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Frank Zappa

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, December 21, 1940, to Francis Zappa (Greek and
Lebanese descent) and Rose Marie Colimore (Italian and French), Frank Zappa
was the oldest of four children of two brothers and a sister. His family
eventually moved to the West Coast due to Frank's asthma problem. They
settled in Monterey, California, then moved again to Pomona, El Cajon, and

then finally to San Diego. During his early childhood his father was a
chemist and mathematician working for Edgewood Arsenal chemical warfare
facility at nearby Aberdeen Proving Ground. Since they lived so close his
father kept gas masks on hand in case of an incident which resulted in
Zappa's references to germs and germ warfare in his music. Around 1955 the
family had moved again - this time to Lancaster (a small aerospace and
farming town near LA) in the Antelope Valley of the Mojave Desert. By the
time he was fifteen he had attended six different high schools. In
Lancaster he had access to much of nearby Los Angeles and had his own
Saturday night show on KSPC 88.7 FM in Claremont. Zappa developed a sinus
problem during his early teens, and his doctor treated it by inserting a
pellet of radium on a probe into each of his nostrils. As a student he
would become bored in class and distract his fellow classmates. He left
community college after one semester to make low budget movies. He took
his children out of school at their age of fifteen and refused to pay for
them to go to college. He himself however was highly intelligent. From
the beginning he was interested in sounds for their own sake. For example,
at the age of thirteen he began playing drums, taking lessons at school in
the summer of 1953, but was told he played the cymbals too much. Then he
switched over to playing guitar, which he quickly mastered. In 1956 he met
Don Van Vliet (best known by his stage name "Captain Beefheart") while
taking classes at Antelope Valley High School. By his final year in high
school he had composed, arranged and conducted a performance piece for his
high school orchestra. After graduating in 1958 he worked for a little
while in advertising. From what he learned there he applied towards
deconstruct music, the music business, the media and society at large to
combine them with the ideas he had gleaned from his studies of Dada,
situationism, and surrealism. Zappa frequently referenced his advertising
industry experiences in his lyrics. In 1959 he then moved into Los Angeles
where he would spend the remainder of his life. He married

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