(Credits: Bent Rej)
Thu 9 October 2025 21:30, UK
Frank Zappa wasn’t too fond of the British, but that’s alright. He wasn’t fond of much… Americans included.
Besides, he had good reason to be jealous of some of his peers from across the pond. As his PA, Pauline Butcher, would later explain, “He worked out he wasn’t a pretty boy like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. He didn’t play their kind of music, he didn’t even like it, and if he was going to get himself heard, he was going to have to do something radically different.”
Thus, he had to take matters into his hands and highlight himself in other ways, as Butcher noted, “He went out of his way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in women’s clothes. All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.”
But he found that these British bastards were even capable of outrage, too. While The Rolling Stones’ hubbub might not have been of the absurdist, sardonic variety for which Zappa was famed, they were certainly capable of making conservative folks squirm.
He also began to foster a degree of begrudging respect for them, and while resigned to a peak position of the nth on the Billboard charts, he reconciled that he would be a quirky cult hit capable of poking fun at the mainstream from afar. Meanwhile, the Stones were more than welcome to sales of 250 million so long as he could also laugh at the sordid shoddiness of the shitty little effort, Dirty Work.
Alas, when they were at their best, they had something that hardly anyone could compete with. With a rawness and rumbling spirit, they could very casually happen upon rare sounds that electrified the masses. Hell, Keith Richards came up with ‘Satisfaction’ quite literally in his sleep, and while it might be a Motown rip-off, it might also be one of the most recognisable riffs ever written.
However, it was a subtle bassline that pricked Zappa’s ears instead. While spinning his 30 favourite songs on BBC Radio 1, the moustachioed maestro commented that ‘Paint it Black’ was a masterpiece of a rare order. “You know what’s really good about that record? Is the way the bass part is there and then where he’s going ‘wooom, wooom’ like that, that’s really exhilarating, it’s probably the…one of the finest things that’s ever happened in British rock. Don’t you think?”
Such a specific analysis is perfectly indicative of the way that Zappa saw music. While most folks would focus on the washboard rhythm or the general foreboding oeuvre of the track, he was busy poking beyond the surface and sampling the bass. That’s what made him brilliant, but I suppose it’s also what made him a cult hit rather than the king of the charts.
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