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.
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