Frank Zappa

• 1. Introduction

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  Frank Vincent Zappa was born on the 21st of December, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a household where Italian was spoken by his grandparents and gas masks hung by the door. His father, a chemist and mathematician who worked in the defense industry, brought mercury-filled lab equipment home from the Edgewood Arsenal chemical warfare facility, and young Frank would spread it across his bedroom floor with a hammer, watching the droplets spray outward in circular patterns. A doctor treated his childhood sinus problems by inserting a pellet of radium into each of his nostrils. These were not the beginnings of a typical rock musician.

  By the time Zappa died on the 4th of December, 1993, he had released more than 60 albums, composed works for symphony orchestras and a digital synthesizer called the Synclavier, directed feature films, testified before the United States Senate, and become a figure of national significance in Czechoslovakia. His career spanned more than 30 years and resists any single label. What held it all together, he insisted, was a single overarching idea he called Project/Object. The questions worth asking are: what did that mean, where did it come from, and why did a man who never finished college and disapproved of recreational drugs end up as one of the most consequential musicians of the 20th century?

• 2. The Childhood That Shaped Everything

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  The Edgewood Arsenal stored mustard gas, and Zappa believed his recurring childhood illnesses, including asthma, earaches and sinus problems, may have been connected to its proximity. That suspicion never left him. References to germs, germ warfare, ailments and the defense industry appear throughout his work, woven in so persistently that they function almost as a signature.

  In 1952, the family relocated to Monterey, California, partly for health reasons, and then moved through the San Diego neighborhoods of Clairemont, El Cajon, and finally Lancaster, a small aerospace and farming town in the Antelope Valley of the Mojave Desert, close to Edwards Air Force Base. Lancaster is where Zappa's musical identity crystallized. He had started learning drum rudiments at age 12 with a teacher named Keith McKillop who had students practice on wooden planks instead of actual drums. Then came a LOOK magazine article about the Sam Goody record store chain, which praised its ability to sell an LP as obscure as The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One. The article described Varèse's percussion composition Ionisation as "a weird jumble of drums and other unpleasant sounds". That description hooked Zappa immediately.

  He searched for the record for over a year before finding a copy, recognizing it by the "mad scientist" photograph of Varèse on the cover. He talked the salesman into a discount. His mother, who disliked Varèse's music herself, gave her son a long-distance call to the New York composer as a fifteenth birthday present. Varèse was in Europe, so Zappa spoke to the composer's wife. Varèse later wrote back, mentioning a composition he was working on called "Déserts". Zappa, living in a desert town, framed the letter and kept it on display for the rest of his life. The two never met; Varèse died in 1965.

  At Antelope Valley High School, Zappa met Don Glen Vliet, who would later take the stage name Captain Beefheart. Their friendship, built around shared collections of R&B records, would run through decades of collaboration and estrangement, surfacing on records from Freak Out! to Bongo Fury.

• 3. Studio Z and the Cost of Nonconformity

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  Paul Buff owned a small recording studio in Cucamonga called Pal Recording Studio, and it contained something rare: a five-track tape recorder he had built himself. At the time, most smaller studios still worked in mono or two-track. Zappa began working with Buff and singer-songwriter Ray Collins during the early 1960s, writing and producing songs for local artists and composing film soundtracks. His earliest professional recordings were two scores, one for The World's Greatest Sinner in 1962 and one for Run Home, Slow in 1965, both low-budget films.

  In March 1963, Zappa appeared on Steve Allen's syndicated late-night show, playing a bicycle as a musical instrument. Using drum sticks and a bow borrowed from the band's bass player, he plucked, banged, and bowed the spokes of the bike. That same year he staged a concert of his own orchestral music, financing it from his film composing income. After his first marriage began to break apart in 1964, he moved into the Pal studio and began working 12 hours or more a day, experimenting with overdubbing and tape manipulation. He eventually took over the studio from Buff, renaming it Studio Z.

  The police ended that chapter. In March 1965, an undercover vice squad officer approached Zappa and paid him $100 to produce a suggestive audio recording for an alleged bachelor party. Zappa and a female friend recorded a faked erotic episode. When he was about to hand over the tape, he was arrested. The press had been tipped off in advance. The Daily Report the next day described investigators who had "stilled the tape recorders of a free-swinging, a-go-go film and recording studio". The felony conspiracy charge was reduced to a misdemeanor; Zappa served ten days in jail with the remainder of a six-month sentence suspended. The police returned only 30 of the 80 hours of tape they had seized. Studio Z was eventually torn down in 1966. The arrest, Zappa later said, was central to the formation of his anti-authoritarian stance.

• 4. The Mothers of Invention

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  Ray Collins was singing in an R&B band called the Soul Giants in Pomona, California, when a fight broke out with the group's guitarist in April 1965. Collins called Zappa. Zappa took over on guitar, then took over the band, persuading the other members to play his music on the grounds that it would improve their chances of landing a record contract. The band debuted at the Broadside Club on the 10th of May, 1965, which happened to be Mother's Day, and became the Mothers. Verve Records later insisted they change the name again, aware that "Mother" was short for a profane term. Zappa expanded it to the Mothers of Invention.

  Tom Wilson, who had produced Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel and was one of the few African-Americans working as a major label pop music producer, spotted the Mothers playing "Trouble Every Day", a song about the Watts riots, in early 1966. He signed them to the Verve division of MGM. The resulting album, Freak Out! (1966), was, after Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the second rock double album ever released. Session musicians were reportedly shocked to find themselves expected to read sheet music from charts while Zappa conducted them. The album mixed R&B, doo-wop, musique concrète, and experimental sound collages. Its 11-minute closing track, "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", was only a backing track; MGM refused to allow the additional recording time needed to finish it. Zappa was dissatisfied with the result but could not stop it from being released.

  The Mothers eventually moved to New York, where they held a residency at the Garrick Theater at 152 Bleecker Street for nearly half a year starting at Easter 1967. Everything onstage was directed by Zappa using hand signals. One evening he enticed U.S. Marines from the audience to dismember a baby doll onstage, instructing them to pretend it was, in his words, a "gook baby". The album recorded during that period, We're Only in It for the Money (1968), ruthlessly satirized the hippie and flower power movements, and its cover parodied the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Cal Schenkel, whom Zappa had met in New York, provided the cover art; that meeting began a lifelong collaboration.

• 5. Two Near-Deaths and the Jazz Turn

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  On the 4th of December, 1971, at Casino de Montreux in Switzerland, a flare set off by an audience member started a fire that burned down the casino. Deep Purple were scheduled to record there after Zappa's performance and wrote about the fire in their 1972 song "Smoke on the Water". Zappa lost 50,000 dollars worth of equipment.

  A week later, at the Rainbow Theatre in London, during the encore of a show performed with rented gear, an audience member pushed Zappa off the stage and into the concrete-floored orchestra pit. His band believed he was dead. He had suffered serious fractures, head trauma, injuries to his back, leg, and neck, and a crushed larynx that, after healing, permanently lowered his voice by a third. He used a wheelchair for more than half a year. When he returned to the stage in September 1972, he was still wearing a leg brace. One leg healed shorter than the other, causing chronic back pain he later referenced in the lyrics of "Zomby Woof" and "Dancin' Fool".

  During the forced layoff from touring, Zappa recorded two strongly jazz-oriented solo albums, Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, using floating lineups of session players and Mothers alumni. When he returned to touring, his first effort was a series of concerts with a 20-piece big band also called the Grand Wazoo, followed by a scaled-down version, the Petit Wazoo, which toured the United States for five weeks from October to December 1972. His commercial peak came a little later: the 1974 album Apostrophe (') reached No. 10 on the Billboard pop album charts, a career high, helped by the single "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow", which reached No. 86.

• 6. The Censorship Fight

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  In 1979, the Anti-Defamation League attempted to prevent the song "Jewish Princess" from receiving radio airplay, claiming its lyrics were antisemitic. Zappa denied any antisemitic intent and described the ADL as "a noisemaking organization that tries to apply pressure on people in order to manufacture a stereotype image of Jews that suits their idea of a good time." That same year, his rock opera Joe's Garage took inspiration partly from the 1979 Islamic Iranian revolution, which had made music illegal, and explored what Zappa described as "the strange relationship Americans have with sex and sexual frankness".

  The confrontation with institutionalized censorship reached its most public point in the 1980s, when Zappa testified before the United States Senate against the proposed labeling of records with explicit lyrics. He was a consistent and unambiguous critic of efforts to restrict speech. His 1981 album You Are What You Is contained the song "Dumb All Over", a tirade against organized religion, and "Heavenly Bank Account", which attacked TV evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson for their purported influence on the U.S. administration and their use of religion to raise money.

  The music video for the title track "You Are What You Is" was banned from MTV. It was later featured in a Beavis & Butt-Head episode. His broader critique of television extended to his observation that TV had a formative influence on his own work: advertising jingles and show themes appear as quotations throughout his later compositions. Zappa remarked in Zappa in New York (1978) that he found it revealing what a society that "clings to the belief that certain words in its language are so powerful that they could corrupt you the moment you hear them" would conclude about the music he made.

• 7. The Synclavier and the Final Years

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  In 1983, Zappa began using the Synclavier, an early digital synthesizer that became, over time, his primary compositional tool. He described it this way: "With the Synclavier, any group of imaginary instruments can be invited to play the most difficult passages... with one-millisecond accuracy every time." He did not view it as a replacement for human musicians but as a separate category of instrument. The same year, his wife Gail founded Barfko-Swill, a mail-order merchandise operation run by Gerry Fialka from 1983 to 1993. Gail explained the reasoning: "Just piles and piles of fan mail sitting around unanswered... we made a Barking Pumpkin t-shirt available just to see what would happen." The goal was independence from major label promotion.

  In 1986, the Synclavier-driven album Jazz from Hell earned Zappa his first Grammy Award in 1988, for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. The same decade, he worked with conductor Kent Nagano and the London Symphony Orchestra to record two volumes of his orchestral compositions. He was not satisfied with the results. He noted that the performance of "Strictly Genteel" required 40 edits to hide out-of-tune notes played by the trumpet section after they had been out drinking on a break. Nagano acknowledged that "the music is humanly very, very difficult".

  In 1990, Zappa was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. He devoted most of his remaining energy to completing Civilization Phaze III, a major Synclavier work he had begun in the 1980s. In 1991 he performed in Prague, saying it was "the first time that he had a reason to play his guitar in 3 years" and that the country was "just the beginning of a new country". He urged the audience to "try to keep your country unique, do not change it into something else." In September 1992 he conducted two pieces at a concert in Frankfurt with the Ensemble Modern, receiving a 20-minute ovation. It was his last professional public appearance. Civilization Phaze III was released posthumously, and his Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award was issued in 1997, four years after his death.