The band who could “play 300 songs at the drop of a hat”
When dreaming of the ultimate rock and roll archetype, a long-haired individual bent over their guitar and wailing out a solo is perhaps the defining image. The six-string maestros have often dominated our visions of music, but while rock may provide the most connection to the guitar, those who knew how to use the instrument best were far more gifted than the parameters of just one genre. Frank Zappa was certainly one of those players.
The mercurial musician who meandered his way through the 1960s and ’70s as one of the most experimental players on the rock circuit, the brilliance of Zappa’s guitar playing and all-round musicianship are often forgotten. Some may attribute this collective forgetfulness to the forthright nature of Zappa’s opinions.
The guitarist was never shy to critique those around him, often providing a cruel or unusual take on a popular band or artist. It would help him sell records and keep him in the public domain, but Zappa was so ready to share his thoughts with his contemporaries because he dearly loved making music. It may seem a given that anyone in a band loves to create sonic landscapes for their audiences to amble through, but the truth is, a lot of performers prefer the limelight to the glow of the recording studio.
Zappa, however, was a devotee of the craft. He practised and performed endlessly. He gave his life to the creation of sound, and after he died, those who knew him closely would attest that he was far more than an experimental goof or a scything critic. Zappa was also as close to a musical genius as anyone is ever allowed to be.
He made sure his band was just as talented, and the Mothers of Invention were about as talented a backing band as ever. Zappa was a dictator when it came to rehearsing the group’s notably complex songs, which meant the outfit was perhaps the most adept at moving through different tunes and time signatures the 1970s had ever seen.
“He was a workaholic,” Mothers sax and reed player Bunk Gardner told Louder. “We could play three hundred songs at the drop of a hat and had to memorise it all as he wouldn’t let us use music.” A brutal way to ensure control, Zappa’s prowess erupted into something close to a classic conductor: “He’d make signs with his fingers to change from five-eight time to seven-eight or whatever and then jump up in the air and come back down and we’d be into another song.”
The trouble was, while this was certainly a great way to ensure you had a competent group, the audience wasn’t so keen. Zappa and his band struggled to sell records because of their intense complexity, and this translated onto the stage too, with Gardner remembering: “There was a riot after the Sportzplatz show [in Berlin] – they threw eggs, hard green pears, litres of paint, metal, even a section of the railing ripped from the front. Zappa handed out medals to the band for surviving this particular incident.”
Despite the long hair, the doubled-over posture and the guitar in his hand, Zappa was never capable of becoming the archetypal image of a rock and roll icon. However, he could damn well play better than most, and, at the end of the day, it was probably his crowning glory.
