Frank Zappa's Cucamonga Studio

Before Frank Zappa was famous, he was broke in Cucamonga.

In the early nineteen sixties, a young Zappa rented time at a studio on Archibald Avenue, Paul Buff's recording facility, and made his first recordings there. The studio was not glamorous. The equipment was not state of the art. The music being made was not commercially viable by any contemporary standard. It was also the beginning of an artistic career that would produce more than sixty albums and reshape what American music was allowed to be.

What is established is the Cucamonga geography, the Buff studio, and the early-nineteen-sixties timeline. Don Van Vliet, who would become Captain Beefheart, was a schoolmate of Zappa's at Antelope Valley High School in nearby Lancaster, a creative acquaintance in the period before either of them had a career. Two of the stranger and more original voices in American music found each other in the same dusty corner of San Bernardino County.

Down the road from the studio, the oldest commercial winery west of the Mississippi was technically still standing. The Rancho Cucamonga, established in eighteen thirty-nine by Don Tiburcio Tapia on a Spanish land grant, produced wine here for more than a century before development overtook it. Wine country, avant-garde rock. These are not the identities most people associate with Cucamonga, which is why the collision is worth noting.

The studio is gone. The vines are mostly gone. The name survives in a freeway exit and a baseball team and a Bob Hope joke from nineteen forty-three.