Time
USA
"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. (read more)
Source: The Waldo Scrapbooks, time.com
"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
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, time.com
Rock fans may find it shocking, but Frank Zappa,
43, the bent mind behind Weasels Ripped My Flesh and
Valley Girl, has gone legit. This week California’s
Berkeley Symphony Orchestra performs the world premiere of
A Zappa Affair, a program of four short ballets. Zappa
may have jettisoned the synthesizers and electric guitars, but
he has kept his famous sense of the absurd. The ballets – titled
Moe 'n' Herbs Vacation, Sinister Footwear,
Bob in Dacron and Sad Jane – are performed
by giant puppets attached to live per-formers. “There are a
lot of things you can do with puppets that you can’t do with
dancers,” explains Zappa. “In one scene a bartender gets so
busy that he’s torn in half. Most dancers would have a hard
time with that one.” Still, old-time Zappers who fear that the
long-haired composer is about to change his record label to
Deutschc Grammophon have nothing to fear. Says the mangy maestro:
“I still enjoy making rock-'n'roll records, and I have no intention
of getting a tuxedo or a baton grafted onto my body.”
Source: time.com
... Zappa announced that “the complete list of
P.M.R.C. demands reads like an instruction manual for some sinister
kind of toilet-training program to housebreak all composers
and performers.” (read
more)
Source: time.com
FRANK ZAPPA: GUITAR (Rykodisc). The thinking
man's mother of invention in a double album of riffs that are
sure to rile. In-A-Gadda-Stravinsky, anyone?
Source: time.com
Music rip-off artists go upscale with CDs, but
the stars fight back with bootleg albums of their own.
Source: time.com
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, time.com