Zappa Made Us Famous, and Vice Versa

Many years ago, to the delight of the Mike Glickmans of the day, Bing Crosby immortalized this plum piece of real estate in song.

I’m gonna settle down and never more roam, he crooned. And make the San Fernando Valley my home . . . .

A generation later, it was Frank Zappa, with help from his daughter Moon Unit, who would immortalize something else about the Valley.

Like omigod like totally Encino is like so bitchen. There’s like the Galleria and like all those like really great shoe stores . . . . I like buy the neatest miniskirts and stuff. It’s so bitchen . . . .

Sound familiar? Grody to the max, right? Whereas Bing sang of the promise of suburban life, Frank Zappa savaged the crass reality. “Valley Girl,” released in 1982, defined these parts as the archetypal home to an archetypal breed of shallow teen-ager with a language all its own. The temptation is to write “Gag me with a stereotype”--but the simple fact is the Valley Girl really did exist, and still does, and not merely in the Valley. They’re, like, everywhere.

But if Francis Vincent Zappa, the composer and social critic who died earlier this month of prostate cancer at age 52, succeeded in satirizing the Valley, it came with a price. The Valley exacted its revenge. What goes around, it is said, comes around.

One can only presume that Frank Zappa would appreciate the irony. Devotees of modern orchestral music knew Zappa, for all his comic inclinations, to be a composer of the first rank. Yet popular culture--and thus, the newspaper obituaries--were more apt to give prominent mention to “Valley Girl” and other satirical tunes. As fate would have it, Vanity Fair magazine would crown the Zappas “first family of the Valley” in the month of the patriarch’s death.

Never mind that the Zappa residence is in the hills above Laurel Canyon, south of Mulholland and thus outside the Valley. The editors of Vanity Fair, a geographically challenged bunch, also divined that the Huntington Library and Old Pasadena are in the San Fernando Valley. But it isn’t residence that identifies the Zappas with the Valley and vice versa. Rather, it’s a testament to the staying power of “Valley Girl.”

It was a brilliant parody, and a commercial smash as well. Some Vals, both here and their spiritual sisters elsewhere, didn’t have a clue. They thought the song was like so bitchen. Even Zappa seemed startled by its popularity.

“It just goes to show that the American public loves to celebrate the infantile,” he once told an interviewer. “I mean, I don’t want people to act like that. I think Valley Girls are disgusting.”

Most of us got the joke. And it was good to see Zappa, a cult figure of the ‘60s and ‘70s, back on the charts. I went through a brief Zappa phase in the mid-1970s, after hearing this lyric: Watch out where the huskies go/Don’t you eat that yellow snow. Somebody had the LP of a live Mothers of Invention performance at Pauley Pavilion. It was nice to find somebody else was amused by the Zachary All commercials (“Eddie, are you kidding?”) and the romantic image of Bob Spreen Cadillac (“where the freeways meet in Downey”). Years would pass before Zappa, who grew up in the Antelope Valley, would be identified with the San Fernando Valley.

The Zappas, it was said, enjoyed the success of “Valley Girl,” but the joke grew tiresome. Recently, I spoke with a friend of a friend who happens to be a friend of the Zappas. The abiding faith is that Frank Zappa will be known to future generations not so much as a prankster but as a dedicated composer of incredible range who left a legacy in jazz and orchestral music with such recordings as “Jazz From Hell,” which won a Grammy in 1986, and “The Yellow Shark,” considered a prime example of his progressive orchestral creations.

The friend also suggested I chat with Nicholas Slonimsky, a 99-year-old composer, conductor and musicologist. Slonimsky, considered a major figure in 20th-Century music, was a fan and friend of Zappa. The younger man tracked Slonimsky down in 1981. Within days, the elderly pianist performed on stage with Zappa at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Slonimsky suggested I quote his lengthy entry on Zappa in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. Here’s part of it:

“An accounting of Zappa’s scatological and sexological proclivities stands in remarkable contrast to his unimpeachable private life and total abstention from alcohol and narcotic drugs. An unexpected reflection of Zappa’s own popularity was the emergence of his adolescent daughter, curiously named Moon Unit, as a voice-over speaker on his Valley Girls, in which she used the vocabulary of growing womanhood of the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles, with such locutions as ‘Grody to the Max’ (repellent) and ‘Barfs Me Out’ (disgusting).”

But it was more intriguing to hear what Slonimsky had to say about the “great consanguinity” between Frank Zappa and the children he named Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva.

I looked it up. Consanguinity refers to a close familial bond--a deep connection. A press release concerning Zappa’s death noted that his children and wife, Gail, were at his side when he “left for his final tour.”

Slonimsky was so favorably impressed by Frank Zappa that Zappa inspired the name of one of his pet cats.

The feline is called Grody to the Max.