The type of music Frank Zappa was always most comfortable playing
Many people consider Frank Zappa a complicated musician, but his approach to creativity is actually very straightforward.
The only thing he ever wanted from his music was authenticity. Yes, he made a lot of prog-rock and is considered a champion of that genre, but that wasn’t the only style of music that he was ever willing to listen to. In fact, his willingness to embrace multiple genres is likely what made him such an icon within the world of prog, given that his definition of the genre is essentially rock music with other styles and cultures injected into it.
“I would presume that people would accept this definition,” he said when offering up his best definition, “Progressive rock is anything that doesn’t sound like regular rock. Regular rock is everything that sounds like itself. All songs which sound the same, everything on MTV, everything on the radio, that’s rock. Progressive rock is stuff that doesn’t sound like that.”
We know that Zappa was a lover of regular rock, as he was a big fan of AC/DC. While their sound may not be as complex as that which Zappa was considered a champion of, he loved their approach to music, as they knew the kind of sound they liked and they put all of their effort into perfecting it. Zappa liked them so much that he tried to sign them once, but it wasn’t meant to be.
“When we first travelled to Australia [in the early ‘70s] he tried to sign them,” recalled Dweezil, Zappa’s son, “They ended up signing to Atlantic but he wanted them for his own label because he thought they were great.”
Dweezil continued, “I think he saw what everybody saw: they could play, they had a ton of energy and they were authentic. It was blues-based and it had an attitude. The thing about AC/DC is they’ve carved a massive career out of playing one style that’s changed very, very little. That’s what people love – that consistency. They’re rock-solid and they have a great sound.”
So, by Zappa’s very own definition, he would take the sound of someone like AC/DC and inject it with something a bit more left field. A lot of the time, this meant using jazz arrangements and time signatures when putting his music together; however, he also liked to use music from other cultures when writing. He loved music from the Middle East and India, so that it often found a place in his creative process.
“For years I had something called Music On The Desert Road [Deben Bhattacharya], which was a recording of all kinds of different ethnic musics from different places in the Middle East,” said Zappa, “I used to listen to that all the time – I liked that kind of melodic feel. I listened to Indian music, Ravi Shankar and so forth, before we did the Freak Out! Album.”
This method of creation led to Zappa discovering the kind of music that he was most comfortable making, a simple construct which he kept at the centre of his complicated work. “The idea of creating melody from scratch based on an ostinato or single chord that doesn’t change,” he said, “That was the world that I felt most comfortable with.”
