I lived in Austria for a while—I was living there in 1993 when the sad news of Frank Zappa’s death came down the pipe. It was striking to me how much more vital his fandom was there; intense Zappa fans were (and are) very, very common, you’d see casual references in the media to Zappa quite often. This quality he shares, I suppose, with Jerry Lewis and countless bebop heroes, he was more appreciated in Europe than in his native U.S. When he died he was truly mourned in the public sphere. I wasn’t in America at the time (obviously), but I doubt that it was quite as keenly felt here as it was in Europe.

So when I heard that some scientists had decided to name a strain of bacteria after Frank Zappa, I knew that they would turn out to be from Europe, and I was right about that. Italian microbiologist and ardent Zappa fan Andrea Campisano of the Edmund Mach Foundation is the lead author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution about P. acnes Zappae, “a formerly pimple-causing bacterium that apparently has moved from human skin to the bark of grape vines.”

The Italian word zappa means “hoe,” and the name of the new strain is also a reference to “the agrarian roots of the wine-related institute where the discovery was made.” Actually, Zappa has this in common with Arnold Schwarzenegger. The root “egge” in Arnold’s name means “harrow” or “back hoe,” and the word “Schwarzenegger” would translate as “black back-hoe man.”
 

Campisano said he played Zappa’s music regularly and kept a quote from the genre-bending rock musician displayed on his computer screen in the laboratory: “If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television … then you deserve it.”

 
Insofar as pimples and Frank Zappa albums share the trait of being incredibly common—Zappa released somewhere in the neighborhood 60 albums during his lifetime, and he died at the young age of 52—that’s another link.

And then there is this...

Here’s Frank and the Mothers of Invention, live at the Roxy in LA in 1973.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Make Me Laugh’: Frank Zappa and Gallagher on bad 70s game show
Amusing ‘The Big Lebowski’ poster starring Frank Zappa, Iggy and Bowie