The song Frank Zappa wrote to kill off “country and western music”
As talented as he was, and as hard as it may be to denounce said talent, detractors will frequently find themselves arguing that Frank Zappa never took the art of being a musician seriously.
Given how much of his most celebrated work was laced with satire, it’s hard to tell when he was trying to make a serious point, or whether he was simply in the business of taking the piss out of stuff to wind others up. With an album title like We’re Only in It For the Money, you’re bound to get under the skin of a few other people with the mere suggestion that your craft is only being done for the cold, hard cash, regardless of whether it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek or not.
Of course, the album itself is an incredible work of satire, as much of his earliest material was, but given how good his songwriting and musicianship were, you then have to ask whether he was ever truly a fan of the stuff he was doing, or whether that was all one big joke at the listener’s expense. Are we meant to be enjoying any of Zappa’s so-called masterworks, or was the moustachioed menace just pulling our legs the entire time?
Hot Rats stands tall as being a zany jazz rock album in its own right, with the intention of it being clear that Zappa wanted to make an album in this style, but then you listen to a record like Thing-Fish, and you have to wonder whether he’s simply trying too hard to make the album kooky so that people ask the question: “Am I being taken for a fool?”
His career had begun to fade slightly in the 1980s, with fewer people being on board with his increasingly puerile and tawdry brand of humour, but that didn’t stop him from being intensely prolific throughout the decade.
Even though he was constantly at work, whether in the studio or on the road, he found a brief gap in his schedule to speak to Guitar World in 1982 about his ongoing projects, and when he confessed that he was hard at work on a future project, he revealed details about one particular song that was written with the sole intention of taking the mick.
“I’ll tell you what we’ve already recorded,” he began. “A lot of stuff with Roy Estrada. A song called ‘Truck Driver Divorce’ which will probably be the end of country and western music. It’s like country music on PCP.”
‘Truck Driver Divorce’ is far from the first time that Zappa ever dipped his toes into the world of country, and certainly wasn’t the first time he’d aped the genre in an attempt to poke fun at its often conservative values and lack of progressiveness. But in his heart, did Zappa really hate country music, and was this meant to be a pastiche that was designed to kill the genre off for good, or was it simply another corny joke?
As things transpired, ‘Truck Driver Divorce’ did little to speed up the decline of country music as Zappa had, perhaps flippantly, intended it to, but at the same time, it’s two minutes of incredibly obvious mimicry followed by another seven minutes of jazz fusion guitar solos. Who knows what’s going through Zappa’s mind, and to be perfectly honest, would we be any better off knowing?
