Q: Your shows are very well rehearsed.
Zappa: Immaculately rehearsed.
Q: You've said that so many times and, hence the feedback that you get in the press from some ex-musicians about being strict.
Zappa: Let me say this right now: Any ex-musician is an ex-musician for one of two reasons. One, he's not good enough to be in the band anymore; or Two, he had a career opportunity that led him to resign his post, for which there are probably 30 people waiting for his job.
I have no problem getting people to volunteer to subject themselves to the discipline that's in the band, and if you knew anything about the band and the crew ... There is a spirit of accomplishment that surrounds this touring unit that is really quite remarkable. Second only to being in the Marines because this band can go out there and do anything. And they know it. And they're thankful that they were rehearsed to the point where, even under the most adverse circumstances, they can go out and do a 2-hour show that'll kick yer ass. And the crew will have the thing up and down in record time and everybody gets along and they're happy to be doing it, and that's what the discipline is all about.
A guy who leaves the band and then complains about the discipline... he's maybe regretting the fact that he's not in the band anymore and so how else is he gonna get his name in the paper than to say that I'm a dictator? Well, fact of the matter is, I AM the dictator - I'm the guy who signs the checks. I'm also the guy who has to take the responsibility for everything that goes wrong and along with that I have the responsibility for making sure that the band delivers a good performance to an audience that bought a ticket. So it's not really being a dictator, it's being the referee between the audience and the band.
If the audience buys a ticket I say "Okay band, you have to do this - and these people want it good so give it to them good." And if they don't do it well they either have to improve themselves or they go. The word in the band is "Will that be an aisle or a window?", which means that your ticket back to Los Angeles is right over here, and everybody knows that. I've sent two guys home already from this tour.
But see, the people that find that baffling would be people who have like a Union Mentality. The Union Mentality means that too many people do too little work for too much money and then go on strike in order to get more days off. And there are a lot of people like this in the world who think that that's the way things ought to be.
My attitude is this: I pay money to have a service performed for me on behalf of an audience that pays money for a service performed for them and I'm there to make sure that if somebody buys a ticket to my show they're not going to be disappointed in it. They're going to see a band that knows what they're doing, that does it well and delivers entertainment for the money that's spent.
Same thing on a record. Whether you like the style of the music is irrelevant. The quality of what's put into the show is definitely there and that quality is the result of a huge cash investment that I have to put out before the tour even starts. It costs a quarter of a million dollars to make a band sound like that. That's talking about 2 months of rehearsal, six days a week, eight hours a day; everybody's on salary, crew is on salary. I have the cost of all those salaries plus the rental of the hall that we rehearse in, the equipment and all that stuff - I pay for it before I get a nickel from anybody buying a ticket.
There's not too many groups that will take that kind of a risk and not too many groups that have one man in the group who takes that financial risk himself. And that's the way I do my business. So, if there's something wrong with that then lemme know. The results speak for themselves.
Q: Last year you had a riot on your hands in Sicily. You went there for a visit of the old roots.
Zappa: That's right. I wanted to see the town that my father was born in and I went there and I saw it and then we played the concert and the next thing you know, you have the army and the police; each with their own general telling them what to do; an audience that had brought their own guns; and they're shooting tear gas and tearing up this stadium that we were playing in. We played for an hour and a half in this riot with tear gas in our face and everything else, and when it was all over we went off the stage and we were trapped inside this place. The audience was circling around outside shooting at the police and the police were shooting back. I got a pretty good idea of what my Sicilian roots are like after seeing the town of Partinico - it was pretty bleak.
Q: After that you were very ... pissed off really about coming back to Europe.
Zappa: Oh yes.
Q: And you swore that you wouldn't come back but . . .
Zappa: I changed my mind.
Q: What you were playing yesterday, and I think you've done it many times before, but yesterday was very very obvious, you're playing very much what I could describe as Contrary Notes; not going according to the melody. The guitar notes that you were playing were like a totally different song altogether. Do you ever shut the rest of the rhythm section from your ears and actually concentrate on actually . . .
Zappa: Well I always concentrate on what I'm playing but I can hear the rhythm section and I have the type of discipline where I can either play their rhythm . . . Actually, what was happening last night on some of the solos I was using a digital delay that had a single chord stored in it, and it was on a loop, and every time that loop would come around it would have a certain rhythm which was totally irrelevant to what the rhythm of the bass and drums were doing. So I have a choice of two different established rhythms that I could play, plus the option of choosing a third one that was completely between those.
There's no reason why the human mind shouldn't be able to compute that kind of math when they hear it and it leads you into some interesting harmonic and melodic directions.
For example, a melody functions in a harmonic climate. The chord that is being played is the harmonic climate - if it's an augmented chord it's a mysterious climate; if it's a diminished chord it's a little tenser; if it's minor it's serious; if it's major it's happy; if it's major seventh you're falling in love; if it's augmented 11th it's bebop. You know these are all established harmonic aromas that people recognize whether they do it consciously or not, that's what's built into you. So a melody functions against a harmonic climate in terms of what is the fractional delay between the time that you hit a note that is tension to that chord, to the the time that you hit a note which is inside the chord which creates the resolution - that's how melodies work. How many notes are you playing in your line that rub against the chord versus how many notes are inside the chord that takes the tension to rest. Your ear is computing that, ok?
Now, if you're playing a straight disco number where everybody is marching along to the same beat, well, your options for the amount of intrigue you can create with a melody improvised against a chord are pretty limited. Because the minute you stray from an exact 16th note fluctuation, the disco consumer loses interest because he wants everything to sound like it came out of a Casio rhythm machine. But with the type of stuff that I do, once the solo begins, unless it's a fixed 12-bar thing like I did two choruses on "Penguin In Bondage" in the key of D - that's that. But if it's an open-ended solo that starts with a single tonality, I can do amazing things in that context if you understand what is happening musically - what's going on.
Some people listen to it and say "That's awfully weird," or "That scale is strange," or "Those notes are weird," but there's a reason for doing it and there's a lot of skill involved in choosing those notes and there's also a lot of skill involved in the rhythm section being able to accompany me in what I'm doing. That bass player [Scott Thunes] is great at following me. He's one of my favorite bass players to work with because his harmonic concept, um - he understands what I'm doing when I do those things.
Q: Do you personally think that you're under-rated as a guitarist?
Zappa: I think that I shouldn't be rated as a guitarist. Rating guitar players is a stupid hobby.
Q: You're a composer.
Zappa: I'm a composer and my instrument is the guitar. If you like the composition, fine - I mean, my technique as a guitar player is ... fair. There are plenty of people who play faster than I do, never hit a wrong note, and have a lovely sound, okay? If you want to rate guitar players - go for them. But there isn't anybody else who will take the chances that I will take with composition, live onstage in front of an audience - and just go out there and have the nerve, the ultimate audacity to say "Okay, I don't know what I'm gonna play, and you don't know what I'm gonna play, and that makes us equal so let's go, we'll have an adventure here." And, that's what I do. There's no way to rate that. You either like that kind of stuff or you don't.
This is the second of two Frank Zappa interviews from the same CD.
As with the first transcription, The Interviewer (Q:) is not credited on the disc and so he remains anonymous. I believe, due to the context and the accent of the interviewer, that this was possibly conducted somewhere in Germany. While in the first interview it was obvious that the interviewer was a fan, in this one it seems equally clear that this interviewer knows very little of Frank and his work. He keeps referring to an incorrect bio for information on asking some of his questions. -- Evil Bob
Q: How have you managed to survive all these years in such a bitchy industry?
Z: It's not even a matter of surviving in it because I refuse to be stopped. You know, just because somebody ... There's a big audience that wants albums that have all the same songs on 'em, and there's a number of other artists who do that so they're never going to run out of material - they'll always have what they like, but the people who like what I do like variety. They enjoy that experience of having the contrasts between a song in one style with one kind of a sound followed by something completely different. To them that's a refreshing experience.
That's the way I like to hear music, I like things next to each other that at first seem incongruous, but then when you step back into the whole thing you see it fits together properly.
Q: So in this context of the free discussion, what does a success mean to you?
Zappa: Success to me is if I have a musical or let's say any kind of an artistic concept and I start out to execute it, if it is executed to 100% of the specifications of what I imagined when the idea first came up - that's success. That's the only thing that really matters to me because if I don't enjoy listening to it myself when it's all done, then why did I bother to do it? Because there are other things I can do to make more money than this. This is a high overhead business. I happen to like what I'm doing so, to me success is if you get close to 100%.
Q: How did Sometime In New York City, the John Lennon and Yoko Ono collaboration come about?
Zappa: The day before the show, a journalist in New York City woke me up - knocked on the door and is standing there with a tape recorder and goes: "Frank, I'd like to introduce you to John Lennon," you know, waiting for me to gasp and fall on the floor and I said "Well, ok. Come on in." And we sat around and talked, and I think the first thing he said to me was "You're not as ugly as I thought you would be." So anyway, I thought he had a pretty good sense of humor so I invited him to come down and jam with us at the Fillmore East.
We had already booked in a recording truck because we were making the "Live at the Fillmore" album at the time. After they had sat in with us, an arrangement was made that we would both have access to the tapes. He wanted to release it with his mix and I had the right to release it with my mix - so that's how that one section came about.
The bad part is, there's a song that I wrote called "King Kong" which we played that night, and I don't know whether it was Yoko's idea or John's idea but they changed the name of the song to "Jam Rag," gave themselves writing and publishing credit on it, stuck it on an album and never paid me. It was obviously not a jam session song - it's got a melody, it's got a bass line, it's obviously an organized song - little bit disappointing. I've never released my version of the mixes of that night.
Q: Do you ever intend to?
Zappa: One day yeah - but it would be drastically different because there were things that were edited out of their version and certain words that were being sung that were removed because of the editorial slant that they wanted to apply to the material and I have a slightly different viewpoint on it. (Parody lyrics regarding Yoko Ono --Ed.)
Q: Another thing the bio states is that your interest lies more within the serious music.
Z: No. Let me explain to you about serious music. What most people regard as serious music is not really that serious at all. See, there's been a lot of propaganda about classical music since it was first invented. Let's examine the history of classical music briefly, and then you'll see what I'm talking about.
All the music that people regard as great masterpieces today were written for the amusement of kings, churches or dictators - that's who was paying the rent. If the man who wrote the music happened to be working in a style that was appealing to the person who was paying for it at the time, he had a hit, he had a job, and he stayed alive. If he didn't, he could lose his fingers, he could lose his head, he could be exiled or he'd starve to death. There was very little in between.
All you have to do is look at a book called "Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians" and you can see that throughout the ages there have been guys who had hits and guys who didn't have hits, and it's not necessarily connected to the quality of what they wrote, it's connected to how well they pleased the patron that was paying the freight - and it's the same thing today.
So, all the norms, the acceptable norms of classical music, are really the taste norms of the church, the king, or the dictator that has been been paying for it down through the ages. It was not the taste of the people. People never got to decide. So, when you say I have more of an interest in serious music, I take my work seriously but I perceive it as entertainment and it's entertainment for those people who like that sort of entertainment. I don't write for a king, I don't write for a church, and I don't write for a government - I write for my friends and that's the way the material should be perceived - it's entertainment for them. Even if it's written for an orchestra or it's written for a rock and roll band, it makes no difference, it's the same people who would listen to the music. I have several orchestral albums, okay? Those are not purchased by people who go out and buy the Dvorak New World Symphony, they're bought by rock and roll consumers. A special type of rock and roll consumer. Q: When did you realize that you can be self-employed in the industry that until that time did not allow self-employment?
Zappa: I realized it at the point where . . . that first independent label deal was as a result of a lawsuit that was brought against MGM. They were happy to give me an independent deal because we had caught them doing something with the books that was not.... right. So they figured you know, this stuff will never sell, he'll be out of business in 15 minutes - let him do it. But my arrangement is unique, not only in the fact that I'm self-employed, but that I own all my masters. I own the rights to everything that I do. Most people who make records do not. And I fought for that and I think that it was worth fighting for.
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