Five wild moments from the life of Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa always lived life on the more endearing side of strange, and his music was a reflection of his non-conformist alternative lifestyle. Whether he was bashing Republicans or penning songs about dental floss tycoons, he remained a free-thinker and creative throughout his entire career. His music remains shockingly innovative and ahead of its time because there was almost no style Zappa couldn’t execute flawlessly.
Zappa first gained public attention during his time with The Mothers Of Invention. Their debut, Freak Out!, was a theatrical, avant-garde album that blended satirical lyrics with quite conceptually high-brow compositions. Together, they gained a strong fan base whilst eschewing all established rules of making it in the rock business. Their songs were often silly but musically were always incredibly complex.
When the Mothers broke up in 1969, Zappa went on to a genre-defying career that saw him work with orchestras and musicians worldwide, including the likes of Steve Vai and Alice Cooper. He was famed for running an extremely tight ship, often holding musicians playing for him to increasingly high standards. His infamous ‘The Black Page’ was an audible testament to this and was written by design to be almost impossible to play. When his band mastered it – he simply wrote a second version.
In his lifetime, he released over 62 albums. A gifted satirist as well as composer, the lyrics on those albums swung from fairly serious social commentary to non sequitur nonsense. If life imitates art, it’s almost no wonder that Zappa’s career was coloured by a series of wild moments. Here, we’ve compiled a list of five that tell the story of Zappa’s weirdest moments.
Frank Zappa’s five wildest moments:
Biohazardous Childhood Toys
Fans of Zappa will be aware of the weirdly titled ‘Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask’ that appeared on Weasels Ripped My Flesh – but they might not know it was a childhood fascination that inspired it. His father worked as an engineer and metallurgist for Convair aircraft corporations, studying the effects of mustard gas. When a young Zappa lived on the compound where his father worked, everyone in the family was issued a gas mask in case experiments went awry and the gas tanks leaked.
Talking to The Washington Post, Zappa said: “I opened mine up with a can opener to see what was inside. I was probably the only one in the compound who did that. But it made it much easier to breathe without the stuff inside. We were real poor. It was my only toy. The crazy thing is if the gas tanks had leaked, I would have suffocated.”
First TV appearance
Frank Zappa was one of the world’s most proficient guitar players. He could also play drums, percussion, piano and bass, and when he composed, he made it his business to know how every instrument in an orchestra worked. Oh, and he managed to play a bicycle in one of his first television appearances in 1963 while appearing on the Steve Allen show.
Armed with only two drumsticks, a bass bow and two bicycles, Zappa manages to produce all sorts of weird and wacky noises, which is a skill he always pulled off well. Even though it was just a playful skit, there’s something quite inspiring about his ability to conjure sound out of the most simple of things.
When he lived like a ‘freak’
Almost a precursor to the burgeoning hippie movement that rose up in the United States in the 1960s, Zappa and his wife Gail were ardent members of the Freak scene. The self-styled ‘freaks’ were bored and disillusioned with suburbia. They set up base in Laurel Canyon, lived a semi-communal lifestyle that involved quirky clothing, total sexual freedom, and enjoyed a kind of bizarre, frenetic dancing that became known as ‘freaking out’.
Zappa’s band, The Mothers Of Invention, became central to the scene. Audiences at his shows were encouraged to ‘freak out’ and go wild in the crowds, screaming and doing whatever kind of strange movement came to them at the moment. “On a personal level,” wrote Zappa, “Freaking out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricted standards of thinking, dress and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his environment and the social structure as a whole.”
When he testified at Congress
Frank was always outspoken, whether it was on tirades against the drugs culture that had enraptured the rock and roll scene, to freedom of speech. Yet he was always dismissed by the press, his music was too fringe, and he was just seen as just another musician who profited from shock value. In 1985, Zappa shocked everyone by appearing at a congress hearing, eloquently testifying against the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), who were attempting a crackdown on what they called “porn rock”.
Zappa wiped the floor with them, advocating for artistic freedom in his usual acerbic way. “Bad facts make bad law,” he said in the hearing. “And people who write bad laws are, in my opinion, more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religious Thought, and the Right to Due Process for composers, performers, and retailers are imperilled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain.”
Broken legs and ‘Smoke On The Water’
Zappa himself can’t actually be credited for his wildly bad luck at shows because both of these instances can be chalked up to concert-goers attending his performances. The most infamous of the two incidents is the stuff of rock legend and inspired the Deep Purple classic ‘Smoke On The Water’. In Switzerland in 1971, Frank Zappa and The Mothers were performing at the Montreux Casino when someone in the crowd shot off a flare gun, and the ensuing fire quickly spread. Thankfully, nobody was killed in the blaze, with the worst injuries being minor cuts and burns.
Zappa wouldn’t escape so unscathed from a performance only a week later though. When the band performed at the Rainbow Theatre in London, concert-goer Trevor Howell charged the stage and shoved Zappa into the concrete orchestra pit, a drop of over 15 feet. Sadly, Zappa sustained multiple broken bones, temporary paralysis of one arm, and, most devastatingly, a crushed larynx. The incident permanently lowered his voice and led to a lifetime of back pain.
