Brilliant, broke and wilfully annoying: the sad legacy of Frank Zappa
We’re sorry, this service is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
Dismiss
Normal text size
Lady Gaga owns the Zappa house now. She paid $US5.25 million,
Variety reported in 2016: a steal after the $US23 million she “splashed out” for her Malibu estate two years earlier. The Zappa family trust was $US6 million in debt. The kids had to sell.
Yes, it is crass to talk dollars when culture is at stake. But that’s how we’ve learnt to measure things in the music biz.
No disrespect to Gaga, but it’s sad to think of that legendary Hollywood Hills home, with its mythic basement vault now emptied of four decades of unparalleled creation, sold cheap to pop’s nouveau riche. One worries whether the fabled Utility Muffin Research Kitchen – the sprawling recording studio where the workaholic composer made scores of utterly unique albums up until his death in 1993 – will retain its value as a shr