(Frank Zappa - and thankfully the world would never be the same)

I can't think of very many people who came of age in the 1960s who weren't influenced in some way by Frank Zappa's music, whether it was the inimitable icon-bashing and social commentary or the intricacy of his music that led off in all directions and broadened horizons in music appreciation in a way no high school class ever did.

Listening to Frank made me search out people like Harry Partch, Luigi Nono, Edgar Varese (whom he always quoted "the present day composer refuses to die"). Turned me on to the lesser known works of Igor Stravinsky. Gave me an enjoyment of people like Ornette Coleman. Turned me on to people like Pierre Boulez. Basically, opened up an entire world of music I just wasn't aware of as a teenager.

And I'm pretty sure that happened to a lot of people. Frank led the way and we've come away better for the experience.

In this documentary, produced for BBC Radio 4 in 2006, the feminist author, commentator and social activist Germaine Greer offered some personal insights and a background on the life of Frank Zappa.

If you've never been aware of the music of Frank Zappa, I can't imagine how you missed it. If you're a fan like me, it will remind you how lucky you were to be witness to the whole thing.

(Hot Rats - desert island disc)

As a companion piece to this weeks Newstalgia Pop Chronicles, I thought I would include a cut from one of my favorite Frank Zappa albums. It was hard picking which one. The thing about the music of Frank Zappa is there is no shortage of memorable albums and tracks; you could spend weeks. So it really boiled down to the blindfold test - toss a bunch of albums on a table and pick one blindfolded. And this one won the toss.

So tonight it's Peaches en Regalia off Hot Rats, an album I have a special fondness for because I was working (briefly) with Straight/Bizarre Records at the time and everybody was excited when this one was released.

I still am.

A track I heard almost non-stop when it was first released in 1981. Robert Williams' Buy My Record was an instant anthem on a lot of the free-form/New Wave Radio stations around the country at the time.

Trouble was, it came and went in a flash and not much has been heard from him since. Well, not if you're concentrating on the mainstream. Williams, a former drummer with Captain Beefheart and an experimental musician in his own right, has been issuing material since that 1981 release - just not on A&M.

But tonight it's that signature track. And since it's off the original A&M EP, it slides effortlessly right into the next track, Black Yard, which may or may not be familiar with you.

The 80's.

This is a slight cheat. This session wasn't done for BBC Radio but rather it's the audio portion of a BBC-TV session The Mothers Of Invention did in on October 23, 1968.

Frank makes mention of the fact that this is something that never would have been done on American TV at the time and he was right. America just wasn't ready for Frank, or anything experimental. And even though we joke about it now, it spoke volumes about where the mainstream were in the so-called "Swinging 60's" and what an uphill slog it was just to get an audience.

So tonight's session comes from BBC-TV. And the tracks featured are:

1. Improvisations
2. King Kong
3. Oh, In The Sky

Vintage Frank Zappa and the reason music of the 60's took a huge leap forward. I can't imagine what the music scene would have been like without him.

In the 1960's endless discussions were spent laboring over the subject of The Communications Gap. An adjunct to the Generation Gap, The Communications Gap had more to do with selective hearing than it actually had to do with language skills. Case in point was the subject of music. Even in the 60's members of the mainstream were hard pressed to figure out what Rock music was. Rather than accept it as a form of popular music it was viewed as some secret society to which only a select few were privy to the myriad of ever-changing codes. The dark, mysterious and all encompassing Counterculture.

I ran across this panel discussion (more of an inquiry), originally broadcast around 1969 and rebroadcast in 1971. It featured a rather eclectic cast of characters, including Frank Zappa, L.A. Philharmonic Music Director and Conductor Zubin Mehta. Philharmonic Manager Ernest Fleischmann. Film composer David Raksin and the KPFK moderators Lew Merckelson and William Strother.

Zappa is viewed by Mehta and Fleischmann much the same way Esmeralda viewed Quasimodo - with a degree of repulsion and curiosity. Mehta is adamant in explaining that "young people don't understand counterpoint" as the reason they don't go to Classical music concerts. Zappa explains that Classical music has gone through a season of doldrums and the conservative programming in the concert hall needed more new and adventuresome pieces performed. The younger audiences were there - Zubin and Ernest were just going about finding them the wrong way. The borderline patronizing and condescending dismissal were symptomatic of what the universal problem was in all aspects of the 60's. Music was no exception.

What's interesting about this interview is that it pre-dates the L.A. Philharmonic/Mothers Of Invention concerts that eventually took place at UCLA in May of 1970 - the results being partially disastrous and part wildly successful in the first performance of 200 Motels which featured both the L.A. Philharmonic and The Mothers of Invention in what Frank referred to as "Zubin And The Jets". So obviously some groundwork was laid, no matter how tenuous.

But from a historic point of view this is an interesting panel discussion and one I don't think has been heard in 40 years. It's interesting to realize how much the whole field has changed in that time. Zappa went on to be regarded as a composer capable of not only his signature material, but also his serious material and was championed in that regard by none other than Pierre Boulez, who is also a respected composer and much loved musician (there was an attempt once, by members of the Philharmonic to draft Boulez as Music Director, but flattered, he declined).

So attitudes eventually change, but hearing how they arrive there is usually more interesting than the end results. This half hour broadcast gives you some idea of just what the atmosphere was like.

Early Alice Cooper tonight. Probably one of the great overlooked albums of the 70's. Easy Action was Alice Cooper's second release during their tenure with Frank Zappa's Straight Records, released in March of 1970 (ah yes, 41 years ago . . .I swear!), and because Alice Cooper was still at that undefined stage, it was hard getting them airplay and subsequently this outing didn't fare particularly well in sales or in reviews (Rolling Stone supposedly trashed it). It was also the last album officially put out by Straight before the group landed on Warner Bros where their fortunes changed considerably, as did their direction and production.

Tonight it's Return Of The Spiders, which starts off side 2 of the lp. Still at the experimental stage, but still Alice Cooper.

This is actually a rather famous and famously circulated batch of recordings made during a concert put together by then-fledgling composer Frank Zappa under the auspices of Mount St. Mary's College on May 19, 1963.

The recordist, Carlos Hagen was my very first teacher in the area of phono-montage and experimental music. It was through him I wound up working at KPFK in the autumn of 1966 and it was because of him I developed a great love for the experimental music of Harry Partch, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Frank Zappa and countless others. He was (and mostly likely still is) the person you would see at all sorts of gatherings with a portable tape recorder (a Uher 5000 if I correctly remember), recording endless hours of everything, not only for his weekly radio program, but for his archives. Everything that had any relation to sound held enormous fascination for him and it was his lifelong desire to preserve those sounds and to turn other people on to them that has made him something of an institution, not only among the eclectic population but among historians as well.

And so recording this concert was right up his street - in fact, it actually was since he has been associated with UCLA for many years and had an office on campus which was a few blocks away from Mount St. Mary's.

For those of you who know this tape (and I'm sure there are a lot), there's nothing I can add to it, other than list below was the pieces are. For those of you not familiar with it, a lot has been chronicled about Frank's early experimental work and that this was where his passion was. The Mothers Of Invention was a commercial side line as far as he was concerned; a means to an end - the thing that brought the money in to pay for what he was really interested in doing. And I'm pretty sure had there not been a Mothers Of Invention and the outrageous reputation they acquired over the years, he may not have attracted the attention of people like Pierre Boulez who championed his more serious work in Europe. So sometimes the sidelines do pay off.

At any rate, here is the concert. The sound isn't all that good. Carlos recorded almost all of what he did on the fly and getting it right was a hit-and-miss affair as it always is. But we can all be thankful he had the foresight to actually be there in the first place. Thanks Carlos - once again, you were where history happened. Also, remember (if you're not all that familiar with early Frank Zappa) that this is experimental music and it's not for all tastes - you are almost required not to dance to it. I am sure a lot of you will absolutely hate it - some things just never change. But, as everything with life, if you approach it with an open mind and a tiny bit of willingness, it could be pretty amazing.

Enjoy.

Mount St. Mary's College, LA May 19, 1963
* Variables II for Orchestra
* Variables I for Any Five Instruments
* Opus 5, for Four Orchestras
* Rehearsalism
* Three Pieces of Visual Music with Jazz Group

I kept humming this all day. I haven't thought about this album in a while. Frank Zappa was (and still is) one of my heroes. I can honestly say that if it wasn't for Frank Zappa my world of music would be microscopic in scale. His music was a stepping off point from which a whole vast universe came into view. And for that, I am forever grateful.

Tonight it's a track off Uncle Meat, one of those albums that was a turning point in the evolution of Frank's music. As ground breaking as Freak Out was (his first album) at the time, Uncle Meat was pivotal in Frank's transition from Pop iconoclast to serious composer.

Uncle Meat Variations is off the original side 2 of the lp and the one I was humming all day. As a stand-alone piece it probably doesn't do the whole album justice. But with the limited amount of time, it's a good taste if you aren't familiar.

Frank Zappa's catalog of albums is huge (some 60 at last count), and if you aren't all that familiar with him, Uncle Meat is a good album to jump into.

But then, I'm partial to it. I've been humming it all day.

(Supersister - Owed much to Caravan and Frank Zappa, though not in any particular order)

Had they decided to break up when their original lead singer left in 1969, we probably never would have had much of the Progressive Rock movement as we knew it in the 1970's. Supersister were a Dutch band (a country probably known more for Golden Earring and The Tee Set here in the States) who put Europe on the map as far as the Prog-rock movement was concerned.

Influenced a lot by the Canterbury scene in the UK in the mid-late 1960's with the likes of Caravan and Soft Machine, they were also very much influenced by early Mothers of Invention and the free Jazz and electronic music scene that was happening all over Europe from the 1950's onwards.

By today's standards, the band wasn't together all that long. Three albums worth before going separate ways in 1974, until a brief reunion in 2001 which sadly didn't become permanent owing to the loss of Sacha van Geest, one of the founding members to Cancer that year.

Still, Supersister have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity over the years because, like many of their counterparts from the period, it was never picked up by the mainstream and was deemed comfortably weird enough to remain timeless to those who never heard them in the first place.

Thank God for that.

Here is a cut off their second album "To The Highest Bidder", which was issued in the UK on Dandelion Records and came out in the U.S. for about a minute and a half. "A Girl Named You" starts off the original Side two.