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In 2012, Swans founder Michael Gira told Prog how much Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention meant to him – and when the mercurial band leader stopped meaning so much.
“I was young in the 60s, but I was old enough to be consuming the great music of the time – and the various other substances often associated with it!
I bought everything by The Mothers Of Invention. Ideally, I see the band as gloriously filthy and crazed hippies marauding through the neon suburbs of Los Angeles, scaring the living shit out of the local residents.
I think Zappa was a complete genius. Culturally, what he was doing was as much an affront to society as punk rock ever was. My regret is that I never got to see them live at the time. They were something like a circus act in a slaughterhouse, I imagine.
The music was a schizophrenic sleigh ride through the greasy tunnels of my horribly psychedelicised mind. They had so many great songs, each of them weird and disturbing events.
I love Brown Shoes Don’t Make It, Plastic People, Who Are The Brain Police?, Let’s Make The Water Turn Black, Trouble Every Day… they’re all brilliant. Help I’m A Rock is amazing. It’s almost like proto-Can.
Now that I think of it, Zappa was my first hero – but I never liked anything he released after those three great albums (1966’s Freak Out!, 1967’s Absolutely Free and 1968’s We’re Only in It for the Money).
He had some of the more unfortunate tendencies of progressive rock, with all the multiple tempo and textural changes, but early on it was really sonically inventive.
I actually saw him sit in with Pink Floyd at a rock festival in Belgium in 1969. I was there as a runaway hippie kid! The festival also featured Soft Machine, Yes, The Pretty Things and the Chicago Art Ensemble.
But Zappa was terrible. He took the spotlight and did some predictable blues/rock solo and ruined an otherwise magnificent experience of ensemble-generated perpetual crescendos – a spectacle of sound.
I think I hated him a little bit after that.”
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