Frank Zappa to Jack Kirby: "I Could Have Scored 'Star Wars'!"
Hoodoo
By Gustavo Turner in B-Side Stories, LA Stories
Mon., Dec. 7 2009 @ 2:30PM
http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/la-stories/frank-zappa-star-wars-jack-kir/
The current issue of visually spiffy pop culture magazine Royal Flush
has a really interesting interview with Ahmet Zappa, where he reveals
details of his dad Frank's surprising friendship with legendary comics
maverick Jack Kirby. (Yes, the LA Times blogged about this a month ago,
but bear with us.)
http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/zappakirby.jpg
Photo dug up by Jeff Newelt for Royal Flush magazine
Holy Super(cultural) Hero Team-Up!: When Zappa met Kirby
There are many touching anecdotes about the two pain-in-the-ass
countercultural geniuses sitting around and shooting the shit. Kirby and
Zappa had much in common: sharp wit, savant-level technical chops in
their respective fields, a lingering desire to stick it to The Man
(particularly anything smacking of corporate hivemind or "conformity"),
and, of course, a severe addiction to tobacco products.
But the most surprising revelation from the Royal Flush interview,
buried in Jeff Newelt's entertaining article, is what Ahmet remembers
his dad telling Kirby about Star Wars (for you young ones: Star Wars was
the Twilight of the 1970s, except far more sexually explicit):
[One of their meetings] was around the time [The Empire Strikes
Back] came out and was HUGE [1981 -ed.], and I remember Jack confided in
Frank that he felt like the stories he created helped shape the Star
Wars saga, that he saw direct parallels between his characters and the
movie's story arcs."
Of all rock stars in the world, Zappa, famously an outspoken
champion of free speech and artist's rights, was the ultimate
sympathetic ear.
"He told my dad stuff like, 'Darth Vader was Doctor Doom and the
Force is the Source' and that George Lucas ripped him off. Now this you
may not know, and I was only a kid, but I remember learning at the
dinner table that my dad was asked to write the music for Star Wars; he
turned it down, he said he wasn't interested. That would've been really
strange, the lives of us Star Wars fans woulda taken a different turn
and that whole score woulda sounded like Tatooine Cantina music."
Indeed. Can you imagine a parallel dimension in which John Williams
would have moved on straight to Christopher Reeves' Superman and the
Star Wars score would have sounded like Hot Rats? Who knows--maybe
without the neo-Fascist, populist marches that imprinted entire
generations back in 1977 Reagan might have not gotten elected, GW Bush
would have proven a not-thicker-than-par MLB manager, and Palin would be
just an annoyingly sexy homemaker in Alaska.
Damn you, Frank Zappa! You and your "integrity"!
--
"Think with your dipstick, Jimmy."