Posted on 10/07/2015 9:56:09 PM PDT by dayglored
Gail Zappa, wife of Frank Zappa and executrix of the Zappa Family Trust, has died. She was 70. A cause of death has not been revealed, though TMZ reported she had had a long battle with lung cancer. Zappa, "departed this earth peacefully at her home ... surrounded by her children," according to a statement from the Zappa Family Trust.
"Gail will forever be identified as a key figure in the creative renaissance that is Laurel Canyon," the statement says. "But more than any singular accomplishment, she defined herself in her personal relationships, happiest when surrounded by loved ones and artists, often one in the same. The memories she leaves behind are indeed her own art form. Her searing intelligence, unforgettable smile, wild thicket of hair and trailing black velvets leave a blur in her wake."
After her prolific husband died of prostate cancer in 1993, Gail kept Frank's recordings in the public, putting out dozens of posthumous albums and judiciously licensing his image where appropriate. Earlier this year, the Zappa family announced that the couple's son Ahmet would be in charge of the Trust.
Gail, whose full maiden name was Adelaide Gail Sloatman, was born on January 1st, 1945, the daughter of a nuclear weapons research physicist with the U.S. Navy, according to Zappa biographer Barry Miles. She lived with her family in London as a teenager and got a job as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development rather than attend college....
(Excerpt) Read more at rollingstone.com ...
Oh, I know -- I grew up with Freak Out!, any my high-school garage band covered songs from that album, We're Only In It For The Money, and Lumpy Gravy. I knew all the lyrics by heart, and played lead guitar -- not as good as Frank of course, but good enough for my suburban high school dances. We blew a lot of minds. :-)
RIP.
She was beautiful. I love bangs on girls.
Kick off your high heel sneakers it’s party time.....
Dweezil’s done his dad proud at that concert!
I miss Zappa - he died way too young.
Thanks for posting this everyone.
I think I probably still know all of the old stuff lyrics by heart, could probably sing them in my sleep. No other artist has ever influenced me and my music more than Zappa. That’s really really cool that you were in a band that could cover them. I’m a pro bassist and lifetime guitarist and singer but finding players that understand Zappa and Beefheart I’ve found impossible.
Yes, Zappa propositioned his secretary (who later wrote a book about him) even as he had a wife and kid at home.
But apparently he drew the line at hard drugs.
“Zappa was a sexual libertarian and enthusiastic celebrant of “groupie culture”
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/oct/03/frank-zappa-women
Hard to say.
But whatever she thought about that, she obviously adored him and respected his musicianship more than anyone can know. She devoted the rest of her life after he died to bringing his previously unreleased material to the public. A monumental undertaking.
After setting up the Zappa Family Trust, Gail issued 38 albums between 1994 and 2015 of previously unreleased music that Frank had recorded. This year's Dance Me This was billed as Frank's final album and is significant for being his 100th record.The above is why we celebrate Gail and mourn her passing. We have her to thank for an amazing collection of great music like nothing else on Earth.Gail spoke with Rolling Stone in August about a documentary that filmmaker Alex Winter is making about Frank's life. "My obligation was to get the work out there the way Frank built it in the first place," she said of her role after his death.
She also shared what she hoped the documentary, due sometime in 2017, would explain. "If I was gonna have to do this myself, I would want the question answered: 'Why the f**k would anyone want to be a composer?'" she said. "I know the answer to that, because I lived it. I just want it revealed."
Don’t forget Diva and Ahmet, the other two.
Mud Sharks for sure!
I know it was the “look”, but she did not look very healthy even back then. Probably a life long heavy smoker.
With a tiny little mustache
Cathalic Girls
Do you know how they go?...............
Speaking of Frank Zappa -
Long time LA friends told me of interesting lore claiming many 1960’s Hippie musicians (such as Frank Zappa) came from Laurel Canyon, and happened to have parents who had high profile jobs in the military.
Never quite knew what to make of that. However Frank had gone into great detail about what he knew about the Illuminate.
Would of loved to see him live. I liked his later stuff too, ie: Disco Boy, Flakes, Gobblin girl, and Foxhole.
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr93.html
Inside LC part 1 excerpt -
An uncanny number of rock music superstars will emerge from Laurel Canyon beginning in the mid-1960s and carrying through the decade of the 1970s. The first to drop an album will be The Byrds, whose biggest star will prove to be David Crosby. The band’s debut effort, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” will be released on the Summer Solstice of 1965. It will quickly be followed by releases from the John Phillips-led Mamas and the Papas (“If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears,” January 1966), Love with Arthur Lee (“Love,” May 1966), Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (“Freak Out,” June 1966), Buffalo Springfield, featuring Stephen Stills and Neil Young (“Buffalo Springfield,” October 1966), and The Doors (“The Doors,” January 1967).
One of the earliest on the Laurel Canyon/Sunset Strip scene is Jim Morrison, the enigmatic lead singer of The Doors. Jim will quickly become one of the most iconic, controversial, critically acclaimed, and influential figures to take up residence in Laurel Canyon. Curiously enough though, the self-proclaimed “Lizard King” has another claim to fame as well, albeit one that none of his numerous chroniclers will feel is of much relevance to his career and possible untimely death: he is the son, as it turns out, of the aforementioned Admiral George Stephen Morrison.
And so it is that, even while the father is actively conspiring to fabricate an incident that will be used to massively accelerate an illegal war, the son is positioning himself to become an icon of the ‘hippie’/anti-war crowd. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. It is, you know, a small world and all that. And it is not as if Jim Morrison’s story is in any way unique.
During the early years of its heyday, Laurel Canyon’s father figure is the rather eccentric personality known as Frank Zappa. Though he and his various Mothers of Invention line-ups will never attain the commercial success of the band headed by the admiral’s son, Frank will be a hugely influential figure among his contemporaries. Ensconced in an abode dubbed the ‘Log Cabin’ – which sat right in the heart of Laurel Canyon, at the crossroads of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue – Zappa will play host to virtually every musician who passes through the canyon in the mid- to late-1960s. He will also discover and sign numerous acts to his various Laurel Canyon-based record labels. Many of these acts will be rather bizarre and somewhat obscure characters (think Captain Beefheart and Larry “Wild Man” Fischer), but some of them, such as psychedelic rocker cum shock-rocker Alice Cooper, will go on to superstardom.
Zappa, along with certain members of his sizable entourage (the ‘Log Cabin’ was run as an early commune, with numerous hangers-on occupying various rooms in the main house and the guest house, as well as in the peculiar caves and tunnels lacing the grounds of the home; far from the quaint homestead the name seems to imply, by the way, the ‘Log Cabin’ was a cavernous five-level home that featured a 2,000+ square-foot living room with three massive chandeliers and an enormous floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace), will also be instrumental in introducing the look and attitude that will define the ‘hippie’ counterculture (although the Zappa crew preferred the label ‘Freak’). Nevertheless, Zappa (born, curiously enough, on the Winter Solstice of 1940) never really made a secret of the fact that he had nothing but contempt for the ‘hippie’ culture that he helped create and that he surrounded himself with.
Given that Zappa was, by numerous accounts, a rigidly authoritarian control-freak and a supporter of U.S. military actions in Southeast Asia, it is perhaps not surprising that he would not feel a kinship with the youth movement that he helped nurture. And it is probably safe to say that Frank’s dad also had little regard for the youth culture of the 1960s, given that Francis Zappa was, in case you were wondering, a chemical warfare specialist assigned to – where else? – the Edgewood Arsenal. Edgewood is, of course, the longtime home of America’s chemical warfare program, as well as a facility frequently cited as being deeply enmeshed in MK-ULTRA operations. Curiously enough, Frank Zappa literally grew up at the Edgewood Arsenal, having lived the first seven years of his life in military housing on the grounds of the facility. The family later moved to Lancaster, California, near Edwards Air Force Base, where Francis Zappa continued to busy himself with doing classified work for the military/intelligence complex. His son, meanwhile, prepped himself to become an icon of the peace & love crowd. Again, nothing unusual about that, I suppose.
Zappa’s manager, by the way, is a shadowy character by the name of Herb Cohen, who had come out to L.A. from the Bronx with his brother Mutt just before the music and club scene began heating up. Cohen, a former U.S. Marine, had spent a few years traveling the world before his arrival on the Laurel Canyon scene. Those travels, curiously, had taken him to the Congo in 1961, at the very time that leftist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was being tortured and killed by our very own CIA. Not to worry though; according to one of Zappa’s biographers, Cohen wasn’t in the Congo on some kind of nefarious intelligence mission. No, he was there, believe it or not, to supply arms to Lumumba “in defiance of the CIA.” Because, you know, that is the kind of thing that globetrotting ex-Marines did in those days (as we’ll see soon enough when we take a look at another Laurel Canyon luminary).
Making up the other half of Laurel Canyon’s First Family is Frank’s wife, Gail Zappa, known formerly as Adelaide Sloatman. Gail hails from a long line of career Naval officers, including her father, who spent his life working on classified nuclear weapons research for the U.S. Navy. Gail herself had once worked as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development (she also once told an interviewer that she had “heard voices all [her] life”). Many years before their nearly simultaneous arrival in Laurel Canyon, Gail had attended a Naval kindergarten with “Mr. Mojo Risin’” himself, Jim Morrison (it is claimed that, as children, Gail once hit Jim over the head with a hammer). The very same Jim Morrison had later attended the same Alexandria, Virginia high school as two other future Laurel Canyon luminaries – John Phillips and Cass Elliott.
RIP, agreed.
That's true for me as well.
I'm amazed my parents put up with that band for so long. They were mystified about what I and the other guys were doing down in the basement making these weird noises in between the surf tunes, Hendrix, Yardbirds, Airplane... My Dad had a clue because he was a 50's jazz fan...
Back then I played an early 60's Gibson Melody Maker customized to within an inch of its life, later a '63 SG which I still pull out at times, though most of my performing and recording these days is on a triple-pickup Black Beauty Les Paul Custom.
I play keys and bass in addition to guitar, so after high school (where I played mainly guitar) I had the opportunity to rediscover a number of these tunes playing keys (mainly Fender Rhodes piano and early monophonic synths) in a jazz lounge band. We snuck in Zappa material whenever we could get a chance, typically towards the end of the evening when the management had faded out. :-)
“The warm-up band was Sha-Na-Na. It was the most memorable show I’ve ever seen.”
Truly those were the days.
Very good reading you man. Cheers!
Long live Zappa
Frank was a friend. Never met Gsil, but she called me every time Frank was playing anywhere nearby. Always had stage passes. She seemed to be very nice. I am grieving!
Frank Zappa taught me one life lesson I will never forget, watch out where the Huskies go...
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