Zappa.com

I'm sure I've read in one of the many biographies of Frank that I own
that he actually WAS a genius according to I.Q. tests.
Even his father was quoted as saying Frank was a genius!

Also, in the late 70's when Genie Becker was an interviewer for
"The New Music" (a Canadian music news program at the time)
she was interviewing Frank while he was in a limo and he said to her
after she made some difficult comment to him:
"I am a genius but don't hold it against me!"

asperger's syndrom is not always necessarily a bad thing.
It is believed by some in the medical community
that every person has some degree of autism.
It is just manifested in different ways from the high
functioning genius person to the negetively affected.
It is quite possible that many well known artists
and musicians have this syndrom and it has positively
affected their lives. who's to say? I don't fucking know
or care THAT I DO KNOW.

in no shape or form did Zappa have any variation of autism. & anyone who thinks so, tho' that may be their right, needs to subscribe to a course in logic...

in no shape or form did Zappa have any variation of autism. & anyone who thinks so, tho' that may be their right, needs to subscribe to a course in logic...

I sincerely think he had asperger's (or something else in the spectrum).

Yes, e was married but he spent most of his time away from his family, alone in his basement doing the one thing he liked in an obsessive manner.
Many of his bandmembers commented on his cold attitude toward his musicians.
In a 1-on-1 situation (such as an interview) most aspies can manage to interact but if there are more people involved in a social situation (ie. familydinner on a holiday) he preferred to back out (in his own words: 'they have to drag me out of the studio kicking and screaming and I have to sit down and talk to people, I don't like to talk, it feels like exercise to me').
He had a few interests (music, film, politics and human behavior), he knew A LOT on those topics.
He was a controlfreak having to control his immediate surroundings (check any backstage footage of him and his bands).
All this sounds very autistic to me, sure he could communicate but he was better at it in his (very detailed) music.
He also had to do stuff his own way, which is a preferred attitude for autistic people.

I'm thinking more than likely, it makes logical sense if he was on the spectrum. Here's the deal, Asperger's/Autism isn't just a broad brush though. I was diagnosed when I was about 15. Information on Asperger's was scarce and being black with Asperger's was damn near unimaginable. Zappa's esoteric knowledge and even the complexity of his music really fit the profile of someone on the autism spectrum.

I've actually joked that to experience the thought process of someone on the autistic spectrum, listen to Zappa's '74 band. Then you're on the right track.

He didn't have Aspergers...He nearly ran for president for fucks sake.

Oh....he had Alzheimer's disease !

from what i understand the basis of the so called autism spectrum is this; we all, that means everybody has behavioral characteristics that fall into the realm of autism. Whether a person is labeled autistic depends on the degree of that behavior. Like some people with autism do not get metaphoric speech like some people on this forum. You say that "drives me up the wall" and they start looking confusedly at the wall and don't understand. One person doesn't like loud music where as a person with more severe autism cannot tolerate it. It literally sends their nervous system into trauma. Some people with autism have such sensitive hearing they can hear everyone's heart beating in a room and can't be in crowds of people. Or someone likes cooked carrots and their mom always cuts them in circular slices. They go somewhere and the carrots are cut square, that would throw them off. they maybe very visually oriented. Or they may not be able to organise information. i don't know whether to buy all of this but that is some of the scientific background for this type of "spectrum" thinking. like the guy who had to have the certain color m&ms removed.

David Lee Roth autistic?

I doubt it

He didn't have Aspergers.

He didn't have any problem communicating with people in any medium. He just didn't waste time trying to communicate with people he didn't think he had anything in common with.

He nearly ran for president for fucks sake.

It's some kind of I need constant attention disorder.

Q: Do you still have any animosity towards David Walley and his biography?
FZ I wouldn't say that it's animosity, but I wouldn't say that it's too enthralling either, because I think that it's a bad piece of work, and I hate to see my name connected with it. I asked him not to write the book, because I didn't think that he could do a good job on it, and he said that he already had a contract to do the book and that he was going to go ahead on it whether I cooperated or not. And so it puts you in a position where somebody is going to write the story of your life, you don't think that they can do it and there's no way you can stop him from doing it. So you have a choice: you can either not talk to him anymore, or you can give him some interviews, and try to give him some information he can use. But what happened at the time Walley interviewed me, is he'd come over to my house, he'd ask me a question and I got to answer it, and then he'd start talking about his father. I mean I spent two or three nights listening him telling how his father sent him to military school, and him comparing me to his father, and I'm going "Jeeesus!"
And then he would do numbers like he'd bring his girlfriend over to my house, with licks like: Yeah, you know, I'm going up to interview Frank Zappa, you wanna come along?" And all that kind of shit, And I'd sit there like "Ngngng..." And then, when he had finally finished the book, he sent me the galley proofs, you know the galley proof is the book before it's a book, except that it wasn't. He sent me some printed pages, but there was already 10,000 finished books sitting in a warehouse some place, and there was no way that I could have corrected any of his errors. So it was just an unfortunate thing that happens to someone in show business. And when you're in showbusiness, and somebody comes up to you and says:
"Hey I'm gonna do a book about your life," you just tell him: "GO FUCK YOURSELF!"