Frank Zappa

Don't Do That On Stage Anymore

For the pop life of me, I cannot see why anyone past the age of 17 would want to listen to Frank Zappa again, never mind revere him as a deep and important artist, never mind worship at the tottering edifice of his recollected, remastered and repackaged works. Surely the only pertinent use for Zappa was as an interim stage for young lads ‹ scared witless by what they suddenly perceive as the transience or hollowness of popular culture ‹ for whom Zappa represents a gi-normous prefab sneer of self-importance behind which they can shelter for a while. (And, lest we forget: in the pre-Viz, pre-Mayall and Edmondson 1970s, he was the only legitimate supplier of fart and bum and willy jokes).

When you're a Zappa fan, you're supplied with a number of get-out clauses from the idea of simple plain fun most of us plain simple folks get from popular culture. If you're still slightly nervous about the idea of worshipping some geeky, greasy-hair, guitar-stranglin' guy, there is Zappa's obeisance to notions of Western cultural fidelity (as witness his attempts at More Serious Works) to buoy up your sense of engagement with something bigger, something... Beyond. If you're just an average Bill 'n' Ted kinda guy, looking to gross out on guitars 'n' guffaws, then there is Zappa's blanket cynicism, misogyny, Catch 22 smutty humour (supposedly a parody of smutty attitudes ‹ yeah, and Are You Being Served is Hegel in hiding). And finally ‹ and perhaps most important of all for Frank's fan-boy club ‹ is the fact that all this would-be cultural iconoclasm is served up with its outsize Guitar Worship intact. So Frank's boys can genuflect at the feet of a Real Musician; they can collate and collect and fanzine-date each and every guitar solo into hermetic, cultural, slo-death oblivion ‹ while simultaneously pretending it's all being held suspended daintily between gilded quotation marks. Just like Frank did for most of his life. Instead of having to come out and face the difficult adult world of belief, lust, dirt, pain, you can instead strike ironic poses about belief, lust, dirt, pain; you can string ironic distancing effects like so many fairy lights, finally, around everything you do. Even unto your own aspirations.

At the beginning of his career, Zappa may have perceived one or two truths, whose pure toxicity proved too much for him. Not being someone whose genius was innately, genetically wild and crazy (no Beefheart, Iggy or Reed/Cale he), but who still wanted to be somehow, someway centre stage all the same (and all the time), he cast around. Could he be a leading edge satirist like Lenny Bruce, say? (No, because he wasn't innately... etc.) Could he be another Dylan, an irritant, generational Voice? No, because the economic veracity of the Song never was (and never would be) his forte. Then, why not just jack in all this rock culture bullshit he had such obvious contempt for from the very off, and stick to the Berlioz/Varèse beat, where he could carve out a respectable career as a 'modern composer'? Well, no, he wasn't quite good or brave enough for that, either. So, let's recap: can't sing, can't dance, not a pretty-boy or an intellectual, contemptuous of both the academy and the Street...

Welcome to Zappaland! A strange world of negative values and funhouse mirrors where acolytes spread out across the world, a demented glare in their eye, determined to persuade us non-believers of things that are manifestly not so. Just like Scientologists, who will earnestly tell you what a rocket scientist type guy L Ron really was (or still is), so the Zappoids buttonhole you with what a political giant he was, what a musicological genie, what a wit and a wag. But just because a few poor East Europeans deprived of guitar solos and anti-consumerist humour for a few decades made him Trade Minister Without Portfolio or something, this does not a Noam Chomsky make of the man who inflicted 200 Motels on the world.

Zappalytes say things like: "OK, by this point the humour was getting a little oafish, and the endless tales of groupies and on the road life is a little stale, and yes, perhaps we can even detect a mouse-peep of misogyny here and there, but ‹ Wowee Zowee! ‹ check out the modal declension in the five minute solo on "Limburger Corporation Wowser", it's about the third best version on record so far! Hot poop!" No, they really do say things like that. Even (or especially) the intelligent, grown-up ones. Even the ones who have an otherwise coherent grasp of the adult world and all its politics and evasions and lies claim him to be the author of some kind of on-going modern Leviathan ‹ a splenetic contemporary satire, withering in its attack, all-encompassing in its range. Then you (and they) search for the actual targets of this piercing worldview, and what do they (and you) find? Satires on porn, wanking, dope, more porn, cocktail jazz, teenage girls, disco music, more porn, TV evangelists (always a favourite stop-off for the more intellectual rock star), um... session musicians... um, hello?