About book Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story Of Frank Zappa (2003)
Not just another Zappa biography. A labour of love, and one that needed to be done. Clearly Slaven is not going to do as good a job as Frank Zappa (in the Real Frank Zappa Book), who has an unfair advantage in being able to remember most of this life better than everyone else. However, he does have one advantage over FZ - he can also write about his death, and the impact that that had. The usual cast are there, and the events that surrounded Zappa's life are narrated in good detail.What Slaven also does is to look at all of the albums that Zappa created and evaluate them in their context. Zappa fans, like myself, know that they were much more than 'comedy music', as Amazon.com would have you believe. Zappa was constantly juggling his desire to work as a composer with the need to keep his family in food and clothes, and a working band on the road so that he could develop his craft. Not until he discovered the Synclavier did he find a musician flexbile enough to play it like he wrote it (but I honestly think he still preferred the band because they could not only play the stuff, they could also 'put the eyebrows on it'). Slaven also discusses Zappa's experiments with classically-trained musicians, and we can all rue the fact that he had not met the Ensemble Modern, or something similar, much earlier. I can't say I was surprised or astonished by anything I read here, but the combination of well-written prose and familar subject matter felt very comfortable - reading Electric Don Quixote was not unlike drinking hot chocolate: warming and satisfying, unthreatening and relaxing. Not something you could often say about Zappa's music.
On the whole, some interest in Zappa is probably a pre-req for enjoying this book. The good news is that it is better (and better informative) biography than either The Real Frank Zappa Book — the 'autobiography' which Peter Ochiogrosso assisted Zappa in compiling . . . which, while it has its certain (in Zappa's phrase) 'folkloric' significances, gives the reader to understand that Zappa was prepared to focus for hours getting the music right, but didn't have the patience to apply to 'proper autobiography' (which was probably the right balance of attention for Zappa) — or the Barry Miles bio, which thinly veils the author's hostility to the subject in places (count the times he uses the phrase "Sicilian patriarchal control freak" or its variants — no, really, count 'em).
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In 1982 when my peers were just leaving Two Tone and getting into Duran Duran and the Human League (who aren't half bad BTW) I (somehow) stumbled upon Frank. I think it happened when I was on a rugby tour in Toronto and they took us to a record shop and I bought Live in New York.Well, the lyrics had an instant puerile appeal to a teenage boy but the music was amazing, like nothing I'd heard before.This book is helping me to finally undertstand exactly why I love Frank Zappa and his music. It's because he was his own man and never wavered for a single moment. He managed to make a living without selling out one little bit. Which is an admirable achievement in my eyes.Also, he really didn't give a fuck!The text is very factual with discography (which I actually like) but amongst it are some blinding quotations from the man and those who knew him best. No compromise.
—Jason West
