1983—Chronology Sources, Notes & Comments

January 1983—Jam Session with Tommy Tedesco & Joe Pass

Steve Laury, "Joe Pass, Tommy Tedesco and Frank Zappa," stevelaury.com

Joe and Tommy Tedesco were doing a NAMM show in Anaheim California in the early 1980s. [...] The story goes like this according to Joe Pass and I'm paraphrasing: "Tommy and I were both very excited to hear the Frank Zappa would be gracing our small stage that day at the NAMM show." Joe went on to say "In fact I was nervous, my palms were sweating, I had read and heard that this man was one of the greatest guitarists and composers of all time, like a modern day Mozart."

"We played a set, we waited, no Zappa, we played another set, still no Zappa. By this time, the suspense was killing both Tedesco and myself," (myself meaning Joe Pass.)

"At last, we see a dark haired man wearing a black long cape surrounded by a flock of worshipers coming toward our stage. We had to stop playing because there was complete chaos around our booth as Zappa was signing autographs and his fans were trying to touch his garment."

"After an hour of worship and autographs, he picks up a guitar and bangs out a couple of loud bar chords. Zappa turns to Tommy and asks, 'What do you guys what to play?'" Joe Pass started to rattle off tunes like Giant Steps, a John Coltrane classic, hey, Joe said, "we figured this Zappa guy is the best, lets play the most demanding music possible."

"After requesting more then two dozen standards, we realized this guy couldn't play any standards, not one. We ended up playing a TOO loud 12 bar blues, that's all Frank could play. It was pathetic."

Pino Marrone, Facebook

Pata Michi, Sylmar, California

Translation:

The photograph was taken in January, 1983, in the Pasta Michi restaurant in Sylmar, California, a real magnet for jazz guitarists, attracted by its owner, Charlie Chiarenza—Burt Bacharach's guitarist—, and where Pino played more than once in the mid 80s.

Pino says the reunion took place apparently due to a recording session that Tommy Tedesco did that afternoon for Frank Zappa, whom later he invited to the summit with dinner and 'zapada' at the restaurant. Between the present ones they are, from left to right, Tommy Tedesco, Jack Ranelli, unknown, Charlie Chiarenza, John Pisano, Frank Zappa and Joe Pass, not to talk about the vibe in the picture!

 

February 9, 1983—Varèse And Webern: One Hundreth Anniversary Celebration

Poster

Varèse Webern Zappa LeRoux

Frank Zappa, legendary rock musician and composer, will make his debut conducting a classical chamber ensemble February 9 at the War Memorial Opera House when the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players celebrate the music of Edgard Varèse and Anton Webern on the 100th anniversary of the composers' births. Zappa—who has described Varèse as "the idol of my youth" and a great influence on his own music—will share the podium with Jean-Louis LeRoux, Music Director and co-founder of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. The concert will be a fund raiser for the group which has earned a national reputation since its founding in 1971. The program will include Ionisation, Intégrales, Offrandes and Poème électronique by Varèse, and Six Lieder Op. 14, Variations for piano, Op. 27, Three Lieder Op. 25 and Fuga (Ricercar a 6 voci) by Webern.

Varèse And Webern: One Hundreth Anniversary Celebration (program)

VARESE AND WEBERN: ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

THE SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS

JEAN-LOUIS LEROUX, MUSIC DIRECTOR
MARCELLA DE CRAY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
GUEST CONDUCTOR: FRANK ZAPPA

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1983 8:00 P.M.
WAR MEMORIAL OPERA HOUSE
WITH INTRODUCTION BY GRACE SLICK

PROGRAM

INTRODUCTION
Grace Slick, Mistress of Ceremonies

IONISATION (1931)
for percussion ensemble of 13 players
Edgard Varèse

SIX LIEDER, Opus 14 (1917-21)
for soprano, clarinet, bass-clarinet, violin and cello
Anton Webern

VARIATIONS FOR PIANO, Opus 27 (1936)
Anton Webern

OFFRANDES (1921-22)
for soprano, piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, harp, two violins, viola, cello, contra-bass and six percussionists
Edgard Varèse

INTERMISSION

POEME ELECTRONIQUE (1957-58)
for magnetic tape
Edgard Varèse

THREE LIEDER, Opus 25 (1934)
for soprano and piano
Anton Webern

FUGA (RICERCATA) a sei voci, No. 2 (1934-35)
from the "Musical Offering" by J.S. Bach for flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bass-clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, timpani, harp and string quintet
Anton Webern

INTEGRALES (1924-25)
for two piccolos, oboe, Eb clarinet, Bb clarinet, horn, trumpet in D, trumpet in C, tenor-trombone, bass-trombone, contrabass-trombone and four percussionists
Edgard Varèse

No photographic or recording equipment permitted.
All proceeds benefit the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

PLAYERS: Judith Cline, soprano; Marvin Tartak, piano; Roy Malan, Dan Smiley, violins; Ruth Freeman, viola; Bonnie Hampton, cello; Steven d'Amico, bass; Janet Lawrence, Barbara Chaffe, flutes; Deborah Henry, oboe; Marilyn Coyne, English horn; Jim Dukey, Tom Rose, clarinets; David Bartolotta, bassoon; Larry Ragent, French horn; Charles Metzger, Ralph Wagner, trumpets; Hall Geff, McDowell Kenley, John E. Williams, trombones; Marcella DeCray, harp; Danny Montoro, timpani; David Rosenthal, Todd Marley, Richard Kvistad, William Winant, Raymond Froelich, Perry Dreiman, Tyler Mack, Pat Scott, Ray Bachand, Kevin Neuhoff, Marvin Tartak, Jean-Louis LeRoux, percussion.
Frank Zappa, Jean-Louis LeRoux, conductors.

Jean-Louis LeRoux, interviewed by Caroline Crawford, Conductor With A Contemporary Music Mission, 2004, p. 54

FZ & Jean-Louis LeRoux

Crawford: In 1983 there was a benefit concert of Varèse and Webern with Frank Zappa. Talk about that. How was that put together?

LeRoux: I had heard that Zappa had conducted some pieces in New York. He had a tremendous admiration for Varèse, so I think I called him on the phone and said, "I would like to organize a concert. That would be the 100th anniversary of Varèse and Webern, and how about sharing the conducting—you conduct the Varèse pieces and I take care of Webern?" He said yes almost immediately. And he said, "My only problem is that I need a little bit of instruction, how to conduct, to handle these pieces." I said fine.

So I went to Los Angeles. I spent an entire day with him in his house, talking about music, and we talked about what to do and what to watch out for, and I told him it would be so well received and the Players would be so happy to see him and to be working with him, and he would not have any problems.

And he came with only one request, to be in a hotel where they have twenty-four-hour service, so he could eat anything at any time. [laughter]

Crawford: And you rented and nearly filled the opera house!

LeRoux: We had more than 2,000 people. I still have a hole in my stomach about the risk we were taking. [laughter] No, I don't know how much it cost. It's a lot of money to rent the opera house, a lot of money.

Crawford: You don't remember how much?

LeRoux: No. There were stagehands and everything that goes with it. It was a lot of money.

Crawford: But the board agreed. It was a great accomplishment.

LeRoux: We did it, and we made quite a bit of money, too. Several thousand.

Crawford: Grace Slick was the mistress of ceremonies. How did that happen?

LeRoux: I think that was Frank's idea to ask her, said she would do it, and she did, and she did a wonderful job.

Robert Commanday, "Opera Crowd Whoops For Zappa," San Francisco Chronicle, February 11, 1983

STRANGE GOINGS-ON in the Opera House Wednesday. Some 2500 folk, mostly under 30s, vividly gotten up and down for the occasion, were there sitting in quiet awe of four delicately colored works by Anton Webern and wowed by Edgard Varèse's modernist "music noises," sensuous and otherwise.

Loud whoops went up periodically, a surprising one after the first of Webern's "Six Lieder," Op. 14, but mostly to greet the appearance onstage of rock heroes Frank Zappa and Grace Slick. It was the Varèse-Webern dual centennial celebration mounted by Jean-Louis LeRoux' San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, a benefit.

Zappa was there to conduct the Varèse "songs" as emcee Slick routinely called them: "Ionization" (1931) to open, and "Intégrales" (1925) to close the program. [...] He took his untypically formal role seriously. He shushed the greeting, responded to some shouts with "Let's get serious," turned, gave the beat in an audible "One, two, three, four" and awkwardly stroked out the conducting patterns, mouthing the count.

HIS STRICT marking of time and meter changes was enough for the SFCM Players to give Varèse a good, rhythmically clean, dynamically balanced go. "Ionization," with 13 percussionists on 34 instruments, was effective but no longer shocking, having made its influential point years ago. "Intégrales" for 11 winds, four percussion, was the hit, evocative of some primitive ritual, of contrabass shofars, battle horns, deep-lying forces.

[...] The SFCM Players were rewarded for the unconventional event itself, and properly. Popularizing Webern on a grand scale and with rock stars for bait? Well, no harm done.

Dan Forte, "An Interview With Frank Zappa," Mix, June 1983

In February, Zappa shared the baton with maestro Jean-Louis LeRoux for a 100th anniversary celebration of the music of Varese and Anton Webern, performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the city's War Memorial Opera House. Though the concert was a bona fide success, Zappa admitted afterward, "It was the first time I've conducted anything by anybody else, and we only had two rehearsals. I didn't even know if I was going to be good enough to do the Integrales, because it's a lot harder than Ionisation, the other Varese piece I conducted."

[...] Mix: How did you interact with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in the rehearsals?

Zappa: Did I tweeze it out? Yeah, I tweezed it. They knew the stuff very well before I got here; they had played it before. They knew what the notes were—it was just a matter of spiffing it up. Ultimately, it's up to the musician. What the conductor is doing is showing where the beat is, and then telling them things about style to taper it to his own taste. The instructions I gave them about style were not extensive, because the minute I started conducting them they sounded like they had a pretty good grasp of what the piece was supposed to be. The only things I told them, for instance, was how to say certain parts—don't just play the notes, but make it talk.

Mix: What's your feeling regarding the success of having your name connected with a program of classical music by other people?

Zappa: Well, I think it helps to sell tickets.

FZ, interviewed by Alain Chauvat, Mother People #33, 1986

Alain: In an Edgard Varèse tribute you conducted some various compositions, what were they?

FZ: Ionisation and Intégrales.

Alain: Do you plan to make a record of those sessions?

FZ: No. At the time that I did it, I thought that the performances were really good and the only thing that exists is a little cassette that was made in the audience. There wasn't any money, any source to pay for the musicians or recording to do it. But those musicians in San Francisco that played it were very, very good. It's too bad it wasn't recorded because they had the parts well learned, and the tone was good, the rhythm was good—it was a pleasure to conduct them.

FZ, interviewed by Den Simms & Rob Samler, Society Pages, September 1991

DS: In '83, I saw the concert in San Francisco in which you conducted the music of Edgar Varèse . . .

FZ: Um-hm.

DS: I was familiar with those compositions. I had listened to them many times, and, if memory serves me right, even attempted, perhaps futilely, to read a score along with some of that stuff.

FZ: Um-hm.

DS: But when I saw that performance, it gave me a completely new outlook on that music, simply because was able to see how the syncopations were working within that . . .

FZ: In the beat.

DS: . . . within that beat that you were swingin' with the baton. It completely changed my whole perspective on that.

FZ: I happen to think I did a fabulous job conducting those pieces! I have a cassette of it, and from a rhythmic standpoint, I think I'm getting real close to what's on the paper on both of those pieces. There were a couple of things that I didn't like about it, but I thought I did a good job on 'em.

DS: How did you feel the ensemble did?

FZ: Pretty good. I had one rehearsal . . . so . . .

DS: That's kinda jumpin' in the deep end, huh?

FZ: Yeah, well, I rehearsed the score at home, just beating thin air, and I knew what the pieces were supposed to sound like, 'cause I'd been listening to 'em for years, so that part wasn't so hard, but I only had about three hours with these guys the day of the show.

Rehearsals

FZ & Grace Slick
[FZ, Grace Slick.]

The concert

FZ & San Francisco Contemporary Music Players
[FZ. San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.]

 

February 23, 1983—25th Annual Grammy Awards (1982)

"Frank Zappa," Recording Academy Grammy Awards

Nominations:
Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal
Valley Girl (Single)

 

Summer, 1983—Overdubs

1983—New Drum Recordings

Bruce Bartlett, "PZM Challenge, 1983," PZM Memo, October 1983

After the recording sessions in London, [January 1983,] Mark Pinske, Frank Zappa's recording engineer, suggested that a deeper [PZM] dish would provide better isolation and tighter focusing for closer pickup of the instruments. The dishes were made 3" deep rather than 2", and he has found that they accomplish what he sought. He is using two of them tilted down away from each other over the drum kit, as they redo tracks on some of Zappa's other recordings.

August 1983—Old Masters Overdubs

Arthur Barrow, Of Course I Said Yes!, 2016, p. 131

The rest of the [August 15th] week was spent doing bass overdubs on We're Only In It For The Money and Lumpy Gravy, replacing the bass parts on the original 1960's recordings. [...] He said that he had never been happy with the original drum and bass parts, and wanted Chad and me to record new tracks to the original versions. I couldn't believe he wanted to do it. [...]

Though as a fan I philosophically disapproved of replacing the bass and drum tracks, it was actually a lot of fun for me. [...]

In the psychedelic part of "Flower Punk" as the LSD is supposed to be coming on to the Flower Punk, Frank told me to insert the "My Sharona" lick that he loved to stick in anywhere and everywhere. He seemed to find it particularly entertaining to hear the new wave lick in the context of the old recording.

 

September 1983—FZ vs. Warner Bros. (Again)

Tom Mullhern, "Not Exactly Duane Allman," Guitar Player, February 1983

It's a really complicated legal story, and I don't want to recite it again. But the fact of the matter is that part of the lawsuit was settled out of court, and I got all of those masters back; I got all of the tapes back. They're going to be remixed, remastered, and re-released.

East Coast Live, WQDR-FM Raleigh, July 23, 1983 (transcription by Charles Ulrich)

Allan Handelman: You won the case from Warner Brothers. That's where it started, right?

FZ: Well, it's not— The thing was settled out of court. It didn't go to a conclusion where one or the other side won. It was settled out of court. And part of the settlement was I've retained the ownership to all of my original masters going all the way back to the beginning. The only album that I don't own is 200 Motels, because that's owned by United Artists. But everything else I have, and I'm going to remix it, remaster it, and put it out in a humungous collection around Christmastime.

Associated Press, September 14, 1983

Rock star Frank Zappa [...] is suing Warner Bros. Records Inc. for $6 million, his lawer says.

Attorney Christina Jacobs says the suit filed Monday in Superior Court charges that Warner Bros. failed to account properly for sales under the 42-year-old entertainer's two records labels, Bizarre Records Inc. and Discreet Records Inc., and seeks $3 million in compensatory damages and another $3 million in punitive damages.

"Frank Zaps 'Em" (unknown origin, reprinted on Mother People #20, October 22, 1983)

Singer Frank Zappa filed a $6 million suit Monday against Warner Bros. Records, charging that the firm's distribution company failed to properly account for the royalties owed him. The Superior Court suit claims Warner failed to account completely for sales and issued false statements to Zappa and his tow companies, Bizarre Records Inc. and Discreet Records Inc., in violation of agreements reaached in 1968 and 1973. The suit seeks an accounting of record earnings, $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages.

Robert Cassella, "Z=AP2," Gold Coast Free Press, January 5, 1984

Q: How's the situation with Warner Brothers?

Zappa: I'm still suing them. This is my second suit against them. It was originally started in the state of New York and brought back to the state of California, and will probably be going to trial in about three years. These things take time. The first one lasted seven or eight years, and I've got another suit against CBS which is the same problem, royalties.

Patrice Apodaca, "Zappa Keeps Eye Now On Bottom Line," Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1989

In 1983, Zappa sued Warner Bros. Records, alleging that Warner used questionable accounting methods to mislead him about royalties due from sales of his music, a practice he says is still common in the music business. Most artists don't take the time to closely scrutinize their contracts with record companies, Zappa said. But he wanted more control over the sales of his records.

When the suit was settled out of court, ownership of many of the masters reverted to him. Zappa said he spent about $1.6 million on the suit, but the steady sales of his old records are very lucrative. "I have albums that were released 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago that are selling substantial quantities in CD and cassette," he said.

Warner Bros. executives declined to give figures on past sales of Zappa's albums, and they remain touchy about the lawsuit. "I'm not going to deal with any issue relating to Frank Zappa," said a source at the company, who asked that his name not be used. "If we say he sold 2 million records for us, he might come back and sue us for royalties." But the source did say Zappa's records consistently sold hundreds of thousands of units, which "wasn't huge, but it was substantial."

 

Barfko-Swill

Connie Bruck, "Life Of The Party, The New Yorker, January 25, 1999

In 1983, [Gail Zappa] decided to start a mail-order business to bolster the family finances. "I took all the boxes of fan letters that we'd never answered, and I typed up names and addresses, and I did a mailing. I think we had about six thousand names. We sent out a little postcard that had the logo of the record company on it and that said, 'Would you like to buy a T-shirt?' The response was overwhelming! So I was suddenly stuffing T-shirts in bags and putting stamps on them on the floor of my living room for weeks on end, but the money was coming in. Eventually, we started selling records that way as well."

Most artists make deals in which the record company pays them an advance and assumes responsibility for everything required to bring a record to the public (recording, manufacturing, distribution, promotion), and then the company; after reimbursing itself for all those costs (and fees) from the record's profits, pays the artist royalties. Gail realized that, by operating independently she and Frank could, essentially collect the record-company share. Their company prospered. Gail says, "We never advertised, and we were servicing, ultimately; on a regular basis, between fifty thousand and seventy thousand customers. Other musicians wanted the big advances, the artists' deals, the promotions, the touring—everything that goes with it. But this way you have control. Otherwise, you don't get to play your music the way you want to play it. People were afraid of Frank, because he didn't hold back, and he didn't compromise himself in any way, artistically or in terms of his own perspective. It's so absurd, you know. We were very, very patriotic—grateful to be in the country whose chief export, apart from everything else, was democracy; but stunned by the fact that most people didn't appreciate it. They were too busy crying to make rules to swallow it up, and were not thinking about what happens when you do that."

Drew Wheeler, "Just Plain Folks," Billboard, May 19, 1990

Aside from the demands of raising un-rated kids in an X-rated society, Gail Zappa is also the driving force behind Barfko-Swill, the Zappa mail-order operation. Barfko-Swill offers the Zappa fan an assortment of t-shirts, videos, posters, sheet music and collectors' recordings such as the Old Masters Boxes, which contain newly remastered versions of out-of-print MGM and Warner Bros. albums and more. The Barfko-Swill consumer hotline 818-PUMPKIN provides up-to-the-minute news of Zappa projects and activities. When asked what was the impetus to start Barfko-Swill, Gail replies, "Just piles and piles of fan mail sitting around unanswered or with no response. The first thing that we did was put a list together from the fan mail and made a Barking Pumpkin t-shirt available which we still have—same old shirt, same old logo, same old price—just to see what would happen. Everybody would write to us and ask us if there was something they could get besides records."

Like other Zappa ventures, freedom and independence were cornerstones of Barfko-Swill. "That was really the primary reason for getting into the business—for setting up Barfko-Swill—in those days was to be independent," Gail explains. "To not have to rely on a major record company's interest and ability to promote your product. And that was what the challenge was for me. I prefer the autonomy."

 

UMRK Goes Digital

FZ, interviewed by Dan Forte, Mix, June 1983

Zappa: I've rented a digital 24 track so I can do the [LSO album] editing in my studio. It's a dream, the Sony PCM 3324.

Mix: Would you ever record your own band digitally?

Zappa: If I could ever afford one of those machines—they're $150,000.

Billboard, October 1, 1983

Frank Zappa has acquired a Sony PCM-3324 digital recording system. Zappa already owns a Sony PCM-1610 two-track digital audio mastering system.

George Petersen, "10 Technology Movements," Mix Online, October 1, 2007

FZ, Toshi Doi & Curtis Chan
Frank Zappa with his PCM-3324 in his Utility Muffin Research Kitchen studio, flanked by Sony's Toshi Doi (left) and Curtis Chan (right).

 

No More Touring

FZ, interviewed by Robert Cassella, Gold Coast Free Press, January 5, 1984

Now that we don't tour anymore, that's the end of [live recordings]. Still got the truck. [...] The last concert was Palermo, Sicily last summer. [...] I was forty-three years old on the twenty-first of December, and I really don't enjoy touring that much anymore, so that's that.

 

Synclavier

Steve De Furia

Mark Pinske, interviewed by Chris Michie, Mix, January 1, 2003

The Synclavier came right in the control room. As a matter of fact, Steve De Furia, who was a gentleman from New England Digital, came in to do a demonstration for us. [...] He came in and did an audition with the Synclavier, and Frank saw it as a very usable tool. Something that would be—oh, gee, I don't know—something we could use to implement samples and making good recordings, and all that kind of stuff. [...] So when he auditioned the Synclavier, Frank said, "Well, we need somebody to operate this thing." So he offered Steve De Furia the job. To just come on board with us. And Steve accepted the job. Steve was working with me in the control room when we started going into the so-called Synclavier phase. And him and Frank started doing all kinds of archiving together on the actual Synclavier itself. Heck, we had—at one point, believe it or not, we lost about three months worth of work into that thing, when the Winchester hard drive crashed. It was just a heartbreaker. In those days we still had some of those reliability problems.

FZ, "Digital Sampling And Guitar," Guitar Player, December 1983

We have a trumpet sample in the Synclavier now, and the guy who's programming for me, Steve [De Furia], did a tweeze on it that he calls "wazzing" the note. He set it up so that once the sample is initiated by the keyboard, it starts to rise an octave; and it will go all the way up an octave if you keep your finger on the key long enough. But if you take your finger off, or if you're playing fast lines, the result is this bizarre sort of thwarted linear desire: It keeps trying to rise, but it never gets all the way up to the octave. It makes the strangest effect on the trumpet sounds. I imagine it would do just as well on any string sample. So far we've sampled some great low notes on a Bösendorfer piano, huge bass drums, castanets, snorks, wu-han cymbals, chimes—all kinds of stuff. And you're able to play scales of these things after they're in there, and they sound completely real. It's not like the Fairlight [another digital synthesizer], which, to me, sounds kind of like cardboard when you put things in sample. Synclavier sampling is much more realistic because of the 50k [50,000 cycles per second] sampling rate.

Steve De Furia, interviewed by Paul White, Sound On Sound, June 1995

My first experience as a software designer was writing a set of composition programs for Frank Zappa. Those programs got me very deep into computer programming. Before that, I'd never really written any software.

FZ, quoted by Paul Gilby, Sound On Sound, February 1987

Well, I have had [my Synclavier] for about four years, and when I first got it I probably did the same thing that a lot of people do when they buy a complex piece of equipment—I said, "Oh my God, do I have to read all those big books?" So I didn't! Yes, I can tell you honestly folks that I never did read those big books.

But on the other hand I did happen to hire people who had read them, and they did all the stuff that I didn't want to do.

What I wanted to do right away was write music on it, not learn how to write computer programs. I still don't know how to do that and I will probably never bother to find out, because it took me about two or three months before I could turn round and say, "I can type music into that!"

I remember I had a guy [Steve De Furia] operating the machine and the way it happened was—and, boy, how this man suffered! I was working on a piece and I had to get the musical information into the computer. Since I didn't know how to type it in, I had to sit next to him and say, "Make that one a C, make the next one a G, etc." Then one day he said, "Look Frank . . . if you would just do this, then I wouldn't have to sit here!" So I said "Okay, let me try," and it only took about a day to learn the process. From that point on he couldn't even get into the room to use the machine because I was there day and night!

David Ocker

David Ocker, The David Ocker Internet Interview, 1994-1995

Steve DeFuria [...] taught me a lot about the Synclavier—and he actually wrote software that we used. In fact, I got switched over from copying to Synclavier because Steve really wasn't available for as much work as Frank wanted done. Steve wrote a column in Keyboard magazine after that for a while.

FZ, interviewed by Robert Cassella, Gold Coast Free Press, January 5, 1984

David [Ocker] is in the process of loading in some stuff on the computer, this composition that I'm working on, so that's very time consuming. Basically, what he's working on is a keyboard piece that is rhythmically pretty close to impossible for a human being to play. But the computer I've got in the other room is doing it very nicely. It's a great sounding piece, but he can only load in two or three minutes a day. I work on it during nights.

 

October 1983—FZ vs. CBS

"Zappa Sues CBS Int'l," Variety, October 12, 1983 (reprinted in Mother People #21, December 1983)

CBS Records International is being sued for $856,609 by the firm in charge of Frank Zappa's disks for Barking Pumpkin Records, a CBS Records affiliated label.

The defendant is charged by Pumpko Industries Ltd. with underpaying its royalties obligations to the plaintiff form Jan. 2, 1979 to June 30, 1982 through improper calculation of amounts due.

The suit, filed in N.Y. Federal Court, Monday (11), claims underpayments for the period totaled $1,004,571.60, $147,961.78 of which was credited to the plaintiff´s account this summer.

 

 

Research, compilation and maintenance by Román García Albertos
http://www.donlope.net/fz/
This page updated: 2023-03-14