Zappa
by Barry Miles
Grove Press


I hate to speak ill of the dead, which is why I’m glad that Barry Miles has gone and done it for me with this exhaustively researched tome. When the time comes for the good folks at Grove to issue Zappa in an unexpurgated paperback edition, they can use this promotional quote on the back cover, absolutely free:

"Barry’s Big Book of Bastards is a Butane Bombshell Biography."

They won’t, of course, but they really should because never before in the history of popular music have so many immoral bastards fought for space between two hard covers.

Where to begin? Maybe with manager Herb Cohen, who stole all of Cynthia Plastercaster’s plaster cock casts and then refused to return them until she took him to court (pages 177-178).

Or maybe with John "Imagine No Possessions" Lennon and wife Yoko Ono, both of whom jammed with the Mothers Of Invention on Zappa’s composition "King Kong" and then released the live tape on a John & Yoko album behind Zappa’s back—after they changed the song title and claimed copyright to it (pages 213-214).

Or maybe with Warner Bros. who took possession of four Zappa albums, which they refused to pay for, and then released after heavily editing them (page 259).

Or perhaps we’ll start scraping right at the very bottom of the barrel with the lice-infested, bath-detesting Zappa himself (pages 1-387). Let’s see…we could begin with the artistically obtuse Zappa who wanted to change Alice Cooper’s name to Alice Cookies and then release Pretties For You on a series of mini-discs stuck inside tuna-fish cans.

Or with the money-obsessed Zappa who fired the original Mothers a week after their last retainer check had been issued to them. This would be the same miserly Zappa who then fired another musician on the spot after he dared to ask for a fifteen dollar meal allowance while on the road.

Or with the control-freak Zappa who then re-recorded parts of the early Mothers albums because he didn’t like the quality of the original musicianship, including that of famed drummer Jimmy Carl Black. This would be the same possessive Zappa who died spitefully refusing to give Captain Beefheart the tapes to Bat Chain Puller so it could be released.

Or with the sex-obsessed Zappa who was fascinated with homosexuality, anal sex, threesomes, sex devices, groupies and prostitutes—to the point where he walked around the house naked and allowed his children to watch pornographic films with him. This would be the same sex-addict Zappa who shot a photo spread in Hustler magazine which was paid for by his good friend Larry Flynt.

Or the unsociable Zappa who spent all his time alone in his basement studio, ignoring his abandoned children to such a degree that one of them actually slipped a note under the studio door, re-introducing herself to him. This would be the same neglectful Zappa whose children were prevented from going to college because he refused to pay for their tuition.

Or the odious Zappa who defended himself against charges that he was anti-Semitic by seriously lecturing an interviewer in 1980 that: "I personally know people of the Negro persuasion who eat watermelons and pork chops. And as we all know, there are Jewish people who jerk off…" This would be the same misogynist Zappa who wrote and recorded a song about burying a woman under his lawn after bashing her head bloody against a wall.

To this day, many ill-informed people still persist in being smugly amused by what they deem to be a delicious irony: That Frank Zappa was widely regarded as being the ultimate weirdo when, in reality, he was really the straightest of straights. These people are severely fooling themselves.

We all had him figured out correctly right from the very first moment we saw his picture and heard his music. Where we went wrong, however, was in giving him a lot more credit than he really deserved because Zappa was actually much weirder than any of us could have possibly imagined just by listening to his puerile lyrics.

This book forever shatters that idealized myth by replacing the generally accepted image of Frank Zappa as benign fatherly genius with another much sadder and far more devastatingly accurate one. Ask any vegetable and you’ll come away with only one irrefutable conclusion.

He’s an idiot bastard, son.