Now this is a beard that still exists, and it is still called the Zappa after this man. Like him, its a bit of a rebel, and is described as having a thick, wide moustache over a small tuft, or "soul patch" under the lip.
Frank Vincent Zappa was born on December the 21st, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, and named after his father Francis Vincent Zappa, whose gene pool was mainly Sicilian, but also included a mixture of European, Arab and Greek heritages. His father worked in defence, so they moved about a bit, and when they did come back to their home state it was to a house practically on top of a chemical warfare unit storing mustard gas, so close that gas masks were kept on hand in case of any spillages, and practising for these was a part of regular life. If you listen to his music, you can tell that even though he was but a toddler, the atmosphere of that sort of environment carved of itself into his psyche. For some reason his father also used to bring things home, including liquid mercury, which young Frank was both intrigued by, enough to play with it, and scared of it, in equal measure. This is almost certainly why he was frequently sick as a child.
Eventually, twelve years later, the family relocated to California, and his father became a teacher. Being in California was a wonderland to little Frank, and he was hungry to learn about music, of all kinds, from the classical to the unearthly. California was also where he joined his first band, whilst still at school, as a drummer. And after he left school he joined another band, also as a drummer, which where he met Jim Sherwood, who would later become part of Frank Zappa`s group, The Mothers of Invention.
At the end of 1960 Frank Zappa got married. At the time he was working as a writer and producer of songs for other people, and not really considering performing them himself. It was only after his marriage broke up in 1963, and he moved into a friend`s recording studio, that he started performing in local bars, on the guitar, which was easier to store and carry than the drums.
In 1967 he got married again, and this was much more successful, resulting in four children and lifelong happiness; the couple were only parted by his untimely death in 1993, when he was only fifty-two years old.