This year’s Maryland General Assembly session has been plenty busy, with legislators still trying to get a feel for new GOP Gov. Larry Hogan, and with such issues as charter schools, fracking and powdered alcohol all spurring debate.

But for sheer star power and national-headlines-grabbing potential, nothing has approached those heady March days of 1986, when Frank Zappa and the fear of naughty words put Maryland’s legislature in the national spotlight. Early in that year’s session, Montgomery County delegate Judith C. Toth had sponsored legislation that would have made it illegal to sell records and tapes deemed obscene to minors. And that made free-speech advocate Zappa, a Baltimore native who attended elementary school in Edgewood, pretty darn disgusted with his home state.

On March 17, he arrived in Baltimore to let everyone know just how unhappy he was. Noting that several other states, as well as the federal government, were considering such laws, he pointed an accusatory finger at Free State legislators. “Maryland was the first state to launch this kind of stupidity,” Zappa said during a press conference at BWI Airport, in advance of a scheduled appearance before the legislature. “If you can stop it here, it will be something the state can be proud of.”

Zappa, who fronted the frequently foul-mouthed Mothers of Invention in the 1960s, was no johnny-come-lately to the censorship issue. The previous year, he had testified against similar legislation before the U.S. Senate (during hearings that led to no new laws, but did spur the recording industry to start putting warning labels about offensive lyrics on some records and, later, CDs). And as he would prove before the legislature, Zappa was no one to mince words or couch his views. Lawmakers, he said, should not be the ones telling anyone, not even kids, what they should listen to. “Rock music was never written for conservative tastes, it was never intended to provide easy listening for mom and dad at home,” he said to a packed hearing before a state Senate committee -– a hearing that most likely never would have even happened (committee chair Thomas V. Mike Miller had already vowed not to let the bill out of his committee) had Zappa not come to town.

Added Zappa, alluding to testimony from religious groups that included a minister reciting sexually graphic lyrics into the official record, “There is not a sound that will come out of your mouth that is so powerful that it will make you go to hell.”

At the previous day’s press conference, Zappa was even more succinct in his opinion of the proposed legislation. “This bill sucks,” he said.

(Toth’s bill, although it passed in the House of Delegates, never made it through the state senate.)