The band Frank Zappa thought was too “robust” for Britain
Frank Zappa has always been something of an eccentric and was notoriously hard to please. Throughout his prolific career, his motive was often to create music that was confounding and boundary-pushing, but it often came at a cost of alienating his audience. However, while he was never built for mainstream success, he managed to amass something of a cult following, and it was part of his appeal that he never created something that would be appreciated by a wider audience.
You have to sometimes call into question whether he was a contrarian for contrarianism’s sake, but a deeper dive proves that he had a varied taste that encompassed music from a variety of genres. He may have said plenty of disparaging things about his contemporaries, but deep down, he was an appreciator of anything that attempted to think outside of the box, whether that was in rock, jazz or classical music.
His bizarre antics, sense of humour, and avant-garde sensibilities were always going to push him towards the leftfield, but despite this anti-popularity stance that he took, he was still celebrated by several notable figures within the mainstream, with John Lennon and Led Zeppelin expressing their admiration for his extravagance and unique approach to music. That being said, there were plenty who were ardent critics of his work, with Lou Reed, David Bowie and Joni Mitchell taking swipes at him over the years.
Given how polarising he was as a figure, and how he could often be a tad too strange to garner appeal from a mainstream audience, can you imagine the mayhem that would be unleashed if he were to participate as a guest host for a radio show on one of the biggest stations? Well, this actually happened when he was invited to curate his own edition of Star Special for BBC Radio 1 in 1980, and his playlist on the day was filled to the brim with curious choices and unusual insight into the music that he selected.
Of course, he played some songs from close friend and collaborator Captain Beefheart and the notorious outsider street musician Wild Man Fischer to weed out any listeners who didn’t possess a strong enough constitution to be able to handle his madness, but he also chose to play songs from The Beatles and Queen to appease some of his less adventurous listeners. It was a predictably scattered selection from Zappa, although there was one unusual pick that he thought would really struggle to translate to a British audience.
In typical sardonic fashion, Zappa proclaimed that he didn’t think that listeners in the UK would appreciate ZZ Top due to how distinctly American their sound and themes are, and his comments after playing ‘Jesus Just Left Chicago’ were predictably humorous. “I don’t know whether they play very much of ZZ Top’s kind of music in this country,” Zappa inquired. “It seems a little bit too robust for the countryside from what I’ve been able to detect. But if you go for that kind of stuff, I recommend a song called ‘The Mexican Blackbird’ on one of their other albums.”
Of course, UK audiences are more than familiar with the music of ZZ Top, and despite being very American at their core, saying that their work can’t be appreciated in Britain is like saying that the US wouldn’t understand the intrinsically British folk of someone like Nick Drake. It’s funny to think that of all of his selections, he thought that this would be the most out-there and beyond our island’s comprehension, but that’s just a true indicator that Zappa was living on his own planet, and frankly, there was no better place for him.
