December 4, 2024, at home
Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) passed away 31 years ago today. My cousin Scott and I attended one of his performances at The Pier, an outdoor theater in New York City, in 1984. I have a DVD of that concert tour that was filmed at The Pier. There were two shows that year at that venue, so there is a 50-50 chance that we attended that exact concert. I don't remember the exact date we attended. I am a huge Zappa fan. He is one of my favorite guitarists. I have many of his CDs, and, long ago, I used to collect his vinyl albums.In the late 1980s, when I was studying for my master's degree in journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, I wrote an essay on the record labeling hearings in Congress, when Frank Zappa, Bob Denver, and Dee Snider testified against music censorship with Al and Tipper Gore and the lot of them Congress-type people (the Parents Music Resource Center/PMRC committee) on September 19, 1985. I orally presented my essay to my professor and my classmates by first playing on a cassette tape recorder the beginning two or so minutes of Zappa's song "Porn Wars," which starts with dialog from the hearings. I had also sent a letter to the United States government, requesting a transcript of the hearings. I got the address from Zappa's 1985 album "Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention." I received a letter informing me that I would need to pay for the transcript, so I just passed the letter around to everyone during my presentation. (I received my master's degree in May 1988.)
Many years ago, I called on the phone to Zappa's Barking Pumpkin office in Los Angeles and asked to speak with Frank. I was told that he wasn't there.
This video exemplifies just how amazing Zappa is as a guitarist and a composer.
https://youtu.be/wXFxwMAIBYc?si=ROqYnDfan7JKJfpI
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