Frank Zappa in CommitteeMaimon Schwarzschild

Congressional committee hearings don’t usually deliver high comedy.  But sometimes they do.

In September 1985, Frank Zappa testified before the Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation Committee, attacking the Parents Music Resource Center, which was either a music censorship group or a watchdog group, depending upon whom you were listening to at the time.  The PMRC was founded by then-Senator Al Gore’s wife Tipper Gore, and its members included many other political wives, including Mrs James Baker and the wives of five members of the Senate committee.  Zappa opened gently:

The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years, dealing with the interpretational and enforcemental problems inherent in the proposal’s design. 

It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment Issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC’s demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation.

But Zappa warms up as he goes along.  Read the whole thing.  It will brighten your day.

Adding to the comedy, Senator Gore claimed to be a “fan” of Zappa’s music.  And Slade Gordon made it clear that he wasn’t:

Mr. Zappa, I am astounded at the courtesy and soft-voiced nature of the comments of my friend, the Senator from Tennessee. I can only say that I found your statement to be boorish, incredibly and insensitively insulting to the people that were here previously; that you could manage to give the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States a bad name, if I felt that you had the slightest understanding of it, which I do not.

Zappa was a musical phenomenon, from his days with the Mothers of Invention in the 1960s till his death (from cancer) in 1993.  As a fifteen year old kid, I once wandered into a Mothers concert in Greenwhich Village, and it came across clearly even to me that This Was Something Different.  Zappa was very smart, exceedingly rebarbative, and conveyed utter disdain for the idiocy that he obviously felt was all about.  Zappa had an enormous dissident following in Communist Europe, and Vaclav Havel admired him so much that he appointed Zappa an honorary Czech diplomatic representative in the early 90s.

The appointment had to be withdrawn, however.  Zappa had referred to the PMRC ladies, including Mrs Baker, as “bored housewives”.  James Baker doesn’t seem to have forgiven or forgotten.  Now Secretary of State in the 90s, Baker made it clear to Havel that Zappa’s appointment would not be good for Czech relations with the United States.

Or perhaps Baker thought Zappa was Jewish?