Zappa: A Biography

Too much of this book, especially the first two thirds, is simply a history of events, i.e., Frank did this and then he did that. Sometimes the facts are jumbled: he and his first wife are separated, then a few pages later Frank's parents move in with them. The biggest let down is the discovery that nothing in this book is the result of primary research. No one--no one!!!!--was interviewed by the author in this endeavor. So this reads kind of like a competent college research paper based on other research. Miles provides us with notes of his many sources, including some of his own interviews from 30 years ago, but its mostly all stuff that's been out there in other books and magazines and websites. When he finally gets around to drawing some actual conclusions of his own, its mostly to tell us Zappa's Catholic upbringing made him a pervert or Zappa was a fairly heartless capitalist without feelings for his bandmates or Zappa was a misogynist recluse or Zappa sabotaged his serious work with titles too pornagraphic for ears. Crimeny, you'll wonder why anybody would care about the guy. By the end of the book, however, Miles seems to be contradicting himself by reciting all of the accolades Zappa received throughout his career from everyone from the Chieftains to Eastern European statesmen. Let's see, he's a soulless capitalist taskmaster pervert but meanwhile he's courted by band directors, musicians, and statesmen. I'd like to have read more about the upside. I'd recommend that you skip this book, save your money and go buy another Zappa album instead.

I enjoyed the book, and felt that it was successful in what it attempted to do, describing and analyzing Frank's life with its ups and downs. I'm a Zappa fan, and I learned a lot of new info.

Zappa's biggest fans, like fans of any highly-talented unique person, have fervent devotion. As such, it's completely predictable that even the smallest criticism will be categorically rejected by these fans. Just look at the Online Devotion Forums for any artist - as soon as anyone gets off the track of total adulation, others will swoop in and even start flaming until the worship gets back on track.

I like Frank's music very much. I've played some of his tunes in bands. He's hilarious, too. But having heard him interviewed on the radio, seen his bands several times, and having read his comments in print, I'm not shocked that he may be just a wee bit controlling, possibly a little self-centered, and may have preferred machines to humans. I have read and enjoyed Frank's autobiography a couple times and enjoyed it too. But could Frank be just a little low on introspection? Maybe. Do many autobiographers write in a self-serving manner? Just possibly.

I also noticed the oft-quoted time sequence problem in the book. Does this, in and of itself, nullify all the contents? No, it just means that the author and editor messed up. Nearly all the new books I read have loads of typos and other problems. It's clear that editors don't get the time they need to do the job all that well anymore. But that's a universal problem that's not specific to this book.

This is a biography. If we have nothing but praise, it would be a puff piece, or press release. Miles does attempt to analyze Zappa's motives, and takes a stab at finding clues to them in his background. Does he speculate? Yes, that's what biographers do. Short of analyzing the person's brain and seeing a word-for-word copy of everything that ever happened, nobody really knows anyone's motives. You can't even take the person's word for it in many cases. So you have to take a chance and speculate based on observation.

Miles lavishes praise on many things Zappa did. I guess a lot of people just didn't notice. Those who want their biographies to have blind adulation without questioning anything, and without any critical analysis - this is just the type of person that Frank strafed with his lyrics.

This book had more glaring errors than perhaps any other I've ever read. Too many misspellings (inconsistent ones at that; sometimes the author gets it right, other times he doesn't, often in the same paragraph!) of crucial names and song titles, plus myriad typos and grammatical errors are greviously distracting; both the author and editors did an unbelievably sloppy, amatuerish job here.

Precious little light is shed on the compliacted relationships he had with such central figures as Herb Cohen, Captain Beefheart, Ray Collins, Don Preston, Jimmy Carl Black, etc.

Although the book offers a few fascinating insights into Zappa's history, character and relationships with family and fans, crucial analysis and discussion of classic Zappa/Mothers albums are given short shrift at the expense of his later, grandiose (and ultimately far less important) symphonic and computerized work.

The definitive Zappa bio has yet to be written; avoid this second-rate book.

This book adds nothing to what's already been published about Zappa. Its factual points are a rehash of previous books about Zappa. What makes this book particularly egregious, is the author's unfounded opinions. These opinions appear frequently, on just about every page, and are almost exclusively negative. Moreover, the opinions offered are really out there, in left field.

To illustrate my point, I offer one example from the book. Consider the following passage from p.132:

"An air stewardess has described how the Mothers were once on one of her flights. She noticed that Zappa sat alone, away from the band. Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada gave her a copy of Freak Out! and had everyone sign it, except Frank. As the passengers deplaned she stood at the door with the album under her arm. On the way out Zappa noticed it: `I see you have our album, have you heard our music?' he asked. She admitted that she hadn't, whereupon Zappa extended his middle finger and jerked it in front of her face. `Here's a preview!' he snapped, then continued down the ramp leaving her shaken and upset. Clearly ordinary working people were not included in the Zappa Master Plan."

Huh? How can Miles reach the conclusion "ordinary people" had no place in the "Zappa Master Plan"? It's this last sentence "Clearly ordinary working people were not included in the Zappa Master Plan" that show how off-base Miles is in his analysis. Nowhere else in the book does Miles talk about Zappa having antipathy for working people. So, its this single interaction with the stewardess from which Miles draws his conclusion. With this kind of logic, one can see why we have an idiot as the president. Just same something, anything, and it doesn't matter that there is no supporting evidence, no logic, - in fact, present people with bizarre, non-logic, and they'll ingest it whole.

Don't waste your money on this book. Instead, buy the Real Frank Zappa book, or Electric Don Quixote. The "Real" book is an autobiography that makes for fun, provocative reading. The Quixote book is lengthy, providing cradle to grave extensive facts and both positive and negative opinions.

As for Barry Miles:

If your mind is prehensile
You'll put down your pencil
And have yourself a squat
On the cosmic utensil

The other reviewers have already said this in so many words, but the fault of this book is that there is nothing new in it. IT is a cut and paste job pure and simple. Even his opinions, such as that liberal comedians don't so much talk truth to power as they do mock their own liberal mores come from otherbooks. If you've read the other Zappa books and are well read generally you don't need to read this book -- you could have written it.

I'm going to have to dissent from the first few reviews here. I spotted some factual inaccuracies of my own (Memphis as the center of the C&W biz, Strom Thurmond as a senator from South Dakota), but overall I thought the story was well told, the musical judgments were solid, and Miles does an excellent job of placing Zappa in his historical context.

If you want a purely laudatory treatment of Zappa, this is not the book for you -- Zappa emerges as a pretty thoroughly unpleasant and psychologically damaged individual. But Miles never attempts to reduce Zappa to his foibles a la Kitty Kelly. If you have previously seen Zappa only as he wanted to be seen, you may be a bit disillusioned, but then Zappa would have been the first one to warn us about the dangers of hero worship.

I'd give this 5 stars were it not for the inaccuracies (and I'm sure there were more I didn't know enough to spot). And just for the record, quite a few things in the book are sourced to interviews Miles did with Zappa, although it's certainly true that the majority of the book is based on secondary resarch.

Of all the nasty reader reviews I've read here the one that really stands out is the one that begins with a list of the THREE reasons anyone would write a biography. "1- They just love the guy, 2) Revenge, or 3) Money." I'm thinking now of the shelves full of biographies of figures like Hitler and Stalin, and I'm wondering if maybe a 4th reason might be that you understand the historical importance of the person, you find the person and his work interesting (without "sincerely appreciating it"), and you believe there's a need for a better biography.

Most of Miles' conclusions regarding Zappa's motives throughout the book are grounded in the first hand comments of numerous people who were there at the time. Further, Miles opening chapters of Zappa's childhood and adolesence do more than any other biography in offering a context for Zappa's work.

Miles also does a good job in describing the major shift in Zappa's work from an early period in which his audience was in on the joke, part of a larger community of people critiquing "straight" society, to the later period in which, if you wanted to earn Zappa's contempt all you'd have to do was buy his most recent record.

The most dedicated Frank fans remind me of fans of The Grateful Dead if you suggest that Bobby can't write or Jerry sounded pretty smacked out that night or maybe Mickey ought to accept that drums can't actually heal the sick.

Miles has written the definitive Zappa bio.

There are perhaps three reasons someone would devote a substantial chunk of time to writing a biography: 1) a deep and sincere appreciation for the subject's work; 2) revenge; and 3) money. For Barry Miles, author of Zappa A Biography, it seems to be all about revenge and money. Miles, whose credits and so-called pop culture expertise are based all in the 1960's, as evidenced by his other works on the Beat Generation and hippie culture, seems to be a Zappa fan who believes the artist's best work was in that period and has never forgiven him for letting go of the original line-up and evolving musically, socially, and politically from the early days of the Mothers Of Invention.

The book is overwhelmingly unbalanced; the attacks on Zappa become more intense as Zappa continues his career past the `60's. At this point, the book takes on a childish, peevish tone. Miles delights in contradicting even the most trivial of facts quoted by Zappa. His psychological assessment of Zappa is embarrassingly shallow. His knowledge of music stems from musicians' quotations rather than his own understanding. He chooses an assortment of quotes from former band members that are virtually all negative. In reality, countless magazine articles, radio, and TV interviews evidence band members truly appreciative of Zappa, how the ability to get into the band was a supreme accomplishment, how Zappa brought out the best in their playing and raised the creative and technical game of each player, and how each member was profoundly influenced by Zappa even after leaving the band. Yet these positive quotations never appear in the book.

Zappa's obsession for having his music sound to the ear as it did in his head was not a shortcoming as Miles suggests, but a virtue. Zappa was like Howard Rourk in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, with the sole objective of not letting anything, including suboptimal playing of band members, social pressures, or government intervention get in the way of realizing the purity of his creative expression. His frustrations were no different from that of Edgar Varese and Conlon Noncarrow (the latter an important Zappa influence, yet never mentioned in the book).

It is therefore ironic that I would only recommend this book to the most ardent Zappa fans, who can take Miles' overwhelming criticism in stride, and find in the biography a few new facts to fill in gaps of their knowledge of Zappa's life and work. There are several interesting anecdotes, including Tina Turner's background singing on Overnite Sensations and Apostrophe, and details of the final months and days of Zappa's life which are fascinating and not well known. For everyone else, skip this book -- just buy Zappa's music and make your own assessment.

Nothing new here. Seemed as if the author complied this from other zappa books. Miles seems to think that 60's Mothers good/70's and beyond Zappa Bad. The impression given is if only Frank lived in New York everything would have been okay. Most irratating... he injects his opinion onto almost every page instead of finding actual quotes or doing interviews and letting other people make the statements. I enjoyed the McCartney book... this one is pretty lame. Don't buy it.

Overall, this is a good book. It tells a lot about the man and his music, his views, and how others in his circle viewed him.

But, there are some glaring boo-boos in this book. Trivial, maybe, but a little irritating. Any fan of The Mothers Of Invention knows the original singer's name is Ray Collins, and the original bass player's name is Roy Estrada, but Miles has this tendency to call the bassist Ray Estrada. Denny Walley (slide guitarist with the 70's line-ups) is called Danny a few times, and even though Keith Moon has a part in Frank Zappa's life, there is a segment about FZ's family, and at first I didn't know what Keith Moon had to do with babysitting Frank and Gail's kids. I had to re-read it until I realized the passage was about Zappa's daughter, Moon Unit. Miles calls her "Keith Moon" here; it's the part about dancing in the kitchen. In 1970, two members of The Turtles, known to audiences as "Flo and Eddie," joined the regrouped Mothers, and Mark Volman's stage name was "Flo." Howard Kaylan's stage name was "Eddie," but the book has their names reversed. The notes on the rear cover tell of Frank's marriage to Gail Sloatman lasting over thirty years, but they were married in 1967. He died in 1993, twenty-six years after the wedding, so here you have yet another goof. These things abound, but it is still a fairly good book, because I learned a few things reading it that I hadn't already known, such as how percussionist Ruth Komanoff (later Ruth Underwood, after her marriage to Ian Underwood) was referred to Zappa outside the Garrick Theater in New York by her brother, to her acute embarrassment. He (Ruth's brother) just accosted Zappa on the sidewalk, and told him how talented she is. He said to come backstage and audition, and she then found herself in the band. These things.

But, as long as you read this book with a grain of salt, knowing that it isn't 100% factually accurate, it is still pretty good reading.

I read it in two evenings.