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Frank Zappa: Too much or not enough?

by Richard Gehr

Editor's Note:

It is this editor's opinion that Richard Gehr is doing more for groove music on a national scale than anyone else out there. His writings in any number of glossy magazines and the Village Voice have cast a positive light on this music. He also is executive producing a jam band/groove/Gobi disc (with some notable bands) which we can expect to see later this year. All that and he wrote the Phish Book too. We'll interview him about all of this in an issue to come. This time out, we are honored to present the following piece on Frank Zappa. Enjoy!

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By the time of his death from prostate cancer on December 4, 1993, Frank Zappa's taste for life on the road had all but vanished. So we can only imagine the resistance he must have felt for what his family characterized as his "final tour" a couple of weeks prior to what would have been his fifty-third birthday. Yes, Zappa's gone, and the world is a less interesting place for it. But why does it so often feel as though we live in a world that might well have been cooked up in the master entertainer's Utility Muffin Research Kitchen?

Take this whole Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky *mishegas.* It's hard not to imagine Zappa reveling in the hypocritical free-for-all surrounding the intimately documented intergenerational romance between the ruddy-faced President of the United States and his plump twentysomething intern. One envisions the composer whipping out a song cycle or two, perhaps even an opera, in the couple's honor.

But of course he already did, sort of. "Brown Shoes Don't Make It," which appeared more than thirty years ago on the Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free -- describes "a world of secret hungers / Perverting the men who make our laws." Zappa's operetta concerns one City Hall Fred, a bureaucratic bore harboring presidential fantasies about a thirteen-year-old daughter ("I'd make her do a nasty on the White House lawn"). It's not the fabled "windowless hallway" of Monicagate fame, but it contains all the libidinous urgency and subsequent sanctimonious moralizing endured by America's citizenry over the past two years.

"Brown Shoes," along with the rest of Absolutely Free, was a masterpiece of musically complex, dada-inspired, and rock-ignited social commentary. In it's seven and a half minutes, Zappa paraded his Mothers through greasy garage rock, clanging electronics, maudlin lounge music, blistering acid-rock guitar, futurist noise collage, Lenny Bruce shtick, free jazz, Krzysztof Penderecki string clusters in order to parody and deflate the myth of white, middle-class masculinity.

Zappa continued to do pretty much the same thing over the course of more than sixty albums, i.e., use his talents as composer, guitarist, entertainer, band leader, and social commentator to skew the status quo, illuminate hypocrisy, and slaughter sacred cows while showing audiences a good time. Sometimes, though, it seemed as though the only sacred cow above the knife was Zappa himself, who tended to view the world through the sharp-edged lens of "Them or Us" (the title of an instrumental composition, an album, a book, and a proposed movie), forever pitting the know-it-alls against the nincompoops.

Zappa is rarely an acquired taste. To love his music is easy; to miss the point entirely even easier. Zappa abhorred criticism -- as anyone with the self-confidence and artistic hubris to regard their entire output a single integrated gestalt would. For Zappa, his life and work were a "conceptual continuity" he referred to as the project/object. "Is there a single idea behind your work?" he was once asked. "That's simple," he replied. "It's that the emperor's not wearing any clothes. Never has, never will."

In the end, the different hats he wore all blended into a single slippery whole, presently copyrighted down to his trademarked mustache and chin hair. For a composer so vehemently opposed to commercialization, Zappa's image is now preserved in brand-name aspic by the strenuously protective Zappa Family Trust. But at least we won't have to worry about him appearing in Apple ads anytime soon.

FZ THE COMPOSER

As a future composer, the teenaged Frank Zappa was inspired by the music of Edgard Varese and Igor Stravinsky no less than by the visual delights of black notes on white score paper. And a quick skim through the 182 names of people who "contributed materially in many ways to make our music what it is" on the cover of the Mothers' first album, Freak Out! (1966), will find such other twentieth-century stalwarts as Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono in addition to blues men Lightnin' Williams and Sunny Boy Williamson, folkies Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and jazzbos Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor ("Please do not hold it against them"). But an often forgotten antecedent to Zappa's maximalist approach to music was Spike Jones, who, with his group the City Slickers, was as twisted in his own way as Zappa and the Mothers ever were. During the 1940s Jones mauled both the classics as well as the popular music of his era, poked fun at foreigners, and used such unlikely noises as tuned gunshots and harmonized belches to create unusual pop textures -- just as Zappa would more than twenty years later.

"Frank was a dada composer in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp," says composer Joel Thome, who conducted the 1991 concerts of Zappa's music released as Zappa's Universe (1993). "He used all available materials, like the bicycle he played on Steve Allen's television show. Did he even know that one of Duchamp's most famous pieces was a bicycle wheel?" The original Mothers of Invention worked firmly in the dada tradition of multimedia theater. Marines were invited onstage to tear apart dolls during the band's infamous 1967 run at the Garrett Theater in New York City, and the album Ahead of Their Time (1993) documents the others performing a strange piece of musical theater entitled "Progress?" in England with members of the BBC symphony orchestra in 1968. In this hilariously awful piece of performance art, laughing band members spout diatribes about "overthrowing the diatonic system" in-between musical bits referencing marches, waltzes, and a tarantella.

Zappa's compositional modes alternately displayed the influences of Schoenberg and Anton Webern's twelve-tone serial music, Varese's experiments with percussion and timbre, and the sweeping melodies of Aaron Copeland, while always displaying nonetheless his own unmistakable voice and style. "Zappa included serial techniques in pieces like 'Brown Shoes,'" says Thome, who orchestrated the piece for an orchestra and live rock musicians. "He told me he wanted everybody to hear the twelve-tone rows, so I arranged it in a pointillist way, using timbre to bring out the pitch series." As a rocker, you could argue that Zappa was most interested in percussion. As a composer, however, he was constantly searching for new sound combinations. "Girl in the Magnesium Dress," for example, reflects the texture and timbre of Pierre Boulez's composition Eclats in its cymbalum, bells, and chimes.

While Zappa took pride in the perceived ugliness of his writing, much of it was either simply beautiful, or consisted of beautiful music played in a nonpretty manner. "Duke of Prunes," "Holiday in Berlin," "Toad of the Short Forest," "Oh No," "Peaches en Regalia," "Strictly Genteel," and "The Ocean Is the Ultimate Solution" are all exquisite melodies that sound as fresh today as when they were first recorded. Yet Zappa also wrote reams of compositions that resemble little more than soundtrack cues. You can hear his guitar lines on The London Symphony Orchestra's (1983/1987) "Bob in Dacron," but this and other sociologically oriented "dance" pieces sound stream-of-consciousy, as though they'd been scribbled during odd moments on the road in reaction to Zappa's other functions as band leader, entertainer, or rock-star guitarist.

Zappa's longtime dissatisfaction with the ability of musicians to realize his scores is well known. His discovery of the Synclavier in the early eighties at the time seemed an almost too-perfect solution to the problems of human fallibility, union regulations, and the expensive nature of rehearsal time. As Joel Thome recalls, "One night Frank called me and said, 'I'm not going to write any more music for living musicians.' I said, 'Of course you will.' And of course he did." Much of the Synclavier music Zappa released on Jazz From Hell (1983) sounds frantic and anxious, like an overcaffeinated and digitized version of Conlon Nancarrow's piano rolls.

Zappa's career as a "serious" or "classical" composer extends from 1967's Lumpy Gravy to the music for Civilization Phaze III (1994) he composed in the years preceding his death. Tellingly, both works contain some amazing music and a lot of only intermittently amusing talk about pigs and ponies. If 1968's Lumpy Gravy displays Zappa the composer at nearly his most accessible (with multiple versions of "Oh No"), the pieces "N-Lite" and "Beat the Reaper" are its polar opposites. The title of the latter Civilization composition describes the former: "N-Lite" is a nucleic solar cloud of a work that sounds as though the composer were desperately cramming every idea he had into its eighteen timeless minutes. "N-Lite" is Zappa's masterpiece, a dark star of a goodbye note that resonates today and forever.

Not only could Zappa do it all, he was interested in it all -- but always from an outsider's perspective. His rock was outsider rock, his jazz outsider jazz. "Our initial appeal is to the outcasts," he once said, "the weirdoes." Of course this was long before outsiderism had been thoroughly institutionalized by "alternative" rock, and before Zappa fans came to resemble any other drunken louts partying down at the local arena.

FZ THE BAND LEADER

Composing can be an expensive career choice, and rock and roll paid the bills. Zappa led his bands with as much virtuoso flair as he composed or played guitar. His numerous lineups became instruments he could wind up and set loose for the audience, band, and band leader's mutual amusement. Improvisation was always an integral part of the package -- musically, verbally, or both. But Zappa's control over the material increased steadily throughout his two decades of life on the road.

Always jazzed by the moment, Zappa revered the midsixties concept of artistic "happenings": spontaneous eruptions of consensus-disturbing creativity. And while he perversely denied it in later years, the Mothers of Invention who created Freak Out!, Absolutely Free, We're Only in It for the Money, Cruising With Ruben & the Jets, Uncle Meat, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, and Weasels Ripped My Flesh -- Roy Estrada, Bunk Gardner, Euclid James Sherwood, Ian Underwood, Don Preston, Jimmy Carl Black, and Art Tripp -- were, for all their brutalist naivete, as inspired as the triple-scale pros who performed on Zappa's final tour in 1988. Zappa's bands became ever-slicker vehicles for Zappa's increasingly inspired guitar prowess, and less an anarchic posse of freaky dada adventurers who burped and farted, honked and crooned, and basically offered themselves up to the world as the anti-Beatles.

Frustrated with the original Mothers' deficiency in the chops and discipline department, Zappa began to almost exclusively hire fine, flexible musical pros -- preferably with a sense of raunchy humor -- who could pass the audition. After recording three albums with a tight little rock band featuring Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (AKA Flo and Eddie), Zappa revisited the jazz space he'd first explored on Hot Rats (1969). Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo (both 1972) were recorded mainly with Los Angeles session players and ended up being two of his most idiosyncratically delightful releases. It was a mode Zappa returned to with his last band, the amazing twelve-piece horn-driven juggernaut whose improvisational skills were highlighted Make a Jazz Noise Here (1991).

With the possible exceptions of Roxy & Elsewhere (1974) and the posthumously released Lather (1996), however, Zappa's subsequent rock albums seemed subtly different, as though he were consciously attempting to segregate his composer and rocker personas. Singers like Volman, Kaylan, Napoleon Murphy Brock, and Ike Willis were naturals at the sophisticated adolescent humor Zappa dispensed onstage. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) And players like guitarists Steve Vai and Mike Keneally, bassists Scott Thunes and Patrick O'Hearn, drummers Chad Wackerman and Vinnie Colaiuta, keyboardists Bobby Martin and Tommy Mars were made-to-order mediums for FZ's messages.

KVHW guitarist/singer Ray White, who played with Zappa in 1976 and '77, and again from 1980 through '84, was not atypical of his sidemen. "I'd never heard of Zappa in 1976," he recalls. "But one day a guy asked me to come to his house in the San Francisco projects and listen to this record. He put on 'Montana' and I thought, the guy who wrote this has to be the craziest white boy on the face of the planet. A week later, purely by coincidence, I was invited to audition with Frank. I walked in wearing my clogs, white beach pants, dashiki, and an afro about the size of Manhattan. He thought I was a Black Panther. I think I got the gig because I didn't know who he was."

White first appears on Live in New York (1978), which is to say that after intense weeks of rehearsal, he was thrown into the fray of life on the road. "Ten-hour rehearsal days were not uncommon," he says. "Once you got into it, however, a real flow emerged. Sometimes it felt like musician hell and, as we all know, musicians aren't the most disciplined creatures in the world -- except for the successful ones. Guys would get grumpy, but at the end of that seven or eight weeks' worth of rehearsals we had eighty tunes, all with segues, memorized and down cold. I didn't read, so I'd take my tape recorder to every rehearsal and then go back to the hotel room and practice, practice, practice."

The keys to being a Zappa band member were flexibility and proficiency, discipline and reliability. "There were so many different guys who could do so many different things in the bands I was in. Ike and I could trade parts, and singing with Ike and Bobby Martin was pure heaven vocally. You didn't worry about hitting parts because it was automatic. Frank taught me about discipline and loyalty. If you commit to something, do it all the way. If I couldn't play something he wanted me to, he'd find something comparable or let me come up with an alternative myself."

The legacy of the original Mothers of Invention survives in jam bands like Phish, moe., or the Disco Biscuits, groups who seek the heights of the collectively improvised musical experience on a nightly basis. "I have the highest respect for Zappa," says Trey Anastasio in The Phish Book, "for who he was, what he represented, and the fact that he didn't give a shit what anybody else thought about him or his music. Zappa pushed his bands to the limit, wrote music that challenged people, and always worked at the edge of his abilities." That being said, however, it's always been something of a mystery that his influence hasn't saturated the rock world to an even greater degree.

FZ THE ENTERTAINER

Frank Zappa was simply one of the twentieth century's great performers. As funny as he was intelligent, Zappa gave his fans a different show on a nightly basis and, more important, he paid his fans the respect of always giving them a little bit more than they might otherwise expect from a rock band (see You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Volumes 1-6 for proof). Following the dissolution of the original Mothers, Zappa's audience began to consist of wave after constantly replenished wave of eighteen-year-old boys who found his musical risks and sense of humor to their taste. He may have made music for disenfranchised outsiders, but there were enough of them out there to form a sizable fan base. Zappa always claimed to be playing for those isolated souls in the audience, each of whom, deeply in touch with his peculiar aesthetic, was "getting off on this beyond his or her wildest comprehension."

Zappa abhorred a vacuum. From his earliest bands, the Blackouts and Soul Agents (as documented on 1996's The Lost Episodes), to the early-nineties collaboration with Germany's Ensemble Moderne that resulted in The Yellow Shark (1993), Zappa thrived on collaboration, interaction, and an audience. While he claimed he wrote rock songs in order to keep the band amused, it's obvious that, from "Titties and Beer" to "N-Lite," he took equal pleasure in all aspects of his artistic expression. Zappa offered up his humor as a language no less significant than his musical vocabulary. Ongoing catch phrases ("What's a girl like you . . ."), secret words ("the secret word for tonight is 'mud shark'), and signature sounds ("r-r-*rent*") kept the audience in on the joke.

The Simpsons creator and longtime Zappa fan Matt Groening says he was influenced by what he calls Zappa's "basic aesthetic philosophy," namely that of rewarding people for paying attention. "Zappa constantly snuck in musical references, quotes, and parodies," Groening explains. "Once he played me some music he'd written for a documentary on the Exxon Valdez disaster. 'Did you hear that?' he asked me. In the middle of this beautiful Synclavier score, he'd hid the 'What do you do with a drunken sailor?' melody. Zappa convinced me not to let anything be either too high or too low to include in my own work. Well, a few things were too low. Frank's interest in things like Piercing Fans International Quarterly magazine wasn't completely to my taste. But I certainly perused the copies over at his house."

Zappa was once asked whether there was a single idea at the bottom of his project/object. "That's simple," he replied. "It's that the emperor's not wearing any clothes. Never has, never will." The truth is that Zappa enjoyed every aspect of his career, from composing classical music to getting onstage, preening with his guitar, and singing about someone taking it up the shit chute. To privilege one aspect of this total entertainment experience over another is to shortchange a career that was to a great degree dedicated to the proposition that here was one performer you could neither label, categorize, nor stick into a neat little genre.

Zappa, like Howard Stern, was another "king of all media." He directed the films 200 Motels and Baby Snakes, published The Real Frank Zappa Book and Them Or Us, and wrote the pornographic meta-musical Thing Fish, and made a fine living by intelligently and humorously articulating the contradictions and absurdities that most of us only mutter in our beer about. For better or worse, he absorbed everything around him, although -- and this is where you have to shake your head -- it was increasingly filtered through the television set. His major popcult influences included cheap monster movies, the unacknowledged influence of smugly hip middle-of-the-roader Johnny Carson, and a whole lot of CNN.

Zappa's neatest trick remains his ability to combine high and low culture better than almost anyone in the American arts scene. He could throw out Webernian tone rows, his beloved doo-wop harmonies, and enema jokes with equal flair. His point was not to lower the high while elevating the low, nor vice versa, but simply to prove that art should be made out of all available materials. Especially the electric guitar.

FZ THE GUITARIST

It's all there, in the second track of The Lost Episodes. Hear teenaged Frank Zappa, having recently learned guitar, squeeze out overwrought blues leads to accompany singer Don Van Vliet's lyrics about being flushed down the toilet like a turd. Twenty years later, Zappa's guitar playing may have improved by quantum leaps, but his obsession with scat humor persisted. In fact, Zappa's anal-compulsive nature made it possible for us to enjoy hours of archived guitar solos (collected on Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar and Guitar).

Zappa was grounded in the blues. His influences -- especially Eddie "Guitar Slim" Jones, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Hubert Sumlin, Slim Harpo, and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown -- saturate a style as personal as any in the history of rock guitar. It erupts first in the snarling, distorted, and pissed-off riff underneath Freak Out!'s "Trouble Comin' Every Day," whose devastating rap ("I'm not black, people, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white") sounds as powerful today as it did in the wake of the 1966 Watts riots.

"Nine Types of Industrial Pollution," colorfully described over the course of six minutes on Uncle Meat (1969), offers the first example of what would become Zappa's signature solo-guitar style: complex, detailed, and vividly melodic monologues related over a modal vamp. But it was only with the dissolution of the original Mothers that Zappa came to consider himself an instrumental focal point, although "Willie the Pimp," "Son of Mr. Green Genes," and "The Gumbo Variations" on Hot Rats were proved that Zappa could handle the attention.

While Zappa's guitar work originally reflected the blues' linear expressionism, he eventually came to prefer modified reggae grooves. With bass, drums, and keyboards pulsing fatly behind the beat, a second percussionist (usually Ed Mann or Art Tripp) was free to embellish his solos. Zappa was a quintessential guitar storyteller whose most profound influence was Jimi Hendrix. Zappa tapped into the blues through Hendrix, but you can also hear the electric folk-, jazz-, and acid-rock narratives of guitarists like Carlos Santana and Jerry Garcia in his playing, soloists with an equally strong sense of the guitar's rhythmic and storytelling potential.

Zappa also used guitar solos as the foundation for new compositions. During the late seventies he began to experiment with the process he called *xenochrony,* which he once illustrated as "the result of two musicians, who were never in the same room at the same time, playing at two different rates in two different moods for two different purposes [and,] when blended together, yield a third result which is musical and synchronizes in a strange way." Beginning in 1979 with Sheik Yerbouti, and kicking into high gear on Joe's Garage the same year, Zappa began to extract guitar solos from live performances and reinsert them into studio constructions, transforming them from spontaneous personal expressions into retrofitted compositional elements.

CITIZEN ZAPPA

Set up and busted for producing an audio porn tape in 1962, Zappa subsequently took a lifelong interest in free-speech issues. (He eventually recorded and released his own version of the tape as "The Torture Never Stops" on Zoot Allures.) Like his hero Lenny Bruce, Zappa constantly challenged the boundaries of acceptable artistic "speech." This entailed constantly raising the bar of propriety, which was a good thing in the abstract but often made for some pretty silly songs, a relatively small sampling of which are collected on the posthumous Have I Offended Someone? (1997). Zappa's explanation for his witty little diatribes against certain types of gay boys and Catholic girls, Jewish princesses and the French, was that he was simply making sociological observations about the citizenry of the world in which we live. And who's to say he didn't believe it himself?

Zappa was nevertheless among the first to man the barricades when Tipper Gore and her fellow "Washington wives" mounted an attack against "offensive" rock lyrics in 1985. His response to the Parents' Music Resource Center was two-pronged, as it were. Zappa's witty and commonsensical testimony before the Senate's Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee helped undermine a proposed records rating system. And his 1985 album Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention was a perfect example of how sampling could serve as a potent form of political intervention -- not to mention having a profound influence on such groups as Negativland and the Emergency Broadcast System. In FZMtMoP's "Porn Wars," Zappa took Senator Ernest Hollings's denunciation of "outrageous filth," Tipper Gore's matronly criticism of "fire and chains and other objectionable tools of gratification," and another senator's recital of the phrase "bend over and smell my anal vapors" as raw material for a thirteen-minute Osterizing process in which he speeds, slows, and generally mangles their words. These techniques may sound old-hat now, but Zappa employed them in a more *musical* way than the ensuing generation of preacher samplers have usually managed to do. Zappa samples himself as well, adding snatches from Lumpy Gravy and Thing Fish to the track. At points the music on FZMtMoP sounds wistful, sad, even pitying. How strange it must have been for him to defend music he sometimes pretended not to dig all that much in the first place. As with so much of his work, it has the feeling of too many ideas crammed into too little space and time.

But if "N-Lite" was where Zappa dumped his brain at the end of his life, "Watermelon in Easter Hay," on Joe's Garage, was where he let himself dissolve in the absurdity of rock guitar, bands, lyrics, the public, everything. "Who gives a fuck anyway?" he asks with a laugh in the voice of the Central Scrutinizer, who conflates Zappa the band leader, composer, and self-conscious voice of authority in all its manifestations. He answers this question himself in the calm and timeless glory of his ensuing solo. Which is where this hideously condensed overview of Frank Zappa will end. Got your politics right there.

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