Frank Zappa

Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American guitarist, composer, singer and satirist.

Early life and influences

Zappa was born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 21st, 1940 from mixed Sicilian, Italian, Greek, Arab, French, and German ancestry. He was the oldest of four children, with two brothers and a sister. In January of 1951, his family relocated to the west coast because of Frank's asthma. They settled in Monterey, California, on the coast about 100 miles south of San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Pomona, then El Cajon before moving a short distance once again to San Diego in the early 1950s.

Related Topics:
Baltimore, Maryland - December 21st - 1940 - 1951 - Asthma - Monterey - California - San Francisco - Pomona - El Cajon - San Diego - 1950s

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By 1955 the Zappa family had relocated to Lancaster, which at the time was a small aircraft and farming town in Antelope Valley in the Mojave Desert, close to Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Mountains. By age 15, Frank had attended six different high schools, which may have contributed to his sense of alienation in adult life.

Related Topics:
1955 - Lancaster - Aircraft - Antelope Valley - Mojave Desert - Los Angeles - San Gabriel Mountains - High schools

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His father, a chemist and mathematician born in Sicily, worked nearby at Edwards Air Force Base which at the time housed a federal government chemical warfare research facility. Due to their close proximity to Edwards AFB, he kept gas masks at home in case of an accident. This evidently had a profound effect on the young Frank; references to germs, germ warfare and other aspects of the "secret" defense industry occur throughout his work.

Related Topics:
Chemist - Sicily - Edwards Air Force Base - Chemical warfare

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Lancaster's location gave the young Zappa access to the exciting sounds coming from radio stations in Los Angeles and beyond, and his parents were affluent enough to afford a record player, records, a TV, and musical instruments. TV also exerted a strong influence and references to TV and TV shows, including quotations from themes and advertising jingles, can be found in almost every piece he wrote.

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Another formative event was a chronic sinus problem during his early teens. To Frank's lasting horror, his doctor treated the stubborn ailment by inserting a pellet of radium on a probe into both of his nostrils. Nasal imagery and references to the nose also recur, both in his writing and in the classic collage album covers created by his longtime visual collaborator, Cal Schenkel.

Related Topics:
Radium - Cal Schenkel

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As a student, he was bored and given to distracting the rest of the class with his antics, and was once suspended from school for a dangerous prank involving explosive chemicals and a Parents' Open House night. He left community college after one semester in order to make low-budget films. He maintained his disdain for formal education throughout his life, taking his children out of school at age 15 and refusing to pay for their college. Nevertheless, he was in essence a polymath. He was highly intelligent, ambitious and articulate, and possessed a voracious intelligence, drive, singular concentration, enormous creativity and a huge capacity for work and organization. Zappa was passionately interested in music, developing wide-ranging and highly idiosyncratic musical interests and demonstrating superior ability at an early age. His parents were not musicians but had broad musical tastes also, and he grew up influenced in equal measures by avant-garde composers such as Edgar Varèse and Igor Stravinsky, local rhythm and blues and doo-wop groups (particularly local pachuco groups), and modern jazz, including bebop and free jazz, influences which show up in his work.

Related Topics:
Polymath - Avant-garde - Edgar Varèse - Igor Stravinsky - Rhythm and blues - Doo-wop - Pachuco - Bebop - Free jazz

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Zappa was from the first interested in sounds for their own sake, which led to his interest in modern composers. His introduction to Stravinsky seems to have been a pivotal musical discovery but he was soon ranging even further afield, musically. After reading a magazine review panning Varèse's dissonant drum piece in "Ionisation" (actually The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One) as 'a weird jumble of drums and other unpleasant sounds', the teenage Zappa became convinced that he should seek out Varèse's music. When he spotted a copy of The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One in a local record store, where it was being used as a hi-fi demonstration record, he convinced the salesman to sell him the copy despite the fact that he didn't have the full price, beginning a lifelong passion for Varèse and his music. Zappa's mother gave him considerable encouragement. Although she greatly disliked Varèse's music, she was indulgent enough to give Frank the gift of a long distance call to the composer at his home in New York as a fifteenth birthday present. Unfortunately, Varèse was away in Europe at the time, but the young fan spoke to the composer's wife.

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Zappa began his playing career on drums, taking his first lessons at school in the summer of 1953, aged 13. He drummed with local teenage combos, but later switched to guitar, which he quickly mastered. Although he performed as a singer-guitarist for most of his career, Zappa always retained a strong interest in rhythm and percussion. His bands have been notable for the excellence of their drummers and works such as The Black Page are notorious for the virtuoso complexity of their rhythmic structure and arrangement, featuring radical changes of tempo and metre and short, densely arranged passages which are contrasted with free-form breaks and extended improvisations. Classically trained percussionist and drummer Terry Bozzio, who played for Zappa in the late 1970s as well as playing and recording many well-known classical and avant-garde works, is on record as saying that Zappa's writing for percussion is as difficult and complex as anything else he has played.

Related Topics:
Terry Bozzio - 1970s

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In 1956 Zappa met Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) while taking classes at Antelope Valley High School, when Zappa was playing guitar in a local band, The Blackouts, a racially-mixed outfit that also included Euclid James "Motorhead" Sherwood, who later lived with Zappa at 'Studio Z' and was a member of the Mothers of Invention, playing on many of their most famous recordings. They became close friends, influencing each other musically, and becoming collaborators in the late Sixties and mid- Seventies (on the album Bongo Fury, released 1975), although they later became estranged for a period of years. Van Vliet's own feelings about Frank Zappa were perhaps best summarized in a quote published in a March 1994 issue of Musician magazine: "I knew him for thirty-seven years, and in the end, the relationship was private."

Related Topics:
1956 - Captain Beefheart

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In 1957 Zappa was given his first guitar and quickly developed into a highly accomplished and inventive player. He considered his solos "air sculptures", and developed an eclectic, fluent and extremely individual style, eventually becoming one of the most highly regarded electric guitarists of his time. It is possible that he might have become a professional jazz musician, but he was soon drawn into rock music, although he retained a lifelong attachment to jazz forms, voicings and structures and often drew his band members from the jazz world, if only because of the high degree of musical competence his music demanded.

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Zappa's interest in composing and arranging burgeoned in his later high school years and he dreamed of being taken seriously as a composer. By his final year he was writing prolifically and had not only composed, arranged and conducted an avant-garde performance piece for the school orchestra, but had also contrived to have the event both broadcast on local radio and recorded. A portion of this historic recording is included on the CD The Lost Episodes. Zappa did see his childhood dream realized, as the London Symphony Orchestra played a program of his music, and the Ensemble Modern in 1992 received a 20-minute ovation after performing a program of his work at the Frankfurt Opera House.

Related Topics:
London Symphony Orchestra - Ensemble Modern - 1992 - Frankfurt

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After graduating in June 1958 he worked for a time in advertising. His sojourn in the commercial world was another important influence on his work, and within a few years Zappa was co-opting the techniques he learned as a commercial artist, and was using them to deconstruct music, the music business, the media and society at large by combining them with the ideas he had gleaned from his studies of dada, situationism, and surrealism. Zappa frequently referenced his experiences in advertising in his lyrics.

Related Topics:
1958 - Dada - Situationism - Surrealism

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Zappa always took a keen interest in the visual presentation of his work, rapidly developing from album cover designer (e.g. Absolutely Free) to director of his own films and videos. Zappa's album covers are highly distinctive, and frequently bizarre and surreal. His two most important visual collaborators were Cal Schenkel in the Sixties and early Seventies, and Donald Roller Wilson in the Eighties and Nineties. -

Related Topics:
Absolutely Free - Donald Roller Wilson

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Zappa moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and spent most of the rest of his life there. Among his earliest professional recordings are two adventurous and remarkably accomplished scores for the low-budget films Run Home Slow and The World's Greatest Sinner.

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He married his first wife Kay the same year but the relationship soon deteriorated and they divorced two years later. In 1963 he began playing professionally around Los Angeles and bought the small Pal Recording Studio in Rancho Cucamonga, California (formerly called Cucamonga), which he renamed "Studio Z".

Related Topics:
1963 - Rancho Cucamonga

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Zappa had recorded at Pal since the early 1960s and after receiving a payment for one of his film scores he was able to buy the studio. Soon after, his marriage ended and he moved out of his apartment and into the studio, where he began routinely working 12 hours or more per day, setting a pattern that would endure for almost all of his life. At this time, only a handful of the most expensive commercial studios had multitrack facilities and for smaller studios, the industry standard was still mono or two-track. By the time he recorded his first LP with The Mothers in 1966 he was already an accomplished recording and mastering engineer and from his third LP on and for the rest of his career, he produced all his own work.

Related Topics:
1960s - 1966

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After being approached by a customer who offered him $100 to produce a suggestive tape for a stag party, Zappa and a female friend jokingly faked the "erotic" recording, which purported to contain the sounds of people having sex. Unfortunately the customer was an undercover member of the Vice Squad and Zappa was jailed for ten days on charges of supplying pornography. His entrapment and brief imprisonment left a permanent mark on him, and was a key event in the formation of his anti-authoritarian stance.

Related Topics:
$ - Pornography - Anti-authoritarian

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