Birthday Wishes To FZ

Happy Birthday to Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993). I used the pumpkin background in this picture as an homage to Zappa's record label: Barking Pumpkin.

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.

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 one of the two concerts at The Pier. I don't remember the date we attended, so there's a 50-50 chance that we attended the concert on the DVD.

Long ago, I once called his office in California from Long Island, New York, with the hope of speaking with him. The receptionist told me that he wasn't there.

When I was studying for my master's degree in journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia in the late 1980s, I wrote an essay and presented it to my class, regarding the record labeling hearings in Congress, where Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snider argued against the labeling of records due to vulgarity and such. I sent a request to Washington, D.C., for a transcript of the hearings; I got the address from a Zappa album. On the album, it stated that the transcript was free. I received a letter from the U.S. government, stating that there was a $5 charge. It was too late for me to get the transcript, so I just passed around the letter to my teacher and my classmates. I also played on a tape recorder the first two minutes or so of the beginning of Zappa's song "Porn Wars" of Senators Gore and Hollings presenting their explanations during the hearings. Here is the link ...

https://youtu.be/-KZyg75RljA?si=edRpzRSjL7n3ZR-r

December 21, 2025, at home