Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa: The Autodidact Who Made Boulez Listen

In January 1984, Pierre Boulez — the most forbidding figure in European modernism — stood before the Ensemble InterContemporain at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and conducted three pieces by the author of a song called "Titties and Beer." The album was recorded at IRCAM that spring. Zappa had been writing classical music since he was fourteen, and had spent thirty years waiting for an ensemble capable of playing it properly.

Mustard Gas and Mercury

Frank Vincent Zappa was born in Baltimore on 21 December 1940, the eldest of four children in a household of predominantly Sicilian descent. His father was a chemist and mathematician in the defence industry who worked at the Edgewood Arsenal chemical warfare facility at Aberdeen Proving Ground. The family kept gas masks in the house because of the mustard gas stored nearby. His father also brought home mercury-filled laboratory equipment for his son to play with; Zappa poured it across the floor and hammered it into circular sprays of droplets around his bedroom.

He had asthma, earaches and chronic sinus trouble; a physician treated the sinusitis by inserting radioactive radium pellets into both his nostrils. Zappa always believed the mustard gas was responsible. In 1952 the family moved to Monterey for his health. He attended at least six high schools, graduated from Antelope Valley High in 1958, lasted one semester at Chaffey College in 1959, and spent the rest of his life despising formal education — he pulled his own children out of school at fifteen and refused to pay for college.

Varèse, by Mail Order

At twelve he learned drum rudiments in a Monterey summer course, practising on wooden planks. The decisive event came from a *LOOK* magazine article about the Sam Goody record chain, which mentioned an obscure LP by Edgard Varèse. Zappa hunted for it for more than a year before finding *The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One* in a discount bin. *Ionisation*, scored for percussion alone, rearranged his understanding of what music could be.

For his fifteenth birthday his mother paid for a long-distance call to Varèse in New York. The composer was in Europe; Zappa spoke to his wife Louise. Varèse wrote back, describing a piece he was working on called *Déserts*. Zappa was living in Lancaster, in the desert. He framed the letter and kept it on display for the rest of his life. They never met. By his final year of high school he was writing, arranging and conducting avant-garde pieces for the school orchestra, and he later took private composition lessons from Professor Karl Kohn at Pomona College — the closest thing to formal training he ever had.

Studio Z and the Mothers

He worked briefly as an advertising copywriter, then took over Paul Buff's Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga — remarkable for its five-track tape machine when most studios ran two — renamed it Studio Z and worked twelve-hour days on overdubbing and tape manipulation. In March 1965 an undercover vice officer offered him $100 to produce a suggestive tape for a bachelor party. Zappa and a friend faked one, and he was arrested on handover and charged with conspiracy to commit pornography, serving ten days. The experience made him permanently, professionally anti-authoritarian.

In April 1965 he joined an R&B band called the Soul Giants, took it over, and renamed it the Mothers on 10 May — Mother's Day. Tom Wilson, who had produced Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel, signed them to Verve; the label insisted on "Mothers of Invention" because "Mother" was contemporary slang for something unprintable.

*Freak Out!* (1966) was the second double album in rock history, after *Blonde on Blonde*. Session players turned up and were startled to find written charts and Zappa conducting. Over the next two years came *Absolutely Free*, *Lumpy Gravy* — a monument to John Cage assembled through radical tape editing — and *We're Only in It for the Money*, whose sleeve parodied *Sgt. Pepper* and whose songs dismantled flower power with more contempt than he ever showed the establishment. His stated programme was simple: "We're satirists, and we are out to satirize everything."

Guitar, Litigation, Damage

*Hot Rats* (1969) put his guitar playing on record at length for the first time and helped invent jazz-rock fusion. Then, on 4 December 1971, a flare fired by an audience member burned down the Casino de Montreux with the band's equipment inside — the incident Deep Purple turned into "Smoke on the Water." A week later at London's Rainbow Theatre, a jealous audience member pushed him into the concrete orchestra pit. He suffered fractures, head trauma and a crushed larynx; his voice dropped a major third permanently and one leg healed shorter than the other, leaving him in chronic pain.

He recorded relentlessly regardless: *Apostrophe (')* (1974), which reached number ten and remains his commercial peak, *One Size Fits All* (1975), *Sheik Yerbouti* (1979), his best-selling record, and *Joe's Garage* (1979), a rock opera about a state that outlaws music, prompted in part by the Iranian revolution. Most of the decade was spent in litigation with managers and labels. His biggest single, "Valley Girl" (1982), featured his daughter Moon improvising San Fernando Valley teenspeak.

Why Frank Is Called a Genius

Zappa's claim is unusual on this list because it is not primarily about songs. It is about the ability to hear extremely complicated music — rhythmic subdivisions, meter changes, densely stacked lines — notate it accurately, and then insist that human beings play it exactly as written. The horn player Jacques Deleplanque, who performed the Boulez sessions, gave the flattest professional verdict available: "His pieces were top-tier contemporary music — fully conceived and written. He was incredibly demanding, meticulous — almost worse than Boulez." That is a working musician from the Ensemble InterContemporain saying a rock guitarist out-Bouleze'd Boulez on precision.

The supporting evidence is consistent. Kent Nagano, who conducted the London Symphony sessions and was pleased with them, still conceded that "in fairness to the orchestra, the music is humanly very, very difficult." Boulez agreed to the collaboration on one stated condition — "that all parties involved must be professionals" — which from him is an endorsement, not a caveat. And when Zappa adopted the Synclavier in 1983, his reasoning was purely compositional: "With the Synclavier, any group of imaginary instruments can be invited to play the most difficult passages ... with one-millisecond accuracy — every time." He had finally found a performer who would not let him down.

The counter-case is real and he supplied most of it himself. He was dissatisfied with nearly every orchestral recording he ever paid for — "Strictly Genteel" needed forty edits to hide out-of-tune notes after the LSO's trumpet section drank on their break — and a composer perpetually disappointed by professionals is either writing unplayable music or is impossible to satisfy. The Boulez concert itself was modestly received. And the enduring critical split is that his admirers value the compositional complexity while his detractors find the work emotionally hollow, buried under a volume of scatological comedy that makes serious assessment tiring. He was a genius of construction. Whether he was a genius of expression is still genuinely contested.

Legacy

He went after televangelists and the Reagan era's "obscene pursuit of wealth and happiness," and asked the question that defines him: "What do you make of a society that is so primitive that it clings to the belief that certain words in its language are so powerful that they could corrupt you the moment you hear them?" He disapproved of recreational drugs while supporting decriminalisation, and in 1984 keynoted the American Society of University Composers with an address titled "Bingo! There Goes Your Tenure." He died of prostate cancer in Los Angeles on 4 December 1993, aged fifty-two, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 — institutional honours from bodies he would have cheerfully insulted.

Achievements

• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1997
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 1995
• Instruments: guitar, keyboard instrument and bass guitar
• Genres: rock music, experimental music and avant-garde music