9781843540922 / 1843540924

Barry Miles knew Frank Zappa intimately. His biography follows Zappa from his sickly Italian-American childhood in the 1940s - when his father used DDT to clean the kitchen - to his death from cancer in 1993. Zappa's initial desire was to be a classical composer, but he soon realized that this ambition was more likely to lead to starvation than stardom. Instead, he decided to join a band that played music people actually want to listen to and in the mid 1960s he became the leader of a group called 'The Mothers of Invention' who went on to be one of the most internationally famous and influential rock groups of all time. In Frank Zappa Miles traces this rollercoaster career and has produced an authoritative and hugely enjoyable portrait of a singular man - and his music.