Ian Anderson: ‘Frank Zappa resented resented British bands’
For someone whose musical style was so fluid, improvisational, and experimental as Frank Zappa, he was surprisingly prickly about his competition. Rock stars are all too often painted as these ethereal angels who have too much of a free-flowing spirit to really care about anything else in the world, but if we were to take Zappa at the height of the prog rock era as the example, it’s easy to see that this was far from the case.
Where the musical scene of the 1960s manifested in a kaleidoscope of swirling psychedelia, the following decade thrived by truly fine-tuning that notion of experimentation and turning it into something worth deep introspection and analysis. In some respects, it sounds like pretty solitary work, but for Zappa, he only wanted the recognition and rapture for himself.
However, unfortunately for him the main band standing in the way of that universal adoration was Jethro Tull, the British prog rockers from across the Atlantic who, in Zappa’s eyes, were set to rain on his parade. Yet no matter how much this has all the makings of a classic rock feud, the animosity was emphatically one-sided on the American’s part, as the British outfit, namely its frontman Ian Anderson, actually had nothing but respect for him.
In a 2016 interview, Anderson recalled the fleeting yet memorable singular interaction he ever had with Zappa. “Sadly I never got to meet Frank Zappa, we nearly did,” he said. “And I actually read that he didn’t like Jethro Tull at all back then in the ‘70s. He rather resented the fact that us British bands Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and so on. We were going over there [United States] and making tons of money. Seemingly while he was struggling to run his band.”
Yet as the years wore on, something evidently changed in Zappa’s heart towards former rival figures like Anderson. Maybe it was the fact he was facing the end of his life, or realising that at the end of the day, competition just wasn’t worth it – but the rocker requested to call Anderson in the final weeks before he died in 1993, and the pair then spoke over the phone.
Weighing up both the negative energy and possible benefits of the experience, Anderson continued: “He was rather unkind to some of us in the press. It was a shame because I was a big Frank Zappa fan at that point. I was in fear of taking up the invitation to call him shortly before he died. I’ve got a message from one of his musicians that I knew. [They] said, ‘Frank wants to speak to you, he wants you to call him.’ I thought, ‘How do you speak to a dying man?’. You know, picking up the phone talking to someone for the very first time in what turned out to be the last weeks of his life.”
Whatever ended up being said in that fated phone call remains obviously private to Anderson, but it was clearly a seminal moment in his life for a rock god to hold out an olive branch after so many years of bitterness. A lot of rock stars could admittedly learn from that tale – that life isn’t all about the rivalries, and that sharing in your sonic power with others, even at the 11th hour, will always carve you a memorable place in history.
