Numerous people have never heard the music of Frank Zappa, let alone ever got the chance to see it performed live. That’s all changing thanks to the efforts of his son, Dweezil. Formed four years ago, Zappa Plays Zappa is a note-for-note performance of Zappa’s music. You might think it would be easy, but Dweezil spent two years studying his father’s music before putting the band together. Creative Loafing recently spoke with Dweezil, by phone from his hotel in Lansing, Mich., about the tour, the music and his father’s legacy.
Creative Loafing: How’s everything going with the tour?
Dweezil Zappa: It’s been going very well. We’ve been playing a bunch of festivals and our own shows in between, here and there. The main difference at the festivals is that we don’t get a soundcheck, so you get a little different experience every time you go on stage. You’re like, “Hmmm … I wonder if my stuff is working today?”
You’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, how has it changed since you first started doing this? Has it changed?
The real basic idea of doing this is to have the opportunity to play Frank’s music and expose it to newer generations. Younger people, generally, don’t know that much about Frank’s music. When I started doing this back in ’06, even prior to that — the prep work before that — if you would ask a random person under 30 what they knew about Frank Zappa, you’d get a pretty typical response of, “Well, I know ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’ and ‘Titties and Beer’ and those kinds of songs.” The younger you go, the less they know. It’s one of those things I wanted to change because I think Frank’s music is overlooked because a lot of people think of him like Weird Al Yankovic. They think he writes some comic music and that’s not really the bulk of his music. In terms of what we do on stage, the only thing that changes is the setlist all the time. Our initial first tour proved that there was an interest to do this on an annual basis and there’s certainly enough material to do that. I suppose one of the other major things that’s changed is that on the first tour, we had multiple special guests because we didn’t know if we were gonna have another tour the following year. So, we had a few special treats for the fans in case it was the only time we do this. We don’t rely on massive special guests — it’s not a prerequisite to play the songs, but we have included Ray White on the last two tours because he’s a tremendous singer and he’s fun to play with. He’s had a standing invitation. Steve Vai’s come back and forth periodically, and he’s fun to play with, too. That’s pretty much it as invitations go. The other night in Quebec, Adrian Belew played before us, so he snuck on stage and did the Bob Dylan monologue in “Flakes,” so that was entertaining.
I was going to ask how often some of these people — Steve (Vai), Napoleon (Murphy Brock), Terry (Bozzio) — got together with you …
Well, on the first tour, they were — Steve, Napoleon and Terry — would play a few songs with us each night. They weren’t on stage with us the whole time. In our current situation, we have Ray come out and play on quite a few songs with us. We don’t really give out any invitations to do a full tour to anybody at this point. It’s a very short list to anybody that would receive that. If we’re in a particular area, and there’s someone who hasn’t made a particular transgression against Frank in some way through previous employment, they might be invited to play on stage.
Have any other members of your family played, such as Ahmet?
Originally, Ahmet was supposed to be involved, but it just didn’t work out that way. He got busy with other things and I don’t think that’s going to happen any time real soon.
So your goal when this started was to give people a better appreciation, or to give them an opportunity to see it live if they haven’t before …
It’s kind of like … if given the opportunity to experience some of Frank’s music, I thought it would be best if they got an overview from multiple eras of his career. So, they got a better understanding in one sitting of a lot of his music. In our full presentation of our own show, we play at least two-and-a-half hours and in that time there’s over 20 songs in there from any particular era — instrumental, classical stuff. We tend to focus on some of the more sophisticated things because those are often the things that are most overlooked in terms of Frank’s contributions to music and the least understood in many cases.
You studied his music for two years — I read about how much time you spent going through his entire career. Were you aware it would be such a long, involved process when you first started?
It was definitely well-understood before I even set foot … I grew up listening to it while he was working on it, whatever he was doing. I always had an interest in it and I always knew that this was serious. This was serious work. A lot of people think that it’s just everybody doing whatever they want to do and he’s just pointing a baton at them. That’s not the case. This is heavily orchestrated and Frank’s music sounds the way it does because it’s a total vision of his. He had the ability to write it on paper and say, “Here’s how it goes. Play it like this.” That’s a big difference. Some people have this impression that his music sounds the way it did because of the people who played it, but that’s not true either because he had so many different people in his band throughout the years and you can’t say his music sounded any particular way because of anybody in the band. Even drum fills to many songs are written out. This is a completely composed situation except for the moments where it’s designated to be improvised and that’s also a time where people don’t necessarily understand what’s going on in that particular moment. The thing about it is his music is so complex in some ways — even the most simple songs have some twist or turn in them — it’s never a pattern. There’s just no pattern recognition in this thing. That’s what’s so unbelievable. He’s always got something that’s gonna be going somewhere unexpected and to really learn all of the things required, I had to not only study the music, but I had to give myself more of a fundamental musical background in terms of standard musical terminology and music theory and all those kinds of stuff. I knew I was going to be put in a position with musicians who had more of that kind of background to begin with than I did. I had to be able to communicate with them. So, I had to study the music for two full years before I even put the band together so I was well prepared to do what was necessary to make sure that we play the stuff accurately. That’s the important thing here. Because Frank really was a composer, and wrote a lot of stuff on paper, his music needs to be treated the way composer’s music is treated and performed the way it’s intended. You have the actual instructions on a piece of paper and that’s how it goes. What we do is we’ll play a specific album version or we’ll play a specific recorded live album version or sometimes we’ll make a hybrid of the two arrangements, but we’ll never take something and completely rearrange it to suit our own needs because that’s not … it’s not up to me to create the evolution of Frank’s music. That was up to Frank. The way he wanted it heard was on all of his records. So, if somebody has never heard his music, we should give them the opportunity to hear it, the way he wanted it to be heard. The point of this is for people to want to go and hear his versions, not to go and say, “Let’s compare the two.” We’re playing this stuff as accurately as can be played and it’s also … we pay close attention to the timbre of the instrumentation so that the mixes and the execution and the overall feel of what you’re experiencing sounds close to that particular version of the song. So, if we’re playing something that’s from the ’60s, we try and make it sound like it’s from the ’60s. We don’t make it sound modern. There’s no reason to update the stuff. There are very rare occasions where we’ll take a deviation on something. For the most part, what we do is give people a very exact replication of a particular version. To me, with any cover band or any cover of a song from another person’s material, I like to hear somebody play it the way we’re most familiar with it. I don’t really care to hear people change something. If somebody wrote the song a certain way and you want to play it, great, let me hear you play it the way they did and make sure you keep all the details in there. That’s why that song is popular to begin with.
With all the time you spent studying his music and all the times you’ve now played it, did that teach you something new about your father that you didn’t know before?
Well, not necessarily anything new, but it certainly bolstered my admiration for his talent. The obstacles that he was up against all the time … to do what he did is just inconceivable how much music he wrote and recorded. Not just got it done, got it done in an amazingly efficient way, but with the highest quality. The technical expertise involved … he didn’t just write music, he knew everything about the recording process and the science of sound. He was voracious when it came to his appetite for information and how to process it and use all these different techniques in what he was doing. You don’t really have too many people that you can compare in the same way. There were times when he would put out five albums in a year, of wildly diverse music. He made over 80 albums, and there’s still tons of things that people haven’t heard.
I was going to ask if there are plans to keep releasing stuff …
Yeah, we have a few things that are coming out. One thing that just came out is called One Shot Deal and it’s got a couple things that people haven’t heard before from the vault. We’re also coming up on some pretty big 40th anniversaries of some pivotal records in the history of rock music, so that stuff’s gonna be coming out with some special packaging soon.
There are so many things that he can be tied to, as far as being a composer, a musician, guitarist, involvement with censorship — did he view himself as anything in particular? I would guess as a composer …
Oh yeah, he definitely saw himself as a composer. The thing about Frank, as much of a sense of humor as he had, he definitely took music very seriously. The thing about music that he loved so much, it’s the ultimate creative situation. You can hear something in your head and reproduce that thought for someone, especially, let’s say, in a guitar solo in an improvisational way. One of the most fun things that he enjoyed doing was spontaneously composing. He thought of guitar solos as air sculptures. It’s a very different headspace than most guitar players who are just using that as, another phrase Frank used, a body commercial. Just, “Hey, check me out and watch me do this.” Another thing about it is he really had a lot of respect for the art of music … just anybody who did what they did and was serious about the process and enjoyed taking a chance and all of those things. There’s room for every style of music, but when you listen to Frank’s music, there’s a lot more going on than in other forms of music. So, if you get used to hearing that much variety and options in music, it does make the rest of the world of music seem a little dull.
You do get that it wasn’t a flashy “because he can” thing. It was the composition of it …
The arrangements alone — who else was using marimbas the way that he was? He started off as a drummer so the rhythm elements within his music are pretty complex. There’s some things that are downright unplayable. That’s the beauty of it. This is a guy that had to ultimately resort to using a computer to hear his music performed properly when it was his most difficult compositions. That’s just insane.
How did you set apart which songs you were going to learn and perform? I assume that the ones that were tough was just a challenge …
Yeah, there are songs … initially one of the hardest ones was a piece of music called “G-spot Tornado.” That originally was recorded and performed by the synclavier which is a computer. He, when he originally composed that piece of music, didn’t think that it was playable. There are parts that are so fast … I mean, ridiculously fast. At that tempo, only a handful of people, classically trained musicians and whatnot, might be able to execute it with some good precision. But, I thought the melody of that particular piece of music was so intriguing, so even back when he first put the record out which was in the early ’90s on the Jazz from Hell record. I learned like 35 seconds of it, but I wasn’t playing it up to tempo. My band at the time was playing just a bit of that melody. From that, my mom told me that he said, “Well, some people may be able to play this if they start out at a lower tempo like they’ve done with other things that are hard.” So, he started working with the Ensemble Modern for the Yellow Shark record where they do perform that song, that piece of music, “G-spot Tornado” on there and it’s a great piece on there. The recording of it is really, really good. We learned that version and play it as a rock band and I’m here to tell you that just learning the melody and getting it up to tempo took several months. That’s definitely one of the ones that’s on the hard list where you think, “I don’t know if this is playable because it has these parts in the middle that are so fast,” but we got to the point where we could actually play it and that was through a lot of work.
You were an established guitar player before all of this. I imagine it has just made you a better player.
Oh, for sure! To do what is required to play this stuff, I had to drastically change what I was capable of on guitar. I had to learn new techniques and that’s sort of the equivalent of learning how to walk differently. I had been playing guitar for 20 plus years and then to say I’m gonna do it totally different now … most people don’t have the patience for something like that. Patience is what is required in order to learn this stuff, in general, because you have to learn a lot of it at a very slow tempo and build up to the actual song tempo later on. That’s enough to drive a lot of people absolutely insane because it’s taxing on your brain to have to work that hard to train. It’s like training for the Olympics.
Did it ever get frustrating?
It never got frustrating to me, because to get on the other side of it and say, “Check this out!” There’s something that happens collectively as a band — we can listen to a show that we’ve done and from a fan perspective say, “Wow, I can’t believe that we played all those songs. I can’t believe that we remembered all those songs.” That’s kind of the same thing that happens when people see it, they’re just like, “Wow! I never thought I’d hear that song or I can’t believe they learned that one.” The experience that people have had at these shows is overwhelmingly positive. You can look on our Web site with the fan reviews — it’s over-the-top positive. It’s something that we don’t ever take for granted because the ultimate goal here is for people to have the opportunity to hear this and spread the word because it’s not like the music’s gonna suddenly turn up on the radio like Beyoncé or something like that.
I’m sure it will have an impact on your song writing, too.
Oh yeah, there’s no doubt that all of us involved are far better players as a result of playing this stuff night after night. If there was never a direct correlation between Frank’s music and my music in my previous recordings, there undoubtedly will be a stronger influence in future recordings of my own. It’s just the nature of what I’ve been immersed in and what is now possible for me to now do on guitar.
You also have that project you’ve been working on for 14 years …
Yeah — “What the Hell Was I Thinking?” The thing about that one — I haven’t actually worked on it every year during that time. There’s been several years where I haven’t touched it at all, but the thing about is it’s best described as an audio movie. It’s a continuous piece of music that morphs from one moment into the next into something else. So, musically and texturally, it sonically changes almost at random. You really can’t predict where it’s gonna go. There are a lot of things that I might decide to change and rework based on what I’m capable of now versus back when I started. The majority of it is completed. There’s a lot of really cool stuff and a lot of guest players playing on it, but when I started it, guitar playing was still kind of popular and then, after a while, it became, “Oh, you’re a guitar player? That’s lame.” So there was this whole period where nobody would have really cared about a record like that. Now, perhaps, there is an audience that might be interested in it again. There’s no rush to finish it. It’s one of those things, at this point, where it’s like, “Yeah, you know, it’s a cool thing, it’s got a lot of really cool parts. I might as well put the finishing touches on it when I get a chance, but there’s no rush.”
What are your plans at this point for Zappa Plays Zappa? How long do you think this will go on?
Well, we’re in our third year and we already have plans for touring next year. Once we complete that, we’ll figure out something for the next year, which is already at five years, which is a little minimilestone. The thing about it is, there’s enough material to do this for a long time. We just need to be able to see that there’s an increasing demand for it and that’s what it all comes down to. There’s a lot of fun in playing this music — the fans enjoy it and we enjoy it so there’s no reason to not continue. Certainly, there are other things I’m interested in doing, as well. Plus, I have two daughters and I need to spend some time …
Thanks for taking the time to talk with me and thanks for the music.
Thanks.
Zappa Plays Zappa will be at the Neighborhood Theatre on July 29. Tickets are $25.
This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2008.
