FRANK ZAPPA

 

Born in Baltimore, Maryland on 21 December 1940, Zappa was of mixed Sicilian, Italian, Greek, Arab, French, Irish, and German ancestry. He was the oldest of four children, with two brothers and a sister. In January 1951 the Zappa family relocated to the west coast because of Frank's asthma, settling in Monterey, California, on the coast about 100 miles south of San Francisco. They moved to Pomona, then El Cajon before moving a short distance once again to San Diego in the early 1950s. By 1955 the Zappa family relocated to Lancaster, which at the time was a small aircraft and farming town in the Antelope Valley in the Mojave Desert 73 miles north of downtown Los Angeles north of the San Gabriel Mountains. By age 15, Frank had attended six different high schools, which may have contributed to his sense of alienation in adult life.

His father, a chemist who was born in Sicily, worked nearby at Edwards Air Force Base which had at the time a federal government chemical warfare research facility. Due to their proximity to Edwards AFB, he kept gas masks at home in case of an accident, and this evidently had a profound effect on the young Frank. References to germs, germ warfare and other aspects of the 'secret' defence industry occur throughout his work.

Lancaster's location gave the young Zappa access to the exciting sounds coming from radio stations in Los Angeles and beyond, as well as exposure to the hype that went with it, and his parents were affluent enough to afford a record player, records, a TV, and musical instruments. TV also exerted a strong influence and references to TV and TV shows, including quotations from themes and advertising jingles, can be found in almost every piece he wrote.

Another formative event was a persistent sinus problem during his early teens. To Frank's lasting horror, his doctor treated the stubborn ailment by inserting a pellet of radium into his nose on a probe. Nasal imagery and references to the nose also recur, both in his writing and in the classic collage album covers created by his longtime visual collaborator, Cal Schenkel.

As a student, he was bored and given to distracting the rest of the class with his antics, and was once suspended from school for a dangerous prank involving explosive chemicals and a Parents' Open House night. He left community college after one semester in order to make low-budget films. He maintained his disdain for formal education throughout his life, taking his children out of school at age 15 and refusing to pay for their college. Nevertheless, he was in essence a polymath. He was highly intelligent, ambitious and articulate, widely read, and possessed a voracious intelligence, drive, singular concentration, enormous creativity and a huge capacity for work and organisation. However, he was passionately interested in music, developing wide-ranging and highly idiosyncratic musical interests and demonstrating superior ability at an early age. His parents were not musicians but had broad musical tastes also, and he grew up influenced in equal measures by avant garde composers such as Edgar Varèse and Igor Stravinsky, local rhythm and blues and doo-wop groups (particularly local pachuco groups), and modern jazz, including bebop and free jazz, all of which influences show up in his work.

Zappa was from the first interested in sounds for their own sake, which led to his interest in modern composers. His introduction to Stravinsky seems to have been a pivotal musical discovery but he was soon ranging even further afield, musically, in addition to his interests in jazz, doo-wop, R&B, and rock'n'roll. After reading a magazine review panning French avant garde composer Edgard Varèse's dissonant drum piece in "Ionisation" (actually "The Complete Works of Edgard Varese, Volume One") as 'a weird jumble of drums and other unpleasant sounds', the teenage Zappa became convinced that he should seek out Varèse's music. When he spotted a copy of Varèse's "The Complete Works of Edgard Varese Volume One" in a local record store, where it was being used as a hi-fi demonstration record, he convinced the salesman to sell him the copy despite the fact that he didn't have the full price, beginning a lifelong passion for Varèse and his music. Zappa's mother gave him considerable encouragement. Although she greatly disliked Varèse's music, she was indulgent enough to give Frank the gift of a long distance call to the composer at his home in New York as a fifteenth birthday present. Unfortunately, Varèse was away in Europe at the time, but the young fan spoke to the composer's wife. He and Varèse subsequently wrote to each other. Zappa had Varèse's letter framed and he kept it for the rest of his life. http://csunix1.lvc.edu/~snyder/em/zappa.html

Zappa began his playing career on drums, taking his first lessons at school in the summer of 1953, aged 13. He drummed with local teenage combos, but later switched to guitar, which he quickly mastered. Although he performed as a singer-guitarist for most of his career, Zappa always retained a strong interest in rhythm and percussion. His bands have been notable for the excellence of their drummers and works such as The Black Page are notorious for the virtuoso complexity of their rhythmic structure and arrangement, featuring radical changes of tempo and metre and short, densely arranged passages which are contrasted with free-form breaks and extended improvisations. Classically trained percussionist and drummer Terry Bozzio, who played for Zappa in the late 1970s and early 1980s as well as playing and recording many well-known classical and avant garde works, is on record as saying that Zappa's writing for percussion is as difficult and complex as anything else he has played.

In 1956 Zappa met Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) while taking classes at Antelope Valley High School. They were also drumming with a local band, The Blackouts. They became close friends, influencing each other musically, and becoming collaborators in the late Sixties and early Seventes, although they later became estranged.

In 1957 Zappa was given his first guitar and quickly developed into a highly accomplished and inventive player. He considered his solos "air sculptures", and developed an eclectic, fluent and extremely individual style, eventually becoming one of the most highly regarded electric guitarists of his time. It is possible that he might have become a professional jazz musician, but he was soon drawn into rock music, although he retained a lifelong attachment to jazz forms, voicings and structures and often drew his band members from the jazz world, if only because of the high degree of musical competence his music demanded.

Zappa's interest in composing and arranging burgeoned in his later high school years and he dreamed of being taken seriously as a composer. Although he was primarily self-taught, his music teacher gave him considerable encouragement. By his final year he was writing prolifically and had not only composed, arranged and conducted an avant-garde performance piece for the school orchestra, but had also contrived to have the event both broadcast on local radio and recorded. A portion of this historic recording is included on the CD The Lost Episodes. Zappa did see his childhood dream realized, as the London Symphony Orchestra played a program of his music, and the Ensemble Modern in 1992 received a 20-minute ovation after performing a program of his work a the Frankfurt Opera House.

During high school Zappa had also developed a strong interest in graphic arts. After graduating in June 1958 he worked for a time in advertising. His sojourn in the commercial world was another important influence on his work, and within a few years Zappa was co-opting the techniques he learned as a commercial artist, and was using them to deconstruct music, the music business, the media and society at large by combining them with the ideas he had gleaned from his studies of dada, situationism, and surrealism.

Zappa always took a keen interest in the visual presentation of his work, rapidly developing from album cover designer (e.g. Absolutely Free) to director of his own films and videos. Zappa's album covers are highly distinctive, and frequently bizarre and surreal. His two most important visual collaborators were Cal Schenkel in the Sixties and early Seventies, and Donald Roller Wilson in the Eighties and Nineties. One of Zappa's best-known and best-loved album images is that created for the 1969 compilation Weasels Ripped My Flesh, a disturbingly surreal painting by renowned album artist Neon Park.

Zappa moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and spent most of the rest of his life there. He began working as a graphic artist while trying to establish himself as a musician and composer. Among his earliest professional recordings are two adventurous and remarkably accomplished scores for the low-budget films Run Home Slow and The World's Greatest Sinner.

In 1962 he appeared as a solo artist on the Steve Allen Show performing a satirical dadaist piece involving a bicycle. Although many of the tapes of this series were later destroyed, the video of Zappa's remarkable performance survives. He married his first wife Kay the same year but the relationship soon deteriorated and they divorced two years later. In 1963 he began playing professionally around Los Angeles and bought the small Pal Recording Studio in Rancho Cucamonga, California (formerly called Cucamonga), which he renamed "Studio Z".

Zappa had begun recording at Pal since the early 1960s and after receiving a payment for one of his film scores he was able to buy the studio. Soon after, his marriage ended and he moved out of his apartment and into the studio, where he began routinely working 12 hours per day and more, setting a pattern that would endure for almost all of his life. Although only a small business, Pal was particularly attractive to Zappa because it contained a unique 5-track tape recorder built by the previous owner, Paul Buff. At this time, only a handful of the most expensive commercial studios had multitrack facilities and for smaller studios, the industry standard was still mono or two-track. By the time he recorded his first LP with The Mothers in 1966 he was already an accomplished recording and mastering engineer and from his third LP on and for the rest of his career, he produced all his own work.

After being approached by a customer who wanted him to produce a suggestive tape for a stag party, Zappa and some friends jokingly faked the "erotic" recording, which purported to contain the sounds of people having sex. Unfortunately the customer turned out to be an undercover member of the Vice Squad and Zappa was jailed for ten days on charges of supplying pornography. His entrapment and brief imprisonment left a permanent mark on him, and was a key event in the formation of his anti-authoritarian stance.