The Social Critic / Entrepreneur: An Introduction

From very early on in his career Zappa held a cynical view of the music industry and the business aspect of music. He distanced himself from his peers and believed that anyone who played rock and roll was simply in it for the money. He saw the entire music industry as “a cynical commercial exercise.” (Miles p. 73) His strong views of the industry, his fellow musicians and of society in general would soon begin making appearance in his satirical lyrics. Even in his early work he can be heard, for example, exposing shallow American teenagers over-concerned with appearance.

However, being the intelligent man that he was, Zappa soon decided to jump onto that cynical commercial bandwagon and began writing singles for other artists in the ‘60s. Along with his writing partner, Ray Collins, they wrote tracks for The Heartbreakers, Bob Guy, Brian Lord and many others, but they could never seem to churn out a hit. Finally, The Persuaders’ “Tijuana Surf” hit number one in Mexico and stayed there for seventeen weeks and it just so happened that a Zappa tune, “Grunion Run,” was on the B-side. Not receiving any royalties from the hit he soon smartened up and his entrepreneurial side bloomed: in 1963 he set up his own music publishing company, Aleatory Music, the first of many, in order to be able to control the royalties owed to him from all the singles he was writing.

Zappa’s early musical career was filled with many projects, but it wasn’t until The Soul Giants – Zappa, Ray Collins, Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada – got together that he began to think of taking his own music and recording it himself. Liking their dynamic, he came up with a business plan to make money from his original music, without giving it to other artists. Zappa believed that the first step was to move away from the covers they were playing in bars to originals if they were ever going to hear from a record company. They began playing his compositions and “initially it was a financial arrangement. When you’re scuffling in bars for zero to seven dollars per night per man, you think about money first,” Zappa is known to have said.

Unfortunately, the originals got them fired from all of their bar gigs because no one could dance to their music. Feeling confident that his entrepreneurial instincts would not fail him and that he truly had something special with his new group, Zappa reevaluated his business plan and decided that they needed to move to Hollywood.

On May 10th, 1965, coincidentally Mother’s day, the group dubbed itself The Mothers and soon embarked on a life-changing move from Pomona Valley to Hollywood.

The Musician / Performer: An Introduction

Throughout his life Zappa was drawn to two very different genres of music: R&B and the old School of Vienna composers. He appreciated both styles and used a fusion of the two as inspiration when composing his own pieces.

When his first marriage began to fall apart in the mid sixties Zappa moved into his Studio Z in Cucamonga. With almost nonexistent clientele Zappa spent the hours in studio experimenting with instruments, creating new sounds and pushing his music further and further into the bizarre and outlandish.

His musicianship grew and all he wanted to do was play classical music. In May of 1963 he actually held a concert of some of his orchestral music performed by the Student Orchestra of Mount St. Mary’s. However, this was a rare pleasure. As Zappa once said, “I never had any intention of writing rock music. I always wanted to compose more serious music and have it performed in concert halls, but I knew no one would play it. So I figured that if anyone was ever going to hear anything I composed, I’d have to get a band together and play rock music. That’s how I got started.” (Miles p.91)

It is evident that Zappa had a deeply rooted love and respect for music and was willing to sacrifice whatever he had to in order to be a musician and performer.

The Composer: An Introduction

What many don’t realize is that Zappa’s first ever musical dream was to write “serious” music. Music which he found in the repertoires of his classical influences, such as Stravinsky. He dreamed of having his compositions performed by orchestras, but as he found during his first meeting, around the age of seventeen, with the conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra – he had a lot to learn.

With no formal musical training Zappa had a lot to prove before he would be taken seriously. As he admitted himself, he was extremely naïve at the start of his musical career and would write sheet music that simply looked pretty. If the notes on the page were aesthetically pleasing, Frank was happy. The only problem was he didn’t know what the composition would sound like when played.

Through the years, as we will see in later posts, he honed his craft (and learned what different notes would potentially sound like!) and was able to write beautiful compositions. However, by then, his social critiques were brewing inside him, ready to explode and tell the people of the world exactly what was wrong with them.

Zappa opted to take a drastic turn in his musical career path and chose to become an unconventional composer, offering music that was always unexpected but, with time, increasingly welcome.

The Man: An Introduction

From his birth on the 21st of December, 1940 it seems that Frank Vincent Zappa was not destined to lead a quaint, “regular” life.

After thirty-six hours of labor he finally came into the world with his umbilical chord wrapped around his neck and on the verge of not making it. From that moment on, things never got much easier for Frank.

Beginning his journey in Baltimore, Maryland he was liked in school and known to everyone as the clown, but as the Second World War began, and Italy positioned itself as an enemy of the U.S.A., all Italian-Americans began to be looked down upon. To prove his loyalty to the country that was now his home, Frank’s father, the son of Sicilian immigrants, began working for the navy as a chemical weapons researcher, meteorologist, and several other positions which constantly took him around the country. Refusing to travel alone he would constantly uproot his entire family and move. Due to the inability to settle in one spot and find a place to call “home”, Frank never had a chance to build many true relationships and he was alone most of the time.

His constant sickness didn’t help either. Years later it became evident that the chemical research which his father was conducting for the navy, including research on mustard gas and other carcinogenic and deadly chemicals, was taking a toll on Frank, and all other residents in the cities surrounding the research facilities.

Having a high aptitude for art, Frank began to seek solace in painting, film-making and, eventually, music. He immersed himself in the world of art as much as he possibly could and as he reached his late teens he began to miss school, preferring to spend his time listening to records and playing his beat-up guitar.

Although Zappa later admitted he was naïve in his youth, he began questioning everything around him from a young age. He questioned his religion, musical norms, stereotypes, fashion etc. These social critiques and strong opinions would soon translate into his signature avant-garde music that challenged all conventions.

From his first ever band, the Black-Outs, it was evident that Frank wanted to show society that their beliefs were wrong, and his mission was always to improve the public’s musical tastes. The group which integrated African-American and Mexican players was found shocking and disturbing and even alarmed the local police. This was just the beginning of his pushing of boundaries.

Immersing himself in music and trying to absorb as much as he could, he became increasingly discontent with the norms. When he read H.A. Clarke’s Counterpoint: Strict and Free and saw that there was a page dedicated to musical successions that were not allowed, he immediately found that the forbidden ones sounded magnificent! He would fuse Varese and Stravinsky influences with those from R&B, which was unheard of, but as he once explained: “...although harmonically, rhythmically, and in many other superficial ways it was very different, the basic soul of the music seemed to me to be coming from the same universal source.” (Miles p. 27)

Frank would have an ongoing battle with society and their square musical beliefs until his very last day.

Evolution / Revolution: A Quick Introduction

The title of this blog is an all-encompassing statement of its goals: to study Frank Vincent Zappa's evolution into "Zappa," as well as his revolutionary beliefs and compositions.

Evolution/Revolution will strive to explore the journey of Zappa's life and musical career from his humble beginnings in Baltimore, to his often-times isolated teenage years as the misunderstood Frank Vincent Zappa, to his later years as a misunderstood musical experimentalist, to, finally, his long overdue acceptance as "Zappa" the musical genius - Evolution / Revolution will leave no stone unturned.

To further study these issues the blog will tackle five areas of Zappa:

1. Zappa: Composer
2. Zappa: Musician / Performer
3. Zappa: Entrepreneur
   
4. Zappa: Social Critic
5. Zappa: The Man Behind It All

By taking a close look at these five subcategories, whilst using a variety of resources (including: "Zappa: a Biography" by Barry Miles and lectures given by Dr. Pinsonneault at Montreal's Concordia University), Evolution / Revolution will hopefully be able to shed some light on the curious and one-of-a-kind enigma that is "Zappa".