“He was rather unkind”: The prog-rock legends that Frank Zappa resented and why they always regretted it
No artist is safe from a bit of competition whenever they get behind their instruments.
For every great hit that you might land on the charts or phenomenal solo you lay down in the studio, there will always be someone better than you. While hardly any rock eccentrics can even hope to compete with Frank Zappa, even he had a few resentments towards two of the biggest names in 1970s rock.
Then again, was Zappa even looking to make hits when he came out? If anything, he seems like the one musician whose goal was to write anti-hits, making songs that were often humorous or shocking for the hell of it just so people would pay attention to the bizarre music going on underneath everything.
That’s not to say that some of his songs couldn’t be celebrated. For all of the strange anomalies going on in an album like Apostrophe, ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’ did have a fair bit of time on the charts, albeit from a few fans who probably bought it with the mindset of ‘What the hell is this?’ half the time.
Even though Zappa could make a few zany songs live and on record, he still lived in the golden age of expansive rock and roll. Compared to Zappa’s signature weird take on music, Deep Purple was also trying to bring rock into strange territories. While not necessarily as strange as Zappa, both Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord had the kind of musical background that led to songs going in odd directions, pulling from everything from classical music to free jazz throughout their live shows.
And let’s not forget about the prog-rock movement. Despite the fact that Zappa’s music seems like the greatest progenitor of progressive rock, that didn’t stop many other artists from laying claim to what he started, with bands like Jethro Tull taking the trademark sense of humour Zappa had and putting it into lavish concept albums like Thick as a Brick.
Though Zappa could have claimed to have gotten the ball rolling for both Purple and Tull, he didn’t like how his competition was suddenly blowing him away. When talking about meeting Zappa with BBC Radio 2, Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson remembered just how jaded Zappa could be when talking about his place in the rock industry.
After years of hard work, Anderson remembered Zappa talking about his band falling apart when his musical offspring started becoming huge, saying, “He rather resented the fact that us British bands Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, etc. We went over there [United States] and made tons of money. Seemingly, while he was struggling to run his band. So, he was rather unkind to some of us in the press, which was a shame because I was a big Frank Zappa fan.”
Even if Zappa was jaded, it was that kind of competition that led to him taking more risks whenever he went into the studio. As much as an album like Hot Rats may have been good, have you ever noticed that he made an album like that ever again? Zappa was always a chameleon, and as soon as he got one style of music out of his system, it was time for him to move on to the next bonkers idea rolling around in his head.
The two almost reconciled before Zappa’s death
Anderson was, and still is, a major fan of Zappa’s and acknowledges his impact on the music world. In return, Zappa seemed almost threatened by Anderson, which, in some ways, is a kind of flattery. But they waltzed around; they never met or spoke. Then, in 1993, the request came through from the deathbed.
But with all that history and the total unknown of what Zappa wanted to say or how it might be left, Anderson couldn’t seem to stay on the line. “I dialled the number three times, but each time I hung up in a panic; I was embarrassed – what do you say to a dying man?” he remembered.
“A few weeks later he died,” Anderson continued, describing it as one of his biggest regrets from his career. In the end, it seemed that Zappa simply wanted to use his final days for connection and reconciliation as the musicians said, “From what I heard, he’d wanted to talk to a few people, just to say hi, and I was one of them.”
However, if Anderson could retrace his steps, he would have lasted longer than the dial tone as he said, “It wouldn’t have changed anything, except I would have had my first and last words with one of the great original composers and performers of rock music history.”
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