"Five thousand young people are there," TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler wrote, describing a Frank Zappa concert in Philadelphia. "They are expecting to be blasted out of their seats by a succession of rock groups like Jeff Beck, and Sly & the Family Stone. But the Mothers of Invention, who come on first, take the heart right out of the kids. They look old, entirely too old to be a rock group, and underfed, and definitely weird. Especially Frank Zappa, scrawny and at his most unappetizing in long red underwear, straggly black hair tied in a ponytail, a sinister goatee elongating a sallow, canine face. Noise comes out of the band, noise like a zoo is burning down. It is King Kong, one of Frank's creations. The kids start to rock back and forth like they always do. But as the full shock of this noise hits them, you can see them shrivel down in their seats until they sit there paralyzed, barely breathing. Twelve minutes later, the piece rumbles to a stop in the middle of an unbelievable shriek of saxophones. The kids sit stunned." (read more)

Source: The Waldo Scrapbooks

"Most rock groups could not do this sort of thing because they cannot read music," said Zubin Mehta confidently. "Frank Zappa, on the other hand, is one of the few rock musicians who knows my language." As conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mehta is known not only for his willingness to step in where many Angelinos fear to tread but for his ability to get away with it musically. In the peerless leader of the Mothers of Invention however, Mehta was taking on a man whose main goal in life seems to be to zap the musical establishment. (read more)

Source: slime.oofytv.set

Anyone who enjoys being the target of a put-on will revel in Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels. It's an act of undisguised aggression against the audience – rather like a mugging in a movie theater. Zappa makes movies the way he and his group, the Mothers of invention, make music – wildly, brazenly, eclectically. (read more)

Source: The Waldo Scrapbooks

Frank Zappa surely would have appreciated – indeed, relished – the irony ! that his death last week was, as the old show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short of his 53rd birthday, it may now be easier to appreciate an often overlooked fact about Francis Vincent Zappa: he was the most protean and adventurous American composer of his generation. (read more)

Source: okayplayer.com