THE LOST EPISODES: ZAPPA'S TEENS

Zappa's interest in more than one musical direction already showed itself in his teens. On one side he had the ordinary interest among teenagers in the popular music of the fifties, like rhythm and blues and close harmony vocal songs, called doo-wop. He played in some high school bands, the first one named the Black Outs. A photograph of this band has for instance been published in "The real Frank Zappa book" and the one below, where we can see him sitting behind the drums, his first instrument. At the age of eighteen, he started to learn how to play guitar, the instrument that would bring him reputation in the future. An example of Zappa playing guitar at this time has actually been kept. It's a blues improvisation in D with him playing lead guitar, his brother Bobby on rhythm guitar and their friend Don van Vliet singing the lyrics instantly about being lost in a whirlpool.

Lost in a whirlpool, opening (midi file)

Lost in a whirlpool, opening (transcription)

Zappa: "While all other guys spent all their money on cars, I bought records (I didn't have a car). I went to second hand stores to buy jukebox records with rhythm and blues songs [...]. Don was also an R&B maniac, so I took my singles to his house and we listened for hours to obscure hits by Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Guitar Slim, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, [...]" (Real FZ book). It was recorded in an empty class room on a Webcor reel-tot-reel that happened to be standing there and the song is included on "The lost episodes".

The Blackouts with FZ behind the drumset.
Section of a photo from the Patrice Zappa collection (reproduced in her "My brother was a mother" book).

Zappa had no natural gift for instrumental virtuosity and his capacities as a guitar player grew through the passing of the years. Jimmy Carl Black, his drummer in the sixties, commented that in 1964 Zappa was not a great guitar player at that time. When he was able to play the guitar he left the drumset, but there are a few recordings from the early sixties with Zappa playing the drums (for instance "Anyway the wind blows" on "The Lost Episodes"; see the Cucamonga years section) and occasionally he would play percussion instruments on his later albums. At the same time he became wildly enthousiastic about the music of Edgar Varèse, one of the atonal modern composers, who called his compositions organized sound, having absolutely nothing in common with the pop music of the fifties. He was was able to get a copy of volume 1 of the three record set with Varèse's complete orchestral works conducted by Robert Craft. The influence of Varèse on Zappa was not so much that Zappa became a follower of Varèse, but that it stimulated his ambitions to become a composer of modern music.

If you take his word for it, all his early compositions were modern music for small ensembles. One of them is "Pound for a brown". On the album liner notes of "The yellow shark" he's saying: "The tune dates from 1957 or '58. It was originally a string quartet I wrote right about the time I graduated (from high school). It's one of the oldest pieces, and it's been played by just about every one of the touring bands, in one version or the other". Its tune became one of Zappa's favorites. It made its first appearance on the "Uncle meat" album of 1968 in two versions. The first version carries a different title, namely "The legend of the golden arches". The main theme is given here below. The theme has several characteristics that return more often in Zappa's music:
- The theme is purely melodic. The instruments are moving freely through the keys; the harmonies formed can be either traditional and untraditional chords.
- Two instruments are most of the time playing in parallels, fourths and thirds in this case. A third one is giving a complementary movement.
- The melody itself has no tonal centre, but is played over a basso ostinato figure. The figure starts with B as pedal note, so the key becomes B Mixolydian in the first 6 bars, determined by this pedal note of the accompaniment. In bars 7 and 8 some alterations are made and in bars 9 and 10 we get to C sharp as pedal note. Here the key becomes C sharp Dorian. At bar 11 we're back at B Mixolydian.

The legend of the golden arches, theme (midi file)

The legend of the golden arches (transcription)

"Pound for a brown" was used during many tours, including additional opportunities for the band members to improvise. There are versions on "Ahead of their time" and "You can't do that on stage anymore IV" and "V". It got it's final and most elaborate version as a chamber orchestra piece on "The yellow shark".
Of a different nature is the score of an example of a twelve tone peace, called "Waltz for guitar", that has been printed in Zappa! (see the references). Twelve tone compositions were fashionable among modern composers at that time and Zappa shortly tried to go along with them. It's an academic straight forward piece, composed at the age of eighteen. I've written down the numbers of the string at the beginning. This guitar waltz stood model for the atonal intermezzo in "Brown shoes don't make it" (see the Absolutely free section).

Guitar waltz, opening (score)

In Zappa! page 30, he reflected upon this sidestep: "I mean, I had heard some 12-tone piece by other composers that I liked, which is one of the reasons I went in that direction, but as a system it was too limiting for me. I asked myself the basic question: If the intrinsic value of the music depends on your serial pedigree, then who the fuck is going to know whether it's any good or not? Only the people who sit down with the score and a magnifying glass find out how nicely you've rotated these notes. And that's pretty boring. So I started moving in the direction of a more haphazard style. That's what sounded good to me for whatever reason, whether it was some crashing dissonance or a nice tune with chord changes and a steady beat in the background". Here I was holding the magnifying glass for a split moment, but there are things by Schoenberg that I think are marvellous and then I indeed don't care if it's 12 notes rotated all the time or maybe once in a while a 11 note string (who knows).