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Does anyone here who were around in the late 60's remember how much underground zappa was ?

I was born in July 1969. I went to a party in October that I will never forget. Man, those sixties.... you had to be there.

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Let's hear it again for the London Philharmonic Orchestra!

Freak Out! (sides 3 & 4), Absolutely Free, and We're Only In It For The Money were considered as records to be played while one got high. Comedy music. The Mothers Of Invention (like The Rolling Stones before them) were considered as the antithesis to The Beatles. More people were aware of The Mothers Of Invention than of Frank Zappa.

.....and just like now, Frank's music was criticized by individuals that had never listened to any of it.....

.....oh yeah.....I was born in 1950, so it's pretty easy to do the math.....

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"If Frank Zappa cut a fart and mixed it to stereo, I'd buy it!" - jimmie d

I hit the ground running in 1954. I was in Trinidad from 1967 to late 1970, and no-one (even me) knew of Zappa or MOI. Back in Canadian high school ('71 to '73), Zappa/Beefheart was only listened to by the fringe crowd (all 4 or 5 of them). The Fillmore East album, turning up at a party, was considered..... tasting of the Dark Side. Something naughty and rebellious.
I wound up with the fringe crowd due to my shoulder-length hair and odd dress sense. (my previous school was uniforms+traditionally short hair. I over-indulged in my new found "freedom"), so had my taste for MOI bostered by them....and also by the disdain shown Zappa by the straight members of the student body. (Hey, if I'm going to be on the fringe, I'm going to be all the way out there! )

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Stay with me flagrantly and we'll have ecstasy for all eternity.

I was born in the early 60's. I bought my first FZ album maybe in 1977. So I can't say anything about how much underground he was. But I know that the 60's were pretty exciting.

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What's the ugliest part of your body ?

my older brother played those albums for me in 1968. I was eleven and I just couldn't wait to get old enough to be able to hang out with him and his friends, because they were the underground scene in our little hometown in sweden. it took me five long years to get there, though!
and by then zappa wasn't very underground any longer, but still...

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"bit of nostalgia for the old folks."

I was born in'67. Unfortunately I missed out on the Garrick gigs that year.

Jeez I feel old, Well if you remember the sixtys you weren't there. Sounds funny, I do remember, my dad was a big jazz freek, he liked stuff like Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Count Bassie, Glen Miller, but he was familiar with FZ, even around 65, I was in ninth grade, and would here him talking about that wild Zappa shit so I gave my who magic bus, byrds and floyd a break to check it out. Iv'e been a jazz freek since. So he wasn't all that underground. In the navy in 70 my buddies from california were all into FZ

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Confusion will be my epitaph

I don't really remember.

Me neither.

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Country music + Black music = Rock and Roll

If I was born just 2 years earlier, then my personal wilderness of most of the 70's would have been filled with Zappa and (ahem) King Crimson, rather than a solitary quest of discovering FZ and Waka Jawaka at my Local Library in 1978.

Thank goodness Sheik Yerbouti was 'round the corner

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A Blanket in my Muesli. A Blanket in my what??

He's a CEO for Chrissakes!

i was born in '62, so only saw some of the "fun" through the eyes of a child. i had a beaded necklace that i loved back when i was 7. one day, i put it on, plucked a flower, stuck it in my hair and proclaimed to my mom i was a hippie! oy, i would not have made it on a commune, that's for sure. too dirty. i did have a pal who had parents who were a bit more free than most parents. allison had me over for a "sleepover", and the next day, we were standing in the doorway of her parents room, and i saw her mom had the sheets pulled up to her chest, but knew she was naked and noticed her dad walk in the restroom, and-horrors!- i saw his behind! i spent the rest of their conversation studying the floor. we later went to their friends house who were REAL hippies, silkscreening posters and everything. it was an interesting glimpse into a world i was glad i was'nt a part of. cheeez and crackers. sierra, you stole what i was going to say! as the phrase goes,"if you remember the 60's, you were'nt there". very true.

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One two, buckle my shoe!

I was raised in east L.A.during the 50'S/60'S what seemed normal to the young people of the time was underground to the rest.

You must tell us those stories my friend.

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A Blanket in my Muesli. A Blanket in my what??

He's a CEO for Chrissakes!

Is that true? the way the albums were packaged, it was pretty obvious Frank was running the show, he was the center of the packaging (the way Freak out is lit your eyes automatically go to frank no matter how you look at it), he did just about all of the interviews himself, and on top of that wrote all the music. I find it hard to beleive that people considered The Mothers of Invention a group in the sense that The Rolling Stones or The Beatles. I wasn't there, though, so i wouldnt know.

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"Once you go black, you never go back."
--Thomas Jefferson

When I was 9 and with my folks in Merrimac, New Hampshire vacationing in one of the rented cottages we'd started going to since my first birthday -- typically staying for a little over a month -- I remember feeling scared by all those "long-haired freaky people" in the nearly full-page color photograph on the front of "The Boston Globe" and from what I was reading in "The Globe" they definitely meant trouble. Maybe they were going to burst out rioting, smashing and burning everything just like the "negroes in Los Angeles" did?
But I was fucking scared and it was a lot more from what I read in the paper than how "freaky" they looked direct-on, in real life, on the Boston Common. I even hunkered down in the back seat of the car going by the Common, peaking through the bottom of the window -- even though my dad wasn't afraid at all. Both he and my mom wondered, "What the hell's this country coming to when those filthy, hopped-up hippie bastards can just plunk themselves down and take over the whole Boston Common?"
My folks kept calling them "kids" but to me at age 9 they looked too old and big to be "just kids".
Of course I was scared for all the reasons the writers at "The Globe" said they were. I even said to my dad, "So? If all they do is walk around in messed-up clothes and the guys have hair like the girls aren't they OK? They don't do much."
My dad said, "OK, if they 'don't do much' I can park and let you mingle in with a few of them. You want to do that?" "No! I was only kidding! No, dad, don't stop! I was only making a joke!"
My dad laughed and I was relieved that he didn't stop and pull over. Damn! If only I'd known then that "hair like a girl's", "worn-out, torn jeans" and, not at all the least of it, "Freaky Franky" would be a major domestic issues a scant three years later maybe I would have gotten out! But a nine-year-old might not have been any of the "crazy, freaky peoples'" idea of really fun company. More likely than anything I'd have been asked if I was lost!

--Bat

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<------PhotoArtWerk by debutante_daisy http://www.facebook.com/BatchainTheMovie

Even as a little kid, I was never impressed by the hippies. They looked filthy and I thought they were just 'pretending.' No wonder I embraced FZ later in life. I was in the Haight Asbury as a tourist in the Summer of Love. I was 4 years old and I remember my father snapping pictures of the animals in the zoo. A few years later while in the first grade at parochial school, the hippies hung around the local park across from the church. I was proud of my school uniform and felt superior to the smelly humans. Right abut that time, Charles Manson made headlines, and that's all she wrote. Manson, to a kid my age, was the ultimate hippie.

I wish I was born in those times, so do a lot my friends. Unfortunately, I was born in a very sad year... 1993.

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"If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mother, your Dad, your priest, to some guy on television, to any of the people telling you how to do your shit, then you DESERVE it."

Somehow I never made any connection between Charles Manson & Co. and "hippies". I just though Manson was a crazy psychotic and his long hair and bushy beard was pure coincidence. Of course just after his arrest he did shave his head and carve a swastika on his forehead which looked very "un-hippie-like".
Of course there were all those years in during which "hippie" was completely gone from all serious usage and very suddenly started to get used again, presumably to describe some particular kind of people in some definitive way. Hearing it used by FZ in 1980 when I finally got hold of FZ's '77 release, "Zappa In New York" on "Honey, Don'tcha Want A Man Like Me?" sounded very funny if not dated or as if he was using it jokingly on a song that was humorous anyway. It was about on the same order as "beatnik".

--Batchain

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<------PhotoArtWerk by debutante_daisy http://www.facebook.com/BatchainTheMovie

Dirty Smelly Beatniks

Well, here we are, my first post, and you're barking right up my alley. I bought Freak Out as soon as it was released, and no sooner did I start 'freaking out' than I read that The Mothers were coming to New York. Only got to see them once or twice then, but I was greatly pleased when I learned that it went over so well that they were going to stay 'in residency' at The Garrick Theatre over the Thanksgiving vacation.
By this time, I was living in Greenich Village. After befriending Jimmy Carl Black, I called a bass player friend, who loaned his fender to Roy Estrada. The rest, as they say, is history........
I came here to post because of a new Zappa dvd I'd just read about; let me go and post that, and if anyone responds to this, I'll give a link to where my FZ photos are, and I'll tell more tales.

Hell yea lets see some pix!!....and welcome. Zappa stories are always welcome to!

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please tell uss how the "scene" was like from your point of view mr roach : )

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There WILL come a time when everybody in the world they will be free to sing and dance and love : )

he he. The line in the song is "she saw a REAL hippie." Meaning, them throwbacks wuz still around in '76. So, yea, yr right, it is sorta 'beatnik' like, as Frank intended, I'd say. But the problem here is, Zappa was considered to be a hippie himself. He had long hair and made his name in the 60's. That equals hippie to most. I'm not getting technical here. Maynard G. Krebbs = beatnik, right?
Anyway, no hippie connection to Manson!? Are you in denial!? Or maybe didn't go to Catholic school, where we would obsess over these things.

I would like to hear and see alot more Mr. Roach

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Confusion will be my epitaph