How Frank Zappa’s 10 favourite records defined his unique view of mainstream music
Frank Zappa was a phenomenon completely out of the ordinary. Like a firework display for people who hate loud bangs, he became the outsider’s star, the most mainstream maestro of the non-commercial world.
This paradoxical status was no mistake, but very much a product of his own particular aim. After a stint working in advertising before he made the move to The Mothers of Invention, Zappa came to the conclusion that music, in the pop culture age, was 50% about image. Since then, that figure may well have somewhat inflated. But as he went into bat against The Beatles, it was 50% that he had firmly in mind.
While Zappa might not have favoured this new marketing frontier of music, he wasn’t prepared to be overlooked because of it. He wanted to explore his passion for neo-classical experimentalism, but he also wanted to impact culture in a sizable way as he went about it. His goal, therefore, was simple: be weird, but make sure the masses notice.
So, he kept his mind open to any in music. He looked to learn from the groups he felt, by his own admission, he was worlds apart from in every way. As his PA, Pauline Butcher, would later say, “He worked out he wasn’t a pretty boy like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.”
“He didn’t play their kind of music, he didn’t even like it, and if he was going to get himself heard, he was going to have to do something radically different,” she explained. “He went out of his way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in women’s clothes. All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.“
“He [Zappa] went out of his way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in women’s clothes. All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.“
Pauline Butcher, Frank Zappa’s PA
In many ways, he marketed himself as the inverse of the same coin as the British Invasion bands. He was, in his own contrasting manner, equally fun, outrageous and angling towards the iconic. Thusly, he also grew to respect them. This is evidenced by the fact that, contrary to Butcher’s claim, when he picked his ten favourite records for UK magazine Let it Rock, Between the Buttons by The Rolling Stones and Abbey Road by The Beatles, both featured among his choices.
He admired the guts, production, marketing and innovation, even if he wasn’t on board with the bands in the main. This seems to typify Zappa’s approach. A hero worshipper, he was not. But equally, he wasn’t a stubborn contrarian stuck in his ways. For instance, he admired ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ so much he was ready to quit music if its message had seeded firmly within counterculture before his career had even begun. But he did paw to Bob Dylan’s music eternally thereafter, happily criticising Blonde on Blonde.
“Then we got Blonde on Blonde,” Zappa stated, “And it started to sound like cowboy music. You know what I think of cowboy music.” And for those who perhaps don’t know, the fellow who was raised on modern experimentalists like Béla Bartók loathed country music pretty much more than any other. He found it to be traditionalist, dated and a million miles from the sort of anarchic freedom he was after.
Seemingly, he found that anarchic freedom even within the mainstream with the likes of ‘Supernaut’ by Black Sabbath, another of his favourite albums, despite the fact it is actually a single. Unperturbed by the detail, it ticked the necessary need for ‘difference’ in Zappa’s eyes, commenting, “I like it because I think it’s prototypical of a certain musical style, and I think it’s well done. Also, I happen to like the guitar lick that’s being played in the background.“
Therein lies the lore of Zappa’s musical outlook. The likes of Krzysztof Penderecki adapting Aldous Huxley novels into the opera The Devils of Loudon are to be expected in his list, you can pick up on those sounds and themes readily in his own output, but it is these experimental flourishes of great technicality sitting alongside the likes of After The Gold Rush, that simply found a way to sweetly appeal to the masses, that define Zappa as a musician and a man.
Frank Zappa’s 10 favourite albums:
- Supernaut – Black Sabbath
- After The Gold Rush – Neil Young
- Between the Buttons – The Rolling Stones
- Abbey Road – The Beatles
- Muddy Waters Sings ‘Big Bill’ – Muddy Waters
- The Devils of Loudon – Krzysztof Penderecki
- The Complete Works of Edgard Varese Vol. 1 – Edgard Varese
- Three Hours Past Midnight – Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson
- The Story Of My Life – Guitar Slim
- Who Will Be Next? – Howlin’ Wolf
