ter registration drive and later march in Selma, Alabama, which occurred at almost the same time - the Watts' riots were the result of anger rather than hope. Although it is difficult to know to what extent Zappa could have analyzed the importance of these riots when he wrote the song, in retrospect what happened in Watts is in many ways a more accurate gauge of race relations in the middle of the century than what happened in Selma or in Washington DC. And the lessons learned and not learned in Watts would be just as prophetic as those in the South. When Los Angeles burst into flame and violence again in 1992 after an all-white jury acquitted the white officers charged with beating another black driver it seemed as if Los Angeles and along with it the rest of the United States had made no progress whatsoever. Zappa's concluding lines to the song mirror that sense of helplessness that he saw being acted out as he watched the coverage of the Watts' riots:
Because he's out for blood tonight (http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Frank-Zappa/Trouble-Every-Day.html).
Zappa saw - and wrote about - a riot, which is fundamentally different from a protest. There was no possibility of anything good coming out of the riots - unlike the protests that King led (or the other great protests of the 1960s, those against the escalating U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam). There was almost nothing that was right and everything that was wrong in the riots, with blame enough to be laid on both blacks and whites. Zappa's song suggests that in a nation in which race so clearly defined the life and destiny of each person there could be no other possible political outcome but constant, low-level warfare.
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