Frank Zappa: The SongTalk Interview

By Paul Zollo
SongTalk, 1994 Vol 4 Issue 1
Songwriters On Songwriting

When Frank Zappa was thirteen years old and living in San Diego, he read an article in Look Magazine praising the record merchandiser Sam Goody. It claimed that Goody was such a genius that he could sell any album no matter how ugly it was musically. And the album they chose as an example of this ultimate ugliness was Complete Works Of Edgard Varèse, Volume 1, which featured a percussion piece called "Ionisations." The writer described the piece as "a banging and clanging with sirens and stuff." When young Frank read this he said to himself', "Yeah! That's what I want!" He made the trek to what was then referred to as the local "Hi-Fi shop," where records were played on the new equipment to demonstrate the magic of Hi-Fi.

"Apparently, the guy had gotten this thing because the percussion was supposed to be spectacular," Zappa remembered, smiling warmly beneath his huge mustache. "But whenever he played it he didn't make any sales so the album was listed at $10.95, an exorbitant price for a 13-year-old. I walked into the store and saw this album with a black and white cover and a guy on the front who looked like a mad scientist. And I knew from the minute I saw it that it had to be the one. So I asked the guy how much it was and he told me and I didn't have the money, so I negotiated with him. And he was so happy that anybody would buy it to get it out of there, that he sold it to me for six dollars just to get it off his hands. I took it home and listened to it day and night for years."

From that day on, Frank Zappa's life was injected with music both wild and weird, music few of his childhood friends had ever heard of, let alone chose to play in their own homes. As he grew up, Zappa continued in the tradition of his idol, Varèse, in creating sounds and melodies and rhythms and textures entirely his own, music the world had never heard before.

Zappa died on December 4, 1993 in Los Angeles. He was 52 years old. Though his life ended at such a tragically young age, he left behind a body of work much greater than most men ever achieve in a single lifetime. Besides the universe of songs he wrote, Zappa wrote chamber music, orchestral suites, ballets, jazz compositions, concertos, symphonies and more, experimenting with and pushing the boundaries of pretty much every musical form there is. In his songwriting alone there is such a vast range of expression that it shares a quality with Scott Fitzgerald's famous quote about Hollywood, that it's impossible for one person to hold all of its equations in his head at once. Zappa's lyrics were often so barbed and ironic, or so deceptively simple and direct, that people sometimes neglected the compositional complexity and beauty of the music that accompanied them. Even his hit "Dancin' Fool" shifted into measures of 10/ 16 time, a pretty weird time signature for AM or FM.

Zappa's soul was perhaps most completely expressed in his instrumental music, in which he was able to explore every rhythmic, tonal, harmonic, sonic and melodic relationship available to human ears. His album Sleep Dirt, for example, is an entirely instrumental work that features music both breathtakingly beautiful and mind-boggling. As he learned at an early age from Varèse, there are no real rules restricting music. It can be anything and everything that a composer can imagine. And the imagination of Frank Zappa was limitless.

When we first interviewed him a few years ago, the Synclavier was giving him a liberty that Varèse never shared, to not only compose and experiment with new musical sounds and shapes, but to be able to hear the fruit of these labors instantly. He had just completed the wondrously instrumental Jazz From Hell when we met, and was in the midst of extending those discoveries into further realms of compositional exploration which he was happy to generously share with us in the warm inner sanctum of his home studio.

We conducted the following interview with Zappa for SongTalk in 1987, at a time when he was publicly fighting Tipper Gore's PMRC and their attempts to place warning labels on albums. Because of this political activity, Zappa was seen to be a little too controversial to be featured on the cover of this journal published by a non-profit organization, and was relegated instead only to our inner pages. It's a belated honor for us at this moment in history to pay tribute to the astonishing musical legacy of Frank Zappa by finally featuring him on our cover.

What follows is our original interview with Zappa, first printed in SongTalk in 1987, Volume 2, Issue 5. It happened to be one of the very first interviews I conducted for SongTalk soon after I became editor. It led me to believe that all interviews could be set up as easily, and that all interview subjects would be as gracious, humorous and brilliant. Of course, I was wrong. There is nobody else like Zappa.

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Frank Zappa means different things to different people. To some, he is the outspoken, political activist who went to Washington to speak out against the PMRC and all forms of censorship. To others, he is the long-haired Zappa of the sixties, fronting the Mothers of Invention, who, in 1966 released both the first double album and the first concept album in rock history (Freak Out!). To others, he's a true guitar hero: filling up full hockey stadiums with the sound of his extended guitar solos. To still others, he is the very cynical, bizarrely humorous creator of satirical gems such as "Dancin' Fool" and "Valley Girl." To many, especially those outside the realm of American influence, he is a compositional genius, writing his own distinctive brand of harmonically complex, rhythmically jangled music for everything from a rock band to the London Symphony Orchestra. However you view him, he is undoubtedly one of the most innovative and creative forces in music, continuing to break new ground now as he has done for twenty years.

Zappa's new ground is being broken on the Synclavier, an amazing machine that can produce both sampled and synthesized sounds and which can be controlled completely by a computer. With one, a composer has the equivalent of a symphony orchestra always at his beck and call, ready to play any piece of music the instant that it is conceived. The difference being that the Synclavier can perform music humans would be physically unable to play, and it can produce sounds and combinations of sounds previously unheard by human ears.

At home, Zappa's demeanor is closer to an Einstein than a Hendrix. Prior to this interview, he caught a quick four hour nap after leaving instructions with his engineer to make mixes of pieces he had been working on in his home studio. When we arrived, he was summoned from his bed – many days of gray growth on his face, hair all over the place – looking very weary. The guy literally works around the clock.

After the interview was completed, we had the privilege of being ushered into Zappa's home studio and hearing Synclavier pieces in progress. Though he didn't smile much, his pleasure at being the first person ever to create this particular music was obvious, and wonderful to share. (For example, he would say, "Let's see what 22 notes in the space of one eighth note might sound like on a bassoon.") He put out a cigarette in the standing ashtray beside his chair, lit another, leaned back and pushed the start button on the Synclavier. The music that filled the studio with all the force of a concert hall, was, like all the music that he has created in his life, colorful, compelling and uniquely and unquestionably Zappa.

Do you generally approach a composition from a rhythmic viewpoint rather than a melodic one?
It depends on what kind of song it is. If it's a song where the text is important, the first job is to make sure that the setting is doing something for the lyric.

Sometimes it's like a difference tone. That's where you have a note and a note and the combination of these two notes gives you a third note, which is a difference tone. You get a theoretical difference tone from lyrics which are set ironically. The sum total of the package is more than just these words, this chord. You get the third concept, which is that these two things don't belong together but somebody put them there. And so you get the extra message there.

The other thing that you have to keep in mind, when writing a song, is who is going to perform it. When I write for myself, since I can't really sing at all (I have a very difficult time holding a pitch, can't hold long notes, can't do any ornamentation), the melody lines tend to be simpler in terms of how wide the leaps are, how long the notes have to be, and the orchestrational texture tends to be more complicated to compensate for the lack of interest that is in the vocal line.

When you're thinking of melodies, do you work on a keyboard or do you come up with melodies in your head?
I can do it any way. I can think of them in my head, I can do it on a keyboard, I can do it on a guitar, I do it on a marimba.

And there's no one way that makes you feel the most comfortable?
It depends on what the end result is going to be. A song like "Strictly Genteel," for example, which has not only a fairly dense orchestral texture, but it's got complicated words, there's no way that I could have done that without the help of a piano, because the piano part is so integral to the thing. I don't play piano – can plunk things out slowly and write down exactly what the thing is supposed to be.

Oftentimes, though, unless you have really skilled musicians in the band, you can't have the piece rendered properly because it takes a certain amount of skill to be able to do those things, and people with that kind of skill generally don't gravitate towards rock and roll. But I've been really lucky in having people available for auditions that want to go into the band and play hard music and actually turn out to be roadable people that can do it. And so I write for them.

When you are working on a composition, do you write everything down? For example, the pieces on Jazz from Hell?
Everything on that album was typed on the Synclavier except for "St. Etienne" which was a live guitar solo.

By "typed on the Synclavier" do you mean that you play it on a keyboard or that you are typing it?
You can do it either way – on the keyboard or by typing note names on sheet music. You look at a stave and say, "I want a G, G3, one eight note long, right there," and you type it in and presto, there's a G there.

And then it plays it for you?
Yeah, as any instrument that you'd like to have it be.

And do you enjoy this method of composing?
Well, since they have software updates every year, and since there's new hardware available every year, every album that I've done on Synclavier has gotten more and more sophisticated. . So compared to what I can do now, it sounds technically crude. The second one I did was the Mothers of Prevention album where I used the voices of people in congress.

Is it true that you had given up the guitar?
I did. I stopped playing it for the last 4 years. I only picked it up again in the last month. I keep it sitting next to my chair in the studio and I occasionally pluck around on it, but I'm only barely getting some callouses back. I literally hadn't touched it since December 23, 1984.

Why did you give it up?
I didn't think that there was any great demand in the marketplace for what I do on the guitar. I mean, why should I bust my chops, so to speak? There's plenty of people who play faster than I do, there's plenty of people who dance around more than I do, and there was nobody doing what I was doing on Synclavier. Rather than stand in line and be just another redundant guitar player plying his trade in the music business, I thought I'd better come up with something new.

But isn't there always going to be an audience for what you do? Does Frank Zappa really have to worry about the marketplace?
Sure. Certainly. Remember – I'm self financed. The money doesn't fly down from heaven or from a recording company. It's all what I can afford to spend to do what I do.

There is a practical side to making records. And then there is the amount of what you can refer to as assumable risk: How weird can you get and still make a living? I think I've experimented well with the fringes of that concept. I'll take it to the max. I will stick my neck out. I'll make albums of stuff that if I had a normal record contract with a normal record company, I would have been dropped from their roster centuries ago.

Some of the things that I've recorded that I happen to like the best are the things that people in the marketplace find the most repulsive about what I do. Songs like "The Dangerous Kitchen" or "The Jazz Discharge Party Hats" are unique in American popular music. There are no two other songs that are in that same style.

If you ask anybody what their favorite song is that I've done, most people would say "Peaches En Regalia" or "Mudshark." They have little or no concept of what some of the other more adventurous things would have been.

Your newest album, Jazz From Hell, contains all instrumentals. Is this because you feel restricted by the song form and feel freer to express yourself without words?
It's two different mediums for me. When you're writing a song with words you have one kind of job to do. I look at that challenge as to how do you take something that is basically in my case prose data and try to make the prose data rhyme with itself and not compete with the notes that are connected to it. So that's the game I involve myself with when I have to write a song with words. When writing an instrumental song, you don't have to make those two things fit together, so it's a different challenge.

So by talking about prose data, do you mean that you work on the words first before the music?
Not always. Sometimes I start with a complicated instrumental line and just for the hell of it see whether I can write words to it. "Inca Roads" is one of the songs that came out that way. It was originally done as a kind of fusion instrumental. I said, "If somebody has to sing this, and it is fiendishly hard to sing, what would be the words that fit on it as it came out?" "Montana" was done the other way. It was like an old story song. The chord changes and notes were fitted in later.

Another example of long prose data that had a musical setting put to it is a song called "Dumb All Over". I wrote it on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to L.A., and it was pages and pages about the fundamentalist right and weird things that they do. And it took awhile to organize a setting that worked on that thing.

You talk about the words and music opposing each other.
Sometimes they're supposed to. I think the irony of the setting is one of the things that can enhance the words or, if the words are used phonetically to assist the music, then you design your entire piece so that the words will definitely take a back seat. They'll just function as texture to the music.

An example of that type of writing would be 1950's "doo-wop" music. The "Doo-run-un". Now what does that mean? But that's your song.

And you have a great love for those fifties songs.
Well, it was the first rock & roll that I heard. It was like a brand new invention when I was going to high school. So I've got a pretty thorough grounding in that musical tradition.

Is that all you were listening to at that time or did you get into classical music too?
No, I was buying rhythm and blues records and avant-garde 20th century classical music at the same time and loving both.

I know Varèse was a major influence.
Well, see, in those days, albums were very expensive, and there were no albums of rock and roll music. The rock and roll album was something that came along long after the rock and roll single was invented, and the original first rock and roll albums were just compilations of hits. If the label had a bunch of hits they would just stick them onto an album. The first one that I ever saw was called Teenage Dance Party that had a bunch of songs from a New York label – I can see it now, it's orange – that was the first one I got. I think the wisdom in the marketplace was that the teenagers wouldn't spend money on albums, they'd spend it on a single but it was a major investment to spend more money on a big record to play it on a slower machine. Remember – most teenagers in those days had 45 rpm record players with a big nozzle in the middle of it that you can't play a LP on. So only a few of the consumers in the rock and roll marketplace actually had a machine that could play an album.

Anyway, I was not really financially in good condition in those days, but I managed to buy two contemporary classical LP's that I listened to day and night, because it was the only two albums I had. I had a cheap recording of "The Rite Of Spring" on Camden budget line. It was the "Worldwide Symphony plays the Rite of Spring". And the other one I had was "The Complete Works Of Edgard Varèse, Volume 1," which is on some obscure label called EMS.

Yeah? And you liked it?
Yeah, sure, right away. My kind of music.

Did you have any friends at the time who shared your enthusiasm for Varèse?
No, but I would play it for them anyway. I mean, usually if they'd come over to the house, everybody does this same thing, if you have records, you tend to play your favorite items for whoever comes in. And that gives them the test to find out what kind of person that individual is. What I used to do was play them parts of the Varèse album and then play them Lightnin' Slim things like "My Starter Won't Start" or "Have Your Way" or I'd play them some Howlin' Wolf. That would clear them out really fast.

They didn't like that stuff either?
Well, usually that would get rid of the girls and the ignorant boys and what was left over was somebody you could have a conversation with.

It's interesting that you mention these two separate currents because I was introduced to your work by a classical cello player who mostly listens to avant-garde 20th century music and you.
Well, he's missing a good bet by not checking out those old records by guys like Lonesome Sundown and Lightnin' Slim. That's good stuff because it's real direct, it's not a matter of pretense there. It's right to the point.

Did you start writing music at this time?
I was writing chamber music. I didn't write a rock and roll song until I was about 20 or 21. But I've been writing chamber music since I was 14.

Did you study keyboard?
No. I started writing music because I liked the way it looked and I had art talent when I was a kid, so I used to draw music. I figured that's what everybody else did, you know, just draw it till you liked the way it looked and then handed it to a musician. Theoretically a person who could read dots on paper and then translate your engraving into some kind of audio masterpiece. And I did, since I didn't know any musicians, labor under this delusion for quite some time and just draw music.

Without being able to read it?
Right, I couldn't read it. I could write it. I could make it look terrific.

Were you basing these drawings on any sheet music that you looked at?
No. I'd seen pictures of music before and I knew how to draw the clefs. That might sound ignorant and impractical but I would say there are many contemporary scores that probably don't sound as good as what I was doodling on paper.

In fact there was a reference – I guess in the early fifties – to a certain type of music common in the contemporary European tradition called "Eye Music". You couldn't play it and you didn't want to listen to it but it looked great on paper. I didn't find out about this concept until I managed to get these things played by musicians and I got the shock of my life when I realized that it didn't sound like what I wanted it to sound like. So at that point I had to find out how the system really worked.

And that's when you learned music theory?
The standard theory that I know is really quite limited because I always found it quite boring. I got a hold of the Walter Piston harmony book when I was in high school and I went through some of the exercises in there. And I was wondering why a person would really want to devote a lifetime to doing this, because after you complete it you'll sound like everybody else who used the same rules. So I learned enough of the basic stuff so I got the concept of what harmony was supposed to do, what voice leading was supposed to do, how melody was supposed to function in a harmonic climate, what rhythm was supposed to do. I learned all of that and then chucked the rest of it.

I started writing my own music in which the thirds were omitted from the chords. That seemed to give me more latitude with the melody because if there's no third in the chord then you're not locked into an exact statement that your harmonic climate is major or minor. If you have a root, a fourth and a fifth, or a root, a second and a fifth, your ability to create atmosphere and imply harmony by having a variety of bass notes that will argue with the suspended chord gives you, for my taste, more opportunities. Then the melody line can go back and forth between major or minor and lydian or whatever else you want with ease. You have more flexibility.

But even to take that approach you'd have to have the understanding of how a triad is structured and the effect of a third.
Yeah, but that's really basic beginner mongoloid stuff.

Yes, but at the same time there are many writers who are at that stage and don't know what a third is.
They don't want to know. I think that when you have award shows that glorify the most ignorant among us for doing things that are called excellent merely because they've achieved large numerical sales, it is not much of an incentive for a young songwriter to come along and say, "I want to learn how music works." Because there's just no reason to participate in the construction of music on an intellectual level when all you have to do is just get lucky one time and then have the record company do the payola. Then you will be the next guy to be standing in line to get a major award. So that's the message that is sent to the marketplace for all the new guys coming in. And there's no glamour to doing the laborious job of developing a personal theory of harmony or a personal feel for how you want rhythm to function in your work.

See, I make a distinction between a songwriter and a composer. They're not always the same kind of a guy because the goals of the two types of disciplines are not always the same. Composers may write songs, but it is a very seldom that a songwriter will do a composition.

A composition is when you're dealing just in a theoretical and abstract way with the raw elements of music, and trying to do things with those basic elements which has not been done before. Instead of sitting down to write a hit, you're going to the raw material to go in a new direction.

Songwriters tend not to do that. They tend to write in a song form. And if you compare it to architecture, it's the difference between building a cathedral and building a Taco Bell. And fast food is important when you're hungry. Fast music is important when you need something to drive to.

Is it your opinion that the state of songwriting is bad and getting worse?
No, the only thing that saves it is the fact that the American's memory span is so short that they actually believe that when they hear the latest regurgitated version of a style that was prevalent five years ago, they believe it's new. I mean, I'm amazed that some of the stuff that is passing for New Wave music today is 1960's semi-folk-rock chord changes that have been reorchestrated to use 1980's technology. It really is the same.

Have you heard any songs recently that you thought were worthwhile?
I like "Living in a Box" by Living in a Box, and I like "Daddy's Home" by Walk the Moon.

So it is possible to use that very restrictive song form and still create something good?
Sure, it is always possible. But when a guy sits down to write a song, he's not sitting down to make history, he's sitting down to make money.

Do you really believe that is always the case? Don't you think there are some songwriters who want to write some timeless songs?
I don't think the urge to be timeless necessarily permeates the pop tune marketplace. The urge to be rich permeates the pop tune marketplace.

That's true, though I know the urge to be timeless does exist among songwriters, although they have to face the reality of the music business.
Any songwriter who had to choose between being rich and being timeless, if he chose timeless, he's probably out of a job. There are just too many commercial pressures on the guy at the end of the food chain, the guy who writes the song, because before he thinks about anything else, he's already looking at airplay or looking at MTV. I think there's got to be an inkling in the back of every songwriter's mind like, "How will this shoot ? What will they do when they make a video of this one?" So what's that got to do with writing a song?

Not much. But isn't it possible for something new and great to be heard-even if it doesn't fit the pat hit-making formula?
Not unless there's a massive change of attitude at the distribution level, which includes the places where music is dispersed: radio, TV, jukeboxes, whatever, until current values disappear. Until then, there is little hope that a person who is doing anything other than formula swill will have an opportunity to have his music recorded, let alone transmitted.

But don't you feel that there's an inherent need among people to have serious, expressive music as a part of their lives?
The problem with that concept is – would they know it if they heard it? Would they like it or would they prefer it to other stuff? See, an audience gets trained. They're trained by their environment. And what they hear on the radio has nothing to do with life – it's all freeze-dried and dead. It's like dead artifacts that are repeated over and over again. The repetition helps to sell records, but the repetition reduces the composition to the level of wallpaper.

Does it?
Sure. Especially in the radio sense, you don't hear it anymore. It's a rock and roll atmosphere that you play in your car, that you hear in an elevator, that you experience in a boutique. It has reduced wallpaper to a lifestyle.

But a great song, even if I hear it a billion times, can still move me. It can't ever become wallpaper, no matter how many times it gets played.
But let's take a look at the broad spectrum of what everybody knows as common American coinage, the musical experience of being an American. The boundary of your musical experience has been determined by accountants. Unless you are going to seek out the newest and the finest of whatever is available in any field, what you are presented with as your set of alternatives that you will choose to inhabit your lifestyle is tiny.

Because of the way that the business is structured? If a record sells 50,000 copies, it's a commercial failure. But you're still reaching 50,000 people. Would you consider that a failure, even if you're reaching that many people and affecting that many lives?
If you were a classical composer and you sold 50,000 albums, you'd be a hero. I mean, the regular pop industry spits at 50,000 records. I regularly do 50,000 records. The only album I ever had that was in the million plus category was Sheik Yerbouti and the only reason that it sold that much is because the song "Bobby Brown Goes Down" which could never be played in the U.S., was a hit all over Europe. The bulk of those sales were outside the U.S. so it was an unpredictable fluke. Usually my record sales are in the 50,000 to 300,000 range depending on what the content of the album is.

Do you consider sales of 50,000 records to be a failure?
I think that that's about the bottom margin for feeling okay given what it costs to make an album. You know, the success, if you're going to look at it in financial terms, you have to look at the difference between what you spend to make it and what it nets you after it's gone into the marketplace. And because I have my own studio and do my own stuff, I can actually make a profit at 50,000 records, where another guy probably could not.

So what would be your advice to the young songwriter when he sits down to write a song-should he concern himself with writing a good hook or should he simply try to write a great song?
It depends on what he wants to do. If he just wants to make money, he should copy everybody else's stuff, which is what everybody else is doing.

But you can only do that for so long.
That depends on how good a copier you are.

How about if you want a career in songwriting?
Basically, it's a career in being a fraud. It's just like when someone says, "What would you advise a young composer?" I always say, "Get a real estate license." You can't earn a living being a composer in the United States. But as far as being a songwriter goes, you can make a lot of money if you will listen for what everybody else has done that has been successful, and tweak it around to the point where you can convince an accountant at a record company that you're fresh, new and original. This is usually accomplished by changing your hairdo periodically and having a good wardrobe. That's basically the business you're entering. The idea of writing a nice tune is the farthest thing from the minds of the people you will be doing business with, and that is the reality of the business.

Recently we interviewed the songwriting team of Livingston & Evans who said that they didn't think that a good melody had been written in about thirty years.
I'd say that's probably true, because the basic thrust of today's music is dance music, especially for Americans, who have an incredibly limited concept of what rhythm is. If you look at the typical dance rhythms that motivate an American dancer, you're very close to march music. It's boom-bap-boom-bap, and if there's anything more than that, an American's feet get tangled up.

So you start with a basic sort of fascist marching beat, and then you add a few parallel fifths to it (if you want it to be heavy metal) and make sure that your melodies don't have anything shorter than an eighth note. Make sure that there is an incredible amount of repetition in the composition, because you're presuming that when people are out there semi-marching and pumping their buttocks up and down that they couldn't really comprehend any more than a five note melody.

If you were to were to do a statistical analysis of some of the most popular, big selling tunes that have been on the market in recent days, you'd see not too many notes, the chords don't give you too many surprises, and the beat is boom-bap. So if you want to do that and make a lot of money, it's not too hard to learn. But if you want to write the great American tune, I would say to get a real estate license.

Do you have an album of your own that is a favorite?
By the time I finish working on an album, I never want to hear it again in my life.

And you don't?
No, I do, sometimes. For example, we're releasing the old masters collections and the old things have to be remixed or remastered again and you do get to hear them again. But usually what I hear is everything that went wrong during a session. It's very seldom that I'll listen to a song and say, "Yeah, that's a good song," because by the time I'm finished doing the grunt work of putting an album together, the initial thrill of writing the song has vanished.

If you are the artist and the producer and the record company president and the art director, after doing all those jobs it becomes a blurr; the original songwriting idea is just something that happened in ancient history.

And when you're in the studio you don't reconnect with that original inspiration at all?
No. That's a one shot deal.

If you had to name a few songs, written by other people, that you consider to be great, what would they be?
I liked "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan. I liked "Paperback Writer" by The Beatles and "I Am The Walrus." And one may not underestimate the impact of "Louie Louie," the original Richard Berry version.

Were those the only songs by Dylan and the Beatles that you like or do you like them in general?
No, those are the only ones I liked. I generally liked the Rolling Stones better than the Beatles during that era; they were a little bit more to my taste because they were more involved in the blues.

I like the group Them, with Van Morrison. And the other thing that I really enjoyed were the early compositions of David and Bacharach. I thought that they were so good because prior to that time there had been little of bitonal or polytonal harmonic implication in American pop music, and we are to thank them for providing them through those early Dionne Warwick recordings.

What do you think of the New York school of composers, such as Phillip Glass?
I'm not familiar with his music but the whole realm of the New York school of repetition music, it's like stuff to be played in the background of an art gallery. It's an atmosphere that people might enjoy participating in, but it's not my style; it's not my idea of a good time.

Should we expect in the future that most of your work will be on the Synclavier as opposed to working with a band?
I don't think it will be exclusively that because there's still certain things human beings do better than machines. One thing about human beings, though, is that they really enjoy being paid. And one thing about doing records that are not selling 30 million units is you have to be very conscious of what you're spending to make the record so one day you have made a profit that allows you to make another record. That's another reason why that machine (the Synclavier) is sitting there.

Do you find any satisfaction in your enormous body of work and the knowledge that it will remain?
Not in a way that you can identify with. You know, I think that what you have in mind is probably something more romantic than the way I look at it.

How do you look at it?
Well, all of the songs that were dealing with sociological topics were things that needed to be said at the time. The comments made then still remain true today and will probably remain true as long as we have bad government and ignorant religion working in America. And on that basis I think they serve a sociological function as an encouragement to other people who have a similar point of view.