Teenage Influences: The Top 5

Often a common understanding of an artist's biography begins with the release of their first popular music, in the case of Frank Zappa, the double album Freak Out! (1966). But in Zappa's case it is arguable that his particular concerns, artistic strategies, and aspects of his personality were consolidated in his teenage years throughout the 1950s. This blog start with a countdown of the top five influences on Zappa during that decade, setting in motion his development as an artist that would proceed all through his career.

1.     The Suburbs:
The suburbs provided Zappa the fodder of the American experience from which he would stitch together a grand satire that would stretch across his entire catalogue. The Zappa family moved to California in 1952 (Zappa was 12), partially because of Zappa's health problems living in an urban environment. From here they would bounce around a lot, as Zappa's father kept relocating the family in search of new employment opportunities in the military-industrial sector. From an early age Zappa felt he did not fit in with Californian suburban orthodoxy – the typical American high school experience of football stars and cheerleaders. It was a conventionality that Zappa found to be profoundly uncritical of its environment, perhaps symbolic of that which he derided about the human condition – the tendency to take one's social experience at face value and accept the status quo as somehow inherent. Yet it was also the setting in which he felt most comfortable to be contrarian – an iconoclast. Suburban California would be his domestic base for the rest of his life.

 2.     Rhythm and Blues (particularly Doo Wop)
Frank Zappa heard his first piece of Rhythm and Blues music on the radio when he was 13, the Crows “Gee.” It would have an immediate impact. Zappa began collecting R&B singles, playing the drums in that style, and forming bands in his mid-teens that tried to emulate his favourite records. Over his lifetime he amassed a huge collection, and he turned to his R&B favourites to comfort him at his bedside in the last moments of his life. One can surmise that R&B provided Zappa with his first glimpse at a worldview that did not adhere to the 'plastic' conventionality he instinctively knew did not appeal to him – music that was fun, careening, and non-white, or at the very least, not a type of music that reflected the attitudes and desires of suburban white America. It also provided him with a form that he would experiment with throughout his career.

3.     Edgard Varèse
Zappa first heard the work of Varèse at the young age of 15, and would subsequently become obsessed with his music. He contacted him and tried to meet with him on several occasions, but the encounter never transpired. Varèse's pioneering ventures into electronic music, as well as his concept of “organized sound,” the notion that music could be grouped together on the basis of rhythm and timbre, would serve as central influences on Zappa's compositional strategies. Yet perhaps more importantly, the music of Varèse served as Zappa's introduction to “serious music,” inculcating his desire to work as a composer rather than as a mere musician. The tension between 'popular' and 'serious' music that characterizes Zappa's opus can all trace back to this initial discovery. Investigations into Stravinsky, Webern, Ives and Cage would follow, but without that initial fire lit by Varèse, Zappa's musical career could have been profoundly different.

4.     Catholicism
The influence of Zappa's Catholic upbringing is a bit more difficult to trace. In Barry Miles's account, the Zappa's family approach to religion was far from ascetic, but a rebellion against Catholic mores would partially explain the zeal with which Zappa dealt with sexual topics throughout his career. Zappa claims to have enjoyed practicing religion as a child, but had given up on the practice by age eighteen. Not to paint all Catholics with the same brush, but Zappa could be fairly judgemental. In addition, he tackled life with a very rigorous set of personal ethics, one that admittedly diverged wildly from Catholic dogma, but were treated as doctrinal just the same. For sure, the family dynamics in the Zappa household had a massive influence on Zappa the man, whether they pertained to structures he inherited, or ideas he rebelled against.

5.     Peripateticism
As the Barry Miles account demonstrates, the Zappa family moved around a lot. Francis Zappa seemed continually dissatisfied with his current posting, so once the family had made the move over to the west coast, they never stayed in one place for much more than a year. As a result, Frank had trouble making friends and forming lasting relationships. Interestingly, this trend continued even after Frank settled in Laurel Canyon permanently, and it is quite possible that the instability of his teenage years had an effect that would last the rest of his life. Relatedly, the constant uprooting of the Zappa family paints a portrait of Francis as the head of the household that called the shots, and seemed to take his work as a first priority, a description that could well fit Frank later in life. Also, it is not a stretch to suggest that the constant impermanence that characterized Frank's teenage years may have resulted in his desire for a more stable domestic life. Excluding touring, and a brief sojourn in New York, the Zappa family would live in Los Angeles from the late 1960s onward.