Zappa.com

WHEN I WAS IN THE MARINE CORPS IN 1974, I WAS STATIONED AT CAMP LEJEUNE, NORTH CAROLINA. A FRIEND OF MINE PICKED ME UP IN HIS '65 T-BIRD (BLACK WITH DELUXE WHITE INTERIOR), ALONG WITH A COUPLE OF OTHER FRIENDS AND A NEW GUY. THE NEW GUY WAS INTRODUCED AS MARK FROM LEOMINSTER, MASSACHUSETTES. HE WAS A FORCE RECON. WE DROVE AROUND THE BASE SMOKING PCP JOINTS (PARSLEY, FORMELDIHYDE AND PCP MIX). AFTER SMOKING A JOINT OF THIS STUFF, THE NEW GUY WHIPPED OUT AN 8-TRACK TAPE AND PUT IT IN THE CRAIG QUADROPHONIC TAPE DECK. IT WAS A COPY OF OVERNITE SENSATION (QUAD VERSION). I WAS HOOKED (ON BOTH THE MUSIC AND THE DOPE)! LISTENING TO FIFTY-FIFTY, MONTANA, CAMARILLO BRILLO AND ALL THE OTHER GREAT SONGS ON THAT TAPE, IN A CAR LIKE THAT AND IN QUADROPHONIC, WHILE ON PCP, WAS A REAL MINDBLOWER!!! AFTER THAT DAY, I BOUGHT ALL THE FRANK ZAPPA I COULD! NOW, BECAUSE OF THAT EXPERIENCE, I'LL ALWAYS HAVE A SPECIAL SPOT FOR THAT ALBUM ABOVE ALL OTHERS! ZAPPA FREAKS ARE THE BEST PEOPLE I KNOW!

here's my zappa story: my dad was slow to buy a cd player in the early 90s. mostly because he never unpacked the stereo when we moved in '88 and just quit listening to music. in '94, when i was 10 and started appreciating music more, we pulled his stereo and records out of the attic. within a few months he decided to buy a cd player. the first two cds he bought were "rise and fall of ziggy stardust" and "apostrophe/overnite sensation." he played zappa for me and i enjoyed it, but it didnt blow me away. i did think he had a great sense of humor though. years later i randomly decided to buy hot rats because peaches en regalia was on it, and that was always my favorite zappa song. that kicked off what i later named my zappa renaissance. i didnt listen to anything but zappa for about a year and a half. i was determined to hear it all. and now here i am

Do you know the main reason writing in all caps is so bad? In lower case the upper half of each line of text has a multivaried negative space and the brain uses these shapes just as much as the actual letters to quickly recognise words. All caps is blocked and loses the advantage of these shapes.

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The way I see it Barry, this should be a very dynamite show.

do not forget to mention that no-one in its mighty mind could read this.

Probably heard the music from Frank in a dancehall first, also the silly sayings what he would be like, till some older friends told me all this and a few things more. Ah, and their had them records. Roxy, i swear...

I doubt they post anymore. That was over a year ago.

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You gotta give the people something good to read, on a Sunday

In the beginning there was Apostrophe'/Overnite Sensation

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Hi,

Madison, Wisconsin ...

Around 68 or 69, I think ... can't say when, but it was right after John Lennon mentioned that Frank was great ... I went after it.

Surprisingly enough, the one album that finally nailed me into this, was not an album, but a MOVIE ... and then the album ... and it was called "200 Motels" ... which to this day, is still something that most people can't handle watching, any better than they can a Godard film throwing film conventions on the floor, or some Germans creating "anti-music" by doing the same thing Frank was doing with loops and dubs and overdubs! (example: CAN's Tago Mago), and we have not started into the anti-theater and anti-writing scenes yet!

Which were all very vivid at the time, but progressive boards refuse to acknowledge.

Probably my earliest recollection is having to take trips to Illinois to visit my aunt, and when we'd get near St. Louis, I'd always hear Dancing Fool in there a few times. Then, getting stoned all the time as a teen in the 80's, someone turned me on to a little Nanook and I were hooked...
Then it was just a matter of devouring everying I could get ahold of, and when they put in a Best Buy, I scarfed up all the cds they carried, which was alot back then. Never lost the love, and getting the net opened up alot of new ways to get some Frank. All those interviews, and his fights against the powers that BE.
My kid is even finally liking it now, even requests it in the car. Sure, she likes scream-o, but this is gonna stick with her long after that...

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You might think my hats funny, but I don't...
Shitty blog./Shitty youtube.

when i was 12 i changed schools and met a guy called Fred Lowry whose uncle was drummer for "Them" and had stayed with FZ for 6 weeks in LA while they where on tour in late 60s so fred knew FZ and thats how I know FZ. This was in 1981.

this is some of Them now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QOH_xbneGU

Mungo

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Drink..............it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance

It was 1971 and I was in 8th Grade, when one of my classmates turned me on to the Filmore East album. Since I was 12, I thought all the dirty words and innuendo were pretty cool and I used to listen to it in my room with the volume low so my mom wouldn't hear it. Over time, I realized that Frank was a great guitarist and by the end of high school was blown away by his composition and arrangements. I couldn't get enough Zappa. I would go to all of the concerts I could in So. Cal.. I even started to go see concerts for any musician who ever played with Zappa from Jean Luc Ponty to Johnny Guitar Watson to Missing Persons, etc. I used to go to the Capitol Records swap meet in Hollywood to buy bootleg Zappa albums (which was not affiliated with Capitol Records, but was held in their parking lot from midnight to dawn the first Sunday of every month). I still have every album and bootleg I ever bought, most of which I also re-bought as CD's. I even have a cassette of when Frank played the entire Lather album on the radio and encouraged everyone to tape it to get back at Warner Bros. I believe. ZPZ has really reinspire me to get back into Frank and has brought back fond memories.

Thanks for sharing this.

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I'm not Antisocial,Society is Anti me !

Back when Dinah Moe Hum first came out, my cousin played it for me on the sly, so that my parents and his parents didn't know what we were listening to...it piqued my curiosity...then Dancing Fool came on the radio, and it piqued it even more....what put me over the edge was at a party where Joe's Garage ended up on the turntable, and I saw God!....the rest is history!

Some time around the mid to late 80's, I lived in a house of students who played Zappa pretty much constantly on tapes they'd recorded off friends of theirs. To be honest, I didn't 'get it' - either musically or lyrically. Then one stoned/drunk evening, Them Or Us was put on. Baby Take Your Teeth Out came on and I collapsed in a fit of giggles (I still think it's his most ridiculous song). This as you know is followed by Marque-Son's Chicken. BOOM! Jaw dropped. Everything else fell neatly into place. Where once was chaos, I now heard melody. I spent the next five years or so in record shops hunting down the LP's.

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Carry Go Bring Come

My name is tom and I'm a zappaholic!?
I was a child of the 70's and 80's a lot of people only knew of valley girl, I was almost one of them, I knew he had a huge catalog but was too busy trying to play Black Sabbath War Pigs on the guitar...fast forward and rewind to three years ago, It was my 16th year working as a commercial artist, I paint illustrations of what set designs and art direction are to look like for movies and video games, art by the pound basically, like being the studio musician on countless hit parade tunes, I was having some kind of mid life crisis, going to work on the train reading the fountainhead or miller's tropic of capricorn didn't help either. I was sick of having my life rented to help make mindless entertainment for little timmy the video game junkie...I found a animation by bruce bickford online and was blown away, it was like a lazer from the creative gods shot me in the forehead, the first thing I bought was Leather records my friend had 200 motels and watched that a ton of times, I always crack up seeing the giant UA for united artist logo come on before the titles and wished I could have seen the faces on the United Artist film executives when they first screened it....But
looking at everything Frank did breathes pure contagious free creative mind food. Amen and thank you to the zappa family for continuing to preserve and bring the music and humour and cartoon monster movie noises with structure and practical ideas and fun. But the great thing that the music did for me as a artist, was seeing someone just "Doing" not wasting time over thinking a concept but putting ideas down and going for it... rinse and repeat, and you get the catalog of his size, maybe thicker than longer, but jokes aside in our culture a artist who finances on their own art and of the scale frank did and with the variety of pure unedited brain dumps, doing things maybe other artists thought of but were afraid to do because they couldnt fit it into a commercial bubble will stand the test of time and inspire many more future zappaholics .
Amen and blah blah blah

mmm loads of "Stationed in the Army / Services" folks here -

I was Stationed in the Army in Brisbane Australia in the late 70s and listened to a University Radio station - 4ZZZ - where I found FZ... in 1980 I was stationed to Paderborn in Germany for three months May June & July - I saw FZ play in Hamburg whilst on leave - brilliant and I have been collecting his stuff ever since -

Cheers - g

http://gallery.me.com/gavin.warren#100178

Nice pictures Gavin, welcome to zappa.com.

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The way I see it Barry, this should be a very dynamite show.

If you saw God don't blame Joe's Garage.

talking about god visions......my memories are much more recent last december to be precise. I recall myself sitting in front on my computer, dancing furiously on the notes of catholic girls, especially the kind of prog instrumental side, after the Warren Cuccurulloooooo and Vinnie Colaiudaaaaa chorus. I thought there ''this music really deserves more than a simple you tube listen''. And there we are, after two days the first copy of a Zappa CD was mine.

Tragic is my wife made a small video of me dancing with her self phone, good is that she looks quite indulgent to my new affair.....well for now at least. But for the future? I really hope that she deleted it may be a very bad instrument of retaliations

The John Lennon album Sometime in New York City had Zappa and the Mothers. It started me to wonder

Why would you smoke formaldehyde? I don't consider myself a freak, but if that's what it takes to be part of the Zappa krew, I suppose I can get freaky.

Great story, man!

Thats awesome dude.

How I got into Zappa....
I grew up in London, my parents weren't crazy about music. My father is sort of tone deaf and played the accordeon. That didn't help. I spent my pocket money on computer games and some music cassettes. When 16 years old, I had been into all sorts of bands... this was in 1984/1985. My favourites were the Clash, Talking Heads, The Police, Alice Cooper... I tried Kraftwerk (interesting and new, soon got bored despite their original sound) and my brother (who had money and a good turntable) played me Pink Floyd, Led Zep, Hendrix, Queen and some heavy metal like Sabbath etc etc.

Saw on TV a rare interview of Alice Cooper (I think we only had 3 channels back then in England), it was the 1st time I had heard him being interviewed and I was excited. He mentioned twice the name Frank Zappa who I thought only as a record producer.

Few months later I'm looking at some tapes in the local record shop and I see a cool album cover with a dog with shades named "Them or Us". 3 of the titles made me laugh. "Frogs with dirty little lips", "Sinister Footwear" and "Baby pull your teeth out".
What is this crazy shit? I thought and bought the double album cassette. It wasn't cheap with my budget.

I couldn't quite figure this music out. Never heard anything like it. I loved it and I disliked it is the best way to describe it but I instantly loved the 1st minutes of Sinister Footwear. I thought it was a genius piece of music. So much better than Jean-Michelle Jarre that so many people thought of as original. (remember, this was 1984-85 and I knew nothing about music)... within 3-4 days the rest of the album/cassette grew on me.

Some months later, my budget had changed. Had 5-6 albums (some on vinyl now to listen to on my dad's turntable) and realized I was sort of hooked.
I made a conscious decision to not buy anymore Zappa because I couldn't afford it and I wasn't all that impressed with my last Zappa purchase which was "FZ meets the mothers of prevention" which was new and expensive.

I found Burnt Weeny Sandwich on vinyl in 2nd hand record store in Notting Hill, it wasn't in a great condition but some stuff on that blew me away and I realized that I was hooked and knew that I would spend a fortune buying all of his records which I have.

Whoops, bit long my story. Fuck it.