(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 9 January 2026 20:23, UK
As well as being a pioneer, a left-fielder and a figure who undeniably added more intrigue to the 1960s and ‘70s, Frank Zappa was a harsh critic and an avant-garde artist who was a vital pillar of his community.
Up in the hills, his home at 2401 Laurel Canyon Blvd became known as the Cabin and became a meeting point, or a place to pass through, with Pamela Des Barres and her gaggle of groupies revolved around there, babysitting the Zappa kids and forming a band with his help.
Touring rockstars on a budget would crash there, and rockstars with bad habits would crash out there, and therein lay Zappa’s primary critique: he hated drugs.
“Well, it’s not just that drugs kill you,” he said in his famous rant, “it’s that when you take them, they turn you into a type of person that I don’t like to hang around with. I mean, people…their personalities just mutate, their value systems change, and generally, this is not a hard and fast rule all over the world, but it has been my observation that when Americans consume drugs they are instantly transformed from regular, normal human beings into raging assholes.”
His take was that drugs made people dull, and as more people wandered through his doors and sat wordless on his couches, that take grew stronger. Zappa hated drugs, to the point where he in fact hated the whole sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, and even hated rock and roll.
“My band played strictly rhythm & blues music. We didn’t know any rock & roll songs,” Zappa said of his early bands back in school, adding defiantly, “In fact, everybody in the band hated rock & roll”. But this was the 1950s, the era of early rock and roll, but still, Zappa was hearing this stuff on the radio and simply felt repulsed by it. In particular, he was repulsed by the new face and leader of it, ranting, “Rock & roll was that horrible Elvis Presley kind of hillbilly music”.
To him, Elvis Presley was nothing more than a hillbilly with nice hair who’d managed to hack the system, and during the era where his face was absolutely everywhere as the most famous musician on earth, Zappa was sickened.
This was also the time when he realised he wanted to make music, but he wanted to make what he saw as real music, casting off what the radio called rock and roll to instead go to the source. “I liked Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmy Reed and that kind of stuff,” he said as he set his focus on the true originators, with Zappa all in on proper rhythm and blues, on the Black American music that was the genesis for all the incoming white rock and roll acts.
From the classic blues guitar players teaching him his techniques, to the doo-wop groups and the dawn of the girl groups, Zappa was enthralled by the work of Black artists, so by the time Elvis popped up, taking their tunes and turning them vanilla, the former couldn’t get into it, and couldn’t see him as anything but a hillbilly biting their bit.
Related Topics