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With his trademark moustache and goatee, Frank Zappa was one of the most distinctive-looking figures in modern music. He was also one of the most brilliant, original and provocative. Leader of The Mothers Of Invention, composer and guitar hero, perpetual irritant to radio stations and record companies, cultural adviser to Vaclav Havel's fledgling Czech Republic, Zappa was consistently controversial and unrepentant: 'My insensitivity is pretty evenly spread around,' he concluded in 1993.

His dazzling eclecticism was evident from the start. As a teenager Zappa was simultaneously enthralled by black R&B (Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, Guitar Slim), doo-wop (The Channels, The Velvets), the modernism of Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern, and the dissonant sound experiments of Edgard Varèse. A fascination with chemistry (he knew how to make gunpowder at 6) led to suspension from high school after an ill-judged pyrotechnical display, but, despite not gaining sufficient units, he graduated from Antelope Valley High in June 1958 (Friday the 13th, to be precise). The school authorities were just happy that he wasn't coming back.

In 1960, after an unsuccessful year in Hollywood as a film-score writer, Zappa enrolled at Chaffey Junior College in Alto Loma, ostensibly to study music, but chiefly to meet girls. He met and married Kay Sherman, dropped out of college with her, then worked variously as an advertising copywriter, door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, and greetings card designer. In 1962 he co-wrote and played on his first single, "Break Time" by The Masters, with one Paul Buff, who produced it at his Studio PAL in Cucamonga ("Wipeout" by The Surfaris had been made there). A succession of singles followed, each under a different name. "Tijuana Surf" by The Hollywood Persuaders was a #1 hit in Mexico for ten months. Zappa subsequently bought Buff's studio, renaming it 'Studio Z', and moved in whilst filing for divorce. The money for the studio had come from a score he'd written for the cowboy film Run Home Slow (released in 1965).

In 1963 Zappa appeared (minus moustache and goatee) on The Steve Allen Show, where he and Allen performed an improvisation on two bicycles, accompanied by a pre-recorded tape and the TV studio band. Zappa also financed a concert of his own experimental music in 1963 at a private Catholic college in Los Angeles. It was recorded and broadcast on local radio, and included such delights as "Piece No. 2 of Visual Music For Jazz Ensemble and 16mm Projector".

By 1964 he'd joined The Soul Giants, a bar band playing in Pomona, Los Angeles. Zappa was keen to try original material and on Mother's Day 1964, after minor personnel changes, they were renamed The Mothers, finally securing their first recording deal with producer Tom Wilson. Out of necessity their name was amended to The Mothers Of Invention.

Their 1966 debut, Freak Out (pipped only by Blonde On Blonde as rock's first double album), was a mix of sneering songs ("Who Are The Brain Police ?"), sharp social comment ("Trouble Comin' Every Day") and wild experimentalism ("The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet"). The line-up ran: Zappa (guitar/vocals), Ray Collins (lead vocals), Jimmy Carl Black (drums), Roy Estrada (bass/vocals) and Elliot Ingber (guitar). This was later augmented by the talents of, amongst others, Ian Underwood, Bunk Gardner, Arthur Tripp, Don Preston and Jim 'Motorhead' Sherwood.

1967 found The Mothers in New York with a six-month residency at The Garrick Theater, where their freakish style - the show included rotting vegetables and a giraffe that sprayed whipped cream at the audience - was better received than on the West Coast. Subsequent albums included Absolutely Free (1967) and Uncle Meat (1969), the latter arguably their most subversive and compendious LP, including some of Zappa's most enduring tunes ("Uncle Meat", "Dog Breath" and "King Kong"). With We're Only In It For The Money (1968) Zappa took aim at The Beatles' Sgt Pepper and at 'Flower Power' conformity. On the LP sleeve (a perfect parody of Pepper's) he urged listeners to read Franz Kafka's short story In The Penal Settlement prior to sampling "The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny", the sinister flip side to The Beatles' "Day In The Life". One factor behind Zappa's mistrust of hippie counterculture was his enduring anti-drugs stance, an attitude unprecedented during the era of 'peace and love'. His preference was for cigarettes and black coffee, rather than substances that made you stumble into the furniture.

By October 1969, Zappa had disbanded the original Mothers and released Hot Rats. Essentially an instrumental affair, its only song was "Willie The Pimp", sung by old high-school friend Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), whose seminal Trout Mask Replica album Zappa had produced that year. Though later at odds with one another, Beefheart toured with Zappa in 1975, with performances captured on Bongo Fury (1975).

In 1970, fostering a more vaudevillian style for the reformed Mothers, Zappa brought in two members of teen band The Turtles, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan ('Flo & Eddie') on lead vocals. Zappa's simultaneously stunning and throwaway film, 200 Motels (1971), encapsulated this period and the vagaries of life on the road. It featured Ringo Starr as Zappa-lookalike 'Larry the Dwarf' and Keith Moon as a nun, with animation designed by Cal Schenkel (Zappa's-long-standing cover artist) and bemused contributions from London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The project produced a soundtrack album ("The Pleated Gazelle", a suite of five orchestral/choral pieces, was one of the highlights of Zappa's career) and a touring show, banned from the Royal Albert Hall in London on the grounds of obscenity.

Throughout the 1970s Zappa released a wealth of material, from the quirky big band 'jazz' of The Grand Wazoo (1972) and the cartoonish virtuosity on Studio Tan's "The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary" (1978), to the raucous rock and studied sarcasm of Sheik Yerbouti (1979) - Zappa's best-selling album. One Size Fits All (1975), held in high regard by many fans, brought slick jazz-rock mythologizing of flying saucers, poverty, pyjamas, in-flight snacks, incarceration, cowboy actors, sofas - and, on "Evelyn, A Modified Dog", the echidna that Zappa and his family adopted at the Los Angeles zoo.

As ever, Zappa's work was full-to-overflowing with cross-references, musical quotes, band in-jokes/folklore, and a host of 'low-rent Americana'. Who else would, or could, write a song about growing dental floss on the prairie, the subject of Over-Nite Sensation's "Montana" (1973) - a track all the more bizarre for the uncredited Tina Turner and the Ikettes on backing vocals (uncredited at Ike Turner's insistence). Whilst many dismissed Zappa's songs as mere smut and nonsense, he contended that they were his form of social anthropology. Targets ranged from politicians, evangelists and yuppies to Jewish princesses, truck drivers, groupies, and (in 1982) the "Valley Girl" - a rare 'hit' for Zappa featuring daughter Moon Unit's arresting monologue as an airheaded LA teenager.

 Such unexpected chart success did little to assuage Zappa's bitterness at "basically, being shut-off at every turn when I tried to do something original and creative". Indeed, 1977 should have seen the release of "Läther" (pronounced 'leather'). Planned as a quadruple box set,it encompasses every genre in which he was working - live rock performances, orchestra, chamber jazz, guitar improvisations, musique concr&egra;te - propelling the listener into uncharted realms of 'taste' ("The Legend Of The Illinois Enema Bandit", "Titties'n'Beer"). Warner Brothers, his label at the time, refused to release "Läther" and pulled strings to ensure he couldn't do so elsewhere. Incensed, Zappa took to the airwaves. Sounding uncharacteristically tipsy, he played the entire set on KROQ radio in Pasadena, urging listeners to tape it - an inevitable bootleg went into circulation. Meanwhile, he reluctantly reformatted the bulk of "Läther" into more generic chunks. The live double album "Zappa in New York" appeared in 1978 alongside "Studio Tan", followed in 1979 by "Sleep Dirt" and "Orchestral Favourites", with other fragments surfacing elsewhere. "Läther" achieved quasi-mythic status as the great 'lost' Zappa album, another in a long line of not-to-be projects such as the 1972 sci-fi musical "Hunchentoot" (bits of which later showed up on "Läther") or the hilarious world-cup soccer opera "Dio Fa" outlined in the chapter "Failure" of his autobiography 'The Real Frank Zappa Book' (1989). However, fast forward to late 1996 and "Läther" was resurrected from the vaults, issued by Rykodisc as a 3CD set, thanks to a little forward motion from Gail Zappa (Frank and Gail had married in 1967) and complete with a cover concept by 'heir-guitarist' son Dweezil.

Zappa regularly toured, pushing the technical skills of band members to the limit. A twelve-CD series of live recordings from 1965 to 1988, You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore (1988-92), displays Zappa's disciplinarian traits - auditions were notoriously gruelling and merciless. At various times band members included Steve Vai, Terry Bozzio, George Duke, JeanLuc Ponty, Warren Cucurullo (Duran Duran) and Adrian Belew (Bowie, Talking Heads, King Crimson).

During the 1980s, working from a state-of-the-art home studio (The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen), Zappa gained critical acclaim as a 'serious' composer with concerts and recordings of his work by the London Symphony Orchestra - LSO Vols. 1 & 2 (1983/87) - and The Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez - The Perfect Stranger (1984) - as well as commissions from the Kronos Quartet and the Aspen Wind Quintet. These projects were dogged by his dissatisfaction with orchestras used to 'snoozing their way through Handel or Mozart', and whose financial demands were often extortionate - a series of abortive European concerts in 1979-80 cost Zappa $250,000 without a note being played. By the mid-80s he was realizing many of his ideas on a Synclavier computer, which provided the freedom and control he was after.

In 1984, Zappa, posing as his real-life eighteenth-century namesake, Francesco Zappa, issued an eponymous album of 'digital baroque dinner party music'. The humour of this album and of the Synclavier's instrumentation, sending up classical music's growing obsession with authentic performance and the (big) business of 'hit' composers, seemed lost on critics and fans alike. Back in 1968, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets had created a similarly bamboozling effect, as Zappa and The Mothers delivered their leering tribute to doo-wop subculture and cheesy teenage love songs.

Zappa's contrary activities were never more acute than in 1984. Alongside Francesco Zappa and The Perfect Stranger appeared the vertiginous rock of Them Or Us, amidst a June-to-December world tour of some 112 dates. Then there was Them Or Us (The Book), a 300-page story and screenplay of delirious magnitude available through Zappa's mail order outlet Barfko-Swill. And then there was Thing-Fish. Often cited as Zappa's most offensive and incomprehensible release, this was originally conceived as an off-Broadway musical, an avenging parable of an America choking on racial, sexual, religious and political oppression. A plot extract was published with colour photos in the American porno mag Hustler just to add to the contention.

In 1985 Zappa testified to the US Congress, fighting music censorship proposals initiated by the Parents' Music Resource Center. Excerpts from the congressional proceedings appeared, suitably mutilated, on the cannily titled Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention (1985). When, in 1987, the title track of Jazz From Hell (1986) earned a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental, Zappa recognized a music industry titbit designed to shut him up - 'The Grammys are all fake', he declared, an extension of his contempt for MTV, corporate rock, and the increasing trend towards stylistic regurgitation (he termed it 'Death By Nostalgia'). Once again turning his back on the industry, he put together a 12-piece band (the biggest combo he'd used since 1972) and was on tour throughout 1988.

After a visit to post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia in 1990 (President Havel was a fan), Zappa was briefly made an overseas trade representative, an appointment soon thwarted by US governmental pressure. A year later, Zappa announced that he was considering standing as a non-partisan presidential candidate, having summarized his political outlook as 'practical conservatism'. Confirmation of prostate cancer in late 1991 sidelined these ambitions; but, despite worsening ill-health, Zappa continued to work right up to the end. September 1992 saw concerts with Germany's Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna, with specially commissioned pieces premiered alongside older works. Zappa was thrilled: 'I've never had such an accurate performance at any time for the kind of music that I do.'

Frank Zappa died, aged 52, on December 4, 1993 at his home in Los Angeles. Since his death, the traditional music industry vultures have been making what they can from his remains. Strictly Genteel (Rykodisc; 1997) is a compilation of great dollops of music for films and other neo-orchestral stuff and Have I Offended Someone? (Rykodisc; 1997) is a compilation of tracks chosen by the man himself the year before he died, selected for their power to get beneath the skins of minority lobby group members. Just the kind of joke he'd have loved when alive, one has to wonder just how funny it is now he's dead.