Speaking of dirty words

More tour tales soon. In the meantime:



Great googly-moogly! Joe's Garage is coming to the stage (in LA, of course). The LA Weekly has a cover story by Steven Leigh Morris.

It's impossible to talk about this masterpiece (one of Zappa's many masterpieces) without referencing the PMRC brouhaha. Zappa, as you probably know, was an opposing witness at those hearings, and Joe's Garage, which came out a few years before the brouhaha, was a particularly obscene album in an oeuvre full of obscene alums. As I suggested in the discussion occasioned by my last post, it seems strange to me that we haven't made a whole lot of progress in terms of how we relate to this stuff as a culture. It seems we have anything but, ahem, catholic (little "c") tastes.



By the way: anyone who has read (or re-read) Zappa's autobiography in the "post-9/11 world" might have noticed that the man could be pretty prescient. Consider the evidence found in this PMRC-inspired Crossfire exchange, quoted by Morris:

Zappa: The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe.

Novak:... Do you really think ... in this country, with the permissiveness, that we are moving toward a fascist theocracy?

Zappa: You bet we are, buddy.

[Lofton and Novak laugh derisively.]

Braden: One example of a fascist theocracy?

Zappa: When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion, and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun ...

Lofton: Then you are an anarchist. Every form of civil government is based on some kind of morality, Frank.

Zappa: Morality in terms of behavior, not in terms of theology.

Many of Zappa's Crossfire appearances have been available on YouTube at some point (subject to the whims of the estate).