Jacques Cousteau
Jacques Cousteau (June 11, 1910 - June 25, 1997) was a French marine biologist, documentary film maker and inventor. He invented the aqua lung, which improved scuba diving, and made several documentary films and TV specials about life in the oceans, all narrated by himself. Cousteau was also an environmental activist.
Frank Zappa and Jacques Cousteau
In 1989, Zappa was approached by the Cousteau Society to compose music for a documentary, produced by them, about the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster earlier that year. As he explained in They're Doing the Interview of the Century, Part 2 (22 December 1989):
Frank Zappa: "I just took a job scoring my first TV show for Jacques Cousteau, which I have to deliver before I go back to Russia on the 15th."
Eric Buxton: You're going back to Russia on the 15th of January?
Frank Zappa: "Yeah, and Cousteau is going to be over there at the same time, and I'm taking a television crew with me. I'm hoping to interview him while I'm there."
Later in the same interview, Zappa also comments: "Well, the story of "Lost In A Whirlpool" goes back even farther. When I was in high school in San Diego in '55, there was a guy who grew up to be a sports writer named Larry Littlefield. He, and another guy named Jeff Harris, and I used to hang out, and we used to make up stories, little skits and stuff, you know, dumb little teenage things. One of the plots that we cooked up was about a person who was skindiving – San Diego's a surfer kind of an area – skindiving in the San Diego sewer system [laughter], and talking about encountering brown, blind fish. [laughter] It was kind of like the Cousteau expedition of its era." [laughter]
The documentary Alaska: Outrage At Valdez (1990), with Zappa's music, was made by Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of Cousteau. A piece of Zappa's score for this documentary was performed by the Ensemble Modern during the 1992 The Yellow Shark concerts, under the title: Outrage At Valdez.
Jacques Cousteau is also mentioned and thanked in the liner notes of The MOFO Project/Object (2006) album. [1]
Interviwed by N.F. Mendoza in The Los Angeles Times (5 March 1995), Dweezil Zappa said that he originally wanted to be a marine biologist: "I couldn't watch enough Cousteau. Then I saw ‘Jaws,’ and decided I wasn’t going into the water.”[2]
