The album Frank Zappa literally couldn’t give away for free: “Don’t buy it, tape it!”
Classic rock has its fair share of contrarian figures. The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Nirvana all have anti-establishment blood running through their veins, but it was the moustache sporting Frank Zappa who defined rock counterculture.
While The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and everything coming out of liberalist California were spraying the world in technicolour, Zappa stood amidst its rainfall, head to toe in waterproofs with a furrowed brow. It wasn’t that he was averse to vibrant artistic portrayals of music that leaned on everything from the psychedelic to the punk and everything in between; he just didn’t want to do it like anyone else.
In fact, as strong as his musical legacy is, he’s equally as famous for being music’s definitive contrarian, lambasting his contemporaries at any given opportunity. While Paul McCartney and John Lennon were digging into the works of Elvis Presley, Zappa was developing somewhat of an obsession with the French composer Edgard Varese.
While his scruffy disposition and mesmerising guitar ability seemingly platformed an artist that typified 1960s liberalism, he was a critic of drug culture and promoted a spiritual but substance-free lifestyle. It’s perhaps the most significant mark of his contrarian tendencies, for abstaining from drug use in the music scene of that era is like asking a school child not to download TikTok.
His scathing indictment of traditional rock and roll tropes, as well as the musical capabilities of his contemporaries, gained Zappa a fair amount of enemies. And despite his anti-establishment stance, he wasn’t immune to accusations of being a commercial lapdog; as Lou Reed once said: “Frank Zappa is the most untalented musician I’ve ever heard,” he continued, “He can’t play rock n roll because he’s a loser… If you told Frank Zappa to eat shit in public, he’d do it if it sold records.”
So when Zappa was preparing to release Läther, he was faced with a scenario in which Lou Reed’s premonition could come true. Initially set to be released as a four-record box set, Warner Brothers refused to release Läther, so Zappa re-formatted the music into four albums – namely Zappa In New York, Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favourites in an effort to fulfil his contract obligations.
“I owed them four albums, so I walked in one day and said, ‘Here’s the tapes’,” he told Musician, Player & Listener in 1979. “And they were supposed to pay me, but they never did. And I’m the one who paid to make the tapes–all the costs of the musicians, the studio time, the parts copying, the rentals of the equipment, and all the other costs of making an album. I put that all out of my bank account to produce those tapes, and they have no publishing licenses, and they haven’t paid me any royalties. They left me holding the bag for quite a few bucks”.
When he featured on LA radio station KROQ-FM, during the year of the album’s release, Zappa threw caution to the wind and decided the incurring legal costs of breaking his contract rules were worth more than the money that would line Warner Bros pocket when the album was eventually released: “My future as a recording artist is dangling in mid-air pending court procedures, which in California for civil cases can take anywhere from three to five years just to get a day in court and have your case heard,” he said.
“Since I don’t think that anybody wants to wait three to five years to hear my wonderful music,” he added. “I have taken it upon myself to come down here and advise anybody interested in the stuff that I do to get a cassette machine, and tape this album. You can have it for free, just take it right off the radio. You know–don’t buy it, tape it!”
