Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa (born December 21, 1940, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died December 4, 1993, Los Angeles, California) was an American composer, guitarist, and satirist of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. One of the great polymaths of the rock era who, arguably, possessed a broader range of skills and interests than any of his peers, Zappa was an instinctive postmodernist who demolished the barriers and hierarchies separating “high” and “low” culture.

Cultural iconoclast

Zappa was, in no apparent order, a first-rate cultural gadfly dedicated to upsetting American suburban complacency and puncturing the hypocrisy and pretensions of both the U.S. political establishment and the counterculture that opposed it; a contemporary orchestral composer uncompromisingly rooted in 20th-century avant-garde tradition; a rock bandleader who put together a series of stellar ensembles both under the rubric of the Mothers of Invention and under his own name; an erudite lover of the most esoteric traditions of rock and roll and of rhythm and blues; an innovative record producer whose use of high-speed editing techniques predated the later innovations of hip-hop; and one of the premier electric guitar improvisers of a generation that included Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck.

A peripatetic childhood

The son of a Sicilian-born meteorologist who worked for the U.S. military, Zappa and his family moved frequently throughout his childhood. When he was about 10 years old, the family moved from Baltimore, Maryland, to California, although their life continued to be a peripatetic one. Zappa attended high school for a time in San Diego, where he learned to play drums and immersed himself in doo-wop and the avant-garde music of composers Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse. In Lancaster, the family’s next residence, Zappa taught himself to play guitar and began writing his first compositions. He also formed his first band, the Blackouts. When his family moved to Florida, Zappa settled in Los Angeles and began writing scores for B-movies. In 1964 fellow musician Ray Collins invited Zappa to join his band the Soul Giants, which was renamed the Mothers and then Mothers of Invention when the group signed with Verve Records in 1966.

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Not a hippie but a “freak”

Zappa was a prolific workaholic who released more than 60 albums in his 30-year career. His first release with the original Mothers of Invention, the conceptual double album Freak Out! (1966), was a key influence on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the following year. By way of wry acknowledgment, the cover of the Mothers’ third album, We’re Only in It for the Money (1968), parodied that of Sgt. Pepper’s, just as the music challenged the Beatles’ visions of love and beauty with the deliberate “ugliness” with which Zappa assailed what he saw as the totalitarian philistinism of the establishment and the vacuous fatuity of many aspects of hippie subculture. Zappa was not a hippie, he claimed. He was a “freak.”

Crowd-pleasing (yet controversial) releases and live shows

After retiring the name the Mothers of Invention in the late 1970s, Zappa withdrew from explicit political commentary and released, under his own name, the enormously influential jazz-rock fusion album Hot Rats (1969), which featured a memorable vocal from his old Lancaster friend Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart. Throughout the 1970s Zappa released instrumental albums that featured orchestral music, jazz, his own guitar improvisations, and, later, synthesizers and sequencers. He also released rock-oriented vocal albums that, like most of his live concerts, specialized in jaw-dropping displays of technical virtuosity and crowd-pleasing exercises in misogynistic grossness such as “Titties & Beer” (1978) and “Jewish Princess” (1979).

Political activism and influence

In the 1980s, by contrast, Zappa was sufficiently angered by the policies of U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan’s administration to rediscover politics. He set up voter-registration booths in the lobbies of his concerts and memorably testified to Congress against censorship at the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) hearings in 1985 in Washington, D.C. (The PMRC was founded in 1984 by four Washington-based women with political ties who lobbied to impose stronger parental controls over content in songs, albums, and music videos. The group’s activism resulted in warning labels being added to music with lyrics or imagery deemed to be explicit or otherwise controversial.)

In the wake of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution (1989), Zappa was invited to Prague, where he met with the country’s new president, Václav Havel. A longtime admirer of Zappa’s commitment to individual freedom, Havel named him a special ambassador to the West on trade, culture, and tourism, but U.S. officials pressured Havel into retracting the appointment.

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“Valley Girl” and family life

Through it all, Zappa continued recording. He had an unlikely hit single with the satirical “Valley Girl” (1982), which featured a rap by his daughter Moon Unit. The song was nominated for a Grammy Award for best rock performance by a duo or group. Zappa had four children with his wife, Gail Zappa (née Sloatman)—Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva—all of whom became artists and creators.

Posthumous honors and legacy

Shortly before his death from prostate cancer in 1993, he was finally recognized as a composer of “serious” music when his Yellow Shark suite was performed and recorded by Germany’s Ensemble Modern. Zappa was posthumously honored when a set of his pieces was performed during the Proms festival at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Considering that he had been banned from the Albert Hall in 1970 when the theater manager objected to some of the saltier lyrics from Zappa’s motion picture 200 Motels (1971), this was no mean achievement. Similarly, an annual festival celebrating Zappa thrived in the early 21st century in Bad Doberan, Germany (formerly in East Germany), where his music had once been banned.

Zappa was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and he was a 1997 recipient of the Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. In 2005 the U.S. Library of Congress added We’re Only in It for the Money to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” His life was chronicled in the documentaries Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words (2016) and Zappa (2020).