Mojave Desert
The Mojave Desert is located in the South West of the Us, extending into California, Nevada (including Las Vegas), Arizona and Utah).
When Frank Zappa's family moved to Lancaster between 1956 and 1958, they lived close to the Mojave Desert, where Zappa's father, Francis Zappa, worked at the Edwards Air Force Base.
While living close to a desert brought all the teenage boredom and frustration of a desert town along, Zappa was thrilled when he heard Edgar Varèse's composition Déserts, since he associated it with the desert not far from his town:
"When you're fifteen and living in the Mojave Desert and find out that the world's greatest composer, somewhere in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory, is working on a song about your "home town" you can get pretty excited. It seemed a great tragedy that nobody in Palmdale or Rosamond would care if they ever heard it. I still think Déserts is about Lancaster, even if the liner notes on the Columbia LP say it's something more philosophical." - Frank Zappa in Edgard Varèse: The Idol of My Youth (1971)
Zappa's friend during these days, Captain Beefheart, enjoyed the desert more, since he loved being close to nature and the animal life there. In 1982, after Beefheart left the music industry, he spent his final years near the Mojave Desert. In Anton Corbijn's documentary Some Low Yo-Yo Stuff (1993), Beefheart is filmed and interviewed in the Mojave Desert.
References to the Mojave Desert in Zappa's work
- Billy The Mountain: "They left that night, crunchin' across the Mojave Desert"
- San Ber'dino: "She lives in Mojave, in a Winnebago"
- The constellation Mochajava on the star map on the back cover of One Size Fits All is another reference.
