|
Profile/Copyright © 1974, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
Frank Zappa's on the stage. That means you're in Mother Country. Anything can happen.
Frank Zappa is rock music's night watchman, stalking around in the wee hours, keeping an eye on the deeper, darker sounds and leerics the rest of rock hasn't caught up with yet. Brownie blues don't make it on this moonlight drive.
But don't get the wrong idea. He's not heavy. He's your Mother.
The Mothers of Invention, once a group of musicians, looked like the sort of thing you keep in a bedroom upstairs when company is coming. Like, give it a test and see if it communicates.
Frank Zappa, who was responsible for the Mothers' nature, wasn't discovered, he was excavated. He's one of Mrs. Shelley's honorary corpses.
He's thin as a snake. His eyes are the sort of things people probably looked up to as the Tower of London axe man earned his keep.
He always seems a scraggly heap—as if he'd just made it through college Hell Week, or like rats and weasels had ripped his flesh. With the luck of the Devil, Rosemary's Baby might have been his spitting image.
Because in rock music, baby blue, money isn't the root of all evil, Frank Zappa is.
Society smells a rat whenever he's on the loose. So far as society is concerned, he's talking through his rat's nest of hair. Actually, he's winking from under his inelegant tire-tread eyebrows.
Consequently, youth culture follows the range of his wit. His range is anywhere from the shocking to the classical, the lewd to the sophisticated, the rehearsed zoo cheers to the note-for-note Mozart.
One reason given for his currently wide popularity is that people want to catch him before he turns into a bat.
People are strange. Frank Zappa, on the other hand, is a supertalented spit in the face of Robert and his Rules of Order.
There's an old Bohemian superstition that if you place a silver spoon and a violin on either side of a newborn baby, you can tell what he's going to be when he grows up. A musician reaches for the fiddle; a rich man reaches for the spoon. Frank Zappa probably reached for both.
He's anti-drugs, but if he ever writes his autobiography, it would probably make DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater read like the outpourings of a mild shoe salesman from Wichita.
It's a shame Robert Louis Stevenson isn't around to ghost-write it for Zappa. Hoist the jolly roger, it's Long John Zappa, cutlass in his teeth, wooden leg in his thigh, parrot on his shoulder. It's not a concert stage when he gets on, it's a hellship.
Zappa gives his nethermost every time out. He comes on stage one night in long red underwear and greets the audience:
"Hello, pigs."
My favorite number is when he and his Mother's little helpers stop whatever they're doing, sit down, and ignore the audience until the tension level seems suitable enough to start playing their instruments again. The piece is called "Dead Air."
Theater was never so absurd, comedy was never so black, rock never so insouciant—until the Mothers of Invention.
They first got together around 1964, appealed to a small southern California audience partly because the Mothers insulted them, and took their name on Mother's Day, 1965.
They never had hit single, just good albums. The first one, Freak Out!, hit in 1966, and was non-stop weird. From the start, the Mothers goosed you. They purloined your mind.
Freak Out! turned out to be a cockeyed cocktail party, a single piece of musical composition, courtesy of Mother Molotov. Rumor had it that Boris Karloff was executive producer.
Ever since, Mothers' record tracks have been way off the beaten track. "No commercial potential," they were always being told. Cramped in studios with not enough room to swing a rat in, they lost that whole nutty multi-media oddball effect on the eyeball. Some even say that the studios made mummies of the Mothers.
What happened was, Mother music became electric flower-punk haywire-current chrome-plated-megaphone gumbo variations of whines, whistles, Fender Stratocaster fuzz and feedback.
|
Destruction was constructed. Alienation went communal. Annoyance became pleasure. A jam became four guys belching at once in different keys. And the finished product still managed to play a pretty mean cash register—mainly because of Zappa.
Fellow musicians and composers regard Zappa's electronic deviltry as a kind of true genius. This guy doesn't "write songs," he "composes pieces," like rock adaptations of Mozart's Symphony No. 40, Hoist's "The Planets," a few piano sonatas, and a thirty-five minute work called "King Kong."
He also conducts—the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, among others, including the Mothers themselves, of whom there were usually about six to eight at a time.
Some of them over the years were Ian Underwood, Euclid James Motorhead Sherwood, Billy Mundi, Jimmy Carl Black, Ray Collins, Bunk Gardner, Roy Estrada, Art Tripp, Don Preston.
The band changed personnel in late 1969, but since they were mostly Franny's Zooey to begin with, Zappa remained renowned. He performed at the Grammy Awards once and made pig noises. He got the string section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic to scream "Barf!" in harmony.
True, you can't dance to wowie-zowie oinks and snorts, but you can cruise with Zappa and the Pests if you've an ugly mind to. Or even join his fan club: the United Mutations.
Ugliness objectively correlates Zappa's thoroughly anarchic notion that acting and thinking strictly within society's unwritten rules prevents you from being fully and freely you. (Whew! What a long way of saying nicety is the mother of prevention.)
Zappa wields heavy-handed irony, caricature, satire, parody, mimicry, silliness, and ugliness to, as he once put it, send you screaming from the room.
His targets include war, Bo Diddley, hippies, Guy Lombardo, cops, the Supremes, Stravinsky, and even that president of a record company, Bizarre Inc., named Zappa.
At his best, he's as fiercely penetrating as a Siberian tiger tooth; at his worst, he's cretin silly.
Mothers' material, here in 1974, still holds its own for outrage. If you go to a Zappa show, be prepared to get jerked out of your mind by the strangest character to ever bestride a rock microphone.
It's a peanut butter conspiracy to turn the old not-so-Great Society on its head, and be absolutely free. That's from a guy who used to work 8-to-5 in advertising and now can't get a taxi in forty-eight states.
"When a true genius appears in this world," Jonathan Swift once wrote, "you may know him by the sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
Frank Zappa—rock’s Kafka.
The Fool Killer.
***
CD: Frank Zappa, Strictly Commercial: The Best of Frank Zappa. Rykodisc, 1995.
Book: Frank Zappa, with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book. Poseidon Press, 1989.
Websites:http://www.zappa.com,
http://www.united-mutations.com http://www.rockandrolljournal.com
|
