Frank Zappa

On October 16, 2014, we sold the final print of the edition. This work is no longer available from DrewFriedman.net.

Only thirty (30) prints of FRANK ZAPPA were produced for this edition. The image area is approximately 15″ high x 11″ wide, centered on an untrimmed 19″ x 13″ sheet. Each print is signed in the lower right, hand-titled in the center, and numbered in the lower left (all beneath the image).

According to many insiders, Zappa was a fan of Drew Friedman’s work. Here’s a photo of Frank’s studio piano taken in the 1980s. Propped above the keyboard is Friedman’s 1984 book Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental (co-written with his brother, Josh Alan Friedman), featuring Shemp on the cover.

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“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit,” Frank Zappa warned, “then you deserve it.” Zappa was many things, but boring wasn’t on the resume. He was a musical polymath who played, produced, composed, arranged, directed and scored films, designed album covers, spat immortal quips (“Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.”), and elevated potty humor to hip levels. This immensely talented and unapologetically opinionated cultural icon was embraced by hippies despite his disdain for their lifestyles and his penchant for lampooning their naiveté.

Adored by legions of fans, he was disinclined to compromise and veered off in whatever artistic direction fans didn’t expect him to go. His tastes ranged from experimentalists like Edgard Varèse to roadhouse R&B, which led him to produce genre-surfing albums (many as leader of the Mothers of Invention) which careened stylistically from psychedelia to cocktail jazz to musique concrète to parody. In one title he name-checked Eric Dolphy, and composed an orchestral tribute to King Kong. Zappa flirted with mainstream acceptance, and in 1982 became a Top 40 one-hit wonder after collaborating with his teenage daughter Moon Unit on the novelty song “Valley Girl.” Never one to hold his tongue (“There is no hell. There is only France.”), he delighted in offering shock-art, but lived a comparatively conservative life. He worked hard, avoided drugs, stayed married for 26 years, raised four kids, and kept mindful of his business affairs. He was a champion of underdogs, launching two Warner-affiliated labels (Straight and Bizarre) which introduced to the world Alice Cooper, Captain Beefheart, the GTO’s, and Wildman Fischer, while releasing LPs by Tim and Lord Buckley (who shared nothing but a surname).

In the ’70s and ’80s he maneuvered in and out of lawsuits, controversy, multi-media projects, stylistic genres, and label deals. (He started several of his own, including Zappa Records and Barking Pumpkin.) He earned his first Grammy in 1987, for the album Jazz from Hell.

He often quoted Varese’s credo that “the present-day composer refuses to die.” If only that had applied to Zappa, who passed away all too soon at 52 (in 1993). But because his music was never in style, it had no style to go out of, and today retains old admirers while attracting new ones. Mortality brought immortality: posthumous election to Down Beat magazine’s Jazz Hall of Fame and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Five years after his death he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.                  (bio: I.C.)