Remember the time when musicians actually stood for things? Not like today’s artists, such as Green Day and Incubus, who lambasted the Bush Administration for the wars in the Middle East, who have now gone quiet in criticism of Obama for perpetuating this same wasteful conflict. Remember when artists celebrated creative individuality as opposed to parroting popular rhetoric, easily accepted by the majority?
One such musician, composer, and individual who proudly marched to the beat of his own drummer was Frank Zappa. Frank made no apologies to anyone; religious leaders, congress, the average American, feminists, gays, Republicans, Democrats, musicians, and many more. Pretty much any group whose own special interests were held high upon a pedestal were fair game for Zappa to publicly ostracize. Not just a musical hero of mine, Frank Zappa embraced individual freedom and fought (sometimes even on Capital Hill) collective group thought; in my eyes his most redeemable qualities.
One such group Zappa disdained above all others were workers unions. From about the first moment Frank was composing and recording music, unions had been making his life a living hell. Union representatives for stagehands would threaten to prevent any recording equipment from being switched on until a series of expensive special union fees were met by Zappa. “I have experienced situations in which union stagehands were paid astonishing amounts of money for doing nothing. In some instances, they actually degraded the quality of the live shows they were hired to work on.” The methods that union reps operated on, Zappa said, boarded on “extortion, subjecting touring groups to interpretations of regulations that border on science fiction.”
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