: 19 Zappa said that as a child he "used to play with it all the time", often by putting liquid mercury on the floor and using a hammer to spray out mercury droplets in a circular pattern, eventually covering the entire floor of his bedroom with them. Zappa's father often brought mercury-filled lab equipment home from his workplace and gave it to Zappa to play with. : 20–23 This living arrangement had a profound effect on Zappa, and references to germs, germ warfare, ailments and the defense industry occur frequently throughout his work. Due to their home's proximity to the arsenal, which stored mustard gas, gas masks were kept in the home in case of an accident. After a time in Florida in the 1940s, the family returned to Maryland, where Zappa's father worked at the Edgewood Arsenal chemical warfare facility of the Aberdeen Proving Ground run by the U.S. : 6 The family moved often because his father, a chemist and mathematician, worked in the defense industry. įrank, the eldest of four children, was raised in an Italian-American household where Italian was often spoken by his grandparents. His mother, Rose Marie ( née Colimore), was of Italian (Neapolitan and Sicilian) and French ancestry his father, whose name was anglicized to Francis Vincent Zappa, was an immigrant from Partinico, in the Italian island of Sicily, with Greek and Arab ancestry. Zappa was born on December 21, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland.
He remains a major influence on musicians and composers. Though he worked as an independent artist, Zappa mostly relied on distribution agreements he had negotiated with the major record labels. He had greater commercial success outside the US, particularly in Europe. Zappa was a highly productive and prolific artist with a controversial critical standing supporters of his music admired its compositional complexity, while critics found it lacking emotional depth. Unlike many other rock musicians of his generation, he disapproved of recreational drug use, but supported decriminalization and regulation. He was a strident critic of mainstream education and organized religion, and a forthright and passionate advocate for freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship.
His lyrics reflected his iconoclastic views of established social and political processes, structures and movements, often humorously so, and he has been described as the "godfather" of comedy rock. Zappa's output is unified by a conceptual continuity he termed "Project/Object", with numerous musical phrases, ideas, and characters reappearing across his albums. He continued this eclectic and experimental approach whether the fundamental format was rock, jazz, or classical. His 1966 debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages.
He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm-and-blues bands, later switching to electric guitar. While in his teens, he acquired a taste for 20th-century classical modernism, African-American rhythm and blues, and doo-wop music. Īs a self-taught composer and performer, Zappa had diverse musical influences that led him to create music that was sometimes difficult to categorize. He is considered one of the most innovative and stylistically diverse musicians of his generation. Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works, and produced almost all of the 60-plus albums that he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. His work is characterized by nonconformity, free-form improvisation, sound experiments, musical virtuosity and satire of American culture. Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American musician, singer, composer, songwriter and bandleader.