Frank Zappa: Perfectly Frank

Originally printed in Guitar World, February 1999

The life and times of Frank Zappa—composer, satirist and towering giant of the electric guitar.

“There’s no single ideal listener out there who likes my orchestral music, my guitar albums and songs like ‘Dyna-Moe-Hum,’ ” Frank Zappa told me in 1988. “That’s why sometimes I’ll do an orchestral album, and the people who like guitar stuff can’t stand it. And then a guitar album comes out, and the people who liked the orchestral album can’t stand that. But you know, they’re all my friends in their own way. So why not accommodate them all?”

Now that Frank is gone, it’s somehow comforting to reread those words. Frank Vincent Zappa was notoriously intolerant of the imperfections in human nature. With a few curt remarks, he could decimate an audience member foolish enough to shout out a song request, or a journalist presumptuous enough to concoct a half-assed theory about him. Yet he was willing to consider all of us who love his music as “friends.”

There are rabid Zappa fanatics out there who would insist that it is possible for one person to admire Zappa’s knotty, inventive orchestral compositions, his honking, brilliant guitar work and the prickly combination of sociology, satire and schoolboy scatological that went into his song lyrics. But it’s no small undertaking. Frank Zappa’s 60-album oeuvre is an imposing body of work. Some of the records are better than others, but the overall quality level is astonishingly high. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Zappa was still in top creative form at age 52, when he succumbed to prostate cancer—on December 4, 1993—after battling the disease for several years.

We’ll never know what he would have achieved had he lived another 20 or 30 years. But we can console ourselves with the fact that, in the brief time allotted to him, he accomplished far more than most humans. Beyond his having been a superb composer and musician, Frank Zappa was also a committed and capable political activist, an innovative filmmaker, able businessman and one of our century’s all-around bona fide smart guys. He raised rock’s IQ more than a few notches.

Submitted by slaptop on 2008-09-20 01:25

I was not so happy see that you left out We're only in it for the Money, maybe my all time favorite after Freakout which I bought in the summer of 66, became an instant lifetime Zappa fan, and still have it although it isn't as playable as it once was, I bought another copy in the 80's and I have it on CD now, and Thing Fish I'd still like to know who ripped off my original box version, but that too I now have on CD. When Frank died I had at least 42 of his original albums, including some other recordings before the Mothers and I'd like to know who took many of those as well, I figure I'm missing around 300 to 400 albums thanks to a few sticky fingered lowlifes. Some I've found on CD many may never be found unless i get mine back. Frank left us one of the greatest collections of music by any composer/musician ever. And maybe some day we'll get to at least hear the rest of it unless Dwezil ever gets around to selling it to us before we die.

Frank Zappa: Perfectly Frank

Comments