A “distasteful” sign of demise: The 1960s band Frank Zappa could never enjoy
There are as many cases of Frank Zappa sharing his anger at conventional pop music as there are notes on the guitar he wielded with such ferocity.
The archetypal rock artiste, Zappa, has long been a purveyor of the purer side of music making, rejecting commercialism at every turn and championing the pursuit of creativity as his only true calling. As he characteristically put it, “Art is moving closer to commercialism, and never the twain shall meet”.
Over the years, this led him to confront some of the titans of the rock and roll world head-on. While later softening his view on the band, he once famously took umbrage with fair-faced Fab Four from Liverpool, who had invaded America’s rock and roll sanctity with a brand new form of pop music.
Zappa casually dismissed their influence on a few occasions, once noting, “Everybody else thought they were God! I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group.” And as we know, the moustachioed maestro wasn’t all that fond of anything commercial.
Zappa took swipes at other bands, too. The Velvet Underground and, perhaps more pertinently, their manager, Andy Warhol, were on the receiving end of a verbal bashing. His Mothers of Invention bandmate, Jimmy Carl Black, accounted for it, saying: “I don’t remember Zappa actually putting them down on stage, but he might have. He really disliked the band.” And the feeling was reciprocated, too, with Lou Reed, the Velvets’ de facto leader, labelling Zappa “the most untalented musician I’ve ever heard”.
However, considering his adoration for the artistry at the centre of his vision for rock and roll, there’s one band that could have topped the list of Zappa’s most hated: The Doors.
The Jim Morrison-led group weren’t exactly the experimental force of nature that Zappa always rated highly, instead favouring a simple musical structure bolstered by the poetic lyricism of Morrison. But it was their penchant for acquiring the almighty dollar that really put Zappa’s nose out of joint.
Zappa had been well aware of the rise of the band, and Morrison in particular, through his wife: “Well, I knew Jim Morrison too. As a matter of fact, my wife knew Jim Morrison when she was a child. They used to play together. In fact, I think she even hit him on the head with a hammer or something. And so, I know all about Jim Morrison. And, as a matter of fact, Herb Cohen tried to manage him at one time. And they were playing around LA when we first started.”
“They were working at the Whisky a Go-Go and all that stuff,” Zappa continued. “And so I am pretty well-acquainted with the rise of Jim Morrison. And the thing that was obnoxious about Jim Morrison was when Crawdaddy decided to proclaim him the Lizard King of rock and roll and went on this bizarre rampage.”
However, it was the commercial machine operating around the group that really put him off: “The type of merchandising that was originally associated with Doors music I thought was really distasteful and stretching the boundaries of what it actually was beyond the realm of credibility.”
For Zappa, the group were not worth the merit they were given by the press. While The Beatles delivered on their promise of being pop saviours, Zappa saw Jim Morrison and The Doors as products of a hype machine that can still inflate sub-standard performers to icons in a matter of weeks.
As he told Guitar World in 1982: “No, I’m not even picking on Jim Morrison. I am talking about the machinery that takes anything and exaggerates it to the point where it’s blown out of proportion and the public believes the inflated version of what the reality is. I am a realistic kind of a guy.”
He caustically added, “I just try and look at things the way they are, take them for what they are, deal with them the way they are, and go on to the next case. But Americans thrive on hype and bloated images and bloated everything, and anything that’s realistic, they turn away from. They want the candy gloss version of whatever it is. And Jim Morrison is only one example of that.”
Yet, he was a notably polished and pretty example. With that in mind, we might glean a little further understanding from Zappa’s PA, of all places. Pauline Butcher, who worked for the weird rocker from 1967 to 1971, told Louder Sound in 2012: “He was a precociously intelligent man in a business which is not necessarily filled with a lot of intelligent people, and he stood out.”
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.”
So, that’s exactly what he set out to do. “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,” she continued. “All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.” Was bashing bands just part of this?
To label a group distasteful, one might expect them to have continually challenged their contemporaries, been on a Steve Allen TV show to play the bicycle as a musical instrument, or (allegedly) chowed down on Captain Beefheart’s faeces – all things Zappa has on his resume – not simply be enjoyed by the music press and make commercial decisions based on that popularity as The Doors did. However, Frank Zappa has rarely played by conventional rules.
