It's strange how I can miss someone I never met and wasn't even of my generation, but I miss Zappa. His mind-blowing music, his brilliance and wit in EVERY SINGLE INTERVIEW HE EVER WAS ON, his politeness and stubbornly independent thinking, he was truly a King among men.
I'm amazed at how many reasonably smart people I've met whose heads Zappa goes completely over, even now. That includes a a lot of people who actually like Zappa.
My high school had a groundskeeper whose family lived in a house across the road that the school provided for them. He was a political refugee from the Czech republic and his wife was an American who had met and married him over there. Before they moved to the US they had their first baby, and every time Zappa played they (and a lot of other parents) would take the baby to the front of the crowd and hold her up as close to Zappa as they could, like he was some kind of old-world Catholic saint - that's how much of a hero he was in that country at the time. They managed to do it four or five times before they left. Seems completely reasonable to me.
Actually, that guy's brother lived in LA and was an ironsmith; in the late 80s the Zappas decided that the grates on their central air were ugly and chose him to build them new grates entirely because he was the only Czech ironsmith in the LA phonebook.
Needless to say, Pavel was the coolest adult on campus by far.
I've read The Real Frank Zappa Book cover to cover too many times. In fact, since I'm house sitting for my parents all week, I'm going to go down to their basement right now and see if they still have my old copy of it from high school.
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