Frank Zappa and the And Edited by PAUL CARR Glamorgan University, UK ASHGATE© Paul Carr 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Paul Carr has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court East Union Road Farnham Surrey, GU9 7PT England Ashgate Publishing Company 110 Cherry Street Suite 3-1 Burlington, VT 05401-3818 USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Frank Zappa and the And. -- (Ashgate popular and folk music series) 1. Zappa, Frank--Criticism and interpretation. |. Series Il. Carr, Paul. 182.4'2166'092-dce23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frank Zappa and the And / edited by Paul Carr.Contents List of Figures, Music Examples and Table List of Contributors Acknowledgements General Editor’s Preface Introduction Paul Carr 4 Zappa and Horror: Screamin’ at the Monster ichard J. Han 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 Zappaand The Razor: Editing, Sampting and Musique Concréte 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 7 Zappa and the Story-Song: A Rage of Cultural Influences Geoffrey |. Wills 8 Zappa and Technology: His incorporation of Time, Space and Place when Performing, Composin: MusicPaul Carr 9 Zappa and the Freaks: Recording Wild Man Fischer David Sanjek 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 12 Zappa and Mortality: The Mediation of Zappa’s Death Paula Hearsum Bibliography Indeximage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not available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,image not availableimage not availableimage not available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’.*° 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’ ,** resulting in compositions such as Also Sprach Zarathustra * and ‘La Donna é Mobile’? 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” and ‘Status Back Baby’, both of which incorporate fragments of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring *° and Petrushka respectively. 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’,*' seemingly using these gestures as tasters for the more avant-garde experiments 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,” 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’ .** 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’, ‘Dog Breath, In The Year Of The Plague’,®® and ‘Lonely Little Girl’,*° in addition to his final album Civilization Phaze III,°” which merges music from the early 1990s with material from Thing-Fish,*® The Perfect Stranger,*° and Lumpy Gravy.” Although, this, practiceimage not availableimage not availableimage not available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 looking in the mirror — almost in a Kierkegaardian sense.” 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’?°° 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 | 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. 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’”° and how artworks have ‘multiple texts’, with the meanings we create being a ‘direct product of the textual spaces we enter and engage in’.” 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image not availableimage not availableimage not availableMiddleton regards his final form of primary signification, destructive parody, to be even ‘less frequent [than quotation and stylistic allusion] but considers it ‘fundamental to the work of Frank Zappa’,'®’ 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. '*° Additionally, Zappa would ‘destructively’ allude to a range of personalities in his lyrics, ranging from parodies of musicians such as Bob Dylan" and Al Di Meola,'" to ex- presidents such as John F. Kennedy,‘"? Richard Nixon‘"* and Ronald Reagan, ''® to more generic phenomena such as rock band folk law,''® or corrupt televangelists.'”” 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,'"* 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?’""® 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’.17° 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.image not availableimage not availableimage not available' The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966). ? Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). > 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). ° 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’. ® Between 0:00-0:07 and 0:16-0:21 of ‘Amnesia Vivace’. ° Between 1:29 and 2:07 of ‘Status Back Baby’ ' 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’. ” The Supremes, ‘Baby Love’, Motown, M-1066 (1964). Quoted between 1:11 and 0:47 of ‘The Duke Regains His Chops’. '® Between 0:08 and 0:26 of ‘Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin’. ™ Between 0:47 and 0:54 of ‘Soft Cell Conclusion’. ‘5S 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 G/obalia. Refer to Anonymous 5, ‘Musical Quotes' (2012), at http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/quotes.htm| [accessed 1 March 2012] for details. '® Barthes, Image Music Text, p. 53. ‘’ Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful (Indiana, 1986), p. 11. *® Michel Imberty, quoted in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (New Jersey, 1987), p. 9. '® Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, p. 9. Ibid. ”' Ibid., p. 167. 2 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. 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). * 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,image not availableimage not availableimage not availableextract of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. ‘°° 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. 1° Middleton, Studying Popular Music, p. 220. ‘° Refer to Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 172. "l Refer to ‘Flakes’, on Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti. ‘? Refer to ‘Peaches III’, on Frank Zappa, Tinseltown Rebellion, Barking Pumpkin, PW237336 (1981). "3 Refer to ‘Plastic People’, on The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free. 1 Refer to ‘Dickie’s Such An Asshole’, on Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988). “5 Refer to ‘Reagan at Bitzburg’, on Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. “° For example ‘Mudshark’, on Frank Zappa, The Mothers — Fillmore East, June 1977, Bizarre, MS2042 (1971). ‘’ For example ‘When The Lie’s So Big, on Zappa, Broadway The Hard Way. “8 Frank Zappa, You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3, Rykodisc, RCD10085/86 (1989). 1° Taken from the sleeve notes of Zappa, You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3. 120 Middleton, Studying Popular Music, p. 232. 121 Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. 1? Ibid., p. 17. "3 Ibid ‘2 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. 128 Douglas Hofstadter, Gédel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (London, 1980), p. xxi. 127 John Blacking, How Musical Is Man (Seattle and London, 1974), p. 26. 18 The one exception to this is Paula Hearsum’s chapter on death, which is situated as the final chapter. ‘2° There Is No Need’, on Frank Zappa — The Making of Freak Out! Project/Object, Zappa Records, ZR 20004 (2006). 18° Frank Zappa, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets, Verve, V6-5005X (1968). 13! The Mothers of Invention, We're Only in It for the Money. 182 Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. 183 Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 1998), p. 29. 13 Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 155. *85 David Walley, No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (New York, 1996), p. 28.‘8° For a detailed discussion on Zappa tribute acts, see Carr, ‘An Autocratic Approach to Music Copyright?’. ‘3 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].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 Saint-Saéns’ Danse Macabre (1872) through to later works such as Béla Bartok’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,' 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’,? the high Gothic camp of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show (1973) and its subsequent film adaptation,’ 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 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.° 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.° 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.’ 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 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)° was a clear pastiche of Zacherley’s 1958 novelty horror single ‘Dinner with Drac’.° A review from The Free Aquarian (November 1972) by Greg Carannante provides a fascinating insight into the Passaic gig.'° At the outset of the review, Carannante makes it clear that ‘Zappa, though in good spirits, did.not.really, riseimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableStuff That Is Not Normal’.2” 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’.”® 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 7° 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.*° 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,image not availableimage not availableimage not available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.*° ‘Mysterioso Pizzicato’ is an example of what Zappa describes as ‘Archetypal American Musical Icons’.*” 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: | 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.’® 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 include the use of the theme tune from the popular television series The Twilight Zone “° 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’,®° ‘Tinsel Town Rebellion’ and ‘Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk’.®* He frequently incorporated it, as we shall see, into live performances of ‘Honey, Don’t You Want a Man Like Me?’? 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.image not availableimage not availableimage not available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 musical Hunchentoot.®° 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-maché 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’.°” 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.image not availableimage not availableimage not availableJackson’s Thriller video,®? 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.’* 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 ™ 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 Varése 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.image not availableimage not availableimage not available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)' before releasing his first official LP Freak Out! in 1966.° 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 movie-making 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.* In fact, Zappa produced eight full-length movies between the years 1971 to 1988, namely 200 Motels, Baby Snakes,° The Dub Room Special!,’ Does Humor Belong in Music?, ® Video from Hell, ° Uncle Meat, '° The Amazing Mr. Bickford "' and The True Story of 200 Motels,. ‘ 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image not availableimage not availableimage not availableRoom Special! (1982).°? 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! *° 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 (Baby Snakes **) and editing (The Dub Room Special! *). 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.°° 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image not availableimage not availableimage not availableFigure 2.2 Uncle Meat (Frank Zappa, 1987) 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.*° 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 ° where Zappa the filmmaker is closer to Zappa the music composer. As withimage not availableimage not availableimage not available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,®’ 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.® 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 Prevention °° or Broadway the Hard Way.” 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),” borrowed its title from a question Zappa was asked in the film: his response being — ‘I think so, it belongs in everyday life — unless the Republicans want to take it away’.’? 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’”’), to the social stereotypes encouraged by the media (‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’” and ‘He’s So Gay’”’), to songs like ‘Honey, Don’t You Want A Man Like Me?’,”° 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:inclusiom ofimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableMajority) were attempting against the Constitutional rights of the United States. He persisted on this idea in his records during the eighties, and in movies such as Does Humor Belong in Music? °° or Video from Hell.°* 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.® 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 °° 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 Waldman’”) and his collaboration with the post-Communist Czech government of Vaclav 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image not availableimage not availableimage not available38820 (1983). ° Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act |, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979) and Frank Zappa, Joe's Garage Acts II & Ill, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). ® 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). ® 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 Movilizacion para la Disidencia Politica (Madrid, 2006). °" In order to know how the rating system works in cinema and its implications in distribution, see Frédéric Martel, Mainstream. Enquéte sur cette culture qui plait a tout le monde (Paris: 2010). ° 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. °° Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203 (1985). 7° Frank Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking Pumpkin, D1-74218 (1988) " Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. ” Ibid. 78 Ibid. ™ Ibid. * Ibid. ” Ibid. 7 Ibid. 78 Zappa with Occhiogrosso, p. 185. ”° Michael Bloom, ‘Interview with the Composer’, Trouser Press, 7/47 (1980): pp. 18-22, at 22. © Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. ®' 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. ® Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. ® Zappa, ‘He’s So Gay’, Does Humor Belong in Music?. ® Zappa, ‘Be in My Video’, Does Humor Belong in Music?. ®5 Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. °° Zappa, Video from Hell. ®T Ibid. 8 Frank Zappa, Jazz from Hell, Barking Pumpkin ST-74205 (1986). 88 Zappa, Video from Hell. °° Zappa, Does Humor Belong in Music?. °' Zappa, Video from Hell. °? As he had done in his first movie and as he was doing in’ Uncle Meat.image not availableimage not availableimage not availablesomeone who believes in God’.’® 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.” 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.?' His non-participation 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.2* 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: | don’t believe there is a Hell ... | don’t see any evidence that there is areal Devil. | 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.2° In a 1986 roundtable discussion on the CNN, programmeimage not availableimage not availableimage not availablecounsellor at the police station informs the boy to ‘stick closer to church-oriented social activities’.*? Meanwhile, Mary arrives in the story via the introduction to ‘Catholic Girls’ ,* 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’.*° 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." It is less than ten minutes into Act |, 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.’’ The mystical advisor L. Ron Hoover diagnoses Joe as a latent appliance fetishist, and encourages him to seduce a Roto-Plooker, which is part German-speaking vacuum cleaner, part magical pig robot. Joe serenades the Roto-Plooker in German with the song “Stick It Out’,“° 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,*° which is a story about the creation of the universe. In this story, Zappa describes the ‘Good Lord himself’®® 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’.®' He asks that they ‘give unto me a bit of flooring’.®* 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image not availableimage not availableimage not available‘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’® flows through melodic quotes from ‘Dixie’,®° ‘The Old Rugged Cross’,** theme from The Twilight Zone,® and that oft- repeated Zappa trope ‘Louie Louie’, 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.®” 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 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’,®* 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’.®* More than anything else, these songs advocate the separation of church and state, and warn of the erosion (or non-existence) 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,image not availableimage not availableimage not availablethe creation story from the aforementioned ‘Sofa’ suite are mutated into the instrumental ‘Sofa No. 1’'2! and the album's final song, ‘Sofa No. 2’. The latter includes lyrics in English and German, and reads as a quasi-spiritual variation on the ‘l am large, | contain multitudes’ section of Walt Whitman's ‘Song of Myself.'?° The narrator begins, ‘I am the heaven, | am the water’, '** and eventually calls himself the clouds, and labels himself a Chrome Dinette. ‘Ich bin hier und du bist mein Sofa’,'* he repeats, which translates as, ‘| 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,'*° 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’, '2” and this expression of microcosm and macrocosm would certainly apply here. Simon Prentis applies this to One Size Fits All'?® 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.'*° The cover art for the album supports the notion that this album is about God, as Cal Schenkel’s illustration is from the 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’,‘*° ‘Inca Roads’'*' satirises the notion that aliens landed in the Andes and built pyramids, and ‘Can't Afford No Shoes’'*? addresses the Hare Krishna movement with the declaration that ‘Chump Hare Rama ain’t no good to try’.'*° Years later, Zappa took aim at Hare Krishna in ‘The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing’ with the line, ‘Is Hare Rama really wrong if you wander around with a napkin on’, which mutated in Thing-Fish ‘* into ‘Is all de mammys really wrong if we’s wandrin’ aroun? wit’.de, nakkinimage not availableimage not availableimage not available' Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts I/ & Ill, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). ? Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, One Size Fits All, DiscReet, DS 2216 (1975). $ Ibid. 4 Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage, Act !, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979) and Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & III. 5 Frank Zappa, You Are What You Is, Barking Pumpkin, PW2-37537 (1981). ° 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. ® David Sheff, ‘The Playboy Interview’, Playboy Magazine (May 2 1993): pp. 55-73, at 55. * The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in it for the Money, MGM Verve, \V6-5045 (1967) 1° Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts | and Zappa, Joe’s Garage Acts II & Ill. " 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. ” Kevin Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa (Toronto, 2002). '° Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p. 18. “ Sheff, ‘The Playboy Interview’, p. 62. ‘8 Matthew Collings (Presenter), BBC2 Late Show Special Broadcast (December 17, 1993), at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV1YaBxhewE [accessed 5 January 2012] 1® Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, pp. 23-4. ‘ See Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 24 for more details. ‘® The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966). '® Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 79. 2 Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, pp. 106-7. 2! 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=C3cdb828ADOEgsToPDskI9GRwi9_L- 1y1BNmmLtnCt [accessed 5 January 2011]. Robert Novak (host), CNN Crossfire (March 28, 1986). ® Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, pp. 148-59. 2 Ibid., pp. 168-9.image not availableimage not available2012]. °' The Mothers of Invention, We're Only In It For The Money. °? Frank Zappa, Apostrophe ()). °3 Frank Zappa, Thing-Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKCO74201 (1984). * Ibid. °° Frank Zappa, Studio Tan, DiscReet, DSK 2291 (1978). ° Ibid. 8’ Zappa, Thing-Fish. °8 Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 185. °° The Beatles, Rubber Soul, Capitol Records, ST-2442 (1965). ‘°° Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 23. ‘°! Anonymous 2, East Village Other (1967), at http://afka.net/Articles/1967- 03_IT.htm [accessed 5 January 2012]. 1° The Mothers of Invention, We're Only In It For The Money. ‘ Ibid ‘ Ibid 1 Ibid. 1° Ibid ‘°” Zappa, Apostrophe (’). 18 Ibid 1° Ibid. 110 Zappa, Apostrophe (’). 11 Ibid 1? Rainey, Lawrence (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven, 2005), p. 258. 13 Ibid. ‘4 Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, p. 260. “? Frank Zappa, Roxy & Elsewhere, DiscReet, 2DS 2202 (1974). "Ibid “T Ibid 118 Ibid, ‘18 Zappa, One Size Fits All. 2 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. *?8 Ben Watson, Frank Zappa:The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York, 1993), p. 95. ‘27 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.paf 128 Zappa, One Size Fits All. eR' Simon Prentis, ‘As Above, So Below: One Size Fits All’, pp. 33-38. 18° Greg Russo, Cosmik Debris: The Collected History and Improvisations of Frank Zappa (Floral Park, 2006), p. 120. 13! Zappa, One Size Fits All. 182 Zappa, One Size Fits All. “Ibid 'S# Zappa, You Are What You Is. ‘88 Zappa, Thing-Fish. ‘5° Ibid. ‘8’ Zappa, Apostrophe (’) 138 Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6-8741 (1968). ‘8° Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). ‘40 Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. 1 Zappa, Apostrophe (’). Don Menn, Matt Groening, ‘The Mother Of All Interviews Part 2’, Guitar Player, May 1994, p. 87, at http://www.afka.net/mags/Best%200f%20Guitar%20Player.htm [accessed 5 January 2011]. “43 Ibid “#4 Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 8. ‘45 Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act | and Zappa, Joe’s Garage Act Il & Ill. “48 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. 4” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York, 1988), p. 141. ‘48 Packard Goose’ on Zappa , Joe’s Garage Acts Il & Ill. “4° Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964). 15” Courrier, Dangerous Kitchen, p. 8. 15! Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 244.Chapter 4 Zappa and The Razor: Editing, Sampling and Musique Concréte 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." It seems significant that Civilization Phaze III,? the last aloum Frank Zappa completed, ends with ‘Waffenspiel’, one of the ‘purest’ pieces of musique concréte 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 * — 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’* — 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!’.° The dogs’ utterances in the piece certainly bring to mind a whole pack of canine references in Zappa’s own songs,° but they also hark back to the barking hounds at the end of ‘Caroline No’, the final track on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.’ The 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. * 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.° 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.'°® 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’,"' the composer Edgard Varése, who famously referred to his music as ‘organized sound’."* 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 | do’.'? 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 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’* was an unprecedented construct of multiply- overdubbed" 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 bruits '° (studies in noise). These first examples of what Schaeffer called ‘musique concréte’ 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 concréte 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 concréte sound could come from any source, natural or electronic. In practice, musique concréte 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.'” 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 Varése — 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.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.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’.2” Radical editing is also evident on the second Mothers album Absolutely Free *° with the album’s masterpiece, ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’? 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 composers with no interest in electronics have been struck by the power of spliced discontinuity.” 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? | thought | 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 | 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. | like that effect.*! It was, however, the next two releases that sealed Zappa's association with musique concrete and radical editing. Opening We’re Only In It For The Money * 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 ‘concréte’ 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 | 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 tightly-packed ‘concréte’ 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 * 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 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 ‘concréte’ 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 “4 and Uncle Meat * 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 ‘concréte’ texture of ‘Nasal Retentive Calliope Music’® 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’ .°” Lumpy Gravy: A Special Case Accounts of the genesis of Lumpy Gravy ** — as well as detailed analyses of its contents — may be found elsewhere,°** 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,*° 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 ‘sped up’ passages in ‘Sink Trap’,*' and the studio musicians’ spoken exchanges at the beginning of ‘Let’s Eat Out’? and at the end of ‘Gum Joy’.** 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!.4 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 | 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 | would suggest to them via the studio talk-back system.” 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’.*° It is certainly the album that most thoroughly embraces the ‘aesthetic of discontinuity” and may be seen to represent the peak of Zappa’s ‘musique concréte’ style. 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.** Regardless of the theoretical and ideological differences that lay behind the schism between musique concréte 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 concréte — imposed by technical limitations — that Schaeffer himself found frustrating. He stated — ‘As long as | only have two of four shellac players, with which | can only realise approximate junctions, | will remain a terrible prisoner of a discontinuous style, where everything seems cut off with an axe’.‘° 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 | have so much to do with the actual production of the records, as acomposer 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, | 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 Lumpy Gravy. To call that ‘editing technique’ sounds like somebody sat there and cut out all the mistakes.*° 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 *' and Bitches Brew * 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. *° 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 Sandwich * and Weasels Ripped My Flesh,°° 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 | had all the master tapes and | 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, | could take that razor blade and cut it apart and reassemble it a different way and it would still make sense. 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. | 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’.°” 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,** 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’.°? Commenting on the performance of the London Symphony Orchestra, he said: They made so many mistakes, and played so badly on [‘Strictly Genteel’®], that it required forty edits (within seven minutes of music) to try to cover them’.®' Zappa’s editing skills were confirmed by engineer Mark Pinske: ‘| 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 | first started with him, | was afraid to pick up a razor blade. Now, | could put a breath into a vocal or take a breath out. | was just privileged to be able to have learned from somebody like that’? Cutting Into the Present ‘Excentrifugal Forz’® 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 ’.®* The ‘line’ here is in fact the splice: immediately after this lyric we cut to a 1967-type snippet of ‘concréte’ tape manipulation which transports us to ‘way back when’®: 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’.® Leather Conversations While Zappa was prevented from releasing new material by a dispute with Warner Brothers and his former manager Herb Cohen,*” 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'’.®° 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 [Lather] ... 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 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[.]®? 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aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.live You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series. For example, ‘Montana’* cuts between 1973 and 1984 performances; ‘Black Napkins'® jumps between 1976 and 1984, and, as outlined in Paul Carr's chapter in this publication, ‘Lonesome Cowboy Nando’* 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. 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: | 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 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.** 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 *" the instrument was capable of digital sampling: Yet where'aimage not availableimage not available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,‘ yet another work that — pace the Zappa Family Trust — seems to have been abandoned rather than fully realised.'°° 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’,'°' Gail Zappa quoted in Phil Alexander, ‘Keeper Of The Flame’, Mojo, 122 (2004), p. 55. ? Frank Zappa, Civilization Phaze III, Barking Pumpkin Records, UMRK 01 (1994). Unless otherwise noted, all discussion in the chapter refers to this album. ° Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy, Verve, V6-8741 (1968). * Taken from ‘A Little Green Rosetta’, on Frank Zappa, Lather, Rykodisc, RCD 10574/76 (1996). ° Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers (London, 1959), p. 25. ° See the introduction of this volume for some additional examples of canine Conceptual Continuity. ™ The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, Capitol, T 2458 (1966). ® 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 Ill - Pre Release Version’ (2012), at http://lukpac.org/~handmade/patio/weirdo/cpiiiunreleased.html [accessed 9 January 2011] 1° 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. \t was first propounded publicly in the following press release: ‘Hey Hey Hey, Mister Snazzy Exec’, Circular, 3/2 (1971). ‘' Frank Zappa, ‘Edgard Varése, Idol of My Youth’, Stereo Review 26/6 (1971), pp. 62-3. ” For example: Edgard Varése, ‘Organized Sound for the Sound Film’, The Commonweal, 38/8 (1940), pp. 204-5. '? Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989), p.139 [emphases in original]. ™ Les Paul, ‘Lover/Brazil’, Capitol, C 15037 (1948). ‘8 That is, few guitars overdubbed very many times rather than many different guitars overdubbed. '® Pierre Schaeffer, L’GEuvre Musicale, INA-GRM, ina c 1006-09 (1990). ’ Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music and Culture (New York, 2008), pp. 47-8. ‘® 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. '® Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, p. 61. 2 The Singing Dogs, ‘Oh! Susanna’, RCA Victor, 47-6344 (1955). ?' The Chipmunks, ‘The Chipmunk Song’, Liberty, F-55168 (1958). 22 Buchanan and Goodman, ‘The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 & 2)’, Luniverse, 101 (1956). 23 The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve, V6-5005-2 (1966). * Ibid. ?5 A short section from the second of these is unexpectedly spliced into ‘Help I'm A Rock’, a later song on the album.* The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 2T 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). 9 Ibid. 8° Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘New Temporalities in Music, Critical Inquiry, 7/3 (1981): pp. 539-56, at 544. %! Frank Kofsky. ‘Frank Zappa: The Mothers of Invention Part 1’, Jazz & Pop, 6/9 (1967): pp. 15-19, at 17. 2 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. * Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. * Ibid. 3 The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre Records, 2MS 2024 (1969). “6 The Mothers of Invention, We're Only In It For The Money. °T Ibid. %® Zappa, Lumpy Gravy. Unless otherwise noted, all discussion in this section of the chapter refers to this album. 38 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 Roman Garcia Albertos, ‘What's On Lumpy Gravy?’ (2001), at http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/misc/Lumpy_Gravy.html [accessed 7 January 2012]. # Frank Zappa, Lumpy Money, Zappa, ZR20008 (2009). Wibid'. ” Ibid. * Ibid. “ The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 4 Zappa, Civilization Phaze III sleeve notes. 48 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. 48 The Mothers of Invention, We're Only In It For The Money sleeve notes. “° Daniel Terrugi, ‘Technology and musique concréte, 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. °° Barry Miles, ‘ZAPPARAP: Miles talks to Frank’, /nternational Times, 63 (1969): pp. 9, 20, at 9. 5! Miles Davis, In A Silent Way, Columbia, CS 9875 (1969).* Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, Columbia, GP 26 (1970). °° Details of this unreleased project can be found at Anonymous 10, ‘The History and Collected Improvisations of the Mothers of Invention’ (2012), at http:/Awww.lukpac.org/~handmade/patio/weirdo/unreleased.html#historyandcollected [accessed 4 October 2011]. & The Mothers of Invention, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Reprise, RSLP 6370 (1970). °° The Mothers of Invention, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Reprise, RSLP 2028 (1970). °° Jerry Hopkins, ‘The Rolling Stone Interview: Frank Zappa’, Rolling Stone, 14 (1968): pp.11-14, at 11. 57 Billy James, Necessity is... The Early Years of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (London, 2001), p.79. S$ Frank Zappa, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, FW 38066 (1982). °° Tom Mulhern, “I’m Different”, Guitar Player 17/2 (1983): pp. 74-8, 82-4, 86, 89-90, 93, 96, 98-100, at 100. °° Frank Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 2, Barking Pumpkin, SJ- 74207 (1987) ®' Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p.156. ° 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]. °° Frank Zappa, Apostrophe (‘), DiscReet, DS2175 (1974). ° Ibid. Capitalization and underlining as in original lyric sheet. ® Ibid. ®6 William S. Burroughs, ‘Origin And Theory Of The Tape Cut-Ups’, Break Through In Grey Room. Sub Rosa, 006 008 (1986). ®T This resulted in an unusually long gap between Zappa releases, from November 1976 to March 1978. ®8 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:/Avww.afka.net/articles/1990-06_Society_Pages.htm [accessed January 9 2012]. °° Terry Bozzio in personal e-mail communication with the author, 10 May 2011. 7 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. ™ Frank Zappa, Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar, Barking Pumpkin, W3X 38289 (1981). ” Zappa, Lather. 7 Ibid, 7 Evelyn, A Modified Dog’ on, Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, One Size Fits All, DiscReet, DS 2216 (1975). 7° The Mothers of Invention, Burnt Weeny Sandwich!’® Zappa, Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar. 7” 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. 7° Bernard, ‘From Lumpy Gravy to Civilization Phaze III’, p. 23. © 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 Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays (New York, 2000). ®| Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, One Size Fits All. ® Frank Zappa, You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 4, Rykodisc, RCD 10087/88 (1991). ® Frank Zappa, You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6, Rykodisc, RCD 10091/92 (1992). ® Ibid. 85 Notable examples include Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Frank Zappa, Tinseltown Rebellion, Barking Pumpkin, PW237336 (1981), and Frank Zappa, Them Or Us, Barking Pumpkin, SVBO74200 (1984). °° 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. °’ Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention. Barking Pumpkin, ST-74203 (1985). ® Alan di Perna. ‘Megabytes at Barking Pumpkin’, Keyboards, Computers & Software, 1/2 (1986): pp. 22-5, at 25. ® Miles, ‘ZAPPARAP’, p. 9. °° Birchall, ‘Modern Music Is a Sick Puppy’, p. 48. ® Ibid. ° Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention. °° 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. °* Charles Amirkhanian, ‘KPFA-FM Radio Interview’ (17 May, 1984), at http://www.archive.org/details/AM_1984_05_17 [accessed 4 October 2011]. °° Rick Davies, ‘Father of Invention’, Music Technology, 1/4 (1987): pp. 42, 45, 48-50, at 45. °° Zappa, Civilization Phaze III. °T Ibid. °° Frank Zappa, Thing-Fish, Barking Pumpkin, SKCO74201 (1984). °° Although unpublished, the entire script of Hunchentoof canbe found ataa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.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, 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.? 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.” 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’ and the book and film versions of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’ 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 rignts, sex relations’ .’ 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 should, but more socially-oriented attacks such as ‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’,® ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’,° ‘Valley Girl’? and Joe’s Garage "' 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.’”? 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,'° 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.'* Frank was bor 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’.'° The ‘can-do-it’ masses were rewarded with the security of the nuclear family, with credit and 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?’ 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’."” Such seemingly throwaway references in Zappa's work thus embody deeper cultural triggers: ‘Machines don’t decide to say things like “We’re Beatrice”’® in precisely the “wrong” place in the middle of a song and make people laugh.’'® He even links performances of instrumentals such as ‘Peaches en Regalia’”° directly to creating that comic universe: To see Ike Willis pretending to be Count Floyd?" for one or two beats in the middle of all that is something | 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-o0, whoooo00-0000!’ Of course it's mega-stupid. That's why | like it. However, Zappa could display ambiguity on his lyrical content, for example when discussing ‘The Dangerous Kitchen’: | 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 | 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.2 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 | 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’.”° 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’. 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 | 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.”” 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’.** 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)’,”° 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, | didn’t even know what to call the stuff my life was made of. You can imagine my delight when | discovered that someone in a distant land had the same idea - AND anice, short name for it.°° 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).°' But in the US. satire.is.nurturedaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.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. | mean completely. It was amazing: politically, musically, socially — everything. 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.*° 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!,4° 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’ .*’ Similarly vapid, aspirationsare attacked in Uncle Meat’s ‘Cruising for Burgers’,“® 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’,42 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.’®° 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 with conceptually complete albums such as Joe’s Garage.*' 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',®* 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 /ead it:Given his track record, Zappa could be forgiven his lapses, certainly after creating Hogarthian epics such as ‘Billy the Mountain’,** 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’.®° 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’,®* which picks up on the celebrated insecurities of 1967’s ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’” 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 concept-like to the point of pure drama, although, given their uncompromising content and language, it was unlikely that Joe’s Garage: Acts 1, Il & III °° and Thing-Fish © 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’*' or ‘Bobby Brown’.® Indeed, by his own admission, the off-the-road Zappa spent many hours daily watching CNN,* 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, * the satirical yet mainstream The Simpsons started broadcasting prime-time 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.°° 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 Rats ® was so popular in Europe because of its ‘professional;:straight-aheadsound’,®” adding that it was a hit because there was ‘no musique concrete, no live chaos, no Suzy Cheamcheese, no nonsense’. Indeed, 16 years later, for the original release of Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention,®° 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.’”° 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,’ 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’” — and unionised musicians with ‘Yo Cats’. The subsequent Broadway the Hard Way ” 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, his manipulation of comic imagery and action in films such as 200 Motels ”* and Baby Snakes ” was hit-and-miss, resulting in.a-string: offlawed masterpieces. More consistent success rested in arresting images such as the Toilet Posters’® and the extensive gallery of aloum covers, particularly those with Carl Schenkel-produced artwork/packaging, such as We’re Only in It for the Money.” 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’” 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’,’® and later the theme from family sitcom My Three Sons ®° 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’”.’®! 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/lather,°* quotes from ‘Louie Louie’®* 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.®* The significance of the moustache was confirmed by the fact that, publicly at least, it was never shaved off. 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 Varése 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,®° 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,® 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 ®*’ was a daring and stunning statement, while the post-war breakthrough came with Mad magazine,®* Lenny Bruce (ff. mid-1950s—mid-1960s), Joseph Heller's Catch-22,°° and Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How | Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.°° 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.*' Zappa was stung by claims in the press of it being the first concept album, when the honour belonged to Freak Out!,°* released in June 1966,°° and he instead wrote We're Only in It for the Money,” 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’,® a nod to the seminal Bruce routine ‘To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb’.°° 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 police-instigated disturbances around L.A. coffeehouses that provided much inspiration for the writing of Freak Out! °’ Bruce made his name here as did Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, and so it was logical that their paths would cross.** 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semi-satirical hits such as ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face”? and ‘All | Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth’' which blended lyric and instrumental humour.'*' 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,'°? so too Warren Zevon with incisive songs such as ‘The French Inhaler'*® and ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner’.'°* 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-Gls 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’ and ‘Smells Like Nirvana’'® 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: ... 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.'°7 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.'° 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.'°° 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.'°' 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. ? There are arguably no ‘serious’ tracks (i.e. those devoid of comic elements) in the Zappa canon. 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. ¢ Gail Zappa, quoted in Barry Miles, Frank Zappa (New York, 2004), pp. 285-6. ® Allen Ginsberg, How! and Other Poems (San Francisco, 1955). ° 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. ® Frank Zappa, Sheik Yerbouti, Zappa, SRZ-2-1501 (1979). ° The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free, Verve, V6-5013 (1967). 1° Frank Zappa, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, FW38066 (1982). " Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act I, Zappa, SRZ11603 (1979), and Frank Zappa, Joe's Garage: Acts II & lil, Zappa, SRZ21502 (1979). ” Kelly Fisher Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa (London, 2007), p. 15. 'S Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989). ™ 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). ‘8 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 Frank Zappa, Chunga’s Revenge, Bizarre, MS2030 (1970). ‘T Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 132. *® An advertising tagline for 1970s US conglomerate Beatrice Foods. '° Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 173. 2° Frank Zappa, Hot Rats, Bizarre, RS6356 (1969). 2! A vampire TV host who howled like a werewolf, played by Joe Flaherty in Canadian comedy sketch show Second City Television (SCTV) (1976— 1984). 2 Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 168. 23 Frank Zappa, The Man from Utopia, Barking Pumpkin, FW38403 (1983). ** Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 185. 5 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 433” (1952), Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Island Records, ILPS 9309 (1974). 6 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:/Avww.science.uva.nl/~robbert/zappa/interviews/Kofsky.html [accessed 16 January 2012]. 28 Ibid . °° Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, pp. 243-59. °° Ibid., p. 255. *' 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. * Thus Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is as satirical as Joe’s Garage: Act I. %3 Zappa with Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 239. % Ibid., pp. 226-7. *5 Frank Zappa, You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore Vol. 1, Rykodisc, RCD 10081/82 (1988). °° Zappa, Joe’s Garage: Act I. %' Zappa, Chunga’s Revenge. 8 Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation, Discreet, MS2149 (1973). °° 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. ° Paul Provenza and Dan Dion, jSatiristas!: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs and Vulgarians (New York, 2010), p. 343. *' 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 Populare Musik (Bielefeld, 2011): pp. 135-49, at 136. 8 |bid ., p. 136. “ 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. “5 Billy James, Necessity Is...: The Early Years of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (London, 2005), p. 91. “© 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. 4’ The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!. 8 The Mothers of Invention, Uncle Meat, Bizarre, MS 2024 (1969). “° The Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.image not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.image not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not 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industry see music industry rednecks 104 reggae 1, 23 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’ (Mol, 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 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-Saéns, 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)/94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’ (Mol, 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 134 Starck, Nigel 203 Starr, Ringo 41 ‘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-Mol 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aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.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’ (Mol, 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 /) 9, 49, 57 Watson, Ben 5, 95-96, 126, 152, 159, 161, 183, 196 Wayne, John 18-19 Weasels Ripped My Flesh (Mol, 1970) 76, 155 Webern, Anton 11 Weill, Kurt 89 Welles, Orson 120 Wells, H.G. 24 We’re Only In It For The Money (Mol, 1968) 4n36, 14, 49, 97, 99, 209 cover 125 musique concréte 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’ (Mol, Freak Out!) 4n34, 71 ‘Who Needs the Peace Corps?’ (Mol, We’re Only In It For The Money) 61 Willis, Ike 20, 56, 58 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 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aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.