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23 | Gorton v. Zappa

M

iof onsLLi Music fAns who didn’t give a rip about the budget

deficit were introduced to Slade Gorton in 1985 when Frank

Zappa came to Capitol Hill. A brilliantly oddball musician and

record producer, Zappa’s progeny include Moon Unit and Dweezil and

more than 50 albums, including “Burnt Weeny Sandwich” and “Weasels

Ripped My Flesh.” He was the father of The Mothers of Invention, a semi-

nal art-rock band.

Drugs, sex and violence in rock ‘n’ roll worried Tipper Gore, the spouse

of Senator Al Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of Treasury Secretary

James Baker. They founded the Parents Music Resource Center—PMRC—

whose goal was to convince the music industry to offer parents guidance

on the content of records. Nineteen record companies had agreed to put

“Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics” labels on their albums. The Senate

Commerce Committee, featuring Gorton, Gore and James Exon, a home-

spun Nebraskan, resolved to hold a fact-finding hearing on “porn rock.”^1

Hair cropped short, mustache neatly trimmed, Zappa wore a conserva-

tive suit and a brittle air of indignation at the machinations of “bored

Washington housewives.” Beginning with a recitation of the First Amend-

ment, he denounced their proposal as “the equivalent of treating dan-

druff by decapitation.” It was “an ill-conceived piece of nonsense that

fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties

of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for

years. No one has forced Mrs. Baker or Mrs. Gore to bring Prince or...

Sheena Easton into their homes. Thanks to the Constitution, they are free

to buy other forms of music for their children....^2

“Taken as a whole,” Zappa continued, “the complete list of PMRC de-

mands reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of ‘toilet

training program’ to house-break all composers and performers because

of the lyrics of a few. Ladies, how dare you? (Your) shame must be shared

by the bosses at the major labels who, through the Recording Industry

Association of America, chose to bargain away the rights of composers,