ZAPPA's ZAPPER
“There was an incredible quietness as soon as Frank walked into the room. He had an aura that, if you could bottle it, you would make a fortune. There was something about him, not just his looks. As soon as he walked in the room fell silent. It was like being in the presence of someone special.”
(Robert Davidson, photographer of the photo-session “FZ on the toilet”)
In 1966 in Czechoslovakia the Frank Zappa Songbook was outlawed: in fact “an eighteen-year-old had already gone to prison for it.” The news was widely spread, without the reasons for the ban being known. It is known that the anti-communist resistance (financed by those who wanted the regime to fall and fueled by the blind use of Soviet force during the Prague Spring: never forget Jan Palach!) used "Absolutely Free!" as a propaganda meme. Zappa and his sonically indisputable but politically dubious “alternativeness” became a banner of counter-information.
The regime was worried and they were right: to quote the blog strictlyZappa.wordpress Zappa’s records “gained such popularity that they were credited as one of the main inspirations for the movement that led to the revolution.” In fact, when Zappa went to Prague in ’89, it was as if he personified all that was best of the best the West had ever produced. Zappa's roadie Dave Dondorf remembers that visit like this:
“Frank was shocked by the flattery, in a way. It was the too much of a bad thing kind of thing. It wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t blasé, it wasn’t relaxed. I want to tell you: these people were crazy. It was like the ‘King of Freedom’ had shown up. It was very strange.”
In his inaugural speech as president, Havel said things about communism that are still valid today for the unbridled capitalism of the New Twenties:
“Our morality is sick because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in anything, not to worry about others... Love, friendship, pity, humility, or forgiveness have lost their depth and dimension... They represent a kind of psychological curiosity, or appear as forgotten wanderers from distant times.”
Czech musicians (and especially their fans) had included Havel among their saints since - through Charter 77, the movement that equated Havel with the Lech Walesa of Central Europe. Havel had famously started a "liberation struggle" for The Plastic People of The Universe. Allegedly inspired by the Velvet Underground, this curiously-named Czech trio, founded in '68, had seen his members imprisoned because of the law against rock music.
All in all, the choice of an English, petrol-friendly & spage-ageish name for the band - such as Plastic People of The Universe - completed by an American inspiration for revolutionary freedom and one original member, a certain Paul Wilson, of Canadian birth let us believe...that the band's stance had to be pro-West. Revolution was embodied by a petroleum-derivative inspired name, and... an obscure interview with Zappa from December '65, on KFWB hitline.
In this interview Zappa, no longer a mere pop musician, spoke like a communicator from a futuristic Ministry Of Information's center for cultural propaganda, anticipating in the meantime themes that would appear in "Freak Out!":
"We consider that most people are plastic. They have no respect for the finer things in life, no thought for their fellow men. This is not just the usual complaint about the lack of humanity. These people have no soul. (...) We consider ourselves therapeutic workers who massage the brains of people who dance to our music with the lyrics of our songs. We sing songs with the feeling of those composed in the late fifties.”
Havel, sold at the time as an enlightened president, a man of letters, a poet, an open-minded person (and a fan of Zappa!,) had indeed been trained by the faculty of economics of the “University of Technology” in Prague. And if I look at his political CV I register his adhesion to the bombing of Kosovo in ’99. Which the Daily Beast summarizes as “an influential contribution to the growing principle of humanitarian intervention” and which I - I don’t know about you - would instead put at the top of the Top 10 “Nato slips.”
Today Havel is considered responsible for letting Czechoslovakia split in two, facilitating the transition from the semi-collectivist regime to the oligopolistic regime n/euro-neo-lib. On the issue of the mánicky (long-haired) leader Milan Hlavsa, bassist of the PPU, and his imprisoned colleagues, the funny ending: when, in '88, the government finally allowed them to perform legally... they disbanded!
At this point, in Czechoslovakia enter Zappa: he meets the prime minister and the ministers of culture and finance "to discuss ideas on how to grow the country by introducing credit cards and TV shopping" (things he satyrised about.) And he starts setting up a business, founding a company for the occasion. But James Baker, the US Secretary of State, runs to Havel and explains to him that - erm - these international affairs are State Department's business.
Hagiography has it that Baker told Havel “choose: it's either us. Or Zappa” and Havel will then deny it, but - since this is what happened - he must have replied “it's... we!” In any case, Zappa ended the bizarre adventure as a Czech businessman as “special ambassador for the West for trade, culture and tourism”, gaining good media coverage. As the 'Strictly Zappa' blog comments:
“Zappa made little or no move to oppose the ultimatum, completely backtracking once he realized he had raised the stakes too high”.
At the 1991 Freedom Concert in Prague, Zappa harangued the crowd, with instant translation into Czech. But did he really believe what he asked them was possible?
“I’m sure you already know this but this is just the beginning of your new future in this country. And I hope your future will be very perfect. And as you deal with the new changes that will happen please try to keep your nation unique, don’t change into something else, keep it unique.”
52 years ago, the “Duke of Plums”, with the still ineffable and delicious “Freak Out!”, his first album, became the intellectual spearhead of a Los Angeles musical world intent on absorbing and reacting to Beatles' supremacy. After all, the first riff on his (or say The Mothers Of Invention's) album was the cultured transposition of the Stones' Satisfaction riff...
In eighteen months L.A. hook up the world rock market with a galactic explosion of new bands, a swarm of pop hits launched into the airwaves between the first day of summer '65 (with the Dylan cover par excellence: Mr. Tambourine Man by the Byrds), through autumn '65 (the Mamas & Papas with the hippies' advertising jingle: California Dreaming - November '65) arriving in '66 with the much talked about Love by Arthur Lee (March '66), Buffalo Springfield (April '66), “Freak Out!” (June '66 - a neologism that will give birth to a magazine of the same name) and the Doors (January '67)!
Today, 25 years after his death, we can say that no one else has ever composed music like his, and should anybody start writing an playing Zappa things, he would be immediately exposed as a fake. Cacophonous breaks, convoluted melodic lines, unusual instrumentations, superb instrumentalists, free-flowing angular guitar solos, cabaret kitsch, obsessive tribal-jazz rhythms mixed with pure free jazz, sonic jolts, and a bizarre alternation of full and empty sound. A duality that reflects the duplicity of Zappa's life as told on television: a "serious and respected classical composer" and yet the thinking mind behind "bizarre shows and lascivious lyrics", or what the Encyclopedia Britannica called "exercises in misogynistic vulgarity made to please the public" let alone his political crusades and business deals.
Zappa was a self-proclaimed emulator of Edgar Varèse who administered ante-litteram rap and consolatory circuses, lately sold as sketches fueled by a clownish, crudely sexual vein; a juggler of people, acting as a crazy, non-politicised, no-big-govt. average Joe.
Half of FZ's narrative was established by that unique "Zappa look," a meme in itself. Part Groucho Marx (had Groucho been tall and haughty,) and part lumpy gravy buffoon sending hippies a message to laugh at through gritted teeth. That goatee, and his hooked Sicilian nose, together with those hypnotizing eyelashes, helped by that soothing (yet traumatized in real life) voice strong in the low register. We might almost call it a Mephistophelian look - and in fact Frank at times seemed a sort of rocker brother of Anton La Vey.
25 years after his death and 78 years after his birth, today, what do we really miss him for? Was it sheer pleasure and alternative vertigo in a world of ignorant me-too record companies or was Zappa the “fifth column” of the US establishment in the world of Los Angeles - that is, global - pop? A pimple with a strange face (“ugly” - as he called himself) on the vast media surface, an apparent case of short circuit of the system? Or music for the 'alt. right' looking - away from the hippie crowd - for a young spiritual leader (Frank called himself “Head Mother,” after all) against the “government”, but medievally pro-business?
The Little Chemist
“He had a remarkable magnetic charm, I would say.” (Gail Zappa on FZ, 1990)
Dad Francesco “Francis” Zappa (from Partinico, Sicily,) during World War II wasn't keen to be mistaken for an Italian turncoat. He must have been good and trustworthy to the Allies, noticing how he worked at the Opa Locka military center “in the field of ballistics research and the calculation of projectile trajectories”.
It was a baptism of fire, Barry Miles laconically comments in his biography of FZ: “the father would remain in the Defense sector for the rest of his life.” And more precisely, for what jobs? He was an expert metallurgist, Miles tells us. He was a mathematician, others write. He was a chemist, a BBC documentary tells us.
And he was also a “meteorologist” at the “Edgewood arsenal”. Which was the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, in Maryland: the main American center in the field of chemical and biological weapons, set up “to work with the most toxic known compounds in the world”. and also one of the centers where the MK-Ultra program was carried out: experiments for military purposes on the effects on humans of psychoactive substances such as LSD, sarin, THC, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine. Certainly a place where all jobs required a good level of clearance.
Perhaps this is why the Francis Zappa family moved often in pattern designed by his different jobs, ending up in Lancaster, CA, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. 35 km away is Palmdale, “the aerospace capital of America”, home to Edwards Air Force Base, a research centre - including nuclear - where Francis worked. The base is on the edge of a desert salt flat “where since WWII every US Air Force plane has been tested before being adopted.”
Francis then received a job offer at the Dugway Proving Ground, a centre in Utah specialising in bio-chemical weapons, but he preferred Monterey, where he apparently taught at the Navy's specialist school. Living in a military environment, little Frank's character was forged in places of veneration for Technology, ending up breeding his "little chemist" animus with the paraphernalia of war, as we discover innocent anecdotes of young Frank:
"In Edgewood they produced mustard gas [a lethal gas used as a weapon for the first time in April 1915 in Ypres] and every member of the family kept a gas mask in the closet, in case the tanks ruptured. It was my favorite toy, I pretended it was my space helmet."
What would I say about Zappa's fascination with the “stuff that makes you throw up,” chloropicrin a powder-like substance that induces retching and vomit? It had been devised to be used before a mustard gas attack so that the powder, seeping under the masks, would force soldiers to pull their masks away, so as not to suffocate in the vomit. Frank’s comment: “I’ve always been amazed that people were paid to figure out how to do all these things.”
It’s no surprise that his praise of Technology became a constant in his life, reaching maturity with records in the form of the 16-track recording console, a “world premiere” prototype, the 1993 digital recording of some orchestral works, or the synclavier programmed (also) to “play burps” of different pitches. Technical flaws such as nuclear accidents are considered nonsense, because "every time something comes out of the Government, that is, you already know... it smells of a lie".
Zappa had a way of knowing if they were nonsense or not, considering that his wife Gail (Klein) Sloatman was the daughter of a researcher for the Defense, nuclear weapons sector, Captain Joseph Klein Sloatman III. And also her brother John Sloatman III and she also worked for the Government, employed by the delicate office of Naval Research and Development.
But after Gail trained in communications and marketing, she became the queen-wife of the Zappa hearth. This happened following the very curious circumstances in which she met (and decided to dedicate her life to) Zappa.
Her first 'Zappa impression' was not an encouraging one: "he stank terribly. He also had a runny nose and was infested with crabs, even in his hair, which he hadn't combed in months." And instead Gail, a seductive Californian who - according to Kooper - looked like Jean Shrimpton and who everyone wanted to screw, ended up as if in a fairy tale screwing dirty Frank. Here's what Gail had to say the New Yorker about waking up after that fateful first night of love:
"I rolled over in bed and saw an eye over the edge of the pillow, and at that precise moment I heard a voice - I've always heard voices, all my life - that said to me. 'This is the way it is: if you can't get over it, we'll never talk to you again.' And I remember thinking: Oh my God! I think this guy is extraordinary, it's such a different feeling! I know he hasn’t had a bath in four months and his mustache smells like peanut butter…” and then I was like, ‘Well, okay.’ I guess that’s love at first sight.”
About hearing voices, call me conservative, but I think like dr. Thomas Szasz, that psychiatrist who said: "if you talk to God you are religious, but if it is God who talks to you, then you are schizophrenic".
(...)
Beatles emulation
It is absolutely! certain that Zappa (born in 1940, like John Lennon) had the Beatles as true competing references. starting from that game of mirrors that wants "Freakout!" as the inspiration for "Sgt. Pepper's" - which in turn inspired the rip-off cover (and true statement?) of "We're only in it For The Money".
It was also a matter of relaunching the American industry, taken by surprise by a wonderfully coordinated operation of the years '64/'65 that were the Beatles at number 1 in the USA. FZ wrote about those early days in his autobiography:
"The most requested groups were those who pretended to be English. Often they were surf groups with wigs so they looked like they had long hair, or they added the word Beatles somewhere in the name of their band - you get the idea, don't you? There were Beatles clones everywhere. We didn’t have long hair, we didn’t have band uniforms, and we were ugly as shit. We were, in the biblical sense of the word, UNEMPLOYABLE.”
The Beatles had given a very white spin to the blues, from which the Four drew heavily. But in the process of whitening that sexy music (that is r’n’b) the Beatles had revolutionized the music industry, whose value chain used to start with Tin Pan Alley's fixed-salary composers. Lennon & Mc Cartney, instead, wrote and composed their own songs.
Image-wise, the Beatles "experience" eclipsed Elvis' by offering four faces, four archetypes, four human stories for the price of one.
They had also introduced a European posture to rock, usually a rowdy style. This was due to George Martin's "pre-ordained" arrangements, where each instrument had its place, like George Harrison's cubist digressions, or the classical music embroideries (the harpsichord of In My Life could never have happened with an American producer of the mid Sixties.)
Zappa brought a couple of American and white elements to pop music and - for once! - the American response was far more cultural, sociological, jazzy and witty than the English one.
In this FZ was supported by the Mothers of invention who - with a dose of disrespect that was anything but British - suggested that the name could be used as an abbreviation of motherfuckers. Motherfuckers they were (MF = expert musician, in the lingo) as they brought to the band's table untainted professionalism (in r'n'r terms) and instrumental cojones, when compared to the much vaunted Beatles. You just need to look at one photo of James Carl Black to know he's something else than Ringo.
And their moments of tonal improvisation (like the subsequent George Duke of Eat That Question in “The Grand Wazoo” or the swerves of Jean-Luc Ponty) and the free piano fragments that 'democratised' Cecil Taylor's sound, both sound very fresh and up to date; a thing that cannot be said for most of the Beatles, at least until to “Rubber Soul”.
Zappa claimed he didn't respect the Beatles much, musically speaking. In ’71, let's say to appease with each other, the Liverpudlian John Lennon played with Zappa at the Fillmore East, and inserted Zappa's famous King Kong live track they performed that evening in his LP “Sometime in NYC.” He called it Jam Rag and attributed it to Yoko and himself. Frank politely did not sue him.
(...)
[quote by Antonio Albanese's politician 'Cetto Laqualunque']
“We generally do great in areas where there is disorder between generations, because we tend to gas up the environment!”
(FZ on the Mothers, 1967)
One of Frank’s famous crusades has been the celebration of groupies as a symbol of earned sexual freedom. They were embodied by the G.T.O.'s, a group of twenty-year-old girls who don’t seem to look like Franzoni defines them in a recent video: “everyone’s whores”. However, it was a very 1910s debasement of female sex, or sexuality tout-court, typical also in the 1960s.
Zappa invented a ‘puttanesque’ myth with a and pro-Tecnique name: GTO as in Girls Together Orally, (or also Outrageously; and also GTO as in the V8 sports car.) The outcome transmitted to future generations was promotion of a post-modern absence of feeling.
Groupies became a meme of the 'Right' thrown into society and played as if were an alternative to the liberal flower children: the latter were idealists, the former pragmatitsts: groupies as starfucking specialists, accidentally also instrumental to the reaffirmation of the celebrity (male) myth.
On the web, if you look for the G.T.O.'s you can find alternated versions that de-mythologize this ‘slutty’ aspect of the original GTO. Pauline Butcher knew them and was also a groupie, she describes them differently:
“The GTOs were asexual, at the beginning. Two of them, Sparky and Pamela were virgins, Christine had made love to a man, Sandra had a child with Calvin to whom she was faithful, Cinderella and Mercy came later and were heavily into drugs.”
The latter detail clashes with Zappa's Weltanschaung. Zappa's official and strict position on (or better against) psychoactives has found space in books like “Psychedelic Popular Music” by William Echard. His drug regimen was even stricter than that of... ABBA. Only tobacco. And coffee. And, well, a few beers.
Zappa did not like drugs to fuck with the life of his rock musicians, and he claims he has smoked “maybe nine joints in ten years;” and never tried LSD.
Steep change from the early days, Technology freed Zappa's last period from the burden of having a band, he - functioning on coffee - immersed himself for days in the bowels of his studio, accompanied by his “favorite vegetable”, cigarette tobacco, as smoking continued even whith advanced prostate cancer. In his (almost) anti-drug attitude Zappa shared the ethos of the Freaks, Vito Paulekas at the forefront, vocally opposed to any alteration from psychoactive substances.
In an interview with Szou, Vito's wife is seen swinging on a hammock in Vito's studio, while she speaks of LSD and defined it an "army experiment", demonstrating a certain foresight, given that it was only much later that LSD's use as an army experiment became public. These were illicit acts, because administered to unaware users, like those clients of colluding prostitutes who found themselves 'trippy' without wanting it.
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Published on the December '18 issue of the Italian music-magazine Blow Up.
ZAPPA's ZAPPER
“There was an incredible quietness as soon as Frank walked into the room. He had an aura that, if you could bottle it, you would make a fortune. There was something about him, not just his looks. As soon as he walked in the room fell silent. It was like being in the presence of someone special.”
(Robert Davidson, photographer of the photo-session “FZ on the toilet”)
In 1966 in Czechoslovakia the Frank Zappa Songbook was outlawed: in fact “an eighteen-year-old had already gone to prison for it.” The news was widely spread, without the reasons for the ban being known. It is known that the anti-communist resistance (financed by those who wanted the regime to fall and fueled by the blind use of Soviet force during the Prague Spring: never forget Jan Palach!) used "Absolutely Free!" as a propaganda meme. Zappa and his sonically indisputable but politically dubious “alternativeness” became a banner of counter-information.
The regime was worried and they were right: Zappa’s records (to quote the blog strictlyZappa.wordpress) “gained such popularity that they were credited as one of the main inspirations for the movement that led to the revolution.” In fact, when Zappa went to Prague in ’89, it was as if he personified all that was best of the best the West had ever produced. Zappa's roadie Dave Dondorf remembers that visit like this:
“Frank was shocked by the flattery, in a way. It was the too much of a bad thing kind of thing. It wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t blasé, it wasn’t relaxed. I want to tell you: these people were crazy. It was like the ‘King of Freedom’ had shown up. It was very strange.”
In his inaugural speech as president, Havel said things about communism that are still valid today for the unbridled capitalism of the New Twenties: “Our morality is sick because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in anything, not to worry about others... Love, friendship, pity, humility, or forgiveness have lost their depth and dimension... They represent a kind of psychological curiosity, or appear as forgotten wanderers from distant times.”
Czech musicians (and especially their fans) had included Havel among their saints since - through Charter 77, the movement that equated Havel with the Lech Walesa of Central Europe - he had started a "liberation struggle" for The Plastic People of The Universe - a Czech trio - inspired to the Velvet Underground - founded in '68, imprisoned because of the law against rock music.
One original Canadian member, a certain Paul Wilson, and the choice of an English name for the band were completed by an American inspiration for freedom. Embodied by the petroleum derivative, which had turned into a fashion in those years; and... an obscure interview with Zappa from December '65, on KFWB hitline.
In this interview Zappa transformed himself. No longer a mere pop musician, he spoke like a communicator of a future Ministry Of Information's center for cultural propaganda, anticipating certain themes of "Freak Out!":
"We consider that most people are plastic. They have no respect for the finer things in life, no thought for their fellow men. This is not just the usual complaint about the lack of humanity. These people have no soul. (...) We consider ourselves therapeutic workers who massage the brains of people who dance to our music with the lyrics of our songs. We sing songs with the feeling of those composed in the late fifties.”
Havel, sold at the time as an enlightened president, a man of letters, a poet, an open-minded person (and a fan of Zappa!,) had indeed been trained by the faculty of economics of the “University of Technology” in Prague. And if I look at his political CV I register his adhesion to the bombing of Kosovo in ’99. Which the Daily Beast summarizes as “an influential contribution to the growing principle of humanitarian intervention” and which I - I don’t know about you - would instead put at the top of the hit parade “Nato filth.”
Today Havel is considered responsible for letting Czechoslovakia split in two, facilitating the transition from the semi-collectivist regime to the oligopolistic regime n/euro-neo-lib. On the issue of the mánicky (long-haired) leader Milan Hlavsa, bassist of the PPU, and his imprisoned colleagues, the funny ending: when, in '88, the government finally allowed them to perform legally... they disbanded!
At this point, in Czechoslovakia enter Zappa: he meets the prime minister and the ministers of culture and finance "to discuss ideas on how to grow the country by introducing credit cards and TV shopping" (things he satyrised about.) And he starts setting up a business, founding a company for the occasion. But James Baker, the US Secretary of State, runs to Havel and explains to him that - erm - these international affairs are State Department's business.
Hagiography has it that Baker told Havel “choose: it's either us. Or Zappa” and Havel will then deny it, but - since this is what happened - he must have replied “it's... we!” In any case, Zappa ended the bizarre adventure as a Czech businessman as “special ambassador for the West for trade, culture and tourism”, gaining good media coverage. As the 'Strictly Zappa' blog comments:
“Zappa made little or no move to oppose the ultimatum, completely backtracking once he realized he had raised the stakes too high”.
At the 1991 Freedom Concert in Prague, Zappa harangued the crowd, with instant translation into Czech. But did he really believe what he asked them was possible?
“I’m sure you already know this but this is just the beginning of your new future in this country. And I hope your future will be very perfect. And as you deal with the new changes that will happen please try to keep your nation unique, don’t change into something else, keep it unique.”
52 years ago, the “Duke of Plums”, with the still ineffable and delicious “Freak Out!”, his first album, became the intellectual spearhead of a Los Angeles musical world intent on absorbing and reacting to Beatles' supremacy. After all, the first riff on his (or say The Mothers Of Invention's) album was the cultured transposition of the Stones' Satisfaction riff...
In eighteen months L.A. hook up the world rock market with a galactic explosion of new bands, a swarm of pop hits launched into the airwaves between the first day of summer '65 (with the Dylan cover par excellence: Mr. Tambourine Man by the Byrds), through autumn '65 (the Mamas & Papas with the hippies' advertising jingle: California Dreaming - November '65) arriving in '66 with the much talked about Love by Arthur Lee (March '66), Buffalo Springfield (April '66), “Freak Out!” (June '66 - a neologism that will give birth to a magazine of the same name) and the Doors (January '67)!
Today, 25 years after his death, we can say that no one else has ever composed music like his, and should anybody start writing an playing Zappa things, he would be immediately exposed as a fake. Cacophonous breaks, convoluted melodic lines, unusual instrumentations, superb instrumentalists, free-flowing angular guitar solos, cabaret kitsch, obsessive tribal-jazz rhythms mixed with pure free jazz, sonic jolts, and a bizarre alternation of full and empty sound. A duality that reflects the duplicity of Zappa's life as told on television: a "serious and respected classical composer" and yet the thinking mind behind "bizarre shows and lascivious lyrics", or what the Encyclopedia Britannica called "exercises in misogynistic vulgarity made to please the public" let alone his political crusades and business deals.
Zappa was a self-proclaimed emulator of Edgar Varèse who administered ante-litteram rap and consolatory circuses, lately sold as sketches in a clownish, crudely sexual vein; a juggler of people, acting as a crazy, non-politicised, no-big-govt. average Joe.
Half of FZ's narrative was established by that unique "Zappa look," a meme in itself. Part Groucho Marx (had Groucho been tall and haughty,) a "lumpy gravy" buffoon sending hippies message to laugh at through gritted teeth. And that goatee, and his hooked Sicilian nose. And those hypnotizing eyelashes, hypnotising with the help of a (traumatized) voice in the low register. We might almost call it a Mephistophelian look - and in fact Frank at times seemed a sort of rocker brother of Anton La Vey.
25 years after his death and 78 years after his birth, today, what do we really miss him for? Was it sheer pleasure and alternative vertigo in a world of ignorant me-too record companies or was Zappa the “fifth column” of the US establishment in the world of Los Angeles - that is, global - pop? A pimple with a strange face (“ugly” - as he called himself) on the vast media surface, an apparent case of short circuit of the system? Or music for a segment of the right-wing that was looking - far from the hippie crowd - for a spiritual leader (after all, he called himself “Head Mother”) against the “government”, but pro-business?
The Little Chemist
“He had a remarkable magnetic charm, I would say.” (Gail Zappa on FZ, 1990)
Dad Francesco “Francis” Zappa (from Partinico, Sicily,) during World War II wasn't keen to be mistaken for an Italian turncoat. He must have been good and trustworthy to the Allies, noticing how he worked at the Opa Locka military center “in the field of ballistics research and the calculation of projectile trajectories”.
It was a baptism of fire, Barry Miles laconically comments in his biography of FZ: “the father would remain in the Defense sector for the rest of his life.” And more precisely, for what jobs? He was an expert metallurgist, Miles tells us. He was a mathematician, others write. He was a chemist, a BBC documentary tells us.
And he was also a “meteorologist” at the “Edgewood arsenal”. Which was the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, in Maryland: the main American center in the field of chemical and biological weapons, set up “to work with the most toxic known compounds in the world”. and also one of the centers where the MK-Ultra program was carried out: experiments for military purposes on the effects on humans of psychoactive substances such as LSD, sarin, THC, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine. Certainly a place where all jobs required a good level of clearance.
Perhaps this is why the Francis Zappa family moved often in pattern designed by his different jobs, ending up in Lancaster, CA, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. 35 km away is Palmdale, “the aerospace capital of America”, home to Edwards Air Force Base, a research centre - including nuclear - where Francis worked. The base is on the edge of a desert salt flat “where since WWII every US Air Force plane has been tested before being adopted.”
Francis then received a job offer at the Dugway Proving Ground, a centre in Utah specialising in bio-chemical weapons, but he preferred Monterey, where he apparently taught at the Navy's specialist school. Living in a military environment, little Frank's character was forged in places of veneration for Technology, ending up breeding his "little chemist" animus with the paraphernalia of war, as we discover innocent anecdotes of young Frank:
"In Edgewood they produced mustard gas [a lethal gas used as a weapon for the first time in April 1915 in Ypres] and every member of the family kept a gas mask in the closet, in case the tanks ruptured. It was my favorite toy, I pretended it was my space helmet."
What would I say about Zappa's fascination with the “stuff that makes you throw up,” chloropicrin a powder-like substance that induces retching and vomit? It had been devised to be used before a mustard gas attack so that the powder, seeping under the masks, would force soldiers to pull their masks away, so as not to suffocate in the vomit. Frank’s comment: “I’ve always been amazed that people were paid to figure out how to do all these things.”
It’s no surprise that his praise of Technology became a constant in his life, reaching maturity with records in the form of the 16-track recording console, a “world premiere” prototype, the 1993 digital recording of some orchestral works, or the synclavier programmed (also) to “play burps” of different pitches. Technical flaws such as nuclear accidents are considered nonsense, because "every time something comes out of the Government, that is, you already know... it smells of a lie".
Zappa had a way of knowing if they were nonsense or not, considering that his wife Gail (Klein) Sloatman was the daughter of a researcher for the Defense, nuclear weapons sector, Captain Joseph Klein Sloatman III. And also her brother John Sloatman III and she also worked for the Government, employed by the delicate office of Naval Research and Development.
But after Gail trained in communications and marketing, she became the queen-wife of the Zappa hearth. This happened following the very curious circumstances in which she met (and decided to dedicate her life to) Zappa.
Her first 'Zappa impression' was not an encouraging one: "he stank terribly. He also had a runny nose and was infested with crabs, even in his hair, which he hadn't combed in months." And instead Gail, a seductive Californian who - according to Kooper - looked like Jean Shrimpton and who everyone wanted to screw, ended up screwing the dirty Frank like in a fairy tale. and here's what Gail told the New Yorker about waking up for the first time after that fateful night of love:
"I rolled over in bed and saw an eye over the edge of the pillow, and at that precise moment I heard a voice - I've always heard voices, all my life - that said to me. 'This is the way it is: if you can't get over it, we'll never talk to you again.' And I remember thinking: Oh my God! I think this guy is extraordinary, it's such a different feeling! I know he hasn’t had a bath in four months and his mustache smells like peanut butter…” and then I was like, ‘Well, okay.’ I guess that’s love at first sight.”
About hearing voices, call me conservative, but I think like dr. Thomas Szasz, that psychiatrist who said: "if you talk to God you are religious, but if it is God who talks to you, then you are schizophrenic".
(...)
Beatles emulation
It is absolutely! certain that Zappa (born in 1940, like John Lennon) had the Beatles as true competing references. starting from that game of mirrors that wants "Freakout!" as the inspiration for "Sgt. Pepper's" which in turn inspires the irony of "We're only in it For The Money".
It was also a matter of relaunching the American industry, taken by surprise by a wonderfully coordinated operation of the years '64/'65 that were the Beatles of the USA. FZ wrote about those early days in his autobiography:
"The most requested groups were those who pretended to be English. Often they were surf groups with wigs so they looked like they had long hair, or they added the word Beatles somewhere in the name of their band - you get the idea, don't you? There were Beatles clones everywhere. We didn’t have long hair, we didn’t have band uniforms, and we were ugly as shit. We were, in the biblical sense of the word, UNEMPLOYABLE.”
The Beatles had given a very white spin to the blues, from which the Four drew heavily. But in the process of whitening that sexy music (that is r’n’b) the Beatles had revolutionized the music industry, whose value chain used to start with Tin Pan Alley's fixed-salary composers. Lennon & Mc Cartney, instead, wrote and composed their own songs.
Image-wise, the Beatles "experience" eclipsed Elvis' by offering four faces, four archetypes, four human stories for the price of one.
They had also introduced a European composure to rock, usually a rowdy style. This was due to George Martin's "pre-ordained" arrangements, where each instrument had its place, like George Harrison's cubist digressions, or the classical music embroideries (the harpsichord of In My Life could never have been inagined by an American producer.)
Zappa brought a couple of American and white elements to pop music and - for once! - the American response was far more cultural, sociological, jazzy and witty than the English one.
In this FZ was supported by the Mothers of invention who - with disrespect that was anything but British - suggested that the name could be used as an abbreviation of motherfuckers. Motherfuckers they were (MF = expert musician, in the lingo) as they brought to the band's table untainted professionalism (in r'n'r terms) and instrumental cojones, when compared to the much vaunted Beatles. You just need to give a look at one photo of James Carl Black to know he was something else compared to Ringo.
And their moments of tonal improvisation (like the subsequent George Duke of Eat That Question in “The Grand Wazoo” or the swerves of Jean-Luc Ponty) and the free piano fragments that 'democratised' Cecil Taylor's sound both sound fresh even today; a thing that cannot be said for most of the Beatles, at least up to “Rubber Soul”.
Zappa claimed he's uninclined to respect the Beatles. In ’71, to -let's say- direct their respective relationships in the right direction, the Liverpudlian John Lennon decided to play together with Zappa at the Fillmore East, and to insert the King Kong live track of that evening in his LP “Sometime in NYC.” He called it Jam Rag and attributed it to Yoko and himself. Frank politely did not sue him.
(...)
And hairs for everyone!
“We generally do great in areas where there is disorder between generations, because we tend to gas up the environment!”
(FZ on the Mothers, 1967)
One of Frank’s crusades is the celebration of groupies as a symbol of earned sexual freedom. were embodied in the G.T.O.'s, a group of twenty-year-old girls who don’t look like Franzoni defines them in a recent video: “everyone’s whores”. However, it was the debasement of the female sex, or of sexuality tout-court, which is very 1910s but was typical of the 1960s too. With this post-modern absence of feeling that Zappa transmitted by inventing a ‘puttanesque’ and pro-Tecnique myth: GTO as in Girls Together Orally, or also Outrageously; and GTO as in the V8 sports car a tough Texan would drive.
Groupies are a brand of the right thrown in society as an alternative to the liberal flower children: these are starfucking specialists, instrumental to the reaffirmation of the celebrity myth.
On the web, if you look for them, you can find other versions that de-mythologize this ‘slutty’ aspect of the original GTO. Pauline Butcher knew them and was also a groupie, she describes them differently:
“The GTOs were asexual, at the beginning. Two of them, Sparky and Pamela were virgins, Christine had made love to a man, Sandra had a child with Calvin to whom she was faithful, Cinderella and Mercy came later and were heavily into drugs.”
Finding a space in books like “Psychedelic Popular Music” by William Echard, Zappa's official position on psychoactives was even stricter than that of... ABBA. Only tobacco. And coffee. And beer.
Zappa apparently did not like to mix drugs with the life of a rock musician, and said he had smoked “maybe nine joints in ten years” and never tried LSD. Since then, when Technology freed him from the burden of having a band, he - functioning on coffee - immersed himself for days in the bowels of his studio, accompanied by his “favorite vegetable”, cigarette tobacco, smoked even when prostate cancer was advanced. In this (almost) anti-drug attitude he shared the ethos of the freaks, with Vito Paulekas at the forefront, perpetually opposed to any alteration from psychoactive substances.
In an interview with Szou, Vito's wife is swinging on a hammock in vito's studio, and she speaks of LSD as an "army experiment", demonstrating a certain foresight, given that it was only later discovered that LSD had been an army experiment, illicit if administered to unaware users, like those clients of colluding prostitutes who found themselves trippy without wanting it.
Published on the December '18 issue of the Italian music-magazine Blow Up.