Zappa on a pole

If you wanted a wonderfully freaky name for a musical genius you could hardly do better than the one bestowed by Francis and Rosie Zappa upon their son, born four days before Christmas 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland. And if you were a proud and freedom loving people eager to shake off decades of political oppression, and wanting to symbolise imagination, creativity and – indeed – freedom, one unlikely yet accurate choice you might make for that representation, would be the very same - Frank Vincent Zappa.

 

In 1990, Frank Zappa, soon to be diagnosed with prostate cancer, was in Hungary at the invitation of the mayor of Budapest, Gabor Demszky, celebrating the demise of communism in Eastern Europe. On 29th June, Frank, his wife Gail, Demszky, and Arunas Toras, were enjoying a cruise on the Danube. Toras was the mayor of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. I’m not sure what the specific personal connection was, but evidently Zappa’s music was popular in Lithuania, a country which did not achieve independence from Soviet domination until January 1991. Four years after that (and two years after Zappa’s death on 6th December 1993), a small memorial to the musician was erected in a slightly scruffy square on the west side of the Vilnius city centre. Designed by Konstantinas Bogdanas, who had made something of a career out of creating busts of Lenin, it isn’t an obvious likeness of Zappa, but all the same I was pleased to see it on my visit there last week, tangible evidence as it is of a mildly wacky and anarchic streak in Lithuanian life. Given the constant threat from the east, long may that streak continue and evolve.