Mother! The Frank Zappa Story
By Michael Gray
Plexus, 1994. 256 pp., $35 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
When Frank Zappa died of prostate cancer in December 1993, aged just 53, the world of cultural dissent lost one of its pioneering standard-bearers. Frank Zappa and his band, the Mothers of Invention, had produced some of the most musically innovative and socially critical rock music in the late '60s and early '70s.
It is true, as Michael Gray writes in his biography of Zappa, that Zappa's audiences were "bored, fascinated and bemused in equal measure" by Zappa's blend of surrealist creativity, love of rhythm & blues and avant-garde weirdness, but although some of his output has not aged too kindly, Zappa's compositions stand tall on the barren commercial landscape of the homogenised, plastic, formulaic, politically agnostic music industry "product".
Zappa took his musical unconventionality into the realm of politics. He criticised the Vietnam War by having disaffected US Marines dismember a doll on stage during one of his performances. He opposed the Gulf War, relentlessly attacked censorship, deplored racism and campaigned against "AIDS-induced homophobia, God, George Bush, mass media manipulation, TV evangelists, fundamentalists, creationists and Nazi idiots".
Zappa, however, was a conservative (rather than socialist) libertarian. Women's liberation was not his strong suit — he was every bit the Victorian patriarch, refusing to let his wife Gail enter the paid work force, unilaterally naming their children (Dweezil and Moon Unit — what else?) and even the family's dog (Barking Pumpkin). He had his fill of groupies. Many of his songs are sexist "smut-sagas", of dubious progressive value even for the pre-women's liberation years of the '60s.
Zappa was an authoritarian leader of his band, sacking musicians for drunkenness or drugs or musical disagreements, and autocratically disbanding the Mothers in the late '70s.
He was a firm believer in capitalism. Zappa opposed trade unions because they interfered with private enterprise. He once considered Australia as a site for a colony of music artists but was "scandalised by Australian union power". He welcomed the disintegration of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe mainly because it opened up prospects for his cultural enterprises and for establishing, for a friend, a business franchise to "sell deep-frozen muffins" to the Russians ("just what they had had a revolution for", says Gray mockingly).
Zappa's capitalist convictions led him into confrontations with revolutionary students in the '60s. "Demonstrations are just a fad", he told them in a patronising put-down. In Berlin in 1968, the Mothers of Invention were chanted down with cries of "Mothers of Reaction! Mothers of Reaction!".
Zappa's music, however, speaks louder than his contradictory political interventions. It attacked the cultural fortresses of uniformity and orthodoxy within capitalism. Pop success was not his aim — he was proud that the Mothers had "no commercial potential". MGM did tap the market niche which existed in the culturally rebellious '60s by releasing the first ever double album — the Mothers' Freak Out — in 1966, but Zappa never became mega-rich, though he did become a well-off Californian from his own record companies and became more pro-capitalist as his wealth increased.
"Dreary and inartistic filth", cried an apoplectic stuffed-shirt manager of the Royal Albert Hall, when cancelling a Mothers concert. Some of it was, but more of Zappa's work was a challenge to stifling orthodoxy and unquestioning social conformity.
Zappa's music was never going to foment revolution — Zappa was more inclined to shock the bourgeoisie rather than overthrow it. The best of his music and political activity, however, was, and remains, grit in the eye of the bourgeoisie.