Today’s the birthday of George Washington and . . . my older
brother Thomas. So it seems fitting to take this opportunity to salute an
American original and a one-of-a-kind talent, whom no one who ever hung out with
my brother in the Seventies could avoid hearing and hearing plenty: the one,
the only (and soon to replace the mudshark in your mythology) . . . Frank
Zappa!
Does Zappa have his own postage stamp yet? What’s wrong with
this country? Frank Zappa, besides being a fiendishly inventive guitar-playing
genius, a composer of wit, verve, audacity, complexity and cartoonish
absurdity, a jokester, scourge of hippiedom and formal education, champion of
freedom of speech in rock lyrics, well-spoken, intelligent, and even humble
advocate of his own weird but accessible music and persona, was a beacon of
what you hope for your children: that they will figure out an angle on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
that is unique, satisfying, and even inspiring. And he died dismayingly early for such a clean-living (except for those cigarettes) family man, at age 53.
And I’m not really that big a fan. I heard almost every
Zappa recording up through Zoot Allures
(1976). I saw him live at least three
times. One of those times, October 1976 at the Spectrum Theater, I’ve just
found out is now available online and I’m going to have to go for it. I mean, I
was there! Zappa was ever and always Zappa. No bullshit about that. But his
music is so NOT “strictly commercial” or strictly any recognizable genre but
Zappa, there’s no easy way to make him match to what passes for music in the
world of rock’n’roll. Zappa had little patience for rock. And as to writing
songs that speak about emotional entanglements, soulful self-examination, high
and happy pursuit of sexual thrills, or earnest evocations of Meaning and
Causes—as Suzy Creamcheese would say: “for-get it!”
Today’s
“song” is a perfect example, from the album
Apostrophe (1974), the only top ten record Zappa released. In this first-person narrative, a man finds his python boot is “too tight”; he is unable to take it off; a week goes by and he finally removes the
offending article; his girlfriend informs him
that he’s “got stinkfoot”; he then brandishes his foot in the immediate olfactory vicinity of Fido, a puppy who is
bringing his slippers. Fido passes out. (Then there's a blistering guitar solo of amazing dexterity.) But that’s only the set-up. Fido
regains his senses and proceeds to relate to his master a tale in which Fido,
when questioned about his “conceptual continuity,” informs his interlocutor
that “the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.”
This sets off a brief foray of denial by “the
man who was talking to the dog” (whether the python-boot-perplexed master or
the other speaker in Fido’s tale) who, using most if not all of the
contractions which our language permits, says “you can’t say that,”
etc. At which point Frank says “ain’t
this boogie a mess” and then proceeds to serenade us on his guitar, while some backup singers regale us with the lyrical
reflection, “the poodle bi-yites, the poodle chews it.” Meanwhile in the closing thirty seconds, Zappa buries many guitar heroes.
My brother, who when marshaling us to get up out of our
chairs to venture forth for munchies, might be heard often to deliver the line “Out
through the night and the whispering breezes / To the place where they keep the
imaginary diseases,” was steeped in the lingo of Za-Pa, which could almost be Da-Da at times, and at other times was more like doo-doo, like the puerile
attempts at humor of some pimply kid from our collective pasts.
Frank doesn’t quite do fart jokes,
but he’s not far off. Is he misogynist? Do guys have dicks? But, on
that score, he had a wife he raised four kids with. I imagine his kids’ playmates' parents
may have had doubts about inviting the Zappas to the barbeque, but what do I
know? This was CA, so all bets are off.
A product of a clean-cut world of doo-wop and bobby-soxers,
Zappa, like others of his generation, had to invent his musical idiom out
of whatever came to hand, but retained the taint of squaresville longer (in 1966 he's still dealing with Elvis-era stuff) and made it the antithesis of the Freakdom he fully represented. But not the freaks of Hippiedom.
Zappa hated hippies and I doubt he had much use for The Beatles even before
Sgt. Pepper, which struck him as pretentious, and got travestied by the cover
of his album We’re Only In It For the
Money (1968). He does a Dylan knock-off of sorts on Freak Out! (1966), the debut album of Zappa and his band The
Mothers of Invention. All of which lets you know that Sixties “counter-culture”
struck Zappa as a kind of silly white-boy fantasy. His way of handling things was the lampoon.
Everything is mockable.
Zappa’s singing voice is an enjoyable baritone, more at home delivering the kinds of “voices” one associates
with radio shows and comic radio shows (like the
National Lampoon). After an
unfortunate accident in 1972, he was pretty beat up: a fan knocked or pushed
him off the stage and he fell into a concrete orchestra pit . . . the kind of
thing, come to think of it, that Zappa might invent for the protagonist of one
of his weird story-songs (the guy with the boot and the talking dog is far from
the weirdest, or most extended—for that check out “Billy the Mountain,” which I
have heard many many times, sort of
the anti-concept LP/mock-rock opera song. It was
a Seventies thing, kids). But he came back, perhaps better than ever. At least
his string of LPs in the mid-Seventies, of which
Apostrophe is the best, IMHO, were more apt to include catchy songs—ringing
bizarre changes on melodies is a Zappa trademark—memorable lyrics and, always
some, though you might might want more, guitar wizardry.
As to me, I adopted the phrase “the crux of the biscuit” to
apply to any apothegm that nails it. It might even apply to doing the right
thing at the right time. And, well, we all can only hope that we have or find
some “conceptual continuity.” As to the “apostrophe”—Frank
cleverly distracts us with the punctuation mark, used to indicate a contraction
or possession (which is where a lot of people get into trouble) and, at times,
quotation, when in fact the nature of most of Frank’s songs, in addressing
the listener (particularly in asides such as “this is the dog talking now”),
use “apostrophe”: “an address to a person or personified object, not present.”
Well, y’know, friends, I’m kinda partial to the apostrophe
myself. Seems it gets me out of that rather less beguiling situation where you
really are always and only talking to yourself. By virtue of the apostrophe—hey,
presto!—I’m not talking to me any more, but to you. That helps. And now, as we
used to apostrophize to Frank many times: shut up and play yer guitar!
