21 YEARS AGO FRANK ZAPPA DIED

The best laid plans of mice, men and editors sometimes go pear shaped. For months I have been planning a Frank Zappa special for Gonzo Weekly, to coincide with today - the 21st anniversary of his untimely death. But although it will happen, it won't be this weekend for a whole string of reasons with which I will not bore you.

But I would like to remember his passing both in the magazine and here on the Gonzo Daily blog.

Because Frank Zappa was one of the most important, and certainly one of the most talented musicians and composers ever to come out of rock and roll music.


There is a panel in Watchmen that always makes me think of Zappa. It is the front cover of a nasty right wing newspaper which is emblazoned with the headline "Honor is like the Hawk - sometimes it must go hooded". Whenever I see that page I think how it should be changed to something like: "Art is like real life - sometimes it is stupid, sexist and utterly brilliant". And no-one did any of those things better than Frank Zappa.

I was seventeen and just about to be kicked out of the rather unpleasant Public School at which I was an unwilling pupil for a couple of terms, when I first discovered Frank Zappa through a fairly obscure compilation put out through Verve records sometime in the second  half of the 70s.

I bought it for the quite substantial sum of £2.50 and took it back to school where I played it to my peers who uniformly hated all of it except What's the Ugliest Part of your Body which made them snigger. Not for the first time, and by no means for the last, I realised that my tastes and those of the people around me were often going to be radically different, because I loved the record.

It gave me permission to be silly, and pointed out that the awful grey trench coated homogeneity of the circles in which I moved did not have the monopoly on ideas. Indeed silliness in music was as much of a thought crime as much of Zappa's perceived sexism is now. But I didn't care. I felt gloriously liberated, and from that day on my life was never the same.

Fifteen years later I knew that my hero was dying. But a world without Frank Zappa seemed unbelievable, and I was convinced that Frank would have a last minute reprieve like the one which only this year happened to Wilko Johnson. But miracles don't happen very often, mors certa, hora incerta, and 21 years ago today Frank Zappa died, and my life - but more importantly the world as a whole - was never the same again either.