| January 26th, 2005 05:09 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
I am large, I contain multitudes
A biographer arm-tackles the contrarian Frank Zappa
By Alexandra Yurkovsky
San Francisco Bay Guardian
FRANK ZAPPA'S SCATHING genius tears so powerfully Barry Miles's uneven new biography that fans like myself may find themselves bingeing on his work with renewed awe. The vital contradictions of his music, lyrics, and life deserve a less duty-laden adjective than "relevant," but they are relevant, in the broadest sense. Miles's psychological analyses of Zappa's motives and imperfections, though basically accurate, neither fully explain nor diminish the importance of his subject's unique perspective.
Zappa was an archetypal American iconoclast, up there with Charles Ives and, say, the Norman Mailer of The White Negro. He was, to use Christopher Hitchens's term, a "contrarian." That role doesn't exempt Zappa from criticism, but Miles's Freudian approach in Zappa: A Biography is rather facile. He tends to link adult behaviors or opinions to childhood events without fully discussing the connections. For example, he caps Zappa's remark that music is "chemical, merely chemical" with the one-liner "His father always wanted him to be a chemist." Childhood experiences color everyone's outlook, but they don't completely invalidate it. Miles concedes this, in a way – or perhaps realizes that summing up Zappa is impossible – by concluding with a Zappa pronouncement: "If [he] had one ultimate message ... : 'It's that the Emperor's not wearing any clothes, never has, never will.' It is even more relevant today than when he first said it." Ironically, the relevance has become greater with the appearance of this book.
It's a big "if" to limit Zappa to one ultimate message. Otherwise, the quote encapsulates his perspective well enough. Even his music vibrates with the sentiment. Zappa agreed with Stravinsky that music can express nothing, yet his synthesis of disparate styles and fresh approach to incorporating humor often make his music sound as ironic as his lyrics.
Potted bios of his parents provide necessary background and are moving in their own right. Zappa's father was born in Italy, and his mother was a first-generation Italian American. Their first son, Frank Zappa, was born Dec. 21, 1940. A breech birth, he nearly strangled on the umbilical cord, and respiratory problems plagued him throughout his childhood. Despite, or perhaps because of, his sickliness, he developed a precociously pungent sense of humor: sighting his first nuns at the age of three, he quipped, "Look at the lady penguins!"
Miles's descriptions of the toxic environments in which his subject grew up obliquely foreshadow Zappa's prostate cancer. This includes a precious photograph of a slightly chubby 11-year-old Zappa standing by his younger brothers Bobby and Carl, one hand raised in a frozen wave, the other suavely holding a cigarette. Their father was a scientist in U.S. Navy and Defense Department laboratories and brought home chemicals, both unwittingly and for his home laboratory. Zappa learned to make gunpowder at around the same time he learned to play his first instrument, the drums. "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask" alludes to impressionist composer Claude Debussy and to the masks his father brought home in case of attack, one of which Zappa dissected with scientific zeal.
Zappa's humor, combined with his musical talents, mitigated the extreme isolation and alienation of his school years. He missed a lot of school because of illness and changed schools frequently because his father changed jobs, moving the family from Baltimore to Florida and eventually to California. So he found it difficult to initiate and maintain friendships, a pattern he followed throughout his life. Yet he always managed to find musical collaborators, however ugly some of the partnerships turned, and he remained, in his own way, committed to his wife, Gail, and their children, even if he slept with groupies on the road and was often unavailable, even at home. His naive, if well-meaning, ideas on treating children like adults gave his daughter Moon Unit fuel for her autobiographical, sad-funny novel, America the Beautiful.
The connection between Zappa's lonely childhood and his impersonal relationships in adulthood, not to mention his dismissive attitude to the whole "Summer" – or any season – "of Love" phenomenon, is obvious. It's more difficult to identify the factors that give an individual, however musical, the inclination and ability to blend the idioms of doo-wop, rock, and jazz with those of 20th-century classical composers like Varèse, Stravinsky and Bartók, themselves quite distinct. The short answer is that Zappa was an extremely gifted musician who, thanks to other particulars of personality and environment, could see – could hear, literally – beyond cultural prejudices and pigeonholes. Never mind that he sometimes drowned out the music with lyrics or titles dripping adolescent sexual humor or sabotaged possible concert performances by giving quirky but broadly accessible pieces titles like "Penis Dimension." Because of the inherent and self-inflicted obstacles to recognition Zappa encountered, simple accounts of his meeting Varèse's widow, then working with Boulez and Berkeley's Kent Nagano, become delightful. A great joy of his life, verbalized without the usual smirk and with unusual praise, was hearing the Ensemble Modern play an all-Zappa program at several European venues. Miles reports that "Zappa was thrilled: 'I've never seen such an accurate performance ... for that kind of music that I do.... – it would take your breath away. You would have to have seen how gruelling [sic] the rehearsals were, and how meticulous the conductor, Peter Rundel, was."
"Freak Out!" portrays the Mothers of Invention on the verge of making it, at the height of the 1966 Los Angeles and San Francisco scenes, and is probably the most riveting chapter. It astutely addresses Zappa's verbal side, from the vitriolic lyrics to the opinionated interviews. In a passage similar to Nat Hentoff's critique of Lenny Bruce, Miles writes:
It is a common belief that satire is used by the oppressed against their oppressor, but this is not so.... Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer, Woody Allen ... all mock liberal pieties. It was in this tradition that Zappa focussed [sic] not on the right wing in power, but upon liberal hypocrisies [sic] and lifestyle.
Miles considers the left-wing phenomena mocked by Zappa, like women's liberation and Jimi Hendrix, "easy targets." He further opines Zappa only later attacked right-wing politicians, and "with much less effect." In fact, Miles himself suggests Zappa's "Flower Punk" was an affectionate parody of "Hey, Joe" (and Hendrix is, after all, on the cover of We're Only in It for the Money). Eventually, he just seemed exasperated with everyone. He oscillated between offending middle-class proprieties shored up by military-industrial-complex prosperity and insulting audiences who were ineffectual in fighting the complex – or in understanding his music.
Neither Miles nor Zappa adequately addresses the latter's myriad contradictions. But Zappa does provoke an itch to resurrect what was electrifying in Zappa's work, to reassert: "Zappa Forever!" That needn't be an empty slogan if readers and listeners continue to explore, question, and celebrate Zappa's diverse legacy.
Alexandra Yurkovsky is a poet and writer who lives in Berkeley.
Zappa: A Biography
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