“Anything Anytime Anyplace For No Reason At All”: Frank Zappa for President
Apparently, Andy Warhol hated Frank Zappa. What’s up with that?
In the posthumously published The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol recounted his impressions of a short interview he conducted with Zappa for his Andy Warhol’s T.V. cable access show in 1983:
Frank Zappa came to be interviewed for our TV show and I think that after the interview I hated Zappa even more than when it started. I remember when he was so mean to us when the Mothers of Invention played with the Velvet Underground — I think both at the Trip, in L.A., and at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I hated him then and I still don’t like him.
The interview was only 3 minutes long.
When Warhol’s Plastic Exploding Inevitable multimedia event traveled from New York City to California in 1966, with The Velvet Underground and Nico, along with Warhol’s Silver Factory menagerie, they shared venues with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There was an inevitable culture clash between The Mothers’ Los Angeles freak scene and Warhol’s New York junkie speed freaks, and with Zappa’s open and profound disdain for drug use, the die was cast. Everybody hated everybody else.
On his encounter with Frank Zappa, who–reportedly–remarked “This band sucks” about the Velvet Underground from the stages of The Trip in Los Angeles and The Fillmore in San Francisco, Lou Reed offered:
He’s probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s a two-bit pretentious academic, and he can’t play rock’n’roll, because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself and I think he’s right.
Ouch.
Even as recently as 2013, the Velvet Underground’s John Cale couldn’t resist the opportunity to relive his lingering displeasure with Zappa, recounting to Uncut magazine:
I have a healthy resentment for him. He had a great, acid sense of humour, but this guy, with all his technique and ability, never did anything that made me want to love music…he had contempt for the rock music he played. And self-contempt. Fear, loathing, and self-hatred.
As a result, one can easily imagine the shock and dismay that Zappa’s widow, Gail, must have experienced in 1995 when she learned that Lou Reed had been chosen to induct Frank into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Despite the fact that Reed phoned Gail Zappa to discuss the matter and apologize for past remarks, and despite the fact that Zappa had publicly admired such Velvet Underground songs as “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Femme Fatale”…awkward!
However, anyone who has followed Frank Zappa’s career knows that it was founded and shaped amidst tribulation and chaos. His lawsuits against Warner Brothers Records and ex-manager Herb Cohen are legendary as, at the height of his fame in the late 1970s, he was almost frozen out of the business by duplicitous corporate maneuverings.
It began when Warner Brothers refused to release Zappa’s 4-album set Läther in 1977. Zappa then edited the set into four separate albums to finalize his contract with the record company. Warners refused to honor Zappa’s contract agreement, so Zappa sued them. He went so far as to play the album in its entirety on KROQ radio as a show of civil disobedience. He had his nerve. Läther was eventually released in all its splendiferous glory in 1996.
In the 1980s, Zappa testified in Congress against the Parents Music Resource Center, headed by Tipper Gore, and their sanctimonious crusade against the purported evils of rock and roll lyrics. Little did people know at the time that it was Senator Al Gore’s opening bid for the ultimate failure of his 2000 presidential campaign.
Zappa implicated the Senate committee for holding these “Porn Rock” hearings to divert attention from a blank tape tax, HR 2911, which would benefit a select group of record labels at the expense of consumers, artists, and record retailers. “Is this a consumer issue?” Mr. Zappa asked the committee rhetorically before answering his own question, “Yes it is”:
The major record labels need to have H.R. 2911 whiz through a few committees before anybody smells a rat. One of them is chaired by Senator Thurmond. Is it a coincidence that Mrs. Thurmond is affiliated with the PMRC? I cannot say she is a member, because the PMRC has no members. Their secretary told me on the phone last Friday that the PMRC has no members, only founders. I asked how many other District of Columbia wives are non-members of an organization that raises money by mail, has a tax-exempt status, and seems intent on running the Constitution of the United States through the family paper-shredder. I asked her if it was a cult. Finally, she said she could not give me an answer and that she had to call their lawyer.
In the 1990s, Zappa made friends with Czech leader Vaclav Havel (who, in addition to having a wondrously alliterative and slightly symmetrical name, had also made friends with…Lou Reed), and was threatening to run for president himself. He would have done so had he not succumbed to prostate cancer at the age of 52 on December 4, 1993.
Although Frank Zappa released almost 70 albums during his lifetime, he was never a willingly mainstream artist, despite being a permanent cultural presence for a certain generation of the record-buying public. It always seemed that more people knew his name than knew his work, and there was always the feeling that even if one didn’t know exactly what he did, you knew that he represented something authentic (whatever it was).
Before the advent of freeze-dried Top 40 corporate radio programming, Zappa music would appear somewhat regularly on the airwaves, but he was always more of an album artist than a singles artist. As such, his album sleeve artwork was always as important and as carefully crafted as the music it enveloped. A Zappa album cover, such as the Cal Schenkel designs for Hot Rats, Uncle Meat, and Burnt Weeny Sandwich, or Neon Park’s illustration for Weasels Ripped My Flesh, would always be a startling addition to the family listening room.
There was always the sense that Frank Zappa never talked down to his audience either, in that he wasn’t afraid to leap into some new, unexpected direction wondering if his fans would follow. He didn’t seem to care; he just did it. People would either listen or they wouldn’t. Whatever. From the outset, there was never really any way to predict the aesthetic path that Zappa would choose next, or what listeners would discover.
For example, Zappa’s third official release wasn’t a Mothers of Invention album, but a solo “orchestral” release, Lumpy Gravy, that didn’t include any “songs,” but, instead, two sides of collaged musical themes, found sound, and random conversation. Certainly this was no way to conduct a serious pop music career!
The Mothers fourth album, 1967’s We’re Only In It for the Money, lampooned America’s Summer of Love ethos during the Summer of Love, while their fifth official release, 1968’s Cruising with Ruben and the Jets, was a faithfully rendered collection of doo-wop ditties completely at odds with the countercultural heaviosity of the time. Zappa never seemed concerned with giving the public what they might want but, instead, tested the boundaries of the marketplace, creating his own universe in the process.
From 1968 to 1972, Zappa ran his own record companies, Bizarre Records and Straight Records, where he was responsible for such classics as Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica, Alice Cooper’s first two albums, and the inimitable An Evening with Wild Man Fischer.
Bizarre/Straight were known for their unconventional catalogues, managing to release albums by Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, and Laurel Canyon groupie collective Girls Together Outrageously (The GTOs), alongside more “traditional” fare by Tim Buckley, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester, and the debut album from acapella group The Persuasions. Although the albums may have reveled in the “No Commercial Potential” spirit of their producer, they certainly documented a small freewheeling moment in late-1960s culture that would never transpire again.
Something else that Frank Zappa documented through his “Project/Object” and “Conceptual Continuity” was the mundane, workaday life of the average jobbing musician, something thoroughly considered in Ben Watson’s exhaustive 1994 treatise The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. This subject expressly manifested on Lumpy Gravy in snippets of taped dialogue, but followed through on We’re Only In It for the Money, where the recording engineer could be heard commenting on the recording process itself, and reached epic proportions on 1968’s Uncle Meat. With Uncle Meat, groupies could be heard discussing the folklore surrounding the LA music scene at the time, disgruntled band members are heard complaining about their lack of payment, and audience in-jokes (such as The Mothers playing “Louie, Louie” on the Royal Albert Hall symphony pipe organ) were placed into the landscape as if Zappa meant them as notes in his overall musical score.
But, it wasn’t just random anthropological field recordings that Zappa was inserting for no reason at all into the mix. He was consciously demystifying and demythologizing pop stardom in a way that wasn’t being done then, and hasn’t really been done since. When we look back to the pop scene of the 1960s and beyond, we can see that pop music product was sold to consumers as perfect, shiny artifacts which appeared on teenage radios miraculously, as if from the heavens. Average listeners didn’t really know how records were made at the time, and the pop music press, still in its infancy stages, sold an image of pop stars that fit a particular narrative, namely that their products were the result of divine inspiration.
Zappa set out to change all of that by giving fans a glimpse behind the celebrity curtain into the actual labor involved in producing a work of musical merchandise. He showed his audience the circumstances surrounding the creation of an artist’s product, everything that went into a piece before and during its construction. He didn’t buy into the Romantic notion of the blessed artist sitting alone in his room awaiting guidance from some cosmic force; this was a job, and this was the reality of life on the road for musicians.
The only other artist who has come close to demythologizing their work in a similar way, ironically, was Zappa’s arch-nemesis Andy Warhol. Warhol was also a great observer and recorder of everything around him. Just as many people did not understand much of what Warhol was doing at the time he was doing it, let alone the reasons why he would be doing such things, Zappa, too, was criticized for trivializing such an esteemed tradition as pop stardom. Their work was also unrepentantly Dadaesque in the way they would incorporate found objects from real life into their pieces, as if to say, “See? It’s all just one thing.” There was no separation, for them, between art and “the real world.”
For the last 10 years of his life, Zappa concentrated on computer compositions that remain some of the most complex and satisfying works of his career. Albums like Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Jazz from Hell, and the posthumously released Civilization Phaze III, are largely electronic symphonic works that used the Synclavier computer program as his orchestra. These records are a continuation of what he began back in the 1960s, but updated utilizing the most modern compositional tools available at the time. There is still nothing like them in the marketplace.
Many people may not know that Zappa released rock’s first double album (beating Blonde on Blonde by a couple of weeks), or that he filmed the first full length movie on videotape (1971’s 200 Motels),or that four members of his group left in the 1980s to form the chart-topping new wave band Missing Persons; they do seem to know that he sang comedy songs of some sort, or that he christened his children with, what were considered at the time to be, unconventional names.
Despite a career full of public indifference and critical derision, Zappa worked, literally, every day to produce a catalog that no other musical performer can match and one that will be rediscovered time and again through the ages. In this way, Zappa is more fun than the internet; the deeper one goes into his universe, the more inter-connections one will find within his work. It is like putting a puzzle together that will never be completed.
In 1992, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening asked Zappa about his ideas on time:
Well, I think that everything is happening all the time, and the only reason why we think of time linearly is because we are conditioned to do it. That’s because the human idea of stuff is it has a beginning and it has an end. I don’t think that’s necessarily true… you know, this is one of the better explanations for why people can have premonitions, because instead of looking ahead, they’re just looking around. You don’t have to look ahead to see the future. You can look over there.
Within Zappa’s voluminous output of records, interviews, films, articles, artwork, production for other artists, etc., one can find the past, present, and future waiting to be explored in one man’s singular expression of artistic intent. Zappa didn’t confine himself to pop culture, but spread his vision throughout all media as an artist, a social observer, and a conscientious citizen.
As seriously as he took himself and his art, he was equally fond of pointing out just how ridiculous everything can be. In closing his interview with Matt Groening, he offered a little advice to remind us of the absurdity of it all: “I think that when is a very important thing, but ‘what the fuck’ is also a very important thing to ask.”
