The one band both Frank Zappa and Lou Reed couldn’t stand: “Beyond the realm of credibility”
If you put the most studied musicologists in a lab for a year and told them to come up with something on the eccentric side, there’s a good chance they couldn’t hold a candle to Lou Reed or Frank Zappa.
Neither of them apologised for being so profoundly weird in their tunes, and throughout their history, you can practically pinpoint the moments where they changed rock on a dime whenever they put out a new record. Not everything was spotless, but they would rather have pushed the envelope than been a poser.
Because let’s face it: both Zappa and Reed marched to the beat of their own drum. Reed would forever be known as the one who brought alternative music to the mainstream with The Velvet Underground, but if he had a lot more swagger in his attitude, Zappa was the studied musician who brought more sophistication to rock and roll while simultaneously making fun of it half the time.
Nothing that Zappa ever made was designed for the charts, and especially in an era that was known for peace, love and understanding, he had no room for hippies. The idea of free love and being able to express oneself may have resonated with him a bit more, but the idea of a bunch of people running through a field high out of their minds on acid and refusing to take a damn shower probably wasn’t the best message for people to bring across.
And no one matched that mentality better than The Doors back in the day. For all of the great music that they made throughout their career, Zappa felt that everything they stood for was absolutely horrible, saying, “The type of merchandising that was originally associated with Doors music I thought was really distasteful and stretching the boundaries of what it actually was beyond the realm of credibility.”
Although that kind of mentality was the exact reason why Zappa included that hilarious ending bit in ‘Who Needs the Peace Corps’, it would have been easier for Reed to understand it, right? He famously disagreed with Zappa on many different aspects of his life, but if there’s one thing that they could agree on, it was the fact that Jim Morrison was far from the kind of artist that they wanted to champion.
The band was at least trying to expand the minds of a lot of kids during that time, but all Reed saw was someone trying to be as pretentious as humanly possible, saying, “They were just painfully stupid and pretentious, and when they did try to get, ‘arty,’ it was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by ‘stupid,’ I mean, like, The Doors.” Then again, are Reed and Zappa really being fair here?
No, they weren’t meant to be one of the most in-depth bands of all time, but there’s something to be said about someone who exposed the world to more avant-garde ideas. ‘Moonlight Drive’ would have never had a shot on the charts had ‘Light My Fire’ not blown everything wide open, and while Morrison’s moves are somewhere between a tortured poet and a drunken buffoon, he at least believed in the idea that his music could move mountains.
Although The Doors, The Velvet Underground and The Mothers of Invention all occupy some strange place in rock and roll history, the one thing that everyone can agree on was that they each had a dream of rock and roll being something bigger. They had followed the lead of other revolutionaries before them, and they would not stop until they left a trail of artistic destruction in their path.
