The guitarist Frank Zappa called “one of my favourite players on the planet”
The late Frank Zappa tended to be a tough customer. A sneering misanthrope who sat at the party next to Steely Dan and The Fugs, in addition to his various musical exploits, the Mothers of Invention leader provided many a hot take. Given the undoubted breadth of his intelligence, his opinions range from remarkably incisive to totally dumbfounding.
“Everybody else thought they were God,” Zappa once said of The Beatles. “I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group“. Whilst most can find some capacity of agreement with what Zappa says about the Fab Four, things take an incomprehensible turn when noting that he openly preferred The Monkees, the era’s ultimate commercial group, formed to capitalise on the teenyboppers that made Beatlemania such a cultural force.
Pauline Butcher, Frank Zappa’s personal assistant from 1967 to 1971, provided a fascinating account of her old boss when speaking to Louder Sound in 2012. This first-hand knowledge outlines the character with which he approached everything: “He was a precociously intelligent man in a business which is not necessarily filled with a lot of intelligent people, and he stood out,” Butcher said.
She continued: “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. 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.”
Calculated or not, sometimes Zappa did provide glowing accounts of musicians, and when he did, given his usual penchant for vitriol, they always carried extra weight. Regarding the world of guitar playing, he named Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson as his “original favourite” and also cited the skill of many others, including Allan Holdsworth, Jimi Hendrix, and even Billy Gibbons.
However, there was another eminent guitarist who Frank Zappa had a lot of love for: Jeff Beck. Notably, Jeff Beck was one of the finest guitarists of his day, replacing Eric Clapton in The Yardbirds and helping them pioneer psychedelic rock. After he left the band, Beck embarked on a solo career that would take many different guises, cementing himself as a hard rock hero whose fingerpicking style was one of the most distinctive out there.
Zappa was such a fan of the Londoner that he labelled him “one of my favourite guitar players on the planet”. As quoted in The Frank Zappa Interview Picture Disk, he said of Beck: “One of my favourite guitar players on the planet. From a melodic standpoint and just in terms of the conception of what he plays. He’s fabulous. I like Jeff.”
Zappa and Beck would work together, too. The former Yardbirds man featured played guitar on the 1969 album Permanent Damage by the all-girl group The GTOs. It featured Frank Zappa on the tambourine and as co-producer. A fusion of experimental and psychedelia, it downright bonkers.
