ZAPPA THE MAN:

    Frank Zappa’s background is from Italy; he was the first generation of his family to be born in the United States. As a kid, Zappa experienced many health problems. He was the kind of kid that would get sick very often and stayed in bed. Although, Zappa would be reading or playing in his house with the chemical instruments that his father had or listen to music since an early age. In his teenage years, Zappa was seeing as the clown of the class for his unusual and strange ideas.  Besides that, in his last high school years, Zappa would be composing and conducting pieces for the school orchestra. After finishing high school, Zappa moved out from his parents’ house and met Kathryn Sherman and got married in December of 1960. 

   Throughout the early 1960s, Zappa worked with different local artists composing and recording songs. During this period Zappa’s marriage ended and he moved to Cucamonga where he started to record in the renamed "Studio Z". Although in this studio Zappa did not created a lot of recordings, it became famous after the incident of the fake erotic tape where Zappa was arrested and stayed in jail for six months. Consequently, all these experiences and knowledge that Zappa gain through his life were the result of all his work throughout his career. He had a defined and creative vision and interest to generate music with the philosophy of improving American musical knowledge and also to incorporate social and political manners. Zappa had always an unusual and innovative way to think and express himself, so he wanted to communicate all his ideas through his music and art.

ZAPPA THE ENTREPRENEUR:

Zappa was always very consistent in his work and throughout his entire career. He would always tried to make a balance between his art and the commerce part of it. Since the beginning of his career, Zappa had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve and he took the leadership of the band to manage the production of the music and also the business.Zappa had the vision of produce music to create and expand a superior musical taste between young people, but he would also be focus in the business of it. Zappa would explain that he wanted to become famous to of course be able to survive as a musician but also to be able to infiltrate in different ways with his music. 

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So in order to become recognized in the musical industry, Zappa knew that he had to sign contracts with music recording companies. Of course this would produce some conflicts with Zappa’s work since many of his songs have explicit lyrics, but this would not stop him. He signed a series of different contracts with different music recording companies, where they always limited and controlled many of the original recordings of Zappa. On the other hand, most of the contracts that Zappa did during his career helped the band and Zappa to be recognized and to be able to go on tour and travel around the world. All of this was mainly generated by Zappa’s constant work and effort along with their manager Herb Cohen. After several contracts and the absence of labels that would record Zappa’s music, in 1973 Zappa and Cohen decided to create DiscReet Records, which was distributed by Warner Bros. Although, in 1976 the relationship of Zappa and Cohen finished because of different conflicts produced by the rights of the DiscReet Records label. In consequence, Zappa would have a period where he would not be able to release and have access to his own material, but eventually this would finish in the mid 1970s.