Reminiscing about the audacious genius of the Grand Wazoo
I was talking the other day with my L.A. pal, guitarist-composer-conceptualist and all-around upstart Skip Heller. Consoling each other in the midst of our post-election doldrums, Skip began reminiscing about what a significant impact that Frank Zappa had on him while growing up in Philadelphia during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Skip’s encyclopedic knowledge of FZ’s music had me dipping into my own memory banks about my myriad encounters with the Grand Wazoo himself.
I guess Zappa first came into my consciousness through Freak Out!, the 1966 Verve album produced by the forward-thinking and criminally unsung Tom Wilson, who had previously produced Cecil Taylor’s 1957 debut, Jazz Advance, Sun Ra’s 1961 album, The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra, as well as two key Bob Dylan albums from 1964 — The Times They Are a-Changing, Another Side of Bob Dylan — along with Dylan’s 1965 single, “Like a Rolling Stone.” He also produced Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., which included “The Sound of Silence.” So we’re talking genius level output here.
My older brother Tom had brought home Freak Out!, which I instantly regarded as a kind of comedy album that fit in with the counter cultural humor of Mad magazine of the day; a more bizarre version of Stan Freeberg’s musical political satire albums and pre-dating the Firesign Theatre’s Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him by two years.
Between the absurdist “Help, I’m a Rock” suite, the socio-scolding “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” the experimental/psychedelic “Who Are the Brain Police?” and the musique concrete of “The Return of The Son of Monster Magnet” (which pre-dated the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” from the White Album by two years), it all struck me as some kind of post-beatnik performance art, though that term wouldn’t come into the parlance until the ‘70s.
But along with the L.A. freak/political humor represented on Freak Out!, there was also plenty of music — an obvious doo wop influence on “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder,” a nod to surf rock on “Wowie Howie,” along with some straight up raunchy blues on “Trouble Every Day.” There just weren’t the kind of guitar heroics on that album that I would later come to associate with Frank Zappa.
Subsequent albums like 1967’s Absolutely Free and 1968’s We’re Only In It for the Money struck me as more immersed in satire and campy humor than music, per se. But 1969’s Hot Rats was the first Zappa album to really grab me by the lapels and sit me down for a serious listen. There was an unabashed stretching aesthetic inherent in Zappa’s wild wah-wah-infused guitar solos on “Willie the Pimp,” “Son of Mr. Green Genes” and “Gumbo Variations,” while his compositions “Little Umbrellas” and the mellow “It Must Be a Camel” were both decidedly jazz flavored (courtesy of the hip piano comping and intricate horn parts by Frank’s right hand man on this project, Ian Underwood).
Zappa would push the envelope even further in that jazz direction on 1970’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh, which included an avant garde instrumental titled “The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue” along with some nasty violin soloing from Don “Sugarcane” Harris on the bluesy “Directly From My Heart to You.” Frank showcased more wah-wah guitar soloing on the drone-oriented “Get a Little” while the title track was a blast of white noise pre-dating Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music by five years. And the aggressive pop vocal tune, “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama,” a wah-wah-fueled favorite of mine, was a bridge to Zappa’s more commercially successful guitar-oriented albums to come, like 1973’s Over-Nite Sensation and 1974’s Apostrophe.
I first saw Zappa in concert on May 11, 1973 when he made an appearance at the Milwaukee Arena. The Mahavishnu opened on a twin bill, also marking the first time I had ever seen John McLaughlin in concert. A year later, on April 21, 1974, Zappa returned to Milwaukee to play the Riverside Theatre with his nonet featuring the Fowler brothers (Tom on bass, Walt on trumpet, Bruce on trombone), along with keyboardists George Duke and Don Preston, the drumming tandem of Chester Thompson and Ralph Humphries along with vibraphonist Ruth Underwood. Over two sets they performed tunes from Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe while premiering “Village of the Sun,” a tune that would later appear on the live Roxy & Elsewhere.
In my review for the campus newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the UWM Post, I dabbed in absurdist exaggeration in a manner that I felt appropriate for the subject: “I walked around in a void following the Frank Zappa concert at the Riverside Theatre Tuesday, debating various methods of suicide. After experiencing the ecstatic peak of my life, I saw no further need in continuing it. The rest of my life would seem anti-climactic after witnessing the genius in person. Needless to say, the man who is light years ahead of his contemporaries kept the crowd in constant suspense as he reached into his zany bag of tricks for some typical Zappa madness.” And I concluded my review with this:
“Zappa is a a most unheralded guitarist, as his incredible riffs often become overshadowed by his absurdity. The new material plays at the concert hints that Zappa will be coming out with another new album in the future, which will probably cause me to postpone my suicide.”
My third concert encounter with Zappa came later that year, on Nov. 24, 1974, when I drove up to Madison with a carload of friends to see him at Dane County Coliseum. As I recall, bassist Tom Fowler had a cast on his arm for that whole tour, which essentially premiered new material that would appear on Roxy & Elsewhere, along with a memorable reggae flavored cover of the Allman Brothers’ tune, “Whipping Post.”
I remained totally onboard with Zappa through 1975’s One Size Fits All, which included the rhythmically-complex “Inca Roads,” a tune sung by George Duke and one which introduced Zappa’s pick-tapping technique (he called it ‘the bagpipe technique,’ which Eddie Van Halen copped and ran with, resulting in his vaunted solo on 1978’s “Eruption”). I also dug 1975’s Bongo Fury, featuring the insane, rough-hewn vocals of Captain Beefheart, and 1976’s hard-edged Zoot Allures, which introduced 24-year-old drummer Terry Bozzio and featured the snarlingly sardonic “Disco Boy.” The live Zappa in New York (recorded in late December 1976 during a three-night engagement at The Palladium, though not released until 1978) featured the mighty horn section of Mike and Randy Brecker, baritone sax ace Ronnie Cuber, alto saxophonist Lou Marini and trombonist Tom “Bones” Malone. It also featured “The Black Page,” Zappa’s extraordinarily difficult through-composed melodic drum showcase for Bozzio.
While 1979’s Sheik Yerbouti (with Zappa pictured in an Arab headdress on the cover) was shrouded in controversy — the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reacted to Zappa’s scornful tune “Jewish Princess” by asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban the record from being played on the air — it nevertheless became one of his best-selling albums of all time, selling over two million copies worldwide, quadrupling the sales of his next-in-line best sellers, Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe, each racking up 500,000 in sales.
After moving to New York City in 1980, I had several more encounters with FZ. On Nov. 17, 1981, I caught Zappa at The Ritz the night he brought on a surprise guest guitarist, Return To Forever’s Al Di Meola, who he introduced as “another great Italian.” It was also the world premiere of a song that Frank had written specifically with Al in mind, entitled “Clowns on Velvet.” Al learned it that afternoon and flashed his signature speed-picking chops that evening before an adoring crowd at The Ritz.
A few weeks later, I attended my first Zappa Halloween concert at The Palladium on October 31, 1981. (Zappa’s annual Halloween residency, a NYC tradition going back to 1974, was first held at the Felt Forum before moving to The Palladium in 1977). A few weeks later, I ended up interviewing Frank for a December 1981 cover story in the Long Island biweekly entertainment publication, Good Times, where I was the managing editor. Publicist Jane Friedman of The Wartoke Concern set up that interview in her Midtown Manhattan office, and I remember being very nervous about the prospect of meeting Zappa face to face. Luckily, upon entering the room, I noticed that Frank was particularly taken by my unusually-designed blonde Italian leather pimp shoes from the 1970s, and he immediately commented on them. Those exotic wingtips served as a nice ice-breaker for my one-on-one with this somewhat irascible figure who was known to be a tough interview. Thank God I didn’t wear brown shoes for that interview. Because as Zappa had clearly pointed out in his satirical song from Absolutely Free, “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.”
That Good Times interview was done in conjunction with Zappa’s current release at the time, You Are What You Is. Meanwhile, Frank had simultaneously done a mail-order-only release, an instrumental box set entitled Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar, which was geared strictly to six-string aficionados. During my hour-long interview with FZ for the piece entitled “Zappa: He Are What He Is,” he talked about his two new releases while also addressing the sad state of radio play and the record industry in general. And he had lots to say about the state of America under Ronald Reagan (who had just begun serving his first term as president earlier that year, on January 20, 1981). And he spoke out vehemently about the advent of Christian nationalism (under the tag of the Moral Majority, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell). As he put it, “This year it’s really taken a nose dive, since the Reagan Administration has gotten in. It’s frightening. We’re looking at the prelude to the New Dark Ages here. If you know anything about history, this Dark Ages we’re going into now is gonna make the first one look like a company picnic.”
A year later, I got an assignment to interview Zappa for a February 1983 cover story in Down Beat magazine. This time out, Frank remembered me, although I wasn’t wearing those same ice-breaking ‘70s pimp shoes I had on during our previous interview for Good Times. I showed up at his hotel room and there met the photographer assigned to do the cover shot for Down Beat. It was Darryl Pitt, who at the time was also the official photographer at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Coincidentally, Darryl would go into artist management, forming his Depth of Field company, which ended up repping Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider and later tenor sax great Michael Brecker. (Pitt currently co-produces “The Nearness of You” benefit concerts in honor of the late tenor sax titan, along with Brecker’s widow Susan). I remember Pitt setting up a backdrop for his cover shoot right there in Frank’s hotel room. It was a multi-hued pastiche that screamed early ‘80s — a faux Memphis-Milano style marked by bold, bright colors, geometric shapes, striking patterns put together in a playful, almost futuristic aesthetic. Ever the cynic, FZ took one look at Pitt’s backdrop and instantly insisted on posing with a piece of cheesecake that still sat uneaten on his room service tray. “Because that backdrop is cheesy,” he sneered. Of course, he was being perfectly Frank. As always.
Here's that DB cover story from Feb. ’83 entitled “Frank Zappa: Guitar Player!”:
He considers himself too irascible and cynical to be interviewed, yet he remains one of the most outrageously outspoken, eminently quotable figures in popular music. Over the past 18 years — an astounding, prolific career that has seen him produce 40-plus albums, four films, four ballets, various works for orchestras, and one musical stage play entitled Hunchentoot — Frank Zappa has been revered as a genius by some, scorned as a dangerous upstart by others. He has cultivated a large, loyal following from his endless outpouring of recorded music and his countless concert appear nces. And he has made enemies (radio programmers, disco dancers and the Moral Majority topping the list).
He is a social commentator, a humorist, a composer, a 41-year-old father of four, an independent businessman (having formed his own Barking Pumpkin Records in 1981), a filmmaker, a Sagittarius with Capricorn rising, and a former employee of the Nile Running Greeting Card Company. Given that avalanche of credits, it is perhaps easier to understand how we sometimes lose sight of this very simple fact:
FRANCIS VINCENT ZAPPA CAN PLAY THE GUITAR!
To bring that point to light and clear up any questions about the matter, this multi-faceted Zappa released a stunning three-record set of strictly instrumental music last year, showcasing FZ at his fiendish best on guitar solos in various styles. This ambitious package is titled, appropriately enough, Frank Zappa: Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar, and until recently being picked up for nationwide distribution by CBS was available to hard-core Zappa fans by mail only.
A terse comment on the back of the album box aptly states the premise of this project: “While the papers and magazines shouted the praises of every other fashionable guitar strangler and condemned Zappa for having the guts to sing lyrics they felt were disgusting, he quietly continued to play things on his instrument that were far more blasphemous than any words could convey. In the rush to be offended by what he said, the music press forgot to listen to what his guitar was talking about. Zappa's guitar solos, as captured in this album, say a lot of things that just might prove to be embarrassing to the writers who forgot to listen."
So for this down beat interview, we decided to focus on this often overlooked side of the Renaissance man — Frank Zappa: Guitar Player.
Bill Milkowski: You were actually composing classical music before you ever picked up a guitar, then at the age of 16 you got hooked on r&b music. What was the early fascination there?
Frank Zappa: Well, let’s face it, there’s nothing that sounds like an electric guitar. Good of distorted electric guitar is a universe of sound that transcends the actual noise that is coming out. I mean, you can take one fuzztone note from a guitar and look at it on a spectrum analyzer and calculate everything that’s in it, but there’s so much more in it than the harmonic components. It just says something that no other instrument says. It has emotional content that goes beyond other instruments. And nothing is more blasphemous than a properly played distorted guitar. It is capable of making blasphemous noises, and that’s what first attracted me.
BM: You’ve mentioned Johnny Guitar Watson and Gatemouth Brown as major influences.
FZ: I wouldn't say that Gatemouth sounded so blasphemous. Johnny Guitar Watson was an extremely evil-sounding guitar player at the time, but the smuttiest one I heard was Guitar Slim [Eddie Jones]...just pure smut. The thing that I liked about the Johnny Guitar Watson solo I heard when I was 16 that really intrigued me — his solo on "Three Hours Past Midnight" —was not just the tone of the instrument but the absolute maniac way that he spewed out these notes in a phrase with little or no regard to the rest of the meter or what was going on, but still being aware of where the beat was. He was just yellin’ it at you! Same thing with Guitar Slim’s solo on “Story of My Life.”
BM: More like a voice, which is how you think about your own solo playing.
FZ: Yeah, I think that's the most direct way to communicate with somebody, using speech rhythms. That really makes a big difference. Because, if you listen to a guy playing nice neat scale patterns and things like that, no matter how skillful he is in making his stuff land on the beat, you always hear it as Music—capital "M" music—lines, chord changes, and stuff like that. Real studied. But if you want to get beyond music into emotional content, you have to break through that and just talk on your instrument, just make it talk. And if you’re gonna make it talk, you have to be aware that there's a different rhythmic attitude you have to adopt in order to do that.
BM: Playing off the beat, around it.
FZ: No. you don't say to yourself, “I'll now play off the beat.” I don't know how to tell you how to do it. You just make it talk, and if you then go back and analyze those rhythms, you’ll see that there’s some really strange looking things on paper. You have to take the approach that what you're doing on your instrument is that without using your own mouth you are getting some kind of theoretical idea or an attitude that transcends the actual notes or harmony of the song. It goes beyond all that and gets right to some emotional point you want to get across. And that's what I appreciated about those early solos by Guitar Slim and Johnny Guitar Watson; there was no fucking around. They got right to the point.
BM: Did you own a guitar at the time you first heard them?
FZ: No, my brother Bobby did. He had bought this old guitar for $1.50 at an auction, and he never played it, so I just picked it up and started messing around with it. I actually started on drums when I was 12, but after hearing Guitar Slim and those guys, I began collecting r&b records and working out things. I didn't know any chords; I just started playing the blues ... period. That’s all I wanted to play. I hated jazz and didn’t care about anything else then. The guitar I had wasn't electric—just an arch-top, f-hole, unknown-brand guitar with the strings way above the fingerboard. I didn't know about technique or anything, I just had to teach myself what to do with it. It was all by ear.
BM: And during this period of learning licks off of records, did you also learn by watching other guitarists play?
FZ: There were none to watch, not where I lived, in Lancaster, California There were no local groups, and as far as touring groups or anything, nobody at that time came to Lancaster. Before our family moved to that town, they had a rock & roll concert there at the local fairgrounds where a number of black r&b groups would perform, but some people began selling drugs to the local cowboys at these concerts, and the city council had sworn that they would never allow this evil form of entertainment back into the Antelope Valley. And there hadn't been any kind of movement in the area until I formed my band. Then they gave me a lot of trouble. My band played strictly rhythm & blues music. We didn’t know any rock & roll songs. In fact, everybody in the band hated rock & roll. Rock & roll was that horrible Elvis Presley kind of hillbilly music. I liked Howlin' Wolf and Jimmy Reed and that kind of stuff.
BM: Were you singing then?
FZ: Naw, I’m still not singing, are you kidding? We didn't even have a microphone. It was all just instrumental boogie music.
BM: And what guitar were you playing with this band?
FZ: I started off with a [Fender] Telecaster, which I rented from a music store. After that I bought a [Fender] Jazzmaster, which I used for about a year-and-a-half while playing lounge gigs at places like Tommy Sandy's Club Sahara in San Bernadino. That guitar got repossessed, butthen I made some money by writing music for a film,so I went out and bought a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster, one of those big fat hollow-body jobs with three pickups on it. I used to really like that guitar; it had a nice neck on it, but there was a real problem with uncontrollable feedback whenever I needed more amplification for larger halls. That’s common for hollow-bodies. A lot of people said, "Well, just stuff it with styrofoam and it won’t feedback so much," but I didn't feel like doing that. So I switched to a solid body, a Les Paul gold-top, which I used for a couple of albums. And eventually I got a Gibson SG. The hollow-body had a nice feel and I liked the tone of it, but you could never use a fuzztone with it, and there was no way to tweeze it up and make it work. Remember, in those days there were no graphic equalizers or any other scientific equipment.
BM: What was this first film project you mentioned?
FZ: It was called Run Home Slow, a western starring Mercedes McCambridge which was written by my high school English teacher [at Antelope Valley High], It was an independent feature that I scored with a little orchestra, and I made enough money off of that to not only buy my first guitar but also buy the recording studio that I started off in.
BM: When did you start experimenting with fuzztones and other distortion effects?
FZ: Well, the very first fuzztone that I ever heard about was designed by a guy named Paul Buff, the same guy who invented the Keypex and the Gain Brain and a number of other studio utensils. He has a company on the West Coast now called Valley People. He was also the guy who I bought that first recording studio from ... a real electronic genius. What he did was he plugged an electric bass into a phonograph preamp and then plugged it directly into the board, like a fuzz bass. It was one of the greatest noises I ever heard. Prior to that, if you wanted to distort a guitar, you could plug your guitar into the input on the amp that was supposed to be for microphone. The old Gibson amps used to be able to do that; you’d get some really ugly distortion. But the only other way to get distortion in those days was to slash the speakers.
There’s a story I’ve told before about taking demo tapes to various record companies during the '60s. One of them was a recording I made with Captain Beefheart before he was Captain Beefheart; we had this group called the Soots, and he had done a deranged version of the Little Richard tune Slippin’ And Slidin'... kind of a delta blues with fuzztone guitar.
Now remember, this was 1962. So I took that tape to a guy at Dot Records, which was one of the few companies in Hollywood that was buying masters produced outside of the record company. So I took it to the guy and he said, “We can't release this! The guitar is distorted!" The guy’s name is Milt Rogers.
BM: No doubt a vacuum cleaner salesman today.
FZ: Perhaps.
BM: And when did the wah-wah come into the picture?
FZ: After the fuzztone, around 1966 or 1967. I was one of the first guys to use one, I'll tell you that. I loved the noise. The last tour, though, I didn't use any wah-wah at all. In fact, the only effect that I did use were three DDLs [digital delays] for different functions: one to give me slight delay with a little bit of pitch shift so it makes a vibrato and just thickens the sound, and the other two for passages that we'd just play over and over again, like recording loops.
BM: What’s interesting about your video, The Dub Room Special, is that we get a chance to see you in two very different settings—the 1974 band and the 1980 band. Did you use different equipment for each context?
FZ: Oh yeah. I played the Gibson SG in the 1974 segments and the Les Paul in 1980. But on the last tour, in Europe, I hardly played the Les Paul at all. I played all Strat. I've got a Floyd Rose apparatus on my Strat, and it just changed the world for me. Basically, it’s a vibrato bar apparatus that doesn't go out of tune, which had been the main drawback to playing a Strat, because a couple of good yanks on the bar with that and you're cut to lunch. But the Floyd Rose stays in tune. I had this thing installed so that you could not only bend way down but bend up on it; it’ll take you up a whole step or drop it down below an octave, so it gives you the possibility to play glissandos and other types of sounds that you can’t get any other way. I also had some special equalizer circuits put into the guitar so that I can make the thing sustain to disgusting amounts at any volume.
Of course, I didn’t have the same amplification equipment in those earlier band segments that I'm using now. Science has come a long way since 1974. With that band I was using Marshalls, and in those days if you wanted Marshalls to distort, you had to turn them up all the way. But since that segment was originally intended for a tv show and was shot in a small place—like 200 people in the audience—I had to turn it way down. No sustain... a very old-fashioned kind of sound. So that's what you get from the 74 footage. The amplification that I was using on the last tour we did of Europe, I was using three different kinds of amps—Carvin, Acoustic, and Marshall in different types of speaker configurations. I had each amp set up to do a certain type of a function. The Acoustic amp was set up to be more low and mid range, a more muddy sound. The Marshall is always gonna sound like a Marshall—really screaming. And the Garvin would be used in a kind of a bright fuzztone sound. So all that blended together.
BM: Can you talk about the different rhythmic settings that the two bands offered and how that affected your role as a guitar player?
FZ: Well, playing in the group with George [Duke] and Ruth [Underwood] was a lot easier. I don’t think I was playing that well there, but it was real easy to play with George, especially, because he's such a great musician and you can always count on him to play something musical behind you. It's not just a matter of having a keyboard player to blast his way through and be obnoxious during somebody else’s solo. George would always seem to support whoever was doing a solo, whether it was Napoleon [Murphy Brock], me, or whoever. It was musical to play with him, and I don't always get that same sensation from other accompanists that I've worked with since that time. Frequently, within the last few years, I've been put in performance situations where there's been a temptation for other musicians to overplay in the background department, so I’ve had to create regulations within the band that will limit the amount of accompaniment that will support me. Especially when you have a large band, there's always a temptation for everybody to go into Jam Sessionland when a guy plays a solo. And it just makes a mess.
BM: You've made some comments recently about how proud you are of your current touring group, especially in terms of their rhythmic support.
FZ: Some yes and some no. And that’s generally the way it’s been for the last eight years. There's always a few who are right in there. I had a real good ESP/musical relationship with Vinnie Colaiuta, so I thought that playing with him was real good. And by the time the European tour was over, I thought the rhythm section in this band had turned out to be real good. But there's always those occasions when—this is especially true of the keyboards and percussion—they just play extra stuff that didn’t need to be in there. Because when you're on-stage with a lot of lights, and the lights are going on and off, you always have a tendency to say to yourself, "Gee, am I doing enough for the audience to notice me?" And in times of stress, that would be the guiding factor in a musician's decision as to whether to be quiet or cavort.
BM: I would guess that Steve Vai might tend to unconsciously slip into cavorting because of his amazing facility on the guitar.
FZ: Well, Steve has many great attributes, but playing rhythm guitar is not one of them. He's really quite a virtuoso. His duties in the band are mostly to play the hard-written lines and real complicated stuff that is beyond my capability—all that whammy-bar stuff on Stratocas ter. He's fantastic, but I don't really feel that comfortable with him doing rhythm because with the best intentions in the world, some times he will come up with stuff that might tweeze me off in the wrong direction. But he’s a great player. Ray White, on the other hand, can play fantastic rhythm accompaniment, but quite often he lays back and tucks himself away when he shouldn’t.
BM: What is the ideal attitude for an accompanist in your band to have?
FZ: You have to be sympathetic to what's going on. You can't be concerned about your relative position in the musical universe. If you’re out there playing a piece of music, you have to go for the music and not for yourself. And I could see situations where if the lead player was holding one note and the rhythm player knew what he was doing, that a passage of various chords against that would be fantastic to listen to, so long as when the rhythmic and melodic activity stepped up on the lead instrument that there wasn't a bunch of extra chords to go along with it to make it muddy. Remember, most of the places where we're working are large environments where the chords and notes hang in the air longer than they should, so they just tend to obliterate each other. It’s difficult to do amplified music arrangements in an environment like that because you don’t really know what's going to happen to the music until you stick it into the air mass that it's going to function in.
BM: So you're looking for a clean juxtaposition of the two.
FZ: I’m looking for music; musical ideas that will get the point across without worrying about certain types of industrial correctness. I don't think the audience gives a f*0# about industrial correctness. They want to get some kind of message out of what you’re playing. They want who you are and what you do and anything that gets in the way of that is, to me, not aesthetic.
BM: This idea of air mass is something that most bands don’t consider.
FZ: Well, you've gotta consider it. If you're playing a room with very little reverberation, you can play a million notes and you'll hear all of them. But the decay time varies with the size of the room and the material of the walls and things like that, hockey rinks being the worst, which is where we usually tend to play.
BM: St. John's Cathedral in Manhattan — eight-second delay.
FZ: International Ampitheatre in Chicago —10-second delay. The Palle De Sporte in Leon — gotta be at least a 20-second delay because it’s a circular building and the notes just go around and around and around, and after they go around, they hang. It’s really horrible to play in places like that. You just can’t enjoy it because you know the audience just doesn't get any sense out of what you're doing. They just gotta be watching you like some kind of tv show or something because they sure can’t hear you. In extremely resonant places like that, you simply cannot play fast. It all just turns into a cluster. So you have to compensate for it consciously in the band. The band has to want to do a good job in that kind of environment, and you have to be playing arrangements that permit that to happen. That's why I’m fussy about trying to arrange things and getting people to stick to their parts because I do give some thought as to what’s gonna happen when you play it; there’s gotta be enough space in there so that the sound will work in an air space. That’s what makes the music work. It doesn’t work on paper and it doesn't work in a vacuum. It works in air. You hear it because air molecules are doing something that happens to your eardrums. That’s how you hear it, whether it’s coming out of a record player or a p.a. system or acoustically in a concert hall. So without those little molecules you don't have nuthin'.
What we're talking about when you perform music is you’re talking about sculptured air. Patterns are formed in the airwaves; all the different frequencies of all the instruments playing are making patterns, and your ear is detecting those patterns. And beyond the music, purely on a scientific level, these frequencies are also touching off certain psychological and physiological reactions in the listener. One certain frequency will stop your heart; something else will make you take a shit; another will give you a headache; something else will give you a nosebleed; another will spur sympathetic emotions in you. So my theory is that you don't just perceive music or sound just through your ears, you get it through your entire body. I mean, I hear things in my throat, in my stomach, in my arms, in my feet... you just get it all over. And when you're talking about the kind of amplification that you’re using in a big concert hall, you are doing something to people besides entertaining them. You are affecting their bodies, and you should be aware of that while you're playing loud.
BM: Getting back to equipment, which of the three guitars you carry on tour—the Strat, the SG, and the Les Paul—do you prefer?
FZ: Each one has its assets and its liabilities. The Les Paul, even though it has a thicker neck, for some reason you can play certain passages on it three or four times faster than you can on the Strat. But then again, you can’t get the same type of sustain or vibrato, and you can’t play those weird glissandos on the Les Paul. So, it just depends on what you want to say on the instrument. The Les Paul has more 200 cycles [bottom end] to it, so it's got a meatier sound. The SG tends to have a brighter sound with the tone somewhere between 500 cycles to 1000 cycles. The Strat that I'm using now seems to have a little more bite at 2K [2000 cycles], but it has the option of a lower frequency distortion because you can turn the parametric equalizer and pick up a lower range and boost the snot out of that to reinforce that oinky high end that you normally get out of a Strat at high volume. It gives the appearance on tape of being as fat as the Les Paul but with the bite of a Strat, so you get the best of both worlds out of it. And that Floyd Rose apparatus on the Strat is interesting to me because you can really go out to lunch with it, then let it come back—especially with chords. It's an amazing sound to hear the complete deterioration and then hear it come back. It's right there.
BM: I'd like to ask you about a specific technique that seems to be a Zappa motif on several of your recordings—the Bulgarian bagpipe technique.
FZ: You mean with the pick on the strings? With your left hand you’re fretting the notes and with your right hand you're also fretting the notes with a pick. Instead of plucking the string you're fretting the string, you hit the string and then that presses it against the fret so it actuates the string and also determines the pitch, and you can move back and forth real fast that way ... just aiming it straight down at the string. On the guitar album you can hear it on "Gee I Like Your Pants" and "Variations On The Carlos Santana Secret Chord Progression." Actu ally, I learned it from Jim Gordon, who is a drummer, and he picked it up from some other guitar player. He showed it to me in 1972. That's when I first saw anybody do it, and the first time I ever used it in concert was in Vienna in 72 or 73. I decided I would try it, and I've done it ever since.
BM: Do you play any of this Eddie Van Halen harmonic stuff on the other side of the nut?
FZ: Oh, I can. But everybody now is specializing in that. It's the new hip thing to do, including my son Dweezil. He’s very good at it. Steve Vai taught him a few of those tricks. It's a nice sound, but it sounds so much like a gimmick. It's so freeze-dried because it's such a customary modern-day fuzztone syndrome, which is not part of my musical language. It's something that I can appreciate if somebody else does it, but it's not me.
BM: Do you still play your SG at all?
FZ: Well, right now I'm not playing at all. I just kinda stopped playing after the last date on the European tour. I haven't touched a guitar since. I just haven't been too enthusiastic about playing.
BM: What is your opinion of your own playing lately?
FZ: I think it’s a case of too little too late. I mean, I really have just about lost interest in playing guitar. I tried. I did everything that I could, but I don’t feel like doing it anymore. I’m interested in other things now. I mean, I did it. Now I'm thinking of selling my guitars.
BM: But wouldn’t you say that your playing has improved over the years?
FZ: In some ways, yeah, in some ways no. In some ways it's a lot worse. I used to play more parts in the band, but I was never really accurate at it. I was a very unreliable parts player because I’ve always been sloppy. I wouldn’t sit there and practice for months on end. I mean, there are guys who practice for life. I ain't got time for it. I got afew other things I have to take care of. I have to run the business of what I do. I can’t sit there and devote myself to just playing really fast scales. Besides that, it would be boring for me to do it. I like the instrument, I like the way it sounds, I like the fun of playing concerts, but I tried for years and nobody gave a f*0#. So that's it. I got enough tapes of me playing to release 'em for another 15 years. So it's senseless for me to keep doing it.
BM: But from what I've seen lately of you in concert, I would've guessed that you'd be more enthusiastic these days. I mean, you were playing your butt off on the last tour—Whipping Post, no less!
FZ: Well, I love to play the blues ... but you gotta look at it from my point of view. Every time I play a solo with a band, it makes me feel likeI'm wasting their time, you know what I mean? Like they have more important things that they should be playing. Also, the audience’s tolerance for instrumental music in the United States is not that great. They want to hear some songs. If you have some records out, especially if there's a new release that you're touring with, the audience expects to hear some songs they are familiar with. Other wise, they don't feel that they got their value for their ticket. You could be ready, willing, and able to do something that is above the call of duty, but unless you perform those basic functions of playing things that they know and like for a certain part of the show, it's not only not fair to them because that's probably why they came there, but I think it’s actually rude to defeat the audience’s desires. So I try to mix and match. I try to play enough things that they want to hear, along with things that are brand new which are being rehearsed on the tour for recording, along with stuff that might even be made up on the tour, and some improvisations. On the European tour I was averaging eight to 10 solos a night in a two-hour show. But see, today people are very much oriented to the two-minute song. They want little quick songs that go bye-bye real fast. And the least fashionable thing that you can do on a stage is to play a real long guitar solo I mean, everybody goes, "Ooooo, yuk! That's like the 60s! What is this, the Grateful Dead?" And journalists are also inclined to say in reviews that this is a bad thing to do.
BM: So fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
FZ: Well, yeah, but by the same token, in certain countries the power of a journalist to destroy a group within a matter of moments is there. If you’re getting bad reviews or somebody says your show is boring, then in times of economic stress, why would anybody buy a fuckin’ ticket to go see your show when they could see this band that plays a mass of two-minute songs? It’s disgusting to me, because if a society lets itself be led around by arbiters of taste like that, when you have to go by somebody else’s word of what is good and what is bad, and you don’t get to decide for yourself, and you're willing to give up your freedom of choice, then you're a fool. It’s a sad state, but that's the way it is, and you have to deal with things as they are, not the way you wish they were
In this interview with Frank Zappa for the August 1984 issue of Modern Recording & Music magazine, entitled “Orchestral Maneuvers,” we addressed his side career as a composer of symphonic music and his recent collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra.
After 18 years of playing practically every concert hall and hockey rink in the free world, Frank Zappa was nearly ready to call it quits. Disgusted with the whole exhaustive prospect of touring and playing before legions of rowdy, potentially violent fans, Zappa decided to shelve his rock career in order to concentrate on other pursuits, namely, symphonic music.
Phase One of Zappa's new career began last year with the release of a digitally-recorded album of his ambitious contemporary symphonic pieces, performed in concert by the London Symphony Orchestra. That program was conducted by 31-year-old Kent Nagano, of the Berkeley and Oakland symphonies. The recording session was produced and engineered by Zappa for his own Barking Pumpkin label. Phase Two occurred in February 1983, when Zappa shared the baton with maestro Jean-Louis LeRoux for a 100th anniversary celebration of the music of Edgar Varèse and Anton Webern, which was performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the city's War Memorial Opera House
Zappa's burgeoning interest in symphonic works is nothing new. He dabbed in such large canvas composing as early as 1975, where he premiered new symphonic works performed by his 37-piece Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus, with conductor Michael Zearott conducting. Recordings of that live concert later appeared on 1979’s Orchestral Favorites (die-hard Zappa fans will recognize “Rollo” as an intricate instrumental segment in the middle of “St. Alphonso’s Pancake Breakfast” from 1974’s Apostrophe).
Zappa’s interest in symphonic works continues. This past January, three original Zappa chamber compositions were performed by conductor Pierre Boulez's prized chamber orchestra, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, with Boulez himself conducting the proceedings at the Theatre De La Ville in Paris. An album on EMI Records is forthcoming. Last spring, Nagano and his Berkeley Symphony presented the world premiere of Zappa's "Sinister Footwear," a ballet performed by the Tandy Beales Company and featuring the puppet creations of Ron Gilkerson.
And there's more. Zappa has been invited to guest conduct at the prestigious Magghio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence, Italy, and has also been asked to guest conduct for the Honolulu Symphony 1984/85 season and to conduct his own music and selections from Edgar Varèse at the University of Buffalo in 1985.
All this from the man who brought you such irreverent rock classics as "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow," "Dinah-Moe Humm," "Illinois Enema Bandit, "Half A Dozen Provocative Squats", "Help, I'm A Rock," "Saint Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast," "My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mamma" and the notorious "Stink Foot," to mention just a few in his discography of hundreds of recorded compositions.
Zappa has not abandoned his rock career. He's just put it on the back burner for a while. This summer he plans to release Them Or Us, the 36th album of his career. Besides featuring his regular band of Steve Vai and Ray White on guitars, Chad Wackerman on drums, Bobby Martin and Tommy Mars on keyboards, and Scott Thunes on bass, it will be something of a family affair. His oldest son Dweezil will be making his debut with daddy, playing some insanely wicked wang-bar riffs on "Stevie's Spanking" and a reggae remake of "Sharleena," a love ballad that originally appeared on Zappa's Chunga's Revenge album. Daughter Moon Unit will also make an appearance on the new LP, offering up a Valley Girl rap for a mock aerobics tune called "Hoznia." And Zappa's youngest son Ahmet Rodin actually penned one of the tunes, "Frogs With Dirty Little Lips," which is a little ditty he dreamed up at the age of six and sang around the house every day. Johnny Guitar Watson also makes an appearance on the new album. Other tunes include "Baby Take Your Teeth Out," "In France," "He's So Gay," "Won Ton On" and "Planet Of My Dreams."
And as if that weren't enough ... there's also a book in the making and a Broadway musical in the offing, a production called Thing Fish, which Zappa has been working on for some time now. While in New York recently, Zappa talked about his music, his career and where he's headed.
I understand that you had a harrowing experience in Palermo, Italy, the last date on the last rock tour you did. Was that something that turned you off to touring?
I would say so, yes. What happened in Palermo was ... we were working in a soccer stadium, it was the last concert on the tour, and I had been looking forward to playing in Sicily because my father was born there. And that afternoon I had taken a drive over to his hometown, this horrible little village called Bartenicco. So I checked that out, you know, getting into the Sicilian vibe of it all. There's this Italian schmaltz connected with Sicily for all people of Italian extraction.
So anyway, I was in a pretty good mood after exploring these old haunts. I get to this gig, had a great sound check, I had written a song that afternoon and taught it to the guys in the band ... everything looked like it was going to be fine. We start the show and within 10 minutes of the beginning of the show there's this weird something going on, but you can't see the audience. It's totally black out there. They're a million miles away cause we're out in the middle of this soccer field. And I hear some disturbances. Suddenly, they got the army there and the police department and they're all fucking armed to the teeth. The next thing I know, the tear gas starts going off and guys are kneeling down with rifles, like mortars, shooting this tear gas into the stands. Bricks start flying. It turned into chaos. And we kept on playing through this. But it got so bad that we had to put wet rags on our faces to keep the tear gas out of our eyes. And we kept playing on and on.
Finally, the lights start going on and we see that the place is being emptied out. They're firing tear gas all over the place and they're clearing these people out of the stadium. We played for about an hour and a half during this thing. And we found out later that some kids had brought guns to this concert and the cops had guns and they were shooting at each other like cowboys and Indians. Meanwhile, we're trapped in the stadium downstairs, some gangs had broken into the tour bus, there's rocks flying all over the place and it's like a little war going on. And what the fuck for?! We go there to play some music and it turns into a situation where people are injured.
And you lost money on that tour besides.
Oh, yeah. The complete tour was financially very problematic, to the tune of $160,000. So after that whole experience there I'm saying, "Look, I am 42 years old, I like music a lot. But I don't believe that subjecting yourself or the audience to that kind of potential abuse is something that you must have to do in order to make music. I think it's quite enough to make records. And I've got at least the next five records already on tape, 37 tunes ready to mix, with the last road band. And I'm not saying that I'm never going to go on stage again because I've done some conducting since that tour of Italy was over. But to go out there with an electric guitar and play rock 'n' roll music on a regular basis night after night in town after town ... I don't want to do that. I've done it ... 20 years of it. It's enough.
Would you agree that what did happen in Palermo is an extreme example of the potential for violence at any rock concert today?
Any place, but especially in Europe. There's a large amount of anti-American sentiment over there as a result of the actions of the present administration. It used to be that if you were an American, your name was mud. Now your name is shit. Because, if they see you on the street, you are the visible manifestation of everything they hate about a regime they don't understand, located someplace else, that threatens their country. There's so much distrust and distaste for American behavior and ideals right now. It's a bad time to tour.
What about the American concert circuit?
American concerts are dangerous to do also because the Americans don't have any money to go out and buy tickets. So, the only things I'm really interested in doing on stage now are things with orchestras or chamber groups.
You have no degrees, no mentor or no formal music training, yet you're composing this incredibly difficult music. How did you teach yourself?
I went to the library. It's free and it's there. And until they close down the public libraries in the United States, everybody has access to the same information. Just go and do it.
So you were hungry for this sort of information at an early age?
Yeah, I started when I was about 14. I was writing symphonic pieces before I ever wrote a rock 'n' roll song.
And throughout your career it's been trial-and-error with the various projects you've undertaken?
Yeah. I don't think I've mastered any of the techniques but I've gotten to a point where I'm severely competent. And in order to master the things that I've set out to master, the main thing that stands in my way is the budget to do it, because the stuff I'm working with is all expensive machinery and expensive personnel and things like that. I mean, I'm at the stage now where in order to do the things that I need to do, it requires resources beyond what I'm capable of providing for myself. Remember, it's my money that makes these things. I'm not funded by grants or foundations or anything. If I get a sales of a concert ticket, part of that money goes back into buying equipment and the airplane tickets for the next tour and paying the salaries of the people who go out. And the costs of making records keeps going up too. So I operate just like any other small business. The capital comes in to keep the business running so that people can consume it. I mean, I don't stick the money up my nose and I don't buy a yacht. It goes right back into the music. It's like converting the income I made from "Valley Girls" into this orchestra album. But I see no way in the future that I can continue funding such projects. This orchestra album is as much as I can spend, and it's kind of a dead-end project at that because we only pressed 6,000 copies of the album and it cost so much to do it that it's already a net loss as a project. So that gives me a number of problems for future projects.
I understand you had a number of problems in getting this orchestral project together. What happened?
Wanna know why we didn't do this thing in the United States? Besides the bad attitude we encountered, it was a money situation. We were originally going to record this with the Syracuse Orchestra with Christopher Keene conducting, and it was going to be premiered at Lincoln Center in New York City. We had made a deal with the Syracuse Orchestra and within a matter of days they managed to double the price. It started out at $150,000 for the whole project and then somebody in the orchestra union had found a whole bunch of extra rules that brought the cost up to $300,000. So I said no way.
This project has gone through a lot of sidetracks along the way. You mentioned that at various times it was going to be done with the Krakow Symphony Orchestra, then the Mexico City Symphony, then Syracuse. How did you end up with the London Symphony Orchestra?
Well, as soon as we got this extortion-y message from the Syracuse Orchestra we decided to try to contact a British orchestra. First we called the BBC Orchestra but they were booked solid for the next five years. Then we called the LSO and they said, "Well, we don't know whether we can do it because we're just finishing off a film score and the musicians have one week off before they have to do another film score." And since they get to vote on everything they want to do, they put it to the orchestra and the orchestra members chose to record my stuff rather than take a vacation. They went directly from Return Of The Jedi to my stuff to another film. We had just a certain number of days to do the whole thing, and they were rehearsing their butts off. We had 30 hours of rehearsal for one concert and three days to record.
They probably didn't have to rehearse that much for Jedi.
Well, they didn't have to because it's more traditional notation. It's not that hard to read, no difficult counting involved.
What were the problems you encountered with the Krakow and Mexico City orchestras?
I went to Mexico City and actually conducted their orchestra for a little while. They were very interested in doing the project, then after we had the rehearsal and we got down to what it would cost, the guy I dealt with added it up and wanted $400,000. He had somehow gotten a hold of what the scale would have been if I had done it in New York City. And there was no way that they were as good as the New York Philharmonic and no way that I was gonna give them $400,000... so I said, "Thank you, goodbye.” As far as the Krakow Orchestra goes, they had been after me for years and at one point last August, right at the end of a European tour, I was supposed to go from Sicily to Warsaw to start this project. It had all been set up at the beginning of the tour. Two weeks into the tour, martial law broke out in Poland and all this other crap was happening over there. So I said, "I don't think I want to take my recording truck into Poland next to the tanks. It's crazy to do that." So we passed.
Can you tell me about the problems you encountered in dealing with the orchestra unions in America?
You have problems with the unions because of the way the union scale works and the cost per musician to do these projects and the further entanglement of union regulations that you have to wade through in order to do the project. That's only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the attitude of the people on the board of directors of the various orchestras as to what they will or will not program. Then you have the economic constraints placed on the orchestral business in the United States by the concertgoers themselves. Concertgoers will only buy tickets to certain types of events because they haven't been educated to new music. Most concerts of orchestral or chamber music in the United States are devoted to regurgitation of artifacts left to us by dead people from another country. That's classical music in the United States. If you're not dead and you don't come from someplace else, then obviously you're no good and your music shouldn't be played. That pretty much sums up the attitude of the people who make the decisions as to what orchestras play. And part of that decision is based on how many tickets they can sell to the concert.
The economics of the business are totally different from what people think of in rock'n'roll. I'll give you an example: If by some strange coincidence you are a composer and an American orchestra wants to play your piece, something that you may have worked on for five years, in order to just get the parts copied for the orchestra it might cost you thousands of dollars. And do you know what you receive from the orchestra for playing your music? $300 to $500 for the rental of the materials to play it. That's how great the business is from a composer's point of view. The only time a composer has a chance to earn anything above and beyond that is if the piece gets recorded and he gets publishing royalties from those records. But those records don't sell in the huge quantities that rock records do, so the publishing royalties aren't that great. The other way composers stay alive in the United States is with grants or with teaching positions. But it's very difficult to see why anybody who is studying music now would ever want to become a composer. It's pretty much a dead-end street in the United States. And if you become a composer, you have to know in advance that what you're doing will probably never be played. The only person who will ever hear it is you, in your head.
Why is that?
Because most symphony orchestras in the United States are simply doing what amounts to cover tunes of the greatest hits. Guys in orchestras have been playing Bachand Beethoven and Mozart and all that stuff since they were in the conservatory. They already know all the hits, so when a guest conductor comes to town, all he has to do is go out there, wave his stick and look romantic and it sounds perfect. It's like bar bands. Everybody knows how to play "Louie Louie." No problem. But if you hand them a piece of music they've never seen the likes of before, they'd have to learn it. So in a situation like that, if you want to try and get something brand new played, you're not going to get a good performance. For an orchestra to sound like a unit, playing something that is totally unfamiliar to them, it has to be rehearsed. So usually they won't touch a new piece because it's too much work, and also because the cost of rehearsal is so high.
For instance, some of the material I have written would take four weeks of rehearsal – that's eight hours a day, five days a week. In Europe you could get that, but in the United States you couldn't afford it. No way. And I've had offers from orchestras who want to play my music. They say they'll give it two days rehearsal, and they make it seem like they're doing me a favor. Two days? They're crazy!! I would rather not hear it played at all than to hear it played wrong. Then you have to sit there while the newspaper critics say how shitty it was when what they have heard is not what I wrote. If it's going to come out, I want somebody to hear what I wrote and I want it played correctly.
I've heard stories about the unions being so strong in some American orchestras that they were able to keep musicians who were completely incompetent due to alcoholism and were just faking it on stage. hidden within the orchestra. I understand that these people can't be fired because they are under binding contracts, yet the London Symphony Orchestra has no contracts and forces players to maintain a high degree of competence or else get booted.
The London Symphony Orchestra owns itself, it's an associative orchestra. The members own the orchestra, they hire their own conductor, they run their own business and they share in the profits. Consequently, an average guy in the London Symphony Orchestra will play 90 recording sessions a year while the average guy in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for example, will only do 17. See, the union scale in England is lower than in the United States so it costs you less to do a project with a British orchestra. And they're eager to do work, whereas the US orchestras want to raise their pay scales up to the point where it's so sky-high that they're really not doing very many recording sessions. So ultimately their gross at the end of the year is less than what the British orchestra is going to get. On top of that, the attitude of an American orchestra seems to be: the smaller the amount of work you do, the better it is. It's really a lazy mentality, and it's the same kind of mentality that exists in other unionized industries like the auto industry. I mean, it makes me laugh when people complain about, "Hey, Japan is kicking our ass!" Yeah, they're kicking our ass because the American workers are getting all these benefits and big prices per hour for doing work, and they don't care about their job. All the quality control is gone. Craftsmanship isn't a part of your life anymore, you just want to get as much as you can from the evil capitalist pig who owns the factory, you wanna rip off the management, give them the big hose job, go on strike all the time and then when the stuff that you don't do well on the assembly line turns out to be a lemon and people don't buy it anymore and the company has to shut down, you just cut your own throat.
By not putting back in.
Right. I just think that things would be a lot better if you are productive if you have a job, if you put in the effort and you do more work without ever having to go on strike. Then your boss, as a gesture of fairness and recognition, should give you more money ... but for doing more work, not because 100 guys say, “We won't work at all unless you give us more money!" Because what happens then is the boss says, “OK, you think you got my balls in a bear-trap? I'll do this: I'll give you more money, but I'm raising the cost of my product 20 percent above what it was and I'll wind up making more profit.” So the worker goes home with one dollar more in his pocket but the thing he needs to buy on the street is now costing him two dollars more. And every time there is a strike, there is this effect. That's the economic spiral that happens. You want more money? There's no free lunch. The guy who owns the thing is not gonna take less profit. Believe me, he'll find a way to make more profit. And strikes have been so prevalent that the product keeps going up in cost, a little bit and a little bit ... and the next thing you know a jar of peanut butter costs five dollars!
The Minneapolis Symphony went on strike earlier this year.
Yeah. I can just see it: "We will now withhold culture from the entire Minneapolis area until we get more pay for fewer concerts." More orchestras have this cold what-can-I-get-outta-this attitude today. The Chicago Symphony is an exception. But you have to recognize that the Chicago Symphony is generally regarded as the best in the world. They sound good and they play like they really mean it, whereas, most of the other orchestras in the United States are not really serious about doing it. I mean, just because you have a tuxedo on doesn't mean that you're into something. They wear tuxedoes in Las Vegas ya know.
POSTSCRIPT: On November 8, 1991, I attended a performance of “Zappa’s Universe” at The Ritz in NYC. It was originally planned for Frank himself was going to make an appearance at this show, but he was too ill to attend. (Zappa’s children Moon and Dweezil later revealed to the public for the first time in a press conference that their father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in the spring of 1990). FZ’s guitar playing son Dweezil carried on for him, along with fellow guitarist and former Zappa sideman Steve Vai, guitarist-vocalist Mike Keneally, bassist Scott Thunes, and the Swedish tandem of keyboardist of Mats Öberg and drummer Morgan Agren, who had formed the Zappa tribute group Zappsteetoot in 1984. And longtime friend and collaborator of Zappa’s, Joel Thome, also conducted a 27-piece orchestra on several pieces.
Zappa died from prostate cancer on December 4, 1993, at his home with his wife and children by his side. He was only 52 years old. Zappa’s passing from prostate cancer was a sobering wake-up call for me last summer when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Unlike Frank, I decided to have a surgical procedure to quickly remove it before the cancer spread. Frank reportedly refused treatment for his prostate cancer due to a combination of factors, including his distrust of the medical establishment, a strong desire to maintain control over his life and body, and potentially believing that the aggressive treatments available at the time would significantly impact his ability to continue making music. I recently celebrated my 70th birthday. Frank remains buried at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Word to the wise: Have a blood test, get your PSA level checked. You dig?
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