Late American musician Frank Zappa was a clever, complex, "one-of-a-kind" artist.
According to music critic William Ruhlmann:
Composer, guitarist, singer, and bandleader Frank Zappa was a singular musical figure during a performing and recording career that lasted from the 1960s to the '90s. His disparate influences included doo wop music and avant-garde classical music; although he led groups that could be called rock and roll bands for much of his career, he used them to create a hybrid style that bordered on jazz and complicated, modern, serious music, sometimes inducing orchestras to play along...
In statement and in practice, Zappa was an iconoclastic defender of the freest possible expression of ideas. And most of all, he was a composer far more ambitious than any other rock musician of his time and most classical musicians, as well.
This image was taken when Zappa and his band, The Mothers of Invention, came to Sydney in 1973.
**This photograph is part of an IA series that looks at Australia through the lens of award-winning photojournalist Bill McAuley.**
Bill McAuley's 40-plus-year news career began in 1969 as a cadet photographer at 'The Age' in Melbourne.
He has several published collections, including 'Portraits of the Soul: A lifetime of images with Bill McAuley'. To see more from Bill, click here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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