Who is the best rock musician of all time? Bob Dylan? Jimi Hendrix? Maybe, for the genre’s historians, an overlooked innovator like Sister Rosetta Tharpe? The debate among fans will never be settled: taste is subjective.
A more interesting, if less discussed, question is: who is the weirdest? There are lots of plausible candidates. The Residents, an anonymous quartet, dressed like giant eyeballs with top hats and canes. Ozzy Osbourne had a pet shoe. Not to mention 1980s noise-rock outfit the Butthole Surfers.
For me, the answer to both these questions is one and the same: Frank Zappa, the most eccentric, versatile, talented and—bluntly—pretentious figure on the scene. His output defied categorisation, incorporating Mississippi delta blues, avant-garde jazz and ironic doo-wop—often during the same song. Whether recording with the Mothers of Invention or the London Symphony Orchestra, he was restlessly innovative. Celebrity fans include Irvine Welsh—Trainspotting is stuffed with Zappa references—and Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. Salman Rushdie is a Zappa-head, as is Germaine Greer. Musical admirers have included the ageing Duke Ellington, David Bowie (who made his band cover Zappa songs), and our current queen of weird pop Lady Gaga. His spectacular career, captured in a fascinating new documentary by Alex Winter entitled simply Zappa, is a singular lesson in the importance of being unusual.
Frank Zappa was born in 1940 with a name that didn’t require adaptation for the stage. His family moved from Maryland, where his father had worked in a factory that produced mustard gas for the US Army, to a succession of spots in California. Just down his street in Lancaster, in the desert south of the state, lived Don Van Vliet, who would later become the pioneering bandleader Captain Beefheart—another deeply weird artist and a lifelong collaborator with Zappa. As teenagers, the two would listen to rhythm and blues records until three in the morning.
Zappa was already determined to do something different. An epiphany came when reading a negative review of a classical music piece—it was virtually unlistenable, said the review, and verging on the unethical. Zappa immediately bought Edgard Varese’s “Ionisation” and, as he put it, “couldn’t understand why people didn’t love it the minute they heard it.” As a young rebel, Zappa once plotted to blow up his own high school. Failing that, he blew up musical orthodoxy instead.
The rest is rock history. He formed a local band (it was racially mixed and opposed by the city authorities, who regarded it as a threat to the decency of the community), moved into a recording studio in LA (where he was arrested for making indecent films) and eventually formed his first big-time outfit, The Mothers. Their 1966 debut, Freak Out!, gives you a good idea of his range. It moves from the rock-anthem opener “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” to the more adventurous “Help, I’m a Rock!” to the finale: a 12-minute number called “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet (Unfinished Ballet in Two Tableaux),” the latter part titled “Nullis Pretii (No Commercial Potential).” The album introduces us to Suzie Creamcheese—a recurring character played by various collaborators including Jeannie Vassoir and Pamela Zarubica, and who would later be joined by the likes of Potato-Head Bobby.
His work ethic was prodigious. Zappa put out 62 albums in his lifetime, and some 54 more have been released since his premature death in 1993. He performed a surprisingly successful duet with his daughter, who he named Moon Unit. Much of the later recording was done in his home studio called the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Career highlights include: Hot Rats, with its sumptuous opener, “Peaches en Regalia,” followed by the aggressive 10-minute blues jam with Beefheart, “Willie the Pimp.” Weasels Ripped My Flesh is another standout (and Rushdie’s favourite). We’re Only in It for the Money was a controversial parody of the Beatles, complete with distorted Sgt Pepper artwork. Rolling Stone ranked it as one of the best albums of all time.
Other rock musicians released weird tracks: The Beatles could at times embody self-conscious, art-student oddity. But the sheer absurdity laced through Zappa’s discography is in another, altogether more joyful, league. Take the spoken intro to “Muffin Man”—the best version being the one performed on the Bongo Fury tour with Beefheart—which still has fans scratching their heads as to what, if any, deeper meaning lies beneath.
The Muffin Man is seated at the table
In the laboratory of the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen…
Reaching for an oversized chrome spoon
He gathers an intimate quantity of dried muffin remnants!
And, brushing his scapular aside
Proceeds to dump these inside of his shirt.
He turns to us and speaks:
“Some people like cupcakes better. I, for one, care less for them!”
Arrogantly twisting the sterile canvas snoot
Of a fully charged icing-anointment utensil
He poots forth a quarter-ounce green rosette
Near the summit of a dense-but-radiant muffin
Of his own design.
Later he says:
“Some people, some people like cupcakes exclusively
While I myself I say, there is naught
Nor ought there be, nothing so exalted
On the face of God’s grey earth
As that Prince of foods… the Muffin!”
And here is “The Duke of Prunes”:
A moon beam through the prune, in June
Reveals your chest. I see your lovely beans
And in that magic go-kart I bite your neck.
The cheese I have for you, my dear
Is real and very new
There is something different going on here from your normal rock-star rebellion or psychedelic “revelation.” It is much sillier, a kind of Dadaism—yet of a very high quality. “He had so much talent, it defied everything,” says his late collaborator Bruce Bickford in Zappa. The Zappa sound is hard to explain because it’s so diffuse and incorporates so many elements, but at the heart of it is an emotional core transcending the technical wizardry. Somehow, despite the variety, you know when you’re listening to a Zappa song. As former band member Ruth Underwood put it: “It’s jazz music, no it isn’t. It’s rock music, no not at all! So what is it? It’s Zappa!”
It wasn’t for everyone. Lou Reed called him “probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life,” though he later recanted and helped induct Zappa into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
On the carnival went, with the orchestral elements becoming gradually more pronounced. One former band member credits Zappa with being at “the forefront of innovation with regard to rhythmic, polymetric notation.” The performances with the LSO brought him attention from a new audience and, thanks to collaboration with figures like Pierre Boulez, he became a prominent member of the classical avant-garde. His final project was one of his greatest: a series of performances with the Germany-based Ensemble Modern, released as The Yellow Shark. The opening concert was met with a 20-minute standing ovation. “It’s the clarity of his perfect madness, and mastery,” said Tom Waits of the recordings. “Frank governs with Elmore James on his left and Stravinsky on his right.”
“The young Zappa once plotted to blow up his high school.
Failing that, he blew up musical orthodoxy instead”
He was deeply political, too. Zappa campaigned against censoring music, appearing in front of congressional committees. He performed an unexpected formal diplomatic role between the US and the newly liberated Czechoslovakia—he was seen there as the doyen of free expression, and was astonished at being greeted by 5,000 people when he got off the plane in Prague for a meeting with the new Czechoslovak president. His death from prostate cancer came shortly after the trip: he smoked like a chimney his entire life, though interestingly, given the counter-cultural stereotype, he despised drugs—and often the people who took them, no matter that this would have included many of his fans. There is not necessarily anything wrong with weirdness that is chemically-induced, but his wasn’t—it was innate.
What new light does Alex Winter shed in his film? Quite a lot. Known best for his role as Bill to Keanu Reeves’s Ted in eighties cult classic Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (and the two sequels), Winter is a die-hard Zappa fan, and so this documentary probably isn’t the best starting point for newcomers—it is a passion project by someone who’s been thinking about Zappa for a long time. Winter has gained access to the immense archive below Zappa’s old house: it took him years to restore the old material and countless hours to go through it all. He does well to stitch so much previously unseen footage into a coherent celebration of this remarkable man, while giving due attention to the bandmates, visual artists and, crucially, the women who were sometimes elbowed aside as Zappa blazed his pioneering trail.
If I have one complaint, it is that at times Zappa’s classical turn feels presented as though it was the logical zenith of his career: as though the silliness was just immaturity, before the proper composer broke through. If any viewers are enticed into that view, it would be a shame. The sense of defiant nonsense laced through Zappa’s career, from the first Mothers recordings through to the high orchestral composition at the end, is key to the whole story.
The larger question is: what was that weirdness for? It’s amusing, it’s unsettling, but beyond shock value (or even, as with 1979’s Sheikh Yarbouti, gratuitous offensiveness), what purpose does it serve?
One answer is to look at things in pragmatic terms: it was Zappa’s playful free-spiritedness that enabled him to experiment without the fear of sounding silly, and so produce music of unparalleled variety. By rising above the expectations of society and the fashions of the day, he was able to explore what no one else could. It liberated him to try new things, with all the advantages that entails in terms of musical progression.
There’s certainly a case for that reading. But for me, Zappa’s weirdness—indeed, weirdness in general—is not reducible to “usefulness.” Maybe part of the joy is that it’s useless. Matt Groening has praised musicians who refuse to march to what he terms the “factory rhythm”—the normal metre which pretty much all music—all life—abides by: dum, dum, dum, dum. The world can be dull, and when it’s not dull, it’s often interesting for bad reasons, because of war or natural disaster.
Zappa, though, was not dull. He never marched to the factory rhythm. That is a public service, and valuable in its own right. We could all do with being a bit more like Zappa. But if that’s too much of a reach, you can start by listening to him. Just don’t call your daughter Moon Unit.
