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Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 –
December 4, 1993) was an United States|American
Rock and roll|rock/jazz fusion musician, composer,
and satire|satirist.

== Early life and influences ==

Born in Baltimore, Maryland on 21 December 1940,
Zappa was of mixed Sicilian, Italian, Greek, Arab,
French, and German ancestry. He was the oldest of
four children, with two brothers and a sister.  In
January 1951 the Zappa family relocated to the
west coast because of Frank's asthma, settling in
Monterey, California|Monterey, California, on the
coast about 100 miles south of San Francisco,
California|San Francisco. They moved to Pomona,
California|Pomona, then El Cajon, California|El
Cajon before moving a short distance once again to
San Diego, California|San Diego in the early
1950s. By 1955 the Zappa family relocated to
Lancaster, California|Lancaster, which at the time
was a small aircraft and farming town in the
Antelope Valley in the Mojave Desert 73 miles
north of downtown Los Angeles, California|Los
Angeles north of the San Gabriel Mountains. By age
15, Frank had attended six different high schools,
which may have contributed to his sense of
alienation in adult life. 

His father, a chemist and mathematician who was
born in Sicily, worked nearby at Edwards Air Force
Base which had at the time a federal government
chemical warfare research facility. Due to their
proximity to Edwards AFB, he kept gas masks at
home in case of an accident, and this evidently
had a profound effect on the young Frank.
References to germs, germ warfare and other
aspects of the 'secret' defence industry occur
throughout his work.

Lancaster's location gave the young Zappa access
to the exciting sounds coming from radio stations
in Los Angeles and beyond, and his parents were
affluent enough to afford a record player,
records, a TV, and musical instruments. TV also
exerted a strong influence and references to TV
and TV shows, including quotations from themes and
advertising jingles, can be found in almost every
piece he wrote.

Another formative event was a persistent sinus
problem during his early teens. To Frank's lasting
horror, his doctor treated the stubborn ailment by
inserting a pellet of radium on a probe into both
of his nostrils. Nasal imagery and references to
the nose also recur, both in his writing and in
the classic collage album covers created by his
longtime visual collaborator, Cal Schenkel.

As a student, he was bored and given to
distracting the rest of the class with his antics,
and was once suspended from school for a dangerous
prank involving explosive chemicals and a Parents'
Open House night. He left community college after
one semester in order to make low-budget films. He
maintained his disdain for formal education
throughout his life, taking his children out of
school at age 15 and refusing to pay for their
college. Nevertheless, he was in essence a
polymath. He was highly intelligent, ambitious and
articulate, and possessed a voracious
intelligence, drive, singular concentration,
enormous creativity and a huge capacity for work
and organisation. However, he was passionately
interested in music, developing wide-ranging and
highly idiosyncratic musical interests and
demonstrating superior ability at an early age.
His parents were not musicians but had broad
musical tastes also, and he grew up influenced in
equal measures by avant-garde composers such as
Edgar Varèse and Igor Stravinsky, local rhythm
and blues and doo-wop groups (particularly local
pachuco groups), and modern jazz, including bebop
and free jazz, all of which influences show up in
his work. 

Zappa was from the first interested in sounds for
their own sake, which led to his interest in
modern composers. His introduction to Stravinsky
seems to have been a pivotal musical discovery but
he was soon ranging even further afield,
musically.  After reading a magazine review
panning Varèse's dissonant drum piece in
"Ionisation" (actually The Complete Works of
Edgard Varèse, Volume One) as 'a weird jumble of
drums and other unpleasant sounds', the teenage
Zappa became convinced that he should seek out
Varèse's music. When he spotted a copy of The
Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One in a
local record store, where it was being used as a
hi-fi demonstration record, he convinced the
salesman to sell him the copy despite the fact
that he didn't have the full price, beginning a
lifelong passion for Varèse and his music.
Zappa's mother gave him considerable
encouragement. Although she greatly disliked
Varèse's music, she was indulgent enough to give
Frank the gift of a long distance call to the
composer at his home in New York as a fifteenth
birthday present. Unfortunately, Varèse was away
in Europe at the time, but the young fan spoke to
the composer's wife.  Zappa had Varèse's letter
framed and he kept it for the rest of his life.
http://csunix1.lvc.edu/~snyder/em/zappa.html

Zappa began his playing career on drums, taking
his first lessons at school in the summer of 1953,
aged 13. He drummed with local teenage combos, but
later switched to guitar, which he quickly
mastered. Although he performed as a
singer-guitarist for most of his career, Zappa
always retained a strong interest in rhythm and
percussion. His bands have been notable for the
excellence of their drummers and works such as The
Black Page are notorious for the virtuoso
complexity of their rhythmic structure and
arrangement, featuring radical changes of tempo
and metre and short, densely arranged passages
which are contrasted with free-form breaks and
extended improvisations. Classically trained
percussionist and drummer Terry Bozzio, who played
for Zappa in the late 1970s as well as playing and
recording many well-known classical and
avant-garde works, is on record as saying that
Zappa's writing for percussion is as difficult and
complex as anything else he has played.

In 1956 Zappa met Captain Beefheart (Don Van
Vliet) while taking classes at Antelope Valley
High School, when Zappa was playing guitar in a
local band, The Blackouts, a racially-mixed outfit
that also included Euclid James "Motorhead"
Sherwood, who later lived with Zappa at 'Studio Z'
and was a member of the Mothers of Invention,
playing on many of their most famous recordings.
They became close friends, influencing each other
musically, and becoming collaborators in the late
Sixties and mid- Seventies (on the album Bongo
Fury, released 1975), although they later became
estranged for a period of years. Van Vliet's own
feelings about Frank Zappa were perhaps best
summarized in a quote published in a March 1994
issue of Musician magazine: "I knew him for
thirty-seven years, and in the end, the
relationship was private." 

In 1957 Zappa was given his first guitar and
quickly developed into a highly accomplished and
inventive player. He considered his solos "air
sculptures", and developed an eclectic, fluent and
extremely individual style, eventually becoming
one of the most highly regarded electric
guitarists of his time. It is possible that he
might have become a professional jazz musician,
but he was soon drawn into rock music, although he
retained a lifelong attachment to jazz forms,
voicings and structures and often drew his band
members from the jazz world, if only because of
the high degree of musical competence his music
demanded.

Zappa's interest in composing and arranging
burgeoned in his later high school years and he
dreamed of being taken seriously as a composer. 
By his final year he was writing prolifically and
had not only composed, arranged and conducted an
avant-garde performance piece for the school
orchestra, but had also contrived to have the
event both broadcast on local radio and recorded.
A portion of this historic recording is included
on the CD The Lost Episodes. Zappa did see his
childhood dream realized, as the London Symphony
Orchestra played a program of his music, and the
Ensemble Modern in 1992 received a 20-minute
ovation after performing a program of his work at
the Frankfurt Opera House.

After graduating in June 1958 he worked for a time
in advertising. His sojourn in the commercial
world was another important influence on his work,
and within a few years Zappa was co-opting the
techniques he learned as a commercial artist, and
was using them to deconstruct music, the music
business, the media and society at large by
combining them with the ideas he had gleaned from
his studies of dada, situationism, and surrealism.
Zappa frequently referenced his experiences in
advertising in his lyrics.

Zappa always took a keen interest in the visual
presentation of his work, rapidly developing from
album cover designer (e.g. Absolutely Free) to
director of his own films and videos. Zappa's
album covers are highly distinctive, and
frequently bizarre and surreal. His two most
important visual collaborators were Cal Schenkel
in the Sixties and early Seventies, and Donald
Roller Wilson in the Eighties and Nineties. One of
Zappa's best-known and best-loved album images is
that created for the 1969 compilation Weasels
Ripped My Flesh, a disturbingly surreal painting
by renowned album artist Neon Park.

Zappa moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and spent most
of the rest of his life there.  Among his earliest
professional recordings are two adventurous and
remarkably accomplished scores for the low-budget
films Run Home Slow and The World's Greatest
Sinner.

In 1962 he appeared as a solo artist on the Steve
Allen Show performing a satirical dadaist piece
involving a bicycle.  He married his first wife
Kay the same year but the relationship soon
deteriorated and they divorced two years later. In
1963 he began playing professionally around Los
Angeles and bought the small Pal Recording Studio
in Rancho Cucamonga, California|Rancho Cucamonga,
California (formerly called Cucamonga), which he
renamed "Studio Z". 

Zappa had recorded at Pal since the early 1960s
and after receiving a payment for one of his film
scores he was able to buy the studio. Soon after,
his marriage ended and he moved out of his
apartment and into the studio, where he began
routinely working 12 hours or more per day,
setting a pattern that would endure for almost all
of his life.  At this time, only a handful of the
most expensive commercial studios had multitrack
facilities and for smaller studios, the industry
standard was still mono or two-track. By the time
he recorded his first LP with The Mothers in 1966
he was already an accomplished recording and
mastering engineer and from his third LP on and
for the rest of his career, he produced all his
own work.

After being approached by a customer who offered
him US dollar|$100 to produce a suggestive tape
for a stag party, Zappa and a female friend
jokingly faked the "erotic" recording, which
purported to contain the sounds of people having
sex. Unfortunately the customer was an undercover
member of the Vice Squad and Zappa was jailed for
ten days on charges of supplying pornography. His
entrapment and brief imprisonment left a permanent
mark on him, and was a key event in the formation
of his anarchism|anti-authoritarian stance.

==The Mothers of Invention==

After a short career as a professional
songwriter — his elegiac "Memories of
El Monte" was recorded by The
Penguins — in 1964 Zappa joined a local
R&B band, The Soul Giants, as a guitarist. He soon
assumed leadership, renaming the rock band|band
"The Mothers." 

They gradually began to gain attention on the
burgeoning Los Angeles underground
music|underground 'freak scene' and in 1965 they
were spotted by leading record producer Tom
Wilson, who had earned acclaim as the producer of
the seminal Bob Dylan albums Bringin' It All Back
Home and Highway 61 Revisited, as well as the
breakthrough 'electric' version of Simon &
Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence. Wilson was also
notable for being one of the only
African-Americans working as a major label pop
producer at this time. Wilson signed The Mothers
to the Verve Records|Verve label, which had built
up a strong reputation for its fine modern jazz
recordings in the 1940s and 1950s, but was then
attempting to diversify into pop and rock, but
with an "artistic" or "experimental" bent. Around
this time, Zappa also met and signed with longtime
manager Herb Cohen.



The Mothers signed with Verve records, which
insisted that they officially retitle themselves
"The Mothers of Invention" out of a concern
(likely justified) that the band's original
moniker had obscene undertones. With Wilson
credited as producer, The Mothers recorded their
groundbreaking double album debut Freak Out!
(1966), a mixture of often topical R&B and
experimental sound collage that attempted to
capture the 'freak' subculture of Los Angeles at
that time. One of the first record albums united
by an underlying theme, it was also only the
second double LP of rock music ever released, and
firmly established Zappa as a major new voice in
rock music. Wilson is also credited with producing
the even more accomplished follow-up Absolutely
Free; but for the third LP, Wilson was listed as
'Executive producer', and Zappa took over as
producer for all the Mothers and solo Zappa
recordings issued from that time on. It's clear
that even on the two first albums, Zappa was
already responsible for virtually all of the
musical decisions, with Wilson providing the
industry clout, credibility, and connections to
get the unknown group the financial resources they
needed to produce a double album with use of an
orchestra; by the third album, Zappa had already
enough of a proven track record to allow for a
more accurate description in the album's credits
of their respective roles. During this period,
Wilson also had Zappa collaborate with The Animals
on the song "All Night Long" on their album
Animalism.



Zappa's second and third studio albums were
landmarks of record production and were
highlighted by liberal use of his famous 'cut-up'
editing techniques. The brilliant Absolutely Free
(1967) continued Zappa's lyrical preoccupations
with the hypocrisy and conformism of American
society and the sinister suppression of
underground and alternative culture. It was
followed by the album widely regarded as the peak
of the group's late Sixties work, We're Only In It
For The Money (1968) which featured some of the
most radical audio editing and production yet
heard in pop music, and ruthlessly satirised the
hippie and flower power phenomena. The cover photo
(which included Jimi Hendrix) famously parodied
that of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band.

This was bookended by two closely linked companion
pieces. The dazzling audio collage Lumpy Gravy
(1967) took Zappa's production techniques to a new
peak and, according to Zappa himself, took nine
months to edit. After We're Only In It For The
Money, next was his Doo-Wop tribute Cruising with
Ruben & the Jets. Other important Mothers
recordings from this period (including the pivotal
song Oh No) were collected in the 1970 compilation
album Weasels Ripped My Flesh.

During the late Sixties Zappa continued his rapid
artistic development, emerging as a superb lead
guitarist, a skilled producer and engineer, and a
composer and arranger of extraordinary range and
facility.  He increasingly used tape editing as a
compositional tool; his editing skills are
apparent on the stunning work he produced in the
late Sixties with The Mothers. Allegedly, a
theremin was used at some live performance making
use of the unique sound characteristic.

Zappa evolved a unique compositional
approach — which he dubbed 'conceptual
continuity' — that ranged across
virtually every genre of music. His work combines
satirical lyrics and pop melodies with virtuoso
instrumental prowess, where long, jazz-inflected
improvisational passages are counterbalanced with
densely edited and seemingly chaotic collage
sequences that mix music, sound effects and
snatches of conversation. 

He also became famous for regularly quoting
musical phrases that influenced or amused
him — one of his most famous and
regular quotes was the riff from the perennial
Sixties rock hit  'Louie Louie', which appears in
various forms in more than twenty separate
recordings over the whole span of his career. He
also frequently quoted from or referred to TV show
themes and advertising jingles, from famous rock
songs such as My Sharona and Stairway To Heaven,
and from classical works such as Igor
Stravinsky|Stravinsky's "The Rite Of Spring".

Zappa earned a fearsome reputation as a ruthless
taskmaster who possessed a seemingly limitless
capacity for work (he regularly worked as much as
twenty hours a day in the studio until very late
in his career) who also possessed immense
technical knowledge and a photographic memory of
the contents of his vast archive. He also became
known for dismissing the contributions of his
musicians, going so far as to withhold royalties
rather than share the glory.

The Mothers' anarchic stage shows were
legendary — during one famous 1967
performance at the Garrick Theatre in New York
City|New York, Zappa managed to entice some
soldiers from the audience onto the stage, where
they proceeded to dismember a collection of baby
dolls.

Around 1968 Zappa also began regularly recording
his concerts, beginning with a simple two-track
portable recorder and eventually progressing to a
portable 48-track digital system. In the process
he built up a vast archive of live recordings. In
the late 1990s some of the best of these
recordings were collected for the 12-CD set You
Can't Do That On Stage Anymore. Because of his
insistence on precise tuning and timing in
concert, from the 1970s on Zappa was able to
augment his studio productions with excerpts from
live shows, and he is known to have inserted
'live' guitar solos into the final studio
recordings of some compositions.

Although they were lauded by critics and their
peers and had a rabid cult following, mainstream
audiences often found much of the Mothers' music,
appearance and attitude impossible to comprehend,
and the band was often greeted with derision. More
importantly, the financial strain and
interpersonal tensions involved in keeping a large
jazz-rock ensemble on the road eventually led to
the group's demise in 1969, although numerous
members would remain with or return to Zappa in
years to come.

During this period Zappa also produced the
extraordinary double album Trout Mask Replica for
his old friend Captain Beefheart as well as
releases by Alice Cooper, Tim Buckley, Wild Man
Fischer and The GTOs.

==1970s==



After he disbanded the original Mothers, Zappa
released the acclaimed solo instrumental album Hot
Rats, featuring his jazz-inflected guitar playing
backed by jazz, blues and R&B session players
including violinist Don "Sugarcane" Harris,
drummer John Guerin, multi-instrumentalist Ian
Underwood, and bassist Shuggie Otis. It remains
one of his most popular and accessible recordings
and arguably had a major influence on the
development of the jazz-rock fusion genre.

Around 1970 Zappa put together a new version of
The Mothers that included British drummer Aynsley
Dunbar, jazz keyboardist George Duke,  previous
Mothers member Ian Underwood, and no fewer than
three members of The Turtles: bass player Jim
Pons, who before joining The Turtles had been the
lead singer of The Leaves (of "Hey Joe" fame); and
singers Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, who due to
persisting legal/contractual problems adopted the
stage-monikers "The Phlorescent Leach and Eddie,"
or "Flo and Eddie" for short.

The new lineup debuted on Zappa's next solo LP
Chunga's Revenge, which was followed by the
sprawling soundtrack to the movie project 200
Motels, featuring both The Mothers and The Royal
Philharmonic Orchestra. At the time George Duke
was in the band and appears both in the film and
on the sound track as a musician. He left the band
to play with Cannonball Adderly and was replaced
by Don Preston from the original Mothers, who
acted in the film, but is not playing on the
soundtrack.  This double disc album was followed
by two superb live sets, Fillmore East - June 1971
and Just Another Band From L.A., which included
the 20-minute track Billy The Mountain, Zappa's
satire on rock opera, set in Southern California.
The former features hilariously low-concept cover
art (similar to the bootleg albums that had
recently become popular) just at the apex of the
era of great rock "album cover artwork". 

In 1971 there were two serious setbacks. While
performing in Montreux, Switzerland, the Mothers'
equipment was destroyed when a flare set off by an
audience member started a disastrous fire that
burned down the casino where they were playing
— an event immortalised in Deep Purple's
Smoke On The Water.

Then in December, Zappa was attacked on stage at
the Rainbow Theatre, London. The jealous boyfriend
of a female fan pushed Frank off the stage and
into the orchestra pit. Frank suffered serious
fractures, head trauma and injuries to his back,
leg, and neck, as well as a crushed larynx (which
caused his voice to drop a third after it healed).
This left him wheelchair bound for a time, forcing
him off the road for over a year. (He was wearing
a leg brace for a period thereafter, had a
noticeable limp and couldn't stand for very long
while onstage.) He said one leg healed shorter
than the other -- a reference found years later in
the lyrics of Dancin' Fool . He employed a
bodyguard thereafter when touring, John Smothers,
an accomplished martial artist, former military
chauffeur and bodyguard for several big-name
celebrities. Meanwhile, the Mothers were left in
limbo, and eventually formed the core of Flo and
Eddie's band as they set out on their own. 



In 1971-72 Zappa released two strongly
jazz-oriented solo LPs, Waka/Jawaka and The Grand
Wazoo, which were recorded during the layoff from
live concert touring, using floating lineups of
session players and Mothers alumni. He began
touring again in late 1972, first with a Grand
Wazoo 'big band' and with groups that variously
included Ian Underwood on brass and reeds, Ian's
wife Ruth on vibes, Sal Marquez (trumpet),
Napoleon Murphy Brock (sax and vocals), Bruce
Fowler (trombone), Tom Fowler (bass), Chester
Thompson (drums), George Duke (keyboards, vocals)
and Jean-Luc Ponty (violin).

He continued a high rate of production through the
early 1970s, including the excellent and
accessible albums One Size Fits All and Apostrophe
(album)|Apostrophe, Over-Nite Sensation and Roxy &
Elsewhere featuring ever-changing versions of a
band no longer called the Mothers.

In the mid 70's Zappa began recording material for
a highly ambitious studio project. This was
Läther, a four-LP extravaganza featuring all
aspects of Zappa's art. Rock songs, theatrical
works, complex instrumental compositions, and
Zappa's trademark guitar solos were all recorded
for the release. Zappa had completed the recording
for the album when all of a sudden his record
label, Warner Brothers, pulled the plug.  Zappa
famously went on air and played the entire thing
on the radio, instructing listeners to tape it.
Soon after, some of the material from Läther was
officialy released on "Zappa in New York." After a
legal battle with Warner, in order to satisfy his
contract, Zappa allowed the label to release much
of the music on three LPs, but he had little input
beyond that. The records "Studio Tan," "Sleep
Dirt," and "Orchestral Favorites" were dumped on
the market with no promotion and rushed cover art.
Nonetheless these albums include some classic
Zappa fare like "Lemme Take You To The Beach, "The
Adventures of Gregory Peccary," and "Sleep Dirt."
Läther was finally re-constructed and released in
its original form in 1996.

==1980s==

In 1980, Zappa helped former band members Warren
Cuccurullo, Terry Bozzio and Patrick O'Hearn
launch their new band, Missing Persons, by letting
them record their 4-song demo EP in his brand new
UMRK (Utility Muffin Research Kitchen)  studios. 
In 1981, the double album You Are What You Is was
released, featuring 19 songs, which included such
complex instrumentals as "Theme from the 3rd
Movement of Sinister Footwear", but mainly focused
on rock songs with Zappa's sardonic social
commentary.  "Dumb All Over", is an example of
this, being a devastating tirade on religion, as
is "Heavenly Bank Account", wherein Zappa
objurgates people such as Jerry Falwell for
relying upon the US administration to finance the
religious organisation, the 'Moral Majority',
whilst simultaneously embezzling the funds.  The
album is notable for the presence of guitar
virtuoso Steve Vai.

In the same year, Tinsel Town Rebellion was
released, a mixture of songs taken from a 1979
tour, one studio track and the rest were taken
from the last tour of 1980.  The album is a
mixture of complicated instrumentals, of which
"The Blue Light" is a salient example,
demonstrating Vinnie Colaiuta's dexterity round a
drum kit, and Zappa's use of sprechstimme
(speaking voice), a compositional technique
utilized by such composers as Arnold Schoenberg,
and Alban Berg.  



In May of 1982, Zappa released Ship Arriving Too
Late to Save a Drowning Witch, which featured his
biggest selling single, Valley Girl (topping out
at #32 on the Billboard charts).  In her
improvised  "lyrics" to the song, Zappa's daughter
Moon Unit satirized the vapid speech of teenage
girls from the San Fernando Valley. Naturally,
this led to the meme-like propagation of
"Valspeak" such as gag me with a spoon and barf
out.  In 1983, The Man From Utopia was released,
which was striking for its album cover, portraying
Zappa as a muscle-bound, demonic guitarist.  The
album itself is eclectic, featuring the vocal-led
'Dangerous Kitchen' & 'The Jazz Discharge Party
Hats', continuations of the sprechstimme
excursions shown on "You What You Is".  "Tink
Walks Amok" is a piece to exhibit Arthur Barrow's
capabilities on the bass guitar, and doo-wop songs
such as the title track and "Mary Lou".

After a break Zappa returned, and much of his
later work was influenced by his use of the
synclavier as a compositional and performance tool
and his mastery of studio techniques for producing
specific instrumental effects.  His work was also
more explicitly political satirising the rise of
television evangelists and the United States
Republican Party|Republican party.

On September 19, 1985, Zappa testified before the
United States Senate|US Senate Commerce,
Technology, and Transportation committee,
attacking the Parents Music Resource Center or
PMRC, a music censorship (though others would say
watchdog) organization founded by then-Senator Al
Gore's wife Tipper Gore and including many other
political wives, including the wives of five
members of the committee.  He said,
:"The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of
nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits
to children, infringes the civil liberties of
people who are not children and promises to keep
the courts busy for years  dealing with the
interpretational and enforcemental problems
inherent in the proposal's design.

:"It is my understanding that, in law, First
Amendment issues are decided with a preference for
the least restrictive alternative.  In this
context, the PMRC's demands are the equivalent of
treating dandruff by decapitation."

Zappa put some of the PMRC hearings to music in
his song Porn Wars. Zappa is heard interacting
with Senators Fritz Hollings, Slade Gorton, Al
Gore (who admitted to being a Zappa fan), and,
most notably, a funny exchange with Florida
Senator Paula Hawkins over what toys the Zappa
children played with. Zappa would also go on to
argue with PMRC representatives on the CNN's
Crossfire in 1986 and 1987.

His last tour in a "rock band format" took place
in 1988 with a 12-piece group which was reported
to have a repertoire of over 800 (mostly Zappa)
compositions, but which split acrimoniously before
the tour was completed.  The tour was documented
on the albums The Best Band You Never Heard In
Your Life (Zappa "standards" and obscure cover
tunes), Make a Jazz Noise here (mostly
instrumental and experimental music), and Broadway
The Hard Way (new original material), with bits
also to be found on You Can't Do That On Stage
Anymore Volume 6.

==1990s==

In the early 1990s Zappa devoted almost all of his
energy to modern orchestral and synclavier works. 
In 1990 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, a
disease which caused his death in 1993 at the age
of 52. Although ill, in 1992 he appeared as a
guest conductor with the Ensemble Modern in a
series of concerts in Germany devoted to his
compositions, recordings from which appeared on
The Yellow Shark.  



During these years, he edited numerous CD
collections of concert recordings made throughout
his career.  In 1993, he completed Civilization,
Phaze III, a major synclavier work he had begun in
the '80s.  He stated in interviews that he was
working on hundreds of synclavier pieces, most of
which remained unfinished.   

Frank Zappa died on December 4, 1993 at 52, and
was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park
Cemetery in  Westwood, Los Angeles,
California|Westwood, California.

Zappa was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame in 1995. That same year the only known cast
of Zappa was installed in the center of Vilnius,
the capital of Lithuania.  Zappa was immortalized
by Konstantinas Bogdanas, the famous Lithuanian
sculptor who had previously cast portraits of
Vladimir Lenin.  In 2002 a bronze bust was
installed in a square in Bad Doberan, a small town
in the north of Germany, where, since 1990,
there's an international Festival celebrating the
music of Frank Zappa. Zappa received a posthumous
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.

==Other information==

Zappa was married twice, once to Kay Sherman
(1959–1964; no children), and then to Gail
(Sloatman) Zappa, with whom he remained until his
death.  They have four children: Moon Unit
Zappa|Moon Unit, Dweezil Zappa|Dweezil (born Ian
Donald Calvin Euclid Zappa, (the names of his band
members) because the hospital refused to put
Dweezil on the birth certificate; Dweezil later
legally changed  his name to "Dweezil") ("Dweezil"
is also the name Frank had given to one of Gail's
toes), Ahmet Zappa|Ahmet Emuukha Rodan, and Diva
Zappa|Diva Muffin.  One time he was a guest on the
Tonight Show, chatting with guest-host Jay Leno. 
Leno asked Zappa why he had given his children
such unusual names.  Zappa answered, in a casual
tone of voice, "Because I wanted to!"  And that
was that. Zappa once said in an interview that if
their names ever gave them problems, it would be
because of the last name.

After his death an internet email campaign to the
International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet
Center led to an asteroid being named in his
honor: 3834 Zappafrank, the asteroid having been
discovered by Czech astronomers.
http://www.klet.org/names/view.php3?astnum=3834
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andymurkin/Resources/
MusicRes/ZapRes/asteroid.html Since then other
things have been named in his honor including:
another asteroid (16745 Zappa), a gene (ZapA  gene
of Proteus mirabilis, a microbe that  causes
urinary tract infections
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andymurkin/Resources/
MusicRes/ZapRes/ZapA.html), a goby fish (Zappa
confluentus
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andymurkin/Resources/
MusicRes/ZapRes/fish.html  ), a jellyfish
(Phialella zappa
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andymurkin/Resources/
MusicRes/ZapRes/jellyfish.html which was actually
named by Nando!), an extinct mollusc (Amauratoma
zappa), and a spider with an abdominal mark
supposedly resembling Zappa's mustache
(Pachygnatha zappa
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andymurkin/Resources/
MusicRes/ZapRes/spider.html).

In 1995 a series of Intel PC motherboards were
named after him.  

Zappa made a cameo appearance in the 1968 in
film|1968 film starring the Monkees, Head
(movie)|Head with a talking cow. He also made a
cameo appearance on an episode of the Monkees TV
series. 
He was the voice of the pope in a 1992 in
television|1992 episode of Ren and Stimpy|The Ren
& Stimpy Show. He appeared on What's My Line? and
Saturday Night Live, in a sketch as
Coneheads|Connie Conehead's date; he played a drug
dealer once in Miami Vice, appeared on Dick
Cavett's interview show in the early 1970's with
the Flo and Eddie version of the band, and other
interview shows.  He also appeared on MTV and a
one hour Zappa TV special.

==Note on his name==
As his autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book
notes, his real name was "Frank", never "Francis".
Until rediscovering his birth certificate as an
adult, Zappa himself believed he had been
christened Francis, and he is credited as Francis
on some of his early albums.  Some encyclopedias
still incorrectly claim that his real name was
"Francis".  

Zappa means "hoe" in Italian.

==Quotations==

*Stupidity is the basic building block of the
universe.
*My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a
happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her
as far away from a church as you can.
*The manner in which Americans "consume" music has
a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee
tables, or using it as wallpaper for their
lifestyles, like the score of a movie -- it's
consumed that way without any regard for how and
why it was made.
*Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not
wisdom, Wisdom is not truth, Truth is not beauty,
Beauty is not love, Love is not music, Music is
the best.

==Samples==
*Media:HungryFreaks,Daddy.ogg|Download sample of
"Hungry Freaks, Daddy" from Freak Out!
*Media:We're Only in It for the Money - What's the
Ugliest Part of your Body sample.ogg|Download
sample of "What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?"
from We're Only in It for the Money.

==Discography==

For a detailed discography, see: Frank Zappa
discography

== Further reading ==
* The Real Frank Zappa Book, by Frank Zappa and
Peter Occhiogrosso, is the definitive Zappa
autobiography.  Includes his Senate testimony.
* No Commercial Potential--The Saga of Frank
Zappa, by David Walley
* Frank Zappa; The Negative Dialectics of Poodle
Play, by Ben Watson, St. Martin's Press (March
1996)   contains extensive notes on history, tours
and releases.
* In Cold Sweat-Interviews With Really Scary
Musicians, by Thomas Wictor, contains an extensive
interview with Scott Thunes, one of Zappa's most
creative bassists.
* Lunar Notes-Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart
Experience, by Bill Harkleroad, contains several
references about Zappa's collaboration with Don
Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart.
*Mother! the Frank Zappa Story, by Michael Gray
*Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of
Frank Zappa, by Neil Slaven
*Necessity Is... The Early Years of Frank Zappa
and the Mothers of Invention, by Billy James
*Cosmik Debris: The Collective History and
Improvisations of Frank Zappa, by Greg Russo,
Crossfire Pubns; 2nd Rev edition (January 9,
2003), ISBN 0964815702
*My Brother was a Mother, by Patrice "Candy" Zappa
*Them or Us, by Frank Zappa
*Under the Same Moon, by Suzannah Thana Harris
*Being Frank: My Time with Frank Zappa, by Nigey
Lennon
*Zappa: A Biography, by Barry Miles,   Publisher:
Grove Press (November 9, 2004), ISBN  080211783X
*Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa,
by Kevin Courrier, ECW Press (June, 2002) ISBN 
1550224476

== External links ==

*http://www.zappa.com/ Zappa.com
*http://www.singingfool.com/player.asp?PublishedId
=&List=327703|588284&showid= Frank The Dancing
Fool on Singing Fool
*http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/ Zappa Wiki Jawaka
- a wiki dedicated to FZ
*http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/6095/ A
Tribute to Frank Zappa (much detailed biographical
material - click on "Biography")
*http://go.palmdalelibrary.org/cgi-bin/strasburg/v
iew.pl?table=strasburg_data&id=2680 Innovators
Highlight Pop Music Wasteland (Frank Zappa,
Captain Beefheart, Clarence White)
*http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/special/rocknroll/
0003834.html Details of (3834) Zappafrank
*http://www.ibiblio.org/mal/MO/philm/zappa/ Philm
Freax: Frank Zappa
*http://www.tangento.net/prezappa.html Zappa at
Tangento's
*http://www.thewire.co.uk/archive/essays/zappa.htm
l Don't Do That On Stage Anymore, July 1995, The
Wire
*http://www.lukpac.org/~handmade/patio/ the zappa
patio (detailed discography including bootlegs)
*http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/ FZ Lyrics & Else
(includes musicians list track by track)
*http://members.shaw.ca/fz-pomd/ The Planet Of My
Dreams (includes line-ups chronology)
*http://www.killuglyradio.com/ Kill Ugly Radio (FZ
focused weblog plus articles, gig list, reviews)
*http://www.zappateers.com/ Zappateers - we're
only in it for the music
*http://www.zapguz.nl/ - A big Zappafan with some
interesting pictures on this page)
*http://www.debrakadabra.com/ DebraKadabra -
Italian FZ Appreciation Consortium
*http://www.science.uva.nl/~robbert/zappa/quote/ph
rases A library of Frank Zappa quotations
*imdb name | id=0953261 | name=Frank Zappa