"Stone age love and strange sounds too,
Come on baby let me get to you
Bad nights causin' teenage blues,
Get down ladies you've got nothing to lose"
The Runaways - Cherry Bomb
This week, I watched a documentary on Zappa and the Mothers of Invention with my dad. While at first, it wasn't really anything I hadn't already seen in class (him playing the bicycle, for instance, was in the movie), I ended up learning a few things from this.
1: I hate Kim Fowley, a lot. I first encountered him in the movie The Runaways and the book Neon Angel by Cherie Currie, and immediately disliked him. He's described as being a pig and just generally a bad person. I shouldn't judge a person based on just someone else's account of who he is and what he's done (I obviously don't know him in person). However, everything I've been taught about this man was bad, so finally putting a face to the name didn't help matters.
2: Wild Man Fisher is awesome. There was a clip of him on Laugh In (I think, anyways) just... making weird noises and moving his hands around a lot. It was really interesting to watch. He really does have a lot of talent, in my opinion - it's just not the kind of talent you would hear in the mainstream. I'll definitely be looking up more of his music and performances.
3) The way Zappa broke up the Mothers wasn't very nice. He took the whole band by surprise, from what they say, and just let them go. I understand he wanted to move on as a musician, and make different music with different people, but the way he actually did it just seemed so... brutal.
The documentary as a whole was pretty interesting. I did learn more about Zappa's beginnings than I did in the class, and saw the history of the first incarnation of the Mothers, which we haven't covered in class yet.
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