Brother A. West

Brother A. West (self-portrait).

Brother A. West (real name: Andrew West Reid, Jr.) (b. 1954) is an American comedian, cover artist, illustrator, art director and convicted sex offender.

Frank Zappa

He was part of the "Brother A. West World Salivation Ministry", a comedy troupe who've opened for a number of punk bands in the mid 1980s. He designed the album cover of Broadway The Hard Way (1988) and can be heard during the track A Few Moments With Brother A. West, which was recorded in Philadelphia on February 14th, 1988. He also illustrated The Real Frank Zappa Book (1988).

Later life

West was an art director on the PBS television show "Jay-Jay the Jet Plane," and won two Cable Ace awards in the category of Best Art Direction in a Comedy, Musical or Series for Shelley Duvall's "Rock 'n Roll Mother Goose" and for "Adventures in Wonderland," both on the Disney Channel.

In 2008 he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison for molesting a six-year old child and the possession of child pornography. He was freed in 2014, but still had to pay $5.4 million to his victim and remains registered as a sex offender.

Zappa about Brother A. West

Frank Zappa: "Well, first I was doing business with a printing company that showed me these things (FZ hands Den a book of "Rev. A. West World Salvation stamps") 'cause they had done some work for A. West."

Den Simms: Reverend A. West World Salvation stamps. . .these are great! (laughs)

Frank Zappa:: "Take 'em! ... Uh, then I was introduced to him by Jeff Stein, who worked on Dweezil's "My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama" video. And then I saw some of his work. He did some logos for me and some other illustrations. He did the album cover for Broadway The Hard Way, and then he did illustrations for the book."

Den Simms: The work he did on your book was really fantastic.

Frank Zappa: "That took a long time."

Den Simms: Yeah, and there was a unity of all of those things. It was ...

Frank Zappa: "Well, the way that was done was he'd come over here and we'd go chapter by chapter through the book, and I'd tell him my ideas for what oughta be, y'know, how to illustrate what I was talking about. Then he would do sketches, and some of 'em were not approved by the publisher. They wouldn't let him put some of the things in there."

Den Simms: So there was some things that you guys wanted to have in there that didn't make it?

Frank Zappa: "Yeah. One of the problems was the publisher was very adamant about the size of the book. It only had to be a certain number of pages. Some of the other decisions as to what to leave out were based on, they felt the illustrations were in bad taste, or something like that. And there's nothin' that I could do about it because it's not my publishing company."

(...)

Den Simms: But just in the way that the style that he drew those illustrations, and such. There was an element of continuity throughout that I found really pleasing. I just thought he did a really outstanding job.

Frank Zappa: "Well, so you'll understand, it's another one of those things like "Mississippi Mud" that you don't know about. The whole illustrational style in there is derived from a type of cartoon approach that was in American popular literature in the early part of the century. It's got that, the whole old-fashioned type of illustration to it. So it's a parody of that kind of Americana that he's doing."

- Frank Zappa in They're Doing the Interview of the Century, Part 1, Den Simms, Eric Buxton, Rob Samler, Society Pages, April 1990.

External links

• Lambiek Comiclopedia article.