“He had a nervous energy that almost had a hum to it,” Gail Zappa remembers down the line from Los Angeles. He used it as an “intelligence test”: if people enjoyed the record – like his classmate Don Van Vliet, the future Captain Beefheart – they could enter his social circle.
In 1958, at the age of 17, he’d found an unlistenable album by the avant garde composer Edgard Varèse and read it as a barcode of his own personality. He grew up in the Mojave desert where his father was a chemical warfare specialist (the infant Frank used to play games in gas masks, thinking they were space helmets). He was manically driven, extravagantly gifted, utterly unique.
The owner threw the occasional bash at his old house, the famous Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon, but as he didn’t drink or take drugs and was easily bored, his wife Gail tells me he’d just start bossing people about: “Okay, you guys go over there and write a song about The Roxy.” So instead of flooring bottles of tequila, he’s in this basement at four in the morning working out that if he plays his latest track Peaches En Regalia at half-speed he can overdub some percussion and a solo played on a bass guitar which, when speeded back up, will give the whole thing a twinkly cartoon finish.įrank Zappa, it’s immediately obvious, was not like other men. A lot of the neighbours are rock stars too and throw parties all the time – Jim Morrison, Buffalo Springfield, Love, Canned Heat – but nobody’s smoking weed and falling in pools around this place.
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