This is a random list of people somehow related to FZ and not included in the Freak Out! List Of Contributors. Some of them are included in the Special Thanks list on The Yellow Shark and the MOFO List Of Contributors
Well, who were your major influences? I'd like to go back to Freak Out.
Well, there's a list in the album. 156 names.
All these people have been . . .
. . . legitimate influences.
What about since that time?
There have been about three or four.
I expected you might say that. Would you mind naming them?
Krzystof Penderecki, Gyorgy Ligeti, Phillipe Koutev . . . and I can't think of another one. There must be only three.
Those are people I'm not familiar with.
Krzystof Penderecki is a composer. He's the head of all Polish music and writes in a certain kind of style. Gyorgy Ligeti is a composer best known for his "scary music" in 2001. But they just borrowed that from his straight compositions. Phillipe Koutev is the organizer of a folk music ensemble in Bulgaria; it's the hottest band in that area.
Are they available on European discs?
Yea, sure. And American discs. Nonesuch has got several albums of the folk music of Bulgaria, the Phillipe Koutev ensemble included. Gyorgy Ligeti is available on Columbia, and Penderecki is available on RCA.
Well, on the Freak Out! album there's a list of 160 names—both positive and negative influences, I'm, you know, I'm influenced just as easily by things I hate as by things that I like. And since that first list I don't think I would have added more than four names to it, 'cause at that time I don't believe I've heard Penderecki or Takemitsu, so I would add those two names to it.
While I was working for Frank a recording of the music of George Antheil performed by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble was released—making many people aware for the first time how insanely great his early works are. These include the Ballet Mechanique (for percussion, pianos, airplane propeller, various buzzers etc), a Jazz Symphony and several sonatas for violin and piano. Frank liked Antheil's music too. Once, in a discussion with Frank and someone else, I mentioned that I thought the Jazz Symphony was the best piece on the album. Frank disagreed and chose one of the violin sonatas as his favorite (I believe it was the one with the drum bit at the end). I was surprised by this but also pleased that he chose a small-scale chamber work instead of a large, colorful orchestra piece. (I've spent a lot of my life playing chamber music and regretted that Frank showed so little interest in small acoustic instrumental pieces. At that time he was writing many large, colorful orchestra pieces. I had assumed—wrongly—that he'd be more interested in Antheil's orchestra work.)
Another time: I was working on something at the house and Frank was nearby. I was whistling while I worked—as I often do—not really aware of what the tune was. Frank said "Oh, Antheil's greatest hits." and I realized that I was whistling the Ballet Mechanique theme.
[David Axelrod's] Blakean tone poems [Song Of Innocence (1968) and Songs Of Experience (1969)] found fans in Sly Stone and Frank Zappa.
[...] "Good times. I'm getting all these write-ups, I've been in time magazine. What could go wrong?"
Zappa knew. Self-taught musicians and voracious devourers of knowledge, Zappa and Axelrod would discuss everything from the mountain-climbing prowess of Aleister Crowley to the inestimable importance of press officers. "He said, 'You've got to get PR.' I figured I didn't need it. Things were going well. He said, 'You're making a great mistake.' Quincy [Jones] said the same thing."
Worried that Axelrod was getting carried away as an 'artist'—and would be less inclined to work as a producer—Capitol decided the best thing to do was kill him off by not promoting the solo albums. "Today I realise that [Zappa] was right and I was wrong," says Axelrod. "What can I tell you? But you can never undo things. I never dwell on it."
Frank [Zappa] was a dear friend and we used to compare notes on how we studied. A great deal of it was done in a public library.
I like most of Bartok too.
Also you ought to get Bartók's first, second and third piano concertos, which are all very groovy and good to dance to. I have the version on Westminster (18277) by Edith Farnadi with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. I've never heard any other version of the second and third piano concertos so I don't know whether or not that's the best recording. It might not even be available. I heard another version of the first at Andy Kulberg's, of the Blues Project, who has an extensive collection of modern music.
[FZ] said he liked "one or two songs" on the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper—which the Mothers took off with the cover of We're Only In It For The Money—but the best Beatles songs were Paperback Writer, Strawberry Fields and I Am The Walrus. "I don't like the rest too much," he said.
I tried for a number of years to do an album with Jeff Beck, we discussed it about 5 or 6 different times, but because he's signed with Epic, and that's part of Columbia, they would never let him do anything like that, and so it could just never come off.
[Columbus, March 6, 1988] We got to rehearsal and ran through some stuff. Frank mentioned that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant might be popping up sometime to play "Stairway To Heaven," and he said it would be nice to do "Shapes Of Things" for Jeff Beck when he shows up in London. So Frank looked at me, and I figured out the chords and we did a reasonably good instrumental version of "Shapes Of Things" with Frank playing the vocal melody on the guitar.
I loved his political outbursts. From what I could read between the lines he probably could have made the best American president ever. He was very knowledgeable about world affairs and he had a deep cynical streak.
Me and Ronnie Wood knew no fear when we were together [in the Jeff Beck Group] in '69. I knew where Frank lived and I drove up to Laurel Canyon in a rented Camarro and did a rubber burnout outside his house. He of course heard it, and came out and said: "You can cut out that shit," and invited us in. He took a shine to me and Ronnie big-time.
You may or may not know this but Frank and Jeff [Beck] were friends and played together for fun on a few occasions. They discussed making a record together. I would have loved to have heard that.
[Jello Biafra, FZ.]
Biafra stumbled upon a reproduction of a painting by European artist H.R. Giger titled "Landscape No. 20: Where We Are Coming From." The painting, which features dismembered, ugly genitals copulating in what looks like sludge, had been reproduced in many books and magazines over the years, and Biafra secured the rights to include it as part of the Frankenchrist package. About the painting, Biafra says "I began to realize, 'My god, we have met the enemy and it is us, this is what we do to each other every day in consumer-oriented society. Wait a minute, this is what we're talking about on a lot of the Frankenchrist songs.' I thought the Giger painting would be a great way to drive home the point, even if some people in high positions of power with no sense of humor didn't seem to understand."
Originally, the painting was meant to be the gatefold inner cover for Frankenchrist, but a member of DKs vehemently objected and it was instead inserted into the album as a poster. Although the poster was expected to raise some eyebrows, no one expected it to cause as much trouble as it did. A warning sticker, albeit a sarcastic one, was affixed to the cover, partially to parody the warning stickers that the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was demanding at the time, partially to cover themselves in case there was difficulty. The sticker read : "WARNING : The inside fold out to this record cover is a work of art by H.R. Giger that some people may find shocking, repulsive or offensive. Life can sometimes be that way."
When a San Fernando Valley mother complained that her 13- year old daughter had purchased the record as a gift for her 11-year old brother (at a Wherehouse Records outlet in a large mall), the LA City Attorney's Office decided to prosecute the case. Deputy city attorney Michael Guarino, the prosecutor in the case, admitted they chose to prosecute the DKs because it would be a "cost-effective" way to send a message to other musicians, record companies and fans. Guarino had been considering prosecuting several other groups when this case came along, and he thought he could win this one.
The first Biafra heard of all this was when he was awakened from his sleep one morning by the sound of his window being broken and several police officers invading his house, supposedly to seize the "evidence." ( No one bothered to knock.) They took numerous personal effects, including his address book, as well as a few copies of Frankenchrist and the business ledgers of Alternative Tentacles, making it impossible to conduct business for a while.
Charged in the case were Biafra, and four others, including the 67-year old man whose company pressed the Frankenchrist disc. Conspicuously not charged were Wherehouse Records which sold the offending album. They had agreed to stop selling Frankenchrist and all other Dead Kennedys albums when the controversy first surfaced.
Biafra and the others decided to fight the charges of distributing harmful matter to minors, and set up the No More Censorship Defense Fund, which along with helping with the legal fees in the Frankenchrist case, makes available copies of articles dealing with censorship and plans to help others who are being harassed. Contributions came in mostly from fans of alternative music; envelopes of teenager's allowance and an encouraging note were common. Not so common were contributions from those popular figures who stood to suffer if Biafra lost the case. Three notable figures who did come to Biafra's aid were Frank Zappa, Little Steven Van Zandt and Paul Kantner.
Although Tipper Gore's PMRC did not claim credit for the case, they certainly approved of it, and it was their talk of rating records that led to the pro-censorship climate of the mid and late 1980's. ( Of course, they are very loath to call it censorship, even though several major record store chains had agreed to not to carry any record that contained a negative rating label.) The No More Censorship Defense Fund called for a boycott of Coors beer and other companies that financed the PMRC, and chronicled their activities in the newsletters inserted in DKs albums.
Finally, after months of delay, during which Biafra's time was taxed enough that he had no time to work on his music, the case went to trial. After a week-long trial in which witnesses such as Greil Marcus testified on the group's behalf, and a respected art teacher attempted to show how the poster was an integral part of the Frankenchrist package, the jury came out deadlocked (7-5 in favor of acquittal), and the judge dismissed the case.
Ironically, the painting which stirred up all the controversy had been printed in several books which could be found in libraries all across the U.S., all published without incident. Giger is a highly respected artist who had even won an academy award ( for his Alien set design), and found all the controversy very strange.
The famous obscenity trial for the DK's Frankenchrist album resulted in a precedent setting victory for free speech, but nearly bankrupted the label. Amazingly, despite the numerous famous artists under attack at that time, only Frank Zappa and a couple of others tried to help.
RIP: They're cracking down on rock 'n' roll in other ways too. Look at the lawsuit against Jello Biafra stemming from the poster inside of the Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist album. Or the suit against Ozzy Osbourne because some father claims that it's Ozzy's fault that his kid committed suicide while one of Ozzy's records was playing. A spokesman from the L.A. District Attorney's office stated that he has a deskful of other possible rock 'n' roll prosecutions. Is this too going to become fashionable?
ZAPPA: It depends on the outcome of the Biafra case. Right now I'd take that folder on the other prosecutions and use it as evidence in the Biafra case to prove it's a conspiracy on the part of the judiciary and the law-enforcement officers in California, and that it's completely prejudicial and has nothing to do with anything in rock 'n' roll.
What I want to know is, how can a person in the San Fernando Valley who becomes irate at a rock 'n' roll poster in an album suddenly get a search warrant from the State Attorney General's office, requiring the service of six vice-squad officers plus three more flown up from Los Angeles, to search someone's house in San Francisco who's not presumed to be dangerous? That's nine guys, armed, going up to someone's house with a search warrant from the State Attorney General for the purpose of, as the warrant says, "To pick up three copies of the album." First of all, why not go to a record store and buy them? Then there's the slight matter of who's been indicted here, right down to the guy who pressed the albums. Notice it's not the Wherehouse record store that sold the records—a curious omission. And, they have to prove that by seeing this poster, someone has been irreparably damaged. It's an absurd case.
DT: Are you up on what Jello Biafra is doing on his anti censorship tour?
FZ: I know he's on tour, and he's made an album of some of it, but I haven't seen it. He's been over here (at the house) a few times. I've met him, but he's not a close' friend. I supported him during his trial. We put out something called a Z-Pack, and I provided him with all that data (on the PMRC, and censorship).
When the punk label Alternative Tentacles was attacked by the government for the artwork included with a Dead Kennedys album, Zappa put his money alongside his mouth. Despite his antipathy for punk, Zappa made a sizeable donation to the No More Censorship Defense Fund and called up label owner and Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra. Biafra recalls being advised to remember that he was the victim and to keep his dignity. In all, they had about seven or eight conversations, and Biafra was invited over to Zappa's house.
The two-week trial of former Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra ended on August 27th in a victory for the singer when a Los Angeles jury was unable to reach a verdict. Biafra and Michael Bonanno, the former manager of Biafra's record label, Alternative Tentacles, were charged with distributing harmful matter to a minor. It was apparently the first court case to scrutinize the contents of a rock album. The jurors deliberated a little more than a day before declaring themselves stalemated, causing the judge to declare a mistrial and throw out the case. [...] But the singer added that the victory didn't come cheaply. Since his arrest, the Dead Kennedys have disbanded, and Biafra's marriage has ended. "I've been wearing Lenny Bruce's shoes for over a year, and I don't think they fit very well," he said, referring to the late comic, whose career tailspinned after several obscenity arrests. Biafra's legal fees total more than $55,000. Few members of the music community came to Biafra's support; Frank Zappa, Steve Van Zandt and Paul Kantner were the only high-profile rock artists to contribute to his defense fund.
Meeting Frank Zappa was one of the few silver linings to come out of the trial. He got a hold of me and the helpers of the No More Censorship Defense Fund rather than us having to find him. He gave me some very valuable advice very early on; something that anybody subjected to that kind of harassment should remember: You are the victim. You have to constantly frame yourself that way in the mass media so you don't get branded some kind of outlaw simply because of your beliefs and the way you express your art. The outlaws are the police. I got to visit Frank two or three more times at his house in Los Angeles and those were very special times. He showed me a hilarious Christian aerobics video. The women were in their skintight leotards doing jumping jacks. "One-two, two-two, three-two, praise the Lord!" And of course the bustiest one was in a striped spandex suit dead ront center of the screen!
3. We're Only in It for the Money, The Mothers of Invention
I love the first three Mothers albums, Freak Out, Absolutely Free, and this album, so any one of them could fill this spot. No doubt about it, Frank Zappa was a genius—how he recorded these albums is beyond me, they seem to have recorded his brain! His lyrics were so cynical and contemptuous of [particularly] American life, both [the] older generation and [the] then current generation. They could make you laugh, question, debate, or despair of what the hell was happening in the world.
Shan Sutton: How did your feelings about rock and roll change over time? Is that true to say that you've come to acknowledge its legitimacy a little more over time? And also, did playing with your sons in the early '70s have an influence on your view of rock music?
Dave Brubeck: Oh yeah. My sons, especially Chris and Danny, loved rock and were involved in rock bands, and would bring home rock musician friends that I grew to respect gradually because they were such great musicians. And, there's a lot of it that doesn't seem to move me that much, but there's some that does, like—Iola, who's that great rock composer that I like so much?
Iola Brubeck: Sting?
Dave Brubeck: Sting is one, but before Sting—I played with him in a Boston concert.
Iola Brubeck: You played with him in Boston?
Dave Brubeck: Yeah. Oh, dear.
Iola Brubeck: Oh, I know who you're thinking, Frank Zappa.
Dave Brubeck: Frank Zappa.
Shan Sutton: Really? Brubeck and Zappa, huh?
Dave Brubeck: Well, we were on the same night, and I thought some of the things he was doing were just terrible because they had on rain clothes, and high boots like you were going through a storm, and rain hats—you know, those yellow kind of hats, and they would roll on the floor and everything. Then I started listening to the music rather than looking at these guys, and I was thinking, "Boy, there's a lot going on there musically." So, you never want to put down any trend, any direction.
Informant: cekman at Zappateers.
Eric himself is very interested in spreading peace through music, rather than violence. For this reason he isn't too fond of the Frank Zappa—Mothers of Invention approach. "He excites violence as a reaction from the audience. I think that it is easier to get the message across this way but it isn't my way. I think that Zappa is the Adolf Hitler of music.
"Mind you, if I'm on stage and I'm not getting across, in this difficulty I do a blues because with the sex and violence that you can use in a blues you can provoke a reaction. But, although I'm still in a blues bag, it isn't my way."
It comes as something of a surprise to meet the man of the infamous reputation to discover he is painfully introvert on meeting strangers, (He double bluffs this one by saying things like "I'm shy but I don't like to talk about it") hyper sensitive ("I have that clipping in which Eric Burdon called me the Adolph Hitler of rock and roll") and seldom raises his voice above a whisper.
Stockhausen isn't really an influence. That is, I have some of his records but I don't play them much. [John] Cage is a big influence. We've done a thing with voices, with talking, that is very like one of his pieces, except that of course in our piece the guys are talking about working in an airplane factory, or their cars.
Before you mentioned the aspects of chance in your music, how much if any do you have looked at anything as far as John Cage has been dealing with, or also have you had any experience with a group of artists in New York called Fluxus?
I've heard of Fluxus, and I have listened to John Cage's albums, and I have attended a couple of John Cage lectures, and I did some research into that kind of aleatoric music, and studied other aleatoric composers during the late '50s when that was turning into something to be reckoned with, but there's very few of those people that I thought did anything that sounded musical, you know, it was interesting, but I wouldn't compare it to any lasting musical expression, you know it was just the sound of the times, and it was worthy as such, and if I listen to any of those records today, I just hear it as an indicator and not as a piece of music. Like the Bartok 2nd Piano Concerto is a piece of music, and John Cage's Music For 2 Prepared Pianos and something or other is . . . That doesn't register as music with me.
I have many John Cage recordings, but I find his writing more interesting than his music.
Once upon a time, when I was an impressionable young composer, somebody gave me a John Cage record and I listened to it, and went 'What the fuck is this?' But since I didn't know what the fuck anything was, I thought 'Maybe this is really good.' A short time after that, John Cage came to Claremont College and he was giving one of his . . . he does these performances with a throat microphone. He'd put this thing on his throat and drink a quart of carrot juice, or read something to you while he was drinking the carrot juice. In a way, this ties in with my over-all feeling towards colleges. In this instance, there was a college audience watching John Cage drink the carrot juice and do these things, and they were pondering it like it had this large significance. It occurred to me that if he could do that, then certainly, SURELY there were other things equally ridiculous that a person such as myself could do in the music business. And so I decided that I would try, not necessarily to gargle with the carrot juice, but that I'd do other things that come awfully close.
The most recent record that I heard and impressed me was a "Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord and Two Chamber Orchestras" by Elliott Carter. I did a radio interview in Boston, about three or four days ago and I found this record. It's a Nonesuch album and it's really good, just go get it. Found this record sitting in their bin and I was going: "What is this album doing here, you know? Most have got shipped to the station by mistake." And so I snatched it out of the bin and the whole concept of what I was doing on the show was: the disc jockey told the audience that he was going down to city hall to hear some speeches about the Red Sox. And that he was turning the station over to this disc jockey and Frank Zappa and I was: "I just play what I like", but actually he was still sitting there running the turn tables and I was running my mouth. So I grabbed this thing and put it on. I said: "We are going to try to make this record a hit in Boston." And we kept playing it, and playing it and playing it, you know, and just saying: "All the calls are coming in and the record stores can't keep it in stock. And then we played the flip side which was a duo for violin and piano. Just gave it this horrible hype [...] But people were people calling the station asking where they could find it? And it's a great record, but it's not the kind of thing that anybody is going to play on the radio.
When I wanna relax a lot I listen to classical music usually. [...] The stuff that puts me into the most dream like state would be something like Anton Webern string quartets. Or maybe I listen to Elliott Carter string quartets.
He's dynamite. You know, I've never— You know, like I have a lot of respect for him as a musician but I was never so surprised since I sat down and talked with the cat. 'Cause he's really, you know, he's really into something. [...]
He's not exactly— He's not all blues. If you listen to what they're doing he's made an attempt to take his blues background and mold it into something, you know, more original. When you hear them in person, uh, lot of their improvisation would start off with a theme based upon, uh—like they'd start with the song "Spoonful" by the Howlin' Wolf and they'll sing the words to that but after that's over they just go completely berserk and they're into something else. It's not all blues. It does grow out of the blues. It's a completely different treatment of blues oriented material than you'd find a Chicago blues band playing.
Photo of FZ with Kathy Dalton shared on one of the [Facebook] groups.
Do People like Miles Davis know about you and your music?
Well, I met Miles Davis in 1962 in a jazz club in San Francisco called the Black Hawk. I really liked his music and I went up to him and introduced myself to him and he turned his back on me. And so I haven't had anything to do with him or his music since that time.
In 1962, though, you hadn't recorded anything.
That's okay. He had his chance. I don't treat people that way.
Zappa has reached the right medium in combining the seriousness of jazz with light-heartedness and laffs of rock and roll, and then again with the seriousness of classical music. [...] (An indication: he says he likes Miles Davis' Nefertiti, which was "good because it was free, but not crazed." Which, further, is a clue to Zappa. Free but not crazed. Weird ass, but in the proper structure.)
NT: It seems that you and McLaughlin and [Miles] Davis seem to be setting a similar trend . . . which I find especially interesting since you come from such different backgrounds.
FZ: Are you talking about the rhythmic aspect of it, or the melodic aspect or what?
NT: Well, both, and the way they bounce off of each other.
FZ: Well, I don't find too much in common melodically between what we do and what the Mahavishnu does; and the only thing in common with our group and Miles Davis is we got a trumpet in it.
Rhythmically there are some similarities, because we're playing eighth-note and sixteenth-note time signatures that are uneven and so forth, but we've been doing that for seven years.
After dinner, Kennedy drove us up Mullholland Drive. Final destination: Frank Zappa's house. I was just a stupid kid, and unfortunately it wasn't until years later that I started to fully appreciate Zappa's music. I grew into a connoisseur of the odd and obscure, which eventually put Zappa's style at the forefront in my musical mind. Of the few people on Earth (past or present) that I would completely geek-out on, Frank Zappa was definitely one of them. I wish now that I could have sat and picked his brain until he ran me out the front at the tip of a sharp object, which he probably would have.
[...] Frank was not up for company. This was in 1993, very shortly before he died of prostate cancer at the age of fifty-two. There was a fireman's pole that extended from the top floor to the ground floor of the house.
I had played the Rhodes with Don Ellis. I joined the Don Ellis Big Band for a while. I was pretty comfortable playing a lot of odd time signatures. But working with Don Ellis, who a lot of people probably don't remember, I got bathed in the waters of time signatures. It was an amazing experience. Jay Graydon was in that band, and Ralph Humphrey, who eventually wound up in the Zappa band.
ED "LEROY" MANN
[...]
FORMER EMPLOYERS: Don Ellis
I have recently finished reading Pictures of an Exhibitionist an autobiography by Keith Emerson. [...] Keith tells this story (according with the book it's around late 1970 and we know Frank was in UK in late November):
But before ELP took off, heading north on the M1, a call came through via Tony Stratton-Smith.
'Frank Zappa is in town and staying at the Kensington Hilton. He wants to meet with you.'
I found myself knocking on his hotel door.
Much to my surprise, after an hour of deep discussion about time signature, orchestras and avant-garde composers, he gave me a piano transcription written by an Ian Underwood.
'You should learn this,' he said.
Most gratified that our meeting had reached such a level of confidence as to entrust me with a rare manuscript, I hurried home and immediately stuck it on the music rack of the upright piano. It was a very demanding piece of piano writing, but I persisted, practicing it until I reached the last page where I hoped a conclusion would be offered. The piece sort of tailed out and Frank had written: 'More about this later.'
There is a connection with another book I have read recently: Emerson, Lake & Palmer—every album, every song by Mike Goode. In this book, Mike reviews Tarkus (released 1971) and while speaking about "Eruption" (the first movement of the "Tarkus" suite) he writes:
As well as Ginastera, Emerson also admitted to a Zappa influence when composing the music for Tarkus. 'I was a huge admirer of Frank Zappa and had met him on a few earlier occasions when he wanted my advice on how to cope with English orchestras. Frank was of the opinion that there shouldn't be time signatures. That's how I felt.'
Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926-September 3, 1987) was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown.
When I was working on the piano reductions Frank asked about the possibility of doing one for "Mo 'N Herb's Vacation." [...] I felt I knew what Frank would consider a successful piano version of an orchestra piece, and didn't think that "Mo 'N Herb" would work out to his satisfaction. He made a comment like "How about if we slow it way down? It would be so weird, like a ballad from Mars." But that was not seriously considered. But then he said, "Why not do it for three pianos? Morton Feldman has a beautiful piece for three pianos." We never did it, but that comment revealed that Frank was familiar with at least some Feldman, and had liked what he heard.
The Mothers of Invention "Freak Out!" (1966)
"I bought this in late '66, around the time I first saw Hendrix playing—in a pub. That was a very special year. I was 16, just starting to play live, and my mind was so irrevocably blown just by the music that I never ever felt the desire for drugs. OK, I still like a glass of wine on occasion. Interestingly, neither did the madcap genius Frank Zappa. I'd never seen a gatefold double album before, and this one was bubbling over with a kaleidoscopic montage of astonishing music from ultra-avant-garde atonalism—in memoriam Edgard Varese, who'd died a year before this release—to lobotomised doo-wop on 'Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder' and everything in between. I lapped it all up voraciously (most of my friends just liked the funny bits). This album certainly influenced my production of the Miniatures compilation album in 1980, which had 51 completely different tracks, none longer than a minute."
This is an EML Synkey from the early-to-mid '70s, I guess, and the first time I saw one of these was a Frank Zappa concert in London in [1977], I think it was. I'd met Zappa in his hotel for a production meeting, which never led to anything, but he invited me to his concert the next day, and his keyboard player at that time was a friend of mine, Eddie Jobson, well-known English actually violinist and keyboard player who played with Curved Air, UK and many other bands.
[Fisher] He sipped tea with Frank Zappa at London's Dorchester after cold-calling him about producing the British Lions.
Sounds got wind of a potential Mott The Hoople reunion, and in a moment of weakness the group decided to play along. The Rainbow Theatre was booked for a photo sessions and live showcase, during which the band failed to impress either the band or themselves. Half-hearted attempts to find a producer—including a meeting with Frank Zappa—turned up little.
Fisher had joined Mott the Hoople in 1973. Following the departure of front man Ian Hunter in 1974, the remaining members of the band continued to work under the name MOTT, but without much success. In 1977, they were morphing into yet another band called British Lions.
Fraternity of Man busted
The L.A. based "Fraternity of Man" joined the ranks of rock groups busted for drugs last week. Chicago police raided their hotel rooms and arrested four members of the group.
Laurel Fisherman and Ingber Elliot were busted for possession of marijuana, stimulants and depressants; Warren Klein, for suspicion of possesion of stimulants; and Lawrence Wagner for suspicion of disorderly conduct.
The star of STORY #2 is a girl named Laurel Fishman. (We'll use her real name because she is, in fact, proud of her accomplishments.)
She had been a regular attendee at our concerts in Chicago and other Midwestern cities in the 1960s, and in 1970 she won a contest run by a radio station in Chicago. The contest was to tell in twenty-five words or less how the Mothers of Invention had saved your life.
Her entry said that, since hearing the song "Call Any Vegetable," she had gotten in touch with her friends in the vegetable kingdom and, as a result of this, her body functions had been more regular.
The contest winner was to receive a backstage pass to our concert at the Auditorium Theatre [May 21, 1971], with one guest. I didn't even know the radio station was having a contest. At the gig, the promoter told us about it, and introduced us to THE WINNER— Laurel Fishman.
She had screaming orange-red hair, and makeup out to here, and was a little bit on the pudgy side. She walked in with a guy who looked like Carl Franzoni from the early Freak Out! days.
She had brought with her a 'present' for the band. It was a piece of her own shit, which looked like it had been hand-molded into a perfect sphere, sitting in a mason jar. She claimed that was exactly how it had left her body. I couldn't imagine how that could be true—I thought I saw palm prints on it.
Jim Pons, the bass player at that time, was fascinated by it. After the show, he took it with him. We got to the motel, got out of the car and were walking to the elevator. Pons couldn't stand it anymore—he had to find out if it was real. He unscrewed the lid, took a big whiff, and went, "OOOhhhh my God!" It wound up in the trash can just outside the elevator in the motel.
I met Larry Flynt for the first time yesterday. He came to my home with his wife and some of the people from the HUSTLER staff. This was the result of an invitation from HUSTLER to direct a fantasy sequence for an upcoming series in the magazine.
The next day my wife and I went to the HUSTLER offices and had a long talk with him. That is why I am writing this piece now. I had been previously aware of a few facts surrounding Larry's legal problems, but not being a regular HUSTLER reader, the wretched details of the story were not clear to me. The discussion I had with him filled in several blanks.
I think Larry Flynt is a brave man. I also think that what has been done to him, in and out of U.S. courts, is as disgusting as anything ever printed in this magazine.
Flynt met the Zappas in 1984, when he asked Frank to create a photo spread of one of his fantasies for Hustler, Flynt's smutty sex magazine. The two became fast friends, and remained so until Zappa's death, in 1993. "Frank was a genius, a rebel," Flynt said. "And Frank and I in all our conversations had a very honest dialogue. We were never really out of sync politically or socially. There were always things to talk about, but never really anything to argue about." He hesitated, then added, shyly, "Frank really, really liked me a lot."
Well, I was a businessman and I was in a restaurant on sunset boulevard, ben franks, and I was having lunch with my partner, a guy by the name of Joe Dana—we were in the mail-order business together selling funny things in the mail and [...] I said I'm going to go over there and see what she had to say .. and she was really opened. And that's the way it was in the '60s, people were open with each other, you could just walk up and talk to somebody and they wanted to know you. Especially in Hollywood everyone was interested in show business or a part and they wanted your attention, they wanted to meet you. so we were business-looking men, I wore a suit and stuff. I walked over to her and she said I'm a painter. I said, oh, yeah? I'd like to see your painting. and which was vito's studio on Laurel and beverly and she said come over there and bring your friend. I was a girl by the name of Mary Mancini. she was a fine artist. we had to walk into vito's place down in the basement, and we saw what she was painting, very vibrant painting so um when we left i said to my friend joe, Jeez, really like what I just saw and felt down there in that basement.
So I continued to come back there for at least a year. that was '64. I kept coming back there and getting involved with the artists. I had spent some time at the San Francisco art institute for photography. so I started out as the their photographer; they had a new baby and I took pictures of the baby and then Vito suggested that i might take some clay sculpting classes. And what would happen we would go to this class and it would only last 'til 10 o'clock, so at 10 o'clock all those people would pile into their cars and go to the local dance hall. And it just increased. And I didn't dance at first. For the first month or so I didn't dance. I just went there and watched them and looked what to do (laughs) to see their improvisations. And then one night i just went out there and I didn't stop. and i got out of the business I was in. And I gave up my cars and motorcycles and just would show up at the Whisky and places like that and would dance every night. And I got work out of it; they asked if I'd do movies and stuff like that.
[...]
Vito Paulekas, who was my teacher at the time, he had a place on Laurel Avenue, and why I'm telling you this is because the Byrds came there and rehearsed. Anyway, he was looking for a band to play at a teenage dance on Melrose Avenue, and it was at a church, kind of a church configuration, upstairs . . . anyway, so we were interviewing bands, and a lot of bands came to Vito's, but the Byrds came there like this: they had an audition and didn't show up. A friend of ours went over to their house and called them a bunch of bums (laughs). And they had just had all their equipment stolen in San Francisco, they had went up there, and they were kind of down, I guess. Well anyway, they showed up the second time, and Vito hired them for the dance. A lot of teenagers. Tons. There were 200 people there. So they go there and the dance was for Stop the War in Viet Nam. [...] The Byrds were, in my estimation, the best dance band that Hollywood ever saw, because they made people dance with that kind of music. Those guys were forever fighting with each other, but when they got up there they really cooked. The next night was Ciro's; first night at Ciro's, and we walk in this place, it's a totally red room, lots of light, the best dance floor in Hollywood, it's about 40 feet by 60 feet, all the stars in Hollywood are there; these guys have never played for them before. We stepped on the dance floor, and from then on it was music and dance for months and months. All right.
[...] They asked me to pick a good amount of people to go with them and we became the Byrds' dancers. But the Byrds . . . Jim McGuinn didn't like us getting any action, so he made us dance in the audience, he never brought us up on stage. I was upset with them about that and I think that's why they fired me at the end. But as far as the tour itself, the tour itself was really something!
When I was 14 years old I made the decision that I was going to find and purchase every Frank Zappa record. In 1984, this took some doing since all of his records from the '60s and '70s were out of print. I would take buses all over L.A. and the Valley for these records, every one of which had a huge, powerful effect on me. [...]
By the time I was 15 I owned all of the records and was spending about 70% of my musical life studying and learning his music. [...] I taught myself to read music by comparing the written notes in the Frank Zappa Guitar Book to the recordings of those songs. [...]
By the time I was 16 I knew how to play damn near everything in terms of his compositions. That learning process, as well as the dedication and devotion I had for his music was a hugely important step in my eventually having my own voice as a musician. Also, those potentially difficult years were mostly a lot of laughter in my head, as his sense of humor felt to me like a friend. Furthermore, his self-assured and confident attitude gave me the reassurance to believe in myself completely and not let anyone tell me shit.
By the time he was 16, John Frusciante had mastered all of Frank Zappa's guitar solos—some of the trickiest licks in rock—and had even auditioned for Zappa's band, a sobering experience that drew him up short. "I was sitting there thinking, do you want to be a rock star and write your own songs and draw all the girls," he told Mojo magazine, "or do you want to be in Frank Zappa's band, where you'll be told what to do all the time, not allowed to take drugs, and it's kind of a square band so there's not going to be a lot of girls at the shows?" It wasn't a tough call. When the Chili Peppers came calling the following year, he jumped at the chance.
We know The Fugs pretty well, they are good friends of ours and we get compared to them all the time. It stems mostly from Robert Shelton's initial writing someplace about—you know—the comparison beween us and The Fugs. Last year he apologized all over the place for doing it. There is no real relationship between the approach we take, what we do, there is just no comparison.
Q: Who would you like to have been?
A: Buckminster Fuller. He invented the geodesic dome, besides being an architect and a triple genius.
Practicing as a lawyer in New York in the mid '60s, Glotzer became peripherally involved with the music business when he began representing some songwriters. In 1967, he did some legal work for the Blues Project, which was splitting up at the time. From the remnants of the Blues Project came Blood, Sweat and Tears and Seatrain, both of whom Glotzer began managing. He then formed a management company with Albert Grossman, who had handled Bob Dylan. Together in New York, the two handled the likes of The Band, Janis Joplin, Gordon Lightfoot, Tom Rush and Paul Butterfield.
Glotzer remembers, "After Janis died and various other things came down, I decided I wanted to move to California and Albert decided he really wanted to live in Woodstock instead of a large city, so we just split things up."
Glotzer moved to Los Angeles in 1974 and, after a meeting with Zappa set up by a mutual acquaintance, began managing him in 1976. Leven and Hagen were signed soon afterward.
[...]
Glotzer's current staff includes Ronni Balter, the publishing administrator for Zappa's Munchkin Music, Open End Music, Oyster Music and others obtained through past management deals, and management reps Joan Abend, Camilla Fegy and Mitch Rose.
Glotzer Management's publishing concerns are growing. Brian Halio of the A&R department is on the lookout for new writers and material.
A graduate of Columbia Law School, Glotzer's entry into the artist management business came after he completed legal work for The Blues Project during their 1967 split, leading him to manage the groups that resulted from that fracture: Seatrain and the multi-platinum jazz-rock outfit Blood, Sweat & Tears. [...] Glotzer linked up with [Albert] Grossman in 1969 and formed the New York-based Grossman-Glotzer Management, which managed the careers of Joplin, The Band, Lightfoot, Seatrain, Tom Rush, James Cotton and The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, among others. After the two men parted ways several years later, Glotzer moved to Los Angeles and launched Glotzer Management, where he and his team additionally handled publishing administration and publicity duties for a client list that included Zappa, Nina Hagen and singer-songwriter Hollye Leven.
Jamie Gangel: Did it make you feel better about [Tipper Gore] when it was revealed during the campaign that she was a drummer in an all-girl band, The Wildcats, [...]?
FZ: No, I didn't ever heard that one, but I can . . .
Jamie Gangel: You didn't know that?
FZ: No.
Jamie Gangel: She's got a new set of drums for Christmas this year.
FZ: Pfff . . . Oh, ho ho ho, ha ha ha . . . That one day I wasn't watching the news . . . ha ha ha . . .
Jamie Gangel: Then does that give you a new feeling for her?
FZ: Yeah, I've got a respect on 'em now.
Jamie Gangel: Have you heard from them since that?
FZ: Well, when it was revealed that I was sick, I got a nice letter from the Gores.
"Frank is my Elvis," he emphasizes. "His example encouraged me, comforted me, made me feel it was okay to go my own way, to not do things the way the authorities told me to."
Pre-planning and chutzpah actually afforded Matt the chance to meet Frank once in those days of impoverishment. "When I drove down to Los Angeles in 1975 to see the big orchestra," he recalls, "I showed up a day early figuring they'd be rehearsing, and I was right. I walked in, and there was Frank Zappa directing the musicians. I asked if I could sit and listen, and he said fine. That was my first personal encounter.
"I moved to Los Angeles on a hot August night in 1977. My car broke down in the fast lane of the Hollywood Freeway right above Capitol Records at the same time I was listening to a disc jockey on the radio who'd just been fired, who was drunk and ranting about the station on his last show. That was my introduction to Los Angeles. Moving here is why Life in Hell originated."
Between 1979 and 1985, Groening supported himself as a music journalist writing a weekly column called "Sound (???)" for an underground music tabloid, The Los Angeles Reader, about his misadventures trying to get from club to club in a beat-up car. Long before he became Bart Simpson's creator, he intended to be Frank Zappa's biographer. He actually got down 500 pages of notes, supplemented by 1,500 pages of research material. Matt's success with his self-published Life in Hell series led to Bart's cameos on The Tracy Ullman Show in 1987, and then on December 17, 1989, the premiere of The Simpsons, which catapulted Groening into the stratosphere of commercial television. Of necessity, the Zappa project was placed on hold. But not his interest.
"Around 1988," he continues, "I was on KCRW, a local FM public station, playing an hour of Frank Zappa music as a guest on Roger Steffens' program about music of the '60s. In the middle of the show, Frank called in, gracious and grateful and surprised that someone was playing so much of his music on the radio at once. I was delighted. That was basically my real introduction. Then about a year ago, I did an interview for Interview magazine, and the guy who talked to me said that Frank Zappa had told him that he liked The Simpsons. Through him, Frank invited me to call. I did and we've become friends."
We approached Danny Elfman, whose career I'd been following since I saw him perform as the leader of The Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo (best described as an avant-garde Cab Calloway-on-Mars vaudeville ensemble) at the Whisky-a-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip in the late '70s. Elfman had recently composed the soundtrack to Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and I knew he'd be perfect.
I gave Elfman what I called a "flavors" tape, featuring the kind of sound I wanted for The Simpsons theme. The tape included The Jetsons theme, selections from Nino Rota's Juliet Of The Spirits, a Remington electric shaver jingle by Frank Zappa, some easy listening music by Esquivel, and a teach-your-parrot-to-talk record.
Elfman gave it a listen and said, "I know exactly what you're looking for."
Rutger Hauer: "Zapppppppa o man he is/was/4ever will be. Love him/his stuff".
In June 2000 Rutger was at the 200 Motels & Suites event played by the 'Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest' in Carré Amsterdam. I read somewhere that Gail even asked Rutger to perform on that 200 Motels event. Instead of performing he was sitting one row in front of me enjoying the show. The Zappa's and Hauers were neighbors.
Some of the really good things that Hendrix did was the earliest stuff, when he was just ripping and brutal. "Manic Depression" was my favorite Jimi Hendrix song. The more experimental it got, the less interesting and the thinner it got.
One of the most musical people around today is Allan Holdsworth, a guitar player who has developed a very interesting style. I find him very musical. He did a few albums for Warner Bros., but naturally they dropped him because he wasn't commercial. I also like Chad Wackerman, the drummer who has done a few tours with him, and is also the drummer in our band.
One of the most interesting guys on guitar on the planet is Allan Holdsworth. I really respect his playing.
CH: Did you know [FZ], at all?
AH: Yeah, I did! But he was really good to me—helped me out and he one time let me use his studio, you know, and there was no reason for him to do that, you know—he was just basically helping me out! But, you know, we were all, you know, really sad about what happened to him. You know, I just wish I could have seen a little bit more of him. Let him know what all of us thought about him.
I was trying to find a drummer and I crossed paths with Frank Zappa who told me, "Oh, you should check out this guy." So when I held some auditions, I invited Chad [Wackerman]. We just improvised, just me and the drummer, we didn't play any songs at all.
I know that people can learn to play certain music, you can learn anything, but I wanted a guy I could feel comfortable playing with. And with Chad, it was like, ok, you can stay. Even today, there's always surprises when we play together, which is great.
His approach to guitar was so unique and quite honestly baffling, especially to the 13 yeard old me who spent a summer trying to learn licks from his "Metal Fatigue" album. My dad was an admirer of Allan's playing as well. He talked about him in high regard in several interviews.
One day Allan came to our house to visit my dad. I don't recall the exact circumstances but it may have had something to do with Chad Wackerman who used to play drums with my dad and also played with Allan.
[...] I was lucky enough to know Allan after my dad had passed away. He was very kind and spoke fondly of the time he visited with my dad.
FZ: The only people I would add to it would be Penderecki and— that would be about it. I'd add Honegger too.
DR: Why Honegger?
FZ: I like his music, I like the way it sounds. I got about three albums by him, last year. I listened to them over and over again for about 4 months.
DR: What particular works?
FZ: The Liturgical Symphony, uh, Symphony for Strings and Two Trumpets, the Pastorale d'Ete, the Chant of Joy. I like that stuff.
"My White Bicycle"—Tomorrow. Because it was one of the bestmade singles of its time, and it may have been a little ahead of its time too. I also like the other side, "Claramount Lake"—I like the guitar solo—oh, it's Steve Howe, is it? Well if you see him tell him I like the guitar solo on "Claramount Lake."
Tomorrow managed to meet one of our heroes, the great writer and guitarist Frank Zappa. Twink brought him back to his flat in Eden Grove where Keith and I waited patiently. He told me that my guitar solo on "Claremount Lake," the B-side of "My White Bicycle," was one of the best he'd heard. I was knocked out, to say the least. We talked about his band and how we loved Absolutely Free, the first Mothers Of Invention album, and all his playing and writing. He was very influential and attitudinal. He used the wah-wah cleverly, like a decoy sound that lurked until he stepped on it, when it burst into life—some weird mish-mash of rhythmic wizardry only happened when he performed.
On the liner notes [of 50 Minute Tehnicolor Dream] it talks about your encounter with Frank Zappa, when the Mothers were in London in 1967. Any other memories of your encounter with Zappa?
Well, only that Twink arranged this, and we sat waiting in his apartment while he went and met Frank and brought Frank to the apartment, and we loved the Mothers of Invention, and we were just thrilled that Frank was coming to the apartment. It was sort of like, this isn't going to happen, is it? Is it going to happen? Suddenly a door opens, in comes Twink, and in comes Frank Zappa, and he sits down and we just sat there talking I guess for I don't know, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes or something, and I just never, ever been able to forget my complete shock when he turned to me and said, "I really like the guitar solo on 'Claramount Lake.'" And I was like, "Uh, wha, wha, that solo on 'Claramount Lake'?" And he said, "Yeah, it's terrific."
And I was so blown away because at that time I didn't take any notice of anybody who said anything to me in the public—you know, when the public came rushing up to me and said, "Oh, that was great!" and I said, [nonchalant] "Oh yeah, fine. Good, I'm glad you liked it." And really I was incredibly blasé and secretly conceited I suppose, or secretly building my ego, so it was never really me saying to other people, hey listen I'm good; it was other people saying hey that's pretty good, and I took it pretty casually. But when somebody like Frank Zappa said it to me, it was, like I lost all control [laughs]. I really was amazed that he knew anything about Tomorrow. But there again I suppose he was just as inquisitive as we were about what other people were doing, and English groups were revered because of the Beatles, so I presume that he'd heard about us, and got a recording, and known about us.
"Brian Epstein, The Beatles' manager, had a house in the hills in summer 1965 and he had a party for The Beatles. Frank Zappa was there," Danny Hutton recalls. "And Frank came to the party with a whole pitch for Epstein with charts and diagrams and sat there working in the room. I met Frank Zappa in 1965 at MGM, and Corey Wells and the Enemies had been produced by Tom Wilson, who also produced Zappa at MGM. David Anderle was my manager and I got hooked up with MGM. I remember going with Frank to the It's Boss club. I heard 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It' in a garage."
The Stones are still the best sound in England. I've only just got hold of a copy of Beggar's Banquet, but my favourite album is Between The Buttons. I thought it was superior to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. Jagger has a mind that's in the right place. Other stars ride around in their Rolls Royces, but you can picture Jagger sitting in one taking his shoes off or picking his nose and wiping it on the upholstery.
There's nothing wrong with a good sound effect if you stick it in the right place. Spike Jones made a living out of it. Really one of the greats.
Another huge influence was the zany bandleader Spike Jones. Through Jones' weekly TV show, Zappa was given a tutorial in serious music turned into musical mayhem. Jones was the only here to whom Zappa would ever send a fan letter.
"I was a massive Spike Jones fan," [FZ] told Charles Amirkhanian, "and when I was six or seven years old, he had a hit record called 'All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth' and I sent him a fan letter because of that." [Society Pages, 6, "Ode To Gravity".]
"I used to love Spike Jones," said Zappa. "He had a lot of special instruments built to do all that stuff, like arrays of car-horns that you could honk that were in pitch. In the early sixties, when I moved to Los Angeles, they were having an auction of that equipment and I would have dearly loved to have bought it, but I had no money."
I've developed a 'formula' for what these timbres mean (to me, at least), so that when I create an arrangement—if I have access to the right instrumental resources—I can put sounds together that tell more than the story in the lyrics, especially to American listeners, raised on these subliminal cliches, shaping their audio reality from the cradle to the elevator.
We crack up during rehearsal because some of the stuff is so stupid. When building an arrangement, every time I have an opportunity to insert one of those modules I cram it in, and since rehearsal is a daily two-hour occurrence while we're on the road, the arrangements often change overnight, based on the daily news or some morsel of tour-bus folklore.
During the pretour rehearsals, the band members pencil these 'extras' in next to 'the real notes' so, when they finally have the show learned, they know not only the song-as-originally-written but also, superimposed on it, a flexible grid which will support a constantly mutating collage of low-rent Americana.
I owe this part of my musical existence to Spike Jones.
[...] While I was attending collage in Boston and was going to see Frank perform for the first time, Ona Dunbar (wife of drummer Aynsley and Frank's secretary at the time) arranged for me to sit in on the Mothers' rehearsal and meet Frank and his "pumpkin" (wife), Gail. [...]
Fast-forward several years later, [...] the Kirbys became my "West Coast parents" and I developed my [film] script with Jack and sought Frank's involvement with doing a soundtrack for the film. I suspected from Frank's early advertisements in Marvel Comics that he would be a Kirby fan and my hunch paid off. Frank wanted to meet the Kirbys, so one memorable night I took the Kirbys to the Zappas. [...]
That night I said to Frank: "You know, it took eight years for this night to happen!" He grinned and said nonchalantly, "So ya like this, huh?" This historic meeting of two of the greatest pop culture icons had to be recorded for posterity, so with my trusted Minolta auto focus in tow, I snapped a photo.
[FZ & Jack Kirby, 1981; photo by Michael James Zuccaro]
I reached out to Steve [Sherman, Kirby's assistant] and turns out Jack and Frank Zappa were not only pals, but also essentially neighbors. How was this friendship kept secret so long?
A mere week later, I wind up having drinks with fellow Flusher Paul Pope and none other than Frank's youngest son, Ahmet Zappa!
So I had to show Ahmet my Blackberry screensaver, the image I had found of his dad and Jack together, and Ahmet goes, "Whoa, I never saw that! That's in my living room . . . Jack would come over and smoke cigars and Frank would smoke cigarettes, and they'd talk and talk. [...] One of the most significant moments in my life is when my dad said, 'meet Jack, he's the guy who created all those superheroes you love.' That blew my little mind. I thought it was awesome and weird that my dad had this friendship with this guy. It was like meeting like a real magician! [...] This was around the time Empire [Strikes Back] came out and was HUGE [1981 —ed.], and I remember Jack confided in Frank that he felt like the stories he created helped shape the Star Wars saga, that he saw direct parallels between his characters and the movie's story arcs."
Of all rock stars in the world, Zappa, famously an outspoken champion of free speech and artist's rights, was the ultimate sympathetic ear.
"He told my dad stuff like, 'Darth Vader was Doctor Doom and the Force is the Source' and that George Lucas ripped him off. Now this you may not know, and I was only a kid, but I remember learning at the dinner table that my dad was asked to write the music for Star Wars; he turned it down, he said he wasn't interested. That would've been really strange, the lives of us Star Wars fans woulda taken a different turn and that whole score woulda sounded like Tatooine Cantina music."
After the great success of Zappa's hit song, "Valley Girl," Zappa tried to convince Kirby that Kirby should adapt the song for a comic strip!
Kirby actually went along with the idea!
Here's the first (and I believe, the only) strip . . .
Not so surprising, the idea did not go anywhere, but still, how amazing is it that Jack Kirby did a comic strip based on a Frank Zappa song?
I talked with Jack Kirby today . . . the comic book guy? Jack Kirby? He did Dr. Doom, and all those . . . for Marvel Comics. Well, I talked to him, and I invited him over. He's comin' over next week.
Q: Who is your favorite musician?
A: Kontarsky, a pianist.
Aloys (14 May 1931-22 August 2017) and Alfons (9 October 1932-5 May 2010) Kontarsky were German duo-pianist brothers who were associated with a number of important world premieres of contemporary works. [...]
Their first public concert was in 1949, in which they played Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Pianos. [...] From 1962, Aloys and Alfons were instructors at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music. [...] As a piano duo, the brothers gave first performances of works by Luciano Berio, Sylvano Bussotti, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Luis de Pablo, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
For starting, I used to really enjoy Spike Jones and Leiber & Stoller. America should give them an award for what they did to make rock 'n' roll happen.
I'm sick of reading things that say Paul is the musician and George is the philosopher. I wonder where I fit in, what was my contribution? I get hurt, you know, sick of it. I'd sooner be Zappa and say, "Listen, you fuckers, this is what I did, and I don't care whether you like my attitude saying it." That's what I am, you know, I'm a fucking artist, and I'm not a fucking P.R. Agent or the product of some other person's imagination. Whether you're the public or whatever, I'm standing by my work whereas before I would not stand by it.
Nobody says it, so you scream it: look at me, a genius, for fuck's sake! What do I have to do to prove to you son-of-a-bitches what I can do, and who I am? Don't dare, don't you dare fuckin' dare criticize my work like that. You, who don't know anything about it.
Fuckin' bullshit!
I know what Zappa is going through, and a half. I'm just coming out of it.
[...]
I admire Yoko's work.
I admire "Fluxus," a New York-based group of artists founded by George Macuinas. I really think what they do is beautiful and important.
I admire Andy Warhol's work, I admire Zappa a bit, but he's a fuckin' intellectual—I can't think of anybody else. I admire people from the past. I admire Fellini.
Two previously unheard tapes of John Lennon telling stories, nursery rhymes and improvising songs are expected to fetch £70,000 at auction.
The 80-minute tapes were recorded in 1969 and 1970 and display for the first time the bond between Lennon and Yoko Ono's daughter, Kyoko.
[...] Lennon is then heard accompanying Kyoko in an unlikely rendition of Frank Zappa's "Jelly Roll Gum Drop".
Another time, I came in to work and a waiter told me that the hotel had tried to send in a guest but he was not allowed into the restaurant because he was not dressed properly. I looked in the book, saw the name Cappa, then went into the hotel and asked at the desk who Mr. Cappa was. The girl pointed into the lobby at a very rough-looking tall man who was sitting with a beautiful woman and these children. He didn't look so bad. So I went over to introduce myself and he said, "So you're the guy who won't let me in?" We talked for a minute, and I thought he was interesting. He was a musician from Los Angeles, and he had very long hair. I apologized for the problem with the jackets and he said, "So let me get this right, I have to put on a jacket and a tie to try this crème brûlée?" I told him to make another reservation, thinking, honestly, that he wouldn't and sent up for crèmes brûlées to his room.
The next day his wife comes to make a reservation. I said to the staff, "Oh my god, I don't want another scene, just let him in and put him somewhere where people can't see." But he came in looking very elegant, with a beautiful suit and a tie that we gave him. He said to me, "This better be the best fucking meal of my life—I've toured the Kremlin, met the Pope, and I've never needed a suit. If I don't like this meal, you're paying for the suit!" Of course he liked the meal, and we got to talking about everything—politics mostly, communism. He'd been on several trips to Russia, he'd been everywhere. Everywhere except Italy!
When I got home that night I asked my sons if they had ever heard of a singer called Cappa who had long hair and was a bit like a revolutionary and very funny. I thought my sons were going to throw me out the window. His name wasn't Cappa, it was Zappa, with a Z, Frank Zappa, and although I still didn't recognize the name, he was very famous. I just thought he was very intelligent. My sons told me his kids had funny names and that they were waiting to see him that same night on a television show. When he came on, he was wearing the same suit and the tie, and the interviewer, Mr. Letterman, said, "Nice tie," and Mr. Zappa told the whole story of how he had gone to Le Cirque and I made him wear the suit and tie. At the end he said, "The best thing about this restaurant is that they let you keep the tie!" I laughed and laughed. He became, really, my best friend. he came to the house on Sunday with his children who had those funny names I can't remember. And he sent me all his records. I tried to listen to them, but the words didn't make sense to me. I had my sons read me the lyrics, but I still didn't really get them, except for "Catholic girls, with the tiny little mustache."
After that I always called him Mr. Frank Zappa, because he thought it was so funny. I tell you, he was a great American. I don't think I ever laughed so hard as when we were together. He always told about the trouble he got into with everyone—the music people, the media, politics. Yes, I think I liked him because he was always in trouble!
I had met [FZ] in 1967, in Scandinavia, when he and The Mothers Of Invention were playing there and we were in Copenhagen at the same time. So that's where I met that crowd. "If you come to America, look me up." So I did. [...]
I stayed at Zappa's cabin for the first part of my three-week vacation. If you're going to America the first time, you obviously have to head for some person you know and start from there. In the three weeks. I never really left Hollywood and Laurel Canyon. It became the confirmation for me. That's where I wanted to move eventually.
The feeling when you listen to the song "2401" is the vibe you hear. For me it was a very eccentric household, really. Frank and Gail Zappa, at the center, were the grounding factor there. The sanest people on the planet. I think really Frank encouraged that, and he kind of collected oddballs and information about America and its culture.
[Paul McCartney] joined a circle that included a man named Miles who ran Indica Books on Southampton Row. The Beatles kept a running account at the store and depended on Miles to send them whatever he thought might interest them; magazines, books, newspapers, whatever. Paul and John got their information on the hippie movement in America through the underground newspapers that Miles would send them: the Berkeley Barb, the Oracle, the L.A. Free Press, and the East Village Others. He sent them Frank Zappa's album Freak Out and its free-form recording techniques and tracks lasting over ten minutes impressed Paul mightly. After hearing it Paul told Miles that he wanted to make the next Beatles album something other than just a collection of singles—a "concept album," in other words.
NT: It seems that you and McLaughlin and [Miles] Davis seem to be setting a similar trend . . . which I find especially interesting since you come from such different backgrounds.
FZ: Are you talking about the rhythmic aspect of it, or the melodic aspect or what?
NT: Well, both, and the way they bounce off of each other.
FZ: Well, I don't find too much in common melodically between what we do and what the Mahavishnu does; and the only thing in common with our group and Miles Davis is we got a trumpet in it.
Rhythmically there are some similarities, because we're playing eighth-note and sixteenth-note time signatures that are uneven and so forth, but we've been doing that for seven years.
A person would be a moron not to appreciate McLaughlin's technique. The guy has certainly found out how to operate a guitar as if it were a machine gun. But I'm not always enthusiastic about the lines I hear or the ways in which they're used. I don't think you can fault him, though, for the amount of time and effort it must have taken to play an instrument that fast. I think anybody who can play that fast is just wonderful. And I'm sure 90% of teenage America would agree, since the whole trend in the business has been "faster is better."
What do you think about the late Frank Zappa's criticism of your work as simply "operating a guitar like a machine gun?" Do you think that Zappa was right when he said that the whole trend in the music business was that faster is better?
I think he was just jealous! I toured with Frank, and while I've always enjoyed his recordings, on tour he would take very, very long guitar solos, and he just didn't have what it takes to play long guitar solos. That said, he has every right to his opinions, and in earlier days, I'm sure he had some validity in his criticisms of my playing.
FZ, interviewed in London, c. 1984
John McLaughlin?
I met John. I think he's a great guitar player and I think that he's probably done a lot to educate American audiences to some aspects of Eastern music that they wouldn't have come into contact with before. We did a tour with McLaughlin and old Mahavishnu, we did 11 concerts with them.
Frank Zappa
7885 Woodrow Wilson Dr.
Hollywood
California
17 July, 1972Robert A. Moog
Moog Music, Inc.
P.O. Box 131
Williamsville
New York, 14221Dear Bob,
Accompanying this note are some copies of WakaJawaka/Hot Rats with pitch-shifted instruments which can be found in the selection "Big Swifty". Happy that you could come by the studio that evening, and it was a pleasure to meet, Ray and David.
The Pitch Shifter is a very impressive musical instrument, and has already found further use in new materials we will be producing this year. If it's possible, I'd like to have one for use in live performance with the Mothers on August 26-27 at Wembley Stadium in London-- we'll be playing for 100,000 at a festival on those dates, and the device would help make the occasion memorable to those feeling secure with usual harmony structures...
November will see the opening of (some kind of) opera Hunchentoot in Los Angeles, which I have finalized and am now assembling the cast for. The proceedings of Hunchentoot involve some personalities and orchestrations that can benefit from various forms of electronic modifications that seem to involve the deviant capabilities of your frequency shifter, as well as other synthesizer equipment.
I would be glad to credit your company in the program notes for these occasions should you make the new pitch shifter available to us for use in these Productions. Hope you like the record.
Regards,
F. ZAPPA
March 20, 1973
Frank Zappa
7885 Woodrow Wilson Dr.
Hollywood, CaDear Frank:
I'm terribly sorry that we dropped the ball by not getting a frequency shifter to you before this. As far as our company is concerned, the frequency shifter is a project fraught with political and legal problems. I believe that these problems are just about solved and that we will be putting frequency shifters on the market within the next couple of months.
That, however, is not the purpose of this letter. I simply want to write you a fan letter for the fine pieces of music that are on Wakajawaka. We have used "Big Swifty" to illustrate a good application of the frequency shifter, and we have played the title band over and over again to display Don Preston's virtuosity on the Minimoog. I have been giving quite a few demonstrations and lectures around the country. I never fail to play Wakajawaka, and it never fails to get a great response from the audience.
I sure hope to have a chance to see you in the near future, and to show you some of our new cookies. We all remember with great fondness that evening recording session in which you pressed the lonely prototype frequency shifter into immediate action, your casted [leg] notwithstanding.
Sincerely,
MOOG MUSIC, INC.Robert A. Moog
President
Was Uncle Meat influenced by jazz at all?
I don't think there are jazz influences in Uncle Meat. If there's any influence in Uncle Meat it's from Conlon Nancarrow. He's a composer who lives in Mexico, but was born in Kentucky. He writes music for player-piano that is humanly impossible to perform. He writes all these bizarre canons and weird structures—punches them out on player-piano rolls. The stuff is fantastic; there are a few albums of it. If you've never heard it, you've got to hear it—it'll kill you. Some of it sounds like ragtime that's totally bionic.
Mr. Nancarrow also has acquired, much to his surprise, something of a cult following in the pop music world. The guitarist and composer Frank Zappa, whose own work reflects Mr. Nancarrow's fondness for dense textures and multiple interweaving melodic lines, says he has been an ardent admirer since 1967, when he was introduced to the composer's work by Jimi Hendrix's recording engineer.
Mr. Zappa said that what initially struck him about Mr. Nancarrow's work was "that the mechanics of design are often more important than their relation to normal harmonic concepts." With the passage of time, he added, his appreciation for Mr. Nancarrow's "unique spiritual build and expression of character, his willingness to take chances," has also grown. "In terms of individualism, I think he ranks up there with Webern, Stravinsky, Varese and Schoenberg," Mr. Zappa said in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "There's been nothing like him before or after."
Den Simms: Would you say that Conlon Nancarrow is the predecessor of what you do with the Synclavier?
FZ: Not completely. Certainly there's a huge influence, conceptually, in what Nancarrow did. In fact, when Nancarrow was in southern California, I tried to get him to come over, so I could demonstrate the machine to him, because here's a guy who pioneered a type of sequencer music, using a player piano, but it's a limited timbre. It's only the sound of that one instrument. [...] And I just thought that the way his mind works, if he would learn how to use the Synclavier, [he] would be able to hear all different kinds of things out of it, but I never got him to come over, and I doubt whether he's ever gonna get into it, but, y'know, I have to tip my hat to him, certainly.
FZ: Speaking of that, I got a phone call from Conlon Nancarrow recently. I finally got a chance to talk to him.
DS: What's he have to say?
FZ: He's ill, right now. He's getting over a stroke, but it was nice talking to him.
DS: Do you think you'll ever be able to expose him to the Synclavier.
FZ: Well, I know somebody else has.
DS: Oh, really?
FZ: Yeah, I heard a rumor that Henry Kaiser had given him a whiff of it.
Side Two
[...]
Why Don't You Do Me Right (Zappa)
[...]
Recorded by Genesis P. Orridge
Produced by Genesis P. Orridge, Alex Fergusson and Steve Brown
here is a small selection of Interviews and Lectures by Genesis P-Orridge made between 1975 (with COUM Transmissions) through out late 70's to 81 (as Throbbing Gristle with interviews by Frank Zappa, Boyd Rice, Red Ronnie, Simon Dwyer) and 1981 until 1984 (with Psychic TV and incl former TOPY members such as David Tibet of Current 93 or John Balance of Coil) for magazines like The Face, Subvert...
Additional informant: D.
FZ: The only people I would add to it would be Penderecki and— that would be about it. I'd add Honegger too.
DR: [...] What about Penderecki?
FZ: I like his instrumental music more than his choral music. The Violin Capriccioso I thought was a good piece.
DR: What's that violinist's name . . .
(FZ and DR in unison) Paul Zukofsky.
DR: The Threnody (for 52 String Instruments for the Victims of Hiroshima), have you heard that?
FZ: Yeah, I have two different versions of that.
DR: Yeah, the Victrola and the Phillips
FZ: I like the Victrola one better.
DR: Why?
FZ: The sound is better.
How did The Persuasions link up with Zappa in the first place? Credit the group's first manager, David Dashev. Now a screenwriter who operates a Florida health care center, it was Dashev who played a live performance tape of the little-known Persuasions for Zappa over the telephone, from New Jersey, one evening in 1969. As Zappa told Rense in a 1990 interview, "I could tell, even over the phone, that these guys were something special." At Frank's invitation, Dashev later brought the tape to Zappa's home in the Hollywood Hills. The first song they listened to was "Searchin' For My Baby." Dashev couldn't get a read on Zappa's response, and feared the worst when the man got up and walked out of the room—only to return minutes later with Gail.
"He wanted her to hear it," said Dashev. "I think her enthusiasm was a key factor. She loved the guys." (Frankly A Cappella is dedicated to both Frank and Gail.)
They spent several hours listening to the tape, and to Dashev's tales of these five young men who were employed as counselors, butchers, and singers at Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration, a federal program to rebuild the troubled Brooklyn neighborhood. Zappa gave a thumbs-up to sign The Persuasions to Straight Records—and suggested using the audition tape as the finished album. As Dashev recalled, Zappa didn't see any need to re-record a note. (The A Cappella album wound up using half audition tape, and half new studio tracks.)
The first time I heard "Freak Out" by the Mothers of Invention was on headphones, smoking an early joint in my drug career, at the house of SRC, a Michigan band of the 60's. That night I kind of knew they were asking (Stooges guitarist) Ron (Asheton) to leave our group and join up with them, so I was hanging around to see what was going to happen. Rather than waste my time, I saw a copy of "Freak Out" and listened to it on the phones.
I thought it was very, very funny. I particularly loved "Help, I'm a Rock," "America Drinks and Goes Home," "Who Are The Brain Police" and the cameo of Suzie Creamcheese. I had already seen the Fugs live on stage, with Tuli Kupferberg changing costumes out of a large bag in a humorous way, so I was somewhat prepared. I liked the Mothers' conceptualism and humor, although the music didn't really do much for me. My own experiments were more influenced by Bob Ashley, Harry Partch, and Berlioz.
[...] When the Stooges went to LA in 1970 to record "Fun House," we were staying at the Tropicana Motel. I walked up the hill to (legendary Hollywood coffee shop) Ben Franks to get something to eat, and there, sitting at the counter expressionless, with his hair and mustache and weird beard, was Frank Zappa. What a vision. I might as well have seen Aristotle. I was very impressed.
At first, Zappa was miffed that Prince wasn't equally vocal on the [PMRC] matter, but he soon realised he was busying himself with his art, and when another battle encroached upon his capacity to do so, it was then that he rose to the figurative frontline. Eventually, Prince resolved his dispute with his label, but the victory wasn't all that Zappa found commendable. It was the will of an artist standing up to the industry and the legacy that should have followed.
"Can you imagine what Prince's image would be like today if it really had all been left up to those guys out there in the valley," Zappa said in an interview following the resolution of the Prince's dispute. "Nevertheless, how many record companies are willing to give up that kind of control, you know, hand over artistic control over their art?"
"Warner Brothers was smart enough to give it to Prince. It's to their credit that they were smart enough to stay out of Prince's way," he added.
This stance enamoured Prince to Zappa. "You can, you look at him and know he is a creative guy," he remarked. "Like his stuff or not, I think that compared to the rest of this stuff in the vicinity, Prince's stuff stuff stands out because it's a vision. You can agree with the vision, you can disagree with the vision, but it looks like Prince, not Warner Brothers, and that's worth something, that's something that's worth protecting. It's something that's worth commending, and I hereby commend Prince and Warner Brothers for working out whatever they worked out."
He concluded: "I would say that the whole music scene would be better off if there were more Prince-like relationships between creative artists and the record company, where they would, you know, just stay out of the guy's way."
BD: Speaking of recordings, there seem to be rather few discs with your music.
DR: You know, I have very few records. I have been very dilatory about promoting myself, and the reason is not for any modesty at all, it's just that for the most part I have always done it very ineptly. You know, I get some idea and I think "This is just great," and "I think I oughtta do this," and then I don't do it well. It's not that I lack belief in what I do, it's just that I hate the whole thing. In fact, that RCA record you and I were talking about [David Raksin Conducts His Great Film Scores (RCA Red Seal ARL1-1490, 1976)], which is the one with Laura, [directed by Otto Preminger and released in 1944], The Bad and the Beautiful and Forever Amber [directed by Otto Preminger and released in 1947], if it hadn't been for Frank Zappa (1940-1993), that record would never have been made.
BD: Well, thank goodness for Frank Zappa, then. How did he get a hand in it?
DR: We had become friends. I brought him down to USC to talk to one of my classes—not one of my music classes, but a class I teach in the School of Public Administration. He was down there and we became friends. I find him a very remarkable and interesting, a wonderful man. Anyhow, I had been asked by a young record producer to do some stuff. He said, "You can have any orchestra you want, so get busy and write some stuff. I've been listening to your music and I think it's wonderful." Well, you know, there it was. So I sat down and started to write, and I was about two-thirds of the way through, when all of a sudden he was killed in a dreadful accident. It was really sad. So there I was. I kept writing. I said, "Well, I'll do this, that's what I'm here for." And then I said to myself, "I should really make some kind of an effort to do something that would not be out of my way of doing things. I'll tell a few friends." So the first guy I ran into was Benny Carter (1907-2003), the saxophonist and composer. He was a wonderful, wonderful, dear man. I told him about it and I said, "Benny, if you ever run across anybody who's interested in doing an album of this kind, just let me know." Well, the second guy was Frank who wanted me to come over. I can't remember what it was we were talkin' about, but he said, "What are you doin'?" So I told him about this thing, and I said, "You know, this guy has been killed." He said, "Yes, I heard. That's too bad. What're you gonna do about the album?" I said, "Well this is what I'm doing—I'm talking to you!" He said, "Well that isn't good enough," so he said, "I'll take care of it." And he called up a guy who was then president of RCA and told him about it, and this guy came out here and saw me. I didn't know who he was. I just went to see him, and the first thing he said to me was, "If you think you're gonna have to do any convincing, forget it. I was around when Percy Faith (1908-1976) made a recording of The Bad and the Beautiful, and I've never recovered. You've got it, carte blanche." Later I wondered if this guy could do it so I looked at his card and it said, "Kenneth D. Glancy, President, RCA Records." [Both laugh] So then I finished the thing and of course I'm mighty grateful to Frank for it. There were still many battles ahead which had to be taken care of.
When asked which was his favourite English group, Frank sat and thought for a while and decided on the Rolling Stones.
Ona was one of Frank's secretaries, and answered the phones they set up for UNITED MUTATIONS (which was essentially The Mothers' fan club). I used to talk to her on occasion in 1971, before Zappa decided to close up United Mutations. She was very friendly, but that's all I remember about her.
YES, the song's reference is to ONA'S TITS! (whom I unfortunately never had the pleasure of meeting . . . )
Friday night Maragarita-driven get-togethers were a regular occurrence and I hung out at a bunch of them, but they were mainly social gatherings. The one documented on the Late Show program was different and special. Although one Friday, Gene Simmons came over and he and Frank talked about a bunch of stuff, including (CC alert) the group Angel who were on the same label as Kiss in the 70's. (Gene was talking about compiling and releasing an Angel box set—did that ever happen?)
DEN SIMMS: Yeah, he's come up with some interesting stuff. How did your association with Nicholas Slonimsky come about?
FRANK ZAPPA: When I was invited to be the host of this Edgar Varèse memorial concert . . .
DEN SIMMS: In San Francisco? [February 9, 1983]
FRANK ZAPPA: No. In New York, at the Palladium. [April 17, 1981]
DEN SIMMS: Oh, yeah.
FRANK ZAPPA: . . . I erroneously thought that since I was supposed to be introducing the works, that the audience would appreciate some background facts about his life, and stuff like that, that would be informative, not realizing the typical New York audience that would appear would be more "Hey, Frank! Hey . . . " [Frank imitates rowdy audience sounds in a way which is impossible to translate into print] . . . and all this kinda stuff, and they didn't wanna know.
DEN SIMMS: Right.
FRANK ZAPPA: But I didn't know that. So, to prepare myself for this, I knew that Slonimsky lived in Los Angeles, and since he conducted the premier of "Ionisations", I thought I would meet him, and talk to him, and get some inside information, and that's how I met him.
MG: I saw you perform, I think it was in 1981 at the Santa Monica Civic, and l was startled to see this nice, portly old man come out and perform with you. It was Nicolas Slonimsky. How did you get him to join you onstage?
I'd been asked to be the host of a concert in New York for the celebration of Louise Varese's 90th birthday, and my function in the concert was to be the MC. What they were trying to do was get a younger audience to come and hear the music of Varese, and I thought that to do a good job, maybe I should talk to some people who knew something about Varese's background and get some anecdotes that I could pass along to the audience. It turned out that this was completely unnecessary, because when the concert occurred, the audience was so unruly, it was just like a Palladium Halloween audience. The concert was at the Palladium. They were behaving like a rock and roll audience. They sat completely still when the music was being played, but as soon as the music stopped there was pandemonium, so there was no way to tell them anything. But I did make the attempt to get some information from Slonimsky about Varese, and that's how I met him. At the end of the '81 tour, I think it was the last day, we invited him to come onstage and participate in some improvisation. He was a good sport and went out and did it.DM: He said it was one of the great experiences of his musical life, partly because the crowd was a rock and roll crowd that lumped up and shouted. He was used to small crowds of polite music-listeners.
I've been to a few of those, too. Every once in a whale they do a little Nicolas Slonimsky birthday celebration here in Los Angeles. Composers contribute little compositions as birthday gifts. I've done two of those. I went to one of these things; it was held at the art gallery in downtown Los Angeles. It was pretty mild. There's no substitute for a rock and roll audience.DM: He said to me that he wanted some time soon to sit down with you and talk about "the basics." Are there "basics" you'd like to talk to him about?
We've had some little discussions about technique in music. I'm reasonably familiar with his books, and on one occasion, when he came over here, we videotaped him, and I asked him to explain the theory behind the chords in that book of scales that most people are familiar with. It was really quite interesting, because it's based on the simple idea that if you take an octave or groups of octaves, and divide them into proportions other than the way in which normal music is divided, then you wind up with different types of harmony. It never occurred to me that that was the simple logic that was generating all those scales. But that was basically me listening to him talk. Maybe on some occasion we should sit down and talk about the way in which I put my stuff together, but there hasn't been a convenient time to do it.
Zappa invited me to try out his Bosendorfer. I sat down at the keyboard and played the coronation scene from BORIS GUDUNOV which required deep bass sounds. Zappa was impressed by these Russian harmonies. He asked me to play some of my own compositions, and I launched into the last piece in my MINITUDES, based on an interplay of mutually exclusive triads and covering the entire piano keyboard. "Why don't you play this piece at my next concert?" Zappa asked. "When will that be?" I inquired. "Tomorrow. We can rehearse in the afternoon." I was somewhat taken aback by the sudden offer, but after all, I had nothing to lose. So I decided to take my chance as a soloist at a rock concert.
The next day I arrived at the large Coliseum in Santa Monica where Zappa's concert was to take place. A huge, towering man led me to Zappa's room. "Mr. Zappa is expecting you," he said, satisfied with my identity. He was Zappa's bodyguard, hired after Zappa had been attacked during a concert by a besotted admirer and hurt his back.
On stage I sat at the electric piano and played my piece. For better effect, I added sixteen bars to the coda, ending in repeated alternation of C major and F-sharp major chords in the highest treble and lowest bass registers. Zappa dictated to his players the principal tonalities of my piece, and they picked up the modulations with extraordinary assurance. I had never played the electric piano before, but I adjusted to it without much trouble.
The hall began to fill rapidly. Zappa's bodyguard gave me ear plugs, for, when Zappa's band went into action, the decibels were extremely high. Zappa sang and danced while conducting, with a professional verve that astounded me. A soprano soloist came out and sang a ballad about being a hooker, using a variety of obscenities. Then came my turn. Balancing a cigarette between his lips, Zappa introduced me to the audience as "our national treasure." I pulled out the ear plugs, and sat down at the electric piano. With demoniac energy Zappa launched us into my piece. To my surprise I sensed a growing consanguinity with my youthful audience as I played. My fortissimo ending brought out screams and whistles the like of which I had never imagined possible. Dancing Zappa, wild audience, and befuddled me—I felt like an intruder in a mad scene from ALICE IN WONDERLAND. I had entered my Age of Absurdity.
Frank Zappa called me because he knew my book, Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. You see, this book is sort of a best-seller. Jazz players pick it up. It's a fifty-dollar book, so not everyone can afford it. Frank said he knew about this book, but he didn't realize I was in Los Angeles, and he wanted to meet me. And so we became friends. That was eight or nine years ago.
Frank immediately engaged me to play the Synclavier with him. He said, "Would you play with me, be my soloist?" I said, "When is your concert?" He said, "Tomorrow." I said, "What do we do?" And so we rehearsed, and I said to myself, "What can I lose?" Nowadays I will accept anything. If someone says, "Do you want to appear in a group of elephants?" I will say, "It's all right, I'll play with the elephants." I always ask myself, "What can I lose?"
The concert was a great success. Usually I have just a hundred or two hundred people, but this was a huge audience, and they shouted and everything! Afterwards, I maintained a friendship with Frank, and I went to his house several times. I tried out his equipment, and I was very impressed. I played his big piano with the extra octave—the Bösendorfer.
286
NICOLAS SLONIMSKY SIGNED POSTER AND HANDWRITTEN MUSICA pair of Frank Zappa items relating to conductor, composer and pianist Nicolas Slonimsky. The first is a signed poster from a concert in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 24, 1973, where Slonimsky was a guest conductor. The poster is housed in a frame, and a note on the paper backing explains that this was given to Zappa during a recording session in 1993. The second is a single-page handwritten piece of music signed by Slonimsky and dated January 1988. Written on Slonimsky stationery, the page is marked "Molto zappo" and references the International Star Registry at the bottom of the page.
Larger, 23 1/4 by 16 inches, framed
$200-400
Question: Who is your favorite classical composer?
Zappa: Varese, Stravinsky, Penderecki, and I like some of Takemitsu's compositions, and I have some scores by Mayuzumi.
Oh Takemitsu! I love "November Steps". If you see him in the future, you must send him this message: when I was in a hospital, I was just crazy about "November Steps", listening to it everyday. It's really excellent. Another good one is "Dorian Horizon".
I like other things in contemporary music, too, particularly Takemitsu. He's one of my favorites.
When I went to Billy [Bob Thornton]'s to meet him, I was immediately embraced by the star and shown his posters of the Mothers of Invention taken while I was in the band, as well as his collection of Turtles and Flo and Eddie records. Billy told me that when he was first making his way to California from Arkansas, he listened to our music exclusively.
I guess I must have heard them as early as '66, definitely by '67 I was listening to the Mothers (of Invention). I had their first two or three albums. My brother and I used to go in the record store [...]. I would go in there and I would look at records—I wouldn't even know anything about it! In my town, people didn't walk around the street talking about the Mothers of Invention or anything. I'd see a record and say "Wow, that looks strange. I'll take that one."
So my brother and I got real hooked on the Mothers of Invention as well as the Bonzo Dog Band out of England as they were kind of their version of the Mothers. The first record of Beefheart's I heard was Trout Mask Replica which I guess wouldn't have been 'til about '69. Got hooked on Beefheart too. So I was kind of musically a person with multiple personality disorder. I would listen to Hank Williams and Jim Reeves on the same day I would listen to Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.
In the first of an occasional series in which the greatest recording artists reveal their favourite records, Tom Waits writes about his 20 most cherished albums of all time. So for the lowdown on Zappa, as above, and Bill Hicks, step right up . . . Tom Waits
[...]
13 The Yellow Shark by Frank Zappa (Barking Pumpkin) 1993
It is his last major work. The ensemble is awe-inspiring. It is a rich pageant of texture in colour. It's the clarity of his perfect madness, and mastery. Frank governs with Elmore James on his left and Stravinsky on his right. Frank reigns and rules with the strangest tools.
It quickly became clear that Zappa's ideas for changing society and those of the militants were two different things. "Society is trying to do away with dreamers," he said. "They want to straighten them out. A dreamer is dangerous if he has an angry dream up his sleeve because it becomes contagious. I am in favour of being comfortable, everyone wants to be comfortable, but everyone has a different idea of what that is. I work towards it in my way and other people do in their ways. There are a lot of Americans who like teenage fairs and Lawrence Welk, now why be a dirty guy and stop them?"
You used the word "obnoxious." A lot of people think that sometimes you actually fit that category.
Well, a lot of people could say the same thing about Lawrence Welk or they could say the same thing about any other music that they didn't like. But we do enjoy it and the people that have various negative opinions about it can use any adjective they want to describe it.
Thank you for giving one of the greatest gifts that can be received—your time and kindness.
[...]
Frank Zappa
"All Day Sucker" was interesting putting a guitar on it because I went to Frank Zappa, who I had a relationship with, because I had worked with him on a few things. I liked Frank, and we tried it. He was amazing, but it was one punch that he couldn't replay what was on the track. It just really wasn't as great as we'd hoped it to be. My friend's nephew, WG "Snuffy" Walden, had met Stevie because he would come to the studio to see him. Stevie asked, "Why don't you call your friend and see if he'd be willing to come down?" It was past midnight into the wee hours of the morning. He came down and was full of energy and played guitar on that. I think he did a great job.
Have you ever used a really large synthesizer setup in the studio?
I've got one, but I've never used it in the studio. It's an EU, and it's about a $50,000 system. It's got a computer and all that stuff. I don't have it set up; it's in storage. Stevie Wonder called the office the other day wanting to rent it.
Additional informants: Javier Marcote, Tan Mitsugu. Special thanks to Javier Marcote.
Research, compilation and maintenance by Román García Albertos