An Interview With Frank Zappa - Revision history

Jason.Kreitzer at 23:48, 13 July 2025

2025-07-13T23:48:37Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 17:51, 21 October 2021

2021-10-21T17:51:42Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 15:26, 30 September 2021

2021-09-30T15:26:59Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 14:55, 29 July 2021

2021-07-29T14:55:07Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 22:13, 14 July 2021

2021-07-14T22:13:58Z

Spider of Destiny at 20:20, 17 November 2020

2020-11-17T20:20:48Z

Duncan: Fixed Kunc link

2008-05-18T11:34:24Z

Fixed Kunc link

Fishbrain: Updated link to London Symphony Orchestra (The Orchestra)

2007-11-27T13:16:10Z

Updated link to London Symphony Orchestra (The Orchestra)

Maroual at 12:59, 29 January 2007

2007-01-29T12:59:20Z

Propellerkuh at 16:08, 28 January 2007

2007-01-28T16:08:52Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 23:48, 13 July 2025
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		+	[[File:Mixjune83.jpg\|thumb\|right]]
		+
	By Dan Forte<br>		By Dan Forte<br>
	Mix, June 1983<br>		Mix, June 1983<br>

@@ Line 84: / Line 84: @@
 '''You're planning on reissuing everything and more from the old albums?<br>
-I've got it all. The only things I don't have are the masters for [[200 Motels]]; [[Wikipedia:United Artists|United Artists]] has them. I'm thinking of releasing them in either 7-or 8-record boxes. All the [[Verve Records|Verve]] stuff would be the first box, ending with [[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Ruben & the Jets]]. Then there'll be an extra disk in there that has all the stuff that was left out of those sessions, that era. I've got some real nuggets lurking around. The next box would start off with [[Uncle Meat]] and go all the way up to the band with [[Mark Volman|Mark [Volman]]] and [[Howard Kaylan|Howard [Kaylan]]] [[Flo & Eddie|[Flo & Eddie]]], and I have more than a disk's worth of unreleased material with them.
+I've got it all. The only things I don't have are the masters for [[200 Motels]]; [[Wikipedia:United Artists|United Artists]] has them. I'm thinking of releasing them in either 7-or 8-record boxes. All the [[Verve Records|Verve]] stuff would be the first box, ending with [[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Ruben & the Jets]]. Then there'll be an extra disk in there that has all the stuff that was left out of those sessions, that era. I've got some real nuggets lurking around. The next box would start off with [[Uncle Meat]] and go all the way up to the band with Mark (Volman) and Howard (Kaylan) ([[Flo & Eddie|Flo & Eddie]]), and I have more than a disk's worth of unreleased material with them.
 '''You're one of the few artists who absorbs virtually all of the production costs for all of your projects, rather than being subsidized by a label or someone.<br>

@@ Line 84: / Line 84: @@
 '''You're planning on reissuing everything and more from the old albums?<br>
-I've got it all. The only things I don't have are the masters for [[200 Motels]]; [[United Artists]] has them. I'm thinking of releasing them in either 7-or 8-record boxes. All the [[Verve Records|Verve]] stuff would be the first box, ending with [[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Ruben & the Jets]]. Then there'll be an extra disk in there that has all the stuff that was left out of those sessions, that era. I've got some real nuggets lurking around. The next box would start off with [[Uncle Meat]] and go all the way up to the band with [[Mark Volman|Mark [Volman]]] and [[Howard Kaylan|Howard [Kaylan]]] [[Flo & Eddie|[Flo & Eddie]]], and I have more than a disk's worth of unreleased material with them.
+I've got it all. The only things I don't have are the masters for [[200 Motels]]; [[Wikipedia:United Artists|United Artists]] has them. I'm thinking of releasing them in either 7-or 8-record boxes. All the [[Verve Records|Verve]] stuff would be the first box, ending with [[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Ruben & the Jets]]. Then there'll be an extra disk in there that has all the stuff that was left out of those sessions, that era. I've got some real nuggets lurking around. The next box would start off with [[Uncle Meat]] and go all the way up to the band with [[Mark Volman|Mark [Volman]]] and [[Howard Kaylan|Howard [Kaylan]]] [[Flo & Eddie|[Flo & Eddie]]], and I have more than a disk's worth of unreleased material with them.
 '''You're one of the few artists who absorbs virtually all of the production costs for all of your projects, rather than being subsidized by a label or someone.<br>

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:55, 29 July 2021
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−	[[Frank Zappa]] is at it again. Or, to be more accurate, Zappa has been "at it" continuously since [[Freak Out!]], his landmark debut with the Mothers of Invention, in 1966. The liner notes to that and several other early Mothers LPs include the epigram, "The present-day composer refuses to die," a quote from Frank's idol, [[Edgard Varèse]]. If Zappa himself is any indication, the present-day composer also refuses to take a vacation.	+	[[Biography\|Frank Zappa]] is at it again. Or, to be more accurate, Zappa has been "at it" continuously since [[Freak Out!]], his landmark debut with the Mothers of Invention, in 1966. The liner notes to that and several other early Mothers LPs include the epigram, "The present-day composer refuses to die," a quote from Frank's idol, [[Edgard Varèse]]. If Zappa himself is any indication, the present-day composer also refuses to take a vacation.

	Zappa is quite probably the most prolific rock artist active, and at 42 he shows no signs of slacking off. Early this year he released his latest album, [[The Man From Utopia\|The Man from Utopia]], on his own [[Barking Pumpkin Records]]. The record's inner sleeve features an ad for another LP – a picture-disk soundtrack to his film, [[Baby Snakes]], available by mail order only. Originally released a couple of years ago as a 2½ hour opus, the film was seen only at selected screenings; Zappa recently edited it down to ninety minutes. He has also finished another feature-length video, [[Dub Room Special\|The Dub Room Special]], and is currently remixing all of his early catalog items – most of which are out of print – for reissue, along with some previously unreleased material from those periods.		Zappa is quite probably the most prolific rock artist active, and at 42 he shows no signs of slacking off. Early this year he released his latest album, [[The Man From Utopia\|The Man from Utopia]], on his own [[Barking Pumpkin Records]]. The record's inner sleeve features an ad for another LP – a picture-disk soundtrack to his film, [[Baby Snakes]], available by mail order only. Originally released a couple of years ago as a 2½ hour opus, the film was seen only at selected screenings; Zappa recently edited it down to ninety minutes. He has also finished another feature-length video, [[Dub Room Special\|The Dub Room Special]], and is currently remixing all of his early catalog items – most of which are out of print – for reissue, along with some previously unreleased material from those periods.

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 I've also got a wife with a great sense of humor [laughs]. I think it's a traditional American thing to do. If you have a small business, you reinvest in the business.
-[[Category:Interviews with Zappa]]
+[[Category:Interviews with Zappa|Interview With Frank Zappa]]
-[[Category:1983]]
+[[Category:1983|Interview With Frank Zappa]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:20, 17 November 2020
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	[[Category:Interviews with Zappa]]		[[Category:Interviews with Zappa]]
		+	[[Category:1983]]

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 '''How did "[[Dwarf Nebula Processional March & Dwarf Nebula|Dwarf Nebula]]" (from [[Weasels Ripped My Flesh]]) come about?<br>
-"Dwarf Nebula" started off as a piano exercise. During the time we were doing Uncle Meat, I was working with an engineer ([[Richard Kunc]]), who was real cooperative, just trying to do any kind of weird thing we asked him to do. During the 60s, who knew what was right? "Let's try this. Plug it in backwards and see what happens." So we were dealing with different types of short-term distortion, and he built a little box with three pushbuttons; we called it the Apostolic Blurch Injector. And we took various tracks of different types of material and cranked them up into the distortion range and then by poking the buttons you'd get these little rhythmic bursts of white noise, brown noise, pink noise, and gray noise – in a rhythm that you'd select. But instead of being derived from a noise generator on a synthesizer, it was completely distorted voices, instruments, percussion, whatever. We cranked off reams and reams of tape of this kind of material, and that was intercut with the piano exercise.
+"Dwarf Nebula" started off as a piano exercise. During the time we were doing Uncle Meat, I was working with an engineer ([[Dick Kunc|Richard Kunc]]), who was real cooperative, just trying to do any kind of weird thing we asked him to do. During the 60s, who knew what was right? "Let's try this. Plug it in backwards and see what happens." So we were dealing with different types of short-term distortion, and he built a little box with three pushbuttons; we called it the Apostolic Blurch Injector. And we took various tracks of different types of material and cranked them up into the distortion range and then by poking the buttons you'd get these little rhythmic bursts of white noise, brown noise, pink noise, and gray noise – in a rhythm that you'd select. But instead of being derived from a noise generator on a synthesizer, it was completely distorted voices, instruments, percussion, whatever. We cranked off reams and reams of tape of this kind of material, and that was intercut with the piano exercise.
 '''One thing you seem to be able to do that is lacking in most rock performers is think abstractly.<br>

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 Zappa is quite probably the most prolific rock artist active, and at 42 he shows no signs of slacking off. Early this year he released his latest album, [[The Man From Utopia|The Man from Utopia]], on his own [[Barking Pumpkin Records]]. The record's inner sleeve features an ad for another LP – a picture-disk soundtrack to his film, [[Baby Snakes]], available by mail order only. Originally released a couple of years ago as a 2½ hour opus, the film was seen only at selected screenings; Zappa recently edited it down to ninety minutes. He has also finished another feature-length video, [[Dub Room Special|The Dub Room Special]], and is currently remixing all of his early catalog items – most of which are out of print – for reissue, along with some previously unreleased material from those periods.
-Along with his massive output of rock & roll, Zappa has continually written contemporary symphonic pieces, which are only now beginning to be performed by orchestras. Twelve-tone composer [[Pierre Boulez]] commissioned Frank to compose music for his ensemble, slated to be performed in Paris early in 1984. In January, the [[London Symphony Orchestra]] did a program of Zappa's music, conducted by 31-year-old [[Kent Nagano]], conductor of the Berkeley and Oakland, California, symphonies. Zappa also produced and engineered a studio album of the LSO performing his compositions, soon to be released on Barking Pumpkin. Nagano, one of the foremost champions of new music, declares, "As a composer, I rank him right up there with the other great masters of the century. It was one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on."
+Along with his massive output of rock & roll, Zappa has continually written contemporary symphonic pieces, which are only now beginning to be performed by orchestras. Twelve-tone composer [[Pierre Boulez]] commissioned Frank to compose music for his ensemble, slated to be performed in Paris early in 1984. In January, the [[London Symphony Orchestra (The Orchestra)|London Symphony Orchestra]] did a program of Zappa's music, conducted by 31-year-old [[Kent Nagano]], conductor of the Berkeley and Oakland, California, symphonies. Zappa also produced and engineered a studio album of the LSO performing his compositions, soon to be released on Barking Pumpkin. Nagano, one of the foremost champions of new music, declares, "As a composer, I rank him right up there with the other great masters of the century. It was one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on."
 In February, Zappa shared the baton with maestro Jean-Louis LeRoux for a 100th anniversary celebration of the music of Varèse and [[Anton Webern]], performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the city's War Memorial Opera House. Though the concert was a bona fide success, Zappa admitted afterward, "It was the first time I've conducted anything by anybody else, and we only had two rehearsals. I didn't even know if I was going to be good enough to do the Integrales, because it's a lot harder than Ionisation, the other Varèse piece I conducted."

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
-Frank Zappa is at it again. Or, to be more accurate, Zappa has been "at it" continuously since [[Freak Out!]], his landmark debut with the Mothers of Invention, in 1966. The liner notes to that and several other early Mothers LPs include the epigram, "The present-day composer refuses to die," a quote from Frank's idol, [[Edgard Varèse]]. If Zappa himself is any indication, the present-day composer also refuses to take a vacation.
+[[Frank Zappa]] is at it again. Or, to be more accurate, Zappa has been "at it" continuously since [[Freak Out!]], his landmark debut with the Mothers of Invention, in 1966. The liner notes to that and several other early Mothers LPs include the epigram, "The present-day composer refuses to die," a quote from Frank's idol, [[Edgard Varèse]]. If Zappa himself is any indication, the present-day composer also refuses to take a vacation.
-Zappa is quite probably the most prolific rock artist active, and at 42 he shows no signs of slacking off. Early this year he released his latest album, [[The Man from Utopia]], on his own Barking Pumpkin Records. The record's inner sleeve features an ad for another LP – a picture-disk soundtrack to his film, [[Baby Snakes]], available by mail order only. Originally released a couple of years ago as a 2½ hour opus, the film was seen only at selected screenings; Zappa recently edited it down to ninety minutes. He has also finished another feature-length video, [[The Dub Room Special]], and is currently remixing all of his early catalog items – most of which are out of print – for reissue, along with some previously unreleased material from those periods.
+Zappa is quite probably the most prolific rock artist active, and at 42 he shows no signs of slacking off. Early this year he released his latest album, [[The Man From Utopia|The Man from Utopia]], on his own [[Barking Pumpkin Records]]. The record's inner sleeve features an ad for another LP – a picture-disk soundtrack to his film, [[Baby Snakes]], available by mail order only. Originally released a couple of years ago as a 2½ hour opus, the film was seen only at selected screenings; Zappa recently edited it down to ninety minutes. He has also finished another feature-length video, [[Dub Room Special|The Dub Room Special]], and is currently remixing all of his early catalog items – most of which are out of print – for reissue, along with some previously unreleased material from those periods.
-Along with his massive output of rock & roll, Zappa has continually written contemporary symphonic pieces, which are only now beginning to be performed by orchestras. Twelve-tone composer Pierre Boulez commissioned Frank to compose music for his ensemble, slated to be performed in Paris early in 1984. In January, the London Symphony Orchestra did a program of Zappa's music, conducted by 31-year-old [[Kent Nagano]], conductor of the Berkeley and Oakland, California, symphonies. Zappa also produced and engineered a studio album of the LSO performing his compositions, soon to be released on Barking Pumpkin. Nagano, one of the foremost champions of new music, declares, "As a composer, I rank him right up there with the other great masters of the century. It was one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on."
+Along with his massive output of rock & roll, Zappa has continually written contemporary symphonic pieces, which are only now beginning to be performed by orchestras. Twelve-tone composer [[Pierre Boulez]] commissioned Frank to compose music for his ensemble, slated to be performed in Paris early in 1984. In January, the [[London Symphony Orchestra]] did a program of Zappa's music, conducted by 31-year-old [[Kent Nagano]], conductor of the Berkeley and Oakland, California, symphonies. Zappa also produced and engineered a studio album of the LSO performing his compositions, soon to be released on Barking Pumpkin. Nagano, one of the foremost champions of new music, declares, "As a composer, I rank him right up there with the other great masters of the century. It was one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on."
-In February, Zappa shared the baton with maestro Jean-Louis LeRoux for a 100th anniversary celebration of the music of Varèse and Anton Webern, performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the city's War Memorial Opera House. Though the concert was a bona fide success, Zappa admitted afterward, "It was the first time I've conducted anything by anybody else, and we only had two rehearsals. I didn't even know if I was going to be good enough to do the Integrales, because it's a lot harder than Ionisation, the other Varèse piece I conducted."
+In February, Zappa shared the baton with maestro Jean-Louis LeRoux for a 100th anniversary celebration of the music of Varèse and [[Anton Webern]], performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the city's War Memorial Opera House. Though the concert was a bona fide success, Zappa admitted afterward, "It was the first time I've conducted anything by anybody else, and we only had two rehearsals. I didn't even know if I was going to be good enough to do the Integrales, because it's a lot harder than Ionisation, the other Varèse piece I conducted."
 The day after the San Francisco performance, Frank sat still long enough to answer a few questions about what he's been up to lately and what he'll be into next.
@@ Line 39: / Line 39: @@
 '''This was the first time you heard most of your pieces performed. Any surprises?<br>
-A few. The surprises came in terms of things I thought would be easy for people to play but actually tortured them to death to do. I don't want to be critical of the LSO, because they really gave it their all and struggled valiantly with the problems at hand. They weren't fuckin' off; they were really putting out the energy. But there was a certain uneveness from one section to another, in terms of the quality and style of the players in the section. The strings were generally quite good, especially ensemblewise. Good concertmaster. The winds, great – except the first flute had immense problems with [[Moe 'n' Herb's Vacation]]. But other than that, wonderful. In the brass, the trumpets – a little bit of a problem [laughs]. If what I had written had sounded just a liiittle bit more like Star Wars, they would have been okay. Trombones and French horns, good. Percussion, good, except for one guy. Piano, great. Harp, great.
+A few. The surprises came in terms of things I thought would be easy for people to play but actually tortured them to death to do. I don't want to be critical of the LSO, because they really gave it their all and struggled valiantly with the problems at hand. They weren't fuckin' off; they were really putting out the energy. But there was a certain uneveness from one section to another, in terms of the quality and style of the players in the section. The strings were generally quite good, especially ensemblewise. Good concertmaster. The winds, great – except the first flute had immense problems with [[Mo 'n Herb's Vacation|Moe 'n' Herb's Vacation]]. But other than that, wonderful. In the brass, the trumpets – a little bit of a problem [laughs]. If what I had written had sounded just a liiittle bit more like Star Wars, they would have been okay. Trombones and French horns, good. Percussion, good, except for one guy. Piano, great. Harp, great.
 When Kent went to tweeze everything out, certain things had to be taken slower than I would've liked to have heard them, just in order to get people to play the parts. There was this one run in Moe 'n' Herb's Vacation that was just driving this flute player crazy [laughs].
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 Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Some are so simple, you just hum them to everybody. Of course, for an orchestrated piece you don't have time to hum it to a hundred guys – and besides, they won't remember it anyway.
-They're all composed different ways. I'll sketch some things out while I'm waiting in an airport, and come back from a tour with a briefcase full of sketches. The lyrics to "Dumb All Over" were written on a Lufthansa flight coming back from Europe. The march at the end of "Sad Jane" is an orchestral setting of a transcription of a guitar solo from the Shrine Auditorium in 1968, transcribed by Ian Underwood.
+They're all composed different ways. I'll sketch some things out while I'm waiting in an airport, and come back from a tour with a briefcase full of sketches. The lyrics to "[[Dumb All Over]]" were written on a Lufthansa flight coming back from Europe. The march at the end of "[[Sad Jane]]" is an orchestral setting of a transcription of a guitar solo from the Shrine Auditorium in 1968, transcribed by [[Ian Underwood]].
 '''So a whole orchestra is playing your improvised guitar solo.<br>
 Yeah, but harmonized out and orchestrated. You'd never know it came out of a guitar. The reason I chose it is that it sounded so composed. The third movement of "[[Sinister Footwear]]" is an exact transcription of a solo that [[Steve Vai]] transcribed. That's fiendishly hard – probably the hardest thing on paper I've got.
-'''Could we trace the various creative processes through a couple of your songs? How about "Duke of Prunes," which was originally on Absolutely Free and showed up in orchestrated form on Orchestral Favorites?<br>
+'''Could we trace the various creative processes through a couple of your songs? How about "[[The Duke Of Prunes|Duke of Prunes,]]" which was originally on Absolutely Free and showed up in orchestrated form on Orchestral Favorites?<br>
-The melody to "[[Duke of Prunes]]" was part of a film score I did when I was twenty years old for this western movie called Run Home Slow. It was the background music for a scene where a cowboy nymphomaniac is pooching a hunchback in a stall next to a dead donkey [laughs]. That's where the melody came from, okay? So then I wrote words to it and it went into the Absolutely Free album. Then I did that orchestral arrangement of it.
+The melody to "Duke of Prunes" was part of a film score I did when I was twenty years old for this western movie called Run Home Slow. It was the background music for a scene where a cowboy nymphomaniac is pooching a hunchback in a stall next to a dead donkey [laughs]. That's where the melody came from, okay? So then I wrote words to it and it went into the Absolutely Free album. Then I did that orchestral arrangement of it.
-'''How did "[[Dwarf Nebula]]" (from [[Weasels Ripped My Flesh]]) come about?<br>
+'''How did "[[Dwarf Nebula Processional March & Dwarf Nebula|Dwarf Nebula]]" (from [[Weasels Ripped My Flesh]]) come about?<br>
 "Dwarf Nebula" started off as a piano exercise. During the time we were doing Uncle Meat, I was working with an engineer ([[Richard Kunc]]), who was real cooperative, just trying to do any kind of weird thing we asked him to do. During the 60s, who knew what was right? "Let's try this. Plug it in backwards and see what happens." So we were dealing with different types of short-term distortion, and he built a little box with three pushbuttons; we called it the Apostolic Blurch Injector. And we took various tracks of different types of material and cranked them up into the distortion range and then by poking the buttons you'd get these little rhythmic bursts of white noise, brown noise, pink noise, and gray noise – in a rhythm that you'd select. But instead of being derived from a noise generator on a synthesizer, it was completely distorted voices, instruments, percussion, whatever. We cranked off reams and reams of tape of this kind of material, and that was intercut with the piano exercise.
@@ Line 84: / Line 84: @@
 '''You're planning on reissuing everything and more from the old albums?<br>
-I've got it all. The only things I don't have are the masters for [[200 Motels]]; United Artists has them. I'm thinking of releasing them in either 7-or 8-record boxes. All the Verve stuff would be the first box, ending with Ruben & the Jets. Then there'll be an extra disk in there that has all the stuff that was left out of those sessions, that era. I've got some real nuggets lurking around. The next box would start off with Uncle Meat and go all the way up to the band with Mark [Volman] and Howard [Kaylan] [Flo & Eddie], and I have more than a disk's worth of unreleased material with them.
+I've got it all. The only things I don't have are the masters for [[200 Motels]]; [[United Artists]] has them. I'm thinking of releasing them in either 7-or 8-record boxes. All the [[Verve Records|Verve]] stuff would be the first box, ending with [[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Ruben & the Jets]]. Then there'll be an extra disk in there that has all the stuff that was left out of those sessions, that era. I've got some real nuggets lurking around. The next box would start off with [[Uncle Meat]] and go all the way up to the band with [[Mark Volman|Mark [Volman]]] and [[Howard Kaylan|Howard [Kaylan]]] [[Flo & Eddie|[Flo & Eddie]]], and I have more than a disk's worth of unreleased material with them.
 '''You're one of the few artists who absorbs virtually all of the production costs for all of your projects, rather than being subsidized by a label or someone.<br>
@@ Line 90: / Line 90: @@
 I've also got a wife with a great sense of humor [laughs]. I think it's a traditional American thing to do. If you have a small business, you reinvest in the business.
 [[Category:Interviews with Zappa]]