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From Zappa wiki jawaka:
In a March 7, 2011 interview with the drummer of the band, Butch Trucks, Trucks claimed Zappa was an important influence on the Allman Brothers Band's music.
Interviewer Mike Greenhaus: "Did you know Zappa well?"
Butch Trucks: "Yeah, fairly well. Yeah we did several shows with him early on. He was such an influence on us. One of the first what I would call truly great shows I ever saw was in, probably, 1967. The band I was with went to New York to audition to play one of the clubs there and Zappa was playing. It was one of the first public performances of “Absolutely Free” and it had a timpani and about 20 people onstage. They did “Suzy Creamcheese” and all this performance art, and it was just amazing. I had no idea that a rock and roll band could get up and sound like that. My background before I got into rock and roll was classical music and that’s all I knew. [But when I saw Zappa] it was so big—it was so huge, the sound coming from that stage. It reminded me of Beethoven. Up to that point, I had been listening to the Ventures, the early Beatles and Chuck Berry, which had its place but was pretty simple. It is three chords and it’s not exactly what you call big and sophisticated. Hearing Zappa and hearing them doing “Absolutely Free” blew my mind. It just changed my whole concept of what you could do with rock and roll or with what you called rock—it ain’t rock and roll anymore, it’s something else. It’s evolved into something else. And you can label it whatever you want but it’s still music. It’s all music."
Reading the above reminded me of Phil Lesh's autobiography "Searching For the Sound", where he wrote the following:
Our first night in New York: I drag Bobby, Jerry and Billy (Pig was
already at some blues club) over to the gig, the Cafe a Go-Go, to check
it out (we don't start until tomorrow); then, I tell them, let's catch
Zappa upstairs at the Garrick...
"Up and out on the street, up the stairs next door, here's the Garrick:
a small theater with rows of seats and a real proscenium. Real nice
place - too bad we couldn't play here. The Mothers of Invention,
Zappa's band, comes on and dives into an insane torrent of sound. We
listen, jaws on the floor. Zappa's music is brilliantly composed and
precisely played - hey, he won't let his band smoke pot - but short on
any kind of improvised epiphanies. I've always seen Zappa as part of a
long line of true composers, whose individual visions are so powerful
that they must be manifested as purely as possible, a true successor to
his hero, Edgar Varese."
_________________
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>I'm not.
How do I know anything you've said to me is...
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