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 1969
No.119
Frank Zappa &
Paul Eberle Rapping In Los Angeles '69
Interview by Paul Eberle, 2 pp
ZAPPA: What do you want to talk about?
PAUL: I'd like to confine it strictly to music and just talk about that; I'm
not particularly interested in your high school basketball coach and all that
crap.
ZAPPA: Good.
PAUL: I just heard your new album, "Uncle Meat," and some of it sounds like
some of the new Polish music, And some of it sounds like Zap Komix set to music.
ZAPPA: I can dig it.
PAUL: ...and in a lot of it there is obviously serious intent.
ZAPPA: It's ALL serious intent. I seriously intended to make that album sound
exactly the way it sounds. And some people can't understand that you can
seriously want to do something that's not serious.
PAUL: They think the two have to be done separately – like Spike Jones made some
funny records, and others that were just chiffon music...
ZAPPA: What we do and have from the very beginning is concept art. You know?
Like, the real artistic merit of what we do does not necessarily exist on the
disc itself. It's like different tones. I tried to explain this concept in a
lecture I gave to a group of radio broadcasters. Do you know Pauline Oliveri's
piece on the Argosy label... She's made a piece of music on which the sounds
are generated this way. Two sounds, one below the audible range of hearing
and one above the audible range of hearing and from them are produced
"difference tones."
PAUL: Are they audible?
ZAPPA: Yeah. They're quite audible. But they happen in between the two real things. So if you vary those two tones slightly, all this mass in
between shifts. And so
she's created a piece where the tones are varied slightly and the whole thing
is fed into a system of tape plays, and so, when played back on top of one
another, it makes a certain thickness, a bandwidth of non-existent madness...
And some of the things that we do function on a related principle. Some of the
ideas are below the level of human consciousness, and some of them are above the
level of human consciousness. And in the middle is this peculiar by-product,
which is the manifestation of what those ideas are. Does that sound a little bit
too abstruse for you? (read more)
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