For me, Frank Zappa is up there with the Grateful Dead, Phish, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and his infinite number of projects, and other bands and musicians that many of my friends in college loved and yet they never quite resonated with me until much later in life. Perhaps it was the high-level prog nerdiness and/or the low-level meandering jams that I just didn’t have the patience or the focus to check them out.

Until recently, that is, as I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive with Zappa. Mind you, I’m quite familiar with some of his more well-known tracks like the VERY 80s track he did with his daughter, “Valley Girl”…

…or his occasional appearance on The Dr Demento Show with the classic “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”…

…or the deep cut “Flower Punk” (a wonderfully bent take on “Hey Joe”) that my freshman year roommate played me one day…

…or the twitchy “G-Spot Tornado” that showed up on MTV’s 120 Minutes every now and again.

Zappa was definitely one of those musicians that musicians loved. He was also someone you’d hear on the more adventurous AOR and Progressive Radio stations, like I did when I used to listen to WMDK back in the late 80s. You knew he had a ridiculously large discography that spanned studio, stage, and genre. And he was also extremely vocal (and very erudite) against music censorship in the 80s, and spoke at the PMRC Senate hearings.

He’s recently found a place in my ever-growing music library, and I’m eventually going to make my way through his body of work. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get through it all, but I’d like to further understand what he was all about other than being the extremely intelligent and inquisitive weirdo with very little social filter.

Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions on what I should listen to! [And definitely let me know in the comments if there’s a biography about him that you think I’d enjoy!]