Zappa as Rand For Hippies... Perhaps some devotees could take Zappaist Thought with them, which leads to this TL's Apple or Google giving its staff psychedelics?
Yes, a version of the Objectivist not-a-cult-ok-it's-a-cult is what I was thinking.
But in my mind, if he was alive and in control, it would have been straight edge, though. He wasn't anti-drugs, but there's a strain there of him always being quietly, personally opposed to the excesses of the counter-culture.
If he's doing the full Ayn Rand peer pressure act, he's making his followers clear their bodies and their minds; I don't see his rhetoric gripping people who want to go down the path of Timothy Leary or any other standard commune lifestyle from the era.
If they are sober ancaps, the potential for them to influence/infiltrate the emerging IT sector is there... Jobs. Maybe Gates. Jobs certainly is a potential very willing mark. Or adversary.
(Not so fun fact: His sometime colleague Captain Beefheart turned his own band into a violent, reclusive mini-cult during the time they were putting together material for their classic art-rock album Trout Mask Replica; when Beefheart brought his beaten, effectively brainwashed crew into the studio to lay down the tracks in '69, Zappa was producer of the record.)
Zappa considered running for president in 1992, though his stomach cancer stopped him from jumping in. His running mate would be Ross Perot, his attorney general would be Alan Dershowitz, and his campaign would prioritize eliminating the federal income tax. Several political strategists expressed interest in joining Zappa and one poll said 86% would be open to supporting his bid for the White House.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.co...dered-running-for-president-with-h-ross-perot
OMG, the two things that jumped out at me here,
(a.) Frank was one of the first people on the record about how Perot should get into national politics? That deserves to be at least mentioned in major accounts of US political history. This also helps provide context for Cher being a noisy Perot supporter in '92 (very similar base personality type to Zappa I think, ifn a _very_ different career arc post-'66.)
(b.) This article has an MSM outlet (owned by Disney!!) boasting about how accurate its polling was vis-a-vis getting a huge chunk of a survey sample to express interest in backing minor celebrity Zappa, after one single TV interview. Nate Silver would have a stroke at that.
The rest of it basically just indicates to me that, if you take spirituality out of the equation, he maybe would have functioned as an early, tax-obsessed version of Marianne Williamson?