Frank Zappa

One day, I was visiting my friend Andrew’s room. Andrew was also a dancer and I had known him from the previous year, when I did a lot of tech work for the dance department (running the light board for performances, going on tour with them and setting up the sound system, and so on). One of the things that endeared me to him was that he was the only person I had ever met who knew what Synergy was, and he had a couple of Jean-Michel Jarre records, so I knew he couldn’t be all bad (mostly bad, as it turned out, but not all bad). I had stopped by to chat and he wanted to play me some music. He played me Leon Redbone, which I didn’t really appreciate at the time, but grew to love years later. He played a little Boomtown Rats, claiming he had seen them in concert in Denver and that they had ruined I Don’t Like Mondays with all of its elaborate production, it was much better in the stripped down version he heard them perform before the album (The Fine Art of Surfacing) came out. And then he pulled out a record, and played this incredibly strange, incredibly funny song.

It made absolutely no sense, musically or lyrically. The song kept starting and stopping and drastically changing tempos and genres. There was lots of singing about shoes and TV dinners by the pool and smothering somebody’s daughter in chocolate syrup. Somehow, Andrew knew it well enough to sing along, switching into falsetto and dancing to the jerky rhythms. The song was completely bewildering, sounding more like twenty different songs all cut up and randomly put back together than one single composition. Sometimes it was highly moody and experimental and sounded like Varesse. Then it would slam into a burlesque sing-along, and then an avant garde string quartet and then an R ‘n’ B workout. It was unlike anything I had ever heard, more like a Carl Stalling piece for Bugs Bunny than anything a band could actually pull off, and I asked him what it was. He said it was by this guy Frank Zappa and was called Brown Shoes Don’t Make It. I asked to borrow it, and he took it off the turntable, slipped it into its sleeve, and made me promise to take care of it and give it back in a week or so. I promised, and trotted it back upstairs to my room.

I had heard of Frank Zappa. He was some legendarily weird musician that all the freakiest students at Interlochen seemed to like. You’d be walking down the hallway and somebody would walk by admonishing “watch out where those huskies go and don’t you eat that yellow snow” or “I’m the slime oozing out of your TV set” or something equally strange and provocative, and it would always turn out to be “Zappa, man”.

He was the royal jester and voice of conscience, his hysterically funny music skewering everybody from the “squares” to the “hipsters” and calling hypocritical or foolish behavior, no matter which quarter it comes from. But more than just being a musical prankster, Zappa had an intense love of modern classical music – two of his biggest heroes were Pierre Boulez and Edgar Varèse. Consequently, his music can be murderously difficult to play. He’s written lots of classical music and spent great amounts of his own time and money trying to get them performed and recorded by symphony orchestras – and has invariably been disappointed by the poor attitudes and performances of professional classical musicians. He had one moderate hit – Valley Girl, which was based on his daughter’s scathing dinner table imitations of her San Fernando Valley classmates. His brief experience in the bright public limelight disgusted him and he happily went back to working the fringes of musical expression. He took on the hypocrisy of the PMRC, the musical censorship lobbying group formed by the uptight wives of powerful congressmen who felt that they shouldn’t have to decide what was appropriate for their own children and wanted to legislate the country’s morality based on their own puritanical ideas, and testified in Congress, in what has to be one of the most entertaining statements on the congressional record. He was a great musician, a hysterically funny lyricist, and a fiercely intelligent and principled artist and the world is a poorer place since his death.

I got back to my room and greeted Allen. We’d warmed up a bit over the past week, but we weren’t exactly friends. I had learned that he got his scar when, as a child, he was attacked by a dog that bit through his cheek, and hadn’t gotten it in a knife fight like I had imagined. And he learned that, though I was a dancer, I wasn’t gay and wasn’t interested in getting it on with him, so our guards had been relaxed a bit. But we couldn’t find much common ground. He begrudgingly put up with my new wave and synthpop, but his real musical loves were Journey and Rush, which I couldn’t relate to very well. We were cordial to each other, but were really just marking time until moving day. He had graciously agreed to go wherever we needed him to go to make our moving plans work out, so it was just a matter of time before we had to stop dealing with each other.

I put the borrowed record on my turntable and cued up Brown Shoes Don’t Make It. I listened to it all the way through, trying to get a handle on it, and when it was over, Allen, who had stopped reading and was staring at the turntable with mouth agape, said, “what the fuck was that?” It wasn’t an irritated what the fuck, it was more of an amazed what the fuck, so I told him it was Frank Zappa and I had borrowed it from a friend of mine. “Play it again,” he said, so I cued it up and let it run. This time, we were both giggling at its outrageous musical juxtapositions and the hysterical lyrics about doing the nasty on the White House lawn. When it was over, we smiled with the warmth of a shared secret, the ice between us completely broken. We played it a dozen times in a row, learning the lyrics and the strange changes, giddy with laughter. I had just cued it up again when there was a knock on my door. I opened it up and let Eric into the room. He had stopped by to see if I wanted to go hang somewhere, and was completely unprepared for the sight that met his eyes. Allen and I danced around the room, performing the bits of the song that we had figured out for Eric.