Only the names have been changed to make us sound like a bike gang. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead, tough shit.

Beware of the Dog Continuity; The Zappa Fan From Hell

Prologue: Marcel Duchamp’s candid confession at the hands of a young Joan Bakewell.

Scene: A TV studio, 1968. Joan Bakewell, the Thinking Man’s Crumpet, is interviewing artist Marcel Duchamp. He is smoking a pipe and looking good.

"Why did you enter a urinal for the Armoury Exhibition in New York in 1917?" asks Bakewell, sitting there all mini-skirted and intellectual.

"I did it to take the piss because I thought art critics were stupid" says Duchamp.

"What were the aesthetic qualities that informed your choice?"

"There were none, it was crap."

"Why did you carry on doing it" asks JB in that haughty manner which sent Thinking Men the length and breadth of the 60’s into paroxysms of desire.

"I thought, if the stupid buggers were going to give money to someone for all this, it might as well be me".

Despite Mr Duchamp’s candid confession at the hands of the probing Joan Bakewell, the art world continues to take his urinals seriously. I think it is the same with Frank Zappa. Perhaps he dreamed up Conceptual Continuity on a whim, to explain his constant re-cycling of material, or as a Duchamp-like gesture to mock such thinking. And like Duchamp, he found that daft buggers were giving him money for it, so he carried on doing it. "Conceptually reduced to the word arf". Can you imagine him saying that seriously? Well some people can. And these people call themselves Zappapologists.

Such Superfans exist in all walks of life. Mayhap the creator made them so that they could do all this unearthly gathering and the rest of us won’t have to. There are even extreme Phil Collins fanatics. These are called "Serial Killers", and the Devil made them.

There are the Bob Dylan fanatics; the "Dylanalists". The collective noun for these is "A Webberman". That fantastic innovation, the Internet, has allowed them to talk on e-mail discussion lists of how "Froggy Went A-Courtin" was about President Clinton, and trying to find a rhyme for "orange" "Blorenge, a place near Abergavenny, Gwent rhymes with it"…. "That’s a place name, you can’t have place names".… "Oh, so Chuck Berry hasn’t got any songs…?" I know a paranoid schizophrenic Dylanalist. His Dylanalism consists of the agglomeration of mere facts about the records, there is no abstract thought involved whatsoever. Sing him a Dylan line and he will know which song it’s from, which album, how many seconds it lasts. He can tell you Bob holds the falsetto note for 28 seconds on "Freight Train Blues". He can also tell you which day of the week your birthday was on, who played K9 on Dr Who, sense psychically that you’re behind him; all those.

Recently he invented a knock knock joke that goes: Knock knock (Who’s there?) Bob (Bob who?) Bob Dylan. I tried getting him to choose my lottery numbers once, just in case, but it didn’t work. The Zappa Superfan I am about to tell you about isn’t that bad, but he comes close.

"Colin B", folk say, "what was the first band you ever saw?"

They probably hope to catch me out, for ‘tis well known that my taste is finely honed and immaculate and that I have an accumulation of records that can fight anyone else’s. But yah boo sucks to them for I can answer, truthfully, The Mothers Of Invention. Yea verily, I am actually that cool, gaze upon my works o ye indie wusses and tremble. Of course I’m not making it up, if I were, I’d have said The Captain.

I have thus kept up a bit of an interest in FZ, and this has occasionally led to unwarranted attentions from that bizarre breed, the Zappapologist. You know, the sort who keep precisely-annotated and cross-referenced analyses of the entire Zappa oeuvre up their rectum for easy access. The collective noun for Zappapologists is a Duween.

Of course, not all FZ fans are like this. I actually know a girl who likes Frank Zappa (no, really), and she can’t see anything sexist about it and wears a Titties And Beer t-shirt. I even know a chap who detested Zappa for years, likening it to "Benny Hill with guitar Solos", until converted, astoundingly, by that selfsame tale of bikerchick vs. Old Scratchy. (Bikerchick wins. No one ever points this out).

One night recently at my house there were gathered me, Poohbear, OJ, and an old friend of Poohbear’s, hereafter known as Mr Zappapologist, who had suddenly re-emerged from somewhere. Mr Zappapologist used to be OK but recently his Zappapology had worsened. I had encountered this guy before, over the years, and he had often seemed bemused that I don’t consider FZ a "genius", but I didn’t really view this as a warning sign.

I have many CD’s, alphabetised for convenience, but I am not a "record collector". It is an accumulation. To be a "record collector" you have to have "collector mentality", rather in the way in which you don’t become a serial killer simply by having killed a shitload of people. You have to have dogs talk to you and listen to Phil Collins.

And the Zappapologist perused my record accumulation for the first time, and I had sinned in his eyes: I had filed "Bongo Fury" under C for Captain. This made him vexed and ratty.

"It was a Zappa album. Beefheart was merely a guest star".

"I happen to prefer Captain Beefheart" quoth I.

He became shiny-eyed, evangelical, like one of those people who stop you on the street to tell you they know the secret of the universe, even though there ain’t one.

"But Frank Zappa is a genius, a top entertainer who did more for music in the 20th Century than anyone else".

This poor man had Zappapology off the Richter Scale. He had begun to bring each and every conversation around to Frank Zappa, to an alarming degree. This guy is no spring chicken. In his 30s with a responsible job, and wittering on like we all probably did about something-or-other as teenagers. About how he’s started writing a book to explain how Frank Zappa Was A Genius Who Did More For Music In The 20th Century Than Anyone Else.

So he stood there, lecturing us: not an anti-Zappa man there, but we, in just liking the noise he makes, were not Frank Zappa fans enough. We actually thought that he’d made some bad albums. Perish the thought.

"Zappa has never made a bad album, you know."

"What about the poorly-compiled Playground Psychotics, which did us hapless Flo And Eddie fans such a disservice?"

"Well, you’ve got to consider the context in which it was made…"

Gentle reader, I’m from Pont-y-pwl and I’m nobody’s fool, and I say beware that "context" stuff, which means little more than "because I say so". Then up spake OJ, man of few and well-chosen words, in a voice stern and wise: "What about the Uncle Meat CD with all that stupid talking?"

"Well, you can skip past all that…"

"Mate, using that argument, you can say Phil Collins never made a bad album."

Desperate to recover from this rope-a-dope, Zappapologist looked round. He spotted, he thought, a "weak spot" in my record accumulation: the complete works of student faves The Fall!

"The Fall…. They are rubbish aren’t they…? I wouldn’t have them in my collection."

We had been partaking of the Wisdom Weed, so fisticuffs did not ensue. However, Poohbear issued a little verbal slap: "Weeeell…. The Fall are a bit like Zappa really…. they have these annoying fans who go on and on about them till you’re fed up and don’t want to listen to anything by them ever again". Some days later I visited Poohbear, and I found Mr Zappapologist there. Years seemed to pass, civilisations withered and died whilst I failed to understand a lecture about the significance of some obscure spoken word snippet in a Zappa video (which apparently I own, but can’t remember, silly me). Then I was asked once again who has done more for music in the 20th Century than FZ. I tell you, in terms or repetition, nothing compares. Not even the English going on about having won the world cup in 1966.

In an effort to snap him out of his Zappapology, I tried pointing out that Zappa came forth with not one major innovation, even those studio techniques had been done previously by The Goons. He sneered. Combining classical and doo-wop had been done by the Shangri-Las. Sneer sneer. Those Turtles guys were already making brilliant albums without Frankie the Z. Name one. Battle Of The Bands; fucking great. Sneer sneer. Nothing but sneers. His Zappapology was so far gone he thought a sneer was an argument.

"I can’t tell if you’re in the pro- or anti-Zappa camp…"

"I’m not in any fucking CAMP! I JUST LIKE THE NOISE HE MAKES! Jesus God, can’t you like Frank Zappa without all this fuss?"

Later on, when mine host Poohbear was out of the room, I politely asked Mr Zappapologist what he thought of all this hard 70s reggae that’s coming out on the Blood & Fire label (for now is the best time ever for buying hard 70s reggae).

"I haven’t really got time to listen to any, because I am busy attempting to fathom the godlike genius of Frank Zappa…"

"I’m not going to talk to you about that, we’ll never agree…."

"Well why did you bring it up then? YOU BROUGHT UP FRANK ZAPPA, NOT ME…" he said, bordering on fury.

A day later Poohbear rang and I told him, in my humble opinion, this Zappapology thing was getting out of hand. I related how Mr Zappapologist had said something about FZ, then denied it in the next sentence, and how he seemed to genuinely believe what he had said. Poohbear didn’t get it. He thought I was relating some obscure point about Frank Zappa, poor bugger, he must have been Frank Zappaed out.

I suppose people don’t get in a state of Advanced Zappapology at the flick of a switch. It kind of unfurls before you. To anyone encountering the situation afresh, it is more apparent that something is wrong. Hence I noticed it before Poohbear, and OJ noticed it before me.

Eventually, at 3 o’clock one morning, with Zappapologist seated in his house, rattling with several varieties of pills, wittering away about you know what, Poohbear came to his senses and interrupted a monologue no doubt concerning the significance of the dog continuity or some such.

"Get out of my house and out of my life".

"Going to throw me out, are you?" Wrong thing to say.

So Mr Zappapologist was flung out into the industrial South Wales night. He has not been seen since.

I am quite aware of my shortcomings. The irresponsible satirist part of my brain was lapping this up. I can’t really help it, being who I am, doing what I do. The sad part is, he used to be a witty fellow. It might be germane to mention that the Increased Zappapology coincided with the burgeoning consumption of Ecstasy, a drug that works by attacking the critical faculties directly.

Being strictly a Viper Man, I will have no truck with this, unwilling as I am to risk my own splendid critical faculties, which I have spent a lifetime honing to perfection. Poohbear took it once. He called it "Acid for little girls".

There is nevertheless no denying that there is something in the nature of Zappa’s oeuvre, possibly even more so than those of Dylan and the rest, that prompts this foolish, soul-sapping, smug, culturally superior behaviour. I have a theory about why Zappa fandom attracts these extreme elements, and it is this: Zappa was cool, but his character and work nonetheless exhibited an excess of the tendencies that a "nerd" could identify with. But it’s not enough to identify; some want to understand, and think they can do so via something as daft as this "Conceptual Continuity". But like Marcel Duchamp before him, he was having a laugh. But as with Duchamp, some don’t get it. I have gazed into the abyss of where this can lead, and it’s not a pretty sight.