Sunburst Zappa

Our school colors were red and white. Our cars were blue, red and cream-colored. We lived in rural Wisconsin, which alternated between green and white. From the moment the spotlight illuminated Frank Zappa on Nov. 16, 1980 my favorite color has been purple.

Standing just a few feet from me on stage at the Dane County Coliseum, he was a brilliant force of conflicting colors, all of them wild and somehow perfect. He had shiny purple pants, a blue T-shirt and a faded purple bathrobe with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He wore brown suede saddle shoes and the guitar he held was a Gibson Les Paul Sunburst, named so for the color that swatches from bright yellow in the center to the orange and red on the edges. Zappa entered the stage from the left, and only walked a couple of feet before he started playing, looking down at the guitar all the while. He hadn’t said anything or acknowledged the applause. He looked all business, there in his purple mess, and hit the strings with a distorted whistle that pierced the night like, no lie, an electric sunburst. As he stood surprisingly stiff, save for his head bobbing in arrhythmic fits, his hands continued in flurries of impossible, illogical runs while the drummer filled space with equally un-findable rhythms and the bass player noodled high up the neck. Any one of these guys would be a show unto themselves, and here they were mere backup to this guitar player from another land where the national anthem is in some complex, dissonant key. Just as this vamp-jam got to a frenzied point of no return, the band – on some unseen cue – crashed down on two power chords. This unveiled the tune – it was Chunga’s Revenge, the instrumental title track from an obscure album I found that summer. It seemed generous of Zappa to open with it, to allow me to recognize it. It was just one song into the night, and I was now someone who could identify an instrumental based on two chords emerging from what, to the naked ear, had to be improvisational randomness.

I was an authority on something.