It is one of the shrewder received wisdoms of journalism that one should never interview one’s heroes. It is the surest way of turning that sense of wonderment that we try so hard to cling on to with the advancing years, into the dull ache of disillusionment. Let those characters who captured our young, zestful imaginations retain their unsullied reputations. Let them not be subjected to the banal limitations of what has largely become an appallingly artificial format. I have a recurring nightmare of walking into an anonymous hotel room, setting up my tape recorder, and speaking to a grizzled old man hunched up in a cheap armchair. So, Mr Zimmerman: is it still blowing in the wind, haven’t those times changed, and what do you think of the war in Iraq?
So in this respect, at least, I am glad I never got to meet Frank Zappa. Not only did he shape my adolescent sensibilities in what can only be called an extreme way, but he also happened to be very scary. On a superficial level, there was the intimidatingly hirsute look and that voice of rich, baritone splendour that conveyed instant authority on anything he said. Then there was his almost too-sharp mind, as displayed by his ability to perceive, analyse and satirise a trend almost before it had got going. His first albums, in the mid-1960s, scathingly sent up the San Francisco flower-power movement, even while the blooms were being picked. He wrote a song, “Mom and Dad”, about the Kent State killings (”Someone said they made some noise, the cops have killed some girls and boys”) before they actually happened.
But Zappa was not just a sharp-cookie rock star; he was always more serious than that. On his 15th birthday, his treat was to be allowed a long-distance phone call to the modernist composer Edgard Varese, whose difficult, atonal music was already forging an unlikely alliance in Zappa’s young mind with the west coast R&B records of local jukeboxes. From his mid-20s, Zappa dived into the abstract world of musique concrete with the same relish he reserved for his fluid, sinuous guitar solos. The resistance to be labelled in easy musical terms lasted throughout his life, which ended in 1993 after a long battle with cancer, and undoubtedly contributed to his relative commercial obscurity.
On top of all that, he was something of an aphorist. Rebelling against the absurdly pompous claims of rock music, he declared that all the good music had “already been written by people with wigs and stuff”. “Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny,” is also one of Zappa’s. And he was a notable patriot, in a satirical sort of way. On being American: “If we can’t be free, at least we can be cheap.”
So talking to Zappa would have been a tough assignment. Not so meeting his widow, Gail, who visited London recently to promote a new European tour, “Zappa Plays Zappa”, to be performed by the musician’s sons, Dweezil and Ahmet, and a host of “sternly accomplished special guests”. It is a significant moment: the first authorised presentation of Zappa’s music since his death, given added poignancy by the involvement of his two sons. Gail describes them on stage as a “stereophonic” version of her late husband, reflecting the introspective and extrovert aspects of his nature respectively.
We chatted over coffee at the Waldorf Hilton and two things struck me. The first was the significance of the tour opening in Europe, rather than in Zappa’s American homeland. It turns out that he sold roughly four times as many records in the Old Continent than in the country that provided so much of the raw material for his scabrous satirising. Gail Zappa thinks it is to do with the centuries-old tradition of church music that has made European ears receptive and sophisticated (”all we have is the marching band in the town square on July 4”); but I also felt momentarily proud of that much-maligned phenomenon, the European sensibility. We got Zappa: his twists and turns, his reckless veering between high and low culture, his sarcasm, his innovations. These were all too much for his own country, which remains, relative to its size and power, culturally simplistic.
My other speculation was to imagine how much Zappa would have enjoyed the times in which we live. He was making fun of corporate control over artists in the 1960s - witness the splendid take-off of Peter Blake’s Sgt Pepper cover in 1968’s We’re Only In It For the Money - so goodness knows what rich pickings he would have had today. To be sure, Zappa was part of the music business. But his talent was, as Gail reminded me, a matter of finding the right attitude for the moment, adopting the ironic “special eyebrows” that brought people in on the recurring joke that was never far from his art. He was, Gail told me, “a quiet and compassionate man”, not at all to be feared, whose central credo - “Always choose to be in the moment, always choose freedom” - was neither dated nor defunct. It made me sorry I missed him.
The Zappa Plays Zappa tour begins in Barcelona on October 25.
