I’m sitting in my apartment, staring at a picture of Frank Zappa sitting in a wheelchair. The picture must be from 1971 or 1972, close after the accident at the Rainbow Theater in London, when a fan, 24-year-old Trevor Charles Howell (pronounced “howl”), was stricken with jealousy and ran up to the stage, then pushing Zappa down into the orchestra pit, in which he incurred temporarily crippling injuries. Per report, Howell’s girlfriend had issued the statement “I love Frank,” before the incident.
I’m looking at Zappa’s face. It’s hurt, emotionally, of course. More than anything, strangely, it’s disappointed. It’s kind of like how Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is mainly a creation of fear, like gleaning a mass of species with no inner guidance, no purpose, as if the moral sum of a species were spread across a more proliferated being, leaving less cognizant groundwork per individual.
Sure, I wanted to know what the “werewolves of London” looked like. Now, I guess I don’t want to know anymore. I’ve heard Muddy Waters’ bends in “I Feel Like Going Home.” I’ve seen slavery, I’ve heard “Green Sally up,” I’ve heard the epic, timeless moxie of guitars intersecting with drums in modern rock and roll music, and its healing power. And, of course, I’ve heard “Apostrophe” and “Stink-Foot”; two earmarks of some of the most ferocious guitar shredding ever put to wax, also following within five years after the Rainbow incident.
I once got jumped and fu**ed up real bad. I never talk about it. Actually, I never even drink that beer I had the next few nights, which was Yuengling golden pils, and which i even remember as being pretty good. It’s just not anybody’s business. And music is such a great thing because it can foil atrocity — I’m not sure if Zevon was a friend of Zappa’s, and I hardly see that it matters, when we’re glimpsing this aural constellation that the haters thought so surely was Dionysian pomp and circumstance. We were assembling ourselves the entire time, juxtaposed closely with a lower, baser phenomenon, like a backdrop of bloodlusting madness against which to glean a dark truth about ourselves. The details, anyway, seem to speak for themselves, and the conduit between life and death seems pretty clear, at this point.
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