Frank Zappa's Legacy: Music Against Mainstream Norms [Episode 301]

Frank Zappa's music is known for its intricate compositions, satirical lyrics, and iconoclastic viewpoints. He frequently used his music to critique societal norms, political institutions, and mainstream culture, often employing humor and absurdity to make his points. He fought for freedom of speech, self-education, and political participation, while also opposing censorship and recreational drug use. In this episode, author Bradley Morgan explores Zappa's messaging through song. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
On this episode of Book Don Rock, a journey through
the revolutionary music from the man who is a master
at using his art to challenge the status quo, Frank Zappa,
who We're totally booked rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
I mean, I'll leave you you're reading.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Little Hands says it's time.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
To rock and roll.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Roll up. I totally booked, everybody. Welcome back to Book
Don Rock. I'm Eric Senach Bradley Morgan. He has returned
to the show. It's been a while since he's been here.
He was first gone back in December of twenty twenty
one for his book You Two's the Joshua Tree, Planting

(00:37):
Roots in Mythic America. He is back this time to
talk about his brand new book titled Frank Zappa's America.
Great to have you back, Bradley. How you doing.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
I'm doing great, Eric, Thank you so much for having me.
It's an absolute pleasure.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
As you say in the book, so many different opportunities
to approach Frank Zappa's music. He's had one of the
most expansive and dense catalogs in popular music, over sixty
albums during his life time dozens more after his death.
So talk about your approach to his music in this book,
and how exploring his least understood and represented work helped
you to get a full understanding of his legacy.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Well, it's no exaggeration to say that I didn't understand
this book until the moment I finished it. Certainly, in
some ways it's a bit of a spiritual successor to
my previous book that you mentioned you Two's The Joshua Tree.
But I wanted to kind of wrestle with Frank as
for me, the embodiment of the musical and cultural figure

(01:31):
who risked the most for his communicating the ideas of
participatory democracy or freedom of speech, freedom of expression. But
he's also someone with a lot of major cultural baggage
as well. And when I first was thinking about doing
this book, I wanted to approach him as a political commentator,
but I didn't quite have that narrative through line yet.

(01:53):
And it was by really taking a look at this
period in the eighties, or actually from seventy with the
release of Joe's Garage to his death in ninety three,
just exactly how he was kind of channeling his lyrics
to be at first very indirect about who is causing
a lot of the problems in American culture, and then

(02:14):
as the decade went on, more direct actually calling specific
people out in songs. And when I was looking at
the lyrics and the music that I'd grown up with,
it was really at odds with the reputation that he
had as someone who was He was a provocative figure,
for sure, but there's lingering misunderstanding about his legacy that

(02:36):
lumpsom as being a racist, a homophobe, a sexist, and
I just didn't hear that. And through his lyrics and
his commentary throughout that decade, he really exemplified a very
progressive ideal I think at the heart of his music,
and that's really what I wanted to get at, and
that was a journey I didn't understand until literally the

(02:57):
book was done, because of just the sheer volume of
the work that he has and all of that baggage,
and that this very complex, iconic musical figure was just
reduced to a few different, you know, pastiches of just
his his image, great guitar player, provocative lyrics, freedom of
speech advocate, but he was like so much more. And

(03:18):
I wanted to hone in on that.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Can you talk about the Freedom Wall and how it
relates to this book. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
So the Freedom Wall is this art installation in Chicago
that went up in the early nineties by an art
collective called Industry of the Ordinary, and one half of
it is a man named Adam Brooks. He's a British
Man who was a professor at Columbia College at that
time in Chicago, and around the ninety two election, there's
a lot of rhetoric about I remember so well, being

(03:44):
four years old at that time, but you know, around
the ninety two election, from what I've read and come
to understand, is that there was a lot of rhetoric
around freedom, the concept of like fighting for freedom and
you know, what makes us free as Americans. This is
very amorphous idea, and so he wanted to take that
idea and truly explore what freedom meant to different people.

(04:04):
So the Freedom Wall imagine a huge, like seventy two
foot tall, vertical black banner that runs on the outside
of an entire building and there's just a list of
names in white hell Veltica font just going down throughout
the entire thing. And these names were compiled through this

(04:24):
process where Adam was reaching out to various people, either
like directly over phone calls or at that time early
iterations of message boards or email to ask people who
are figures that represent the idea of freedom to you,
whatever that may mean. And the list is based on
the number of times those people were responded. Higher up

(04:47):
the list you have figures like George Washington, Jesus, the
more universally accepted, you know, it may bee perhaps even
if even a flawed figures down to the lower bottom,
figures that may not necessarily come up as often, but
we're very integral at that time. Elie Wizzell Will my
Man Killer is on that list. Angsang su Ki, who

(05:08):
was won the Nobel Peace Prize around that time but
has since been ousted for committing a genocide in Burma
after her house arrest.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
So what's that?

Speaker 2 (05:17):
And it's meant to be at that time to capture
this concept of freedom. And Frank Zappa is on that list.
And what makes this kind of list bizarre is that
it's just the list. There's no description of who these
people are, why they're on there. Some names are more
familiar than others, but this, this list had always kind

(05:38):
of fascinated me, and I write about that piece of
art in the introduction It was actually the last thing
I wrote for the book when I was trying to
figure out how to tie all this together, and it
really spoke to me in a lot of ways. And
unfortunately you can no longer see that art installation in
between where you could visibly see the work from like
the l train on this you know, on the side

(05:59):
of the building, a parking structure has gone up in
its place. That happened over COVID, so it's covering the
entire piece. There's only like a few inches in between
in the buildings, and part of it kind of sticks
out for a bit. But I wish I had known
about this, because I probably would have added that detail.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
In the book.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
But I got to meet the artist when I gave
him a copy of this book to tell him how
much that piece meant to me, And he'd showed me
some photographs of the construction going up, and I asked him,
you know, did he ever think about taking it down
or preserving it? And he goes, well, you know, it's
hard to take down a seventy foot tall banner, and
also you know it adds a depth of meaning to

(06:39):
the piece. You know that here is a list of
people who represent freedom in some way, but now it's
being covered and it's kind of like he sees it now,
it's an allegory to what's happening in the country right now.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
June twenty seventh, nineteen sixty six, the debut album by
Frank Zappa's band Mothers of Invention was released. You call
it an intrepid and uncompromisingly artistic debut album. Who had
quote he uses the album as a platform to mock
American popular culture and the artificially pliable divisions in society
that define and shape it. I want to ask you

(07:09):
about the track, who are the brain Police? Who as
he referring to? And what did Frank have to say
about the song when asked about it?

Speaker 2 (07:17):
So the brain Police is this concept that Frank had
had about people in society at that time. Who one
of the biggest criticisms against Zappa as a commentator, is
just a type of cynicism and callousness that he might
have too for us, you know, for a certain member
of the American populace, and for him he thought a

(07:38):
lot of people who were victims of American culture self
victimize themselves. And the brain police is that kind of
internal you know, self policing that we all do because
we want to, you know, make sure that we are
staying within the guidelines of what's socially acceptable, whether you
know it's in a normal society rat or a fascistic society.

(08:00):
And there's one way that a lot of fascism, elements
of fascism are able to creep it is because we
do police ourselves. And so at a time when it's
during the Johnson administration several years after the Kennedy assassination,
and that kind of future idealism that the early sixties
had kind of inspired was making way for this something

(08:22):
that was more paranoiic, more authoritarian, and that was his
way of capturing it that a huge chunk of our
path there is going to be driven by our own
actions or limiting our own actions.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
Zappa released eight studio albums between nineteen sixty six and
nineteen sixty nine. That's Amazing, Absolutely Free nineteen sixty seven.
Three albums in nineteen sixty eight were only in It
for the Money, Lumpy Gravy, Cruising with Reuben and the Jets.
Another three in nineteen sixty nine, Mother Mania, Uncle Meat,
and Hot Rats. As you get into the late sixties

(08:59):
and the height of the count culture movement. Zappa, you say,
continue to release albums with varying degrees of conceptual themes
and ideas. What were those themes and ideas during that
time period.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Well, the crux of the book mainly, and why my
motivation for writing it was purely to focus on the
year from seventy nine to ninety three. And the reason
why was because albums and compositions released at that time
were addressing the rise of evangelical Christianity's influence in American politics.
In seventy nine, you had Jerry Folwell and the foundering

(09:29):
of the Moral Majority that mobilized this voting block to
then elevate Ronald Reagan to the White House, and you know,
eight years two terms of you know, governing in the
country with a televangelist at his ear. And the reason
why I wanted to go in that direction was because
his commentary is very relevant now as we see a

(09:51):
major political party has been co opted by a far
right evangelical movement. But I even just only covering that
it was going to paint an incomplete picture of Frank
because by focusing on this period and wanting to highlight
the least known part of his career to elevate his relevancy.

(10:12):
One aspect of that was that I needed to demonstrate
that a lot of the values that he had had
been long held throughout his life. And while the book's
main focus is on seventy nine through ninety three, there
is that introductory chapter that goes into the first three
Mothers of Invention albums from the sixties, and you know,

(10:33):
his kind of dip of doing largely socially conscious work
in the seventies. You know, that's where he gets a
lot of his reputation for his guitar work, even some
of his lyrics. But those first three albums are really
trying to address a conservative counter revolution that was the
predecessor to what we see in the late seventies Will
Fall Well and the rise of Reagan. And this one

(10:53):
was very much that kind of resistance to Johnson's Great Society.
A lot of the values that Ken had proposed in
that kind of propelled progressive liberal ideas in America. These
are the kind of ideas that formed out of Barry
Goldwater and kind of just weren't original. They had roots
in a lot of early America. First movements in the

(11:14):
early twentieth century. But those albums were meant to address
that particular ideology and what feeds it, and oftentimes and
Franks view, what feeds it is a type of control
on the culture. And by the end of the sixties,
you have Vietnam, you have a lot of other things.
You have a whole new decade that's coming on, and
even Frank, I'm sure is wanting to move on. And

(11:36):
so throughout the seventies you kind of had this dip
in albums that had that a very large narrative that
focused on that and instead just random compositions are songs
peppered throughout and it's it's curiously also the one that
the decade that really cements his reputation. But in order
to tell that story about his work in the late

(11:58):
seventies throughout the eighties, I needed to show that this
wasn't just a coming to Jesus moment for him, so
to speak, that this was something that he felt there
was a return of something he had recognized a decade before, and.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
He was very active in the seventies, if my math
is correct, twenty one studio albums and on his nineteen
seventy four album Apostrophe, there's a track called Uncle Remus,
and on this track you write that it stands out
for showcasing how Zappa continued to observe the failures over
America's struggle to absolve itself of its original sin. He's

(12:31):
addressing civil rights.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Here, Yes, he's addressing civil rights and a lot of
systemic racism that has underpinned a lot of American society.
You know that track Uncle Remus is seventy four. I
want to rewind it back because in sixty six, on
the first Mother's album Freak Out, there's the track Trouble
every Day, which is a kind of response to the

(12:52):
media's handling of the Watts riots. At what happened, and
for those who may not be familiar with what happened,
it was that there were a couple of black men
in the Watson neighborhood who were beaten by police and
it had escalated to a very large situation, evolved millions
of dollars in damage, a lot of injuries, a couple

(13:14):
of deaths, and it was a major turning point in
that movement, and it caused a lot of trauma, not
only just that community, but in the song Zappa's recognition
that there's a particular type of American, specifically a white American,
who may see the media's handling of this and find

(13:34):
doubt in progressive ideas or progressive policies that are meant
to elevate everyone to a good standard of living. And
we kind of, you know, see that, we've kind of
seen that now over the last couple of years. I
write about in the book how the Black Lives Matter
protests and the protests surrounding the murder George Floyd kind
of inspired the same kind of reaction, like, well, you know,

(13:56):
look at these terrible liberal cities that are burning down.
You know, we can't have that, you know. And that's
that's the attitude that's being adopted by people who aren't there,
who are only seeing a particular one sided view in
the media. That was in sixty six and then with
Uncle Remus, the song was the lyrics were written by Zappa,

(14:17):
but the music was written by George Duke, who was
a very influential and amazing black keyboardist who was in
Zappa's touring band at that time. And it's a song
that recognizes, albeit from Zappa's perspective as a white man,
the particular failures of the civil rights movement, kind of

(14:39):
chewing real progress, for capitalism, for fashion, for commodities. And
it's a very striking song and somber in some ways,
and it ends with just Zappa going to, you know,
a rich person's house and knocking the lawn jockeys off
the lawns. This symbol of this kind of ugliness in

(15:00):
America's past. And that's one of his more well known tracks,
certainly one of his more well known tracks in the seventies,
but it's one that stands out that kind of highlights
a social consciousness in his thinking and in his lyrics
that I think has really been overlooked.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Booked on rock podcasts will be back after this.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
During our brief information, let's take a flying trip from
Milanda fantasy to everyday life.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
zapA railed against the media throughout his career, and there's
a song released as a single in nineteen seventy three.
It's from his album Overnight Sensation. I'm the Slime. Talk
about the song and the clues that he drops at
the open.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Well, yeah, so's a song where lyrically Zappa is trying
to play a guessing game with the listener. You know,
he says things like I'm gross and I'm perverted, I'm
obsessed and deranged. And by this time Zappa kind of
had earned a bit of a reputation with some with
some people as being this kind of weird, gross out guy.
So you might think that he's talking about himself, but
what he's ultimately talking about is the media that we

(16:04):
consume at that time on our television sets that really,
in his mind, played an influential role in how people
think and go about their lives. And you know, you know,
you know, you are what you watch in essence, and
I think that's a very It was something that really

(16:26):
stuck in his craw for a long time, because there
was a lot of other songs that he kept recording
that specifically addressed how media as an institutions, as a
as a cultural institution, arm of society, of government can
be used as as propaganda or to influence, you know,
a particular way of thinking. And for him at that
time in the seventies, it was to address mass consumerism,

(16:50):
mass commercialization, this weakening of American culture and infrastructure. Not
quite yet. There are some lyrics about the role that
government plays in media, but he hadn't quite robustly developed
that more thoroughly until later on, you know, as we
as the you know, the seventies makeway to the eighties

(17:12):
and you have the arrival of MTV and the impact
that had on radio airplay, as well as the deregulation
of the Telecomunications Act that oversaw, you know, consolidation of
media companies and the lessening of diverse voices in media.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
He approaches sex with humor in some songs. Others he
broaches the topic in difficult and uncomfortable ways. Can you
talk about that?

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Oh, yeah, sometimes, I mean some of the songs when
he does approach sex, there is a type of commentary
that is there. Certainly when the rival of MTV happened
and you had music videos that, in his mind exploited
women or you know, if you think about the eighties
hair metal videos and how women were dressed, and he

(17:56):
really didn't like that, so he had he did write
some songs that kind of addressed that music video culture.
One of them is sex and it makes fun of
a lot of those tropes. There's also other songs that
touch upon that. But in yeah, in more uncomfortable ways,
you know, such as he has a track called He's

(18:17):
So Gay from the album Thingfish and Was. It was
issued as a single, and the whole song is kind
of makes fun of a gay character at the center
of it, who is, in Zappa's mind, creating this homosexual
character in order to be seen as viable in music
video culture. And even at the end of the song

(18:38):
it ends with a reference to the culture clubs do
you really want to hurt me? That Zappa is saying, well,
the only way to get, you know, your music played
at MTV is to dress really gay and do this.
And that's you know, a very you know, I'm sure
at that time a very outdated idea, and he was
a complex man in that regard, trying to balance some

(19:01):
of those bad ideas. But it didn't come from a
bad place, and that was really at the heart what
I found a lot of his lyrics is that even
if what he was communicating was abrasive or not the
most politically correct, that at the heart there wasn't a
meanness in what he was trying to say. And that
can sometimes be very hard to get from his music

(19:23):
because it is so layered and a lot of humor
and a lot of in jokes and references. But also
I can understand why someone would not want to listen
to that and have to go through so many recordings.
But it was necessary for me to address those instances
where Zappa failed as a commentator in order to highlight

(19:43):
where he succeeded.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
How did he handle criticism from the media.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Oh not well. I mean he hated journalist a lot,
and he addressed that and sometimes even directly in his music.
Packard goose from Joe's Garage, which Joe's Garage is a
rock opera about a world where music is criminalized systemically
through the constitution, and he had written that album as
a response to the Iranian Revolution and the Iotola banning music.

(20:11):
And there's a track on there called Packard Goosewood which
the main character Joe who who is trying to survive,
who's a musician trying to survive in this world that
where music is being made illegal. That he sees music
journalists as as government whore's And there's even lyrics that
I write about in the book where he states that

(20:33):
they filate their masters for shekels, And that's a really
hard line to accept and it was one I had
to criticize because the media, you know, media is something
that for a lot of conspiracy theorists, you know, is
is derided as being controlled by Jews, and that's that's
a very dangerous stereotype and it's worth not only addressing

(20:56):
in his music in that song on itself, but in
that year in seventy nine, he also released the song
Jewish Princess from the album Shaker Booty, which was under
fire by the Anti Defamation League for being anti Semitic.
And those are the type of moments where his commentary

(21:17):
on media is somehow blurring with his own personal grievances
as an artist, as a person, and sometimes does not
come out well.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Disco became so much part of pop culture as the
decade moved into the second half, and while some artists
embraced it, Zappa critiqued it. Talk about that and the
musical caricatures that he explores, like on the song dance in.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Full Oh Yeah, he had several songs that were meant
to address disco as a as a cultural nuisance, as
this type of fad that was overtaking. I guess what
he more saw his serious music, because for him, he
was seeing the culture of disco as being filled with

(21:59):
the same kind of vapid, self absorbed people that he
was criticizing in the hippie culture with the mothers of
invention in the sixties, that this is how they had
just moved on from being hippies to being dancing in
the discos, to invention in the eighties become the yuppies.
To him, it was all the same. I do have
to say that, as someone who lives in Chicago and

(22:20):
is very well versed in disco demolition, that and I
don't go this into the book, but you know, it's
worth noting that at that time, a lot of criticism
against disco was a critical response to gay and black subculture,
you know, because certainly by the time, because we disco
had already had been around for a couple of years

(22:42):
at that time in the underground with artists such as
Grace Jones. By the late seventies, as it became more
of a fad, you know, with things like disco duck,
any kind of criticism really was just a kind of
response that oversaturation him. For Zappa, I don't think the
criticism against disco was born out of the same sexism
or racism or homophobia that led to things like disco demolition,

(23:06):
which I mentioned. That's the second time you mentioned it.
For people who aren't familiar. Disco Demolition was a day
in the White Sox Stadium where people brought disco records
to burn and it became this huge mess and throng
of violence and everything, And it was all started by
this really tacky local DJ at that time. But for Zappa,

(23:27):
specifically on songs like Dancing Full and Disco Boy, it's
addressing the people who make up that culture. At the time,
that became a fad, this vapid nature of it.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
He largely withdrew from making albums with over political commentary
in the seventies, but that would start to change by
the end of the decade. Can you talk about the
conservative counter revolution that was starting to take shape again
and how that would inspire Zappa to return to political commentary.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yeah, so Zappa was very you know. I last year
I went to a concert where I saw a couple
of Zappa alumni performing at a local club here in Chicago,
Bobby Martin and Ray White, and Ray I got to
talk to him after the show, and Ray was was
telling me that, you know, he was somebody who grew

(24:13):
up as the son of a preacher in rural Illinois.
And he talked about we're talking about the book and
that because I was working on at the time, as
well as some of Frank's opinions on religion. And Ray
had told me a story where there was a point
where he was getting kind of uncomfortable saying some of
these lyrics because for him, he came from a religious

(24:36):
background and he had expressed his concern to Frank about that,
and Frank's you know, I don't hate religion. I just
I don't like the people who exploit it for profit.
And that's for him really was the driving force. You know.
He didn't care what you did, or what you believed,
or who you wanted to pray to, as long as
it didn't interfere with the rights of anyone else, especially
through violence. That was you know, that was it was

(24:59):
fine by him. But wh I seventy nine, well before that,
So back in seventy sixty then when he had Ford
beat Reagan in the primary for the Republican National Convention
and going up against Carter, there was at that time
this burgeoning evangelical movement that was disappointed that someone like
Carter could become president. And by the time eight ye

(25:21):
rolled around and Carter was having these difficulties with the economy,
with the conflict in Iran. Also that Reagan was then
ascended the ranks as being, you know, the one who
will carry this evangelical mission forward and legitimize it in
a way that it hadn't been before, bringing it from

(25:42):
the fringes to the mainstream part of this political party.
And for him that was incredibly dangerous because the people
who were leading this were televangelists, were people who like
Jerry Folwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggert, who were building media
empires that were exploiting financially, people who had real, deep

(26:04):
fears and concerns, you know, who were looking for answers,
and for them it was to send money to some
guy on TV. And that really really bothered him, and
especially as their chosen candidate was so successful in the presidency,
and so as he was seeing this and as he
was seeing what was happening in Iran, he saw ways

(26:26):
in which systematically America could become this fascist theocracy like
he was witnessing.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
Bradley Morgan is the author of Frank Zappa's America. Zappa
he took his shots at pop culture in the eighties
and found himself on the pop charts with a top
forty single, Valley Girl in nineteen eighty three. His daughter
Moon Unit sings lead vocals, and he's addressing the vapidness
of youth culture. And I wonder what Frank was thinking
if he were to see teenagers dancing to this song

(26:54):
at clubs. Do you think he found pleasure in the
fact that the very people he's taking shot a loving
this song, having no idea that really they're the punchline
of the joke.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
Well, you know, Frank was somebody who really from my impression,
and I can't speak for him because he has been
dead for over thirty years, and I do make it
in a point in my book to not speak for
him or not to hypothesize on what he would think,
but my impression of him, you know, in terms of
how he viewed his music in the culture and his legacy,
he was very dismissive of it. You know, you know,

(27:27):
I'm just going to make music. It's going to be
here and it's going to be gone. But you know,
last night I was at, you know, I mentioned this
show I was at last year with Ray White and
Bobby Martin. They came again last night at the same club,
and it was in both times when I saw them.
Last year and this year, they had a music school
that was opened up for them that involved middle schools
and teenagers all performing Zappa's music and just, you know,

(27:50):
there's like the craziest, like ten year old kid just
shredding on the guitar and it just was really fascinating
and doing a lot of deep cuts, and it really
that was a moment where I did think, you know,
I think he would absolutely love to see, you know,
the youth taking on his music and really giving it
the serious consideration that it deserved. Now with something like

(28:13):
Valley Girl, the success of that as a pop single
became a way for him to continue financing, you know,
doing the more serious music that he wanted to do.
I think part of him was a little bit bothered
that his biggest hit was kind of considered to be
a novelty song and even part of his legacy with
a lot of even serious music critics, they still see

(28:35):
him as just a novelty artist. I'm part of The
reason why I wrote that book is to push against that.
I don't think he was a novelty artist. I think
he was a very sincere man in his work. But
that song is also a bit complicated as well, because
his daughter Moon had released her memoir Earth to Moon
last summer at the time when I was copy editing

(28:56):
this book, and in that she tells the story about
how that song came together, and she was doing she
did this impression of just other students that she went
to school with, and she was desperately trying to get
the attention of her father, who worked a lot, who
toured a lot, was gone many months out of the year,
and when he was home, he was in his studio,

(29:18):
just working. He was the boomer absent father that you
could have found in any kind of other industry. He
could have been in a VP and insurance company, going
back to his study and nursing, you know, a couple
of high balls on his own, you know, after work,
and that's unfortunate. But she tells the story about how
that song came together, and he had already kind of
had this backing track made and he said, you know,

(29:40):
just coming in the you know, the studio, and just
go off, and she did it and just like a
take or two, and he had a lot of fun
with it, and it was a very special moment for her,
you know, a bit of a sad moment as well,
because it's one of the very few times that she
could connect with her father, and the song then became
this cultural juggernaut, but also major burden for her as well.

(30:02):
I think with that song, though, I think any commentary,
a lot of it really goes to Moon in that regard.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Book on Rock podcast will be back after this.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
Hold On.

Speaker 1 (30:17):
He wasn't afraid to tackle difficult subjects. We know that
sensitive subjects too. There was his nineteen eighty four album Thingfish,
and this was his response to Ronald Reagan's mishandling of
the AIDS epidemic. You say this is a much beligned
entry in his catalog. Why is that? And what are
your thoughts on this album?

Speaker 2 (30:34):
So I wrote this book out of order because as
I mentioned, I wasn't sure I understood it until it
was finished. And how I started was I identified all
the recordings and all the albums that had some kind
of political commentary, and Thingfish is a difficult record. He
had plans for a Broadway show, and this album is

(30:57):
kind of the original Broadway cast recording that it never
got made. And so the story goes that there's a
part time theater critic who works with the government to
create a potion that is designed to kill gay and
black people. And part of that is because those people

(31:19):
are threats to white hegemony, but they are also specific
threats to Broadway, and this theater critic who wanted, you
know who, wants to keep, as he says in the lyrics,
queers and natives out of Broadway and just keep it
just white. And so to test this potion, they put
in the mashed potatoes at San Quentin and it kills

(31:41):
off a lot of gay inmates, it kills off a
lot of black inmates, but also turns some inmates into
these potated headed, duck lipped creatures. And there's a train
wreck of a story that follows out of that. But
as you mentioned, it was a response to Reagan's handling
of the AIDS crisis, and Zappa had a particularly conspiratorial

(32:04):
view of the AIDS crisis. He was open to the
idea that it was manufactured to hurt black and gay people,
you know, the people who could be voting in elections
and wasn't really buying into official stories that it had
found its way over from a sub Saharan primate. And

(32:24):
his basis for that historically was he used the album
in the AIDS crisis to connect to the Tuskegee Syphilist
study that happened just a few decades earlier, which for
listeners who may not be familiar, Tuskegee University had invited
a lot of black men, typically poor, typically sharecroppers, to

(32:44):
do studies where many of them were infected with syphilis,
and the idea was to see how syphilis would have
impacted them. And these men had no idea that they
were going to be infected with syphlists. They thought they
were being treated for a variety of different diseases, one
being just a general term called bad blood. And that
went on for several decades until a journalist had found

(33:07):
out about it and the study was shut down. And
so for Zappa, America had already proven how it will
treat its most marginalized communities, and so now you have
this disease that's supposedly only targeting certain populations. For him,
there was a lot of skepticism on just the validity

(33:29):
of the official reports that were coming in. And it's
a difficult work because not only of the subject matter,
and it's also just a confusing story, like there's a
lot of exposition that you have to go into a
lot of knowledge. Even though that's what it's about, it's
not very clear that's the response to the AIDS crisis,
because it's just this evil prince is putting this potion

(33:50):
in mashed potatoes. But the main character, who was played
by Ike willis a black man who was in Zappa's
band at that time. The main character the thing is
essentially the Kingfish character from Amos Andy, and he speaks
in that very stereotypical slave dialect throughout the entire piece.
And it's a whole album that really takes the tropes

(34:13):
of American racism and turns it up to eleven to
highlight the absurdity of it and how that absurdity still
kind of infiltrates our society now. And it was one
of the last chapters I wrote for the book because
just so it was just so difficult and I needed
to learn how to kind of approach that. But it
was one I could not leave out because of the

(34:36):
commentary that is communicated on the album. If I had
left it out, I felt like I would have been
whitewashing Zappa's legacy. It gave me an opportunity to kind
of say, there is something he's trying to accomplish here.
It may not be successful, but it's not rooted in
racism or these other factors that are contributing to systemic racism.

(34:57):
There's something here that he's trying to communicate, even if
it may be wrong, even it may be difficult. I
couldn't let it go for my own convenience. It was
an opportunity for me to really address Zappa's whiteness as
a musician, my whiteness as an author, and use it
as an opportunity to hopefully create more dialogue about not

(35:18):
only that record, but Zappa's attitudes when it came to
how America handled its history of racism.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
Chapter five, titled Porn Wars the clips of Zappa defending
the arts, especially rock and roll artists. I always love
his appearance on CNN's Crossfire in nineteen eighty six is classic.
The PMRC talk about the Parents Music Resource Center, What
was their mission and how did Frank Zappa respond.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
So the Parents Music Resource Center were a collection of
the wives of affluent leaders in Washington. They were the
wives of senators, of congressmen, of business leaders who were
having issues with the MTV generations exposure to sex and

(36:05):
things that they felt were inappropriate for children. They're you know,
Tipper Gore has written about how she came in on
her daughter listening to Darling Nikky by Prince and was
being very and was very disturbed by the lyrics mentioning
masturbating with a magazine. And so they had took their
Christmas card list and just collectively put it together to
create this mailing list of people they could contact who

(36:28):
might be sympathetic to their goals in limiting the access
that children could have to content that they deemed to
be not acceptable. And they kind of positioned themselves to say, well,
we just want to have a we want to have
a rating system for music that you know, movies have.
You know, if movies have ratings, why can't music have ratings.

(36:51):
But there's a lot of issue with that. First, there's
a commercial response that as albums were being targeted for
potential labeling, there were threats to companies that sold those albums.
There's a report that I talked about in the book
how Camelot Music had received a letter from the owner
of the mall that they were in that if you
sell these records, you know, we're gonna cut your lease.

(37:13):
So there was that impact that had on the commercial aspect,
but also on the artistic aspect, was that it creating
a freezing effect for artists and the ideas that they
wanted to communicate. And Frank and his testimony says, you
know effectively that you know, an actor is not judged
really by the role that they take. No one thinks
that someone that they're seeing on the movie screen, they're

(37:35):
not thinking that's that person. But when they're listening to
the album, there's kind of a different thing that's happening.
You know. We tend to think that the person singing
to us is somehow endorsing certain ideas, or they're saying
that what they believe. There's not a lot of room
for irony in that or a kind of allegory in that.

(37:55):
So Zappa's response to this was to address potential censorship
issues with the impact that that could have on artists,
which is been the largest aspect of his legacy regarding
the PMRC. But he was also very clever in how
he communicated the business element of this, because what the

(38:16):
PMRC was doing and how they were able to accelerate
so quickly with their mission was that they talked about
all the sex and all the bad content in the music.
But they wanted to wrap this legislation in a tax
bill that was going to put a tax on blank
tapes that the music industry wanted as a mitigation effort
to fight piracy. That was a huge deal in the eighties,

(38:39):
and Zappa had seen the culture war issue as being
that poison pill that would get people to kind of
swallow taking on a private tax that he felt that
the industry should have paid themselves. I mean, if we
think about today, with a lot of the tariffs that
are happening, you know who is paying for those tariffs.
It's you as consumers. You know, you're paying more for

(39:00):
those products because these companies don't want to bear that
re kind of responsibility. And so he recognized that there
was this kind of private tax being levied on American
citizens without their consent, without their voting for it, and
that was really at the heart of what his argument
was and he was right to do it because the

(39:20):
PMRC was very limited in their scope and focus. They
were only targeting rock and pop music. In the book,
I talk about how a lot of representatives in the
music industry and Zappa identified that no one in country
music was being targeted. And it was no coincidence that
one of the Senate leaders who was at the PMRC
was Al Gore, who was the Senator of Tennessee and

(39:44):
whose wife, Tipper Gore, was one of the leaders of
the PMRC.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
The Book on Rock Podcasts will be back after this.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
I mean, there's like no way that we can just
pause for a minute. You guys just go home and
do your stuff, and then tomorrow we can just like continue.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
Thanks so much for checking out the Booked on Rock podcast.
If you've just found the podcast, welcome. If you've been listening,
thank you so much for your support, and make sure
you tell a friend, a family member, share on social
media and let people know about Booked on Rock. And
if you do like the podcast, make sure you subscribe
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Booked on Rock podcast, We're on Amazon, Apple, iHeart, Spotify, Spreaker,

(40:24):
tune in, and on YouTube music. You can check out
the full episodes on video, along with video highlights from
episodes on the Booked on Rock YouTube channel. Find it
at Booked on Rock. Thanks again for listening. Now back
to the show. I wonder how much these politicians were
aware of how intelligent Frank Zapple was. I wonder if

(40:45):
they even realized what they were going up against.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
You know, they I don't think they had any clue.
I think they had in their mind that Frank was
this big, wild haired guy. By this time he had
short haired, He addressed in a suit. A lot they
their own projections. The other two figures who had testified
at that hearing were d Snyder of Twisted Sister and
Twisted Sister was a band that was targeted by the PMRC,

(41:09):
but also John Denver, and I had read quotes from
d Snyder that him and Frank weren't sure where John
was going to be on this issue. You know, he's
kind of the all American, you know, kind of just
good guy, and there's a lot of projected onto him
that like, well, you know he's going to support you know,

(41:30):
the PMRC because he is this wholesome guy, and he
absolutely didn't his statement is actually probably the most fiery
of them all, because he equates the motives of the
pm RC to be like the book burnings in the
Third Reich. And what's kind of fascinating about this is,
not only did that surprise a lot of people that
John Denver was going to have that view, but there's

(41:53):
a great oral history that a writer name, I think
his name was zach Schanfeld that did for the pmr
c's alreadyeth anniversary in twenty fifteen, and he interviewed a
lot of the people who were there. He interviewed Candy Stroud,
who was a public relations expert who supported the pm RCY.
Susan Baker. Gail Zappa speaks in this oral history project

(42:14):
in lieu of Frank, who had passed away by then,
and there's a quote from I think that maybe Susan
Baker or someone from the PMRC who even though John
Denver had made these comments, they still thought of him as, Oh,
he was just such a sweet, nice guy. But Frank,
he was just so mean and just so awful. I
don't have the direct quote, but they still even thought

(42:37):
of him as very offensive, even though his position was,
you know, I'm okay with printing lyrics, and I'm okay
with giving parents more consumer information to make informed decisions
about what they exposed their children to. But we need
to find a way to pay for it that is
not a burden to American taxpayers. And thirty years later,

(43:00):
we're still kind of seen as the provocateur, the one,
you know, the one you had to watch out for,
when really no, not at all.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
When Frank Zappa passed away, there was a powerful tribute
published in The New Yorker on December twentieth, nineteen ninety three.
You cover in the book it was just over two
weeks after Zappa died. It was written by the Czechoslovakian
activist and writer Vatslav Hovel. He served as the last
president of Czechoslovakia from nineteen eighty nine until nineteen ninety two.

(43:28):
He and Zappa met in January of nineteen ninety First,
can you talk about that meeting, their relationship and what
Hovell says in that tribute.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
So, Hovell was president of Czecholovakia until nineteen ninety two,
then it became the Czech Republic, and he was an
activist in the Soviet Union. In Czechoslovakia, who was who
helped draft this thing called Charter seventy seven, which was
kind of a charter document of like how we democratize
and make things more free. That's a very oversimplified way
to describe that, So there's any historianslosmuries, sorry, but it

(44:00):
was their kind of blueprint to make Czechoislovakia and by
I guess the rest of the Soviet Union to be
more democratic. And Zappa's music was really inspirational to a
lot of those people at that time because of the
messaging in his music conveying ideas of freedom. And I
find that so fascinating because at that time he's being

(44:21):
criticized in America for juvenile lyrics, for being a novelty musician,
for not really having anything intelligent to say. I've heard
many times of the years, I like Frank Zappa's music,
but not his lyrics. And here is a country of
people who are actively being repressed.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Really admiring him for that.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
And him and Jimmy Carter were actually seen as the
two biggest enemies of the state in Checholislovakia because of
what they were saying, and as the Iron Curtain was
falling and Frank was kind of getting more respectable. By
the late eighties, he was shifting away from rock music.
His final tour was in nineteen eighty eight. He put
out his final rock album in eighty eight, called Broadway

(45:00):
the hard Way. While shifting away from that, he's getting
very interested in politics, having come up with the heels
of the PMRC, and he's toured around Eastern Europe in
the Soviet Union doing interviews on financial matters. You know,
he was in talks to have a talk show for
the Financial News Network and he had met Hovell as

(45:21):
kind of an effort in that, and he found that
when he did visit Chechoislovakia, and there's great footage of
it in the Alex Winter documentary where he arrives and
there's five thousand people at the airport and they're all
just cheering for him, and he never had that kind
of welcome by any other audience, and it really had
an effect on him. Just to be in an environment
where you're appreciated, of course, you know you're going to

(45:43):
want to try to be involved. And so he had
meetings with Hovell and another of Hobble's administration to be
kind of a cultural emissary to talk about, you know,
not only how you can stimulate economic development in Czechoislovakia,
but how can this economic development also so elevate the culture.
He was all on board to do that until a

(46:04):
Secretary of State, James Baker the Third, whose wife Susan
was on the PMRC, sent a letter saying, no, can't
have Zappa do this. There will be consequences. I don't
know exactly what that letter said or what exactly was communicated,
but they dropped the idea of Zappa being a cultural
emissary for Czechoslovakia. But when he did die of pancreatic cancer,

(46:26):
Hovell did write this beautiful obituary about just how much
of a hero Frank was to so many in Czechoslovakia
and how important he was in that transition in maintaining
dignity for people who are looking to have the same
freedoms and rights that a lot of Americans were taking
for granted. Back home.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
Book down Rock podcast will be back after this.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
Can we go now?

Speaker 1 (46:51):
Please?

Speaker 2 (46:52):
People?

Speaker 1 (46:52):
A good plan today is better than the perfect plan tomorrow.
Find the bookdown Rock website at bookdown Rock dot com.
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plus all the social media platforms were on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,

(47:13):
and x. Also check out the Booked on Rock blog.
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on Rock merch. It's all at booked on Rock dot com.
Europe would play a significant role in Zappa's life after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it culminated in

(47:35):
the last album he released while he was alive, which
is nineteen ninety three's The Yellow Shark, an album of
orchestral music. Two tracks that you say stand out as
distinctly stark and bleak statements about the United States and
the direction in which Zappa believed the country was heading.
What are those two songs?

Speaker 2 (47:51):
So The Yellow Shark was a series of concerts that
he did in Europe in his final two years. I mean,
he knew he was going to die, and he worked diligently.
It was an opportunity for him to hear the music
that he made the way he had intended it for
audiences who would absolutely respect it. And these concerts were

(48:14):
held in Berlin, Vienna, and then one more three European country.
I'm sorry I blanked out on what those cities were,
but the orchestra was called the Ensemble Moderen just avant
garde musical work and did orchestral versions of it. And
there's a lot of older compositions that got that kind
of work. And they even did one of Zappa's sinclavier pieces,

(48:35):
G Spot Tornado, and turned it into a orchestral work
that capped the whole concert, because it was one of
those pieces that Zappa believed could not actually be played
by humans. So if you go on YouTube and look
at G Spot Tornado, it's an incredible performance because not
only are the musicians really adept, but there's two performers
dancing on stage and it's just incredible. But there were

(48:58):
some tracks on that that did have lyrics, despite that
the album is largely orchestral instrumental music. The first is
a reading called Food Gathering and Post Industrial America in
nineteen ninety two, and it's a reading by a woman
named Hillary Sturt, who I think played viola or violin
in the ensemble, and she's talking about a post industrial

(49:23):
wasteland where just just toxic goop is everywhere because all
these factories have just dumped all their sludge and everything,
and people are just eating foam packing pellets. But by
the end of it, there are lines that there are
wild abandoned children who are feasting on each other because

(49:43):
of abortion being banned several years ago. And that's rather
striking because it's a whole piece that talks about this environmental, capitalist,
post industrial nightmare, and it's an awful setting to be in.
But by that final line and the delivery and the
that Hillary delivers that line about the total ban on abortion,

(50:05):
you know exactly who is responsible for these conditions for
this environment. It may not be explicitly said, but it's
there as an incredibly powerful piece. And the other one
is powerful in different ways. It's a piece called Welcome
to the United States, and it's a musical reading of
an immigration form and there's and it starts off with

(50:27):
this German fanfare, and one of the German Men in
the ensemble is reading questions from this form, did you
come by land? Did you come by sea? Have you
been convicted of these crimes? And as a response to
each of these questions, there's some type of like musical
motif that the ensemble performs. So when there's a comment

(50:49):
I think about espionage, there's a brief orchestral point where
they play Louis Louis by the Kingsman. I can't remember
exactly where that comes in, but it's kind of funny.
But at a certain point there's questions about between nineteen
thirty nine and nineteen forty five, where you involved in
this and that? And it's very dark, and it's very

(51:11):
and the music starts just turning, creating something that sounds
very awful. And as he reads these questions about you know,
were you involved in you know, essentially you know, the
Third Reich and and the Nazis tirade through Europe, one
single solitary man at the end of this piece says yes.
Then the leader of the German ensemble, so, you know,
welcome to the United States. So it's a it's a

(51:34):
weird kind of interpretation of a document form that with
its musical cues and the German leader is meant to
kind of create this idea of this type of authoritarianism
that we had seen in Nazi Germany start to creep
its way into America.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
Frank Zappa one of the most fascinating figures in music history,
rock history, in this country's history legacy. How are is
ideals still relevant today? Well, so a.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
Lot of what he was addressing, and what my book
does is to talk about how he saw the rise
of white Christian nationalism in our politics. And since his
death in ninety three, I mean, we do see a
major political party having it largely adopted that in their platform,
and that the barriers are breaking down. I just saw

(52:26):
in the news today that I don't know if it's
a Supreme Court, some court is ruling that churches can
be able to make political demonstrations and endorse political candidates.
And this is something that for seven decades was, you know,
against the law because that would be a violation of
their tax exempt status. But now we have an administration
and people in these various departments say, you know what,

(52:49):
it's okay, Yeah, we don't have to have that anymore.
And you see that increasingly, more and more these policies
and these actions are being driven by a type of
evangelical Christianity that is specifically meant to elevate non white

(53:09):
and non male people. And when I looked at Zappa's
lyrics in the eighties, I saw that exact same kind
of commentary. There's a great track from Broadway the hard
Way called Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk that I think
is this masterpiece. And then this is nineteen eighty eight
and there's lines that go with a ku klux moumo
in the back of a truck. If you ain't born again,

(53:29):
they're going to mess you up, screaming no abortion, no surrey.
Life's too precious. Can't you see? Well, what's that hanging
in a neighbor's tree while it looks like colored folks
to me? And for over forty years he was saying
that these people who are gaining more and more power,
it's going to be the expense of these marginalized groups.
And to me, that is where I had this realization

(53:53):
that Zappa was a very progressive minded figure and you know,
was not this conservative that you know, just because he
has like one clip on you know, Crossfire says well,
I'm a conservative. You may not believe that his values
were at odds with conservative ideology at that time and
especially would be now.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
And there's so much more to explore about this topic
in your book, Frank Zappa's America, which is out now
and you can find it wherever books are sold. You
could also look forward at your nearest bookstore. Booked on
rock dot com. You could find your nearest independent bookstore.
And where could people find you online? Bradley, I'm on
Blue Sky.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
I think it's at Bradley Morgan. I also have a
Instagram where I sometimes I post stuff there for the book,
but mainly a lot of my author stuff is on
Blue Sky. I also have my website Bradley Dashmorgan dot com.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
And yeah, the book's been out since June. Second, what
type of response have you gotten?

Speaker 2 (54:48):
What I have seen has been positive. I've been very
curious about what the Zappa fan community is going to say,
because I had some issues with them even while writing
the book that while there's a large majority of Zappa
fans who recognize a lot of the characteristics that I
identify in the book, there's still that, like like every fandom,

(55:12):
there's still that kind of purest subset that says that
you know, well, we disagree with this for whatever type
of reason they may be projecting. And when I was
writing the book, I had went to a I went
to a couple forums, and I'd asked if there was
any writings about Zappa from women or people of color,
because I wanted to try to get as much of
a non white and non male perspective into this book

(55:35):
as I possibly could. And you know, there are a
lot of people were helpful, like, oh, there's people who
worked with him or played in his band. You can
see clips. I wanted something that was very critical or analytical,
but I did have people kind of chime in and going,
why why do you need that flor huh blah blah blah.
Did you know he was conservative? You know, taking labels
out of context to project what they feel, but it's inaccurate.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
Bradley Morgan, thank you so much for another amazing book.
Now this is the people got to get this book
in your book on YouTube, which is another fascinating read.
Thank you so much for being on and look forward
to having you back on.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Thank you, Eric, It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
It's in the books.