“Amazing”: Frank Zappa’s favourite pop song
With his Guy Fawkes facial hair, Frank Zappa focused all his tyranny against convention. The term genre-defying is perhaps overused, in part because some people get so pernickety about categorisation that avoiding it offers a safe way to navigate the classified terrain, yet there’s scarcely any artists out there more befitting of the term than the zany Zappa.
He might have appeared like the most obvious drug dealer in the room, the sort of fellow with an ounce of homemade magic dust tucked under his bowler hat, but he was staunchly anti-drug. He might have hated commercialism, but his first senior job was working in an ad agency. Similarly, his music, contrary to the instrumentation, has more in common with classical than atypical rock ‘n’ roll.
He started off as a high-school drummer, with his early influences being percussion-heavy modern-classical, before picking up the guitar and dipping into his favourite brand of pop, perhaps the only brand that ever interested him for that matter: doo-wop. This mix of extravagant orchestration and simple blues pop created a wholly weird blend that Zappa called his own.
Why did he hold doo-wop so dear? Well, in many ways, it was a genre that subtly broke free from the confines of conventional pop. As Leonard Bernstein said when The Beatles channelled doo-wop ways into rock ‘n’ roll, “This new music is much more primitive in its harmonic language. It relies more on the simple triad, the basic harmony of folk music.“
He adds, “Never forget that this music employs a highly limited musical vocabulary, limited harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically. But within that restricted language, all these new adventures are simply extraordinary.“ Doo-wop extended the vocabulary by using the boundless medium of vocals as an instrument.
Few songs in history document that quite like Zappa’s favourite pop song: ‘Can I Come Over Tonight’ by The Velours. Speaking about the song in Let It Rock, the late musician selected it among his all-time favourite tunes and explained, “Any musicologist that can find that record and listen to the bass singer … he’s singing quintuplets and septuplets. And considering where it came from and when it was made (it was on the East Coast Onyx label) it was amazing.“
In fact, the bass singing is positively insane—another element Zappa loved in his music. Likewise, the topline melodic singing verges on a Tweety-Pie whistle that makes the whole thing a whirlwind of vocalised sounds. There isn’t a commonplace arrangement in sight on this strange 1957 track, which might have been a monster hit to Zappa, but for the rest of the world, it peaked at 83 in the US and failed to make waves overseas.
The Velours themselves, a vocal group from Brooklyn, would fold in 1961 after eight years of testing the limits of what human voices can parp, bellow and grumble. However, when Zappa began heaping praise and the counterculture kids looked back to the past, they briefly got back together in the late 1960s, but once again, the world wasn’t truly ready for them.
Yet, Zappa didn’t pick many duds in his time, and fate had different plans for The Velours than to see them fade into obscurity. Club owner and toupe fanatic Peter Stringfellow booked the group to a club in Sheffield in 1968 where Motown was still all the rage—eventually mutating into the northern soul craze. However, the wily promoter somewhat disrespectfully billed the band as The Fabulous Temptations, hoping to cash in on the notion that their most successful counterparts might be performing.
Nevertheless, in a manner akin to Zappa’s keen background in advertising, it proved to be a masterstroke, and the show was a roaring success. So, the group stayed in England under the name The Fantastics and doo-wopped their complex little way to ninth in the charts on subsequent singles, and their group leader, Johny Pitts, even ended up settling down as a lecturer at the University of Huddersfield.
It’s hard to tell if Zappa really had that in mind when he praised the group, but the moustachioed musician always worked in mysterious ways.
