Zappa Book

UK writer Barry Miles has a made a career writing solid biographies and histories on counterculture topics, mainly key figures of the Beat movement. Frank Zappa, the subject of a 2003 biography, is a less likely candidate for the Miles treatment than he might appear: A wildly creative middle-class overachiever who shunned drugs and lacked self-destructive demons, his darkly satirical albums ridiculed hippie culture as well as the conservative "silent majority" of the 1960s. Zappa was a genius workaholic rather than an icon of rebellious cool.

Miles' "Zappa" meets serviceable, baseline standards for a biography. Supercharged with documented, granular detail, it strolls from chronological point to point with minimal narrative verve. The topic itself generates inherent interest, even during the long march up to Zappa's Mothers of Invention period, where Miles (or rather his drab surfeit of information) paints an evocative portrait of the west coast's cottage recording industry of the early 60s.

Miles is less deft with analysis than documented facts and makes numerous strained attempts to squeeze psychological revelation from biographical scraps. He opens with a lengthy anecdote of a 1965 incident where Zappa is arrested in a near-comic pornography sting, after making a faked audio sex tape for an informant. He served 10 days in jail, which Miles trumpets as a personal Rubicon where Zappa's trust of American values supposedly evaporated. This event looms large enough in Miles' amateur psychodrama to appear later in its chronological place, re-told in almost identical language, restating its naive thesis with equal conviction.

Miles also quotes Frank Zappa's autobiography so liberally that one questions the value of digesting mediated information. That work is "The Real Frank Zappa Book" (1990), less a pure autobiography than a curated memoir where Zappa selectively holds forth on a range of topics in his own brilliant, inimitable voice. There are no longeurs and no psychobabble. That book is the place to start.