Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

Originally published in Village Voice, 17 February 1988

If I may be so crass as to adjudge a rock icon by his fans, I’d say Frank Zappa might have a demographics problem. Admittedly, the lines to the gentlemen’s lounges were incredibly long last Thursday at the Beacon, where he performed one of his first shows after a four-year never-going-to-tour-again hiatus. But all those greasy dudes whipping out their dicks and pissing into the sinks while discussing Grateful Dead bootlegs made Morton Downey Jr.’s audience look like gene splicers by comparison.

Zappa, in fact, reminded me of a libertarian-Democrat Downey variation himself, mining evangelical right-wing extremism for easy entertainment value. Our “evening with” Frank included politically-flavored comedy pop, a voter-registration drive (”If you don’t register, you can’t vote, and if you don’t vote, democracy doesn’t work”), and two-bit political analysis: “To be honest, ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party today is divided in half. You’ve got the enterprisers on one side and the moralizers on the other side. The enterprisers, they’re okay; it’s those moralizers you’ve got to worry about.”

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