Zappa, Frank Vincent

(b. 21 December 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland; d. 4 December 1993 in Los Angeles, California), rock-and-roll musician and experimental composer who expanded the possibilities of rock and at the same time redefined the role of the popular musician.

Zappa’s father, Francis Vincent Zappa, was an immigrant from Sicily who came to the United States as a child. He married Rose Marie, a first-generation Italian American. Zappa’s father became a meteorologist and metallurgist, a professional background with links to the U.S. military that kept the Zappa family moving. His mother was a home-maker. Zappa, the first born, was followed by two brothers and a sister. He was raised as a Roman Catholic, and his early schooling was marked by an almost immediate reaction against the discipline of parochial school. He later attended public schools throughout California. Zappa was twelve years old when he took up the drums, his first musical instrument.

At age thirteen Zappa discovered a composition by Edgard Varèse called Ionisation. Constructed around percussive instruments, Ionisation incorporates nonorchestral sound makers such as sirens, sleigh bells, and other workaday items. In addition to these unconventional instruments Varèse developed his music upon experimental thematic structures. Zappa was entranced by this new cosmos of sound. At the same time he became enamored of early rhythm and blues and amassed a huge record collection.

In 1955, at age fourteen, Zappa joined his first band, the Ramblers, as the drummer. His family moved to Antelope Valley, where Zappa’s father worked at Edwards Air Force Base. Zappa attended Antelope Valley High School, where he formed a band by the name of the Black-Outs and met Don Van Vliet, later known as Captain Beefheart. To celebrate his fifteenth birthday, Zappa was allowed to place a long-distance phone call to his hero, Varèse, who lived in New York City at the time.

By the time Zappa was a senior, he had traded in his drums for a guitar, the instrument he would use for his entire rock career. He graduated from high school in 1958 and enrolled in Antelope Valley Junior College but quickly dropped out. In 1959 he enrolled in Chaffee Junior College in Alta Loma, where he studied music and met Kay Sherman, whom he married the same year. He again dropped out of college and took a succession of jobs while he played in short-lived groups and played the local bar circuit. In 1961 Zappa wrote the score for a film called The World’s Greatest Sinner, but he never got paid for it. After earning money for writing another score for a film called Run Home Slow in 1964, Zappa opened a recording and film studio in Los Angeles called Studio Z. The same year, Zappa divorced Sherman. They had no children.

After creating a sexually suggestive audiotape for an undercover policeman, Zappa was arrested for conspiracy to commit pornography. Zappa later said that almost all of his professional albums were much more “obscene” than this tape, but he was convicted of a lesser charge and sentenced to ten days in jail. His arrest ended Studio Z and made him ineligible for the draft. Soon after getting out of prison, Zappa learned that a local band called the Soul Giants were looking for a guitarist. He joined, and by the fall of 1965 he had taken over leadership of the band and renamed it the Mothers. He also convinced the other band members to perform his early songs, including “Who are the Brain Police?,” “Hungry Freaks,” and “Oh, No, I Don’t Believe It.” This new material was experimental in structure and filled with Zappa’s confrontational humor. The Mothers played throughout the Los Angeles area and while playing the Whisky-A-Go-Go they were spotted by a record executive who signed the group to a record deal on Verve records.

The band lengthened its name to the Mothers of Invention and released its first album, Freak Out!, in 1966. A double disc packed with musical experimentation, social satire, and rhythm-and-blues–inspired pop, Freak Out! marked the beginning of Zappa’s mix of avant-garde compositions and popular rock and roll. He announced this by quoting Varèse on the record sleeve: “The present-day composer refuses to die!” Although the album received no exposure on radio, the band went on a long tour across the United States and in June 1966 opened for Lenny Bruce, another of Zappa’s heroes.

Zappa’s rigorous work ethic took his band immediately back into the studio to record the Mothers’ second album, Absolutely Free (1967). He moved the Mothers to New York City, where the band played for six months at the Garrick Theater. The beginning of 1967 also saw Zappa writing and recording an orchestral piece called Lumpy Gravy. Before taking the Mothers on its first European tour, Zappa moved back to Los Angeles and married Gail Sloatman in the fall of 1967; their daughter, Moon Unit, was born the same year.

In 1968 the band released its most popular album to date: We’re Only In It For the Money was Zappa’s satirical attack upon the previous year’s watershed album, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As parody it was biting in its criticism of hippie culture; as music it was wildly experimental. The album attacked the complacency and drug use of the hippies. Although Zappa would later advocate the legalization of drugs, he never used narcotics and, unlike most musicians of the period, thought them anathema to the creative process.

Over the next two years Zappa would add to his reputation as a workaholic by expanding the Mothers’ lineup to include ten musicians and putting out several albums, including one of the band’s most popular works, Uncle Meat (1968). Zappa also organized appearances with accompanying orchestras and went on a lecture tour of American universities. In addition to his own work, he produced one of the seminal albums of the period, Captain Beef-heart’s Trout Mask Replica (1969). But by the summer of 1969 the effort of moving his large band around the globe proved too costly, and Zappa disbanded the Mothers. He immediately went to work on his first solo album, Hot Rats (1969). The same year the Zappa family moved into a house on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills that would remain their residence for the rest of Zappa’s life.

Zappa’s first son, Dweezil, was born in 1970; his second son, Ahmet, followed in 1975, and his fourth child, a daughter named Diva, was born in 1980. In addition to enlarging his family, the 1970s were an incredibly prolific period for Zappa. He released nineteen albums, ranging from a reunited Mothers work accompanied by orchestra called 200 Motels (1971), which spawned a film of the same name, to popular work such as Over-Nite Sensation (1973) and Sheik Yerbouti (1979). Albums such as Apostrophe (’) (1974) cemented Zappa’s reputation as a musical experimenter with a caustic wit. The end of the decade also saw the release of his rock opera Joe’s Garage (1979), which warned of censorship in the music industry, and another film, Baby Snakes (1979). Zappa’s distinctive mustache and goatee became a pop trademark, and his comic attacks upon cultural shibboleths and his challenging stage performances made him one of the most popular rock acts of his day.

The 1980s saw Zappa concentrating on his compositions for orchestra. He released twenty-three albums over the course of the decade, ranging from the jazz-influenced instrumental Shut Up ’N Play Yer Guitar (1981) to the popular Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch (1982), which included Zappa’s most popular single, “Valley Girl.” He also worked with many orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra. Several public appearances were indicative of his musical range: in 1981 he hosted “A Tribute to Edgard Varesè” in New York, and in 1983 he conducted Ionisation in San Francisco to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Varèse’s birth. However, in 1982, Zappa’s rock world hit one of its lowest points when a concert in his father’s hometown in Sicily turned into a riot that resulted in the use of tear gas on the audience.

In 1985 Zappa appeared before the Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation Committee to speak out against the efforts of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) to censor popular music. Using a Synclavier, Zappa recorded an instrumental album called Jazz from Hell (1986) that won a Grammy Award in 1988 for best rock instrumental performance. The same year saw the release of You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, the first in a series of archival albums ranging across Zappa’s entire career. In 1989 Zappa traveled to Russia to arrange for the licensing of his work; he became interested in international business and set up a consulting firm called Why Not? On a trip to Czechoslovakia, Zappa met with Czech president and Zappa fan Vaclav Havel, who asked Zappa to represent Czech business in the United States.

Zappa was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer in 1990. Although he never seemed to stop working and even wrote new compositions for the Ensemble Modern, Zappa’s health quickly deteriorated. The Yellow Sharif a Zappaproduced recording of the Ensemble Modern performing his compositions, was released a month before his death. He died on 4 December 1993 in his home and was buried at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles. At the time of his death he had released more than sixty albums.

Zappa was an iconoclast who not only challenged the form and content of pop culture but also collapsed the barriers between classical and rock music. His work combined the avant-garde dissonant counterpoint of Vérese with the harmony of American rhythm and blues to create a unique oeuvre that changed rock and influenced the popular culture of the world. The quote from Varèse on the first Mothers album–“The modern day composer refuses to die!”– continues to be felt in his recorded legacy.

Frank Zappa’s autobiography, with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, was published in 1989. Important biographical work includes Greg Russo, Cosmik Debris: The Collected History and Improvisations of Franks Zappa (1998); Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote: The Story of Frank Zappa (1997); David Walley, No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa (1996); Michael Gray, Mother! Is the Story of Frank Zappa (1985); and Barry Miles, Frank Zappa– A Visual Documentary (1993). Critical appraisals of Zappa’s work and interviews with him are collected in Richard Kostelanetz, The Frank Zappa Companion (1997). A critical approach to Zappa’s relationship to avant-garde art and thought is supplied in Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1995). An obituary is in the New York Times (5 Dec. 1993).

John Rocco