Zappa and Lithuania

I’m a Zappa nut. And I’ll guiltily admit to being steered toward his madness and mayhem by Phish, when I first heard their cover of
“Peaches en Regalia”. I’ve been longing to catch one of his son, Dweezil’s “Zappa Plays Zappa” shows, but so far, no go. Turns out Zappa’s music was adopted by young revolutionaries as a symbol of freedom during Soviet occupation and recently a bust of FZ was put up in the hip Vilnius neighborhood of Užupis.

We never saw Zappa, but nobody ever saw God, and they still go to church. Lithuania is a nation of mythology, legends and fairy tales. Everything is mystified. People believe really quickly, and one of the myths is that independence is good for everyone, with no exceptions. That’s why, in such an environment, the Zappa seeds were so successfully planted.
– Vytautas Kernagis, Lithuanian musician, quoted by Adam B. Ellick in Rolling Stone (Way Back Machine from archive.org cached version).

FZ has left his mark on the world, from Frank-Zappa Strause in Berlin and the infamous Zappanele, to Zappa’s birthplace, Baltimore, where a duplicate of the Vilnius bust will be shipped. Someday, when capable, I will grow a Zappa-stache!