Prague springs eternal: Beat echoes in Zappa visit
Guitar maestro and arch satirist, Frank headed to Eastern Europe and made Ginsberg-like waves as the two briefly became Czech mates
IN RECENT days, I was watching a wide-ranging and insightful survey of the life and art of a man who spent his all-too-brief 52 years dedicated to his aesthetic craft and anti-establishment vision, resisting the easy compartmentalisation of the record business and entertainment industry by rejecting its structures and lampooning its values.
Yet, as I viewed Alex Winter’s new and eponymous portrait of Frank Zappa, initially screened on BBC4 in late October, I was most caught by the echoes re-kindled by the musician’s visit to Prague in early 1990, when he was welcomed as a cultural hero and lauded as the symbol of a new freedom by a young Czechoslovakia drunk on the joys of the recent Velvet Revolution.
What echoes were those? Well, one Allen Ginsberg in the spring of 1965 received a similarly rapturous welcome from the youth of the Czech capital, but at a time when the Russian heel remained strategically lodged on the throat of the Soviets’ post-war Warsaw Pact allies.
After Ginsberg, happy to parade his shame-free homosexual identity in a country where such sexual deviation was not allowed, was crowned King of May by the radical students of that beleaguered nation, he was quickly and unceremoniously deported, before continuing his European adventure in the more liberal land of England, meeting Dylan and the Beatles, heading for a week in Liverpool and then springing the stunning excitements of the International Poetry Incarnation in London in June.
However, Zappa became involved in more than just the ephemeral gesture that perhaps characterised Ginsberg’s brief engagement with the exuberant politics of the street. In Czechoslovakia, the forces of law and order of the 1980s were well aware of the guitarist’s subversive, even radical, reputation.
Rock groups, before the eventually peaceful insurrection, were told by the security forces to stop playing their ‘Frank Zappa music’. The description was a generic catch-all for that kind of music that posed any hint of a challenge to the prevailing system.
Zappa was moved by his reception at Prague airport: ‘When I got off the plane, 5,000 people were waving at me’, a line with curious resonances of American Beatlemania a quarter of a century before. ‘No police, no bodyguards just people waving at me.’ It took him 40 minutes to get from the arrival gate to his waiting transport, so enthusiastic was the pressing of the elated and open-mouthed crowds.
While this unique music-maker was unquestionably an egomaniac and a control freak he was probably not a megalomaniac, even if he briefly entertained the idea of a US presidential bid. Rather, he was obsessed with his own creativity and his power grabs were only accidentally achieved. But when the new Czechoslovakian president Václav Havel, a huge fan of the American rocker, offered him a role as his nation’s Cultural Ambassador to the USA, Zappa was too flattered to turn down such an interesting opportunity.
It didn’t necessarily end well: the US government was suspicious of Zappa and his intentions, uncertain about the network of associations that might arise out of a post-Berlin Wall world, not even sure of Havel’s manoeuvrings and loyalties. But it was an intriguing late century alliance between a fierce critic of the American way and a member of a fresh generation of European statesmen during the age of glasnost. In fact, Havel was possibly the first senior leader to pin his colours to the re-born planet that existed in the wake of Woodstock.
Did Zappa have any links though to the groundbreaking milieu – cultural, social, sexual, narcotic – that Ginsberg had shaped during the 1950s and 1960s? One thing on which these two individuals concurred was a strict anti-censorship position. The poet had shaken up the scene when his great poem ‘Howl’ had been declared to be not obscene and instead of artistic worth by the courts; the musician had infringed notions of taste on stage and record and then became the fiercest critic of the PMRC – the Parents’ Music Resource Center – in the 1980s, as the Washington-based body tried to control the racy and risqué language of popular music.
Interestingly, while Ginsberg and the Beats recommended disorientation of the mental faculties by outside agencies – from drink to drugs – and actually framed the concept in their 1944 ‘New Vision’, Zappa was essentially abstemious: anti-drugs of all kinds except for his lifelong commitment to the dubious joys of nicotine. In the late 1970s, Saturday Night Live invited him on as a guest and then spikily satirised his well-advertised rejection of cannabis, psychedelics and more.
As for mysticism and matters religious, although born an Italian-American with a Catholic family background, Zappa was a fully signed-up atheist, happy to engage with the mind-spinning abstracts of compositional fecundity but only truly concerned with events as they happened in this material world.
He demonstrated this most convincingly when he became an early advocate of artistic freedom and the ability to operate outside the zones constructed by the music majors. Like Prince later, Zappa untangled himself from his big label contract and set up his own independent recording and distribution methods, though, if their views of the music business had some overlap, he did seem somewhat let down by the failure of the Purple One to help him in the PMRC battle. Minneapolis’ favourite son had been one of the principal targets of those attacking the lyrical lewdness of rock‘n’roll at the time yet remained largely detached.
One Beat with whom Zappa shared certain positions was William Burroughs. The Naked Lunch author’s lifelong commitment to artificial stimulation ran completely counter to the musician’s philosophy, but they were more than prepared to agree on the threat to the individual of powerful and intrusive government and the controlling instincts of religious institutions. Both criticised the invasion of their lives by centralised power bases.
As Zappa’s substantial Wiki Jawaka page helpfully summarises, his ‘use of caricature, satire and parody in his work has similarities to those of Burroughs. In Naked Lunch, Burroughs exposes the pitfalls of America's consumerist state, and the overall human addiction to control. Its sub-plots of taboo fantasies and drug-addiction, peculiar and monstrous creatures, eccentric personalities and corruption help unmask mechanisms and processes of control, but led to much controversy among American readers.’
In addition, their instinctive outsider natures – Zappa was thoroughly detached from the rock scene and Burroughs was never an enthusiast for the notion of a Beat Generation – almost certainly brought them together. And, in 1978, they participated in a celebrated event called the Nova Convention In New York City.
The Nova Convention, named after Burroughs’ book Nova Express, was a celebration in word and performance of the author’s extraordinary, often outrageous, life. After a peripatetic 20 years, Burroughs had returned to Manhattan and a treasure trove of key performers gathered to pay tribute to his achievement, including Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Ginsberg and the author himself.
Zappa, a late replacement for an absent Keith Richards who had been recently detained at Toronto airport with a fug of drug allegations hanging over his head and missing for those legal reasons, would read the notorious ‘Talking Asshole’ section from the writer’s most famous novel and therefore confirm a certain allegiance to the Beat brotherhood and certainly to notions of public free speech.
When David Cronenberg’s 1991 movie version of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch went to DVD, the writer penned an article in which he revealed: ‘In 1979 Frank Zappa came to me with the concept of [the book] as an off-Broadway musical. This struck me – and still does – as a pregnant idea, but it was not to be.’ They remained close and Zappa sent a dozen roses to his fellow rabble-rouser for his 70th birthday in 1984.
As for Czechoslovakia, within three years of Ginsberg’s famed arrival and expulsion, the Prague Spring was bravely declared as the country’s leader Alexander Dubček flexed his people’s independent streak only to see the tanks of Brezhnev roll in to the capital and quickly crush such optimism.
Just over two decades later, Zappa would make his presence felt, but not so long before another independent and amicable impulse saw that reinvigorated nation re-divided, in 1993, into the Czech Republic – now Czechia – and Slovakia, as the states of the European East forged their new and liberated identities. It was the same year that Frank would meet his own maker – a concept he would have, of course, found risible – after a lengthy struggle against the ravages of prostate cancer.