Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa, born in Baltimore in 1940, was the rock world's resident mad scientist: composer, guitarist, conductor, satirist and filmmaker, and a man who could jump from a doo-wop parody to a sound collage to an orchestral score without breaking a sweat. Mostly self-taught, he fell as a teenager for modernist concert music, R&B and doo-wop all at once, wrote classical pieces in high school while drumming in R&B bands, and later switched to electric guitar.

The Mothers of Invention's debut, Freak Out!, in 1966, set the pattern, jamming straight-faced rock and roll against long, collaged experiments. Hot Rats in 1969 brought "Peaches En Regalia", a jazzy, fleet-footed piece that dances on the head of a pin. Apostrophe (') in 1974 carried the sardonic "Cosmik Debris", and 1979 brought Sheik Yerbouti with "Dancin' Fool" and Joe's Garage: Act I and its title track. He produced nearly all of his 60-plus albums himself and tied them together in a web of recurring phrases and characters he called "Project/Object".

He was a loud enemy of censorship and a champion of free speech, and he also disapproved of recreational drugs. His audience was larger in Europe than at home. Zappa died in 1993, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 1995, followed by a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.

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