Despite their growing popularity (or, apparently, because of it), Zappa was becoming increasingly disenchanted with his own band -- having developed an adversarial, employer/employee relationship with the other musicians,
many of whom took a dim view of his refusal to injest "recreational substances" -- and following a tour in the summer of 1969 he made the decision the disband the Mothers.
[...]
This second incarnation of the Mothers was abruptly terminated at a show at the Rainbow Theatre in London on 10 December, mere days after the band had lost all its gear in a fire that had erupted during a performance in Montreaux: just as Frank was returning to the stage for an encore,
a demented fan attacked him, pushing him into the orchestra pit ten feet below. He would spend the next several weeks in a London hospital, recovering from the numerous injuries brought about by the fall;
surgery to repair his throat caused his voice to drop a third of an octave.
Despite being in a leg cast and confined to a wheelchair, Zappa resumed his musical activities as soon as was possible, once again exploring the largely-instrumental fusion direction of Hot Rats with the aid of Dunbar, dynamic keyboardist George Duke and an extensive brass/wind section.
[...]
By the mid-1980s Zappa's reputation
as an outspoken social critic had drawn him into various non- or extra-musical contexts, the most visible of these being precipitated by the public hearings held in September 1985 to address the record ratings system demanded by the Parents' Music Resource Center. Amongst the list of music industry figures called to speak -- ranging from Twisted Sister's Dee Snider to country boy John Denver -- Zappa
delivered the most thoroughly researched and well-considered testimony; this increased public profile immediately resulted in several invitations to speak as a guest lecturer,
most often on the topic of censorship. In 1989 he composed a score to the Cousteau Society documentary
Outrage at Valdez in order to draw more attention to the ecological disaster it portrayed, and for which he donated his fee back to the Society. As the 1980s came to a close, Frank also became more active in different business ventures, establishing Why Not?, a consulting company geared towards facilitating U.S. investment in the Soviet Union just prior to the fall of communism; these dealings eventually led to a request in 1990 from Czech president
Vaclav Havel for Zappa to officially represent Czechia's trade interests in the United States (an arrangement that was forcibly terminated by the first Bush administration soon afterwards). For a brief period in 1991,
he even researched the possibility of running for president himself {
- running against Bush Sr - what a thought}, and a few grassroots groups continued to pursue this idea independently until Zappa's death two years later....
