Frank Zappa Early Life

Frank Zappa was born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 21, 1940 to Francis Zappa (born in Partinico, Sicily, of Greek and Lebanese descent) and Rose Marie Colimore (who was of 3 quarters Italian including Sicilian and 1/4 French descent). He was the oldest of four children (two brothers and a sister). In January of 1951, his family relocated to the West Coast because of Frank's asthma. They settled in Monterey, California, about 100 miles south of San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Pomona, then to El Cajon before moving a short distance, once again, to San Diego in the early 1950s.

During Zappa's earliest childhood, his father, a chemist and mathematician, worked at the Edgewood Arsenal chemical warfare facility at nearby Aberdeen Proving Ground. Due to the home's close proximity to the Arsenal, Zappa's father kept gas masks on hand in case of an accident. Evidently, this had a profound effect on the young Zappa; references to germs, germ warfare and other aspects of the "secret" defense industry occur throughout his work.

By 1955 the Zappa family had relocated to Lancaster. Lancaster was a small aerospace and farming town in Antelope Valley of the Mojave Desert, close to Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Mountains. By age 15, Zappa had attended six different high schools.

Lancaster's location gave the young Zappa access to the exciting sounds coming from radio stations in Los Angeles and KSPC 88.7 FM in Claremont, where Zappa had his own Saturday night show. In addition, his parents were affluent enough to afford a record player, records, a television, and musical instruments. Television also exerted a strong influence, as demonstrated by quotations from show themes and advertising jingles found in some of his work.

Zappa developed a sinus problem during his early teens. To Frank's lasting horror, his doctor treated the stubborn ailment by inserting a pellet of radium on a probe into each of his nostrils. Nasal imagery and references to the nose recur, both in his writing and in the classic collage album covers created by his longtime visual collaborator, Cal Schenkel.

As a student, Zappa was bored and given to distracting the rest of the class with juvenile antics. He left community college after one semester to make low-budget films. Frank maintained his disdain for formal education throughout his life, taking his children out of school at age 15 and refusing to pay for their college. However, he was highly intelligent, ambitious and articulate. Zappa possessed a voracious drive, singular concentration, enormous creativity and a huge capacity for work and organization. His superior ability, passionate interest in music, and highly idiosyncratic musical taste was demonstrated at an early age. Zappa grew up influenced in equal measures by avant-garde composers such as Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern, local rhythm and blues and doo-wop groups (particularly local pachuco groups), and modern jazz (including bebop and free jazz).

Zappa was, from the beginning, interested in sounds for their own sake. This led to his interest in modern composers. His introduction to Stravinsky seems to have been a pivotal musical discovery but he was soon ranging further afield musically. After reading a Look magazine story on the Sam Goody record store chain that lauded its ability to sell an LP as obscure as The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One and described Varèse's dissonant drum composition "Ionisation" as "a weird jumble of drums and other unpleasant sounds", the teenage Zappa became convinced that he should seek out Varèse's music. When he spotted a copy of The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One in a local record store after a year of searching (he noticed the LP for the "mad scientist" looking photo of Varese on the cover, and was surprised it was the Varese LP he'd long been searching for), Zappa convinced the salesman to sell him the store's hi-fi equipment demonstration copy at a discount, due to his inability to pay full price. Thus began a lifelong passion for Varèse and his music. Zappa's mother gave him considerable encouragement. Though she greatly disliked Varèse's music, she was indulgent enough to award Zappa the gift of a long distance call to the composer as a fifteenth birthday present. Unfortunately, Varèse was in Europe at the time, so Frank spoke to the composer's wife. Zappa later received a letter from Varese thanking Zappa for his interest, telling him about a composition he was working on called "Deserts" (Zappa, living in the California desert town of Lancaster, found this very exciting), and inviting Zappa to look him up if he was ever in New York. The meeting never took place, and Varese died a few years later, but Zappa kept the framed letter proudly displayed for the rest of his life.

Zappa began his musical career (at the age of 13) on drums, taking his first lessons at school in the summer of 1953. He played drums with local teenage combos, but was told he played the cymbals too much. He later switched to guitar, which he quickly mastered. Although he performed as a singer-guitarist for most of his career, Zappa always retained a strong interest in rhythm and percussion. His bands have been noted for the excellence of their drummers. Works such as The Black Page are notorious for virtuosity and complexity in rhythmic structure and arrangement, featuring radical changes of tempo and metre as well as short, densely arranged passages contrasted by free-form breaks and extended improvisations. Classically trained percussionist and drummer Terry Bozzio, who played for Zappa in the late 1970s (along with many recordings of well-known classical and avant-garde works), is on record as saying that Zappa's writing for percussion is as difficult and complex as anything else he has played.

In 1956 Zappa met Don Van Vliet (best known by his stage name "Captain Beefheart") while taking classes at Antelope Valley High School and playing drums in a local band, The Blackouts. The Blackouts, a racially-mixed outfit, included Euclid James "Motorhead" Sherwood (who later lived with Zappa at 'Studio Z' and was a member of the Mothers of Invention, playing on many of their most famous recordings). Zappa and Vliet became close friends, influencing each other musically, and collaborating in the late Sixties and mid-Seventies (on the album Bongo Fury, released 1975). They later became estranged for a period of years. Van Vliet's own feelings about Frank Zappa were perhaps best summarized in a quote published in a March 1994 issue of Musician magazine: "I knew him for thirty-seven years, and in the end, the relationship was private."

In 1957 Zappa was given his first guitar and quickly developed into a highly accomplished and inventive player. He considered his solos "air sculptures", and developed an eclectic, fluent and individual style. Zappa eventually became one of the most highly regarded electric guitarists of his time. While it is possible that Zappa might have become a professional jazz musician, he was soon drawn into rock music. Throughout, he retained a lifelong attachment to jazz forms, voicing and structures and often drew his band members from the jazz world (if only because of the high degree of competence his music demanded).

Zappa's interest in composing and arranging burgeoned in his later high school years and he dreamed of being a composer. By his final year he was writing prolifically and had not only composed, arranged and conducted an avant-garde performance piece for the school orchestra, but had also contrived to have the event both broadcast on local radio and recorded. A portion of this historic recording is included on the CD The Lost Episodes. Zappa did see his childhood dream realized, as the London Symphony Orchestra played a program of his music, and the Ensemble Modern in 1992 received a 20-minute ovation after performing a program of his work at the Frankfurt Opera House.

After graduating in June 1958 Zappa worked for a time in advertising. His sojourn in the commercial world was another important influence on his work, and within a few years Zappa was co-opting the techniques he learned as a commercial artist. Zappa used them to deconstruct music, the music business, the media and society at large by combining them with the ideas he had gleaned from his studies of dada, situationism, and surrealism. Zappa frequently referenced his advertising industry experiences in his lyrics.

Frank Zappa always took a keen interest in the visual presentation of his work, designing some of his album covers (e.g. Absolutely Free) and directing his own films and videos. Zappa's album covers are highly distinctive; frequently bizarre and surreal. His two most important visual collaborators were Cal Schenkel in the Sixties and early Seventies, and Donald Roller Wilson in the Eighties and Nineties.

Zappa moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and spent most of the rest of his life there. Among his earliest professional recordings are two adventurous and remarkably accomplished scores for the low-budget films Run Home Slow and The World's Greatest Sinner.

He married his first wife, Kay Sherman, in the same year but the relationship soon deteriorated and they divorced two years later. In 1963, he began playing professionally around Los Angeles and bought the small Pal Recording Studio in Rancho Cucamonga, California (formerly called Cucamonga), which he renamed "Studio Z".

Zappa had been recording at Pal since the early 1960s and after receiving a payment for one of his film scores he was able to buy the studio, including a unique 5-track tape recorder. Soon after, his marriage ended and he moved out of his apartment and into the studio, where he began routinely working 12 hours or more per day. This set a pattern that would endure for almost all of his life. At this time, only a handful of the most expensive commercial studios had multitrack facilities, the industry standard for smaller studios was still mono or two-track. By the time he recorded his first LP with The Mothers in 1966 he was already an accomplished recording and mastering engineer and from his third LP on and for the rest of his career, he produced all his own work.

After being approached by a customer who offered him $100 to produce a suggestive tape for a stag party, Zappa and a female friend jokingly faked the "erotic" recording, which purported to contain the sounds of people having sex. Unfortunately the customer was an undercover member of the Vice Squad and Zappa was jailed for ten days on charges of supplying pornography. His entrapment and brief imprisonment left a permanent mark, and was a key event in the formation of his anti-authoritarian stance. It also led him to realize that he could never go to jail again. Partly for this reason, Frank Zappa never took drugs, and later in his career, fired any band members who did.