VALLEY BOY, HE'S A VALLEY BOY ZAPPA NOW REVERED AT HOME.

Byline: CHARLES F. BOSTWICK Staff Writer

LANCASTER -- Iconoclast rock musician and nonconformist composer Frank Zappa once as a teenager was arrested while walking down Lancaster Boulevard, in what he believed was an authoritarian attempt to stop his R&B band from playing at a Lancaster Woman's Club dance.

So it probably would come as a shock to him, 13 years after his death, to learn he occupies a central spot in a Lancaster Museum/Art Gallery exhibit: ``Good Times, Groovy Tunes and Legendary Boards.''

Zappa photographs, album covers, concert posters, even sheet music for the drum part of his ``The Black Page'' piece and instruments played by former local band members take up the exhibit's center, surrounded by surfboards, skateboards, seascapes and a 1949 Chrysler ``woody'' station wagon.

Zappa came to Lancaster as a teenager when his father took a job at Edwards Air Force Base, then in the midst of a Cold War boom that was changing the Antelope Valley from a sleepy farming community.

Zappa graduated from Antelope Valley High School in 1958 and, from his own tiny studio in Cucamonga, started recording music. Before he died of cancer at age 52 in 1993, he produced nearly 60 record albums and, in 1988, won a Grammy for best rock instrumental.

Some of his albums contained complex, experimental orchestral works; others were by his band the Mothers of Invention and had names like ``Weasels Ripped My Flesh'' and ``We're Only in It for the Money,'' combining unconventional music and satiric, often raunchy lyrics.

The music and the satire are what at age 12 or 13 attracted fan Lou Allred, who possesses about 450 Zappa artifacts, some of which are in the museum exhibit, and hosts an annual reunion for former Zappa band members.

``I don't know if you'd call it humor; you might call it sarcasm,'' Allred said of Zappa's approach.

Zappa's best-known song is probably 1982's ``Valley Girl,'' performed with daughter Moon Unit reciting lines of teen slang, such as ``like, barf me out'' and ``fer shure, fer shure'' in a nasal twang.

But the first bands he ever led came out of Antelope Valley High School, uniting teens who like Zappa shared a love for R&B music and blues.

Band members would pick through used jukebox 45-rpm records at a Lancaster store, looking for old-time blues musicians and the bands and company labels they liked.

Zappa listened to the records, figured out each instrument's part and explained to his bandmates what to play.

``I don't know how and when he learned his music theory,'' said Fred Salazar, a 1959 Antelope Valley High graduate who played saxophone in Zappa's bands. ``He impressed me when I first met him. He seemed to know music. He was so comfortable with it.''

And just like in any rock 'n' roll movie from the 1950s, the bands -- The Blackouts and The Omens -- and their music were unpopular with many parents and with the people who rented them halls to hold dances.

``They looked at us as kind of bad,'' said Salazar, who stayed in Antelope Valley after high school and now is a retired Edison electrician. ``We were just out to enjoy ourselves and play the kind of music we liked.''

Band member Peter Lovio remembers riding with Zappa in the 1949 Oldsmobile of Don Van Vliet -- later rock band leader Captain Beefheart -- when Van Vliet was pulled over on Sierra Highway and given a ticket for driving too slowly.

The deputies pulled things out of the car and out of its trunk and threw them on the ground, Lovio said, then told the teens they could go.

``That happened more than once,'' Lovio said. ``We were like outcasts. We dressed different. We looked different. We were continually harassed.''

The bands' members included African-Americans and Latinos, back in the days when the Antelope Valley's population was almost entirely white and most African-Americans lived in Sun Village (about which Zappa recorded a song in 1972).

``The neighbors would kind of look at us: here comes a car with a bunch of black kids into the neighborhood,'' Lovio said.

But Salazar also remembers Zappa performing solo on guitar for an Antelope Valley High assembly, and Lovio said the Omens became accepted enough, after Zappa left Lancaster, to be invited to perform at the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds.

In a 1987 interview with a Daily News reporter, Zappa said of living in Lancaster: ``I have a great deal of sympathy for anybody who is a creative individual and who is stuck in a town with that kind of mentality. If you happen to be a person who is different ... your life can be made to be pretty miserable.''

In 1990, somebody suggested Frank Zappa High as the name for what is now Eastside High School. The school board decided to keep its tradition of naming schools for the community they are in.

But Zappa's name does grace one bit of the Antelope Valley, though few people know it.

Southern California Edison has a practice of naming its power circuits, and when two were added in the late 1980s to the Quartz Hill substation to meet population growth one was named Godde, for a pioneer farming family, and one Zappa.

``I don't know who had the distinction of naming the line, but it was somebody familiar with Frank,'' Salazar said.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: Good Times, Groovy Tunes and Legendary Boards

WHEN: Through Jan. 7.

WHERE: Lancaster Museum/Art Gallery, 44801 Sierra Highway.

ADMISSION: Free.

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo:

(ran in AV edition only) Museum worker Erin Corbin, above, poses with a portrait of Frank Zappa at the Lancaster Museum and Art Gallery as part of an exhibit featuring the late Lancaster High School alumni and rock 'n' roll legend.

Tom Mendoza/Staff Photographer

Box:

IF YOU GO (see text)