Celebrating Zappadan!

It all started in 1965, in a school social hall, in the basement of the grade school across the street from where I lived in Detroit. There was an attempt at creating a teen club. I went with some of my neer do well friends, 15 year olds who were some how different. We liked rock music, thought the Yardbirds were the greatest thing on earth and had the delusion that we were going to start a band and become really cool!
I walked in and a few kids were hanging around and some cheesy music was playing on the cheap tinny PA system. Then a moment of silence and a strange huge sound came slithering out of the air.
I tried to grasp it, it was too big, too strange and too distorted by the cheap tinny sound system for me to grasp it. It sounded like two giant balloons being rubbed together! When the nuns began to run to the back to stop the hideous din, I knew that I had been a witness to something awesome!
As my friend George was being ejected from the hall, I left with him and asked him what he had put on the sound system. He grinned and showed me a copy of FREAK OUT by Frank Zappa and the Mother of Invention!
Over the next few months I listened to and absorbed the esthetic behind the noise. I was already a developing young visual artist who idolized the surrealists and even more so the anti-esthetic of the DA DA movement of the early 20th century. My heroes were Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. Zappa seemed to be the perfect mid 20th century extension of this to me. The Freak Out album is still important to me and I find myself listening to it again and again and always finding something wonderful that I have never heard before. One of the Great Protest Songs of all time is on the record, Trouble Comin' Everyday, a song written in reaction to the media coverage of the Watts Riots in LA, but the sentiment, vitriolic and corrosive is timelesss!
This was a composer who was equally influenced by Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Edgar Varese. He was self taught and scored movies at the age of 18. He appeared on the Steve Allen Show when he was 19 as a composer and performed with Steve Allen a piece of music for Electric Bicycle, tapes, and jazz combo. The results are viewable now on YouTube! He owned and operated a recording studio that released doowop records, novelty recordings and some pretty good dirty rock! He was a true American original, in thought, talent and action.
I got to see The Mothers of Invention perform a year later in Detroit at the Ford Auditorium. I was the art editor of an early student underground paper from Cass Tech High School called Yellow. I did an ad for the Ford Auditorium Show. I got a ticket for the ad and saw a program that had the Mothers abusing the Ford Auditorium stage elevator, doing a medley of doo wop and rock covers with Frank announcing the Label, Artist, Record registration # before each song. Then they did songs from Freak Out including the title song of my blog "Who Are The Brain Police?". At the end of the show they did a early version of the monstrous jazz piece, King Kong! I was never the same!
I saw him perform many times over the next 20 years with different versions of The Mothers. The band morphed from the anarchistic/disciplined Rock unit of the early days into the various mini orchestras with jazz greats like Jean Luc Ponty, George Duke, Sugar Cane Harris playing compositions by Frank.
Zappa was early on a phenomenal guitarist, but his ability and technique increased exponentially through the 70's. In Mojo Magazines top 100 rock guitarists of all time, he is ranked 12. Even that ranking, you have to take with a grain of salt, as they are a British Magazine with their own agenda. In some of his later work, his use of feedback and sustain is taken to a new level as it becomes an integral totally controllable part of orchestral music.
An independant entity, he had to keep a band together by earning enough money to pay good musicians what they were worth. That meant touring all the time. It also meant in some cases pandering to what he thought would sell records. That is why you might know his work from your stoned jerk roomie in college who would play "Illinois Enema Bandit" over and over again. In defense of that piece, he did get Don Pardo to do the dramatic reading.
He defined himself as a conservative, but in the context of a control freak working with groups of stoned musicians who had to enforce discipline to get work done. In reality he was an anarchistic Libertarian who was able to testify before Congress in defiance of Tipper Gores attempt to censor pop music in the 80's and devastate his opponents with his intellect and logic. He was asked by Vaclev Havel to be a member of his government when Czekoslavakia became free. It didn't happen because the Reagan administration FREAKED OUT! and told Havel they would withdraw economic aid. There is his appearance on FrontLine available on You Tube if youu want to see him in action. He even played with the idea of a presidential bid, but only in a performance art sense.
Finally, there is his legacy of symphonic pieces that are becoming part of the modern orchestral repertoire all over the world. If you want to hear some of his orchestral work, there is the "Yellow Shark" volumes 1 and 2 on Rykodiscs.
The world lost Frank Zappa on December 4, 1993. I grew my Frank Zappa Memorial goatee which I have today, albeit greying. I wonder what he would be doing in reacion to the present world situation if he were still alive? I'm writing this to celebrate his work and maybe inspire someone who hadn't listened to him before to take some time and check him out.
I saw a blogpage called Aristocrats who suggested that we start a new holiday period called ZAPPADAN which would start December 4th and run until December 21st, the date of his birth. I am definitely in the midst of Zappadan, I have been celebrating today by listening to Absolutely Free, The Old Masters, Jazz From Hell and The Lost Episodes....tomorrow, I plan to listen to all three cds of the Lather album.
Check out the Aristocrats, I am putting them in the side bar for your navigation pleasure and if you have any Zappa stories you want to tell me, please do. Maybe we can link them to the Ariistocrat page for a giant gala internet Zappadan celebration!
It can't happen here............................
P.S. If you know where I can find the live version of The Mothers performing Ravels'
Bolero, let me know. I heard it on French Radio early in the morning a few months ago and I have been searching for the source...it is brilliant and hilarious!