HJ wrote:
BTW: I have always been confused about which year the Mothers got the name. Zappa states 1964 in his book, but I mean he was arrested in early 1965 (correct me if wrong), and it therefore fits better that it is in May 1965 they became the Mothers. I have always thought that before that (the arrest) he was not performing live with the early Mothers. Any thoughts?
Update: The year of the arrest varies also on the net. I found this from a site related to the newspaper running the original story (Ontario Daily Report); they say '65
http://www.dailybulletin.com/ci_13584340?source=most_emailedFZ occasionally got his timing wrong.
Quote:
It all started a long time ago... When I was little, my family was really poor, not only that, they didn't like music too much, see, so... I didn't really get into contact with anything that resembled musical expression until I was about 14 or 15 years old, which is when I got to hear some of it on the radio. I remember riding around in a car and by accident while somebody was turning the station, we came across some oddball station out in Chino, California that was playing a record called "I" by the Velvets.
Has anybody ever heard "I", by the Velvets? Of course you haven't! It was a long time ago!
They were playing "I" by the Velvets and I said "What was that?" And my father says: "No, turn it away! Don't listen to that!" And then that gave me the first inkling that there was something interesting about to happen in the world, then about a week later I heard, I went looking for that same radio station where the weird music was coming out of, and I mashed to hear another record called "Riot in Cellblock Number 9," by the Robins, then proceeded to go to a place that actually sold records, I'd never been to a record store before, I thought that was a good place to start and went in there, and in those days you could take a record into the little room and listen to it before you bought it, so I snatched up "Work with me Annie" and two or three other... A Joe Houston record, and I listened to it and I was hooked!
There was one problem, I didn't have a record player. It took me a year to convince my parents that they should purchase a record player. When they finally got one,it was... I'll describe it to you, it looked like this:... And it had little fake rod iron legs this big, I believe it was a Decca, and it had these little legs at the bottom, so it elevated it off the table about that much cause the speaker was in the bottom. It had one big needle, Osmium tip job... remember the Osium tip? It was capable of the playing of 78rpm records which they provided us with one free record with the record player, the name of the song was "The Little Shoemaker" and my mother used to play that while she was ironing, it was the only record that she liked. And they were very opposed to any involvement to music that I might be interested in you know, that stuff, it was not a good thing for an Italian sort of a person to be doing when you could probably make a better living if you went into science, or engineering or something intelligent. So when I wanted to listen to music I had to unplug the record player from near the ironing board and take it into the bedroom and listen to other things. Well, that got me working on music, and from listening to it for about two years, I decided I would start writing it, and I started writing when I was about 14, and I'm still writing today, I'm 34... And that takes care of Topic Number One.
(source: 23-4-1975 lecture transcript)
Don't you just wish you didn't age at all?
Candy Zappa points out some more discrepancies in TRFZB.