The Frank Zappa song completed by Gene Simmons: “I played all the instruments”
OK, stay with me on this one, I promise there’s a point to it. Andy Warhol was once interviewed at a WWF show in 1985 by legend of the professional wrestling industry, Mean Gene Okerlund. The company tried to push a narrative that this was proof that even legends of the fine art world loved pro-wrestling. What’s more likely is that Warhol, ever fascinated by tackiness, disposability and crassness, probably saw the likes of Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper as the culmination of American pop culture. I can imagine Frank Zappa having a strange appreciation for Kiss in a similar way.
After all, what were Kiss other than rock ‘n’ roll through a pro-wrestling filter? Long before the band turned up on WCW in the 1990s, they were less a rock band and more larger-than-life characters to believe in. In their case, they just happened to play rock music rather than suplex their rivals at Madison Square Garden. While the actual music was trashy, lowest common denominator bar rock, there was still something progressive about them.
Vanishingly few bands had put this much effort into their presentation without already being the biggest names of the age. Sure, there was Alice Cooper knocking about and Screaming Lord Sutch a few years previous, but Kiss were on another level of absurd spectacle. The kind that turns up the bad taste spectacle and goes straight into John Waters-esque trash art.
Which is exactly the kind of stuff a mind like Frank Zappa would…probably not love, but, at the very least, appreciate. After all, he did make intensely complex rock music inflected with myriad influences from jazz and classical. However, he was also the kind of guy to see artistic merit in bubblegum pop. At least, one really does have to hope that he did, or the actions of his son would leave him turning in his grave.
How did Gene Simmons get his hands on a Frank Zappa song?
Gene Simmons is a notorious social climber. There’s practically no one in music who was famous in the 1970s and 1980s whom he hasn’t got a story or three about, and depending on the telling, Zappa is no different. In some versions, Simmons says that he and Zappa started bonding just before he passed. The latter just so happened to be a huge Kiss fan, but passed away before he could let anyone else. Convenient.
In other tellings, he doesn’t bond with Frank as much as his son Dweezil, whom he met in the 1970s. When Dweezil’s dad passed, Simmons was there to pay his condolences and also to mention that he and Frank had talked about working on a song together. Pity that no one else was there, right? Simmons elaborated on this in an interview with Classic Rock, for all that it’s worth.
He said: “I asked if they had any unfinished Frank pieces because I’d love to finish them and get the family around, and so we came together on ‘Black Tongue’, which was Frank’s title, not mine. I had this 30-second bit that I built an entire song on, this loop, and I played all the instruments and got all the Zappa family in. It was the only song in the entire Zappa history where the entire remaining family members actually sang around the same mic.”
One can only hope that Frank Zappa had some appreciation for just how wild and out-there Kiss’ antics were. There is something artistic in pushing the boundaries of bad taste in terms of stage presence and camp. However, the only boundaries of bad taste Simmons is pushing with his narrative is manipulating a grieving family into making a buck off their dad’s unreleased music.
