The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (159 page)

(Cliffside Park, New Jersey, 12 May 1959)

Black Sabbath

Badlands

(Various acts)

Painfully good-looking and athletically lean, Ray Gillen would have seemed an unlikely vocalist for Black Sabbath ten years before, but once the metal pioneers took a more stadium-friendly stance, he appeared to fit the bill for their mid-eighties incarnation. The high-pitched vocalist jumped into the breach following the departure of Glenn Hughes; he’d already worked with former Rainbow drummer Bobby Rondinelli, so had something of a pedigree in top-division hard rock. Whether Gillen ever mentioned he’d auditioned for a part in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Cats
is not recorded, though his tenure of just eighteen months suggests his secret might have leaked out. (To be fair, Sabbath as a band were falling apart around the time of 1987’s
Eternal Idol
album.) Gillen began his own group, Badlands, a supergroup of sorts, which also featured Sabbath drummer Eric Singer, guitarist Jake E Lee (ex of Dio) and bassist Greg Chaisson – but a fractured career saw this band also break up, in 1992.

Although he was to form yet another act, Sun Red Sun, there were more sinister reasons for Ray Gillen’s departure from Badlands. He had become very unwell, and depressed as a result of diagnosis with HIV, which he kept from family and friends until close to the end. Gillen died at home in New Jersey on 3 December – by coincidence, a date now recognized as World AIDS Day.

‘If we can’t be free,
at least we can be cheap.’

The wisdom of Frank Zappa

Saturday 4

Frank Zappa

(Baltimore, Maryland, 21 December 1940)

The Mothers of Invention

(Various acts)

Few musicians took to the supposedly serious matter of music-making with the humour and panache of Frank Zappa. A genuine contender in the ‘farthest out’ stakes, Zappa displayed such sheer ingenuity in his vast output that he was always going to ruffle the feathers of a society unequipped to deal with his art and irony. But this was surely the catalyst for the man and his work – until his death, Zappa remained several steps ahead of an industry never his intellectual equal.

The part-Sicilian Zappa moved from Baltimore to California when he was just ten years old; Zappa Sr (yes, it was his real name) was a meteorologist studying poisonous gases. The headiness of the tarnished West Coast air clearly had some influence on his son, who, despite a chequered school career (he was once suspended for an impromptu display of homemade pyrotechnics), managed to graduate from the somehow appropriate-sounding Antelope Valley High. At fifteen, he was hanging with the likes of fellow maverick Don Van Vliet (the future Captain Beefheart), both fans of disparate musicians such as bluesman Howlin’ Wolf and experimentalist Edgar Varese. Together, they featured in an eight-piece R & B act called The BlackOuts, though neither showed much indication of things to come. Zappa’s further education foundered and he ensconced himself in music theory and B-movie scoring. In 1962, though, he clashed with authority in an incident that was to inform much of his future direction: framed by an over-zealous vice squad, he was imprisoned for ten days after selling a fake porn tape to an undercover officer for just $100. (Unfazed, Zappa reminded them on his release that his subsequent probation would help him avoid the draft.)

Frank Zappa: Despite many scrapes over the years, no one dared park on his head …

‘Sometimes he sings. Sometimes he talks to the audience. Sometimes there is trouble.’

The sleevenotes for
Freak Out!
(1966)

Zappa fashioned a number of bands, many of which featured Van Vliet and most of which bore odd names such as Captain Glasspack & The Magic Mufflers (probably informing Beefheart’s later choices). The latter became The Mothers (originally spelled ‘Muthers’) on Mother’s Day 1964, to be renamed – quite effectively in the event – ‘The Mothers of Invention’ by nervous Verve record executives. With the 1966 debut
Freak Out!
(the world’s first double album), Zappa at last exhibited to any member of the public open-minded enough to listen his skills as social commentator as well as wordsmith and, of course, those of a damn fine guitarist. At this point, Zappa’s lyrics were built around sexual punning (when he wasn’t dedicating entire sides to Varese) but his delivery was so gauche his songs could barely be considered offensive. Further great recordings followed (with the MOI line-up mutating, and disappearing, frequently):
Hot Rats
(1969) is still the most celebrated Zappa long-player, and even found the man a Top Ten position in Britain, where his shtick – initially appealing to fans of The Bonzos or Syd Barrett – began to pull in a wider audience. Throughout the seventies, the artist was either reinventing himself, his sound or The Mothers, or nurturing newcomers such as the extremely grateful Alice Cooper. And when he wasn’t quite so busy, Zappa found time to father four children by his second wife, Gail Sloatman, esoterically naming them Moon Unit, Dweezil (a nickname legally adopted by his son), Ahmet Emuukha Rodan and Diva Muffin – thereby starting a whole new ‘thing’ among rock dads. When quizzed about this by Joan Rivers, Zappa’s typically spot-on response was: ‘Consider for a moment any beauty in the name “Ralph”.’

Hugely prolific in the studio despite two bizarre incidents in 1971 (
Closer!),
Zappa parodied – or completely attacked – a number of US institutions in his time, in 1979 turning his attention to disco with
Sheikh Yerbouti,
a thinly veiled slur against the trend. This record contained the tremendous ‘Dancing Fool’, one of two close shaves Zappa had with Billboard. (The other, 1982’s ‘Valley Girl’, featured 14-year-old Moon Unit ‘like, totally grossing out’ on vocals.) Zappa showed undeniable prescience that same year with the issue of
Joe’s Garage,
an album imagining a future in which music was outlawed: just six years later, he confronted the PMRC (Parents’ Music Resource Center) at Capitol Hill, to justify his work, accusing the group, whom he dismissed as ‘bored housewives’, of promoting censorship. The entire hearing was made public via the brilliantly titled 1985 album
Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention
and is transcribed in the autobiography he finished shortly before his untimely death.

In January 1990, Frank Zappa – who had suspected he was ill for a while – learned he was suffering from prostate cancer, and doubled his efforts to do justice to the countless ongoing projects he felt he might not have time to complete. Zappa soon became unable to perform live, and his two eldest children went public with news of their father’s condition; he died at his Laurel Canyon home three years later, leaving some fifty albums in his wake. While it took until 1995 to install Zappa into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame (a move he would have in any case rebuked), the unique performer has since had a mollusc, a jellyfish, an Intel motherboard, a gene and at least two asteroids named in his honour.

See also
Henry ‘Sunflower’ Vestine (
October 1997); Jimmy Carl Black (
Golden Oldies #79); Captain Beefheart (
Golden Oldies #123);Jim ‘Motorhead’ Sherwood(
Golden Oldies #161). Longtime Zappa cohort Larry ‘Wild Man’ Fischer also died in 2011.