Zappa again...
Zappa again…
I havent posted anything about Frank Zappa in a while. I got about three albums into a serial album review because more and more aa i tried to write meaningfully about what I was listening to, it became difficult because i hadn’t really ever studied the real time stuff.. I’d read frank’s autobio, but that was a while back and more memoir ad reminiscences than blow by blow this happended, then that did.
Another thing that sorta ruined the oomph for the reviews was that i started looking ahead in the book. I got in my head i wanted to listen to Joe’s Garage, about 12 years ahead of where i was, and i lost the steam to blast through. And it became more and more my opinion of the music, not necessarily the context in which it happened.
It turns out that Zappa has been more appreciated elsewhere than here. First, he started out as the local bad boy band that was more banal than anything else, but they would also be commended for cleverly including things by Stravinsky, for example, in their music.
I’ve been reading a book called “Mother! The Frank Zappa Story” by Michael Gray, a UK music writer and music industry insider. It’s a laundry list of first he did that, then he did that, then so and joined/quit/rejoined the band, etc. Frank started his ascent in the LA scene in like but wasn’t really appreciated as musician of talent until he got to NYC, and had another level of that when he went to Europe. It’s helpful to know what was recorded when, and a lot of the earlier stuff got published later (some posthumously) so going in order wasn’t meaningful in that way, either.
Another interesting bit is reading the crosses with other artists. When I read the Jim Morrison biography 20+ years ago, i don’t remember Zappa being mentioned, but apparently they were close enough that it wasn’t unusual for Morrison to be over at Zappa’s house getting high with the girls while Frank mostly likely scowled &/or growled disapprovingly.
I don’t think that Frank and I would have liked each other had we ever had any reason to interact in any meaningful way.
An interesting similarity between Zappa and Morrison: during the late 60’s they were exploring crowd dynamics with their performances: Morrison checking out how much he could whip the kids into a frenzy (a post concert riot being a success) while FZ was checking how much he could insult his audiences and get away with it.
I hope to do some more music reviews soonish…