Poolside Friday night at the Wild Wild West Casino, there is a little lightning and a little drizzle. A teenage girl is on stage singing an X-rated Frank Zappa song: "Keep it greasy/ so it'll go down easy."
When she leaves the stage, I ask her: "Do you know what that song is about?"
"It's about butt sex, right?" she says, her smile all innocence. I'd know her accent anywhere. She is from the Main Line in Philadelphia, right around where I grew up listening to lots of Frank Zappa on the sly.
Only in Las Vegas do I have moments like this: weird, surreal—and somehow seeming to communicate directly to me in the most personal of ways. Suddenly, I am flashing back to prep school in Philadelphia two decades ago: The headmaster telling me that my cassettes of Frank Zappa were not welcome on the property of the Haverford School. (A year later I would no longer be welcome at the Haverford School, either.)
Apparently, things have changed back home. In fact, 24 students from various elite Philadelphia prep schools were at the Wild Wild West last weekend performing a concert that featured over two hours of Frank Zappa's music. The kids are students in an after-school program run by Paul Green, who, according to his publicist's careful legalese, is "the apparent inspiration" for the movie School of Rock." (Well, he kinda looks like Jack Black). Green arranged a unique graduation exercise for his class by taking them on tour, doing 17 shows in 16 days. In fact, the Vegas stop marks the tour's conclusion, and so many parents came to collect their kids and see the show. So the Wild Wild West concert had a bit of a school-recital vibe, too.
Not that these students played like amateurs. How could they? In addition to being a potty mouth, Zappa was rock's most sophisticated and difficult composer. His backing musicians had to be the best in the business, and even then they were pushed to the limit by the extraordinary technical demands of Zappa's songs. Among the Zappa alumni: Steve Vai, Lowell George, Adrian Belew, George Duke and Jean-Luc Ponty. In fact, in interviews with me over the years, Belew and Vai both compared their time playing with Zappa to going to college, in a good way. So it was extra impressive to see the School of Rock kids admirably take on some of Zappa's knottiest works: "Zomby Woof," "Pound for Brown," "Advance Romance." To play this music at all is an achievement, to play it so well a joy.
After the kids executed "Florentine Pogen," Napoleon Murphy Brock (who is touring with the School) said, "These are great musicians. They are the future." Brock, a singer and multiinstrumentalist, should know: The Zappa veteran played on the original studio version of the song.
Near the end of the show, a mother told me that she thought her son's saxophone-playing with the School of Rock was a good extracurricular for his college application. But just when I was declaring victory against school administrators probably long ago retired, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to face a man about my age.
"Excuse me," he said. "Were you the reporter talking to my daughter about that song and about anal sex?"
Ouch!
"Please, leave her name out of your story. It is a thin line. I am proud of her for doing this, and I love the music. But I don't want it to come back to haunt her in a few years."
Zappa would surely have appreciated his sentiments, although, of course, he would have responded, "You mean, come back to bite her in the ass."