Shut Up 'n Play Yer ... Bicycle?

May 3, 2024 7:57 AM

In 1963, a clean-cut Frank Zappa appeared live on the Steve Allen show playing a musical composition on bicycles. The entire 16:28 is worthwhile to watch for the conversation and interaction between the two, but the performance with the show's orchestra starts at 11:56. The show's talent coordinator Jerry Hopkins discusses how the young musician's debut performance came about.

(Yes, this is a dupe from 2006. I came across this on my own, but it's been 18 years, the links are dead in the dupe, and I think it's worthwhile to revisit)

posted by ShooBoo (15 comments total)

"Linda was already in the bar when I arrived. She wrapped me up in a hug, and I remembered how much like a bicycle she had felt like in bed." --Erasure, by Percival Everett
posted by chavenet at 8:23 AM on May 3 [3 favorites]

Steve's chuckle. The best.
posted by Czjewel at 9:01 AM on May 3

I know Zappa will never be a Metafilter fave, and he was problematic at times to say the least. But he truly was a genius, and he had a fascinating story. I think the fact that he was a good 8-10 years older than the rest of the late-'60s and '70s rock stars of the time did quite a bit to set him apart. Scatalogical humor in some of his stuff, some gross sexual stuff (but he always pointed out that he was only singing about what human beings actually do!), but he was way more mature in many ways than a lot of his contemporaries. I have love for his earliest stuff, but his years with Ruth Underwood, Napoleon Murphy Brock, George Duke, Chester Thompson, etc (about '73-'75) are my favorite era. I find the material from the end of his tragically short life (he died when he was my age, 53) to be mostly unlistenable, but by then he was composing/recording everything electronically by himself. It was directly out of his head into sounds in the air.

Prime Zappa is amazing. It's hard to understand a lot of his work, but I believe it's because it was mostly meant to be listened to and experienced live on stage... almost like semi improvised operas. His studio albums are often odd mish-mashes of stuff from his live performances, and the studio stuff just doesn't show his musical genius IMO.
posted by SoberHighland at 9:40 AM on May 3 [9 favorites]

There’s plenty to criticize about the man, but his music has a… synesthetic effect on me that’s rare in popular music. There’s a vividness to it that most of the frazzle-brained psychedelic musicians of his era couldn’t touch.
posted by ducky l'orange at 11:29 AM on May 3

I never thought of Frank Zappa being a major influence on Einstürzende Neubauten but here we are.
posted by alex_skazat at 11:55 AM on May 3 [1 favorite]

This was also in my algorithms this week. Astounding that he's only 23 when that tape was shot. He has such a unique place in music history. He built a bridge that nobody was asking for between the experimental and high modern music of the art house and the psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s.

He truly was a genius, if at times what we would describe as "problematic" here in the 2020s. But as with so many other things that you "could never get away with today", the explicit racial and sexual satire found all over his oeuvre shouldn't get made today anyway. I tend to think that shocking people and pushing the limits of free expression was probably a socially useful thing to do at one point, but only in reaction to the dominant mode of social conservatism at the time. Not the world we operate in anymore.
posted by voiceofreason at 11:57 AM on May 3 [3 favorites]

That’s surely true. If the definition of a gentleman is “someone who can play the accordion, yet abstains,” i think one measure of the health of a liberal society is that people uphold the freedom to shock and offend, but, you know, don’t actually go around doing it all the time.
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:45 PM on May 3 [2 favorites]

I was going to post this last week as it came into my feed but came across mandolin conspiracies comment
and of course madamjujujives post. Very nice, thanks for posting this, it is worth the watch.
posted by clavdivs at 1:20 PM on May 3

"Get on yer bike."
posted by BWA at 1:45 PM on May 3

you "could never get away with today"

ITYM "you can't do that on stage anymore".
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:13 PM on May 3 [5 favorites]

I have conflicted feelings about Zappa. I can acknowledge his talent, he was obviously a genius and a lot of people I've admired have admired him, but I've always had this feeling like he was the smartest man in every room and he still wasn't as smart as he thought he was. Too much of his music strikes me as a parody of music itself, like his songs were sarcastic and deliberately unpleasant and he was sneering at you for listening. Here he encounters Steve Allen, a guy who was no slouch in the smugness department himself, and it's bizarre to see Zappa being condescended to like this.

Something weird is going on with their heights. I would've assumed Zappa was like two feet taller than Allen, Zappa always read as a very tall guy to me and Allen didn't. A quick Googling puts Zappa at six feet even and Allen at 6'3", but Allen towers over Zappa here, that's not a 3-inch difference. (Plus Zappa has a big ol' pompadour in the clip, which has gotta add at least an inch or so.) Zappa is really young and I thought he might not have finished growing, but another quick Googling reveals that he was 23 at the time of this appearance. So, what gives? Is the internet wrong about Zappa being six feet tall? Did he have a big growth spurt when he was 24? His relative shrimpiness here adds to the overall feeling of a smirky young suitor having his first meeting with his girlfriend's unimpressed dad.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:21 PM on May 3 [4 favorites]

Be a loyal plastic robot for a world that doesn't care.
posted by whatevernot at 3:25 PM on May 3 [3 favorites]

Zappa was enamored with Edgard Varèse (still alive in 1963) who probably influenced the musique concrète nature of this performance. I think he would have rather kept doing this kind of thing than the commercially successful comedy-adjacent stuff. I mean, he spent the last few years of his life basically writing weird MIDI files.
posted by credulous at 4:09 PM on May 3

He also wrote some fantastic, odd and very listenable modern classical pieces. "The Girl in the Magnesium Dress" is one of my all-time faves.
posted by mediareport at 7:01 PM on May 3 [1 favorite]

I was impressed by young Zappa's stage presence and calm demeanor and how he just ignored Allen's foolishness and dumb jokes. I was a big fan of Steve Allen back in those days, but his constantly going for the joke instead of letting Frank do his thing was a little irritating.
posted by charlesminus at 10:59 AM on May 4