Underwood and I discuss the 1993 sessions that she famously played with Zappa, at his home studio, months before his death in December of that year. There, for four days, Zappa sampled marimba tracks for the music that he was producing despite his frailty. "In fact, when I got there, I was amazed at how wonderful he looked, and how straight he stood, how tall he was," she says.
"I actually started going over to the house, first, to bring him food. Not health food, which he would have immediately rejected, but meals from Casa Vega in the San Fernando Valley on Ventura Boulevard. While we ate, he'd play music and saw how receptive I was. After a lifetime of avoiding and rejecting music theory, he actually asked me to help him with some theory. Should this be a G-flat or an F-sharp, and why. And he was so eager to learn that. By late May, he phoned to ask me to sample my marimbas. I was most shocked as I hadn't played a note of malleted instrumentation for fourteen years. I was not in shape, and when you sample, you're looking for something exact. I asked for time to practice and dust off my mallets and beaters with all of our tour stickers still on them. That's when I heard a tone in his voice. Not the same tone from the past where he wanted everything that he wanted immediately and in full, all the time. But rather an urgency. So there was no time to waste. And once we started, he was as descriptive as always, asking for things like quiet, drum rolls, for example that sounded like two gnats saying hello to each other on the drum head to build a crescendo. Even though sampling was against my religion, I would have done anything for him.
"I would like to believe that I was helping him to finish this remaining work of his, but I really don't know if he had ever done anything with our sessions," Underwood wonders. "Along with having all of my instruments packed away how I had left them when I stopped playing, I had all of these chime-y things and children's percussive instruments around the house, as I was lucky to have two sons late in life. I had it all and I played it all for Frank that May. I can flatter myself and wonder if maybe Frank was looking for an excuse to see me again. I think that is true. Still, he was all business, and I was there to feed it all to him. From snares to marimbas, like always I gave Frank what he wanted."
