As a child, every Saturday my family would spend each week going by the same schedule. I would wake up around 7:30am, wake up my little brother and we would have only minutes to play with our toys before my father would tell us to wash up. We were on the road by 8:00am to drive my mother to work. After we dropped her off my father would stop by McDonalds to get us breakfast. By the time we got home, I had roughly three hours to kill before wrestling was on at 12:00pm (I could count the times I missed wrestling at noon on one hand). At 1:00pm when it was all over, I had about the whole afternoon to waste. I played with my wrestling figures, read magazines and played Nintendo. My father would go downstairs in his office which was a small room with all his work, his records, a television and his video tapes. I noticed my father had a huge tape collection but he started buying CD’s in the early nineties. He wouldn’t come back from a trip to Sam the Record Man’s without a minimum of ten new CD’s.
While my father would clean up around the house or do paper work in his office I would take a bin of his CD’s, plug in the portable stereo (which back then was a lot more valuable then one you could buy for your office for $20) and I would listen to his CD’s for hours. My dad was a rock n’ roll buff who had practically every record from Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi and worshiped the Rolling Stones (to this day, he own only 3 Beatles albums which are all greatest hits compilations. He says “I was a loyal Stones fan”.) I would discover some bands on my own, like Kiss, Ugly Kid Joe, Pink Floyd and Dire Straits. I was young but I still understood the basic rock track: four instruments and clear-cut vocals.
As I was going through some more CD’s one afternoon, I came across one with a heavily mustached man with simply a shot of his face for the album cover. It read “The Best of Zappa”. I asked my father “What’s this?”… He replied, “the most (expletive) up thing you will ever listen to in your whole life”. Back then, guys like Alice Cooper and King Crimson were totally obscure but were typically normal. As I put on the album, the first track lasted only seconds before I switched to another. This happened for the entire album. I tried to listen to one song on the CD that had a little more of a pop swing to it but I couldn’t get by the strange vocals and weird musical arrangements. I did not like what I was hearing.
Fifteen years later, I decided to listen to some of Zappa’s tracks, properly. I didn’t go out and purchase his records but I downloaded a few along with a greatest hits compilation that could very well be the same one I listened to as a child. I’m not so sure I understood Zappa although I appreciated him a lot more. The music was bearable and because my favorite bands were Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses, I wasn’t ready for something different. As I got older and gave numerous strange musical acts a chance I ended up liking a lot more music I would have never listened to as a child (ex: Black Flag, Kate Bush, Animal Collective, etc.) I cannot say I was a Zappa fanatic or connoisseur before tasking this course but I did have a Zappa experience. It wasn’t necessarily a great one but it was one that needed to happen. I find myself going back to my musical roots when accepting new artists in my life. Even though I am familiar with some of Zappa’s tracks I took this course because I want to get to know Zappa. I would like to understand Zappa. I would also like to know why I didn’t “get” or like Zappa as a child.
