Zappa: Was he For or Far from the People?

In Barry Miles 2003 book on the relationship between the sixtie's counter culture and rock music titled Hippie, Miles simply reproduces an ad for Mothers of Invention's 1966 debut album Freak Out!  in the LA Free Press, and I quote:

Edited by SteveG - February 19 2015 at 10:24

I don't know about his politics but I always thought that what he chose to portray of the human condition was childish.

Overall...he was trying to warn people that they COULD think for themselves as opposed to following a media driven marketing concept created by an industry of trend mongers.  

I don't (and didn't) blame Frank one bit for making fun of things in those early days. There was a lot to make fun of.

From what I know about Zappa, I can tell that he was a cynical and skeptical person, so I'm not surprised that he criticized the hippies. He was also against drugs and rightfully so in my opinion. I kind of agree with his views on hippies, not because I have anything against hippies, but because of the consequences of some of the hippie ideologies. The focus on sex and drugs in society is largely due to the hippies. The former was a bad idea from the start, the latter has had consequences as well. All of the "love" and "peace" ideas from the hippie movement are largely absent from society nowadays. Hippies are good people but it's unreasonable to assume that their actions won't have consequences on the following generations.

This is just speculation, but I think Money came about partially due to genuine resentment towards the Beatles, and not just the petty kind you see from your average talentless prima donna.

Edited by KingCrInuYasha - February 19 2015 at 12:24

I think Frank Zappa liked some of the proclaimed ideals of the counterculture as he recognized most of the things they reacted against as genuine problems with the mainstream culture, but found other aspects of its ideology naïve or even downright dangerous like the promotion of substance abuse, and he disliked how easily it could and did become commodified by the culture industry. A lot of his lyrics from he 1960s have a "real freaks vs. fake ones" theme to it, not just We're Only in It for the Money, but also Plastic People in particular.

Doesn't he go into detail about this in his autobiography? Of course, that's something he wrote many years later. I think Peter Doggett's insanely long book about the rise and fall of the hippie movement, There's a Riot Going On, does touch on Frank Zappa's conflicted relationship to it right down to digging up old interviews but it's a really long book which doesn't spend much time on Zappa specifically. (I think it's like 700 pages or so?) Anyway Zappa didn't get anywhere as much "voice of the generation" hype as someone like Bob Dylan, but enough to reject it in interviews cited in Doggett's book. Doggett does make a similar judgement on the as I described Zappa doing in the previous paragraph, but he comes from a more traditional Old Left perspective whereas Zappa ended up on the libertarian right.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - February 19 2015 at 14:49

The hippie movement was a short period in the mid sixties that happened between the British Pop period and the demonstration period. It peaked during the summer of love in '67 and never came near that level again.

Frank Zappa wasn't pleased with ex-revolutionaries taking over positions as record executives for huge record companies. He was disappointed in the hippie culture wearing suits and grooming themselves ...because they took on a role to shorten songs and dispose of Progressive Rock. I agree that the idea of counter culture was to NOT blindly follow people and ideologies like sheep....  I also believe there was a lot of money being made in the 60's with all the many bands being signed and "Flower Power" itself. Grateful Dead members had stated in the past that in the late 60's, record company representatives would show up in the streets with the attitude...."Sign!, Sign!, sign anybody! Sign that girl on the street shaking the tambourine! The government had control over the entertainment industry and I recall Zappa saying that this "Flower Power" scene was phony and commercial and had mostly to do with the industry profiting. He seemed to develop an attitude after witnessing it all and continued to mock it for that reason.

^ So the first rainbow gathering at Granby, Colorado in 1972, what was it a gathering of dentists or maybe a gathering of hippies?