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Throughout his life, Zappa's music was both eclectic and uneven. At his worst he could be amateurish, as in the early Return of the Son of Monster Magnet. On guitar Zappa was no Eric Clapton, and as a band the Mothers were no match for Lou Reed's raw Velvet Underground, with whom they shared an in-your- face aesthetic that guaranteed zero radio play. At his best, however, Zappa fused two seemingly irreconcilable 20th century musical strains; his masterpiece, Absolutely Free (1967), is a dazzling merger of Stravinsky and Varese with rock and rhythm and blues. Who else would have thought to counterpoint the Berceuse from Stravinsky's Firebird with the doo-wop of Duke of Earl on a song called The Duke of Prunes? To quote The Rite of Spring and Petrouchka as a prelude to some of the hardest-charging, straight-ahead rock of the era? To use Varese's musique concrete, which alters conventionally produced sounds to create an electronic effect, in a paean to rock-groupie archetype Suzy Creamcheese?
His post-Mothers work, including Lumpy Gravy (1967), which Zappa called a "curiously inconsistent piece which started out to be a ballet but probably didn't make it," never quite reached the same freewheeling, free- associating level, although it became more ambitious and technically accomplished. In such works as The Yellow Shark, a 90-minute program of his instrumental music performed last year in Europe, his natural predilections for spiky, dissonant sonorities and unusual sound effects were fully in evidence, exemplifying his Cage-like motto of AAAFNRAA -- "Anything anytime anyplace for no reason at all."
By the end of his life, Zappa had all but abandoned rock; the '60s icon who had posed sitting naked on a toilet for a poster called Phi Zappa Krappa was instead encouraging young audiences to register to vote and battling censorship of rock lyrics. After cancer was diagnosed in 1990, he worked 14 hours a day in his home studio in the Hollywood Hills, composing a musical called Thing-Fish and contemplating an opera. With Suzy Creamcheese finally grown up, Zappa dropped the entertainer's mask, revealing the face of the artist beneath. "My music," he said, "makes the mind think."