Ole Lysgaard

Ole Lysgaard.

Ole Lysgaard is a Danish teacher and passionate Zappa fan, since he heard Freak Out! in 1967, at the recommendation of a friend.

He was present from the very first concert of Frank Zappa in Denmark until the last. In 1970, he received Zappa's autograph at his concert in Copenhagen. Gradually he was able to talk to him for longer amounts of time, until by 1976 he managed to have his photo taken with Zappa. In 1977, he also talked with Zappa's bodyguard John Smothers and was allowed backstage and even joined the ride along to the concert in the Falkoner Theater in Copenhagen.

In 1978, Lysgaard and Zappa talked almost 45 minutes backstage and afterwards he received three cassettes from Zappa. The first was the original Läther, the other a collection of moments from concerts, which Lysgaard described as a forerunner of the YCDTOSA albums. The last tape was a dub of a live recording excerpt from the concert in Williamsburg, Virginia (1 November 1975) (this tape was released to the public decades later as the CD Joe's Menage (2008), restored by John Polito. Lysgaard also wrote liner notes for this album).

In 1981, Lysgaard received a rehearsal tape from 12 August 1981 where, to his glee, Zappa gave a little shout-out to him during Montana: "Everyone on the counts, 'cause there are guys like Ole, who sits out there in the audience with a calculator to see if you are playing it just like the record". He also namedropped Lysgaard during a performance of The Blue Light in Aarhus, Denmark (1982).

Lysgaard became aware that his behavior sometimes came across as a bit obsessive when in 1983 he received an audio tape of an interview on Andy Warhol's TV where Zappa talked about his fans and named Lysgaard as "a very strange man" whom he regarded a kind of a stalker, even skipping school, despite being a teacher, to track him down at his hotel lobby, waiting with a tape recorder. He stated that this might be flattering to somebody, but not to him and this was one of the reasons he didn't ever want to go Denmark anymore. Indeed, Zappa only toured in Norway and Sweden in 1984, but Lysgaard travelled there to these countries too. When they met in Oslo, Norway, Zappa at one point snarked: "Still spying on everybody?". Lysgaard then confronted him, saying that Zappa wasn't very fair, since he really cared about his music. Zappa instantly changed his attitude, saying that he did feel flattered, but just didn't know how to deal with it. He promised to never say anything negative about him again and even gave him his telephone number. From that moment on, until his death, Lysgaard and Zappa phoned on a regular basis, every two or three months.

In 1988, Zappa dedicated his concert at the Falkoner Theater in Copenhagen to Lysgaard and even asked him to stand up from the front row for a moment.

In 2020, Lysgaard co-contributed to the chapter about Zappa's concert in Denmark in the book Frank Zappa - The Nordic Stories.