POP BEAT : ZAPPA SHOW WON’T BURN FCC’S EARS

When disc jockey Fred Hodshon was assembling his play list for the five-hour Frank Zappa retrospective he is broadcasting Tuesday on radio station KSBR (88.5 FM), he instantly recognized the irony in having to bypass certain controversial songs.

“I had to reassure (people at) the station that I wouldn’t play the questionable material,” Hodshon, 29, said, referring to some of Zappa’s lyrics that would undoubtedly violate Federal Communications Commission’s broadcast standards, particularly in light of the FCC’s recent crackdown on radio stations that air programming it deems “indecent.”

This, of course, makes for a situation drenched in irony. Zappa is the most visible and outspoken foe of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), the Virginia-based group that has lobbied to label--some would say censor--rock albums containing references to sex, drugs and violence.

Zappa feels strongly enough about what he perceives as an infringement of First Amendment rights that he’s addressed it in Senate hearings, in symposiums and on the lecture circuit. He even taped one of those Senate hearings, featuring statements by seven U.S. senators, and wove it into a avant-rock collage called “Porn Wars.”

But because “Porn Wars” is spiked with profanity, this musical dig at the rock censorship issue is itself off limits to Hodshon’s program.

“Oh yeah, it’s definitely ironic. There’s (self-imposed) censorship all through this show,” he said, adding that in preparing the program he listened to all the songs on every album to ensure that nothing naughty slipped through.

Given these constraints, Hodshon didn’t set out to establish any grand themes in assembling Tuesday’s play list, which runs in chronological order from “Hungry Freaks Daddy” (off 1966’s “Freak Out” LP) to “The Beltway Bandit” (from 1986’s “Jazz From Hell” album).

The show, which starts at 9 p.m., will also include Hodshon’s comments about various aspects of the artist’s 20-year recording career, a few giveaways of Zappa-related items--and, possibly, a telephone interview with the man himself.

This, from someone who says he’s not much of a Zappa fan, even though he owns all 47 albums officially released by the iconoclastic composer-singer-guitarist.

“All I’m saying is: I’m not, compared to people who collect his bootlegs--who go out and try to find ‘Zappa Plays Borneo,’ ” he cracked, noting that the true devotees subscribe to all the Zappa fanzines and try to collect all bootleg videos and records.

Hodshon did acknowledge that he’s enjoyed Zappa’s music for many years and suffers from a milder form of that collecting mania--which helped spawn the idea for the radio program.

“I’ve been listening to Zappa since ‘71, and had collected the majority of his albums,” he said recently over a bowl of chicken soup at a Lake Forest restaurant.

When he realized recently that he was only a few LPs away from completing the collection, he started acquiring the missing records--and flashed on the idea of a retrospective. And he figured he might have an outlet: Until about a year and a half ago, Hodshon worked regularly as a disc jockey at KSBR, Saddleback College’s non-commercial radio station.

But if Tuesday’s program sounds like a major undertaking, it’s considerably scaled down from the format he first proposed to KSBR. “Originally, I approached them with the idea of playing every album back-to-back,” he remembered, laughing in retrospect at the complications that would have dogged such a marathon.

“(That show would have ended) several weeks later--and probably several lawsuits later, because a lot of the albums include really questionable material.”

The material Hodshon did select will certainly chronicle Zappa’s “development as a musician and composer, beginning as a guitarist, leader and composer, to the last album, where he doesn’t play guitar at all.”

“Another thing,” Hodshon continued, “is that he’s always been like a social barometer with his lyrics and his music.”

“So each one of the songs represent something that was going on at the time they were released. Like ‘Trouble Every Day’ was pretty much talking about the Watts riots, ‘Hungry Freaks Daddy’ (addresses) the flower-power stuff, ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ is a scathing indictment of the ‘50s parents trying to live through the ‘60s kids.”

Obviously, Hodshon has put tremendous effort and thought into compiling the songs for the retrospective. But he emphasized that if listeners call with requests, he’ll try to substitute those songs.

Nearly as obvious: While the man being chronicled Tuesday is an intriguing sort that prefers to operate outside the mainstream, the same could be said of the man doing the chronicling. A New Jersey native who has lived in Orange County for about four years, Hodshon is a songwriter-bassist whose taste in music runs toward such adventurous artists as Fred Frith, Ornette Coleman and Captain Beefheart.

He has a small recording studio in his apartment, where he and others have worked on songs and demos tapes, among other projects. He played bass in two shortlived local bands. And he’s personally made two videos (one for his cover of Beefheart’s “There Ain’t No Santa on the Evening Stage”) and collaborated on several others.

Oh, and he pursues all these things in addition to his full-time job designing contact lenses for a local medical optics firm. So for other lens designers--or just others--not as well versed musically, how would Hodshon describe Frank Zappa’s music?

Grinning at the difficulty of the task, he replied: “It’s a combination of styles. The best way I can describe Zappa’s music is that it’s like 12-tone Motown.”

For more information, tune in Tuesday.

LIVE ACTION: Tickets go on sale Monday for two Pacific Amphitheatre concerts: Crowded House (Sept. 4) and the Monkees (Sept. 20). . . . Alabama and Restless Heart will be at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on Aug. 11. Tickets go on sale Sunday. Tickets will be available Saturday for X and Social Distortion’s concert at Irvine Meadows on Aug. 15. . . . Gary Morris returns to the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana on Aug. 10 and 11. . . . Smithereens will play the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Aug. 2.