They're Doing the Interview of the Century
Part 1
By Den Simms, Eric Buxton, Rob Samler
Society Pages (US), April 1990
"THEY'RE DOING THE INTERVIEW OF THE CENTURY"
A four and a half hour chit-chat with Professor Zappa, Part 1
On the evening of December 22,1989, the three Society Pages executives
conducted an interview with Frank Zappa in the comfortable basement listening
room of his home in the hills of Los Angeles. We could gush on forever about how
gracious and hospitable Frank was, and he was generous enough to give us six
hours out of his schedule. Although we all know Frank to be a regular, nice guy,
our expectations were greatly exceeded. He even served us Christmas cookies and
refreshing beverages.
The entire Zappa family was home prepping for the oncoming Christmas holiday
& hanging out and preparing edibles. The kitchen is obviously the nucleus of the
Zappa family.
We would like to express special thanks to publicist Jim Nagle for arranging
and scheduling this interview. We would also like to express infinite graditude
to Frank for his time, his words, his groovy vibes, etc., etc., etc.....
The following is part 1 of our interview. In the spirit of accuracy in
journalism, we have endeavored to present this interview in word for word form,
with only an occasional microscopic modification needed for translation into
print.
Participants include: Den Simms (DS); Eric Buxton (EB); Rob Samler (RS); Jim
Nagle (JL); and of course, Frank Zappa (FZ).
FZ's Grammy for "Jazz from Hell"
Photo by Rob Samler
INTERVIEW WITH FRANK ZAPPA
December 22, 1989
FZ: Hello?! Hello?! Hello?!! Hello!?
DS: Here we go. Alright. [To Rob & Eric] So what was the
thing that you had said about "Manny The Camper" on the way here?
FZ: He wants to buy some white. Manny the camper wants to
buy some white. Ya wait long enough, all the songs come true. [1]
EB: Who was the original Manny the camper? I know he
wanted white gas, but who was he?
FZ: Just anybody named Manny who had an RV, y'know.
EB: And here he is.
FZ: Yeah. I'm sure he has an RV too. It's probably
bullet-proof. One more thing is maybe he'll return to Managua. You could go
unnoticed in such a place. (laughter)
EB: Him and Imelda and Leona (unintelligible).
DS: It's always sort of traditional for somebody who's
interviewing you to ask about your kids names, but since we've got that story
down pretty much, y'know, we have Moon versus Motorhead; we have Dweezil –
Gail's toe; we have Ahmet as Ahmet Ertegun and Rodan the Japanese monster,
right?
FZ: And Emuukha.
DS: And Emuukha. How does that fit in? I know of the
Emuukha Abnuceals Orchestra? What do those words mean?
FZ: I made 'em up.
DS: Just made up words?
FZ: Where do you think words come from? Somebody's gotta
make 'em up, y'know. They're only made out of letters.
DS: Alright. And Diva has a middle name, right?
FZ: Well – no, she doesn't, but she's been thinking
about adding one. She flips back and forth on this. She actually has two middle
names. Sometimes she, when she writes a note to us and signs it formally, it
says: "Diva Thin-Muffin Pigeen". Now, she made those up. I have no
responsibility for that. She happened to think that those were good names, and I
would not be too surprised if she names at least one of her children "Pigeen",
because she thinks that's a nice name.
DS: My own area of particular interest, something I've
been concentrating on, certainly since that tour, is what you guys did in 1988,
so perhaps I could start with some stuff that pertains to that. Can you talk
about how you utilized the synclavier on that tour, and, we heard about
something you were perhaps puttin' together called "Goin' To Hell".... ?
FZ: "Goin' To Hell" was a sequence that has all these
different ways to say "You're goin' to hell", many different ways to say the
word "Jee-zus", and then it has all these ugly burping, growling, devil worship
kind of demon noises in the background, and some low grunting instrumental
sounds. I put this sequence together, and.... what we'd do with the synclavier
on that tour is each night there would be a sequence, like a complete
composition, loaded it into the synclavier, and during the improvised part of
the show, I could turn that sequence on. The synclavier would play a collection
of sounds and then the band would play along with it. On some nights we used
"You're Goin' To Hell"; on some nights we used some stuff with the congress
voices; some nights other things.
DS: There was one particular sound I can remember too,
which kinda got me off, it sounded like a combination of you, I believe, from
the Mothers Of Prevention album, saying the word "bondage", combined with a
burp.
FZ: Oh yeah. That was not me. That's my nephew, Jade, and
Jade, he has the ability to burp very loud and very long, and he can also burp
words. So, when he was here visiting in '87, we had a sampling session with
Jade. In fact, he got paid the same as any other musician that comes in here to
do samples. I stood him in front of a microphone, and let him do an assortment
of burps, and then gave him a list of words and phrases to burp, and some of
those were put into the synclavier and that's what ya heard.
DS: What did he use to induce the burps with? Somethin'
like Pepsi, or, uh....
FZ: Well, he could do it just by gulping air.
DS: No kidding?
FZ: Yeah.
DS: That's peculiar. Can you talk about how the
synclavier was MIDIed to some of the other instruments on stage? I guess Ed's
silicone mallets, and some of the keyboards?
FZ: Yeah. 'Bout the middle of the tour we hooked up some
wires so that I could throw a switch on the stage and any one of three different
musicians on stage could trigger the synclavier with their instrumental set-up,
so that Ed could trigger the samples on the synclavier by playing the silicone
mallets, and if I flip the switch another way, Bobby Martin could trigger it
from his MIDI keyboard, or Chad could trigger it from his octopads.
DS: I assume there was probably also some things that you
had beforehand manufactured with the synclavier that they were able to do, such
as Ed's little guitar riff that he would do....
FZ: No that's actually his sample. That was in his little
sampler. Just a loop of one guitar strum. I don't even own that sample.
DS: Most of the samples Ed was working with, were those
his or some of his and some of yours... ?
FZ: Most of the sounds you heard from Ed were either his
samples or synthesizer sounds that were triggered by the silicone mallets.
DS: I see. Havin' the silicone mallets really kind of
opened things up for him, didn't it?
FZ: Yeah.
DS: I guess not only just in terms of the array of sounds
that he can use, but also in not having to carry around tubular bells, and all
that kind of stuff.
FZ: Yeah. Also the fact that the sound goes through a
wire to the mixing console and I don't have to worry about mixing things.
DS: And the problems associated with that. Uh...I've got
so many questions here, I definitely can't go through all these, so I'm gonna
try to weed through some of these. Um ...OK, uh....
EB: What color is your aura? [2]
All: (much laughter)
DS: It seems to me that Scott's role on that last tour
was... well, he was more out towards the front of the stage, and had a wireless,
and he was one of. the more ... um, I don't know, I can't think of another word
other than "entertaining". He was running around the stage more, and....
FZ: But he did that in '84 also. I mean, if you look at
the videos of Does Humor Belong In Music, he was somewhat frolicsome in that
band.
DS: I suppose I had that impression because I only got to
see the last two shows in '84, and got to see a bunch of 'em in '88.
FZ: Um hmm. Yeah, but he's always been one of the
showmanship people in the band, and in fact, one of his legendary performances
in '81 was Salt Lake City, where, we used to do Envelopes, and for the first
thirty-two bars, there was no bass. So rather than just stand still on stage
while Tommy played his part, Scott would invent little things to do, that were
not bass parts. In Salt Lake City he decided that he was gonna take this
aluminum canister that he had mayonnaise in it for the sandwiches backstage, and
he brought it out with him onto the stage, and in the space of thirty-two bars,
took his shirt off, took this little rubber spatula thing, coated his entire
chest and arms with mayonnaise, in this elaborate ceremony, and then strapped
his bass back on and came in on the beat when if was time to play, which seemed
a very... kind of off the wall thing to do.
DS: Another thing I really like about Scott, is I like
his solo that he does in "Nigger Bizniz", which to me, sort of ... um, I've
known Scott for quite awhile; I knew Scott before he got involved with your
band, and ... uh ... the way that he solos in that song reminds one of the way
that Scott is, which is somewhat comical and, uh ... definitely aspects of being
a buffoon.
FZ: Well see, he's more than comical. He's a fabulous
guy. I felt really upset that the other people in the band chose to hate him,
and chose to hate the way he played, thereby bringing about the demise of the
band. That's ... really unfortunate.
DS: What did they have against the way that he played,
which to my ears, sounds fantastic?
FZ: Well, me too. That's why I hired him. You know what?
The real answer to that .... I'll tell you this way. I just finished doing a
documentary for German television. They shot there for two days and at the end
of the second day, Scott and Mike Keneally came over, while we were videotaping
upstairs, and I told the interviewer, "Why don't you ask these guys what
happened to that 1988 band?" And so, for the first time, I actually heard it, in
their words, what went on. So, I got a nice piece of video tape of Scott and
Keneally answering all those questions in detail.
DS: At the time that that happened, your fans were really
confused and really wanted to know what was happening, and there wasn't alot of
information that was forthcoming about that. I wound up talking with Mike about
it. Just in meeting Mike on tour, and finding out that his background was a
little bit different than most people you get in your band, in that he was a
real ardent fan of your music, y'know, the walking dictionary of your songs, and
all that, was a little different than most of the other people that...
FZ: No, actually there have been two other walking
dictionaries .... Arthur Barrow was a walking dictionary, and to a degree, so
was Ike, but Keneally is a unique individual, because not only is he a walking
dictionary, I've never seen anybody able to memorize anything as fast as
Keneally. He's absolutely a sponge for memorizing musical passages. Y'know, if
you ... well, Colaiuta could memorize fast, but only for the drums, but Keneally
memorizes the entire chunk, the melody, the chords, the rhythm, he gets a
picture of it and he can replicate it, y'know, like Boom! Right after he's heard
it.
DS: Putting that in the context of playing your music and
in your bands, that's a real high compliment.
FZ: Yeah.
DS: He's also a really good guy. In meeting him and just
talking with him, I got the feeling that if I was ever gonna get a straight
story on that from somebody who was involved and might have their opinion swayed
by their own personal experiences on it, if somebody could give me a straight
story, it seemed like he might be somebody who could.
FZ: Yeah. He's a real straight guy.
DS: And he basically, in his opinion, he told me that he
thought that Scott had got a raw deal. I could have asked Scott, but Scott is
Scott. He's somewhat personally involved there.
FZ: Yeah, and he did get a raw deal. But you know who
really got a raw deal
was the fans, because they could still be listening to that band right now. What
happened was that it seemed like out of a twelve piece band, there were three
guys that thought Scott was OK. Me, Keneally and Scott. And there may have been
others who thought he was OK, but they bowed to pressure from a few guys who
just hated his guts. It was like a herd instinct, y'know, and they all just
decided, "Well, we'll just say this guy is, uh, an asshole, and we'll try and
get him out of the band." What is this, like garage band mentality?
DS: There were things that happened that you, on stage,
termed, at one point, as you called them – playground psychotics. [3]
FZ: That's a phrase coined by Jeff Simmons, and that's
all it is, playground psychoticism.
DS: Yeah. Well, that was too bad.
EB: I like your Christmas tree.
FZ: Well, there's a better one upstairs. I mean, this one
is dyin' a horrible death here in the corner, but you gotta understand, although
we have every intention of putting ornaments on the little tree they get for me
in the basement, nobody ever gets around to it, and I never have time to
decorate it. So this may be ....
EB: Would you like me to string the lights while we're
here?
FZ: Go ahead! It may be the only way that I get some
fuckin' stuff on my tree. (laughter)
EB: It's nice, but it's like, leaning over and...
FZ: Well it's ... dejected, and it's dry. And the reason
it's dry is see that pan at the bottom? They hammer this nail through the tree
to stick it in that pan. They made a hole in the pan, so it won't hold water!
(laughter) This is California engineering, guys!
DS: Another example of a flake.
FZ: That's right! So you can imagine somebody out there
going "Geraldo! Hammer that spike through that pan into the....!" (laughter)
DS: (laughs) I have a list of people I've wanted to ask
you about, just to get a reaction from you, as far as those people, and Geraldo
was one of 'em. [4]
FZ: There it is – "Geraldo. Fix the pan on the bottom of
the tree".
DS: Compared to what you did in 1988, in past tours,
certainly through the eighties, you seem to be a little more restrained in terms
of audience participation, and just, the aspect of having the audience be
directly involved with the music, but in 1988, you seemed to get right back into
doing quite a lot of that.
FZ: Well, audience participation depends on two things,
well, more than two. First of all, it depends on the audience. You got the wrong
kind of audience, you'll never get 'em to participate. The next important thing
is where you're performing. If you are in a theater, it's a little bit easier to
do it if there's a stage apron out in front where you can accommodate people,
because if you're just playing on one of those kind of built-up stages, like you
do in a coliseum or something like that, there's not enough dancing area, or if
people come up there, they're gonna trip over the wires on the stage, and you'll
be out of business.
DS: Well, more than audience participation, per se, I
guess maybe I could say too that there seemed to be more of a willingness for
chances to be taken, for just real wacko things to occur spontaneously. Maybe I
can compare this to '84. My own impression of '84 was that certainly, in
comparison to '88, it seemed more rote. Things seemed more ... kinda the same
series of songs that would be done, more or less, pretty much the same way, with
less of that tendency for all of a sudden things to just take off; for the
secret word to be used, with as much gusto as it was used in '88. The secret
word in '88 was brought to a new level of absurdity.
FZ: A fine art. Yeah. Well, you gotta understand that you
put a band together and before they can do the secret word, they gotta be so
assured that they know the material, that they can get back to safe ground if
the secret word doesn't work, (laughter) or y'know. The secret word, it takes a
lot of practice to be able to get a whole band to think in that mode, because if
you rehearse a song, and you're performing it during the concert, you're relying
on what you learned during the rehearsal, in order to do a good job and get
everything in order. But say you're playing along, and suddenly somebody in the
band starts saying, or doing something which is not part of what you learned.
That can really fuck you up if you don't know what to do in that instance. Also,
you gotta know that on stage, sometimes it's difficult to hear what the other
guys are saying. So the secret word stuff is risky business.
DS: Well, I think takin' chances, in the long run, in the
overview, I think pays off. Again, personal perspective.
FZ: Well, I like doing it, but the bands don't always
like doing it, because nobody wants to go on stage, and in the middle of their
splendid, blue solo spotlight wind up fucking up. (laughter) It could mean the
difference between a blow job and black mark on your report card. (laughter) You
just don't wanna fuck up out there.
DS: How do they react when a mistake happens on stage,
and you integrate that, y'know, sort of teasing them about that in the show?
FZ: Well, some people get upset about it and other people
just take it as, like business as usual. I mean, there's certain mistakes that
keep getting made over and over and over again, and when they get made so many
times, I have to ask myself, "Am I gonna flip out here? Or am I going to make a
joke out of it?" Usually I'll make a joke out of it. I think that it's better
than ripping my hair out, saying, "No, No, No!!! Don't you guys know what you're
doing?" Because, I don't believe that they make the mistake to make me feel bad,
or to cheat the audience out of the good performance, but people make mistakes,
so what do ya do with it? Use it as material. Bobby Martin has a habit of
forgetting the words to certain songs, rather consistently.
DS: He has to stay after school afterwards.
FZ: Well ... the....
DS: I remember you saying that, I believe in Hartford or
somewhere. [5] I think later on, you made a mistake, and somebody in the
audience passed you a note that said something like, "Are you gonna have to stay
after school after this one", [6] or something like that happened,
didn't it?
FZ: Oh, I make mistakes up there all the time, but uh, I
can do it. I wrote it so I can fuck it up. (laughter) I'll give myself that
license. But I don't go out there with the intention of making any mistakes, and
I don't think the other guys do either.
EB: With you, it's experimentation.
FZ: (laughs) No, with me it's just the same as the other
guys, 'cause I forget, y'know.
DS: Here's something that I was just talkin' with Jim
[Nagle, FZ's publicist] about a little while ago. You mentioned that you didn't
think it was gonna be possible to tour again unless somebody was able to
underwrite the tour, somethin' like Pepsi, or some other...
FZ: No. No, I'm not thinkin' of Pepsi, that's for sure.
DS: Right. Or just some other company that could give you
sponsorship. D'you think there's anybody around that has economic weight to be
able to underwrite a rock and roll tour that doesn't have to worry about their
corporate image and stuff, to be able to take on somebody that's
"controversial"?
FZ: Not a company, but there's a country.
DS: A-hah. Do tell.
FZ: Well, I was negotiating with these people in Spain,
because, y'know, they have the World's Fair there in 1992, they got the
Olympics, and they have the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus. That all
happens in '92, and there have been ongoing negotiations for over a year with
the Worlds Fair and the Christopher Columbus organization about either putting
together a "World Orchestra" that would tour, or financing some sort of a tour
of a rock band, and I'll hear more about that after the first of the year. But
there's no way that I'd agree to do it unless one hundred percent of all the
expenses are picked up, and I am guaranteed that at the end of the thing, I walk
away with a profit, because in '88, everybody else got paid, and they all got
paid a lot of money, and I lost a lot of money, and I'm not going to repeat that
experience again.
DS: Do you think that if that tour had been able to
maintain and continue, if the band hadn't broken up, and you...
FZ: I'd be talkin' to you in a dressing room right now.
DS: I thought that if you had been playing through the
summer across the United States, some of those summer kind of, oh what do they
call 'em ... pavilion type venues...
FZ: Yeah. Shed dates.
DS: ... that hold larger larger audiences and such, d'you
think that that might have helped to balance the books?
FZ: No question, because we had a whole summer's worth of
job offers, like fifty thousand dollars a night offers that we could have
played, but ya can't play those offers if there's no band. And you can't play
those offers if you have to finish your European tour, and go back into
rehearsal and replace anybody in the band, because it takes months to train
people to do that.
DS: Right. You spend several months in rehearsal before
you go out, right?
FZ: Four months for that tour. And so, to train people to
do it, they're not training for free. You have to pay them a salary, y'know. So,
I looked at the numbers. You take the deficit from the four months of the tour,
you add to it the further deficit of going into more rehearsals, the fact that
the rehearsals would take up the whole summer, and you would miss all the
high-paying dates, and then you would have to go back on the road in September
or October, and there was just no way to do it.
DS: Go back on the road when it starts gettin' cold
again, and start havin' to play inside....
FZ: Yeah. And also having to play inside in places, well,
the trick about playing in the winter months is, in the East coast, especially,
you are competing with the hockey teams, and the basketball teams, and they have
the indoor venues booked, and you have to route your tour around their occupancy
of those buildings. So, every time you have to take a divergence in your tour
routing that takes you out of the nice straight line, economical jumps from one
city to another, every time you have to go (FZ illustrates with hand
gestures) VOOP! like that in order to play a date someplace else, your costs go
way up, because you're runnin' the trucks, and, y'know...
DS: It don't come cheap.
FZ: It's a mess.
DS: OK. Here's something in a completely different
direction. Quite often your music contains quotes from [Giuseppe] Verdi's
"Aida", [Richard] Wagner's "Lohengrin", and [Georges] Bizet's "Carmen". Are you
an opera buff?
FZ: No.
DS: What about those pieces of music appeals to you?
You've been playing around with them for years.
FZ: They're all good tunes.
DS: Yeah. Particularly the "Lohengrin". You've kinda had
a fancy for that for pretty much throughout your career, haven't you?
FZ: Yeah. Y'know, I never heard "Lohengrin" until Hi-Fi
was invented. Long time ago, before Hi-Fi, I didn't know that there was such a
thing called "Lohengrin", and I found out about it because, one day I went to
this record store, and they gave away this forty-five RPM demonstration disc of
what Hi-Fi sounds like, and that was the thing that was on there. Like, the
first Hi-Fi I ever heard was this performance of "Lohengrin", by [Arturo]
Toscanini.
DS: And it appealed to ya.
FZ: Yeah. Nothin' else on there did, but.... (laughter)
EB: (unintelligible) with that Varèse record when you
first saw it, right? (unintelligible) they used it to demonstrate the Hi-Fis,
and they never sold one?
FZ: Yeah. But they weren't giving that away. I mean, this
was like a special promo disc that RCA had made.
DS: Let me ask you somethin' else, kind of in the same
vein. You obviously have quoted many times too, and you have a penchant for it,
the opening notes to [Igor Stravinsky's] "The Rite Of Spring". Now, I've heard
that when an orchestra plays "The Rite Of Spring", that there's this aspect of
tension that settles over the orchestra, because, what is it, a bassoon that
plays that note, and it's hard for him to get a good straight attack on that
opening note, and everybody wonders whether he's gonna blow it or not.
FZ: Well, I don't know whether it's correct to say the
note is not on the horn, but if it is on the horn, it is one of the most
difficult notes to get out of the horn.
DS: Right. Is your fancy for that just because you like
the line, or does it have something to do with that particular aspect of it?
FZ: No, it's... I like the line. I think it's a genius
line.
DS: Yeah, it is.
FZ: And so is all the stuff that comes after it, which
is, that's (laughs) a little hard to quote all that. (laughter)
DS: In 1988, you guys played "America The Beautiful", and
I noticed that there was a short lyric change, which was "The only place to be"
instead of "God shed his grace on thee". What was the reason for that?
FZ: I'm not sure God did shed his grace on this country.
(laughter)
DS: What led up to you playing the Untouchables Theme?
How did that come about?
FZ: I think that's a great piece of music. That's a
genius TV theme, and I've always liked it. One day, we were in Chicago at a
sound check, and I said, "We should play The Untouchables". But nobody could
remember exactly how it went. So Laurel Fishman went to a television station,
and got a cassette, this TV station was running The Untouchables there, and
talked somebody at the station into making a little audio cassette of the theme.
We brought it back to the sound check. We listened to the cassette through the
speakers that played into the room. The horn players went over and stood next to
the speakers and they listened... (to Eric) Were you there at that soundcheck?
EB: Yeah, I was there.
FZ: Alright! And they listened carefully and each guy
picked out his own part out of this thing, and they sketched out their parts,
and that's how we learned The Untouchables.
DS: That's great! Those are the kind of things about
Frank Zappa's bands that I really like. Those abilities to do stuff, to pluck
stuff out of somewhere and to do that. You know, that whole Daniel Schorr medley
thing, [7] that whole... y'know, I was there for the rehearsal, and I
watched how that rehearsal came together, and for me, personally, watching that
rehearsal was one of the best musical experiences I've ever had. Seeing how the
whole thing comes together.
FZ: It's fun to do. That proves it's fun to do music, if
guys just think about music when they're in the band. But the minute they start
thinkin' about stuff that is not music, I mean, maybe even in Chicago these guys
are sayin' to themselves, "What the fuck do we have to do this for? Do we have
to go over and stand in front of this speaker and figure out what the third sax
part harmony is to The Untouchables? Jeezus Christ! I'm a jazz musician!
(laughter) Should I really be doing this?" Y'know, but the net result for the
audience, I think they get off on it, and so there's a time to decide, "OK.
You're a jazz musician, but you're here to entertain people too."
DS: You got a job to do.
FZ: Yeah.
DS: I didn't get a chance to see the Jimmy
Swaggart / Beatles medley. I did get to hear parts of it, and to hear the thing,
to know what it's about. But I didn't get to see it personally. Never having
seen it, I have to let my imagination tell me what's happening onstage when it's
happening. In "Louisiana Hooker With Herpes", when you guys sing that refrain,
and then the word "Oww!" comes after that, I always had this picture of somebody
with herpes putting their hand to their lip and going, "Oww!" Did you guys do
that, or was that just in my mind?
FZ: No, I grabbed my balls for that one. (laughter) Well,
we got plenty of audience sing along on that one.
DS: Yeah. It was a good idea. Are we gonna get to hear
that on a recording? What's the status on that?
FZ: I would love to be able to release it, but see, I
don't have the right to release it without permission from the publisher, and
after that... Michael Jackson owns the publishing, so after my song about him,
I'm not too convinced that I would...
DS: Well, he seemed to have a pretty good humor about,
certainly about the parody that Weird Al [Yankovic] has been doing of his music.
Needless to say, it wasn't quite as biting of a commentary as you gave it,
but...
FZ: It's not the same. (laughter)
DS: So it's all up to Michael and the people on his end,
who control those kinds of decisions?
FZ: Yeah. Sure, I, mean, I've already edited together one
version of it that I could play for ya. It does exist, and it's been mixed, but
I don't have the right to release it.
DS: Yeah. Has there been any indication whether ... I
assume that you've contacted them and asked them if you could do it.
FZ: Actually we haven't contacted them directly. Gail was
the person who handles all that stuff. We have spoken to a few lawyers about it
just to find out whether or not I had the right to release it, and just pay them
the royalties on it without getting permission, and they said no, that you have
to get permission to do it.
DS: Well, I can assure you that your fans really wanna
hear that one really bad.
FZ: Well, they really need to hear it. It's a good one.
DS: That's one that seven-eighths of the country, who
didn't get to hear the tour, heard about that.
FZ: That would sum it up pretty good.
DS: Yeah, I think so.
FZ: That shoulda been a rock video in release at the time
(laughter) that, uh...
DS: You had mentioned too, that you might release
[Maurice Ravel's] Bolero as a single, I suppose only in Europe, because of some
copyright regulations here in the U.S.
FZ: Yeah, the only place in the world where the copyright
has expired, and it's public domain in England. And so, if it's released and
manufactured in England, then it could be done, and I've got an assembled mix of
it. Sounds great. Maybe next year.
DS: That was a wonderful arrangement. I really liked the
little, oh, what was it, "My Sharona", inside there.
FZ: See, you haven't even heard the way it was finally
y'know, by the end of the European part of the tour, they really had it down,
and they were playing it well. They weren't playing it that well in the U.S.
cause we just started doing it within the last ten days of the U.S. tour, so it
was still kind of a fresh arrangement. We played it all over Europe, and it was
a major hit in the show.
DS: The shows I saw were in the beginning of the tour, so
a lot of these things that came later in the tour, the only ways I've been able
to hear a lot of this stuff is through the kind of cheezy little cassettes that
people make in their seats in the audience, and there was really a lot of good
stuff that ... y'know, we wanna hear that stuff on an album some day.
FZ: Don't worry, you'll get it. I'm hoping to have that
out next year. There's a lot of stuff that comes out next year, 'cause it's the
twenty-fifth anniversary, and one goal is to have the entire catalog available
on CD.
DS: Boy, that's a task, huh?
FZ: Well, there's, umm ... what, about a dozen titles
that have yet to be released. Ryko's gonna release eight of 'em, no, it's
actually more than a dozen, and the rest will either come out through Ryko or
another new contract, or they'll be coming out on Barking Pumpkin through
Capitol.
DS: Has the work, in terms of remixing, and all that
stuff, has that work been completed yet?
FZ: The only thing that is not done is putting together
Live In New York, because that's been remixed and extra material has been added
into it, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through assembling those new mixes
for that al
bum.
DS: Here's something related to that. I believe that you
mentioned recently that you were planning on releasing those three "ugly albums"
that Warner Brothers put out, putting them out the way that they put 'em out,
with the same covers....
FZ: With their covers, yeah.
DS: Right. As opposed to reverting back to your original
intentions of putting out Läther as the four record set. Why did you choose to
do that?
FZ: Because boxes are difficult to purchase, because they
cost more, and stores are reluctant to, first of all, stores are reluctant to
stock anything that I do, but they're even more reluctant to stock a box.
DS: Actually, Ryko has been doing real well with keeping
your stuff on the shelf. I can tell you as a longtime consumer of your music,
that from the point that Ryko got involved with you, what they do is in marked
contrast with what I had seen previous to that.
FZ: Yeah. Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they
don't. There's still strong resistance in chain stores, and there's even
stronger resistance as far as the video stuff goes. I think we have to thank our
Christian brethren for that.
DS: Yeah, perhaps. You think so? You think there's something conspiratorial
happening?
FZ: Well, I'll guarantee you that in the case of one major national chain store,
the guy who runs the thing, he's a born-again Christian, and refuses to stock
anything that I do. So maybe that's just his little...
EB: Who is it?
FZ: Oh ... I can't remember, but....
JN: Blockbuster?
FZ: Yeah, uh, it's either Blockbuster or, um...
JN: I know the guy who runs that is a born-again too.
FZ: Yeah. This is Wahl Lee, the guy who runs MPI, told me that he's had trouble
with two, maybe three of these national chains that just won't put the stuff in
the store.
DS: Well we would like to know what store is treating you that way so we can ...
act accordingly.
FZ: Well, actually, the guy to talk to about stores that won't stock my stuff is
Trooper Ash, Chuck Ash, because he's gone to stores in Pennsylvania that just
refuse to carry it. Did you meet Chuck? He was there in Washington D.C. He was a
Pennsylvania State Trooper that did the interview with me... [8]
DS: I saw you talking with him. I was aware of him being
there, yeah. But I haven't met him personally.
FZ: So we'll give you his phone number. I mean, aside
from being a State Trooper, he's also a fan, and...
EB: That's a great interview.
FZ: Yeah, a really good interview.
DS: You did an interview with him back in '81 or
something...
FZ: I've done two tapes with him that have been used in
the Pennsylvania school systems.
DS: Yeah, I remember from that earlier interview that he,
uh, ... I found it kind of curious because he is a Pennsylvania State Trooper, I
kinda thought, "Is this gonna lead into questions about drugs?" And I know what
your views on drugs are....
FZ: That's what it was, exactly. About drugs.
DS: That's kinda what I assumed it would be used for,
part of a ... somethin' for the kids.
FZ: Well, they had a big disclaimer on it that these were
Frank Zappa's views and not (laughter) the views of the Pennsylvania State
Police. (laughs) But, speaking of my views on drugs, y'know, certainly there are
some people who agree with the way I think, and in some surprising....
DS: As of late, George Shultz.
FZ: I was gonna say, I got a letter from him in the other
room.
DS: No kidding!?
FZ: Yes, and what I should do is Xerox it and let you
print it in your little publication.
DS: Oh, we'd love to!
FZ: (to Jim) It's sitting on my desk there, can you bring
it in?
DS: Oh, we would love to! He contacted you ... ?
FZ: No. I heard about his announcements and I called his
office. He wasn't there. He was out on the road speaking someplace, so I sent
him a copy of the book, and I got his letter back.
DS: He got pretty reasonable once he got out of the White
House, huh?
FZ: Yeah.
DS: Two of the things that came out on "Broadway", I
guess one, "Confinement Loaf" was just, was that on the compact disc also, or
just the LP?
FZ: No, that was on the LP.
DS: But I noticed on that and also on "What Kind Of
Girl", that whole chunks of the music that came at the end were kinda lopped
off, and I wondered why that was. Particularly in "Confinement Loaf" that second
verse had some references to Charlie Rose and the Nightwatch interview, [9]
I wondered if that had anything to do with anything.
FZ: No.
DS: Just an artistic choice on your part?
FZ: Artistic choice. I don't have anything against
Charlie Rose.
DS: And that last part of "What Kind Of Girl". I wondered
if that had anything to do with the fact that there was that "Louisiana Hooker
With Herpes" refrain at the end.
FZ: That's right. I couldn't use it.
DS: That was also a wonderful thing you did there.
FZ: That was only performed ... uh, twice, in Detroit and
Chicago.
DS: Muskegon and Chicago. [10]
FZ: It was learned in Detroit, OK. We learned it at the,
um ... what's that little theater where we were working at...
EB: Royal Oak?
FZ: Yeah. We learned it at a soundcheck at Royal Oak.
DS: Leading up to that, you did a concert where you
played straight versions of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" and "Norwegian
Wood".
FZ: Yeah, well first of all, you have to know how to play
the song before you can pervert it.
DS: How did it come about just getting into the straight
versions? Just an idea that you or someone else had?
FZ: Why not do it, y'know. If you got a fabulous band,
play anything you want. Play "Lohengrin". Play "Carmen". Play "Lucy In The Sky
With Diamonds".
DS: You guys were playing a lot of what we'll call "cover
tunes" in that particular tour.
FZ: Yeah, but the total amount of time of the show that
you would hear a theme of a cover tune was probably not more than five percent
of the total volume of the show. One thing about just hearing the melody of
somebody else's tune in there, it gives you a point of reference, because if
you're hearing a band for the first time, and the material is all unfamiliar to
you, if you hear them play something that you already know, and they do it well,
that'll tell you right away whether or not the band's any good. So it's like a
little tester.
DS: I think pretty much anybody that witnessed that band
play knew that it was a good band.
FZ: Yeah. Good is probably not even the best (laughs)
word to use here. It was a fabulous band.
DS: I though it was the most awesome musical ensemble
I've ever seen.
FZ: I think that that was generally the response in
Europe, too. The letters that we've gotten from there have been amazing.
DS: Did you have any problems with the brass section? I
know that in an electrical environment that sometimes you can have intonation
problems with lots of horn players.
FZ: The intonation problems, believe it or not, are due
more to temperature of the room, than to amplification, because when the
temperature goes, instruments, brass and brass wind instruments, tend to go out
of tune, and they're very difficult to get back in tune, because the actual size
and shape of the instrument changes. The metal expands and contracts, so that
changes the intonation. Where it's really dangerous is when you're playing
outdoor gigs, and the temperature swings.
DS: Having those horns really fattened up the sound.
There was really some nice, lush arrangements.
FZ: I love writing for horns. It's fabulous. By the way,
this guy form Germany who came here to do the interview? Also, see all these
videotapes here, these interview tapes and things? He put them in order, and in
doing so, was actually looking through the things and lost a few of the things.
And see those little Beta tapes over there? Those are tapes of the rehearsals
and there's a series of seven tapes that show "Jesus Thinks You're A Jerk" being
put together from scratch.
DS: Ooooo! Ooooo!
FZ: And I haven't even looked at it yet.
DS: Oh, that sounds great!
FZ: What I'm thinkin' is one day, if I ever get around to
it, this would be the best way to show how a song starts from nothing, and then
turns into this major spectacle featuring Eric Buxton. (laughs)
DS: That's a wonderful song to have that kind of a thing
applied to it.
FZ: But it would take a lot of editing, because, like,
seven Beta tapes is seven hours, No! It's more. I think Beta's are two hours, so
maybe fourteen hours of rehearsal that has to be squeezed down so that you could
see each little section being developed.
DS: Oh, that sounds great. There's a particular moment of
that song that really gets me off a lot, and that is that metamorphosis of, I
think it's somethin' like "Battle Hymn Of The Republic" mixed with...
FZ: "Dixie".
DS: With "Dixie", and "Old Rugged Cross", and how that
changes into "Louie, Louie". (FZ laughs) That was really a sweet idea. Speaking
of "Louie, Louie", that seems like sort of a joke for you, and I'll just make
the guess that that's because in your early days you were in bands where lots of
people seriously said, "play 'Louie, Louie'".
FZ: Well, I was also in bands when "Louie, Louie", before
The Kingsmen made it into the joke that everybody recognizes now. "Louie, Louie"
used to be a really cool tune, the Richard Berry version of it. It had, y'know,
a nice arrangement to it, and a whole different feel to it. It wasn't until The
Kingsmen version that it became the, y'know, the Animal House joke that it is
right now.
EB: What happened to all of that stuff that you played
for us last time that was gonna be on Stage, Volume Three? (laughter)
FZ: Well, it's gonna be on either Four or it's gonna be
on Five. Four is finished. It's sitting in there. I don't throw anything away,
you know that.
DS: In "Jesus Thinks You're A Jerk", and in a lot of
other tunes, I guess in "Rhymin' Man" and in many other songs that you've
written, there's snatches of other little music, something that strikes me as a
real Charles Ives kind of thing to do, your tendency to take little musical
quotes from places and work them into the arrangement, and usually I'm pretty
good at identifying what those are. But in 1988, there was a couple that stumped
me where I couldn't come up with a title of what they are. So maybe you can help
me on these.
FZ: OK, great. Alright.
DS: In "Jesus", there's a little melody that one would
associate with, in a cartoon or something, with seein' someone ride a horse.
[11]
FZ: That's called the "Light Cavalry Overture" by Franz
von Supe.
DS: OK. In "Cruising For Burgers", there's the little
Hawaiian melody, which you did in a, not with the kind of a rhythm that one
would normally think of it being... [12]
FZ: It's called the ''Hawaiian War Chant", and I don't
know who wrote that.
DS: And how 'bout that chromatic sounding circus melody
which you used...
FZ: (FZ hums the melody). [13]
DS: Exactly.
FZ: I don't know what that's called, but it's like...
DS: The famous...
FZ: Yeah, that's The Circus Lick.
DS: Exactly, but you don't know the name of it? 'Cause
it's gotta have a title. It came from somewhere.
FZ: I'm sure it does, but I don't know what it is.
DS: That again, that's an aspect of your music, something
that you've been doing all through your career that really gets me off a lot. I
like...
FZ: Well, they're like visual aids, you know. If you
think of music as somethin' to watch with your ears, then those are like visual
aids. You tell a story and then you show 'em a picture and then the point gets
across faster. But go through "Rhymin' Man". Did you catch all the licks in
"Rhymin' Man"?
DS: Most of them, although you did an interview with
somebody. . .which one of those interviews was it, Dallas or, Chattanooga, where
the guy was able to catch one... [14]
RS: "Hallelujah, I'm A Bum".
DS: "Hallelujah, I'm A Bum". That one had slipped by me,
so I was really glad that he got that one.
FZ: Did you get "Mississippi Mud"?
DS: No.
FZ: You didn't get that?
DS: No.
FZ: 'Dipped his hands in the doctors blood and rubbed it
on his shirt like playin' with mud" (FZ hums melody which follows those lyrics)
(laughs)
"It's a treat to beat your feet in the Mississippi Mud". (laughter)
DS: Oh, that's great! The more I learn about your music,
the impression that I get more than any other one is the more that I know, the
more I get the feeling of how much stuff there is in there that's sailing right
past.
FZ: It's whizzin' right by you.
DS: Yeah, and I pride myself with being pretty good at
pluckin' a lot of that stuff out of there.
FZ: The problem is, that, y'know, because I'm so old,
I've heard more music, and more kinds of music than the average listener today.
I lived through a whole musical area that most of the fans that listen to it
now, they never heard those songs, so, y'know, things that would seem automatic
to me, as a visual aid, so to speak, you'll never know. I mean, you've probably
never even heard "Mississippi Mud" or...
DS: I don't know if I ever have. It's certainly nothin'
I'm familiar with.
FZ: Well, one day, in an old movie, you'll hear that
song, and you'll go, "Uh-oh! It's Rhymin' Man". (laughs)
DS: I'll tell ya how one of these came about for me
recently, and that was I was watching a Woody Allen movie on TV,
[15]
and in the soundtrack of that was a jazz standard which I heard and thought to
myself, "That, that's part of 'Punky's Whips"'. And I went, "What is this? What
is this?" And I thought, "Well, I'll wait until the end of the movie, the
credits will whiz by, and I'll be able to pluck it out." Credits whiz by and
there's all these thousands of songs on it. Well, OK maybe I'll see a tape of
the movie on a VCR one day, I'll be able to stop it and see what the song was.
FZ: So you wanna know what the song was?
DS: I found out what it was about a week later when I saw
an American Express commercial on TV. They had somebody singing "Isn't It
Romantic?"
FZ: Yeah!
DS: I went, pulled out the fake book and there it is,
y'know. (FZ laughs) That's the kind of stuff that I'm convinced that your music
will eternally challenge me with those kinds of things, and always keep me
interested.
FZ: Well, y'know, there's a limited number of those
things in there, I mean, it's like, everything I write isn't riddled with that,
but certain types of songs, especially ones with vocals, when you need to put in
a little musical joke, that's the resource that you draw on.
DS: Yeah, well that's an aspect of your music that I
really enjoy. You did a new instrumental in Europe, [16] which we don't
really have a defined title on yet, which maybe was called "The Dessicated
Number", or "The Dessicated Texture", or something like that.
FZ: Yeah, it's called "Dessicated", or "Berlin", 'cause
it was written in Berlin.
DS: How do you feel about the way that that turned out?
Were you satisfied with any of those performances and such, or...
FZ: Well, it was never done perfectly, but there is a
version that has been edited together that I could play for you that's pretty
good. It was only played three or four times.
DS: And I understand that at the same time, Mike tells me
that you were writing some other little pieces that you were, I suppose you were
composing these while you were traveling?
FZ: Yeah.
DS: And he tells me that you composed several other
little things that happened, um ... in a package with all these.
FZ: Yeah, there were chord things for the horns. I would
write the composition, copy out the parts in the afternoon, and then go to the
soundcheck, give 'em the parts, and say, "OK. During, say, 'King Kong' or, uh,
one of those songs..."
DS: Right. "Pound For A Brown" or something like that.
FZ: Yeah. Something like that. "Y'know, when I give you
the cue just start playing this". And that's how they were used.
DS: These songs like "Pound For A Brown" or "King Kong"
or "Dessicated Number", the ones that had the extended "outside" part that comes
in the middle of the song. In my experiences of going stop to stop and seein'
those shows, that was the part of the concert that I would really look forward
to, night after night.
FZ: But see, you're weird. I mean, most people that come
to the concerts think that that's the boring stuff and hurry up and sing me a
song that I recognize off the album.
DS: Like "Dinah-Moe Humm".
FZ: Yeah. And so, you know you gotta entertain everybody
there to a certain degree, and so you can't go and play a whole concert of that
outside kind of stuff. Otherwise, you alienate most of the audience.
DS: How successful did you think that that kind of
outside stuff was? Did that getcha off very much?
FZ: When it worked, it worked great. And when it didn't,
it was ugly (laughter) I mean, same as any other chancetaking...
DS: That's sort of the nature of that kind of music.
FZ: That's right, but I'll take the chance, so long as
the audience knows that what's happening in there is a bunch of guys on stage
taking a chance, then they'll appreciate it more if it turns out to be something
interesting, and if it turns out to be something not interesting, though they
should at least appreciate the fact that we took a chance.
DS: Right. Again, getting back to the synclavier, some of
the stuff, some of the ways that that worked in with that part of the show it
was truly spectacular. In being familiar with the stuff that you've done with
synclavier before that
tour started, and then finding out, reading the press release that you were
gonna be takin' it with you on the road, I was real curious as to just how it
was
going to be integrated into the proceedings, and I thought it was spectacularly
used in that stuff. I thought it sounded great.
FZ: Well, actually I've added more equipment to the
system, and put some software and some hardware improvements into it, so if
there were ever an. occasion to take it on a stage again, it's capable of doing
even more ridiculous stuff.
DS: It's kind of funny, because every time you talk about
what you've been doing with the synclavier, you tend to say, "Oh, the stuff that
I did just a little while ago, that's all obsolete."
FZ: Well, it's not obsolete, but you know, they put out
sometimes two software releases per year and each software release gives you a
chance to do something more refined to the compositions that are already in
there. For example, the composition is more than just the melody line, the
chords, and the rhythm, in order to make a performance out of it, even an
electronic performance, there's all the essence of style, all the texture of the
notes, every note that's in there, whether it's just a group of notes that are
being hit as a chord, each one of them should have it's own identity and all the
different notes in a melody, they should all be different amplitude, and like
that, and when I first got the system you couldn't do that to what you wrote.
You could only put in the pitches, the rhythm, and the chords, and you couldn't
really...
DS: Now you can get into things like aspects of phrasing
and stuff like that.
FZ: That's right. And so, the new software allows you to
give it a better texture and a better feel, and so I think it has more of a
musical feel to it when you do these things. And consequently, I'd gone back to
the things that I wrote when I first got the machine, years ago, and have
updated them using the new software. So now I'm finding things that, earlier
compositions that finally should come out on some kind of a release, some way,
that started off as very basic things but with the software updates, they're now
converted into something that's more musical.
DS: Do you think it's gotten enough to placate those
people who call it "cold" and "mechanical" and all that?
FZ: Well, no, they'll always hate it because it comes out
of a machine, just because that's their blind spot. The way to look at the
synclavier is that it's a new type of musical medium, and let's extend that
concept to all music done with sampling and sequencing machines. You know, the
more numbers you type in, the more expression you get into it because basically,
that's all you're doing, just changing values, durations, amplitude, pitch and
so forth, and it's just a matter of how many numbers can you stand to type in?
And how big is your memory capacity to hold all those numbers. As the speed and
the capacity of the machines change, it makes it possible for a composer to get
closer and closer to some sort of an ideal, and that's what I spend most of my
time doing.
DS: Somethin' else I'm curious about, needless to say
you've had lots of complaints with what orchestras have done with your music,
the situation
where you don't get enough rehearsal time and orchestras that don't give a shit
enough about it to do the job right.
FZ: You gotta understand that, I'm not sayin' musicians
are villains, because there's a matter of economics. How can a musician really
care if the orchestra committee doesn't care enough to spend the money to
rehearse it? You're sitting in an orchestra, maybe you wanna do a good job, but
a guy says, "OK. You got two rehearsals. Learn this." You can't learn it. If you
really cared, your heart would break, because you didn't learn it. Now you're
forced to play it, and you're gonna go out there, and you stand a good chance of
ruining somebody's reputation, because of what you're going to do. So, it's a
defense mechanism. The musicians have to say, "Well, it's just a job."
DS: Do you think it's possible to overcome all the
problems associated with dealing with orchestras, the economics of them, and all
those other problem aspects of working with orchestras by...
-- CUT IN TAPE --
DS: I'm rollin'. I'm not rollin'. Now I'm rollin'.
FZ: You're rollin'.
DS: The wheels are turnin'.
FZ: If ya wanna have a world of well performed orchestra
music, you're gonna have to spend the money to do it. Now, where ya gonna get
the money? Well, you know, if you were to shut down some of these places that
make tritium for nuclear warheads, which we don't really need, you could have
one hell of a musical culture in the United States just by shutting down ...
one! ... of those facilities, which is making the environment polluted, and it
is questionable whether we really need, we got plenty of nuclear warheads. We
could blow up the world five times over right now. Why do we need to make more
of this stuff? I'm baffled.
DS: Well, I guess the reason is perhaps because by doing
something sane and reasonable as something artistic like music is not gonna line
the pockets of those people whose pockets are getting lined by tritium plants
and all that other stuff.
FZ: I guess you just answered the question. (laughter) So
every time you hear a report about defense contractors, just think of them as the
enemy of music.
DS: Definitely, or any of the kind of stuff that would
tend to enhance life and the pleasure of life, and all that kind of stuff,
'cause...
FZ: These people, they're in the death business. But it
pays. It pays big.
DS: Almost drive ya to religion, huh?
FZ: Yeah, well I think it has driven some people to
religion. The fact of the matter is that that almost costs more than the defense
business, by the time you get done puttin' your contributions in.
DS: Who's your favorite TV evangelist? Who's your
favorite, and your least favorite, and why?
FZ: In terms of what?
DS: In terms of anything.
FZ: Performance?
DS: Yeah! Let's say that.
FZ: The best performer is, no question, Jimmy Swaggart.
This guy is a real showman. Also, Pat Robertson is a tremendous showman, but I
also think that he qualifies as one of the most heinous individuals on the
planet, just because of some of the things that he's saying. It's just so
two-faced.
DS: He's pretty dangerous.
FZ: Well, let's say you subtract all the religious
content from what Robertson says. Just from an ethical and moral standpoint, I
believe that what he preaches is questionable. He's really a situational ethics
kinda guy. He's a stinker. And Swaggart, to me is not quite as dangerous, but
just as heinous.
DS: I think Robert Tilton kind of pushes my button
because of his particular approach of...
FZ: Prosperity?
DS: Of sucking the money from the people who can afford
it the least.
FZ: He's a unique individual, but he's not well known
nationwide.
DS: He seems like kind of a small fry compared to some of
these other guys. I also just recently came across one that's new to me, a guy
named Larry Lea. I wonder if you know of him?
FZ: Wait a minute. Is he from Orange County?
DS: No, he's another one of those from Texas. His whole
thing is he's goin' to war against the devil and all of his rhetoric...
FZ: Prayer warriors?
DS: Prayer warriors!
FZ: Oh yeah. I've seen him. He's been on Oral Roberts'
show. They almost formed a coalition (laughter) at one time, because he was
offering this binder, like this, like instructions on how to become a prayer
warrior that he was selling for forty or fifty dollars.
DS: That sounds like the guy.
FZ: Yeah, I've seen him. Nice racket. He charges you
money to show you how to pray. And the idea is it's kind of like a chain letter,
I guess, or ... Robertson has something like this where he urges groups of
people to all pray for the same thing in order to bring about change. One of the
more recent things that I saw him advise people to do is to save the United
States from homosexuals. We're gonna pray for the death of queers sort of a
thing, y'know. He didn't really say it like that, but that kind of an attitude.
DS: That's the underlying intent.
FZ: Yeah. Well, we don't really want 'em to die, but we
certainly wouldn't cry very much if they did.
DS: Well, let's get back to music. It's definitely a
better subject, as far as I'm concerned.
EB: Do you have any more ornaments?
FZ: Boxes. But first, one should turn on the lights to
see whether or not they actually work.
EB: Where's the plug?
FZ: Isn't there a Waber strip down there in the corner?
There should be a plug on the wall. Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who
don't know what's going on right now, the dynamic Eric Buxton is actually gonna
attempt to plug in these Christmas lights he's hung on my wizened and miserable
little Christmas tree here in the basement. Was that it? Yeah.
RS: What did you think about the sentence that Jimbo
[Bakker] got?
FZ: Too light.
RS: Too light, huh?
FZ: Yeah.
RS: Well, one day they'll all get caught.
FZ: Well, if we're lucky.
DS: If we're lucky, yeah.
RS: Don't ya think Tammy shoulda gotten some time too?
FZ: Well, no, not really, because I don't see that she
broke any law, I mean, I can't say that I have any affection for Tammy Faye, but
she wasn't the financial brains of the institution. Basically, he was being sent
to jail for doing a criminal act, not because he was, y'know....
DS: For stealin' people's money.
FZ: Yeah, I mean, I don't see any proof that Tammy Faye
stole anybody's money. If she had, then she oughta go, but...
RS: Yeah, well, she sorta lived the lifestyle off of it,
though.
FZ: Yeah, but I don't know whether that's against the
law, see? I think that it would have been pushing the case to bring her in as an
accomplice. I think they made a stronger case by aiming it at him, because he
was actually the boss of the operation. I think that...
EB: Your fire extinguisher here...? (Eric plugs in
twinkling Christmas tree lights)
DS: Ta-duh!
FZ: Alright! Now they're twinkling! Very Good! (laughter)
That's not bad just the way it is, Eric. (Lights go out) Ooops! Uh-oh!
(laughter)
RS: Shake your ornaments. [17]
FZ: (laughs) Yeah! I remember that!
EB: (begins to sing) Oh, I'm so poor, oh, I'm so poor...
FZ: (laughs) It's the Killer Christmas Tree! Y'know, I've
got a tape copy of that show someplace around here, the Killer Christmas Tree...
DS: Oh, your fans pass that one around.
FZ: Yeah?
DS: Yeah.
FZ: That looks good! In fact, in its way, it looks kinda
better than the one upstairs.
EB: The lights are really getting really like, more
psychedelic in the last few years, have you noticed?
FZ: Yeah!
EB: They're not just blinkin'. They're chasin' each
other...
FZ: Yeah! (laughter)
EB: This one has a control on it.
FZ: A speed control? (Eric increases the Christmas tree
light blink-rate) Oooooo! (much laughter by all) There's some bad brown acid
goin' around Eric! (much laugher)
EB: No, that's New Years Eve.
FZ: That's a little bit too fast. That's not a restful
twinkle. Slow that sucker down a little.
DS: If you get that at the right frequency, you'll induce
somebody to have an
epileptic fit, y'know...
FZ: I had no idea that it had a rate control... (Eric
reduces the rate) OK! That's real good!
EB: That is nice!
FZ: It is.
DS: You guys did this medley called "Orange County Lumber
Truck". At the end of that came the section from "Lumpy Gravy". I understand
that that part of "Lumpy Gravy" was originally written as part of Captain
Beefheart And The Grunt People.
FZ: That was the theme for Captain Beefheart vs. The
Grunt People.
DS: Are there any other pieces of music that we might
recognize as from albums or shows and whatnot that also were conceived as part
of that, that you can think of?
FZ: From Captain Beefheart? Not that we performed. There
were other tunes from Captain Beefheart.
DS: I'll give you an example. Like, we would recognize
"Duke Of Prunes" as being part of the soundtrack to Run Home Slow, and when you
listen to the soundtrack to that, you can definitely pluck that out. I just
wondered, as part of Captain Beefheart and The Grunt People, if there's any
other...
FZ: Oh. Things like that?
DS: Things like that that we would recognize as ... under
some other title.
FZ: Well, yes, as a matter of fact, the legendary Gerald
Fialka gave me as a birthday present a tape copy of The Worlds Greatest Sinner,
and there is some music in there which actually resides in the Uncle Meat album.
DS: Do you remember what?
FZ: Well, I remember the cue is something with a lot of
sixteenth notes in it, sextuplets that had something to do with, uh, it's been
so long since I saw the movie, it was for a plane taking off, and that part was
used, and also, the trail of blood sequence in World's Greatest Sinner, where
the guy stabs the host and there's supposed to be a trail of blood on the lawn.
That was called "Blood Unit", in the scoring list, and that whole unit was done
with electric instruments for Uncle Meat, but I can't remember what I called it.
I know it's in the album. I can't remember what I called it.
DS: I have a tape [audio] copy of that too. I'll go back
and listen to that, think of what that is. Let's talk about A. West. He was
pretty cool doin' his preacher thing. How did your involvement with him come
about? Did you meet him as somebody who was gonna illustrate for your book, or
meet him and find out that he was an illustrator, also? How did that come about?
FZ: Well, first I was doing business with a printing
company that showed me these things (FZ hands Den a book of "Rev. A. West World
Salvation stamps") 'cause they had done some work for A. West.
DS: Reverend A. West World Salvation stamps. . .these are
great! (laughs)
FZ: Take 'em!... Uh, then I was introduced to him by Jeff
Stein, who worked on Dweezil's "My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama" video. And
then I saw some of his work. He did some logos for me and some other
illustrations. He did the album cover for Broadway The Hard Way, and then he did
illustrations for the book.
DS: The work he did on your book was really fantastic.
FZ: That took a long time.
DS: Yeah, and there was a unity of all of those things.
It was...
FZ: Well, the way that was done was he'd come over here
and we'd go chapter by chapter through the book, and I'd tell him my ideas for
what oughta be, y'know, how to illustrate what I was talking about. Then he
would do sketches, and some of 'em were not approved by the publisher. They
wouldn't let him put some of the things in there.
DS: So there was some things that you guys wanted to have
in there that didn't make it?
FZ: Yeah. One of the problems was the publisher was very
adamant about the size of the book. It only had to be a certain number of pages.
Some of the other decisions as to what to leave out were based on, they felt the
illustrations were in bad taste, or something like that. And there's nothin'
that I could do about it because it's not my publishing company.
DS: I noticed that there certainly was continuity among
all those...
FZ: The Nu-Perfect America Company...
DS: Yeah. There was that and the Frank Zappa with the
clothing from the back cover photo, and all that...
FZ: Yeah.
DS: But just in the way that the style that he drew those
illustrations, and such. There was an element of continuity throughout that I
found really pleasing. I just thought he did a really outstanding job.
FZ: Well, so you'll understand, it's another one of those
things like "Mississippi Mud" that you don't know about. The whole
illustrational style in there is derived from a type of cartoon approach that
was in American popular literature in the early part of the century. It's got
that, the whole old-fashioned type of illustration to it. So it's a parody of
that kind of Americana that he's doing.
DS: Yeah, I'd love to talk to him about that. He did a
very good job. Hmm... oh yeah! In, I think Stuttgart, [18] you did
somethin' called "Star Wars Won't Work"...
FZ: Oh yeah...
DS: And something that perhaps was commonly called
"Stairway To Star Wars"...
FZ: Yes.
DS: That whole thing was pretty outlandish. Was that a
military audience you were playing to there? I know that there's the air base
where they had that spectacular crash and all that. [19]
FZ: Um, no. As a matter of fact, one of the interesting
things about our European audience, especially in Germany, when we first started
playing in Germany, we had a large part of the audience in certain cities that
were close to U.S. installations, where the G.I.s would come to the shows. In
some cases it would be thirty to forty percent of the audience would be G.I.s.
So we looked forward to doing those cities because we could do more songs where
we could talk to the audience, 'cause we knew people understood what we were
talking about. We had some fairly amusing experiences in that kind of situation.
I'll tell you one in a minute, but today, when we play in Germany, the bulk of
the audience that comes to see us is German. We have a very low turnout of U.S.
servicemen, because today, U.S. servicemen like heavy metal. They don't like
what we do. They would go to see just about any heavy metal band before they
would come to see us. But in a way, that, to me, is flattering, that the
audience for what we do in Germany really is German. At the Stuttgart
performance, there were four officers that came to the show, 'cause I talked to
them backstage.
DS: U.S. officers?
FZ: Yeah, but there's not a whole lot of enlisted guys. On the
way to the show, we had been passed by a convoy of U.S. military vehicles. You
know, you like to think of the military as a highly disciplined, well-oiled
machine, OK? Well, let me tell you what we saw. There was this one truck goin'
by, and these guys, they were relaxin' in the cab. They had their feet up on the
thing. There were Coca-Cola cans rolling around, (laughter) I mean, these guys,
it was like party time, and they're drivin' down the freeway next to our bus. I
could see in there what was goin' on in the cab, and I made mention of this to
these officers. I said, "Hey! What kinda army we got over here? Russians come
rollin' through here, what are you guys gonna do, look for the Coke machine?"
(laughter) They said that they would look into it. (laughter) We've noticed that
the .it's gotta be difficult to be a U.S. serviceman, to be stationed there. It
doesn't look like there's ever gonna be a ground war with any Russians rolling
through. I think we can safely rule that out, and these guys who are there, in a
country where they can't speak the language, and generally not that
well-received by the people that are around them. They're isolated. It's gotta
be very difficult to be stuck there with or without your family, just to be
stuck there, and sayin' to yourself, "What the fuck am I doing here?"
DS: I've known people who have been sent over there, and
that's what they felt.
FZ: Yeah, so I'm not tryin' to criticize them because I
certainly wouldn't wanna trade jobs with them. But over the years, we've seen a
deterioration in the behavior of the military guys who would come to the show.
They're really either totally drunk or totally wrecked, and just, the pressure
gets to 'em and they leave the base to come to our shows just to be in the
presence of'
somebody who's speaking english to 'em and rocking out on stage, they lose
control, and in one instance we were playing in Ludwigshafen and there was a
guy, at the end of the show, a U.S. serviceman, and I don't know what he was
on...
DS: On this last tour?
FZ: No. This was '81, '80 or '81. [20] He came to the
barrier right at the encore, and took off, this is freezing cold, by the way.
We're in a freezing, cold place. He takes off all of his clothes, he's buck
naked, and he's jacking off in front of the stage (laughter) and the MPs came
and got him, wrapped him in a blanket and took him away. Yeah. (laughs)
DS: That's pretty extreme.
FZ: It's extreme. If you think for a good time you gotta
come to one of my shows, and jack off in front of the stage (laughter) buck
naked in a freezing room, if that's your idea of a good time, I think that
that's pretty stressful.
EB: Military training.
DS: You think maybe this has anything to do with the fact
that perhaps, years ago, when you were getting more servicemen who seemed to be
enjoying the music and not so extremed out on alcohol or whatever, it seems to
me that maybe back then was when there was the draft. So maybe they were just
suckin' people in from the general population and some of those might have been
more regular folks, as opposed to the kind of a person who would go, "Yeah, [I
wanna join the army!]"
FZ: "I need that." Yeah. Well, that's true. That's a good
point. But the other thing is that the deterioration has occured during the
Reagan administration.
DS: Yeah, as so many other things have deteriorated
during that time.
FZ: Yeah.
DS: Alright. We'll go with some continuity here. I'll
just read this: The next day in Mannheim, [21] you guys did a
particularly bent show in which "Cornhole" was liberally used as the secret
word. The show also had yet another performance of...
FZ: "Stairway To Cornhole".
DS: "Stairway To Cornhole".
FZ: It may delight you to know that I edited those two
versions together, so I have a combination Cornhole/Star Wars version of
"Stairway To Heaven"
(laughter) which will probably never be released.
DS: Why won't it be released? Because of, again,
copyright aspects and such?
FZ: Yeah. See, if you're going to perform somebody's
song, and you don't change the words, all you get is a mechanical license, but
if you change any of the words, you need their permission, and indications are,
so far, that the song has special significance to the authors, and they don't
wanna have the words changed. So when we finally do put out "Stairway To
Heaven", it will not have the words changed.
DS: OK. I'll continue here. The day after that, the solo
in "Willie The Pimp" was substituted with [Wagner's] "Flight Of The Valkyrie"
going into "Purple Haze".
FZ: Right, which was a real utter disaster, because it
wasn't exactly the day after that.
DS: I think so. [22]
FZ: It was? Because y'see "Purple Haze" was rehearsed in
Linz [23] and the only tape we have of a good performance of "Purple
Haze" was from that soundcheck in Linz...
DS: That was what Mike had told me, yeah.
FZ: And that's really good. That's been edited together,
by the way, and that'll finally appear in an album. I remember that some cue got
messed up at that concert. It was in a town called Fürth, and we had to bail out
of that when I went into a loop guitar solo, which ended that disastrous part of
the show.
DS: It seems to me that, like, those three shows, Stuttgart, Mannheim,
and Fürth were really, a lot of pretty peculiar stuff certainly happening with
the lyrics and just in terms of weird things like this being introduced into the
show...
FZ: Probably 'cause it was our last show in Germany.
DS: I was just wondering if there was any particular reason that you can think
of, why it seemed like there seemed to be an abundance of zaniness that just
sort of cropped up during that three-day period. Anything you can remember?
FZ: The secret word guys over there, these two guys Dirk Tom and Tommy, and they
were followin' us all around Germany, and every day there'd be the sign, "What's
the secret word for tonight?" And you hate to disappoint 'em. You can't have a
show without some kind of a secret word (laughter).
DS: The secret word definitely was brought to new highs
during that tour, huh?
FZ: That's true.
DS: "Tell Me You Love Me" kind of has gone through some
evolutions. Obviously, it evolved into "Why Don't You Like Me". Before that in
'84, there was somethin' sort of in-between...
FZ: "Don't Be A Lawyer". [24]
DS: "Don't Be A Lawyer". (FZ laughs) I'm not really too
familiar with the lyrics of that, but what's the basic gist of... I know what
the other two mean. I'm familiar with those lyrics, but what's the basic gist of
"Don't Be A Lawyer"? What's that song about?
FZ: Well, basically we have too many lawyers in the
United States, and most of the things that are wrong with the, well, let's look
at it this way. If you had the belief that living, when you, let's see, how do I
say this? Let's say you're a regular person and you have a regular life and you
just wanna do your regular stuff. Hanging over your head is the possibility that
you could run afoul of the law, laws which you don't even know exist. There's
always a chance that the government, in some way, is going to give you a bad
time. This leads to the belief, the widespread belief, I feel in the United
States, that the average guy can't get a fair deal, because there is no fair
deal available anymore, and that always, there lurks the possibility that in
order for you to survive, just to stay out of jail or to stay out of bankruptcy,
you're gonna have to use the services of a lawyer. Well, the lawyer is not your
friend, because the lawyers are the people who created the situation where there
are so many laws that it makes your life miserable. It's a self-perpetuating
monstrosity, and we have too many lawyers dispensing bad law, actually
participating in the creation of bad law at the point where they become
legislators. I think that it's time for some social engineering to steer people
away from the legal profession. There are just too many lawyers for our own
good. These guys have to earn a living, too, and so you wind up with people
suggesting that you sue somebody else. That's how they earn their money, by
generating paperwork. You will pay them money
to make somebody else's life miserable and vice-versa. That's what's lurking
beneath the surface of American life right now.
DS: It's a (Den pronounces it wrong) litigious society.
FZ: Yeah. You pronounce it litigious.
DS: Litigious. Thank you. This makes me
think of something. You said quite a lot of times that you don't like to read,
but yet you're obviously a well-learned person, and most people, in my
experience, who are well-learned, are people who have read a lot. How does that
work out in your case?
FZ: Well, I don't know how I do it. I watch television, and I see the same shit
on television that you do. I don't watch any special programs...
DS: I'll sort of flip that around. As I said. Most people, in my experience, who
watch lots of television wind up being pretty pedestrian in their thought
processes, perhaps as a result. Obviously, in your case....
FZ: There are ways
to extract information from television. First of all, one of the reasons why I
like Keneally so much, is because he has this fabulous ability to memorize. I
have a fabulous ability to memorize, too, not the same stuff that he does, or
the same way that he does it, but if I see or hear an idea, I can store a three
dimensional version of that thing and recall it in unbelievable detail
instantly, and it's located, you know how computers work, how you got the hard
disc, which has distant storage, and then you got the RAM section of a computer
where anything connects to anything else instantly, 'cause it's faster memory. I
have a large RAM capacity in my brain for, I keep those types of artifacts on
line in this RAM, OK? And it works like a filter, so if I watch television, I
can automatically run that piece of shit that they're broadcasting to me through
this filter, and I can throw away all the propaganda, the stuff that they're
tryin' to hurl at me, and find some way to extract the real data from it. That's
the challenge of watching CNN, because so much of it is just bullshit. But
lurking in there are some hard facts, and if you can sort them and accumulate
them, once you've knocked all the bullshit off the fact, stored the fact, that
becomes part of the RAM, and part of the filter, and you just constantly reapply
that to all the data that's coming in. I have the ability to connect ideas and
sort stuff
very fast. The problem with being able to do that is, you can execute the mental
gymnastics faster than you can ever explain it to somebody, what you did. So I
can look at something and I can know stuff about it that it would take me so
long to explain to somebody else what I already did at the point where I was,
y'know, like, exposed to Eric's twinkling lights there. I already ran that
through the filter (laughter) and came up with conclusions about it that,
y'know, it's another thing. That's just the way my brain works. So, as far as
learning stuff, when I say I don't read, it's not a hundred percent that I never
pick up something and read it.
DS: Sure. Obviously.
FZ: But what I do read, I extract a lot from it, and that's what I've been able
to do. The sum total of what I know is the result of 49 years of doing that to
my environment.
DS: That's a thing that obviously comes in pretty handy for your abilities as a
composer too, and...
FZ: It comes in handy everywhere. I'm tryin' to think of a place where it
wouldn't come in handy, and it's not something that other people couldn't do.
You just have to think about thinking. I wish there was a way that U.S. schools
could teach people how to use their brains to do this, because it is a
completely learned technique. There's nobody else in my family that does it, so
it's not a genetically inherited thing. I figured out how to do it. I trained
myself how to do it, and I use it all the time, and I think that you could teach
somebody else how to extract data that way.
DS: Seems like it could be a pretty
valuable thing if it could be taught to people in general to have.
FZ: I've
thought about it. If there was a way that I could give you a formula that you
could stick into your publication right now, so that everybody there could do
the same thing, they'd get more out of life with effort, that's for sure. The
best I can do is tell you that it is possible to do it, that you have to
rearrange in your own brain the way you conduct thought processes. You have to
turn your brain inward for the moment to think about, "How do I think?" You say
to yourself, "What is mechanically going on when I think?" I don't think most
people ever consider that. They take it for granted, that they are thinking.
Now, if you wanna be thinking with a capital "T", you have to organize
the way in which you do it. Just like if you wanna prepare for the Olympics, you
gotta build up your muscles. If you wanna prepare for thinking, you have to
clean up all the data that you've got stored in there and organize it, so that
you can use it. Anybody who has ever tried to manage a database on a computer,
have you ever had any computer experience?
DS: None whatsoever.
FZ: Well, the Winchester hard disc is like a box of data.
It contains all of your files, all of your letters, all of the stuff that you're
working on and the software that you're using to sort and manipulate the data.
And then there's another part of the computer called the RAM, which is faster
than the hard disc. Hard disc takes time to load. But the business end is the
RAM. The more megabytes of RAM you have, the more stuff you can do instantly, or
as close to instantly as electronics will allow...
DS: The faster you can do the process.
FZ: That's right. And so, when you consider what is up
here in terms of memory storage, I think they say the average guy uses ten
percent of his brain. Well, nobody ever told you you couldn't use the other
ninety. You may never get to a hundred percent capacity, but certainly, if you
increase to eleven percent, you're ahead of the game. All you gotta do is train
yourself to do it. It's not a fairy tale. It's something that I think anybody
can do, but you have to have the desire to do it. Some people live their lives
just to grow muscles. And other people live their lives just to lose weight. And
other people live their lives just to get high. And other people live their
lives just to make other people miserable. Well, believe it or not, you could
live your life just to learn how to process data, and it's great. It's really
fun, once you get into it.
EB: There is an actual mechanical process that goes on
with the neurons. As you push them farther and farther out into areas they're
not used to being in, they'll go into those areas and activate new areas...
FZ: That's right. I'm tellin' you. The important thing to
remember is, "Anybody can do it." Dan Quayle became vice-president, ladies and
gentlemen!
(much laughter) Anybody, (laughs) anybody. (laughs)
DS: Most anything can happen, huh? (FZ laughs)
EB: Yeah. Now George Bush is going to Colombia, where
there's a thirty million dollar bounty on his head.
FZ: That's pretty cheap. Well, maybe not.
EB: But can they protect him?
FZ: That is somethin' to worry about.
DS: They should send Quayle down there.
FZ: Yeah, with a rubber mask.
DS: Let me back up here second. The mention of CNN made
me remember a question that had escaped me momentarily back then, when we were
talking about Jim and Tammy. I wonder if you happened to see Larry King, maybe
the night after, or the night after that, that he got his sentencing. There was
a show where Larry interviewed a representative of the prosecutor's office that
did that case, and a representative of the PTL, a woman named, I think Sandy
Galaway was her name.
FZ: Oh yes!
DS: Did you see that?
FZ: Yes, I did.
DS: Wasn't that a great one?
FZ: Oh yes!
DS: Did ya like her comment about God taking revenge with
the earthquake and the hurricane? [25]
FZ: That's right! I saw it.
DS: Boy! (laughs) Larry sort of choked on that didn't he?
FZ: Well, sometimes Larry is too easy on these people.
Sometimes he's harder on the callers than he is on the ones who are there in the
studio.
DS: I wish he would have drawn her out on that a
little...
FZ: (laughs) Yeah.
DS: 'Cause it was really goin' to somethin' pretty
bizarre, but...
FZ: I think they were just on the, toward the end of the
segment was when that occured.
DS: Yeah, exactly. That was what I thought. Um, let's get
back to some secret words. There's a bunch of 'em that we don't know what they
mean. Some of 'em are pretty obvious, but there's a bunch that we don't know. In
Chicago there was one, which goes, "Llama!" What is that?
FZ: OK. Do you remember the Willie Nelson commercial?
They were advertising Willie Nelson albums on television just prior to that, and
one of the songs, they played just a little bit of y'know, each of these songs,
and I don't even know what the name of this song is, but in it, Willie goes,
"Mama!"
DS: "Mama Don't Raise Your Boys Up To Be Cowboys" or
somethin' like that...
FZ: Well that's "Mama!" turned into "Llama!"
DS: And does that have anything to do with Michael
Jackson's llamas?
FZ: That's right. Got it? That's how that one works.
DS: Here's another one. In Bremen, the secret word was
"Xenakis mbl, mbl, mbl, mbl". [26] I know Xenakis as being the composer,
I believe he's Greek, right?
FZ: Well, he's a Greek composer who lives in France, and
he is an architect, by the way. That's really how he earns his living.
DS: What was the reference of his name being the secret
word for that night?
FZ: OK. Remember I told ya I was doing a documentary for
German television? It's all about serious composition, and the guy who did it is
a guy named Henning Lohner, and Henning had been trying to reach me for months
about doing this documentary. And he came to Bremen before the show to meet with
me, and he told me about the other things that he'd done. He'd done a
documentary on Stockhausen, Cage, and Xenakis, and on two people in contemporary
theater, whose names escape me right now. We were talking backstage about
Xenakis, prior to the show. That's how...
DS: It just was...
FZ: Yeah. But see the mbl, mbl, mbl, all that stuff, the
early Xenakis pieces make use of repeated notes like that, as part of the
texture. Different instruments repeating notes at different rates against each
other. It's called "stochastic" composition.
DS: That was another question going along with that,
'cause I can remember that word being used, and I wondered what stochastic
meant.
FZ: Xenakis is the stochastic school of composition. And
it's spelled S-T-O-C-H-A-S-T-I-C.
DS: In Rotterdam, the secret word was "fishbone".
FZ: Prior to the concert, Bobby Martin had eaten some
fish backstage, gotten a fishbone wedged in his throat and had to be taken to
the hospital to have it removed.
DS: Really!?
FZ: And came onstage and sang the show that night.
DS: What a trooper. OK. Munich. "Ayee! Ayee! Ayee!"
FZ: Alright. You ever heard of Erroll Garner, jazz piano
who mumbles along with what he plays?
DS: What was the famous song he wrote? A standard, um...
FZ: "Moonglow" was one of the most famous records he did.[27]
Anyway, Ayee! Ayee! It's the whole concept of jazz musicians who make jazz
noises while they perform. Remember?
DS: Oh, sure! Right.
FZ: Make a jazz noise here: "Ayee! (followed by other
jazz noises that defy spelling)" (laughter). There's a great mix of that show.
That was a good show. And that whole version of "Big Swifty"...
DS: I was gonna say, there was one of those lengthy
vehicles for solos where everybody jazzes out, right?
FZ: Yeah, totally jazzed out, and Bobby Martin does this
keyboard solo and he's..."(more unspellable jazz noise)" along with his solo in
the middle of it (laughs) he says, "What key are we in, A or A flat?"
DS: Sayin' a bunch of stuff like "Cooloh, Daddy-o", and a
bunch of stuff like that.
FZ: Yeah.
DS: Alright. Montpelier. The secret word was "jewelry".
FZ: Jewelry ... I'm drawin' a blank on that. It had to
have something to do with somethin' that one of the guys in the band did, or
bought.
DS: I know some of these are obscure, y'know, so...
FZ: Well, fairly obscure for me, too.
DS: Grenoble was "Hoops And Poops".
FZ: Hoops and poops?
DS: You guys said it a whole bunch of times.
FZ: That was probably derived from a mistake that Bobby
made in one of the vocals. Sometimes the secret word will get going just because
somebody will fuck up a song, and then you keep, you use the fuck-up as the
secret word. 'Cause you don't always go on stage with a word in mind. Sometimes
the shows won't have any at all. Things just get suggested, so the first part of
the show could be really bland, and the second part could be outrageous
depending on what popped up.
DS: Yeah, I saw how in Philadelphia, how after Chad did
his rendition of "The Love Boat", that that wound up...
FZ: The Love Boat show?
DS: Yeah. That wound up coming out several times. I've
mentioned this to you before, but I was the guy who gave you the heart and the
list and stuff like that, and again, I'm eternally grateful for what happened as
a result of that. I mean, that really...
FZ: The list of things to do on stage? The a cappella and
all?
DS: Yeah. That was pretty cool stuff. Particularly,
conducting the audience, where did your idea of doing that ... I know that
you've been doing that for years, too. Is that just somethin' you thought up, or
somethin'? How did you come about doin' that? That's my particular favorite, one
of my favorite things you do.
FZ: There's a school of European composition that deals
with music as texture. Like Penderecki. Some of his stuff would fall into that,
where it's not about the melody and the chords. It's about, if you take a group
of instruments, and you have them doing different kinds of things all at the
same time, it creates something that's more than a chord. It's a texture. It's a
sound that's crawling with texture and it's wiggling. And it seemed to me that
when an audience applause occurs, there's like, random texture, all the
different beats are going at different rates, and that makes this one big sound
that's called "Applause". But if you control the rate of the clapping or the
location of the clapping you could use the sound of the applause as a musical
thing. So I tried it one night and the audience liked it...
DS: Working it around the room and such and getting the
stereo out of it.
FZ: Yeah. I think the first time I did that was '72 or
'73.
DS: I'm really glad that you happened to put some of that
on Jazz From Hell [Den meant to say Video From Hell] because that gave me the
opportunity to talk to people who aren't really familiar with your music and
go, "There's this thing that Frank does," and show them with the videotape of
just what that is. That particular show illustrated it rather well.
FZ: But it didn't illustrate sound texture 'cause it was
mono. But if you could hear it in stereo, and you hear this ... this thing that's
flying around the room. I actually have some four-track takes of the band with
Jean-Luc Ponty where this was done, and you can really hear that it's a usable
texture. But the best example, and I don't know where this tape is, someplace in
the vault, it's from a concert in '78 or '79 in southern Illinois. We were
playing at this college, and the place that they had us playing at, it was the
worst conceivable venue. We were on the floor of an arena, OK, and we were
playing directly into a concrete wall, like, we were facing a concrete wall
maybe twenty feet away, and then, thirty feet up is where the audience starts
(laughter) and then it goes up from there like that, so you can't look straight
ahead and see anyone, (laughter) OK? And in this absolutely impossible place to
play, we decided to do one of these audience participation textures, that's
where I had, first I divided the audience into five sections, and told each
section that they were going to sing a part of the song. It was "Lohengrin",
"Rite Of Spring", "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and "Harbor Lights''...
DS: I heard a cheezy tape of this, yeah! [28]
FZ: And since they didn't know the tunes, I had to hum them, y'know, "This is
your tune..." and then conducted them in and out doing this. And the way that
that was taped, we didn't have a recording truck then. It was taped with one
stereo microphone which was hanging from the lighting truss. And, it was
recorded with a Nagra, so there's a two-track master of this, and because of the
location at the microphone at the height of the thing, we got a pretty good
recording of what this actual audience effect was, and if I ever find that tape,
I'll try and stick it in You Can't Do That On Stage, 'cause it's a pretty
bizarre event.
Audience Participation
2/14/88 Philadelphia, Penn.
Photo by Scott Yobp
DS: Yeah. I imagine that the best place to be, to be able
to hear that is front and center on the stage, it seems that all the sound would
be directed toward that place.
FZ: Well, probably no. Probably the best place to hear it
would be maybe thirty feet ahead of where I stand out over the audience up high.
Then you get a better global picture of it, because where I stand, a lot of what
I hear is coming out of the side-fill monitors and my own monitor box.
DS: I just wonder whether or not it would be a real,
certainly I imagine it would be a challenge to try to set up you know, while a
tour's happening, try to take a specific occasion of doing that experiment, and
trying to get the optimum recording of it.
FZ: You can't because there's always one guy in the
audience who doesn't want to, you know, he's gonna yell "Dinah-Moe Humm" no
matter what happens. And that's part of reality.
DS: That's true.
FZ: Because a couple of times I tried to do that just to
get a sample of it for the synclavier and you can't make the audience behave.
You know, they're there for a good time, they're not there to record.
DS: Sure, and they sell beer in the lobby.
FZ: Yeah.
DS: What are the signals you use? I'm familiar with some
of them.. Like I know that that essentially means "get ready." And that's the
"high" sound. That's the "low" sound. What other ones do you have?
FZ: Well if I go like this, that's "play reggae." If I go
like that it's "play ska."
DS: Right.
FZ: Um ... is eleven.
DS: Eleven, sure.
FZ: And ... is thirteen. And stuff like that.
DS: I've seen your "A" chord or...
FZ: Yeah, it goes "C" and you go "A".
DS: Do you do any other chords besides that? I've seen you do "C" and
"A".
FZ: No.
DS: It seems that those are easy ones that the hand would
accommodate.
EB: Mariachi?
FZ: Oh yeah, and this is "Weather Report."
DS: How do you do some of these other things I've
heard, "Mr. Rogers"?
FZ: Oh God, what was the signal for Mr. Rogers? I point
to my shoe.
DS: That's pretty funny stuff. OK, back to secret words
... shellfish.
FZ: Um... that was Paris.
DS: Yeah.
FZ: And um, somebody had gotten ill, from eating
shellfish. And so, there had been some discussion about this is one of the
things you don't want to do when you're on the road is go out and gorge yourself
on raw oysters in places where the bacteria count is high in the water. Like you
want to commit suicide? Eat oysters in Naples. Because the raw sewerage that's
dumped into the...
DS: Right, yeah ... yeah. OK, we briefly mentioned
"cornhole" from Mannheim. You said something about that, but I don't recall how
that, what that was about.
FZ: I don't know how that one came up. I mean cornhole is
one of those traditional stupid, uh ... uh, playground humor words. Playground
psychotic words.
DS: You used it quite alot that particular evening.
FZ: Yeah. Well that's what the secret word is for. You
just abuse it. How far can you take it? How many times can you stick in the
wrong word in the middle of a song and literally change the meaning of the song?
DS: Do you think that doing that alienates many people in
the audience who don't know what the fuck is going on?
FZ: Well I know on one occasion it gave us one of the
worst reviews we ever got of a concert and it certainly baffled and alienated a
large portion of the audience in Paris when in '82, or no '84, the secret word
was "Danger Will Robinson." You know from Lost In Space?
DS: Yeah, we just saw a snatch of that on television this
morning.
FZ: Well it's like the way Robbie the Robot's arms go,
well they go like this. (laughter) They just flop around like that. And we were
joking about that at the soundcheck and I remembered it and it cracked me up so
much that through the whole show all I had to do is just a little of this and
Ike was falling all over the place, (laughter) and we really had a great time
with it on stage, but the French critics thought that it was just this horrible
show.
DS: They didn't understand.
FZ: They had no idea what it was and so we were, to use
one of the words made popular by Jane Fonda, we were excoriated for doing Lost
In Space.
DS: Right. Alright I got one last one ... which is from
Graz which is "hairpiece."
FZ: Oh, did you ever see that Cheech and Chong movie
where they play these two Arab brothers?
EB: The Corsican Brothers?
FZ: No, not the Corsican Brothers. They play these two
Arab guys.
RS: Hairpiece, I need a new hairpiece.
FZ: Yeah. That's what it was, that's right.
DS: So I'll have to see the movie to understand that.
RS: Wait. Before you go off the secret word, do you
remember the second show in Rotterdam where it started off with you introducing
the band and talked about how Ed Mann had screwed up the lick?
FZ: That's right.
RS: And then the secret word became about rehearsal.
FZ: Well the thing is that was the first show in the tour
where the band really let me down. They really started to play wrong notes.
Unexcusable wrong notes. And I started talking about, "What," you know "maybe we
should rehearse more." And for two or three days on the tour everybody had their
nose out of joint like I have no right to tell them that they're playing wrong
notes, of course they were playing. And in Europe people listen to the notes.
They're more interested in musically what you're doing. [To Jim Nagle as he is
leaving] Have a nice holiday.
JN: It's six below in Chicago.
FZ: Well you're asking for it. You're going back there
with fuckin' laryngitis. They're going to send you back in a casket draped with
a flag. Be careful. Did you know what the CNN Report said? The coldest day of
the century.
JN: When, yesterday?
FZ: Yeah. It's that fuckin' ozone layer.
JN: But I'll call tomorrow and see if Gail has that name.
OK, goodbye. Nice to meet you, thanks.
EB, DS, RS: Goodbye, thanks, take care.
DS: OK. Did Harry Andronis ever get his equipment wet?
FZ: Oh yeah.
DS: Good for Harry. During a rehearsal in Boston you were
fiddling around with a tune and I asked you what it was and you told me it was
an R&B tune called "Diddley Daddy". Who was that done by?
FZ: Yeah, Bo Diddley.
DS: During "Torture Never Stops / Lonesome Cowboy Burt" quite
often there were these references to Tom Petty being the "butt-ugliest human
being known to rock and roll." Where did that come from?
FZ: That was a line that Ed threw in one night.
DS: Something that he made up?
FZ: Yeah, unless he got it from someplace else, but it wasn't my
idea. That's Ed's comment.
DS: You described "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" as being
one of the ugliest songs ever written. What makes that song ugly?
FZ: Oh, I'm just joking, that's not the ugliest. I think "Happy
Birthday" is one of the ugliest songs ever written. (laughter) That was a
comment from the Munich show, where we got the audience to sing along with it.
DS: I have this one as being from ... one of the ugliest, maybe
it was from Munich where the audience...
FZ: Sang it.
DS: ... Actually liked it and you did it twice or they had them
singing it...
FZ: Oh then that was ... one place where they really liked it,
yeah. I can't remember what city that was, but in Munich I asked the audience to
sing along and then I said "Ayee! That was ugly as fuck." No, "I think that was
ugly as fuck." That's what it was.
DS: That was the "jazz" night?
FZ: Yeah.
DS: In Springfield and in Burlington you were poking fun at Eric
because of his shoes. What's significant about Eric's shoes?
FZ: They're very, very large.
DS: What size are they Eric?
EB: Thirteen.
DS: Yeah, they are large, thirteens!
EB: Oh right, but I had lost them. I had left them at the hotel
before that. That's what that was. I leave stuff all over the place.
DS: In Portland, something happened that brought on the song
"Stainless the Maiden". Tell me again, because I've heard a cheezy tape of this
so I have to use my imagination.
FZ: A girl walked up to the stage and handed us a Christian
songbook. And so I thumbed through it and handed it to Bobby Martin to
sight-read it. And
that's how "Stainless, the Maiden" got in the show.
DS: It's hard for me to imagine a Christian song called
"Stainless the Maiden". Pretty bizarre.
FZ: Well, that's why it's in the show. (laughter) If you're
gonna pick a Christian song how about "Stainless the Maiden", huh? (laughter)
DS: In Providence you told the audience that the local police
there believe in the devil, that it said so on TV that evening. Do you remember
what that news story was about? I assume it was a news story.
FZ: It was. I had done an interview prior to the show with some
local television station and they're the ones who told me that they had a
Satanism squad (laughter) or something related but with the police and Satanism.
It's just ridiculous.
DS: That is ridiculous. Although your efforts to register voters
was greatly successful, there were some problems. Such as the League of Women
Voters' objections to the banner which said "Lick Bush In '88" and some other
things. Can you tell us about some of the resistance that you met with in your
efforts to do voter registration?
FZ: It was regional resistance. I mean one example was in
Philadelphia, the Registrar of Voters for the area of the town where we were
playing at the Tower Theater refused to send over voter registration slips
because he said "we already have enough registered voters." He liked things the
way they
were.
DS: Right, I remember that.
FZ: The other place we had troubles was Washington DC where the
comment was made that "we don't know about his politics and so we're not going
to send anyone over." And they withheld support. But we managed to get
assistance from not the League of Women Voters there, but the Citizens' Action
Group. And they sent registrars, and then in Detroit we couldn't register
because of the weird laws that they have there. You'd have to have a registrar
from every suburb. And all different forms and it would be just impossible to do
it. In Chicago we couldn't do it because the registration had already closed.
But just about everyplace else we did it. And we managed to register 11,000
people.
DS: All in all you felt it was pretty successful.
FZ: Better than none. I got other rock and rollers to do it at
their shows. John Cougar Mellencamp did it. Sting did it. Earth, Wind and Fire
said they were going to do it, but I don't know whether they ever did it.
DS: Do you have any plans for future voter registration drives
or doing anything else? Certainly I would imagine for presidential campaign
years, that there's a greater importance attached to that sort of thing.
FZ: I'll find something to do. You know, even talking about it
helps.
DS: What about the show that was cancelled in Richmond and moved
to Towson? They said that that was, they claimed, I read some newspaper accounts
of that where they claimed that it was for logistical problems, some other band
playing, or something like that.
FZ: No. Bullshit. The real thing was that was in the home
territory of the PMRC and the word got out that we were going to play there and
they got the school to cancel the gig. That's all it was.
DS: You think so?
FZ: Yeah. By the way did Jim Nagle tell you about the Honorary
Doctoral Degree that I was supposed to receive from a Catholic university
someplace back East? [29]
DS: No.
FZ: I was supposed to go there in March to receive this degree
and they were going to play some of my music and they called back and cancelled.
(laughter)
DS: Called back and went "woops."
FZ: Yeah. "Well we're not giving that degree this year."
(laughter)
DS: OK, speaking about Towson, in that show something kind of
peculiar happened havin' to do with Bob Rice giving somebody an enema. That kind
of pissed you off.
FZ: Well, sure, because there was a female security guard who
was hired to be part of the staff at the place and Bob Rice who was basically
hired as a roadie decided to use this enema that was dangling on stage as a
prop. Actually it was something that I didn't tell them to put on stage, but the
alto sax player had it hanging off of his stand. Bob went up there, took this
thing and he was trying to impress this girl security guard. And during the
encore when the guards were lined up in front of the stage facing the audience,
he sneaked down behind the barricade and jammed this nozzle up her ass. While
right in the middle of this song, you know, and I think that is inexcusable and
so I stopped the show and told him to apologize, and "Don't ever do it again."
DS: And then took on from there.
FZ: Sure.
DS: There are some good little musical inclusions that resulted
from that too. Lyric mutations and such.
FZ: Yeah.
DS: What's a "Screaming Albanian Jizz-Weasel"?
FZ: Uh, well, that's probably (laughs) one of the things you
make up right on the spot. (laughter) That was Hamburg.
DS: That was Hamburg. Tell us about the dinner in Barcelona and
the raffle that came with it.
FZ: OK. Well the tour had been going on and there's all this
strife in the band and the crew was edgy and all this stuff, and travel in
Europe is really very rough for the crew. We had a day off in Barcelona prior to
this television show that we were going to do. I decided to throw a party for
the band and the crew, and I rented this restaurant and told the promoter there
to arrange to get three prostitutes, and prostitutes are a very common thing in
Barcelona. I said, "Get three prostitutes to come down to this dinner and we're
going to have a raffle", that any members of the crew that would like to have
the opportunity to get their machinery wet with one of these Barcelona hookers,
that all they do is enter into the raffle. The girls came to the party, did a
strip-tease and danced. They brought their own music and, this whole bunch of
hoopla. It was a | 
