Warren
Cuccurullo Biography
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Cyndi Glass, all rights reserved
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Born Dec. 8, 1956, Warren grew
up in Canarsie (on 92nd St. and 94th St.), a neighborhood in Brooklyn (New York
City) and began playing guitar when he was nine.
During his teens, when he wasn't working for his father, Warren was playing music. He started out on drums and quickly switched to guitar, jamming with his brother and his friends in his basement.
"I tried to stay adventurous in my music," Warren says about this time period, going on to list several of his early influences (Beatles, Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Monkees, Motown, blues, Johnny Winter, Alvin Lee, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, John McLaughlin, Ravi Shankar, Pat Martino, Coltrane, and Miles Davis). He found someone very adventurous to emulate - Frank Zappa. "By 1973, I was a diehard fan," he says. He graduated from Canarsie High School in the class of 1974.
| Baby pictures of Warren courtesy of Ellen Cuccurullo, published in Privacy issue 7 You are welcome to download these, but please do not publish them on websites or message boards without permission. Thank you. |
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Warren continued to play in local bands, give guitar lessons, and travel to any Zappa concert within 500 miles of Brooklyn, trying to meet Zappa and submit tapes of his work. At this point, Terry Bozzio and Patrick O'Hearn were playing drums and bass for Zappa. Warren hung out with the band and crew quite a lot, including long-time Zappa crew member Thomas Nordegg, who was subsequently to become Warren's guitar technician for Missing Persons, Duran Duran and beyond.
Finally, Warren got the chance to meet Frank. According to Zappa in several books about him, Warren knew the guitar parts to every Zappa song. The two of them became friends, and Warren was filmed backstage for Zappa's movie, Baby Snakes, in October 1977.
Warren backstage at a Frank Zappa show, New York, Oct. 1977 (from the film
Baby Snakes).
Warren went to the Zappa's New Year's Eve 1977 show in Los Angeles and was invited to Zappa's home, where he was given a sitar and allowed to listen to the unreleased Baby Snakes soundtrack. He even got to narrate a story ("Ms. X") on stage at one of Zappa's famous New York Halloween shows in 1978, accompanied by the band. "A few weeks after that we went out to dinner with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, the great writers, and Frank introduced me to Ginsberg, calling me 'a guitar player.' That was the first time anybody ever referred to me as a guitar player," Warren says. Finally, in December 1978, Zappa phoned Warren and asked him to come to Los Angeles and audition for real.