Difference between revisions of "Relix Magazine's April/May '06 special on Frank Zappa"

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Pioneer, prankster, musical genius and more – we celebrate the life and times of the one and only Frank Zappa.<br>
 
Pioneer, prankster, musical genius and more – we celebrate the life and times of the one and only Frank Zappa.<br>
  
Maverick guitar god, stand-up comedy singer, avant-guarde composer and one-size-fits-all provocateur Frank Zappa seemed to emerge a fully formed Grand Wazoo on the [[The Mothers|Mothers of Invention]]'s 1966 debut, [[Freak Out!]] Some 60 albums later, Zappa was just hitting his stride as a "serious" composer when he died of cancer in 1993, a few weeks shy of his 53rd birthday. I believe it's safe to say that his intricately composed jazz-rock, group inmprovisations, audience aprticipations, frisky electronics, rhythmic conundrums and all manner of spontaeous tomfoolery have influenced the contemporary "jamband" scene no less than than the big guy in the black T-shirt. Zappa's music reveals mor of its magic with every listen, while his wickedly pertinent satire still sounds as timely, for better or worse, as last night's ''Daily Show.'' We hope you enjoy our modest tribute to American music's great cosmic maximalist as much as we enloyed assembling it. and don't forget to register to vote!<br>
+
Maverick guitar god, stand-up comedy singer, avant-guarde composer and one-size-fits-all provocateur Frank Zappa seemed to emerge a fully formed Grand Wazoo on the [[The Mothers|Mothers of Invention]]'s 1966 debut, [[Freak Out!]] Some 60 albums later, Zappa was just hitting his stride as a "serious" composer when he died of cancer in 1993, a few weeks shy of his 53rd birthday. I believe it's safe to say that his intricately composed jazz-rock, group improvisations, audience participations, frisky electronics, rhythmic conundrums and all manner of spontaneous tomfoolery have influenced the contemporary "jamband" scene no less than the big guy in the black T-shirt. Zappa's music reveals more of its magic with every listen, while his wickedly pertinent satire still sounds as timely, for better or worse, as last night's ''Daily Show.'' We hope you enjoy our modest tribute to American music's great cosmic maximalist as much as we enjoyed assembling it. And don't forget to register to vote!<br>
 
<div align=right>–Richard Gehr, Guest Editor, 2/5/06</div align=right>
 
<div align=right>–Richard Gehr, Guest Editor, 2/5/06</div align=right>
 
<blockquote>Information is not knowledge /<br>
 
<blockquote>Information is not knowledge /<br>

Revision as of 04:56, 18 June 2007

Relix, April/May 2006

This April/May special contained several articles and interviews:

Pioneer, prankster, musical genius and more – we celebrate the life and times of the one and only Frank Zappa.

Maverick guitar god, stand-up comedy singer, avant-guarde composer and one-size-fits-all provocateur Frank Zappa seemed to emerge a fully formed Grand Wazoo on the Mothers of Invention's 1966 debut, Freak Out! Some 60 albums later, Zappa was just hitting his stride as a "serious" composer when he died of cancer in 1993, a few weeks shy of his 53rd birthday. I believe it's safe to say that his intricately composed jazz-rock, group improvisations, audience participations, frisky electronics, rhythmic conundrums and all manner of spontaneous tomfoolery have influenced the contemporary "jamband" scene no less than the big guy in the black T-shirt. Zappa's music reveals more of its magic with every listen, while his wickedly pertinent satire still sounds as timely, for better or worse, as last night's Daily Show. We hope you enjoy our modest tribute to American music's great cosmic maximalist as much as we enjoyed assembling it. And don't forget to register to vote!

–Richard Gehr, Guest Editor, 2/5/06

Information is not knowledge /

Knowledge is not wisdom /
Wisdom is not truth /
Truth is not beauty /
Beauty is not love /
Love is not music /
Music is THE BEST ...
[Packard Goose in] Joe's Garage, Act III

Vault Allures

Gail Zappa and "Vaultmeister" Joe Travers unlock the door to Frank's buried treasures.
By Richard Gehr

With the Zappa Plays Zappa band about to enter a three-month rehearsal phase prior to a European tour, four recent releases (Joe's Domage, Joe's XMASage, Imaginary Diseases and the Dub Room Special DVD), and a posthumous lifetime achievement award awaiting Frank Zappa at the April 20th Jammy Awards in New York City, things are humming along quite nicely at the Zappa family home near the top of Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. The compound's business end is crammed with commemorative discs of every precious metal, original album artwork (hey, there's the Uncle Meat sculpture!), and other evocative ephemera. Something in the air suggests significant treats in store for Zappa fans, with the fabled vault finally disgorging its treasures after a long dry spell. His wife, Gail, and official Vaultmeister Joe Travers, who will do double duty as ZPZ's drummer, promise as much, and a longtime fan can only ask:

Fourteen Possible Instances Of Conceptual Continuity:
1) 59 Words from The Real Frank Zappa Book" (1989):
"... [Y]ou may find a little poodle over here, a little blow job over there, etc., etc. I am not obsessed by poodles or blow jobs, however; these words (and others of equal insignificance), along with pictorial images and melodic themes, recur throughout the albums, interviews, films, videos (and this book) for no other reason than to unify the 'collection.'"

What took you so long?
Gail Zappa: There was a ten-year holdback that prevented me from getting into a distribution deal with any recording involving a touring band. Which means we can start releasing a lot of stuff we were unable to release. Until now I could only release it in cooperation with Ryko — but that word does not apply to my relationship with them. We could always put out anything we wanted through mail order, but that's the land of diminishing returns no matter what you do. There are all sorts of considerations the person who would like to consume Frank's unreleased music really doesn't appreciate. Some do, don't get me wrong. But it's expensive to maintain the technology needed to reconstitute what's in the vault, and we had to put the studio back together.

So what's in the vault and when will you let it out?
Gail: We'd never, ever done an inventory of the vault. That inventory existed in Frank's head and it went with him. You could say there's X number of boxes in the vault, but there's no way you can represent what the hell's in them. You can make a cursory evaluation by going through and looking at what kinds of tapes there are. But there's also a lot of visual stuff that had nothing to do with the Ryko deal. And even if you see a box that says, "This contains X," it doesn't necessarily mean that X is in there, or X is complete or X is retrievable from the format it lives in or that we had any way to transfer it at the time. So we've rebuilt the ancient technology and we have our little convection oven ...
Joe Travers: It's not little.
Gail: ... And the prescribed baking formula. How many muffins have you produced, Joe?
Joe: Forty or more reels over the past couple of years. From 1968 to '75, anything recorded on Scotch tape will play; anything on Ampex won't and needs to be baked.
Gail: Apart from boxes labeled with a recording or event, you also have all these boxes filled with "build" reels, where Frank's transferred stuff to make into something else. Or you'll find a box that just has a group of things in it, stuff stacked together that was mixed at a particular time. Every variation you can think of, we find. Question is, how do we put them together and respect Frank's intentions?

Fourteen Possible Instances Of Conceptual Continuity:
2) "Once upon a time, somebody say to me, what is your conceptual continuity? Well, I told 'em right then, it should be easy to see, the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe." —Fido (an unmodified dog), "Stink-Foot," Apostrophe (') (1974)

Frank repeatedly had several albums ready for release when he died. What's their status today?
Joe: We released Civilization Phaze III in 1994 and Ryko released Frank's Have I Offended Someone? best-of in 1997. That leaves Trance-Fusion, Dance Me This and The Rage and the Fury waiting to see the light of day, Trance-Fusion is a guitar record like Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar. The solos are culled from the '84 and '88 tours, with a couple more thrown in. Dance Me This is a Synclavier record like Jazz From Hell. And The Rage and the Fury was the Edgard Varѐse project that happened in the summer of '93 with the Ensemble Modern.
Gail: I decided that when the ten-year hold-back period was up, we'd just start putting things out. By that point we had some info about what the vault contained, and we've divided it up into three basic food groups. Category A consists of mixes Frank actually completed, although there's a lot of variation and leeway. We'll release Category A stuff you've never heard before, that was produced and mixed by Franks on Zappa Records. There's at least one concert project no one knows about that we want to put out on Zappa, too.
Category B would be tapes Frank made, such as all the concert material. Quite a lot of that has either been plucked through for the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series and other projects, or was set aside by Frank for something in Category A. So what remains in Category B has the best audio quality and potential as a whole project. And Category C is everything else.
The idea was that the Vaulternative label would be the real deal, the stuff that lives in the vault. We'll release whole concerts on Vaulternative, but we like to keep that pretty quiet. You might ask why. The answer is that once we announce it in advance – and this is the un-fun part – we're deluged with bootlegs. Zappa fans are seriously dedicated, but the people who want to mess it up for everybody else are pretty serious, too.

Do you have a release schedule?
Gail: No, and this is what we're trying to work out. Joe and I have differences of opinion, but there's stuff we can announce, like the Roxy And Elsewhere DVD, which we know no bootlegger has. But Trance-Fusion should be the next Zappa Records release after Imaginary Diseases.
The two concerts seen in the Dub Room Special DVD exist separately on video, and we're working on releasing one of them in surround sound. This also represents our first foray into another project I'm interested in, which is inviting certain well-known producers and engineers who never had an opportunity to work with Frank, but were well aware of, inspired by or interested in his work, to get their hands on a Frank Zappa project. In this regard, we turned over the 1974 KCET concert to Frank Filipetti. And we'll still release the Token of His Extreme DVD by the same band.

Do you feel like time is on your side? Is there any urgency about keeping the brand alive, in getting more of Frank's nusic out there?
Gail: Time is on my side in this regard: There's no way we can get everything out there. We're in a position to release a project a month for five years. We have the content but we don't have the budget. And the only way we can begin to do that is if the audience wakes up and finds itself. So my intention is to announce that the ten-year holdback is over, even if you didn't know it existed, and that Frank Zappa is alive and well.

Fourteen Possible Instances Of Conceptual Continuity:
3) See: The back cover of Absolutely Free (1967) features an ad for FYDO-brand dog collars ("fits well!"); the "here Fido!" arrival of Frunobulax, the mutant poodle of "Cheepnis"
(Roxy and Elsewhere, 1974); Phydeaux III, Zappa's tourbus in the late '70s.

Why don't you do something along the lines of the Grateful Dead's Dick's Picks?
Gail: The Joe's Corsage series is our answer to that question* Those are official releases consisting of something extra and have nothing to do with our main agenda with respect to the vault. Which doesn't mean we don't work on them. Of course we do. The closest thing you might relate the Corsage series to is The Mystery Disc. We're just sharing nuggets we find in the vault and can't do anything else with. Let me tell you how the series originated: We had to do something for Mother's Day 2004 because it suddenly occurred to us that we were coming up to the 40th anniversary of the original Mother's Day, which was May 10, 1964. when Frank named the band. So we put out Joe's Corsage in June.
Joe: It was only about a half-hour's worth of material.
Gail: I fell in love with the album and wanted to do more of this kind of thing. Then I thought, "What the hell, we can do whatever we want, whenever we want." It's "anything anytime anywhere for no reason at all." The titles play on Joe's Garage, of course. And the fact of the matter is that Joe's Garage has everything you'll ever need to know about anything in terms of how society and civilization actually works. It's all there. I can find a Corsage that expands upon any point of Joe's Garage. It's all homeomorphic.
Our main job is to put out what he wanted to put out I have to protect the intent of the Composer and the integrity of his Work. Most of the time it's pretty straightforward. Some times we know what to do simply by hearing or reading a quote by Frank. Frank has been more than helpful on some of these projects. He makes his own arguments about what to release by virtue of the tapes and the way he made them. "The Purse" on Joe's XMASage is a classic example. Everything you need to know about whether or not Frank would have included certain other things we've got is there. We try to keep the stuff Frank did intact, although we might argue about what should be included in a particular way. And the proof about most of the stuff I've been arguing about is right there in "The Purse." I've been unable to articulate it satisfactorily to Joe, but Frank has delivered it .He makes the best case for most of the stuff I'm adamant about. Most of the Corsaga is just whole chunks of stuff Frank actually edited together.
Joe: And sometimes it isn't.
Gail: Two or three other Joe's Corsagas will come out this year, not that that's what people are jumping up and down about. But we're excited because we think they're really fun. People probably find the titles intensely boring, because everything rhymes, but I dont care. I'm going to keep making them until I run out.
And yes, Joe's Domage [October 2004] is basically a rehearsal tape? but we gave them every fucking clue. I don't want to explain everything.
Joe: Rehearsal tapes have always been traded among bootleggers, and Domage is from a really rare time.
Gail: It's also one Frank carried around. And if Frank could stand to listen to it, I figured the audience could as well. If there's something about it you don't like, try this: Break your leg, sit in a wheelchair, learn how to play guitar in a cast. put that kind of band together, call all your friends, and try to play that shit. That's my advice. And if Frank could do it, what the fuck is wrong with you that you can't take the time to listen?

How did Imaginary Diseases come about?
Joe: The first band I wanted to dive into after I was given my Vaultmeister hat was the Petit Wazoo, simply because it was largely undocumented and very rare. A huge mystery surrounded the band. I wanted to find out what was up with it and how it sounded, so I documented the shit out of all their 1972 tour tapes and put together two CDs with Spencer Chrislu (FZ's in-house engineer during the early '90s] from the original four-track tapes. This was the first tour Frank had the budget to record every show. Prior to that it was very spotty.

Gail: I realized Frank had an idea about some kind of project involving those tapes.
Joe: Then I discovered that Frank had already cut out all the stuff he liked from those tapes. I'd heard the gaps but didn't know what they were. I'd hear it and go, "Whoa, what's going on here?" Eventually I stumbled across actual stereo mixes Frank made from the tour, and we got the machines I needed to play back the stuff I needed to hear. We decided that while there are good performances on the original two CDs we worked on, there were issues with sound quality. We needed to go to the stuff Frank had picked and mixed, whether they're rough mixes or finished and mastered.
Gail: Previously, it would have been something we would have put out on Vaulternative. But it suddenly became something we could put out on Zappa Records. We're not saying Frank would have put the album together the way Joe did. A lot of the time now, Joe says. "Let me put it together and see if you like it." And I think its fair to say I usually do.
Joe: Absolutely.
Gail: I rely on Joe to bring me the head of John the Baptist, and then I see how I want to arrange his curls on the platter. I want to hear everything. If I feel it's missing something, I play around with it, all the time knowing that Joe's falling more in love with whatever he's done and I have a diminishing chance of convincing him otherwise.
Joe: I don't marry myself to it. She has the final word on everything. There's enough Petit Wazoo material for two releases, about two hours' worth. So the first Zappa Records release was authorized by her, handpicked by Frank, mixed by Frank, and produced for release by myself.

What's your opinion of bands covering Frank's music onstage, as Phish used to?
Gail: One thing you fight for as an artist is that you get paid for your work. Here's the way I look at it: They're playing Franks music and I'm not getting paid. Frank did not write it for them to play without paying him, so they sure as fuck should have paid me. It's small money to perform it, cents on a dollar. That's what I don't understand. Why wouldn't they want to do right by the artist? What do they write music for? Do they buy groceries for their kids? Well, so did Frank Zappa.

I take it that's how you feel about anyone playing Frank's music?
Gail: In America every day rock musicians fuck people over by not turning in their setlists for licensing. They're much more stringent in Europe. Don't get me wrong. I love people covering Frank's music. But I want them to license it, I want them to get permission, and I want them to pay.

Most of the bands would say they're not making much money at all playing Frank's music in public.
Gail: I think the biggest hit outside of Frank's own records has been the Gotan Project's "Chunga's Revenge" [on La Revancha del Tango] — and they added lyrics without permission! What the hell's that about? It's always something. It was the same for Frank. Because when you have to deal with the day-to-day shit people dump on you, it is not fucking fun at all.
The most fun I have is sitting down and listening to Frank's music in the studio with Joe. And the most fun Frank had was making records or playing live. Like the jam with the audience at the beginning of Imaginary Diseases — he pretty much invented that. The downbeat happened when his feet landed on the goddamn floor of the stage, and then it just came at you like a fucking train — a whole bunch of them — rolling out of the station and right over you. And you're like, Help! What just happened to me? There's nothing like that, and there's never going to be anything like that, that doesn't take you right back to Frank Zappa.

Absolutely Freaked Out

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's West Coast Pop-Art Extremism
By Jason Gross

Even his name – Zappa! – sounded like a superheroic exclamation. How fitting, then, that Frank Zappa, with the assistance of a heretofore unequaled auxiliary freak squad, elevated pop-music antics to high art during what many fans – including me – still consider his most inspired period. In various configurations, the original Mothers of Invention released seven remarkable albums in their four years together and altered the course of rock forever. Zappa radically stretched the medium's limits by assuming a variety of roles that made each Mothers album an increasingly wonderful and bizarre musical stew.

Zappa As Greasy Doo-Wopper
While Chuck Berry lit a fire under hordes of '60s rockers, Zappa's influences stretched back to early-'5Os rhythm-and-blues. He concocted a twisted version of oldies music, having over-the-top singers howl, moan and croon determinedly cheesy lyrics that might have made The Coasters blush. Such hilarious numbers as "Any Way The Wind Blows" and "You Didn't Try To Call Me" from the Mothers' 1966 debut, Freak Out! would be reworked as more orthodox doo-wop fare on Cruising With Ruben & The Jets two years later. While the originals were ace parodies, the Ruben re-makes didn't sound as lively: the satire's cute but less biting, and it all sounded a little too lovingly faithful. Zappa's doo-wop shenanigans would reappear the following year on both March 1969's Uncle Meat ("The Air," "Dog Breath, In The Year Of The Plague") and December's Burnt Weeny Sandwich ("WPLJ," "Valarie") with just the right amount of kitschy fun.

Zappa As Wacko Maestro
At the same time as The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Who were slowly nudging rock into the realm of A-R-T, Zappa was diving into it headlong. With old European masters like Ludwig Van and Wolfgang Amadeus providing highbrow pop's classy face for the most part, Zappa's heroes included such 20th-century revolutionary geniuses as Edgar Varèse, John Cage and Igor Stravinsky at a time when they were still regarded by many as outcasts, weirdos or worse. Zappa quotes ol' Igor's Rite of Spring and Petrouchka all over 1967s Absolutely Free and name-checks him on Burnt Weeny's "Igor's Boogie." Varese's psychopercussive music underlies just about every Mothers record, especially Zappa's other 1967 release, Lumpy Gravy. By the time of February 1968's We're Only In It For The Money, Zappa's wild tape/electronic experiments were providing sometimes abrasive interludes and interruptions he would mostly abandon after 1969's Uncle Meat.

Zappa could also lay claim to being the Dr. Frankenstein responsible for an oft-maligned monstrosity: the concept album. Absolutely Free included suites devoted to lust for vegetables and the zombification of America's teens. While We're Only In It For The Money (savor that amusing, insulting title) was packaged as a spot-on spoof of The Beatles' recent Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album s real antagonists were a stateside authoritarian government and pathetically shiftless youth culture – kind of like today. Recorded as a Zappa solo album around the time of Money, late 1967s Lumpy Gravy was assembled from (too many) short, fractured snippets, some of which would creep into other Mothers albums. Neither side-long suite s stoned conversations, Varese worship and sludgy blues are as satisfyingly rounded as Free or Money. After the first few Mothers albums, Zappa crafted the band's remaining '60s output as collections of far-flung tracks instead of grandiose unified concepts.

Zappa As Unapologetic Fusion Pioneer
Next to disco, no '70s music bugs haters as much as jazz-rock. Like Miles Davis, though, Zappa was on the fusion tip in its loud, raging infancy, unleashing it briefly on Absolutely Free ("Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin") before ramping up to high-powered razz-jock work-outs on Uncle Meat (the sidelong live staple "King Kong") and August 1970's Weasels Ripped My Flesh ("Didja Get Any Onya?" and "Toads of the Short Forest"). Extended jazz-flavored songs were the highlights of Burnt Weeny Sandwich and October 1969 s Hot Rats (a second solo album, augmented with studio pros). "The Gumbo Variations" jumped out on fiats, while Weenys "Little House 1 Used to Live In" featured impressive soloists including violinist Don "Sugarcane" Harris, saxist/pianist Ian Underwood and Zappa himself. Zappa's fusion grew gradually more defuse, though, with the exception of parts of Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo.

Zappa As Third-Party Revolutionary
American History 101: In the late '60s, a second American civil war erupted between the warmongering establishment and peace-loving hippies. Zappa found both sides equally rucked up and conformist. Years before the straight- edge movement, he adopted an anti-drug stance that extended to the Mothers themselves. Starting with "You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here" (from Freak Out/) and "Plastic People" (from Absolutely Free), he even took the bold, uncommercial step of challenging his own audience s intelligence. He then used most of We're Only In It for the Money to attack mindless hippies ("Who Needs the Peace Corps?" "Flower Punk") and repressive government fascists ("Concentration Moon," "The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny").

Zappa's allegiance lay instead with "the freaks." He championed a community of Southern California pre-hippie bohemians who dripped nonconformity and created instant parties wherever they went. Freak Out/ bears their name, starting with a threat from the weirdo masses ("Hungry Freaks, Daddy") and ending with their guest appearance on a noise concerto ("The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet"). On Money he championed their wild and fearless ways on "Absolutely Free" and "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance."

Though he shied away from both freak anthems and upfront social commentary for the rest of the '60s, Zappa insisted that social satire continued to lurk in his albums. Only instead of relegating it to lyrics, he was putting it in the music – e.g., Weenys elegant "Holiday in Berlin," which refers sardonically to a German student riot.

"Frank Zappa and I come from more or less the same background, the classical avant-garde, though we expressed ourselves quite differently in our work. As a composer, I felt a close comradeship to him amongst more rock-oriented singer/songwriters. He's one of the geniuses of our time and will always have a place there. He will go on and on and on!"
–Yoko Ono

Epilogue
In 1969, Zappa disbanded the Mothers – but feel absolutely free to give it up for Billy Mundi. Bunk Gardner, Roy Estrada, Don Preston, Jimmy Carl Black, Motorhead Sherwood and Ian Underwood – because of a) money, b) ego, c) fatigue, or d) all of the above. He subsequently compiled Weeny and Weasels, mostly from material recorded earlier that year. He resurrected the band name in the '70s, though he mostly abandoned the above roles in favor of X-rated thrills, smaller-scale social parodies and lite fusion. He ultimately put the Mothers moniker to rest near the end of the decade, perhaps admitting that their (and his) woolly exploits were over, tied to and reflective of a stranger and possibly more daring time.

Tokens of Buys Extreme

A consumer's guide to Frank Zappa's Post-Mothers Inventions.
By Mike McGonigal

Up The Wazoo

Imaginary Diseases
By Christopher R. Weingarten

Jamming In Joe's Garage

By Steve Vai

Jamming In Joe's Garage

By Mike Keneally

Zappaesque

Or the story of the dots
By Matthew Van Brink and Jesse Jarnow

Dweezil Plays Frank

By Richard Gehr and Dweezil

See Also

High-resolution scans of all articles can be found here.