This book, Moon Unit Zappa’s Earth to Moon: a memoir, gets off to a misleading rollicking, cheery start: “Growing up I was just like you—I had a rock star for a dad, was told to call my parents by their first names, had two invisible camels for playmates, and dreamed about my future following in Frank’s footsteps by helping people and making them laugh, only I’d be dressed like a nun.” When it comes to lively writing, it delivers in spades: “With each downturn in my career I feel like a hot mess served on a garbage can lid.”
That first sentence is also the most upbeat moment in the narrative, which is in large part a descent into darkness, occasional terror, tremendous confusion, and outright depression That trend is hinted at in the second sentence: “I admit I was also tempted to be barefoot and in charge behind the scenes like my fertile, bossy mother.”
That statement launches one of the strongest themes in the book: the now 57-year-old author’s struggle to determine whether her mother was an abusive, unreasonably controlling figure, or a victim—a woman severely damaged by her husband’s serial infidelity, workaholism, and narcissism. “I wonder why my mom wants to see a psychic anyway,” she writes of one particularly vivid childhood memory. “Maybe it’s because of the groupies. Especially the one from New Zealand we just had living in our basement. I for one am so glad ‘the Auckland slut’ is gone and my dad is back upstairs with us and sleeping in the right bed with Gail again.”
Moon Unit’s father, Frank Zappa, was for me one of the most inventive, avant-garde, and influential rock musicians of the 1960s. Beginning with his band The Mothers of Invention and moving through a long solo career that included collaboration with an array of gifted rock musicians, a schizophrenic street musician, and some of the world’s most prominent symphony orchestras, the breadth and depth of his work is nearly indescribable. Perhaps the most enduring (and entertaining) of his works came late in his career: the hit song, “Valley Girl,” featuring then 15-year-old Moon Unit’s inspired chatter. (A song, it bears mentioning, that still holds up well.)
The story of that song is a heartwarming story with a heartbreaking ending. It was late in Frank Zappa’s career when Moon Unit would come home from high school and entertain her parents with hilarious imitations of her classmates’ speech. Finally, her father had her come down to his studio and record her send-ups. He put it all together with musical accompaniment and background vocals, and released it on an album. It was to become his biggest hit, the only one of his songs to be nominated for a Grammy. The experience made Moon Unit feel closer than ever to her father, and for a short time she was a celebrity at her school.
But then everything took a characteristically Zappa family turn. Frank was so embittered at the song’s being more commercially successful than his “serious” work that he came to loathe it. Moon Unit’s classmates turned on her, accusing her of ruining their lives, and many of them would spit on her when given the opportunity. Then “there is a strange shift, rift, and divide happening between my mother and me. In between interviews or when Gail is overwhelmed by organizing a calendar for people to have their chance to adore me, I notice Gail getting more impatient with me instead of more and more proud.”
At one point, she hisses, “Frank didn’t want to give you any writing or performing credit, period. Earth to Moon, improvisation isn’t writing.” Eventually, this treatment has her reeling. “I try to hold the paradox of being told at home by the nearest and dearest to my heart that my contribution means nothing while the world sees me as clever and funny and talented. This will take many steady years of therapy to untangle.”
Zappa was unusual among 1960s musicians in two noteworthy ways: He eschewed drugs and alcohol and banned them from his studios and tours; and he projected an unusually devoted family-man image, one considerably at odds with his iconoclastic professional persona. He and his wife Gail were married in 1967 at ages 26 and 21, while Gail was pregnant with Moon Unit. The Zappas remained married until Frank’s death from cancer at age 52, and had four children (Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva) to whom they appeared to be exceptionally devoted.
The reality is more fraught. In early childhood, “I don’t love seeing strangers in our yard cavorting or making candles in the nude, near my toys,” and “some of what Frank and Gail do and say and the people and things they have around the house scare me. Like the orgy artwork on the walls or when Gail is mad or the moaning that comes from their room….” Being the oldest child, she is sadder and wiser at age 16 than her three younger siblings, who “don’t yet realize that when your parents conduct a whole sexual revolution in your childhood home, you have to choose your launching pad wisely.”
“Launching” proves to be a lifelong, largely futile struggle to forge her own identity as something other than The Daughter of a Famous Person: “I will automatically feel an unspoken, steadfast, ferocious loyalty to my family—the Unit part—and a pull to be like the actual moon, with no light of my own, just an ancillary object in the infinite reflecting of the light of the sun, a.k.a. the light of my Heavenly Father, Frank, orbiting his every need and expression.”
In her telling, Frank’s needs are near-infinite. Her primary memories of him are of his long absences while on tour. And when he was home, he lived almost around the clock in his basement studio, either working on music or sleeping with groupies. It fell to Gail to endure, and to raise the children largely on her own.
Yet all of the family remained ferociously devoted to Frank, and kept their family secrets to themselves. Given their celebrity, they lived an oddly isolated life, and Moon Unit describes all of the children as being utterly ignorant about how wildly divergent their lives were from those of mainstream families.
One passage in particular highlights the strangeness of the bubble they inhabited. Teenaged Moon Unit is on a television talk show discussing her father’s much-publicized battle to keep warning labels off of records when “I tell my old chestnut ‘unconventional parenting’ story about the time Gail handcuffed Dweezil’s and my ankles together and locked us in an echoey bathroom with a tape recorder so we could hear for ourselves how ‘annoying we were’ and how ‘fruitless our arguing was.’”
This is meant to illustrate how fun and freethinking a First Amendment family we are and prove exposure to everything has no impact on mental health. The smiling blond host looks aghast and when they go to commercial, “she turns to me and says, ‘That’s child abuse.’ She has warmth in her voice and soft, pitying eyes. Her straightforward words and resounding clarity make me feel slapped, exposed, outed, like she knows something about me and my whole life that I don’t.”
This thread is particularly compelling. The most powerful passages are those, like the one above, about the scales being suddenly ripped from Moon Unit’s eyes. Her skill is masterful when she is describing, from an insightful adult’s perspective, how oblivious she was in her youth to the awfulness of her childhood, and how her equanimity about it threatened to crumble whenever she let anyone from the outside get too close a look at her family life.
It is what makes this book stand out so markedly from garden-variety celebrity memoirs, and what makes it so much more than a lurid tale.
Great review, Fred. Still a criminally underrated/underappreciated musician, partly because it’s hard to tell new fans where to begin. Wish he’d lived longer.
I’ve always had this as a go-to for Zappa’s sense of humor:
Excellently rendered, Mr. Moody. The neglectful sadness and permanent damage revealed makes me question my lifelong commitment to discover the artist in the art, not the life. Thank you.
I was a big fan of Frank Zappa as a young person (who lets their kid listen to “We’re Only in it for the Money at 7 or 8 years old? Thanks Dad!), but the more I hear about him I have to say the less I like. Truly a brilliant artist, but definitely a misogynist and misanthrope and for all of the humor in his work he really does come across as a pretty humorless person in retrospect.
I know less about Gail but am also not impressed with how she chose to dole out the spoils of the estate and set her kids against each other. As FZ said, she was the Boss’ wife, and a mean little sucker. Not a great way to live.
One of the high water marks of my musical career (such as it was/is) was getting to trade guitar solos with Ike Willis on “I Am the Slime” at a local club – and Gail Zappa staunchly opposed any of the work he did in keeping Frank’s music alive for modern audiences. So there’s that, too.
We were living in LA as the Zappa geist was taking hold. Even before before they produced the “Valley Girl” hit, the GV “patois” was spilling over the Hollywood Hills into the rest of Southern California. It was, like, you know, a thing. Fer shure.