A magazine insult about Varèse sent teenage Frank Zappa hunting for modern music
A LOOK magazine article sneered at a Varèse percussion piece as a weird jumble of drums. Young Frank Zappa took that as a recommendation, searched more than a year for the record, and haggled the price down. For his fifteenth birthday he asked to phone the composer himself, and got a letter he framed forever.
Zappa was born in Baltimore in December 1940, the eldest of four children in an Italian-American family whose father, a chemist and mathematician, worked in the defence industry. Living near the Edgewood Arsenal, where mustard gas was stored, the household kept gas masks at home. Germs, ailments and military industry kept surfacing in his lyrics later. A sickly child, he believed his early illnesses might be linked to that facility, and in 1952 the family moved to California partly for health reasons.
Around age 12 he was learning drum rudiments, practising on wooden planks rather than real drums, and he developed a fascination with sound for its own sake. His teenage listening mixed rhythm and blues, doo-wop, and modernists such as Stravinsky and Webern. Edgard Varèse became a lifelong passion after that magazine piece. The birthday call, a gift from a mother who disliked the music, reached only Varèse's wife, but the composer later wrote to him about a work called Déserts, which thrilled a boy living in a Mojave Desert town. They never met; Varèse died in 1965.
At Antelope Valley High School Zappa befriended Don Van Vliet, later Captain Beefheart, played drums in a racially mixed band called the Blackouts, and got his first guitar in 1957. By his final year he was writing and conducting avant-garde pieces for the school orchestra. He lasted one semester at Chaffey College and kept a lifelong scorn for formal education, while campaigning hard against censorship. Unusually for a rock musician of his era, he disapproved of recreational drug use.
His debut with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out! in 1966, paired satirical songs with extended sound collages. Over more than 30 years he produced nearly all of his 60-plus albums, found larger audiences in Europe than at home, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posthumously in 1995.
Source: Frank Zappa
