Sure, the recently departed Frank Zappa said, “It’s not important to even be remembered.” But how can we not remember a guy who never could get his father to “buy the concept of long hair as brain-ends”? Whose lyrics went, “What’s the ugliest part of your body? Some say your toes, some say your nose, but I think it’s your mind”?
Even his mishaps were offbeat. In London in 1971, Zappa suffered a broken ankle and a concussion when a man grabbed him on the stage of a theater and shoved him onto the orchestra pit. Members of the audience said the man leaped on the stage and attacked Zappa as he and his group finished a show.
The attacker told police that he was angry at Zappa because his girlfriend had a crush on the American singer.
Here’s a look back at the rock guitar and singing legend, who died of prostate cancer at age 52 last weekend, as he came across in interviews, reviews and news dispatches over the years.
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Seeing was believing (from a Tribune review in 1970):
“The only group around who can start a song with music stolen from Stravinsky’s ballet `Agon,’ jump into a unison chorus of `grow a little vegetable; chances are the vegetable will respond to you,’ continue with a solo yodel on the word `rutabaga,’ and finish with `what a pumpkin,’ is back on the stage-at least for a while.”
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Zappa had a point of view.
“I Don’t Wanna Get Drafted” was the title of a Zappa song, but “I’m not a pacifistic kind of guy,” he said in 1980. “I never was in favor of flower power and sticking the posy down the end of the rifle. This is a very disgusting world. There are people who don’t like Americans, and they’re all around us, so it’s best to be militarily prepared. But putting people in the armed services who don’t want to be there . . . I don’t think is good business. It’s a waste of time and money.”
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Boy, did he have a point of view. Here’s his response to the furor over his lyrics to “Sheik Yerbouti” (the song didn’t sit well with the Anti-Defamation League):
Those lyrics, he protested, were “not comments on religion.” (He was brought up a Catholic and “dropped off the team at 18,” he said.) They were comments on “the behavior of certain people in certain groups. Every group, ethnic or otherwise, has peculiar behavior patterns, and I write songs about those. You may not like the songs, but you can’t deny that these behavior patterns do exist, and I’m doing a public service by pointing them out for people who wish to study them further.”
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He even shared his opinion with the nation’s lawmakers. Here’s his response in 1985 to efforts by the Parents Music Resource Center and National Parent Teacher Association to label recordings that may have objectionable material: “Taken as a whole, the complete list of PMRC demands reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of `toilet-training program’ to housebreak all composers and performers because of the lyrics of a few.”
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What was it like behind the scenes with Zappa?
Suzy Creemcheese, one of the women in Zappa’s life, suggested that Zappa weaved an almost hypnotic influence on those around him. “That big beady stare, it’s like a laser beam. . . .”
That influence extended to members of the Mothers of Invention. Zappa, we learned in 1978, fined any member of his band who played more than 96 notes per solo. Each extra note was duly recorded. Zappa wouldn’t say how much the fine was, but he did tell a friend that his lead guitar player owed him $350.
How did he keep track? “I’ve got a guy offstage who counts.”
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And don’t forget, Frank Zappa begat Moon Unit Zappa, who begat the song “Valley Girl.” That 1982 tune got enough airplay that we became a nation fluent in San Fernando Valleyspeak, fer sure. Moon Unit wants you to know that it was an amalgam of surfer slang and her own friends’ and schoolmates’ personal patter. “A friend of a friend of mine made up the expression. `Gag me with a spoon!’ It’s so funny to hear everybody saying that now, because before it had absolutely no meaning. Nothing! We gave it life!”
