Were Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson on the same page ?......

......if even for a very brief period around the 1966-1967 period?

Surrounded by the same people (David Anderle, Mark Volman, etc.), using many of the same musicians from The Wrecking Crew, producing full music through musical segment editing (Good Vibrations, We're Only In It For The Money, and even the whole overhanging funk of vegatables amidst both SMiLE and Absolutely Free. Obviously both Frank and Brian are musical geniuses in their own fields, but is it possible that for an ever-so-split second that they were almost on the same wavelength?

Discuss....

A prune isn't a vegatable.......a cabbage is a vegatable.

 

The black page, perhaps?

 

Something along these lines has been covered fairly recently:
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threa...n-think-of-frank-zappa-and-vice-versa.269806/

 

Perhaps, briefly. Though vastly different in tone and character, there are some similarities between Absolutely Free/Lumpy Gravy era Zappa and what Brian was attempting on Smile. In the end, Frank had the force of will to see things through while Brian did not.

 

I'm a big Zappa fan. The music on the Smile Sessions is really the only Beach Boys that I listen to nowadays.

They were mining the same territory: innovative music combined with living the unique, west coast, American experience of the 1960's.

 

On one of the Zappa forums someone mentioned emailing Van Dyke Parks about connections between the two of them (since VDP was briefly in the Mothers before working on Smile). As I recall, he replied that he didn't think Brian knew about Frank's music, but that Frank knew about Brian's.

 

If by recently you mean three years ago, then yes.

(No wonder I missed it!)

 

Well, I did say 'fairly recently'...

 

Don't really see much parallel. Everyone was using the Wrecking Crew.
IMO Frank's music was at its core about complex rhythms that get musicians to approximate the hard to quantify rhythms of non-musical speech patterns more than anything else.
As adventurous as Wilson would get in terms of harmonic structure and orchestration, his rhythms were always fairly pedestrian.

Frank approached music like a drummer. Wilson approached it more like a choral director.

Both were far more sophisticated than your garage variety rock musician for sure, but that's about where the similarity ends to me.

 

The instrumental tracks from Freak Out (available on the MOFO set) are the only Zappa tracks I've heard that reminded me at times of Brian Wilson.