Duly, today we’ve listed the five bands the Mothers of Invention man hated, complete with his explanation as to why.
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground’s own outspoken frontman Lou Reed was said to have declared: “Frank Zappa is the most untalented musician I’ve ever heard.” Later adding, “He can’t play rock ‘n’ roll because he’s a loser.” To which bandmate Sterling Morrison added: “If you told Frank Zappa to eat shit in public, he’d do it if it sold records. I would do it if I liked to.”
Zappa never really made it clear in public what his problem with The Velvet Underground was. However, his Mothers of Invention bandmate, Jimmy Carl Black, accounted for it, saying: “I don’t remember Zappa actually putting them down on stage, but he might have. He really disliked the band. For what reasons I really don’t know, except that they were junkies and Frank just couldn’t tolerate any kind of drugs.
The Beatles
They were the biggest band on the planet and made many strides in pop music, this didn’t mean that Zappa was a fan. In fact, he was scathing of the Liverpool group.
The Mothers of Invention album, 1968’s We’re Only In It For The Money, was a cutting satire on the “movement” of the 1960s, and of course, it contained evident digs at The Beatles, the most famous of the lot. The intended cover of the album was originally intended to be what is now a notorious parody of The Beatles’ record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“Everybody else thought they were God!” Zappa once said of The Beatles. “I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group.”
Accounting for his hated of The Beatles is Pauline Butcher, who was Zappa’s PA from 1967 to 1971. In Louder Sound in 2012, she said: “He was a precociously intelligent man in a business which is not necessarily filled with a lot of intelligent people, and he stood out”.
He worked out he wasn’t a pretty boy like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he didn’t play their kind of music, he didn’t even like it.
Jethro Tull
Anderson recalled in a radio interview with BBC Radio 2: “Sadly, I never got to meet Frank Zappa; we nearly did. And I actually read that he didn’t like Jethro Tull at all back then in the 70s. He rather resented the fact that us British bands Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and so on. We were going over there (United States) and making tons of money. Seemingly while he was struggling to run his band.”
“So he was rather unkind to some of us in the press, which was a shame because I was a big Frank Zappa fan at that point,” Anderson noted. It’s an issue that many of Zappa’s fans faced when they had groups. He was as great at guitar as he was putting down new groups.
“I was in fear of taking up the invitation to call him shortly before he died,” he continued. “I’ve got a message from one of his musicians that I knew, that said ‘Frank wants to speak to you, he wants you to call him.’ I thought ‘How do you speak to a dying man? You know, picking up the phone talking to someone for the very first time in what turned out to be the last weeks of his life.”
Led Zeppelin
Zappa had a lot to say about Zeppelin because he was the iconoclast and an opponent of big rock groups. And they were ultimately the biggest big rock group to ever take the stage. Gongs and all.
Notoriously, Zappa made Zeppelin’s alleged mud shark incident a recurring theme of The Mothers of Invention’s two shows in New York City that comprise the lauded Fillmore East – June 1971 album. There are also references to Robert “Plant-it” and Robert “Planet” on their previous album, 200 Motels.
Zappa had so much disdain for Zeppelin that on his 1988 tour, he and the band performed a wholly sarcastic reggae-styled cover of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Interestingly, Zappa had stayed so clear of Zeppelin that according to the tour’s guitarist, Mike Keneally, there was “widespread disbelief among the band” when Zappa asked them to play the track from start to finish, as he had never heard it in its entirety but that “he knew that it was a huge song and he was curious”, per his account in Record Collector.
Of course, when Zappa heard the song, he had his criticisms. Keneally said: “He remarked that he really didn’t like the chord progression for the guitar solo… but he decided he wanted to play the song live because he knew audiences would be flabbergasted by it.”
