were made around several experiences, including again the coverage of the Albert Hall legal suit but mainly using Zappa’s own words: I don’t dislike individual Britons … but the British Isles does not feature high on the list of places where I feel comfortable or wanted.56

This comment is not only based on his well-documented negative experiences, but also through his political feelings around the monarchy: ‘Until you change yourself from subjects to citizens you are going to be eating shit aren’t you?’ But Britain liked him, and his most impressive album, Hot Rats (1969), was a success here though it barely registered on the other side of the Atlantic.57

The last sentence suggests that Zappa’s music was not enjoyed purely by geographical proximity alone. Several papers also referred to the Rainbow Theatre incident of December 1971 when Zappa broke his leg after he was pushed offstage. As a reminder to those who would know the tale, it may also instigate a reminder to fans that at this point he was also feared dead and it certainly adds weight to the growing disconnect with the country and typically explained why ‘[f]or some time afterwards he tried to avoid England’58 and ‘hated everything about

55   Paul MacInnes, ‘When Elvis Came to London’, The Guardian, 22 April 2008, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/apr/22/popandrock.london [accessed 18 February 2012]. 56  Massingberd, The Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries, p. 316. 57   Anonymous 3, ‘Frank Zappa Obituary’, p. 21. 58  Ibid.

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Britain’.59 Unsurprisingly no connection to the UK was made in the American newspapers sampled because the proximity was already made as Zappa was an American citizen and therefore in the same geographical demographic grouping as the readers of the papers – he was one of them. Death is a Battlefield Because Zappa was such a well known musician and personality, with his prostate cancer publically known for a couple of years already, the announcement of his death fits with five of Galtung and Ruge’s news values mentioned earlier: currency, proximity, negativity, predictability and elite.60 The only omission of prostate cancer was in the obituary of the Daily Telegraph,61 and whilst unique to this sample, was not untypical of this newspaper’s house style of the time, but core to the styles of other obituary sections. The increasing seclusion from the public eye or cancelling public appearances was equated directly with his progressive illness which ‘grew more disabling’62 as Zappa increasingly ‘spent most of his later years in seclusion’.63 Before highlighting that Zappa had been too ill to attend the 1991 Ritz concerts, Zappa’s Universe,64 which was performed by friends and his son, Dweezil, the New York Times intimated that, knowing he was dying, Zappa carved out his posthumous record, a process described by Pareles as ‘organizing his recorded legacy’.65 Zappa’s final time spent working on his music was described as being within a private space, whilst he simultaneously was withdrawing from the public eye. His dedication to his music was often described as excessive to the point of being a ‘workaholic’,66 typically working ‘14 hours a day’67 ‘until physical strength failed him completely’.68 When Zappa’s own hero, Edgard Varèse, was used as a cultural anchor, in a citation Zappa had used himself, it took on a ‘painful poignancy’: ‘The modern-day composer refuses to die’.69 The same quotation was also used to sign off the ‘appreciation’ in NME.70 The ongoing cancer narrative of a battle against death itself is implicit in much of the sample both within the obituaries: 59

  Gill, ‘Obituary’.   Galtung and Ruge ‘The Structure of Foreign News’. 61  Massingberd, The Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries. 62   Gill, ‘Obituary’. 63   Denselow, ‘The Father of Invention’, p. 18. 64   Frank Zappa, Zappa’s Universe, Verve, 513575-2 (1993). 65   Pareles, ‘Frank Zappa’, p. 9. 66   Stubbs, ‘Frank Zappa R.I.P’, p. 5. 67   Walsh, ‘The Duke of Prunes, p. 73. 68   Anonymous 3, ‘Frank Zappa Obituary’, p. 21. 69   David Sheppard, ‘The Last Symphony’, Mojo Classic: The Ultimate Collectors Edition, 2/8 (2010): pp. 128–32, at 128. 70   Pouncey, ‘Francis Vincent Zappa’, p. 19. 60

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Frank Zappa … has died from the complications of prostate cancer he had been battling for more than two years. He was 52.71

within the personalised features: Most of the dead popstars courted their own deaths: Janis Joplin fallen down between her bed and the wall, stiffed by an overdose; Jimi Hendrix supposedly suffocated by his vomit in narcotic swoon; Marc Bolan wrapped around a tree. Frank Zappa’s life had to be prised out of him piecemeal by secondary cancer of the bone. Frank knew none better that life is not fair; the savagery of his own death would not have surprised him.72

and within the last interviews completed before his death which contain the exclusivity news value: Now … he is in the middle of a personal life-and-death fight. He has cancer … But now, at 52, the man who put the sneer into rock is losing his last and toughest battle. Frank Zappa is dying of cancer.73

The sample unsurprisingly tended to mention Zappa’s age when he died, as obituaries conventionally do; at 52, it signals to the reader that he died relatively young. Again, as typical for obituaries of lives cut short, some of the sample looked to find a build up from earlier poor health such as when he was ‘frequently ill as a youngster and his family moved several times to warmer locales to cope with his respiratory problems’.74 Posthumous Thoughts Whilst not within the strict scope of this chapter, a nod of curiosity was also given towards a critical engagement with posthumous Zappa because it fits with the concept of both the news value of continuity but also to Zappa’s own ‘Conceptual

71   Paul Feldman, ‘Frank Zappa, Iconoclast of Rock, Dies at 52’, Los Angeles Times, 6 December 1993, at http://articles.latimes.com/1993-12-06/news/mn-64545_1_frank-zappa [accessed 18 February 2012]. 72   Germaine Greer, ‘Frank Was The Real Thing Living In A Nightmare’, The Guardian, 3 December 1993, at http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/Frank_was_the_Real_ Thing_living_in_a_Nightmare [accessed 18 February 2012]. 73   Alex Kershaw, ‘Frank: Fearless and still fighting’. Guardian Weekend, 15 May 1993, p. 7. 74   Feldman, ‘Frank Zappa’.

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Continuity’.75 The Zappa that was socially cemented in the press continues to circulate in our collective cultural knowledge bank. Obituaries and news stories covering a death consolidate our cultural memories of a person and what they might be remembered for, as do the features and special issues, which ran after the obituaries and news stories of his death itself. Critical work around commemorative journalism, most often probed around the mourning of Princess Diana and Elvis acts as a reminder that journalism’s posthumous thread is continued after death, for instance, the Mojo special issue,76 which also plays a role in reshaping and reinforcing collective memories of Zappa. As outlined by Kitch: ... magazines are the most saveable of all journalistic media. When famous people die, magazine editors promote their coverage with labels such as ‘commemorative edition’ … and ‘collectors’ issue’. The cover of an issue remembering a famous person functions as a kind of tombstone and mourning object … a portrait to be preserved … Such content reveals editors’ understanding of what Barbie Zelizer calls the materiality of collective memory, the fact that ‘the media offer memory its own warehouse’ and that the magazines they create will indeed be saved as memory objects.77

It would also be worth comparing how Civilization Phaze III,78 which was released a year after Zappa’s death, and Johnny Cash’s American V: A Hundred Highways,79 were deemed to encapsulate the dying process of an artist through their output, and it is therefore suggested that a discourse analysis of those reviews might be undertaken and compared with the overarching narrative presented here. Death as a marketing ploy was in fact utilised for the first anniversary of Zappa’s death with the release of Civilization Phaze III.80 Reading discursive mediations of music (reviews, features, columns etc) is only one ‘broadcasted’ message of a cultural intermediary. In terms of reception, measuring the effects of posthumously released music requires a different tool to discourse analysis and opportunities are offered through psychoanalytic interpretations. For example, in examining the use

75   In addition to the Introduction of this volume, also refer to the following article for more details on Conceptual Continuity. Paul Carr and Richard Hand, ‘Twist’n Frugg in an Arrogant Gesture: Frank Zappa and the Musical-Theatrical Gesture’, Popular Musicology Online (2008), at http://www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/05/carr. html [accessed 18 February 2012]. 76   Sheppard, ‘The Last Symphony’. 77   Kitch, ‘A News of Feeling As Well As Fact’, pp. 171–95. 78   Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). 79   Johnny Cash, American V: A Hundred Highways, American Recordings, B000276901 (1996). 80  Zappa, Civilization Phaze III.

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of music after 9/11 in the mourning process, Stein highlighted music’s unique intrapsychic functionalities.81 As stories of Berlin streets named after Zappa (Frank-Zappa-Strasse), Lithuanian monuments, the annual Zappanale Festival in Bad Doberan (Germany), inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 or even Baltimore’s Frank Zappa Days and statues are announced, posthumous fame becomes a shaping dynamic of collective memory and of a musical legacy. The protection of that legacy since 1993 has most visibly been undertaken by the artist’s wife, Gail Zappa, through the Zappa Family Trust – an area discussed by Carr when exploring the cultural impact of what many consider to be autocratic copyright protection.82 Gail Zappa sardonically reminds us to move away from journalism altogether in terms of making meaning from Zappa and back to the music itself: Let me say it in the simplest way … My job is to make sure that Frank Zappa has the last word in terms of anybody’s idea of who he is. And his actual last word is his music.83

So whilst the title of this chapter reminds us of Zappa’s thoughts on music journalists and their profession, those who write about a musician’s death have their own complexities with the stories they tell: Why was I feeling maudlin about him? I was not only British, I was also a music journalist – both cardinal sins in the Zappa lexicon. Worse, I was the kind of British music journalist who liked disco and stuff, who couldn’t tell a time signature from a hole in the ground. Why, had we ever met, the man would have hated my guts.84

As academics and in this book as a whole we are also part of this force: … family, fans, journalists, critics, and scholars are all in the same business of defining a legacy, even if they usually work at cross-purposes. Families seek to fix a particular public image, while fans seek to define the celebrity in ways … that honor what they see in them, while journalists both comment on this 81   Alexander Stein, ‘Music, Mourning, and Consolation’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 52/3 (2004), pp. 783–811. 82   Paul Carr, ‘An Autocratic Approach to Music Copyright?: The Potential Negative Impacts of Restrictive Rights on a Composer’s Legacy: The Case of the Zappa Family Trust’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 21/3, (2011), pp. 302–16. 83   Gail Zappa in, Lynell George, ‘Frank Zappa’s ‘last word’’, Los Angeles Times, 21 September 2008, at http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/21/entertainment/ca-zappa21 [accessed 18 February 2012]. 84   Dave Rimmer, ‘R.I.P. Frank’, Mojo, January 1994, at https://www.rocksbackpages. com/ [accessed 20 February 2012].

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FrANK ZAPPA AND tHE AND interpretive process and seek to get underneath and behind it, while critics seek to deepen and complexify, or supercede, these different portrayals, while scholars seek to analyse and explain them.85

Without a doubt it was the music press and special issues rather than the sampled broadsheets which discussed Zappa’s music itself in much more detail, which leaves us the final question to ask of ourselves: by examining Zappa’s death, have we indeed exposed more about to what extent typical news values drive our cultural memory writing, or have we found what Zappa the person, will be remembered for musically? That, of course, depends what you are reading… or as Gail Zappa suggested, what you listen to.

85   Steve Jones and Joli Jensen, After life as Afterimage: Understanding Posthumous Fame (New York, 2005), p. xix.

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Bruce, Lenny (2000). To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb, Knitting Factory, 3019. Buchanan and Goodman (1956). ‘The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 & 2)’, Luniverse, 101. Buckley, Lord (1969). A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat, STS 1054. Buckley, Tim (1969). Blue Afternoon, STS 1060. Burroughs, William S. (1986). Break Through In Grey Room, Sub Rosa, CD 006 008. Captain Beefheart (1969). Trout Mask Replica, Straight, STS 1053. Cash, Johnny (1996). American V: A Hundred Highways, American Recordings, B0002769-01. Chandler, Gene (1962). ‘Duke of Earl’, Eric Records, 171. Chipmunks, The (1958). ‘The Chipmunk Song’, Liberty, F-55168. Chips, The (1956). ‘Rubber Biscuit’, Josie Records, 803. Cooper, Alice (1969). Pretties For You, STS 1941. Crumit, Frank (1994). Mountain Greenery, ASV, 5001. Davis, Miles (1970). Bitches Brew, Columbia, GP 26. Davis, Miles (1969). In A Silent Way, Columbia, CS 9875. Deuces, 4 (1956). ‘WPLJ’, Music City Records, 790. Durante, Jimmy (1964). ‘I’m The Guy Who Found the Lost Chord’, MGM Records, 2006318. Eno, Brian (1974). Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Island Records, ILPS 9309. Exciters, The (1962). ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ United Artists, 662. Fischer, Wild Man (1969). An Evening With Wild Man Fischer, Bizarre/Reprise, 2XS 6332. Fischer, Wild Man (1983). Nothing Scary, Rhino, RNLP 022. Fischer, Wild Man (1980). Pronounced Normal, Rhino, RNLP 021. Fischer, Wild Man (1968). ‘The Circle’/’Merry-Go-Round’, Bizarre/Reprise, 0781. Fischer, Wild Man (1979). Wildmania, Rhino, RNLP 00001. Freberg, Stan (1990). Stan Freberg: Capitol Collector’s Series, Capitol, CDP 7 91627 2. GTOs (1969). Permanent Damage, STS 1059. Hancock, Herbie (1973). Head Hunters, Columbia, KC32731. Harris, Phil (2001). Phil Harris at his Best, Empress, RAJCD 914. Henske, Judy and Yester, Jerry (1969). Farewell Aldebaran, STS 1052. Howlin’ Wolf (1954). ‘Evil’, Chess, 1575. Ice Cube, (1992). The Predator. Island, 57185. Jankovic, Weird Al (1985). Dare to Be Stupid, Scotti Bros, SCT26523. Jankovic, Weird Al (1992). Off the Deep End, Rock’n’Roll, FZ-4033. Jones, Spike (1992). The Best of Spike Jones, RCA, 07863. Jones, Spike (1988). It’s a Spike Jones Christmas, Rhino, R1-70196. Jones, Spike (1988). The Wacky World of Spike Jones, Pair, PDC2-1216. Kaye, Danny (1945). ‘Tubby the Tuba’, Brunswick, OE 9022. Kingsmen, The (1963). ‘Louie Louie’, Wand, WND 143. Lehrer, Tom (1959). An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, Lehrer Records, TL202/202S.

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Zappa, Frank (1970). Chunga’s Revenge, Bizarre, MS2030. Zappa, Frank (1994). Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01. Zappa, Frank (1968). Cruising With Ruben & The Jets, Verve, V6-5005X. Zappa, Frank (1986). Does Humor Belong In Music?, EMI, CDP7 46188 2. Zappa, Frank (1999). Everything Is Healing Nicely, Zappa, UMRK 03. Zappa, Frank (2011). “Feeding the Monkies At Ma Maison”, Zappa, ZR200012. Zappa, Frank (1984). Francesco Zappa, Barking Pumpkin, ST74202. Zappa, Frank (1985). Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203. Zappa, Frank (1988). Guitar. Zappa, CDD Zappa 6. Zappa, Frank (2003). Halloween, DTS Entertainment, DTS-1101. Zappa, Frank (1969). Hot Rats, Bizarre, RS6356. Zappa, Frank (1986). Jazz from Hell, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74205. Zappa, Frank (1979). Joe’s Garage: Act 1, Zappa, SRZ11603. Zappa, Frank (1979). Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III, Zappa, SRZ21502. Zappa, Frank (1996). Läther, Rykodisc, RCD 10574/76. Zappa, Frank (1983). London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 1, Barking Pumpkin, FW38820. Zappa, Frank (1987). London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 2, Barking Pumpkin, SJ74207. Zappa, Frank (1968). Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6-8741. Zappa, Frank (2009). Lumpy Money, Zappa, ZR20008. Zappa, Frank (1991). Make A Jazz Noise Here, Barking Pumpkin, D2 74234. Zappa, Frank (1998). Mystery Disc. Rykodisk, RCD10580. Zappa, Frank (1979). Parc Du Penfield, Brest, France, 19 March 1979, Bootleg Recording. Zappa, Frank (1995). Playground Psychotics, Rykodisc, RCD 10557/58. Zappa, Frank (1974). Roxy and Elsewhere, DiscReet, DS2202. Zappa, Frank (1979). Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501. Zappa, Frank (1982). Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, FW 38066. Zappa, Frank (1981). Shut Up ʼn Play Yer Guitar, Barking Pumpkin, W3X 38289. Zappa, Frank (1979). Sleep Dirt, DiscReet, DSK 2292. Zappa, Frank (1972). Stadio Comunale, Bologna, Italy,30 August 1972, Bootleg Recording. Zappa, Frank (1978). Studio Tan, DiscReet, DSK 2291. Zappa, Frank (1991). The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life, Barking Pumpkin, D2 74233. Zappa, Frank (1972). The Grand Wazoo, Bizarre, MS 2093. Zappa, Frank (1996). The Lost Episodes. Rykodisc, RCD40573. Zappa, Frank (2006). The Making Of Freak Out! Project/Object, Zappa Records, ZR 20004. Zappa, Frank (1983). The Man from Utopia, Barking Pumpkin, FW38403. Zappa, Frank (2006). The MOFO Project/Object, Zappa, ZR20004.

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Eisenstein, Sergei M. (1925). Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin), Goskino. Fleming, Victor (1939). The Wizard of Oz, MGM. Fowler Jr., Gene (1957). I Was A Teenage Werewolf, AIP. Freleng, Friz (1948). Bugs Bunny Rides Again, Warner Bros. Freleng, Friz (1949). Dough For The Do-Do, Warner Bros. Geronimi, Clyde (1951). Alice in Wonderland, Disney. Harman, Hugh (1941). Abdul the Bulbul-Ameer, MGM. Hitchcock, Alfred (1960). Psycho, Universal Pictures. Hitchcock, Alfred (1945). Spellbound, Selznick. Jackson, Wilfred (1935). Music Land, Disney. Keaton, Buster (1924). Sherlock Jr., Metro. Kiers, Roelof (1970). Frank Zappa, VPRO TV. Kneale, Nigel (1976). Beasts, ITV. Kronhausen, Phyllis, Kronhausen, Eberhard (1963). Psychomontage No. 1, Grove Press. Kubrick, Stanley (1964). Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Columbia Pictures. Landis, John (1983). Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Epic. Lester, Richard (1964). A Hard Day’s Night, United Artists. Lester, Richard (1965). Help!, United Artists. Lohner, Henning (1991). Frank Zappa – Peefeeyatko, WDR 3 Mamoulian, Rouben (1931). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Paramount Pictures. Martin, Quinn (1959–1963). The Untouchables, ABC TV. Menzies, William Cameron (1953). Invaders from Mars, Twentieth Century Fox. Novak, Robert (host), CNN Crossfire (March 28, 1986). Nyby, Christian and Halks, Howard (1951). The Thing from Another World, Winchester Pictures Corporation. Prince (1994). 3 Chains O’ Gold, Warner. Reed, Carol (1949). The Third Man, London Films. Reitherman, Wolfgang (1967). The Jungle Book, Disney. Rowland, Roy (1953). The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., Columbia. Rubin, Josh (2005). Derailroaded: Inside the World of “Wild Man” Fischer, Ubin Twinz Productions. Seigel, Don (1956). Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Allied Artists Pictures. Serling, Rod (1959–64). The Twilight Zone, CBS. Sharman, Jim (1975). The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Twentieth Century Fox. Spielberg, Steven (1993). Jurassic Park, Universal Pictures. Vertov, Dziga (1929). Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom), VUFKU. Waters, David (1953). Faces in the Window, WMAQ-TV. Wilder, Billy (1959). Some Like it Hot, Ashton Productions. Wise, Robert (1965). The Sound of Music, Twentieth Century Fox. Wood, Sam (1937). A Day at the Races, MGM.

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Zappa, Frank, Palmer, Tony (1971). 200 Motels, United Artists. Zappa, Frank (1979). Baby Snakes, Intercontinental Absurdities. Zappa, Frank (1982). The Dub Room Special!, Honker Home Video. Zappa, Frank (1985). Does Humor Belong in Music?, Picture Music International. Zappa, Frank (1987). Video from Hell, Honker Home Video. Zappa, Frank (1987). Uncle Meat, Honker Home Video. Zappa, Frank (1988). The True Story of 200 Motels, Honker Home Video. Zappa, Frank and Bickford, Bruce (1987). The Amazing Mr. Bickford, Honker Home Video. Online Sources Albertos, Román, García, ‘What’s On Lumpy Gravy?’ (2001): http://globalia.net/ donlope/fz/misc/Lumpy_Gravy.html Amirkhanian, Charles, ‘KPFA-FM Radio Interview’ (17 May, 1984): http://www. archive.org/details/AM_1984_05_17 Anonymous 6, All Music (2012): http://www.allmusic.com/ Anonymous 4, Census Bureau, US (2012): http://www.census.gov/population/ international/data/idb/worldvitalevents.php Anonymous 9, ‘Civilization III – Pre Release Version’ (2012): http://lukpac. org/~handmade/patio/weirdo/cpiiiunreleased.html Anonymous 2, East Village Other (1967): http://afka.net/Articles/1967-03_IT.htm Anonymous 8, ‘Leather’ (2012): http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/songs/Leather.html Anonymous 5, ‘Musical Quotes’ (2012): http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/quotes. html Anonymous 10, ‘The History and Collected Improvisations of the Mothers of Invention (2012): at http://www.lukpac.org/~handmade/patio/weirdo/ unreleased.html#historyandcollected Anonymous 11, Humo. Be: The Wild Site (2012): http://www.humo.be/ Anonymous 7, Zappateers (2012): http://www.zappateers.com/ Carannante, Greg, ‘Halloween… At the Capitol: A Postscript’, The Free Aquarian (November 1972): http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/72/10/31_Passaic_NJ_ US_Capitol_Theatre Carr, Paul, Hand, Richard J., ‘“Twist’n Frugg in an Arrogant Gesture”: Frank Zappa and the Musical-Theatrical Gesture’, Popular Musicology Online (2008): http://www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/05/carr.html Collings, Matthew (Presenter), BBC2 Late Show Special Broadcast (December 17, 1993): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV1YaBxhewE De la Fuente, Manuel, ‘Author/Recipient Relationships in FZ’s Movies’, The Rondo Hatton Report, 1 (2009): http://www.rhreport.net/archive/2009-12-21%20 archive.pdf , pp. 9–13.

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Diliberto, John, ‘Frank Zappa and His Digital Orchestra’, Electronic Musician, 2/9 (September 1986): http://www.emusician.com/news/0766/frank-zappaand-his-digital-orchestra/145782 Duffie, Bruce, ‘Composer David Raksin: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie’ (1988): http://www.kcstudio.com/raksin2.html Feldman, Paul, ‘Frank Zappa, Iconoclast of Rock, Dies at 52’, Los Angeles Times (6 December 1993): http://articles.latimes.com/1993-12-06/news/mn64545_1_frank-zappa Frame, Pete, ‘A Fine Madness’, ZIG ZAG (31 October 1969): http://www. freewebs.com/teejo/argue/madness.html Frick, Charles, ‘SAINT ZAPPA, HALLOWEEN IDYLL’ (25 October 1995): http://home.online.no/~corneliu/aquarian.htm Foggy G, ‘Hobnoblin’ with the Goblins: The Halloween ʼ78 Files’ (2012): http:// members.shaw.ca/fz-pomd/turtlestew/goblin.htm George, Lynell, ‘Frank Zappa’s ‘Last Word’’, Los Angeles Times (21 September 2008): http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/21/entertainment/ca-zappa21 Gill, Andy, ‘Obituary: Frank Zappa’, The Independent (7 December 1993): http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-frank-zappa-1465925.html Gossard, Jason, ‘We’re Only in it For The Touring’ (2008): http://members.shaw. ca/fz-pomd/turtlestew/index.htm Greenaway, Andrew, The Idiot Bastard Son (2012): http://www.idiotbastard.com/ Greer, Germaine, ‘Frank Was The Real Thing Living In A Nightmare’, The Guardian (3 December 1993): http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/Frank_was_ the_Real_Thing_living_in_a_Nightmare Home, Stewart, ‘Antony Balch Night at the BFI’ (2009): http://stewarthomesociety. org/blog/archives/tag/eberhard-kronhausen Hopkins, Jerry, ‘Mother’s Day Has Finally Come’, Rolling Stone (1969), at http:// wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/Mother%E2%80%99s_Day_Has_Finally_Come [accessed 10 October 2011]. Kofsky, Frank, ‘Frank Zappa Interview’ (1968): http://www.science.uva. nl/~robbert/zappa/interviews/Kofsky.html Krum, Sharon, ‘Family: Interview with Ahmet Zappa’, The Guardian (29 July 2006): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/jul/29/popandrock Ladd, Jim (host), ‘Zappa on Air’, Nuggets, no.7 (April 1977): http://wiki. killuglyradio.com/wiki/Zappa_On_Air MacInnes, Paul, ‘When Elvis Came to London’, The Guardian (22 April 2008): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/apr/22/popandrock.london Menn, Don, Groening, Matt, ‘The Mother Of All Interviews Part 2’, Guitar Player, May 1994: http://www.afka.net/mags/Best%20of%20Guitar%20Player.htm Mervelet, Didier. ‘La dérive Uncle Meat’, The Rondo Hatton Report, 1 (2009): http://www.rhreport.net/archive/2009-12-21%20archive.pdf, pp. 26–29. Michie, Chris, ‘You Call That Music?’, Mix Online, February, 2003: http:// mixonline.com/recording/interviews/audio_call_music/#online_extra_title

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Miles, Barry, ‘Frank Zappa Interview By Barry Miles’ (1969): at http://wiki. killuglyradio.com/wiki/Frank_Zappa_Interview_By_Barry_Miles Mulligan, Terry David (host), ‘Backtrax Frank Zappa Tribute’, Much Music Network (1994): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u5xX0FRUsM&contex t=C3cdb828ADOEgsToPDskI9GRwl9_L-1y1BNmmLtnCt Oullette, Dan, ‘Frank Zappa Interview’, Pulse Magazine (1993): http://home. online.no/~corneliu/pulse.htm Parker, Scott, Zappacast (2012): http://zappacast.podomatic.com/ Prentis, Simon, ‘As Above, So Below: One Size Fits All’, from Actes Intermediaires de la 3eme Conference Internationale de Zappologie (Paris: Les Fils de l’Invention), July 14, 2008: http://www.killuglyradio.com/storage/ICEZ-3draft_2008.pdf Shriver, Maria (host), CBS Morning News (September 18, 1985): http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=LD1DI2SntFI Rimmer, Dave, ‘R.I.P. Frank’, Mojo (January 1994): https://www.rocksbackpages. com/ Russo, Greg, Crossfire Publications (2012): http://www.crossfirepublications. com/ Simms, Den, Buxton, Eric and Samler, Rob, ‘They’re Doing The Interview Of The Century – Part 2’, Society Pages, 2 (1990): http://www.afka.net/ articles/1990-06_Society_Pages.htm, pp. 16–38. Sovetov, Vladimir, ‘Carl Zappa Internet Interview’ (2004): http://www.arf.ru/ Misc/carl_int.html Steel, Gary, ‘Father of Invention’(2004): http://garysteel.blogspot.com/2004/07/ frank-zappa.html Tagg, Philip, ‘Introductory notes to the Semiotics of Music’ (1999): http://tagg. org/xpdfs/semiotug.pdf Verfaille, Jurgen, ‘My Epitaph: Anything, Anytime, Any Place, For No Reason At All’ (1993): http://www.killuglyradio.com/features/articles/my_epitaph_ anything_anytime_any_place_for_no_reason_at_all.php Walsh, Michael, ‘The Duke of Prunes: Frank Zappa 1940–1993’, Time Magazine (10 December 1993): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,979871,00.html Zappa, Frank, Captain Beefheart VS. The Grunt People (1964): http://www. beefheart.com/zigzag/gruntpeople/index.html Zappa, Frank and Gangel, Jamie, Today Show (14 May 1993): http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=UDYzuwG-gOE&feature=related Other Sources Renshaw, Christopher (1992). We Will Rock You, Queen Theatrical Productions, et al.

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Index

Note: Frank Zappa is abbreviated to FZ, The Mothers of Invention is abbreviated to MoI. Absolutely Free (1967) 1–2, 71, 72, 137, 150 ‘Absolutely Free’ (MoI, We’re Only In It For The Money) 61 abstract expressionism 117 Adorno, Theodor W. 112, 167, 168, 184 ‘Adventures of Greggery Peccary, The’ (Studio Tan) 59, 97, 123–124, 131, 170 Ahead Of Their Time (MoI, 1993) 21 ‘Alien Orifice’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore) 23 Also Sprach Zarathustra (Strauss) 3 Amazing Mr. Bickford, The (movie, 1987) 34, 42 American Dream 87–88, 94 ‘Amos and Andy’ (radio series) 196 ‘Andy’ (MoI, One Size Fits All) 62 ‘annoyed listener’ 161, 162 anthropomorphisation 24–25 anti-authoritarianism 10, 150 anti-realism 142–143 ‘Any Way The Wind Blows’ (1963) 135 ‘anything, anytime, for no reason at all’ 1, 115, 169, 191, 197 Apostrophe (’) (1974) 53 Archetypal American Musical Icons 2–3, 25–26, 32 ‘Are You Hung Up?’ (MoI, We’re Only In It For The Money) 72 Aristotle 6 ‘Art Mode’ of collaboration 135, 136 artifice 185 audience/listeners 151 ‘annoyed’ 161, 162 British 18 FZ’s music a challenge to 168–169

FZ’s relationship with 17–18, 19, 21, 22 Auslander, Philip 138 avant garde 3–4, 13, 38, 98, 104, 114, 185–199 and collage 190 and Conceptual Continuity 186, 190 and Freak Out! 186–187 and FZ’s radical aesthetic 189 and humour 194 popular 194 post-Mothers of Invention 193–198 and production/consumption of art 190–191 and spoken word/mouth noises 191–193 and Synclavier/Ensemble Modern 197–198 Thing-Fish and 195–197 see also Dadaism; Modernism; surrealism B-movies 27–31, 32 Babbitt, Milton 4 Babitz, Eve 188 ‘Baby Love’ (Supremes) 2 Baby Snakes (movie, 1979) 20, 21, 22, 33, 34, 36, 37, 47, 97 Bakhtinian concepts 18, 21, 27 Bakker, Jim/Tammy Faye 58 Baltimore (US) 15 Barthes, Roland 1–2, 10, 13, 171 Bartok, Bela 57, 122, 131 Bazin, André 37 Beach Boys 67, 110–111, 180 Beasts (TV drama) 30 Beat literature 117, 118, 129

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‘Beat The Ripper’ (Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger) 4 Beatles, The 11, 60, 98–99, 111, 209 movies of 34 bebop 117 Becker, Ernest 206 Beckett, Samuel 67 Bee Gees, The 124 Beefheart, Captain 9, 30, 68, 99, 136, 150, 155–156 Bennett, Hilton Stith 145 Berger, Arthur Asa 168 Berkowitz, Dan 204 Berlin, Irving 2 Bernard, Jonathan 80 Bernstein, Charles 185, 192, 195 Bickford, Bruce 36, 42 Big Note theory 6–7, 10, 133, 170 and religion 49, 62–63, 64–65 ‘Billy the Mountain’ (MoI, Just Another Band From L.A.) 94, 95, 97, 124, 131 Bizarre Records 17, 136–137, 149, 151 Black, Jimmy Carl 72, 140 ‘Black Napkins’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 4) 81 Blackling, John 13 ‘Blimp, The’ (Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica) 9 ‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’ (Sheik Yerbouti) 44, 87, 94, 95 Boethius 6–7 ‘Bogus Pomp’ (London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 2) 144 Bolter, Jay David 138 Bond, James 5 Borge, Victor 120 Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger (1984) 4, 145 Boulez, Pierre 11, 104 Bozio, Terry 78–79 Brecht, Bertold/Brechtian theatre 89–90, 171, 183 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking) 64, 65 Britain (UK) FZ assaulted by fan in 18, 24, 119 FZ’s concerts in 18 FZ’s obituaries in 208–209, 211–212

Broadway the Hard Way (1988) 49, 58–59, 95, 96 Broadway musicals 31–32 Brock, Napoleon Murphy 125 ‘Brown Moses’ (Thing-Fish) 196 ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ (Absolutely Free) 71, 87, 93, 94, 137–138, 142–143 form chart 179 Modernism and 167, 169, 172–183 significance of, in FZ’s oeuvre 183 Bruce, Lenny 86, 91, 98, 99, 101, 117, 120, 121, 131, 136, 150 bruitism 69, 185 Buckley, Lord 120, 121, 131, 150 Buckley, Tim 150 Buff, Paul 134–136 Bürger, Peter 189 Burnt Weeny Sandwich (MoI, 1970) 76, 160, 190 Burroughs, William 78, 128, 129, 187 Buxton, Eric 58 Cage, John 70 ‘Camarillo Brillo’ (Over-Nite Sensation) 120, 123 cancer 205–207, 212–213 ‘Can’t Afford No Shoes’ (MoI, One Size Fits All) 63 Capitol Records 73 Caplin, Ben 7 Captain Beefheart vs. The Grunt People (movie script, 1964) 30 Carannante, Greg 19 Carlin, George 91, 99 Carr, Paul 35, 50, 86, 92, 108, 111, 190n25 cartoons 130–131, 185 C.A.S.H. (Church of Secular Humanism) 52 ‘Catholic Girls’ (Joe’s Garage, Act I) 22, 53, 54 Catholicism 49, 50, 52, 60, 101n109 censorship/freedom of speech 43, 45, 59, 86, 103, 183, 194, 210 Chaplin, Charlie 98, 194 ‘Charva’ (1962) 135 ‘Cheepnis’ (Roxy and Elsewhere) 10, 28–29, 126

INdEX Chopin, Henri 93 ‘Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny’ (MoI, We’re Only In It For The Money) 59 cinema 117, 127–128 new wave/underground 38 ‘Circle’ (Wild Man Fischer, 1968) 151, 157 civil rights movement 85 Civilization Phaze III (1994) 1, 4, 63, 84, 147, 170, 192, 197, 214 musique concrète in 67, 83, 194 Clapton, Eric 52, 72 Clarke, John 105 Clarke, Juanne 205 classical music 5, 104, 144–145 close miking 185, 190, 193 Cohen, Herb 78, 99 collaboration 135–136, 146–147 collage 70, 71, 83, 95, 96, 99, 167, 169–170, 185 and avant garde 190 Collins, Ray 51 comedy/humour 21, 23, 32, 70–71, 85, 96–100, 149, 159 and avant garde 194 as framing device 97 and FZ’s ethnic roots/moustache 97–98 and resistance 107–112 see also satire Communism 117 composition 68, 71–74, 191 collage approach to see collage and editing 67, 68, 75–76, 77 and entrepreneurial collaboration 135–136 film music aesthetic 170 FZ’s synthesis of skills in 133, 141–142 ‘Concentration Moon’ (MoI, We’re Only In It For The Money) 59, 72 Conceptual Continuity 12, 14–15, 23, 186 and avant garde 186, 190 and FZ’s death 213–214 and religion 49, 55, 62–63, 64–65 and resistance 112–113 and story-song 124, 131

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and studio technology 133, 142 connotation/denotation 11–12 consumer culture 88, 113 Cooke, Nicholas 14 Cooper, Alice 17, 136, 150 Corrigan, Paul 105 ‘Cosmik Debris’ (Apostrophe (’)) 61, 63 counter culture 61, 88, 104, 152 Courrier, Kevin 25, 28, 29, 50, 56, 134 cover art 7–8, 10–11, 62–63, 99, 147, 155–158, 160–161 creative personality, theories of 118–119 ‘Crew Slut’ (Joe’s Garage, Act I) 22, 91 ‘Cruisin’ for Burgers’ (Freak Out!) 93 Cruising With Reuben & The Jets (1968) 11, 14, 154, 159, 160–162 gatefold design 160–161 Crumb, Robert 101, 131 Crumit, Frank 122, 131 Cucamonga studio 134 Czechoslovakia 95, 202, 210–211 Dadaism 38, 90, 188–189, 194 Dali, Salvador 186, 187 ‘Dancing Fool’ (Sheik Yerbouti) 24, 94 ‘Dangerous Kitchen, The’ (The Man From Utopia) 9, 138, 187 Davies, Stephen 137 Davis, Miles 76, 119 De la Fuente, Manuel 43 ‘Dear Jeepers’ (1963) 19 death of FZ 201–216 and Conceptual Continuity 213–214 legacy 201, 207, 208–209, 210–211, 215–216 media coverage of 201, 208–213 and media portrayals of cancer 205–207, 212–213 obituaries see obituaries of FZ and social views of death/dying 201, 202, 205–207 Deleuze, Gilles 116 Delville, Michel 6, 24, 111 Den Tandt, Christophe 186 ‘Dental Hygiene Dilemna’ (200 Motels) 36 Derailroaded: Inside the Mind of Wild Man Fischer (Rubin/Lubin) 154, 165

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Di Meola, Al 12 Dick, Philip K. 101, 128 ‘Dickie’s Such an Asshole’ (Broadway the Hard Way) 96 ‘Dinah-Moe Humm’ (Over-Nite Sensation) 23, 119, 120, 128 ‘Dirty Love’ (Over-Nite Sensation) 91, 130 Disney films 122, 123, 125, 127, 130 ‘Do You Like my New Car/Happy Together’ routine see ‘groupie routine’ Dodds, Bob 128 Dodds, Julian 7 Does Humour Belong in Music (movie, 1985) 33, 43–45, 46, 47 ‘Dog Breath, In The Year Of The Plague’ (Uncle Meat) 4 dog theme 10, 28–29, 67, 97 ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’ (Apostrophe (’)) 125 doo-wop 1, 11, 38, 159–162, 168, 198 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian) 38, 39 ‘Drowning Witch’ (Ship Arriving Too Late to Save A Drowning Witch) 170 drugs 22, 51, 104, 194 Dub Room Special, The (movie, 1982) 19–20, 33, 35, 36 ‘Duke of Earl’ (Chandler) 2 Duke, George 125 ‘Dumb All Over’ (You Are What You Is) 57, 58 ‘Dummy Up’ (Roxy & Elsewhere) 61–62 Durante, Jimmy 123, 131 Dylan, Bob 12, 34, 106, 124 Eastern religion 49, 50, 60–64 Hare Krishna movement 63 in One Size Fits All 62–63 time and 63–64 Zen Buddhism 60, 61–62 Eco, Umberto 9, 13 Edelstein, Alex 105 editing 67–84 of boxed sets/collections 76 and comedy music 70–71 ‘Curse of the Knick-Knack People’ 78

of excerpted guitar solos 79–80, 140–141, 142 film/video 22–23, 35–37, 41, 45, 47 and FZ’s approach to composition 67, 68, 75–76, 77 FZ’s change in approach to 80–82 FZ’s skills in 77, 78 ‘grouting’ (manipulating track intervals) 77, 79–80, 194 ‘leather conversations’ 78–79 ordering of material 68 sound effects 67–68 structural/remedial 77, 79 Synclavier and 82–83 tape splicing/manipulation 69, 70, 71–72, 73–74, 194 technology 68–69 time and 78 virtual performance and 137–140, 142 Eliot, T.S. 4, 61, 94 elitism 4 Ellington, Duke 168 emotion in music 2, 4 Ensemble Modern 83, 104, 197–198 entrepreneurial collaboration 135–136 evangelical Christianity 49, 57–60 ‘Evelyn, A Modified Dog’ (One Size Fits All) 192–193 Evening With Wild Man Fischer, An (Wild Man Fischer, 1969) 151, 154–155, 159 autobiography in 162–164 cover art/sleeve notes 156–158 FZ’s framing of material on 155, 162–164 ‘Excentrifugal Forz’ (Apostrophe (’)) 78, 126 extra-musical meaning 2, 5, 155 see also cover art; sleeve notes Felt Forum (New York venue) 19, 20 films by Frank Zappa 33–47 200 Motels (1971) 33, 35–36, 40–41, 47, 52–53 Baby Snakes (1979) 20, 21, 22, 33, 34, 36, 37, 47 censorship and 43, 45 distrbution problems with 34, 36

INdEX Does Humour Belong in Music? (1985) 33, 43–45, 46, 47 format/technology and 35–37, 47 FZ’s commitment to 33–35, 46–47 and FZ’s independence 35, 37, 41–42 FZ’s subjectivity in 37–38, 40, 41 lack of academic studies on 35, 46 and new wave/underground films 38 political/social concerns in 42–47 Run Home Slow (1964) 33 The Dub Room Special (1982) 19–20, 33, 35, 36 themes in 37 Uncle Meat see Uncle Meat (movie, 1987) Video from Hell (1987) 34, 45–46, 47 Fischer, Larry ‘Wild Man’ 136, 149–165 An Evening With see Evening With Wild Man Fischer, An and ‘annoyed listener’ 161–162 apparent conventionality of 151–152 and doo-wop 161–162 mental health/decline of 153–154, 158, 162–163 relationship with FZ 152–153, 154 and ‘triple pep’ 165 Fiske, John 105 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, The 127–128 ‘Flakes’ (Sheik Yerbouti) 12(n111) Foggy G 20 Foucault, Michel 13 ‘Fountain of Love’ (Absolutely Free) 3 Fowler, Bridget 203 Frampton, Peter 95 Francesco Zappa (1984) 10, 145 Frank Zappa Meet The Mothers Of Prevention (1985) 82–83, 96, 145 Freak Out! (MoI, 1966) 1, 4(n34), 50, 99, 135, 137, 147, 150, 190 cover art/sleeve notes 129, 130, 155, 186–187 musique concrète on 71 satire in 93 freedom of speech see censorship/freedom of speech Frick, Charles 20 Frunobulax (giant poodle) 28–29 Futurism 194

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‘Fuzzy Dice, Bongos in the Back’ (Uncle Meat) 125 Gaforio, Francino 7 Gagnon, Marc-André 115 Galtung, Johan 203, 212 Gangel, Jamie 207 Garrick Theatre 189, 190 Gatti, Nathalie 116 Gebrauchmusik 4 Geldof, Bob 103, 107 Ginsberg, Allan 86, 185 ‘Goblin Girl’ (You Are What You Is) 23, 26 ‘God Bless America’ (Berlin) 2 Goodwin, Andrew 145–146 Grand Wazoo, The (1972) 130 Grandjeat, Yves-Charles 104–105, 106 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) 4–5 Gregory, Dick 99 Grigely, Joseph 8 Groening, Matt 63, 95, 101 ‘groupie routine’ 91, 107–110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116 ‘grouting’ (editing in track intervals) 77, 79–80, 194 Grusin, Richard 138 GTO’s (Girls Together Outrageously) 136, 150 guitar solos 199 excerpted, editing of 79–80, 140–141, 142 Halloween concerts 18–23, 32 film of 19–20, 21 FZ’s editing /arrangements of 22–23 grotesque-carnival in 21–22 and Progress? (play) 21 Hand, Richard J. 35, 190n25 Hanslick, Edward 2 Hare Krishna movement 63 Harris, Phil 122–123, 131 Harrison, George 60, 103 ‘Harry You’re a Beast’ (MoI, We’re Only In It For The Money) 72, 99 ‘Have You Heard Their Band?’ (Civilization Phaze III) 141–142 Havel, Vaclav 210–211 Hawking, Stephen 64, 65

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‘Heavenly Bank Account’ (You Are What You Is) 57 Heintz-Knowles, Katharine E. 105 ‘Help I’m A Rock’ (Freak Out!) 4 Hermann, Bernard 17, 58n85 ‘He’s So Gay’ (Does Humour Belong in Music) 45, 46 high/low art 1–2, 3, 14, 189 cover art and 10–11 in movies 35, 38 and satire/resistance 85–92, 98, 114 Hindemith, Paul 4 hippie culture see counter culture History and Collected improvisations of the Mothers of Invention (boxed set) 76 Hofstadter, Douglas 13 Hogarth, William 31, 94 ‘Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown’ (MoI, Burnt Weeny Sandwich) 139 Holly, Buddy 135 Holmes, Sherlock 5, 127 Holmes, Thom 69 Holst, Gustav 2 homophobia 94 ‘Honey, Don’t You Want a Man Like Me?’ (Zappa in New York) 26 Honker Home Video 35 horror genre 10, 17–32 anthropomorphisation and 24–25 and carnival-grotesque 21–22 ‘Cheepnis’ and 10, 28–29 epic-scale 27–32 in FZ’s lyrics 23–26 and Halloween concerts see Halloween concerts and Joe’s Garage 30–31 melodrama and 25–26 and monster movies 27–28, 32 ‘Mysterioso Pizzicato’ and 25 and politics 26, 29–30 and science fiction movies 28–29 Thing-Fish/Broadway musicals and 31–32 Twighlight Zone and 26 in ‘Zomby Woof’ 23–24, 25 Hot Rats (1969) 5, 95–96, 193 Howlin’ Wolf 30

Hunchentoot (sci-fi musical, 1972) 28–29, 30, 84 ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’ (Freak Out!) 93 hypermediacy 138–139 I Was A Teen-age Malt Shop (rock opera, 1964) 30 Ice Cube 3 ‘Idiot Bastard Son, The’ (MoI, We’re Only In It For The Money) 72 ‘I’m The Slime’ (Over-Nite Sensation) 121 Imberty, Michel 2 ‘Inca Roads’ (MoI, One Size Fits All) 63 Intercontinental Absurdities 90, 188 Internet 5, 15, 20, 194–195 Invaders From Mars 128 Islam 58 Island of Doctor Moreau, The (Wells) 24 Ives, Charles 117, 186 Jackson, Jesse 58 Jackson, Michael 96, 124, 205 Jameson, Fredric 112, 199 Jankovic, Weird Al 100 jazz 5, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121, 159 fusion 95, 97, 168 ‘Jazz Discharge Party hats’ (The Man From Utopia) 142–143 Jazz From Hell (1986) 133, 145–146, 170, 197 Jensen, Joli 215–216 ‘Jesus Thinks You’re a Jerk’ (Broadway the Hard Way) 26, 58, 96 ‘Jewish Princess’ (Sheik Yerbouti) 53 Joe’s Garage, Acts I, II and III (1979) 9, 30–31, 42, 87, 94, 129, 142 religion in 49, 53–57, 64 satire in 94, 95 Jones, Spike 12, 99–100, 110, 125 Jones, Steve 142, 215–216 ‘Jonestown’ (Boulez Conducts Zappa) 145 journalism see media Joyce, James 4, 186, 187 Kafka, Franz 128–129 kaye, Danny 124 Kaylan, Howard 108 Kealy, Edward 135, 136

INdEX Keates, John 56 Keaton, Buster 127 Kellgren, Gary 72, 139 Kennedy, John F. 12 Kenyon, Dave 18 Kepler, Johannes 7 Kesey, Ken 158 Kierkegaard, S¢ren 8b Kiers, Roelof 116 ‘King Kong’ (Lumpy Gravy) 27, 140 Kirk, Roland 186 kitch 25, 190n25 Kitch, Carolyn 204, 206, 214 Kneale, Nigel 30 Kofsky, Frank 119 Koko (gorilla) 64n146 Kountz, Peter 169 Kovacs, Ernie 120–121 Kramer, Jonathan 71 Krassner, Paul 94 Kronhausen, Eberhard 130 La Donna è Mobile’ (Verdi) 3 Laing, David 135 Läther 78, 79 Leary, Timothy 22 ‘Legend Of The Golden Arches’ (Uncle Meat) 8 Lennon, Nigey 128 Litle, Patrick 207 ‘Lobster Girl’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6) 22–23 Loder, Kurt 119 Lofton, John 51–52 London Symphony Orchestra 77, 104 London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 1 (1983) 5, 42, 144 London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 2 (1987) 144 ‘Lonely Little Girl’ (We’re Only In It For The Money) 4 ‘Lonesome Cowboy Nando’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6) 81, 140 Looney Tunes 130–131 ‘Louie Louie’ (Wand) 1, 5, 58, 97, 160 ‘Love Story’ (Boulez Conducts Zappa) 145

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‘Lover’ (Les Paul) 69 Lowe, Kelly Fisher 42–43, 96, 100–101, 168 LSD 51, 52 Lubin, Jerry 154, 165 Lumpy Gravy (1968) 4, 9, 14, 63, 67, 121 musique concrète and 72, 73–74, 79, 80, 192 Macero, Teo 76 Mackinnon, Donald 118 McLuhan, Marshall 65 Mahler, Gustav 11 Make a Jazz Noise Here (1991) 122, 133, 147 Mamoulian, Rouben 38, 39 Marshall, Bob 62 Marx, Groucho 120 Matheson, Carl 7 media 44, 46, 61, 105 and FZ’s cultural proximity 204–205 and FZ’s death see death of FZ ‘Meek Shall Inherit Nothing, The’ (You Are What You Is) 57–58, 59 ‘Merry-Go-Round’ (Wild Man Fischer, 1968) 151, 152, 163 Mervelet, Didier 40 Middle America 95, 103–104, 109, 111 Middleton, Charles 119 Middleton, Richard 11–12 Miles, Barry 9n79, 91–92, 119, 150, 159, 160, 161, 188 Miller, Henry 129 misogyny see sexism Modernism 167–184 Big Note and 170 and ‘Brown Shoes Don’t make It’ 167, 169, 172–183 and dichotomy in FZ’s aesthetics 171–172 literature 4–5 museme theory and 171 and Project/Object 184 style/genre and 169–170, 171 ‘Mom & Dad’ (We’re Only In It For The Money) 73 monster movies 27–28, 32, 126, 187

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‘Montana’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 4) 81, 119 Moore, Allan F. 137 Moorefield, Virgil 139 Moral Majority 46 moral/ethical concerns 10, 31, 86, 103 ‘Mother People’ (We’re Only In It For The Money) 72 Mothers of Invention 1, 71–72, 88, 92–93, 136–138, 149, 209 and avant garde 189, 190 Halloween concerts of 18–19 Mothers, The - Fillmore East (1971) 103, 107n25 ‘Mudshark’ (The Mothers - Filmore East) 12n116 ‘Murder By Numbers’ (Broadway the Hard Way) 58 Murphy, Richard 198–199 museme theory 171 music industry 31, 37, 44, 46, 78, 92, 149 music of the spheres 6–7 musique concrète 1, 67–68, 69–70, 71–74, 80–81, 83, 114, 170, 193, 194 musique concrète, ideological divide in 70, 75 Mussorgsky, Modest 17, 173 ‘Mysterioso Pizzicato’ 25 Naked Lunch (Burroughs) 128, 129, 187 ‘Nanook Rubs It’ (Apostrophe (’)) 125–126 narrative songs see story-songs National Rifle Association 46 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 12–13 New York City 19–20 Nicaragua 44, 45 Nixon, Richard 29, 95 Nordine, Ken 120, 121 Norris, Andrew 6, 24, 111 Nossek, Hillel 204 obituaries of FZ 202–205, 208–213 and British proximity 211–212 as collective memory 203–204 and Conceptual Continuity 213–214 and criteria of newsworthiness 203, 212

and cultural proximity of FZ 204–205 gatekeeping role of 202–203 musical distinctiveness/legacy in 208–209 personality in 209 and political legacy 210–211 shock value in 210 O’Brien, Richard 17, 32 obscenity see sexually explicit/obscene lyrics One Size Fits All (FZ and the MoI, 1975) 39, 62–63 Over-Nite Sensation (1973) 23–24, 25, 119, 120, 123, 127, 128 cover art 7–8 ‘Packard Goose’ (Joe’s Garage, Act III) 55–57 Palladium Theatre (New York) 19, 20, 22–23, 36 Palmer, Tony 36, 41 Pandit, Korla 126 parody 12, 124, 209 Passiac, New Jersey 19 Paul, Les 69, 145 ‘Peaches en Regalia’ (Hot Rats) 88 ‘Peaches III’ (Tinseltown Rebellion) 12n112 ‘Penguin in Bondage’ (Roxy & Elsewhere) 24–25 Penzias, Arno 6 perdurantism 7, 8–9 Perfect Stranger, The (1984) 4, 10, 11, 42 performativity 186 Pet Sounds (Beach Boys) 67 Peter and the Wolf (Prokofiev) 122 Petrushka (Stravinsky) 1, 3 ‘piano people’ 67, 74, 79, 83 Pictures at an Exhibition (Mussorgsky) 173 Pink Floyd 111 ‘Place of Imaginary Diseases’ (Apostrophe (’)) 126 Planets Suite (Holst) 2 ‘Plastic People’ (Absolutely Free) 12n113, 121, 137, 142–143 Plato 6, 7 Playground Psychotics (1995) 193

INdEX PMRC (Parents Music Resource Centre) 43, 45, 52, 95, 103, 193, 210 poetry, avant garde 185, 185–186, 193 poietic/esthetic/immanent model 12–13 political concerns 26, 29–30, 59, 85–87, 103 censorship/freedom of speech 43, 45, 59, 86, 103, 183, 194, 210 in FZ’s films 42–47 in FZ’s obituaries 210–211 see also resistance; and see under satire ‘Poodle Lecture, The’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol.6) 10 Pop Art 34, 43, 187 ‘Porn Wars’ (Frank Zappa Meet The Mothers Of Prevention) 83, 96, 193, 194 posters 97, 188 postmodernism 168, 194, 199 ‘Pound For A Brown’ (Uncle Meat) 8, 147 Prentis, Simon 62 prepared piano 192–193 Preston, Don 21, 30, 38, 41, 77, 137 Progress? (play) 21 Project/Object 8–9, 14, 65, 84, 92, 140, 142, 184 Prokofiev, Sergei 122, 131 prostate cancer 205–207, 212–213 protest see resistance psychology 118 ‘Pygmy Twylyte’ (Roxy & Elsewhere) 24–25 Pynchon, Thomas 4–5, 128–130 Pythagoras 6, 7 radio 67, 69, 153 banning of music on 43, 53 from FZ’s childhood 118, 121, 123, 125, 131, 196 Rainbow Theatre (London) 18, 22, 119 Raksin, David 119 ‘Rat Tomaga’ (Sheik Yerbouti) 140–141 Ravel, Maurice 186 Reagan, Ronald 42–43, 44, 45, 94, 95 recording industry see music industry rednecks 104 reggae 1, 23

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religion 5, 49–65, 104 in Broadway the Hard Way 49, 58–59 and Conceptual Continuity/Big Note theory 49, 55, 62–63, 64–65 Eastern see Eastern religion evangelical Christianity 49, 57–60 founded by FZ 52 fundamentalist 52, 60 in FZ’s childhood 50 FZ’s creation myth 55, 62 FZ’s scepticism of 50–52 FZ’s spriritual philosophy 56–57, 60, 62, 63–65 in Joe’s Garage 49, 53–57, 64 and sex 53 and televangelists 12, 58–59, 86–87, 96, 104 theme in FZ’s work 49–50 Renoir, Jean 37 resistance 103–116 aesthetic, FZ’s manifesto on 115 ambiguity and 104–105, 106, 111–112, 113 and audience reaction 106, 113–115 concepts/positions of 105–107 and Conceptual Continuity 112–113 and humour 107–112 and pleasure/fun 110, 112 and ‘the groupie routine’ 107–110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116 ‘Return of the Son of Monster Magnet, The’ (MoI, Freak Out!) 71, 193 Revueltas, Silvestre 186 ‘Rhymin’ Man’ (Broadway the Hard Way) 26, 58, 96 rhythm and blues 117 Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) 1, 3 ‘Road Ladies’ (Chunga’s Revenge) 91 Robbins, Marty 123 Robertson, Pat 58 rock journalism 201, 215 rock ‘n’ roll 117 Rock the Vote movement 47 Rocky Horror Show, The (O’Brien) 17, 32 ‘Roland’s Big Event/Strat Vindaloo’ (Everything Is Healing Nicely) 198 Rossellini, Roberto 37 Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In 152, 162

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Royal Albert Hall (London) 21, 144, 211 ‘Rubber Biscuit’ (The Chips) 160, 161 ‘Rubber Shirt’ (Sheik Yerbouti) 140 Rubin, Josh 154, 165 Rudin, Herman 119 Ruge, Mari Holmboe 203, 212 Run Home Slow (movie score, 1964) 33 Russo, Greg 134–135 ‘St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast’ (Apostrophe (’)) 125 ‘St. Etienne’ (Jazz From Hell) 19, 145 Saint-Saëns, Camille 17 sampling 82–83, 140, 147 satire 12, 32, 44, 85–101, 124, 194, 209 audience ’s reaction to 95–96, 113–115 and dadaism/absurdism 90 dangers of 91–92 FZ as conceptual comedian 92–93 FZ as ‘perverse’ politician 85, 89, 94–96 FZ as social commentator 44, 46, 85, 93–94 FZ’s choice of cultural references for 88, 91 and FZ’s cross-referencing 86 and FZ’s early life 87–88 FZ’s legacy in 100–101 and high/low art 85–92, 98, 114 Lenny Bruce and 86, 91, 98, 99, 101 as political theatre 89–90 political-social balance in 86–87 and Project/Object 92 and Senate Committee hearings 86, 96 sex and 91–92, 108–110 specificness in 86–87, 95 and three ages of FZ 92–96 Schaeffer, Pierre 69, 70, 75 Schenkel, Cal 62–63, 97, 155 Schoenberg, Arnold 117, 186, 193 Schudson, Michael 204 science fiction movies 28–29, 38, 117, 126, 128 science-faith 49, 56, 57 Scientology 54–55 Searle, Clive 205 semiotics 2–4, 5, 171

Senate Committee hearings 43, 45, 83, 86, 96, 103, 183, 193, 210 sex tape, FZ jailed for 136 sexism 23, 94, 110 sexually explicit/obscene lyrics 5, 23–26, 91–92 controversies over see PMRC; Senate Committee Hearings and religion 53 as resistance 108–110 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles) 98–99 Sheik Yerbouti (1979) 8, 9, 53, 79, 133, 194 Xenochrony and 140–141, 142 ‘Sheik Yerbouti Tango’ (Sheik Yerbouti) 140–141 Shekley, Robert 130 Sherlock Jr. (Keaton) 127 Ship Arriving Too Late to Save A Drowning Witch (1982) 77, 187 Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar (1981) 79–80, 194 signifier/signified 2–3, 11–13 Simpsons, The 95 Slaven, Neil 51 sleeve notes 103, 128–129, 130, 138–139, 156 Slick, Grace 30 Smith, Cordwainer 119, 130 Smith, Verne 123–124 snork 145 ‘Sofa No. 1’/‘Sofa No. 2’ (MoI, One Size Fits All) 49, 62 Soldier’s Tale, The (Stravinsky) 2, 122 Sontag, Susan 112 sound effects 67–68, 145, 190 mouth noises 191–193 ‘Sound Museum’ (Lumpy Gravy) 121 Sound of Music, The (Rogers/ Hammerstein) 31 Soviet Bloc 95, 104 ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ 123–124, 127–128 ‘Speed Freak Boogie’ (1962) 135 Sprechstimme 118, 123, 138 Stalling, Carl 131 Starck, Nigel 203 Starr, Ringo 41

INdEX ‘Status Back Baby’ (Absolutely Free) 3 Steel, Gary 84 Stein, Alexander 215 stereotypes 28, 44, 53, 143 ‘Stink Foot’ (Apostrophe (’)) 10, 126 Stockausen, Karlheinz 70, 73, 168, 186, 198 story-song 13, 31, 117–131 cartoons and 130–131 on children’s records 123–124 in classical music 122, 131 and Conceptual Continuity 124, 131 and dream-story 125–128 FZ’s voice and 119–121 influences on FZ 122–131 and literature 128–131 in popular music 122–123, 131 Spike Jones and 125 Stan Freberg and 124 Straight Records 149, 151 Stravinsky, Igor 1–2, 3, 11, 32, 38, 117, 122, 131, 161n59, 168, 186 Strehle, Susan 143 ‘Strictly Genteel’ (200 Motels) 23, 77 studio technology 68–69, 133–147 and artist-producer roles 141–142 and Conceptual Continuity 133, 142 and development of FZ’s approach 136–141 and FZ’s anti-realism 142–143 and FZ’s choice of musicians/locations 138 and FZ’s films 35–37, 47 FZ’s synthesis of skills in 133, 141–142 and hypermediacy/transparency 138–139 pre-MoI 134–136 Project/Object and 140, 142 Synclavier 82–83, 95, 133, 144–147 and virtual performance 137–140, 142 Xenochrony and 9, 10, 64, 140 see also editing Studio Z 136, 150 Sturgeon, Theodore 130 subject-object relations 13–14 Sun Ra 119

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surrealism 110–111, 129, 130–131, 187–188 Sutton, Paul 161 Swaggart, Jimmy 58 Swift, Jonathan 101 Synclavier 82–83, 95, 133, 144–147, 192, 197 Tabbi, Joseph 107 taboos, breaking 18, 27, 90n31, 91, 149, 151 Tagg, Philip 171 ‘Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6) 22–23 Tanguy, Yves 186 Taylor, Cecil 119, 186 televangelists 12, 58–59, 86–87, 96, 104 text 8–9, 13, 105, 169, 171 Théberge, Paul 141 Them Or Us (1984) 8, 84 cover art 10 Thing-Fish (1984) 4, 8, 31, 59, 63, 84, 95, 129 avant garde in 195–197 ‘Thirteen’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6) 22–23 time 57, 63–64, 78, 133, 147 ‘Tinseltown Rebellion’ (Tinseltown Rebellion) 26, 44 ‘Titties and Beer’ (Zappa in New York) 122, 126 ‘Toads Of The Short Forest’ (Weasels Ripped My Flesh) 139 Toilet Posters (1967) 97 Tolkein, J.R.R. 195–196 ‘Torture Never Stops, The’ (Zoot Allures) 23, 122 Trout Mask Replica (Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, 1969) 9, 68, 150 cover art 155–156 True Story of 200 Motels, The (movie, 1971) 34, 36, 41 ‘Trying To Grow A Chin’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6) 23 ‘Tubby the Tuba’ 124 Twilight Zone, The (Serling) 26, 58

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‘200 Motels Finale’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6) 22 200 Motels (movie, 1971) 33, 35–36, 40–41, 47, 52–53, 84, 97, 128, 129–130, 193 and studio technology 140, 142, 144 Ulysses (Joyce) 4 Uncle Meat (MoI, 1969) 4n35, 27, 73, 137, 151, 193 Uncle Meat (movie, 1987) 21, 34, 38–41, 84 delays in filming 38–40, 41 documentary-fiction in 40–41 FZ’s subjectivity in 40, 41 narrative complexity of 40, 47, 142 United States (US) civil unrest/violence in 149–150 Constitution 59, 86 evangelical Christianity in 57–60 Middle American values 95, 103–104, 109, 111 post-war 87–88, 117, 118 Reagan administration 42–47, 94 universe, sound of 6–7, 63, 64–65 Utility Muffin Reseach Kitchen 35, 46, 141 vacuum cleaners 5 Vai, Steve 138 ‘Valarie’ (MoI, Burnt Weeny Sandwich) 160 Vale, Valhalla 126 ‘Valley Girl’ (Ship Arriving Too Late to Save A Drowning Witch) 87, 109 Van Vliet, Don 30 Varèse, Edgar 11, 14, 32, 38, 68, 109, 118, 144–145, 155, 168, 186, 191, 212 Vertov, Dziga 38 Verve Records 149 Video from Hell (movie, 1987) 34, 45–46, 47 Vietnam War (1955–1975) 29 virtual performance 137–140, 142 Volman, Mark 109 ‘W-P-L-J’ (MoI, Burnt Weeny Sandwich) 160

‘Waffenspiel’ (Civilization Phaze III) 67–68 Wagner, Richard 130, 155 Waka/Jawaka (1972) 193 Wakerman, Chad 147 Walker, Nelcy 125 Walser, Robert 3 Warner Brothers 78, 141, 149 Warner, Timothy 140 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 4 ‘Watermelon In Easter Hay’ (Joe’s Garage: Act I) 9, 49, 57 Watson, Ben 5, 95–96, 126, 152, 159, 161, 183, 196 Wayne, John 18–19 Weasels Ripped My Flesh (MoI, 1970) 76, 155 Webern, Anton 11 Weill, Kurt 89 Welles, Orson 120 Wells, H.G. 24 We’re Only In It For The Money (MoI, 1968) 4n36, 14, 49, 97, 99, 209 cover 125 musique concrète and 72–73 sleeve notes 128–129 and studio technology 137, 139 ‘We’re Turning Again’ (You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6) 22 ‘What Kind of Girl?’ (Broadway the Hard Way) 58 ‘What’s The Ugliest Part Of your Body?’ (We’re Only In It For The Money) 72 ‘When the Lie’s So Big’ (Broadway the Hard Way) 58, 170 ‘When Yuppies Go To Hell’ (Make a Jazz Noise Here) 147 ‘White Christmas’ (Berlin) 2 White, Ray 51 Whitely, Sheila 141 Whitman, Walt 62 ‘Who Are The Brain Police’ (MoI, Freak Out!) 4n34, 71 ‘Who Needs the Peace Corps?’ (MoI, We’re Only In It For The Money) 61 Willis, Ike 20, 56, 58

INdEX Wilson, Robert 6 Winters, Jonathan 158 Wizard of Oz, The 107 Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters, The (Winters, 1960) 158 ‘Would You Go All the Way’ (Chunga’s Revenge) 88 Wragg, David 111–112 Wright, Allan 144 Wyatt, Robert 107 Xenochrony (studio technique) 9, 10, 64, 140–141, 194 You Are What You Is (1981) 49, 57–58 You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series 10, 17, 22–23, 26 editing/producing 76, 81, 133, 138–139 Young, Neil 106 ‘Your Mouth’ (Waka/Jawaka) 192 Yvega, Todd 197 Zacherley/Zacherle, John 19 Zak, Albin 137 Zappa, Ahmet 27, 189 Zappa Family Trust 1, 9, 73, 84, 215 Zappa, Francis (FZ’s father) 50, 87 Zappa, Frank (1940–1993) appearance/moustache of 97, 119 approach to composition of 68, 71–74 artistic independence of 35, 37, 41–42, 46, 135, 141 assaulted by fan 18, 24, 119 and Big Note philosophy see Big Note theory childhood/early life 87–88, 117, 118–119 coherence in work of 167, 169–170, 185–186 and Conceptual Continuity 12, 14–15, 23, 186 connotative/denotative meaning in work of 11–12 conservatism of 104 contemporary performances of music of 14–15

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contradictions/ambiguities in work of 14, 35, 86, 194–195 cross-referencing by 1–2, 5, 117, 118, 131 death/legacy of see death of FZ dislike of reading 187 distrust of ideology 105, 169 early music career 134–136 and Eastern Europe 95 eclecticism of 1, 167, 168, 169 fractal logic/patterns in work of 7–8 imprisoned for sex tape 136 influences on 117–119, 120–131 inter-textual processes of 6–9 as live performer, relationship with audience 17–18 as live performer, spectacular/spectacle and 20–21 movies of see films by Frank Zappa and music industry see music industry personal-extraneous balance in work of 8 and pleasure/fun 110, 111–112, 113, 114, 116, 160 as producer see collage; editing; studio technology Project/Object approach of see Project/ Object prolific/consistent output of 1, 49, 49n7, 85, 133 protest/resistance and see resistance self-referencing by 4–5, 9, 67, 86 synchronic texts in work of 10–11 voice/singing style 117, 119–121, 185, 190 wary in interviews 119 and Xenochrony technique 9, 10, 64, 140–141, 194 Zappa, Gail 67, 215, 216 Zappa, Moon Unit 109, 153 Zappa’s Universe (1993) 212 Zen Buddhism 60, 61–62 Zircon Encrusted Tweezers 5, 13 ‘Zomby Woof’ (Over-Nite Sensation) 23–24, 25, 127 Zuckerman, Marvin 207