Taste is Optional

Larger

Damn I can get serious…time to do some housekeeping, open some windows and lighten this blog up a bit.



Let me talk about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany during WWII if you will permit….Ah ha!


Anyways...


What was your first concert? Mine was Frank Zappa when I was 14. It was a hell of a choice for a first concert I can tell you.


My brother was an avid guitar player most of his life. He brought home albums just to learn the licks and riffs of various rock guitarists and I got to hear some pretty strange music. One day when I was 10 years old he brought home an album called Zoot Allures (translation from French: “Damn It”) by Zappa. The album art on it was this dark looking hippy in white slacks with an obvious hard on, with two other women band members sitting nearby. I was thinking to myself, “What the hell is this?”


My brother put the record on the player and I heard this god awful shit coming from his speakers. There was little harmony and the music went every place no notes should bother to go. I watched my brother bitching to himself trying to keep up with Zappa’s guitar work. I left to go outside.


My brother had a decent stereo system at the time and a huge pile of records to listen to. I would paw through his stacks and pull out what I wanted to listen to. Lynard Skynard, Led Zeppelin, Springsteen and the Alman Brothers were just a tiny fraction of music he owned and could choose from. I would love to play anything new he bought but that Zappa album wasn’t one of them.


If you ever came by my house in the 70’s, chances were very high you always heard music playing and my brother playing along to it. You’d either notice the music as background or you would listen to a particular song you liked. I did that with all the selections he’d play.


He kept playing that Zoot Allures album and I became used to it as background music. But, after two months or so, I started liking it. Soon I was pulling it out to play. It grew on me, this weird music. As the years went by, he bought another 10 to 20 Zappa records to learn from and I listened to them all.


One day in ’79 he had told me he had bought four tickets to a Zappa concert at the Providence Civic Center and would I want to go? Hell yes!


I never saw a collection of potheads, freaks, hippies and various other creatures collected in an area like the civic center before in my life. And to top it all off, I was probably the youngest one there as the rest of them seemed all adults to me. Too cool!


So, I will need to add to this story. I was at that time a pothead as well. My brother was the one who introduced me to it. My brother, Tom, Jack and I were sitting in the arena, smoking joint after joint when you could do that w/o the Providence detectives sneaking around the arena like they do today. By the time the lights went down I was fried.


The lights opened up and there he was, in person, the real Frank Zappa. The color of the lights and the loud music thumping off my chest was wonderful! I knew all of the songs he played in the first set and it was amazing as first concerts always are. When the first set was over, the main lights came up and I was shocked to see this pall of marijuana smoke drifting around the arena. I’m not kidding folks, it looked like fog inside that building. But again, this was 1979 when AIDS didn’t exist, cocaine wasn’t supposed to be addictive and things generally were a bit more relaxed.


After the concert, we ended up at a Sambo’s restaurant. Remember Sambo’s? It was pretty decent burger and fries place and it was the only thing open in Pawtucket at that late hour anyway. I can remember taking over and over again with my brother about what I had seen, the excitement and actually being within 50 feet of Zappa.


The next day was a school day and I told everyone what I had seen. It was met with a “Who’s Frank Zappa?” Ah well, I would’ve said that too if my brother wasn’t an ardent player trying to find the most difficult pieces to play.


God I have great long term memory, short term is another matter! I know what I was wearing at that concert too. I had a two tone denim cowboy looking collared shirt, Disco opened mind you (top two buttons remained unbuttoned), a pair of ratty Levis jeans and those Jox sneakers that were popular back then. It was a typical fashion un-statement from a young teen boy.