Happy Birthday FRANK ZAPPA (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993)

. . . which led me here (first of four parts)--where he has NO MUSTACHE.

The first album I ever bought was Freak Out! I got my $5 allowance and jumped on my Stingray to head down to the record shop to get it (I think I was 7). To this day, Duke of Prunes and Sofa are all-time faves, my mom will still do a little harem dance if she's subjected to Help, I'm a Rock, and I suspect Ensemble Modern (you have to search the CDs--their Greggery Peccary & Other Persuasions is amazing) will continue to embrace him as one of our greatest modern composers.

Not a bad legacy for a guy who didn't care if he left one at all.

...but very quickly after that my sister gave me "Freak Out" for my birthday. From that point on it was like knocking down dominoes...I just bought 'em all. Saw Frank three times in concert: with Flo & Eddie in Boston (opening act, Chuck Berry), at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos with the "Roxy & Elsewhere" band (Napoleon Murphy Brock & George Duke, opening act was a solo Tom Waits), and at the Berkeley Community Theater (the Bongo Fury tour, opening act Captain Beefheart, but...sadly...they never shared the stage for even a handshake).

I think one of the major reasons that Frank HAS such a legacy is that he DIDN'T care. People who aren't worried about how they will be remembered never let that influence their work, and in doing so, BECOME influential.

:toast:

I was stuck in the Midwest and at that age, the best I could do was Ravi Shankar (toured our local college just after Woodstock). My brother was in HS and for some reason was allowed to hitchhike west one summer and even rushed the stage to kiss Janis. By the time I was old enough to really do what I wanted, it was Rush, Van Halen, Def Leppard, AC/DC, and all that good '70s and '80s stuff (IA is still headbanger central, I think). Closest I came to Zappa live was Bogus Pomp, a great cover band out of Tampa; Napoleon frequently appears with them. Their annual Zappaween concert is a scream. (Best winning costume was the year a guy came as Billy the Mountain.)

I've heard about the Captain Beefheart thing, but after seeing him on Letterman repeatedly, maybe he was just too far out there and Frank didn't want to deal with the unpredictability.

Dang. Now I've got to go crank some Be-Bop Tango and smoke a college diploma. :hippie:

on www.wncw.org

All Zappa for one hour, no commercial interruptions.

...the "blink and you'll miss it" swipe at Davy Jones:



In a previous episode, Jones had a segment in which he interviewed a "soul" musician, who attempted to explain the difference between "soul" music and "Monkees" music with terms such as "the one and seven, or is it on the one and the five," which CLEARLY went over Jones' head, even though he sat there with an ear to ear grin while spouting Davy-isms along the lines of "Yeah, man, I can dig it."

:toast: