Frank Zappa & Pete Townshend

["Citywatch Ltd" <email@citywatch.prestel.co.uk>]

I bought a book this weekend, a biography of the late Frank Zappa.  
I'm a big Zappa fan, but I've never really noticed the parallels 
between his work and Townshend's work.  Obviously, musically speaking 
they are poles apart, both in terms of technique and style (Zappa 
couldn't play chords for about a year after first playing a guitar), 
but they both abviously had similar ambitions for an all encompassing 
body of work.  Whereas Townshend seems to obsessed by producing the 
"Opus Magnum", _the_ definitive piece of rock music, Zappa, while 
following similar lines, has gone for "Conceptual Continuity".  This 
means that every album is related to every other album in some way 
(through lyrics, musical phrases, subject matter etc.).  My point is 
this:  If Townshend had taken this approach, would his output of 
songs been even greater??? Zappa has well over 60 albums of original 
material on the go.  This is great - you can sift out the crap you 
don't like.  There must be hundreds of Townshend compositions out 
there that Pete didn't release because they didn't fit in to Tommy, 
Lifehouse or Quadrophenia........
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