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.