Sideways Encino Housewife Maneuver
This is Frank and Moon Zappa appearing on David Letterman's show in October of 1982...If I'm not mistaken, this is Zappa's first appearance on Letterman's show, and there seems to be an awkwardness between them that never goes away, even in two or three subsequent visits over the next few years...It would appear that Letterman doesn't quite know what to make of Zappa, how to approach him, what questions to ask...
This probably has alot to do with the fact that Frank was never a very good talkshow guest. He's simply too brusque, and I use that word pretty deliberately because it seems he has noticable disdain for the talkshow format in general, if not Letterman in particular...I guess this is just an extension, a dimension of his general dislike for much of the showbiz industry...
And yet, in the end, it's a pretty good segment...Moon definitely shines, and had me almost rolling on the floor with her comment about wanting to be in an Encino housewife...
Hotcha! Hank
Labels: Letterman, Sideways Maneuver, TV, video, YouTube, zappa
posted by Hank Mohaski at 6:01 PM
1 Comments:
I definitely agree with brusque...and it had to be a very wearing process when you're asked the same old questions again and again. The thing is, the more I venture outside of his world, the more I start to see a severely wounded individual.
I don't have to explain my love for FZ to you, of all people. The man's voice (both literal and musical) has been branded upon my brain since inception. However, as I get older the stiffness he exudes sorta defies and (to me) defiles the legend.
Here he kindly allows his daughter to outshine him and rightly so. Maybe I'm looking too deeply into it as a result of some of the things she's said and written since, but his performance tastes a bit like all of those on-stage instrumental extravaganzas later in his career wherein he'd simply smoke a cigarette and wave the baton.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, especially when you've got a bunch of suicide chumps making scale in the shadow of your mustache and they're learning how to grow a chin at the same time. Where the fuck am I going with this?
Maybe here: He could've used a few beers with Lonesome Cowboy Burt...just to take the edge off. Drawing all of those dots for all of those years smells like a type of avoidance to me. As if all he really wanted was those plastic people out there to accept him as one of the guys...despite the lumpy gravy.
What he never realized was that all he had to do was loosen up and buy a couple rounds. Maybe over-tip and play a few hands of Uno with the help.
Then again, if he did that he might be Tom Petty. Does this make any sense at all?
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