Most people who know me probably don’t know this particular fact about me, because I actually don’t talk about it much anymore.

I love Frank Zappa.

I love his crazy music. I love his family, especially Dweezil. I loved his crazy approach to guitar. I loved his obsession with being different.

Alex Winter (yes, THAT Alex Winter – “Bill S. Preston, esq.” himself) made a beautiful documentary that takes you on a trip through Frank’s life, telling it through unprecedented access to the Zappa Vault – Frank recorded as much as he possibly could of his life, his music, everything. There’s a TON of footage you’d never expect to see. It weaved a wonderful story, focusing on Frank’s music, but detailing how he related to his family, his musicians, the media, the music business, everything. It was fascinating to me.

Let me tell my Zappa story.

It all started when I was a little kid living in the Los Angeles suburbs – San Dimas, California, to be precise. Which I now realize is kind of crazy considering who made the movie. What a connection. Anyway…I heard this song “Valley Girl” on the radio. It was EVERYWHERE in 1982, including on a K-Tel compilation (“The Hit List”) that we got late that year (or perhaps sometime in 1983). The song was Frank’s only real hit, actually. It featured his daughter Moon Unit doing her best Valley Girl voice, in a time before people really talked about that as an American dialect. It was melodic, aggressive, and semi-dirty. It would cut between the refrain “Valley Girl” and Moon telling some story about something in the life of the titular teen in the verses, and then go into more detail in the band-sung refrain. I loved everything about it, from the bendy/slidey bass parts to the hyper-melodic choruses. It was weird and wonderful and so very LA. I don’t know that I really understood where it was all coming from, but the song stayed with me.

Cut to my senior year of high school. There was a kid a year behind me who was obsessed with really great guitarists. I can’t remember exactly the circumstances, but we were working on something for the school, and he had a boom box there, and he played two records: The first Extreme record, and Dweezil Zappa’s then-brand-new solo record “Confessions“, which just happened to be produced by the guitarist from Extreme, Nuno Bettencourt. Nuno was fast becoming one of my favorite musicians because of their second record “Extreme II: Pornograffitti”.

In the fall of 1991, I headed to college at the very large San Diego State University. The summer before, I had purchased the Dweezil Zappa record and that first Extreme record. I listened to them over and over. Especially Dweezil’s album. He had a song on there called “Vanity” that also featured his sister, and it got me thinking about Frank again. A few weeks into being at my very large university, I was wandering through the very large student bookstore at SDSU and one of the books they had there was this:

I HAD to have it.

It’s still one of the best books I’ve ever read by a famous person. It goes all over the place in scope, talking about everything from his life to music, business, politics, fatherhood – just tons of different topics, and I read it over and over. It just clicked with me in much the same way the comedy of my hero George Carlin did. He wrote things and said things that both confirmed what I thought, but expanded it in ways I never would have thought to think.

After reading Frank’s book, I was a fan. I hadn’t even delved that deeply into his music yet (at this point it was basically Valley Girl and Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow), and I just tried to find anything I could about him. I didn’t know a lot of people that shared this affection, so I mostly kept it to myself.

Then I moved to Pennsylvania and met a nice kid named Joel Niemann. He liked weird shit like Primus. I liked them, too, and because of our shared affection for Primus (who SUCKS – fans will get that), we became buddies, and I found out he liked Zappa, too. His friend from home, Brian, was way into Zappa, so I think he thought it was cool I liked him, too. Shortly after that I got the “Sheik Yerbouti” album, which featured a track that Joel used to sing that made me laugh called “Broken Hearts Are For Assholes”. Like the Dweezil record, I wore it out. The more I dig in to Frank, the more I find I haven’t even heard yet. He produced so much music in his shortened life that they’ll probably still be releasing “new” stuff for the next 20 years, and he’s been dead for almost 30 now. He died in December of 1993, and it actually broke my heart. I had just become a massive fan, and he was gone. Even worse, this same “love an artist and then they die almost right away” thing had just happened to me four years before that when Stevie Ray Vaughan died. When my daughter got obsessed with Michael Jackson in early 2009, I was extra sad for her when he passed just a few months later. But at least you always have the music.

Frank Zappa was a true iconoclast. A genius composer of truly modern music, rhythmically complex and dense, but performed with ridiculous attention to detail by the genius musicians he hired in his bands, and frequently sort of undercut by nasty lyrics or sophomoric humor. The pearl-clutchers in this country never quite got past that.

Despite his lack of commercial success in America, Frank was a truly American original, even though Europeans and Asians seemed to “get it” a lot better.

I’m not sure if he was too smart, too weird, or too filthy for “normies” to understand, but those three things are why Frank was so important to me and my development as a musician and a person. I joked to my wife Erin that if I were a table, Zappa and Carlin would be two of the legs. The other two would probably be Science and Mr. Rogers.

I highly recommend you check out The Real Frank Zappa Book and Alex Winter’s “Zappa”.

Spotify playlists for further listening:

A nice Frank Zappa playlist that doesn’t scratch the surface but features the songs I mentioned earlier plus some other cool shit.

The Hit List – That K-Tel record I mentioned earlier

The Yellow Shark (FZ orchestral music)

Thank you for reading! Stay safe and healthy – wash your hands, wear a mask, and physically distance. Black Lives Matter.

TMS