Frank Zappa

It was nice to see a cover piece on Frank Zappa. However, Zappa has been encouraging people to register to vote on his album jackets since 1971. That's about 17 years and hardly qualifies as a recent fascination. DANIEL BUCHANAN Canoga Park

The Soul Giants were a struggling R&B cover band in Pomona in the mid-1960s when lead singer Ray Collins fired the group's guitarist and invited a musical collaborator from Rancho Cucamonga to take his place. His name was Frank Zappa. The band soon began morphing into the Mothers of Invention, the avant-garde novelty rock group that was Zappa's vision. But Collins' "extraordinary pop-operatic vocals best conveyed" the band's "not-so-mock rage," according to the New Rolling Stone Record Guide.

MUSIC When Frank Zappa intoned "Music is the best!" he wasn't kidding, but he was cryptic. At "S'talking Zappa," a panel will discuss the legendary guitarist, arranger and furry fiend's contributions to music alongside an audiovisual presentation and live performances. The Grammy Museum, 800 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite A245. 7:30 p.m. Thurs. $10. grammymuseum.org.

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report. If you suffer from PST fatigue (PST-igue?), “Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles, 1945-1975” at the Grammy Museum may be the antidote. This small but engaging show covers the same era as other PST exhibitions, but through a decidedly different lens.

Move over Joan Rivers, you've got company. Fox Broadcasting has booted Frank Zappa from his scheduled stint as tonight's guest host on "The Late Show"--and replaced him with a re-run. (Exactly which non-Rivers re-run hadn't been decided by press time, a Fox spokeswoman said.) " 'Every cell in my body is telling me not to do this show,' " producer John Scura said, according to Zappa.

Frank Zappa has long been known as a rock 'n' roll iconoclast, an outspoken, unconventional musician who earned the devotion of a moderate-sized following with records such as "Freak Out," "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" and "Sheik Yerbouti." But the former leader of the Mothers of Invention is also a shrewd businessman. "I don't have anything against making a profit," he said. Zappa, who turns 49 on Thursday, always did part his hair differently than his more commercially successful contemporaries.

Musician Frank Zappa, who rode to fame in the late 1960s as leader of the eccentric Mothers of Invention and kept on breaking the musical rules, has died from the complications of prostate cancer he had been battling for more than two years. He was 52. "Composer Frank Zappa left for his final tour just before 6 p.m. Saturday," the family said in a brief statement Sunday night.

REGARDING Lynell George's piece ["Frank Zappa's 'Last Word,' " Sept. 21]: I saw Frank perform twice in my life. Both times were among my favorite concerts ever, even though I can't say I was a huge fan of his music. I thought he meandered a bit much, but that was part of what made him great. Plus, he was never as good a guitarist as some fans made him out to be, and I was a bit off put by it. Still, this article cemented for me what a fantastic composer and artist he was. I deeply admire Gail's dedication to preserving, as accurately as possible, his legacy.

Whoever devised the slipknot contract clause "into perpetuity" hadn't conceived a Gail Zappa. She's made it her job to parse the music industry's dense legalese, close contractual loopholes and, most significantly, end what she sees as its iron grip on an artist's past, present and future. "Let me say it in the simplest way," she lays it out, her full hand on the table, "My job is to make sure that Frank Zappa has the last word in terms of anybody's idea of who he is.

Is "The Real Frank Zappa Book" really a book? Can an author who starts out by saying, "I don't want to write a book, but I'm going to do it anyway," who grudgingly admits that "I think it is good that books still exist, but they make me sleepy," be counted on to produce anything worth reading? The answer, as nearly everything else about the protean Mr. Z, is both surprising and contradictory.

"Wanna buy a song for a dime?" For many startled UCLA students and Sunset Strip sightseers in the 1960s, that was the way Larry "Wild Man" Fischer introduced himself. Anyone who took him up on his offer was rewarded with a brief, bellowing burst of nursery-rhyme-like verse, punctuated with unpredictable yelps and vocal sound effects from the disheveled troubadour. Despite his unconventional approach and a lifelong struggle with severe mental illness, Fischer, who died Thursday of heart failure at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center at age 66, went on to release several albums and became a cult figure — admired by some as an untamed practitioner of "outsider" art, but regarded less kindly by those who encountered the mercurial musician's sudden bursts of aggression.

MUSIC When Frank Zappa intoned "Music is the best!" he wasn't kidding, but he was cryptic. At "S'talking Zappa," a panel will discuss the legendary guitarist, arranger and furry fiend's contributions to music alongside an audiovisual presentation and live performances. The Grammy Museum, 800 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite A245. 7:30 p.m. Thurs. $10. grammymuseum.org.

It was a rare, early Hollywood television appearance for future rock music renegade Frank Zappa. Lean and hungry and unknown, the 22-year-old composer appeared on "The Steve Allen Show" in 1963. He wore a pressed suit and thin tie, and short, well-greased hair ? standard for those pre-Beatles, pre-psychedelic days. But Zappa was there to perform sounds on a bicycle with drumsticks and a bow (the bike belonged to his sister Candy). Allen was no slouch in the world of beatnik-era hipness himself, but he couldn't help cracking one-liners during Zappa's noisy, atonal demonstration, and he kept pronouncing his guest's name "Zoppa.

You're, like, totally not going to believe this but Baltimore declared Sunday " Frank Zappa Day," dedicating a bust in his honor. Grody to the max. Seventeen years after the rocker's death in Los Angeles, Zappa drew a large, fittingly eclectic crowd to a ceremony in the city where he was born. "It's about time he got the recognition he deserves," said Greg Stinson, 50, accompanied by his 16-year-old son Matthew, also a Zappa fan. The festivities included a concert by Zappa's son Dweezil and his band, Zappa Plays Zappa; a library exhibit, "Zappa's Baltimore: Rebels and Iconoclasts in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave"; and a temporary name for the street in front of the library, "Frank Zappa Way. " "The spirit of Frank Zappa is alive and well in Baltimore," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

Musician and actor Ahmet Zappa has listed his Hollywood Hills contemporary for $1,165,000. The one-story house, with mountain, valley and Hollywood sign views, has a courtyard entry leading to the foyer and main living area. The open-plan design incorporates the living room, dining and kitchen, which has maple floors, stainless-steel appliances and recessed lighting. There are two bedrooms, two bathrooms and 1,468 square feet of living space. Zappa, 36, is the son of legendary rock guitarist Frank Zappa, with whom he wrote the song "Frogs With Dirty Little Lips."

Aside from their proximity in age, and the fulsome praise they got for their debut novels, Salvador Plascencia and Michael Jaime-Becerra would appear to have little in common as writers. Plascencia's "The People of Paper," which was published in 2005 by McSweeney's Books, is a fiendishly inventive meta-fiction that has drawn comparisons to the house-of-mirrors stories of John Barth and Italo Calvino, the self-reflexive screenplays of Charlie Kaufman and the gasp-inducing travelogues of the 16th century Spanish explorer Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

Bob Keane, who founded the West Coast independent label Del-Fi Records in the 1950s and is best known for discovering and recording rock legend Ritchie Valens, has died. He was 87. Keane, who survived non- Hodgkins lymphoma diagnosed when he was 80, died of renal failure Saturday in an assisted living home in Hollywood, said his son, Tom Keane. "He was like the original independent record man in those days," said Tom Keane, a songwriter and record producer. "He was the guy going out and finding talent and developing it and getting it out to the masses."

Jimmy Carl Black, the original drummer in Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, a band that helped define the sub-genre of art rock, died of cancer Saturday. He was 70. He died in Siegsdorf, Germany, according to Roddie Gilliard, who performed with Black in recent years as part of the Muffin Men, a British group that specialized in performing Zappa's music live. A note on Black's official website stated, "Jimmy passed away peacefully. . . .