The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

23 | Gorton v. Zappa
MiLLions of Music fAns who didn’t give a rip about the budget
deficit were introduced to Slade Gorton in 1985 when Frank
Zappa came to Capitol Hill. A brilliantly oddball musician and
record producer, Zappa’s progeny include Moon Unit and Dweezil and
more than 50 albums, including “Burnt Weeny Sandwich” and “Weasels
Ripped My Flesh.” He was the father of The Mothers of Invention, a seminal
art-rock band.
Drugs, sex and violence in rock ‘n’ roll worried Tipper Gore, the spouse
of Senator Al Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of Treasury Secretary
James Baker. They founded the Parents Music Resource Center—PMRC—
whose goal was to convince the music industry to offer parents guidance
on the content of records. Nineteen record companies had agreed to put
“Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics” labels on their albums. The Senate
Commerce Committee, featuring Gorton, Gore and James Exon, a homespun
Nebraskan, resolved to hold a fact-finding hearing on “porn rock.” 1
Hair cropped short, mustache neatly trimmed, Zappa wore a conservative
suit and a brittle air of indignation at the machinations of “bored
Washington housewives.” Beginning with a recitation of the First Amendment,
he denounced their proposal as “the equivalent of treating dandruff
by decapitation.” It was “an ill-conceived piece of nonsense that
fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties
of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for
years. . . . No one has forced Mrs. Baker or Mrs. Gore to bring Prince or
Sheena Easton into their homes. Thanks to the Constitution, they are free
to buy other forms of music for their children. . . . 2
“Taken as a whole,” Zappa continued, “the complete list of PMRC demands
reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of ‘toilet
training program’ to house-break all composers and performers because
of the lyrics of a few. Ladies, how dare you? (Your) shame must be shared
by the bosses at the major labels who, through the Recording Industry
Association of America, chose to bargain away the rights of composers,
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