Zappa, City paper, 94-1 - Revision history

Jason.Kreitzer at 18:09, 23 September 2021

2021-09-23T18:09:38Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 14:57, 4 August 2021

2021-08-04T14:57:50Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 19:38, 31 July 2021

2021-07-31T19:38:34Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 03:14, 22 July 2021

2021-07-22T03:14:23Z

Spider of Destiny at 06:59, 14 November 2020

2020-11-14T06:59:36Z

Spider of Destiny at 23:03, 13 December 2010

2010-12-13T23:03:05Z

Tonefish: link to Schorr page

2008-06-09T14:14:30Z

link to Schorr page

Propellerkuh at 17:09, 23 February 2007

2007-02-23T17:09:52Z

Propellerkuh at 17:06, 23 February 2007

2007-02-23T17:06:54Z

Propellerkuh at 17:05, 23 February 2007

2007-02-23T17:05:40Z

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 Our final rift was over the same sort of thing. I had an assignment from a national magazine to write about something – I don't even remember what, now – and I was supposed to survey various people about what they thought of whatever it was. Almost jokingly, I called Zappa and asked him if he'd like to participate in my survey. He was in a bad mood that night and accused me of being an opportunist and a turncoat, and that was the end of the staunchest, and strangest, friendship I probably ever had.
-That was in 1975. More than once since then have I wished that I could sit again in his basement studio, sipping 60-weight espresso and listening to that flat, ironically affectionate voice discussing the science of acoustics, the significance of [[Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov|Rimsky-Korsakov]]'s influence on Stravinsky, or the idiocy of American voters. There was a lot I didn't understand about my friendship with Frank Zappa, but now that I know it's over for good, I realize how lucky I was to have known him, and I'm truly sorry I never told him so.
+That was in 1975. More than once since then have I wished that I could sit again in his basement studio, sipping 60-weight espresso and listening to that flat, ironically affectionate voice discussing the science of acoustics, the significance of [[Wikipedia:Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov|Rimsky-Korsakov]]'s influence on Stravinsky, or the idiocy of American voters. There was a lot I didn't understand about my friendship with Frank Zappa, but now that I know it's over for good, I realize how lucky I was to have known him, and I'm truly sorry I never told him so.
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 '''Daniel Schorr'''

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 '''Dimitri Ehrlich'''
-A few months before he died, I called frank Zappa for a brief phone interview. The subject was Z, a group formed by his two sons, [[Dweezil Zappa|Dweezil]] and [[Ahmet Zappa|Ahmet]], and their debut album, ''Shampoo Horn''. The record was released on Zappa's own [[Barking Pumpkin]] label, and the music bears his distinct imprint: complex, adventurous – at times difficult listening – but never prosaic or obvious. If the playing isn't quite as visionary as the best work of their father, the songs on Shampoo Horn find the young Zappa brothers fusing a kind of hard-rock fusion that's probably more relevant to their own time than the consistently avant-garde work of the elder Zappa ever was.
+A few months before he died, I called frank Zappa for a brief phone interview. The subject was Z, a group formed by his two sons, [[Dweezil Zappa|Dweezil]] and [[Ahmet Zappa|Ahmet]], and their debut album, ''Shampoo Horn''. The record was released on Zappa's own [[Barking Pumpkin Records|Barking Pumpkin]] label, and the music bears his distinct imprint: complex, adventurous – at times difficult listening – but never prosaic or obvious. If the playing isn't quite as visionary as the best work of their father, the songs on Shampoo Horn find the young Zappa brothers fusing a kind of hard-rock fusion that's probably more relevant to their own time than the consistently avant-garde work of the elder Zappa ever was.
 At the time this interview took place, the prostate cancer that took his life on December 4, 1993, was beginning to keep Zappa bedridden occasionally and exhausted much of the time. But he consented to speak with me, perhaps out of fatherly love, perhaps because he remained until his death an amazingly hard-working professional. We spoke only for about a quarter of an hour, and he was curt and somewhat grumpy throughout. His words came slowly and carefully, in a gravelly voice that reflected not only the considerable physical effort speaking had become for him, but also the deep level of thoughtfulness that he always required of himself.

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 '''David Dudley'''
-Like the lion's share of interesting Baltimore-born artists, [[Frank Zappa|Frank Vincent Zappa]], Jr., American composer (1940-93), blew town as soon as possible. The reason wasn't Tinytown's stifling postwar cultural or artistic climate. It was the climate, period. Young Frank had asthma, and as he writes in his 1989 autobiography, [[The Real Frank Zappa Book]], "I was sick so often in Maryland, Mom and Dad wanted to move."
+Like the lion's share of interesting Baltimore-born artists, [[Biography|Frank Vincent Zappa]], Jr., American composer (1940-93), blew town as soon as possible. The reason wasn't Tinytown's stifling postwar cultural or artistic climate. It was the climate, period. Young Frank had asthma, and as he writes in his 1989 autobiography, [[The Real Frank Zappa Book]], "I was sick so often in Maryland, Mom and Dad wanted to move."
 When Zappa died last month, a victim of prostate cancer at 52, you didn't hear much about the man's local roots in all the music paper obits – mainly because there wasn't much to say. Frank, Sr., taught history at Loyola for a while, then worked as a meteorologist at the Edgewood Arsenal, up in Harford County – that's where the Army stored mustard gas and other chemical weapons. In 1950, the Zappa clan moved to Lancaster, California, a dusty nowheresville near [[Edwards Air Force Base]] in the [[Mojave Desert]]. Frank was 10 years old. He considered returning to Baltimore as a teen, to attend the Peabody Conservatory, but instead he stayed in the desert and taught himself how to be a composer.

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 While he was here, Zappa lived in Army housing in Edgewood, moving into a rowhouse on Park Heights Avenue toward the end of his tenure in Maryland. Frank went fishing and crabbing in the bay with his dad, played with explosives and gas masks (always on hand in the Zappa household in case of a mustard-gas leak from the nearby Army base), ate peanut butter sandwiches, and generally had a fairly normal childhood existence. It was only when he got to California, started playing drums, and first heard French-born avant-garde composer [[Edgard Varèse]] that Frank Zappa started cranking out the music and cranking up the lifestyle that made him infamous.
-It is for the music that Zappa should be remembered; he made a ton of it, some 60-something albums since [[Freak Out!]], that mystifying double-album debut from the Mothers of Invention in 1966. [[The Mothers]] were an old r&b bar band called [[The Soul Giants]] until Zappa got ahold of them in '64 and taught them to play music such as the world had never known. It was nuts; a furious ear-bending mix of proto-acid rock, doo-wop, 50s r&b, cocktail jazz, surf music, and 20th-Century modern classical dissonance. Zappa's heroes were composers like [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]] and [[Anton Friedrich Ernst von Webern|Webern]] and Varèse, and though he played a mean guitar, sang (soma), and came up with a handful of strange sophomoric "hits" (such novelty goofs as "[[Don't Eat The Yellow Snow]]," the disco parody "[[Dancin' Fool]]," the infamous "[[Valley Girl]]"), all that was secondary to his passion of composing demanding, uncompromising music – reams of it – that most people would never hear. "The decoration of fragments of time," he called his business.
+It is for the music that Zappa should be remembered; he made a ton of it, some 60-something albums since [[Freak Out!]], that mystifying double-album debut from the Mothers of Invention in 1966. [[The Mothers]] were an old r&b bar band called [[The Soul Giants]] until Zappa got ahold of them in '64 and taught them to play music such as the world had never known. It was nuts; a furious ear-bending mix of proto-acid rock, doo-wop, 50s r&b, cocktail jazz, surf music, and 20th-Century modern classical dissonance. Zappa's heroes were composers like [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]] and [[Anton Webern|Webern]] and Varèse, and though he played a mean guitar, sang (soma), and came up with a handful of strange sophomoric "hits" (such novelty goofs as "[[Don't Eat The Yellow Snow]]," the disco parody "[[Dancin' Fool]]," the infamous "[[Valley Girl]]"), all that was secondary to his passion of composing demanding, uncompromising music – reams of it – that most people would never hear. "The decoration of fragments of time," he called his business.
 Because there was no place on rock radio for such pieces as "[[Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask]]" (an ode to young Frank's wild years in Edgewood from 1970's [[Weasels Ripped My Flesh]] album), Zappa was haunted for the rest of his career by his unshakable image as some freakish stoner weirdo who wrote crazy little songs. This, despite Zappa's own oddly Calvinist lifestyle (no drugs, no booze), virtuoso mastery of just about every conceivable musical idiom, dictatorial bandleading, and fierce work ethic. But the die was cast, and Zappa was forever doomed to the bitter fringe, which seemed only to fuel his rage to make more music.

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 I was impressed, and not only because it was still, after all these years, a bitchin' solo. Philosophically, it worked on a number of levels. Zappa constantly railed against the stultifying sameness of the American musical state of mind, and no piece of music had been played to banality more relentlessly than "Stairway." And yet, when those saxophones started honking out the last riffs to the solo, the solo that every man, woman, and child in modern America had heard a billion times, the notes still had a life of their own. The music was everything.
-Critics often griped that Zappa never took rock or jazz or anything else seriously, that his music was all just an elaborate put-on, a self-indulgent jab at an idiom and an audience that he felt was beneath him. True, Zappa never suffered fools, in music or politics or anywhere else. But no one who spent the time figuring out how to teach a brass section "Stairway to Heaven" could have done it with anything but genuine affection. It's just not worth it.
+Critics often griped that Zappa never took rock or jazz or anything else seriously, that his music was all just an elaborate put-on, a self-indulgent jab at an idiom and an audience that he felt was beneath him. True, Zappa never suffered fools, in music or [[politics]] or anywhere else. But no one who spent the time figuring out how to teach a brass section "Stairway to Heaven" could have done it with anything but genuine affection. It's just not worth it.
 "No one writes that much music without taking it seriously," says Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor David Zinman, who conducted a Zappa piece, [[The Perfect Stranger]], at the Meyerhoff just a week after Zappa's death. In life, Zappa the composer had a terrible time getting symphonies and chamber-music groups to take a stab at his serious orchestral works – partially because of his own eccentric demands, partially because he was convinced that the "serious" music establishment was interested only in hacking through ancient masterworks from dead composers, the Stairways to Heaven of the classical canon. And Zappa wasn't some art-rock dabbler in classical music; he wrote out his own scores, at enormous expense, and preferred to conduct them himself. He strictly specified instrument layout, demanded extra weeks of rehearsal time, and still was inevitably dissatisfied with the results.
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 [[Category:Articles about Zappa]]

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 Like the lion's share of interesting Baltimore-born artists, [[Frank Zappa|Frank Vincent Zappa]], Jr., American composer (1940-93), blew town as soon as possible. The reason wasn't Tinytown's stifling postwar cultural or artistic climate. It was the climate, period. Young Frank had asthma, and as he writes in his 1989 autobiography, [[The Real Frank Zappa Book]], "I was sick so often in Maryland, Mom and Dad wanted to move."
-When Zappa died last month, a victim of prostate cancer at 52, you didn't hear much about the man's local roots in all the music paper obits – mainly because there wasn't much to say. Frank, Sr., taught history at Loyola for a while, then worked as a meteorologist at the Edgewood Arsenal, up in Harford County – that's where the Army stored mustard gas and other chemical weapons. In 1950, the Zappa clan moved to Lancaster, California, a dusty nowheresville near Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. Frank was 10 years old. He considered returning to Baltimore as a teen, to attend the Peabody Conservatory, but instead he stayed in the desert and taught himself how to be a composer.
+When Zappa died last month, a victim of prostate cancer at 52, you didn't hear much about the man's local roots in all the music paper obits – mainly because there wasn't much to say. Frank, Sr., taught history at Loyola for a while, then worked as a meteorologist at the Edgewood Arsenal, up in Harford County – that's where the Army stored mustard gas and other chemical weapons. In 1950, the Zappa clan moved to Lancaster, California, a dusty nowheresville near [[Edwards Air Force Base]] in the [[Mojave Desert]]. Frank was 10 years old. He considered returning to Baltimore as a teen, to attend the Peabody Conservatory, but instead he stayed in the desert and taught himself how to be a composer.
 While he was here, Zappa lived in Army housing in Edgewood, moving into a rowhouse on Park Heights Avenue toward the end of his tenure in Maryland. Frank went fishing and crabbing in the bay with his dad, played with explosives and gas masks (always on hand in the Zappa household in case of a mustard-gas leak from the nearby Army base), ate peanut butter sandwiches, and generally had a fairly normal childhood existence. It was only when he got to California, started playing drums, and first heard French-born avant-garde composer [[Edgard Varèse]] that Frank Zappa started cranking out the music and cranking up the lifestyle that made him infamous.
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 He wanted to foster a peaceful youth revolution to take over a government he saw as corrupt. Another manifestation of his urge to rock the establishment was his feud with Tipper Gore over dirty song lyrics. But his diatribes didn't spare the youth culture that hearkened to him like Pied Piper.
-He denounced hippies as phony and drugs as stupid. He also mocked himself and his own success. But his self-deprecation was deceptive. He talked about fooling around with music, not letting you know how deeply he was into Bach, Mozart, and the classic tradition. He talked over my head about harmonic climates, and he traveled to Czechoslovakia, became a close friend of [[wikipedia:Václav Havel|Václav Havel]], and studied folk songs of Eastern Europe, writing serious music on their themes. He was also contrary. Talk about his success, and he would say he was a failure. Talk about his popularity, and he said he was lonely. Maybe he was. Maybe the world around him was too crass, too mediocre, too homogenized. So he cursed it with dirty words, and went back to his music synthesizer, searching for new musical meanings. And ways of serving kids. His own, and the world's.
+He denounced hippies as phony and drugs as stupid. He also mocked himself and his own success. But his self-deprecation was deceptive. He talked about fooling around with music, not letting you know how deeply he was into [[Johann Sebastian Bach|Bach]], [[Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|Mozart]], and the classic tradition. He talked over my head about harmonic climates, and he traveled to Czechoslovakia, became a close friend of [[Václav Havel|Václav Havel]], and studied folk songs of Eastern Europe, writing serious music on their themes. He was also contrary. Talk about his success, and he would say he was a failure. Talk about his popularity, and he said he was lonely. Maybe he was. Maybe the world around him was too crass, too mediocre, too homogenized. So he cursed it with dirty words, and went back to his music synthesizer, searching for new musical meanings. And ways of serving kids. His own, and the world's.
 ----
 '''James Finney Baylan'''
-Like a lot of people, I suppose my adolescence could be divided in its distinct each defined by a certain friend, fashion, and music. The Zappa Phase came immediately after my hard labor as a Deadhead, which came on the heels of various obsessions with [[wikipedia:Jethro Tull (band)|Jethro Tull]], the [[wikipedia:Rolling Stones|Stones]], and God knows what else. I confess, in 1974, to having attended an [[Alice Cooper]] concert at which Alice cut off his own head with a giant guillotine and later drank his own blood. At least he said it was his own blood.
+Like a lot of people, I suppose my adolescence could be divided in its distinct each defined by a certain friend, fashion, and music. The Zappa Phase came immediately after my hard labor as a Deadhead, which came on the heels of various obsessions with [[wikipedia:Jethro Tull (band)|Jethro Tull]], the [[The Rolling Stones|Stones]], and God knows what else. I confess, in 1974, to having attended an [[Alice Cooper]] concert at which Alice cut off his own head with a giant guillotine and later drank his own blood. At least he said it was his own blood.
 Zappa's music, however, was not just a phase. Sure, the pornographic hilariousness of it was a dependable way to offend one's parents when necessary, but the amazing thing about Zappa's music was not its raw weirdness. Zappa's music was serious in a way that, to my 14-year-old ears, opened up a new way of listening to and interacting with music.
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 '''What did you think of the title ''Shampoo Horn?''<br>
 Well, in a way it doesn't apply now, since Ahmet is completely bald. He shaved his head, so the album cover is the last chance to see Ahmet with hair on his head.
 [[Category:Articles about Zappa]]

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-Personal reminiscenses by David Dudley, David Zinman, [[Nigey Lennon]], Daniel Schorr, James F.Baylan, Dimitri Ehrlich<br>
+Personal reminiscenses by David Dudley, David Zinman, [[Nigey Lennon]], [[Daniel Schorr]], James F.Baylan, Dimitri Ehrlich<br>
 City Paper, Baltimore weekly, No.3, 1994 January
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−	Personal reminiscenses by David Dudley, David Zinman, [[Nigey Lennon]], Daniel Schorr, James F.Baylan, Dimitri Ehrlich	+	Personal reminiscenses by David Dudley, David Zinman, [[Nigey Lennon]], Daniel Schorr, James F.Baylan, Dimitri Ehrlich<br>
	City Paper, Baltimore weekly, No.3, 1994 January		City Paper, Baltimore weekly, No.3, 1994 January

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	'''David Dudley'''		'''David Dudley'''