WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 688 - Dweezil Zappa

Episode Date: March 10, 2016

When it comes to making music, high standards were set for Dweezil Zappa at a very young age. His father made more than 80 albums in his lifetime, which provided Dweezil with a lot of influences but created some roadblocks, too. Dweezil tells Marc that his own musical journey not only made him a better artist, it brought him closer to his late father. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5 p.m. in Rock City at torontorock.com. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category.

And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talked to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Lock the gate! All right, let's do this.

How are you? What the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fucking ears? What the fucksters? What the fuck wads? I don't know if that's a good one. I don't know if that's a positive thing.

How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? This is Mark Maron. This is WTF. This is my podcast. Thank you for listening.

By the way, my guest is Dweezil Zappa. Dweezil Zappa, son of Frank and Gail, brother of Moon, Diva, and Ahmet. Dweezil Zappa, the guitar player of the bunch. Dweezil Zappa, the true legacy of his father's fingers. Yeah, I talked to Dweezil. And many of you who've listened to this show for years know I dated Moon for a little while. Didn't really end well, but that was not a topic. When Dweezil became available to do the show,

I thought, let's talk some music with Dweezil about his fingers and his guitar and the journey he's been on and his relationship with his father's legacy and his father's playing because he does play a lot of Frank out there on the road. There are family things I could talk about, but I chose to keep it on guitar and Dweezil and Frank. Frank, the mythic Frank Zappa, the mountain that is Frank Zappa, the empire of sound that was generated by Frank Zappa.

Apparently, hours and hours of which we have not even heard, has not even been laid out, laid down. Frank was a big supporter of comedy as well he was a cutting-edge motherfucker in his day carved his own way to the point where he's got so much stuff and there's so much genius to it you got to be a special type of nerd to fully wrap your brain around the frank zappa thing and i'm you know i'm still taking it in like right before i started dating moon back in the day i started getting into zappa and uh i had a brief foray into that world i was able to see the original studio and stuff but uh you know where do you even start the funny thing is zappa connects to beefheart beefheart connects to howland wolf

howland wolf directly connects to hubert sumlin his guitar player and this is a roundabout way of me saying that i did this voiceover for a documentary. Sidemen, Long Road to Glory. And if you're down at South by Southwest, you can go see it. All right? I did the narration. The world premiere of Sidemen, Long Road to Glory, is tomorrow, Friday, March 11th. And there are other screenings next week.

Go to SidemenFilm.com for all the details. Hubert Sumlin, that's who it's about. Three Sidemen, three blue Sidemen. It's about Hubert Sumlin, Pinetop Perkins, and Willie Big Eye Smith.

It basically captures the last three years and the lives of all those guys. They died within eight months of each other. Hubert Sumlin played behind Howlin' Wolf. Pinetop and Willie were in Muddy Waters Band. The guys did a nice job with this.

The fellas that made the movie. Scott Rosenbaum and his crew. There's a lot of guest appearances in it joe perry's in it elvin bishop joe bonamassa the guitar player sugar blue robin ford guy davis they talked to what robbie krieger john landis talks bonnie rate sus, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, Brad Whitford from Aerosmith as well. These are all people talking about Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, Willie Smith. These kind of movies, they're about a time that none of us lived in certainly and if you love the music you're

going to want to see this movie you know these were lives man fucking lives lived and these guys define something if you think about how and wolf you think about hubert something about muddy waters there'd be no rock and roll without these guys i know he's sounding just a dumb old guy but you can go directly i guess my point was directly from howlin wolf to captain beefart who was basically a psychedelic howlin wolf who then deconstructed everything in music itself and and created something different and the relationship between zappa and beefart was formative for certainly for zappa and that gets us the Dweezil. But nonetheless, the movie is great. It's a great doc.

There's a lot of good people in it. It's about some amazing musicians, and it premieres tomorrow, Friday, March 11th at South by Southwest, and there'll be screenings all week. I was trying to remember when I first took in the blues. My relationship with blues music is weird because I play the blues at home here in the garage, and I play them alone in my living room, and I play a lot of blues-based music,

but I don't necessarily listen to the blues that often. I don't know why that is. I've been trying to think about that. I enjoy playing blues music, but I have a hard time listening to it unless I'm really in the right frame of mind, and I can really isolate why I'm listening to it unless i'm really in the right frame of mind and i can really isolate why why i'm listening to a particular performer i don't know what it was that resonated with me early on it was just a it was just a thing either you're wired for it or you're not and when i learned that three car that three chord blues or that bump that fucking i was one of the first

things i learned on guitar and i was like this is the key to everything and i'm not saying that isn't true but then i would got i got into this weird phase where i don't know if i've talked about it but i decided that until you were able to own for yourself muddy waters rolling and tumbling blues until you were able to make that thing your own and and find your voice in that song you weren't officially a blues man it was just this theory i had so i spent years trying to make myself my own version of rolling and tumbling because i thought that there was some sort of depth of a moral turpitude and uh and and pain in that song that has to do with broken hearts and also about just the existential thing of like, you know, just being alive and knowing it. And I just thought that was

the song. That was some sort of Rosetta Stone. But I just became sort of obsessed. And then you sort of hear this Robert Johnson business. The first time you listen to robert johnson who's the guy the crossroads guy the guy who made a deal with devil the great mysterious mythic presence of and and the heart of uh all modern blues first time you listen to that record you're like i can't even understand it it's like it's too crackly what's so great about this and then you got to go past all the crackles and past the potential speed differentiation and past what was pulled off a 78 recording and try to isolate those magical notes and that magical voice into's fucking a wizard on the guitar it's his birthright in a way but uh but he i can't ever get to a level where i can even understand what the hell he's doing i'll talk to him about it because those guys that understand the instrument inside and out

and the electronics of it and what to make with the sound and how to do the sound i'm very impressed with those guys but i have not got a brain that's going to do that kind of work on anything that does not desire to have that much control of the creativity but i'm impressed by it you ever listen frank zappa could fucking play guitar like a like crazy man and all his stuff and all the orchestrations and then dweezil's got this new record out that uh is sort of a a personal journey for him it's called uh via zamata you can get that wherever you get music he's got tour dates coming up around the country you can go to DweezilZappaWorld.com for tickets. This is me and Dweezil Zappa. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats.

Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs and mozzarella balls, yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats, get almost, almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. It's a night for the whole family.

Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5 p.m in rock city at torontorock.com

what kind of guitar do you come in here with i have a guitar that is basically like a 335 but it's uh the trini lopez model uh so it has a different headstock on it and just a couple little things but it's uh uh for the new record um the via zamata record and and the shows that we're going to do uh i needed a guitar that would have a um a different kind of full-bodied rhythm guitar sound. I mostly play an SG, but I just needed something that would have a different kind of chime to it. That's the one you played on, like, I thought it was almost like a classical guitar. There's one cut on that record that sounds like a Spanish guitar almost. Well, there is some Spanish guitar on one part of a song called Truth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you're playing that? Yep. Do you do much acoustic shit? Yeah. You know, I play acoustic guitar. I don't have that many acoustic guitars.

I think I have maybe two acoustic guitars. Yeah, yeah. I love the sound of them, but the real problem for me with acoustic guitars is they always typically have heavier strings. Right. And my fingers don have heavier strings. Right. My fingers don't callus. Yeah.

So the heavy strings just tear me up. What do you mean they don't callus? Look, I play like hours every day. Come on. Yeah. I just felt his fingers. Yeah. And that's as callous as they get.

So if I take a shower like too soon before a show, it's like my fingers will just, the skin will rip right off of that. That's bizarre, man. Yeah. Isn't it? Is that your cross to bear as a guitar player? It is. It's like, why can't I get the hard weather tips?

Yeah, it doesn't even matter. I mean, I could play 12 hours a day and it doesn't do anything. That's fucking weird, man. Yeah. Do you still practice how many times a day well i i play a lot you know i mean lately for uh for the new um tour that we're you're practicing i'm playing probably eight hours a day something like that yeah yeah yeah well like when i when i uh i dated your sister briefly she it was funny because she said that

um when she was growing up all she heard from your room was beatle beatle beatle beatle beatle beatle over and over and over yeah well I mean the thing was when I started playing guitar I mean I I always appreciated my father's playing and his music but I knew even from knowing uh very little about music at the age of 12 that that stuff was something that was really hard. And I would have to know stuff, you know. So I had to start somewhere else. But I started with, I got really inspired by Edward Van Halen and Randy Rhoades. So, I mean, we're talking about 1981, 82.

Right. You know, and at that time, the most popular music in the world was hard rock. Yeah, yeah. With those big guitar players. Yeah, so I was really inspired by the sound and the stuff that they were doing. And so I started to try to learn all that stuff. And of course, to most people,

it just sounds like beadly, beadly, beadly because there's a lot of notes, you know, involved in practicing, you know, like... they were doing and so i started to try to learn all that stuff and of course to to most people it just sounds like beadly beadly beadly because there's a lot of notes you know involved and practicing you know but did you do scales and shit i did i mean i learned when i first uh started taking guitar seriously uh it was interesting because steve vi was in frank's band and around yeah he was around the house and he was only about 19 or 20 right uh and so uh frank asked him to show me a couple things so i learned a couple scales from him and a couple little things but so you were just a kid sitting around with a guitar like kind of hungry looking yeah and frank's like yeah go to go show that kid a few things yeah exactly uh and then nine nine

months later i recorded the very first thing that i ever put out, which was called My Mother is a Space Cadet. And it was produced by Eddie Van Halen. So it was this crazy thing where I had only been playing guitar for such a short period of time. And out of the blue, Eddie Van Halen called the house and ended up coming over like 20 minutes later. He didn't have a relationship with you or your dad before that? No, he called the house. So you got to imagine, nowadays it's ubiquitous to know about any celebrity through any tweet, you know, what they had for breakfast or whatever.

But in that time frame, in the early 80s, there was magazines like Cream. Yeah, Crawdaddy and Guitar Player. Or even like Hit Par daddy and, but, or like hit parade and stuff like that. That was the only place you saw pictures of musicians outside of what they were doing in the studio or on stage. Right. So you had to just imagine what these people must be like,

you know? And so I didn't even know what he sounded like, you know, although you grew up in a recording studio kind of, right. But, but, but the thing is I, but, but for to know anything about a recording studio kind of right but but but the thing is i

uh but but for to know anything about a celebrity like you know eddie van halen right there there was nothing there was no mtv cribs right there was nothing like that so so you would buy a record and you would listen and you would imagine all these things about well you know how did these people make this right yeah but so then some guy calls and says he's eddie van halen so we have no way to verify but then he shows up yeah and sure enough it's him and how old are you 12 you know and and so the thing that was so cool how did he know to reach out to you because you had said publicly somewhere no he wasn't reaching out to me he reached out to to frank yeah he wanted to to meet frank right and uh i guess talk about some music or something.

But what happened was he shows up and it was, for me, the 12-year-old me is looking at this like, I mean, he was wearing the women and children first jumpsuit. So he shows up and he's walking up the stairs to the studio and he might as well have been backlit with a smoke machine. You know, I mean, it was like a bona fide superhero walking into the house. So for me, it was the coolest thing. He shows up, he's got this guitar. It was a purple Stratocaster shaped guitar, but it had tape over the headstock. Sure. Because he was just at that time starting to work with Kramer um uh-huh all right okay right you know he wasn't plugging any name right right but

so anyway he plugs this guitar in and i immediately want to know how do you play mean street how do you play yeah yeah eruption and and so i got to see like you know from two feet away how he played those things, and that made a huge difference in how I could learn to play guitar because I could see the technique and how it was done, how he did it up close. Because there's a lot of trial and error when you learn things from a record. You have to try to figure out, okay, well, I can hear the notes work here, but they can also work at this point on the next. Right, where is he playing and how is the easiest way to get there? Right.

And so it sort of made perfect sense when I saw how he did it because when I was trying to learn that stuff, I wasn't doing it the way he was. Right, and you were spending like nine hours, right? Yeah. And then they just show up and you're like, ah, fuck. Yeah, not like it was ever easy. Right.

I mean, to play Eruption or play any of his songs and play them with the level of skill commensurate with his ability, that's a lifetime's worth of work. Yeah. Do you still have a relationship with him? Yeah, I see him every now and again. We were rehearsing in a room right next to them when they were getting ready for their last tour and stuff.

With David? Yep. Oh, yeah. What'd you hear? Yelling or playing? I mean, they actually, they were running the set that they were getting ready for that Kimmel show in Hollywood.

So they were running that set, and they were sounding good, you know? It's Van. So they were running that set and they were, they were sounding good. You know, it's Van Halen. Yeah. Right. I, um,

so what, when did you actually start playing? Like I get sort of fascinated with not like I came to your father's music much later, like a little before I, I, I remet your sister. I'd started amassing vinyl.

So I, cause I, there was part of me that was always like, you know, like, well, I got to wrap my brain around this shit. Like, I mean, I have to reckon with Zappa at some point. Yeah. I mean, you grew up in it, but obviously as you got older,

I assume that the drive to get inside your father's music was, you know, personal and not just professional. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've been doing Zappa Play Zappa for 10 years right now. You know, this is, it's been a huge part of my life and my musical, I mean, it was a training ground for a lot of things, but what started it was after Frank passed, there was this sort of relegation of his music to this novelty file.

In American culture? Yeah. Because of the five or six hits that were funny songs? And in a way, I can understand that if the only thing you've ever heard on the radio from him is... Sheik Your Booty or Don't Eat the yellow snow or valley girl or whatever then you think oh yeah he's the guy with the silly jokey songs whatever but he made over 80 albums in his lifetime records yeah sometimes five albums a year did your parents ever talk yeah yeah i just i picture he's like i'm going downstairs well you know what's so crazy is he works so fast that was uh and he would get

people that were excellent at what he needed them to do and he would just make it so that stuff was always on a first or second or third take and then you just keep going right so and he obviously loved to play yeah but i mean the level of of um quality that went into the details of the recording the writing the arranging all that stuff uh you know it's it's astonishing when you really try to to pay attention to how he did what he did yeah uh it's i mean it's unrivaled anywhere in the world of music what was the first stuff like like, let's go back a little bit. So how old are you? You're a little older than my age?

I'm 46. Oh, you're 46? Yep. So you're younger than me. God damn it. So I'm 52. But what do you remember about what was going on at that house when you were like your earliest memories of the musicians and stuff coming in

and what was happening? Well, there wasn't a lot of stuff happening like what people imagine. It wasn't like there were people in and out of the house constantly, all these different musicians and things. Most of the records that were made at the house once the studio was built, I mean, you know, there was a punch card. You had to like clock in, you know, this was like a business.

There was a time clock? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, so the thing is, you know, growing up, there weren't a lot of people, like I tell the story that Eddie Van Halen showed up and, you know, just out of the blue, but we didn't have much of that.

There wasn't like a lot of just, you know, different musicians stopping by. But what about by that time what was beef heart and your dad still friends yeah but uh he wasn't really around the house much he would call occasionally and you'd have experiences as a kid answering the phone and there'd be like some guy And I say, yeah. I've got a platypus in my briefcase. And then basically as a kid, you already just go, hold on. And you're like, Dad, Captain Beefheart's on the phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it wasn't like this like grand central of

musicians coming out there were sessions yeah and it was serious you know i mean frank was uh he wasn't really social i mean he was he was pretty anti-social he didn't have a lot of friends he wasn't about like hanging out or anything it was when he was working it was we're on the clock let's make this happen and you know and keep moving it was when he was working it was we're on the clock let's make this happen and you know and keep moving it was just everything was moving forward all the time so he never sat still really uh i mean he was sitting still in his chair while he was composing but you know like as a family thing you guys you know it was it was not traditional in the ozzy and harriet you know obviously yeah but uh he was he basically worked the opposite end of the clock.

So when he was waking up, you know, everybody was basically going to sleep, you know, so it was because he could get more done when everybody was asleep and it was quiet in the house and all that kind of stuff. And I guess most of you just sort of revolved around his schedule on some level. It just became normal. Or you guys, and eventually you guys just sort of had your own lives. Well, you know, we would have dinner. His would be breakfast and ours would be dinner, you know. And it was just that kind of stuff.

80 records. Yeah, well, I mean, it's really wild when you think about uh there were about three or four times in the 70s where he made five albums in one year and one time it was specifically on purpose because he did it to get out of a record deal right uh which had never been done before you know it's the most audacious thing ever you know he wasn't uh enjoying how the record deal was working so he turned in five albums uh all at once and said i'm done yeah and they said you can't do that i just did you know and uh and it revolved it turned into a lawsuit which he won but uh were they good records yeah they were all good records, you know? But the thing about it is the industry changed because of that.

Then contracts were written so that that could never happen again. So they had to tear them out over years. Yeah, if you had a five-record deal, you could only record when the record company said you could record, and it was spread out over time. And they owned you. Yeah. Right.

But, you know, Frank, for people that don't know, he owned all of his master recordings, which is also on her. He went out of his way to do that. And he produced early on. He found some bands. Was it through Fantasy? I can't remember.

Well, he did a couple of things with some people, but he wasn't doing a lot of that. He helped Alice Cooper. He produced a record from Grand Funk Railroad. He did a couple little things. He helped out George Duke. So in terms of your sort of growing up as a guitar player, because you put out your first whole record.

What year was that? I think it was 1986, and I was 15 when I made the record right came out when i was 16 um and was the was the dream because i know that you and your brother did a show and you kind of acted here and there and and i don't know i think you and moon had some shit going on but like what was the goal when did it become like all about musicians i mean mean, I was always mostly focused on music and playing guitar and stuff like that. But there was a period in the 90s where guitar playing and actually being a skilled musician was frowned upon. Like you actually had difficulty getting work if you played well. Were you doing studio work work i was doing stuff uh i mean i've played on a lot of people's records over the

years but uh but what i was starting to get into at that time was um getting into film score oh yeah stuff and but there was that was the one time uh really in the sort of early to middle 90s where I just got sort of disillusioned by what music would be or could be because you know I had learned to be a rock guitar player that now that was the last

thing anybody ever needed on a record what was going on then was that well it was after Nirvana and all that stuff so it got loose it got then was that well it was after nirvana and all that stuff so then it got to the point where it was uh it was really just more about people seem to think that oh the more simplistic or uneducated you're playing sounded then that was what was more honesty yeah you know but but to me it just it's it's one of those things that that it makes it so that people go, oh, I could do that. It's lowering the bar so much that that it. Right. You know, it just seems like, oh, well, you know, and then but then you have people that that just because of their ignorance of of music and other stuff,

music and other stuff think that they're doing something so amazingly unique and original because they have their limited scope and they didn't learn how to do it other than teach themselves and it's noisy and it's messy and right you know so to a certain degree they they have their own personality in that but it's it's well well that's always been the way it's been i mean like the reason why people played rock and roll was it was three fucking chords and it was like now you can do that and and it was that's was the whole industry was everybody playing the same goddamn song right so i think what happened when you were talking about was like people actually turned on hair metal it was like this movement against metal yeah but i wasn't really uh about trying to just do only like metal music right you know but that but that type of rock well something that

that still had some uh see basically i guess virtuosity yeah that that that element of it where where that is allowed to flourish within the music but see the thing is i grew up listening to only what frank was working on or or whatever he was listening to did he really pipe it through the house well no i mean it was that was just uh you know it was ubiquitous in the house because uh he if he was downstairs yeah he's downstairs you hear some noise you hear whatever but the thing is it's whatever he was working on or whatever he was listening to on in his record collection so it could have been rhythm and blues records or it could have been other classical composers like Verraz or Stravinsky, or it could have been the Bulgarian women's choir or it could have been

anything, but we didn't listen to the radio. He had a big appetite for any kind of music. So I never knew what was on the radio until I was about 12. And then when I heard the radio, I said, wait a minute, uh,

what's wrong here? There's a bunch of stuff missing, you know, where's, where's all the rest of it, you radio, I said, wait a minute, what's wrong here? There's a bunch of stuff missing, you know, where's, where's all the rest of it, you know, because I, I did this Stravinsky on this rock station. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was totally confused because there was so much simplicity in this stuff and I had been used to all this instrumentation and tricky rhythms and things. Cause that was just what I heard growing up, you know? So that, that really was a little bit of a thing that throughout my life, you know, when I listened to music, I'm always sort of hoping to be surprised coming around the corner with some

other thing that's, that's coming. Yeah. Well, that's what, what happens to me when I, you know, if I'll sit down and listen, like even like to your record, it seems to me that, that this new record, how do you pronounce it? Via Zamata. Via Zamata. It's sort of like, you know, it's you taking everything that you've learned all your life, but also sort of somehow honoring, you know, the memory of the way your father orchestrates stuff too, a little bit, right? Yeah. I mean, that, that's a pretty good way of putting it because uh you know part of what what the the idea when i got into the studio to make the record was i had had this experience

where i went to sicily and we traced our family roots uh to this uh little place called parts and ecos sicily and there was a street called via zamata yeah which is where uh frank's family emigrated from there was this one little place. How far back? His parents or his grandparents? His, well, his parents, I believe, actually, were there and came as children to the U.S. But the thing was, you know, we got to go, you see on the back cover here, this number 13. It's just this tiny little place.

I mean, the room we're in right now is maybe a little bigger than this place that was in Partonico, Sicily. And it had a little post where you could tie up your donkey outside, you know, but it's this mountain village. tie up your donkey outside you know but it's this mountain village and um so anyway the what i wanted to do was sort of uh do a musical interpretation of of that uh kind of experience of seeing where everything comes from where you can where where zappa comes from yeah and well here's the other thing is the the the name via zamata um from what I've been told by the people there in Partenico, it's not a common word, but the word is supposed to mean the sound of children's footsteps playing in the rain.

Really? Yeah. I love when language does that. Yeah. English is not that good at that. Yeah, no, it's not. And so, but then that street got renamed via frank zappa the the whole town sort of uh banded together to to create this uh

this thing to honor frank uh and so that that little street which only had a dozen buildings on it maybe yeah um uh you know small little yeah homes and and stuff is uh it's now via frank zappa i bet you your dad would have appreciated the old name well yeah but see what's cool is like it was a street that had a specialized yeah or something that had a specialized sound and and and now it also has you know you know frank's own specialized sound. Yeah. But they had their own little, like, military marching band playing some of Frank's music, walking through the streets, and it was this really, really cool thing, you know? Was that the first time you'd heard Frank's music played by a marching band?

I had actually seen some marching bands do some pretty wild stuff on the Internet, but this was cool just because it was local people that are proud to be, like, in some way, you know, part of this family history thing. And they were playing some kind of challenging stuff. But it's like a local military marching band. And it just sounded so cool walking through the streets. And you see all these, you know, there's beautiful mountains and all this kind of stuff around. And then these old buildings.

Were you moved? For sure. Yeah? Yeah. You were like, this is it. It was just a really cool experience. It's kind of a once in a lifetime, you know, kind of thing. And how did that inform the record really?

Well, what it did was it, in a lot of ways, I just tried to take all the elements. It's kind of like what you described before. I tried to take everything that ever made me interested or inspired by music and kind of put them into some little location on the record. And so it's about layers of details. So it could be part of the song or it could be part of the production. So, for example uh um i grew up enjoying a lot of beatles records like a lot of people uh but i had the chance to work with um

uh jeff emmerich who recorded a lot of the beatles records so he came in and did the uh recorded the strings and the and the brass stuff on the song funky 15 and and the song truth yeah oh yeah class the one with the yeah the spanish guitar yeah that also has the string quartet yeah yeah and everything so um and did you oh go ahead i'm sorry yeah basically i was just saying that you know all those those kind of layers of of details are things that are the fabric of of my youth and listening to that kind of stuff that just happens on records and thinking, you know,

I love the sound of, you know, the strings on Eleanor Rigby. Wouldn't it be cool to work with the guy that recorded that, you know? Yeah. And so that's what I got a chance to do on that. And what was he like? He was great.

He had so many cool stories about, you know, how he learned to do what he did. Because for people that don't know, I mean, he started when he was 19 working with the Beatles. Uh-huh. And, you know, maybe even earlier, actually. But he was doing full, you know, sessions and producing and all that kind of stuff. And, I mean, he just, he revolutionized recording in a lot of ways how old is he now uh is he really old did were you no i mean i'm gonna guess that he's in his

70s oh yeah but he's all there and so yeah i'm totally great and into it uh you know so anyway the and there's a lot of humor on the record though a lot of i mean you did get some of your sense of humor i think from frank there you know there's a couple of humor on the record. I mean, you did get some of your sense of humor, I think, from Frank. Oh, yeah. There's a couple, the Malkovich song and the Dragon, what is it, Dragon Master? Dragon Master. Dragon Master is actually the only co-write I ever did with Frank. Oh, really?

Yeah, he wrote the lyrics to that song, and then he asked me to write the music to it. So he wrote the lyrics in 1988 or somewhere thereabouts. So he wrote the lyrics in 1988 or somewhere thereabouts. And what's so funny is, I mean, it's a completely preposterous song about a dragon master. Sure. So what I wanted to do in putting it on the record was find a way to actually create some music that was legitimate for... For the ridiculous folk. Well, that's what he did, right? Yeah right yeah well in a lot of ways yeah but but you know sometimes see i just wanted the joke of it to work on a few levels because if if you're somebody that doesn't listen to heavy metal music then uh

and which this album is not a heavy metal album but this this song is a heavy metal song but the thing is if you don't listen to metal music you'll hear what the jokes are straight away it's pretty obvious right but if you're really into metal it's going to hit you in a different way there may not be a joke in there yeah you know yeah it's very earnest yeah this is honest metal exactly you know because because the thing about it is there's there's just little details in it that that make me laugh like uh there's a lyric that says hate the day hate the light yeah and so i got this this guy to sing it that has a real metal voice this guy um uh sean albro and i was explaining

to him i said okay on on the word light you have to add an extra syllable to it and he says what do you mean i said you know like hate the day hate the light you know it's like it has to have that you know thing he says oh yeah you mean make it cool yeah yeah i'm like yeah you know but it's those like uh it's like a ronnie james dioism yeah yeah yeah and so it's but it's it's like finding the way to to make all of that kind of stuff happen it's like when you you just have to over enunciate things like the word what is what you know yeah and it's just uh it's stuff like that that makes it for me you know i mean it's like there's there's all these other things happening but it's those little details You know, I mean, it's like there's all these other things happening,

but it's those little details that I love. Yeah. No, it's great. And the Malkovich song, where did that come from? Well, it's actually John Malkovich. Yeah. And so what's funny about it is he's got this project that he's doing that's this remarkable photo exhibit that he did with this photographer, Sandro Miller. And so he wanted to have a musical component that could go with this thing that they're touring around,

all these pictures that they've done where they did portraits of John as different famous people in history, or they recreated famous photographs but not with the digital things they actually like staged them staged the photo yeah yeah with john yeah yeah so there's a famous uh photo of of yeah of like two twin six-year-old girls and these weird dress i think it's a diane diane harvest yeah yeah yeah so he's both of the the what is girls that's hilarious i've never heard of this show yeah no it's it's uh it's a really cool thing so anyway what he did was he decided he wanted a musical component to it and he he recorded himself uh reciting plato's allegory of the cave okay and then he decided uh well let's see if um there's

some people that could put this to music and so a random selection of people got asked to make a soundtrack to to his performance so so the album that he has because he's got his own album that that has uh my song is on that but it's also on my record but the thing is uh what he did which is interesting was he gave everybody the same performance of his and then everybody had to make their own music to it so uh the it's yoko ono rick okasik um and you well yeah andy summers i i did one and then um dolores o'reardon from the cranberries and a bunch of other people it's a strange uh collection of of people but yeah but my version um because I have heard I think most of the other stuff my version uh seems to be the only one that is more of like a straightforward song

type of arrangement the other stuff seems to be more like a a soundtrack that allows john's voice to come in and right right and do but uh i just uh thought it would be funny to since it seems that most people won't be familiar with the text that he's he's reciting yeah that it would just be funny to ask the question what what the fuck is he talking about? And so that's what the chorus became. So it's like in the verses, we just let John say his stuff. But actually, one of the interesting things about the production of it, too, is that the very first thing that happens in the song

is this kind of strange little melody and weird rhythm. And what we did was we took John's voice and we used this software that's called melodine and you can have it uh interpret what is happening and you can actually it will take from that um performance it will extract pitch and rhythm yeah so then you can take that and use midi uh notes and uh you can like actually have something that goes along with the performance but what we did was we we extracted the rhythm element and so what his speech pattern that happens is actually creates the fill that starts the song and then it goes naturally into hearing his voice in the cadence that he's he's speaking who thought of that that

was my idea but you know that's that's like uh pretty uh like specific yeah yeah it was a pretty cool thing to be able to do uh was he happy with it yeah uh i i heard a quote from him saying that the chorus of the song asked the question that would be appropriate for his tombstone. You know, what the fuck is he talking about? Did you deal with him at all? That's the funniest part of it. I still have never actually met him or spoken with him. Huh.

Yeah. But he's okay? He's okay with everything? Apparently. Apparently he likes the tune, you know. But it's a fun song that... It's one of the tunes that, as far as the record goes, it was probably one of the fastest things that got done for the record because I received the audio from

John Malkovich and the song was written and recorded and finished 13 hours later. Really? Yeah. You just locked in? Yeah. Straight through? Yep. Why so pressing on that one?

It just was one of those things where it's just like, let's do this, let's do this, let's do that. Oh, we're done. Yeah. So like on this record, I mean, you've got a couple kids. I do, yeah. Did they go with you to Sicily? I mean, you've got a couple kids.

I do, yeah. Did they go with you to Sicily? Actually, my kids have not been, but my niece, Moon's daughter, Matilda, she got to go. Oh, yeah. She got to check it out. And so on the record, on the song On Fire, my kids, my stepdaughter as well,

and also my niece, are all singing background vocals on on the song on fire yeah so that's pretty fun it's cool to hear the kids just to be part of that well I think it's great that they all you know have a relationship all the cousins yeah it's nice you all live near each other because a lot of people don't you know what I mean like I've got cousins where you're like oh yeah I met you when I was three. How you doing?

What's up? But they're all involved in everyone's lives. It's great. So let's talk about this, the evolution of the, like, I sort of, because when I listened to this record, like, it felt to me that, you know, whatever you learn from Frank in terms of composition sort of comes through on this one a lot. Well, yeah, I mean... And that's not a bad thing.

My specific question is that it seems like when you look at the catalog or whatever point that you entered into your dad's work, there was, when I listened to it, you know, as it gets cleaner and the production gets more specific and the orchestration becomes more layered and there's so much going on that your brain sort of has a hard time handling it it seemed to me that he started with it with a pretty strong satirical disposition to to say you know fuck you do popular music on some level uh i would say that that's that's always been there uh because his his mo was just i like making music and if other people like it that's great but that's not

i'm not making music for the masses basically he he just was uh he he's the kind of person that could literally uh have a blank piece of music paper he could sit on an airplane and go from la to new york and have you know 12 15 pages of music that he could write and hear all of the arrangement for every instrument and all that stuff and hand it to somebody and they would play it and it would be like a completely finished piece of music. That's amazing, right? It's totally nuts.

But I like the way early on that he actually satirized other music. There's one album, I don't know if it's Freak Out or any other ones where he just very subtly but very pointedly attacks Jim Morrison in a way. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, that stuff happened throughout his whole musical career. But the thing, too, that's so fascinating is that he had a vision of his music as one complete piece of music.

music as one complete piece of music so he all the records that he ever made to him it was part of one larger project that he called project object and he considered it all to be like basically one big note and and there's this interesting uh element of surprise where characters are introduced on records and then they come back and they're having this dialogue from record to record so if you ever listen to the entire catalog you'll you may find certain characters coming in and out that are they're answering things that happen on previous records and could be like 10 records ago? Yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, he had this thematic coherence for everything, and there was this grand idea that nobody really knew about,

but when you really put it all together and you listen in chronological order, you know, it's just mind-blowing. And it's, because he was sort of a conceptual artist yeah like he comes from right like he comes from from noise music in a way like that some of his heroes early on yeah we're real conceptual out there dudes right what's the name of that one guy verez yeah yeah who had the air raid siren and his um and his one of his first big uh symphonies and that that's what blew your your

old man's mind that in in r&b music like yeah well you know it's uh it's just funny because i mean as a kid uh he just went to the library and taught himself everything about um how to become a composer he learned it all on his own terms completely autodidactic uh you know learning process really yeah and uh so that's why there's no boundaries in his music he'll mix any styles and and all kinds of different instrumentation and and stuff that other people might have said well why would you do that you know yeah he didn't have to answer anybody yeah it was well why not you know why wouldn't i do that and when did you have like when your transition as a player from you know listening to the uh technique of van halen or even steve vi or

somebody when did you begin to sort of intellectually integrate you know what your dad was doing when he started playing his shit well the thing about it is uh a lot of it was always yeah just something that i uh intrinsically had some sort of connection to uh but when i started to to learn the music i studied the music for two years before i put the band together really yeah like what do you what do you mean studied it well because the thing is i don't have the same background as my dad where he could notate anything. I learned everything by ear. So he wrote everything.

Yeah. And so what I needed to be able to do was I needed to be able to go over the fundamentals of a lot of stuff that I skipped over in my process of learning guitar. And I needed to know the names of of things i needed to basically go through and and understand music theory and harmony uh so that when i put the band together i'd actually be able to speak the language that was required to to get the point across right because because my idea uh in putting zappa plays zappa together was to emphasize the things that i thought were the most misunderstood or underappreciated things about my dad's music. And that's the focus or the emphasis that I wanted to put on the performances. And what are those things? Well, in the first few years,

I basically was staying away from any of the stuff that was humor related. Right. staying away from any of the stuff that was humor related right i wanted to focus on frank's compositional skills with his classical music and and uh you know some of the other big band arrangements of of other things um that uh would would really like i said showcase his uh his abilities as a as a composer and then also as a guitarist. Because that was sort of an afterthought for people. People were like, oh yeah, I guess he plays guitar.

He's a monster guitar player. Yeah, and so the biggest challenge in trying to do all of that stuff was obviously it's difficult to learn to play the music and play it the way that it was intended to be played meaning the the page says here's how the notes go here's the rhythms here's the notes we didn't change it or alter it to to try to make it more uh you know for lack of a better description commercial or updated and modern you know because i lack of a better description, commercial or updated and modern, you know,

because I use the analogy like an orchestra basically is playing the music of people from hundreds of years ago and they're carrying that music forward for an audience to be able to appreciate, here's what it is on the page. We're playing it as the composer wrote this thing. So they don't get, you know, they don't say, oh, you know, this music needs an update. We need to bring in a rapper and be like, yeah, yeah, Beethoven, yeah, uh-huh, one time.

You know, they don't. That's a different thing. Yeah, they don't. But see, that's the common perception is when you want to make something modern, you got to make it hip hop or you got to make it. But he was beyond modern already i mean he was in his own time zone exactly you know so so my my point is we we do it unadulterated and and that way it is uh an apples to apples comparison when you try to listen to the the original and compare it to you know how we're playing it live it's like we're playing it

the way it is. Right. And when you were doing that, when you spent those two years, were there moments of discovery for you where you were like, holy fuck? Well, I basically had to completely change everything I knew about how to play guitar. How?

It was like getting a lobotomy and then training for the Olympics. Really? Yeah, because I took over probably 30 years of guitar playing yeah uh and i said forget that you know and you you train yourself to play a certain way you know like a picking style where it's alternate picking right and and it becomes natural it's the same as like walking or breathing or something i had to say nope i'm not doing it that way anymore because what i want to do on the guitar to play these melodies that Frank wrote

for marimba or keyboards and things like that can't be played with just simple alternate picking. You know, you have to have hybrid picking. You have to have sweet picking. You have to have all these things all at once just to get to these things. So I had to remap everything about how I visualized the guitar

and the physical motion to actually play the guitar wow but then on top of that the hardest part was that frank didn't play like a standard guitar player in the sense that he had a bag of guitar licks and he's like okay here's my lick number one he almost made fun of that yeah yeah and so so the thing is he was completely extemporaneous when he played and uh and what he had was this massive vocabulary of rhythmic figures that he could just go ahead and start to use any way that he wanted and then attach notes to those through this whole other vocabulary of knowledge of harmonic content and all this stuff so what i had to do was say well how am i gonna play in context to the music and

play in a way that is like what frank would have approached uh and but still be able to do it in real time through my own voice you know so so i had to be able to find a way to create guideposts where i'd play what frank played and then you know fill in the blanks till the next guidepost but in the fill in the blank moment i didn't want it to just take a left turn i wanted to be able to play in a way that like i said was was uh evocative or in context to the music in the same way that that he would play so but your own yeah so i had to develop a a way to to uh sort of uh interpolate these ideas with i would take rhythmic figures that were part of his music yeah uh things from the black page or things from echchidna's Arf.

And I would study those and I would say, okay, he's using some of these rhythms consistently in his music. Now, if I take these and I look at them and I say, how many of these rhythms can I put on one string or two strings or three strings? And then how can I then just attach any note i want to those same rhythms so that it's these rhythms can still be used in in context to the music and so it became this like a rabbit hole man yeah oh it is you know so so for for years you know the past 10 years i've been developing this this um this system of uh applying these

different rhythms because basically he was a drummer first before he was ever a guitar player so you know a simple example of something like this is if he was going to play a five note group uh you know he would break it into a two or three so you'd have one two one two three one two one two three or one two three one two one two three one two so you have these subdivisions that are in there and so then you you have the choice when you're playing uh how to um how to use those so for example if you're contouring a rhythm of a line and you don't have any notes but you just have the rhythm you have if you're just thinking that you can put any notes that but you just have the rhythm, you have da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. If you're just thinking that, you can put any notes that you want

and then land on a downbeat, and you can create wild-sounding phrases when you play because it's the contour of the rhythm that you pick up on. The notes are superfluous. Right, right, right. So a lot of his music has these these angular lines and stuff that are built around just the rhythm itself and and i sort of arrived at this because of the song the black page which was written as a drum solo and then he wrote an amazing melody to it months later

you know so it was like wait he wrote all the rhythms first and then he put notes to it so that was your key that was your portal in yeah that was said, well, let me see if I can just find a way to create a vocabulary of rhythms that I can facilitate on the guitar with some sort of relative ease and then just choose notes at random to these rhythms. And so when you hear a song like Funky funky 15 on on my record yeah uh it has these angular lines but yeah they're based out of these these concepts that i'm telling you about where it's a certain kind of rhythm but the line just kind of moves through it's the rhythm that keeps it uh but the line actually isn't related to any one particular scale it's like a polytonal idea because it's

going through a lot of things you know so this is a it's interesting to me and i don't know how you feel about it that you know this relationship you've built with your father posthumously yeah is is incredible and deep and interesting i mean well to me it's the way to continue having a relationship with him you know uh i got to spend a lot of time with him musically doing stuff in the studio or on stage or or other things where you know i was probably the one person in the family that had a a continuous solid interest in music and and and was able to you know develop that kind of relationship with him but you know if he was around today i would have a lot of questions for him

yeah like what oh i mean now that i've like uncovered uh so many things about how he wrote some of the stuff um i would just really be curious to know how he consistently took the same. I mean, in Western music, there's 12 pitches. Yeah. Right. That's all you have. There's 12 and you can rearrange them any way that you want. But it seemed like he had a whole other bag of pitches that nobody else had because he did not repeat his the the way that he would do things you know there was no

there's no consistent pattern that you could say oh this is basically a knockoff of this like he never did that in in his in his music so i just would wonder how he was able to consistently just reinterpret those 12 pitches and with all different rhythms and never do the same thing I mean that's the thing that is it just blows my mind over 80 albums that he invented a new way to rearrange those same 12 pitches and rhythms you know I mean you have countless rhythms but the same 12 pitches over and over and over and over. Do you think he was, you know, an explorer or a searcher? Do you know what I mean?

Was he looking, you know, was he outside of the work? Because it seems like, you know, he had an amazing work ethic and he had a vision for what he was doing. Like you said, the object, that it was one continuous piece. And, you know, because it doesn't necessarily i don't it doesn't he doesn't feel like a guy that was looking for something he felt like a guy that wanted to create different things all the time i think that it was uh i don't even know that it was a choice i think it was just that it it just was coming out of him regardless you know he just had to do it he was it's one of those i mean possessed by music for sure you know and how old were you when he passed

you know i never even think about it but it was early 20s so um probably like 21 or 22 something like that i mean i just block that shit out you know you shut it down yeah like i i never remember uh when it i know like uh sometime in early December, you know, there's always some sort of anniversary, you know, and I think it's on the 4th, but I never, I'm never looking for the calendar. I never. Do you think that this life, you know, sort of process of you decoding him is some way of dealing with the grief of it all well i mean it it is it's been cathartic in in a lot of ways uh but uh you know like i said

it's still like a continuation for for me but do you ever miss him when you're absolutely i mean i i've played shows uh on countless occasions and just broken down, you know, while I'm playing. Oh, really? Yeah, because it's rough, you know. Yeah, yeah. It really is. And people go, oh, well, you know, you should be past that at this point. It's like, well, fuck you, you know.

Like, you know, it's my dad. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And when you did, like, because I saw you do one of the Roxy shows. Yeah. Yeah, and that like you know being in that stuff wouldn't say you're playing with some of his guys too it's just like i can't imagine the emotions of it well there you know we had this one thing that we were doing

and we've we've done it a few times where we have some footage uh some film footage of him um that we were able to synchronize so that it's just footage of him playing guitar and singing and then we have him on a screen and he is playing but we're playing in time he's joining the band yeah yeah and uh so that was that was a real trip because he was in his prime you know he's in his like middle 30s in this stuff and uh you know here he is playing live. Uh, and I get to interact with him a little bit, play something. And I saw that once at it. Like,

I don't want to diminish anything, but I saw them do that at a beach boys concert. And I was just sort of like, this is, it's like, you know, it's like summoning, uh,

you know, a ghost in a way. Yeah. You know, and did, did you feel like you were like trading? Well, there's,

there's some really, really cool stuff that, that happens, you know, for me personally, but also for the? Well, there's some really, really cool stuff that happens for me personally, but also for the audience that didn't get a chance to see them. Sure. That's part of the Zappa Plays Zappa thing. Getting it out there? Yeah.

Well, but to give people a chance to see the music in a live situation where they... It's very different to sit and listen to something versus see somebody play it and realize wait a minute how much work goes into doing that you know yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's that's kind of uh yeah it's a real like even when you watch the old like i watched you with the rocks you do it and then like i've watched some stuff online at him and it's like it's massive undertaking for sure yeah i mean it's like oh my god how many people were involved and then everyone knows where they're supposed to be and then when you see frank you're like oh i'm thinking when i'm watching him it's like i hope none of those guys fuck up

because i feel like that could be a bad thing yeah yeah well you know frank frank was was real serious about stuff uh when it came into the music obviously he had a sense of humor too, but if you were in the band, you were required to know what you were doing or you were gone. Yeah, yeah. His phrase was, window or aisle, how would you like to return home? You know?

Because, you know, if you weren't cutting it, that's what happened. Yeah. Well, I think this new record, dude, is a real sort of like amazing melding of what you do and what he did and what you took from him. I mean, it seemed to really come together. Is that how you feel about it?

Yeah, I think it is. You know, because a lot of people before I made the record were saying, what's your music even going to be like? And I said, I have no idea. You know, I went into the studio and this is just what happened. When was the last time you recorded a record? Ten years ago. No shit. Yeah, and so my experience of playing Zappa plays Zappa music all over the world

definitely informed what I was going to do on the record, but what I wanted to do was, in a lot of ways, this is a more simplified record than than anything that i've done uh before and so that might be um unexpected for people because i think the um the song structure is really the guitar actually sort of takes a back seat at a lot in a lot of the record yeah i mean there's still plenty of guitar on the record but before when i made a record if you looked at a picture of a house that's supposed to have music in it you know my guitar was sitting on top of the house you know now now it's just all integrated

into that that one picture because i've i've learned to play in an ensemble and have it be where everybody has a specific thing to make the music move forward you know it's a very different uh thing to be able to to to play uh as a musician versus a guitar player right it's a maturing thing i think it's like you know what i mean you're willing to to sort of let it breathe a little bit and not be like it's me yeah yeah well because you know there was so much emphasis on guitar when i grew up that it was that was everything that was you know i mean it was like that's that's what you're supposed to do you know and so over time it's like well you know there's

lots of ways you can do it yeah yeah yeah so when you play zappa play zappa i gotta assume that you know you know frank's fans are loyal and they're old a lot of them and uh they're very specific and usually they're very intelligent uh you know sort of socially awkward people but i mean i i have to assume that you get a lot of the old timers coming out and and sort of you know almost see you as family in some weird way well you know i mean a lot of what you said is true uh i mean the the thing that um that's interesting is that we started this, like I said, 10 years ago. So if you look at it as the fan base that was always there and supporting Frank's music, the first wave of supporters for all that when we started was that age range.

And they would have been in their middle 50ifties up into their late sixties. Yeah. Right. Right. You know, these are the people that would have been, uh, you know, relatively close to Frank's age, maybe a few years older, maybe a few years younger, but so carry that forward 10 years. Yeah.

We don't have, you know, 80 year olds in the audience, you know, it's actually going the other way. Right. We have a lot more young people uh and we we still have a good amount of people that are in their 50s and 60s that come to this stuff but we're seeing a lot of of younger people you know because it's you can't sustain this music going into the future by only the original sure you know yeah of course you gotta hope that that catches on and some people get interested well i think that because of the abundance of the work um you know people it's one of those things that people can find at

any time and be like if it locks in they're like holy shit well that's always the funniest thing though too is to find out like what record got somebody started like for example what record of frank's got you to where you said, I got to listen to more of this. Well, I mean, like when I was in high school, you know, Joe's Garage came out. So like, you know, and I had that and I played it all and I thought it was funny, but I liked the story and I knew that there was a lot of levels working, but it didn't send me back. And then like recently, you know, after sort of like doing some research about, you know, where he was coming from and knowing that there was such an abundance of work. I mean, I went and just started at the fucking beginning. I also became sort of fascinated with Beefheart and their relationship. So I just,

you know, I just started at the beginning and I'm like, I'll just build out. And then as you know, you listen to more records, I don't have, you know, I don't have 80 records, you know, maybe I have 12, but you're sort of like, you hear the evolution of it and then you start to realize like oh my god this is never going to stop expanding yeah but uh it was much later well that the funny thing is that uh that's usually what happens is uh most people don't start right at the beginning right you know they they start at some point on the timeline and then have to go back to the beginning and say, wait a minute, he started here and ended up here. And there's this amazing, like every record is so different from the next. But it's always fascinating to me to find out what is the record that gets somebody hooked. So there's people that I know where their favorite record is this record called Burnt Weenie Sandwich.

Yeah, I have that one now that record is if that's the first record that you ever hear i personally uh you know i've i listened to that and i mean there's stuff that i totally appreciate and and love on that record but if i if that was the the one record that started me i'm not sure where i would go with that you know but so the people that go this is for me this is finally a record that, you know? But so the people that go, this is for me. This is finally a record for me, you know? There's those people that, like, they get into it and they love that record. And that's, like, that's their dream to hear that

in its entirety played live, you know? And so it's, like, it's crazy. I know that, like, Billy Bob Thornton, that's his favorite record, you know? But so my point is there's there's some records out there and I meet people sometimes and they say, you know, the first record I ever heard was Thing Fish. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. Like, if that's the first record and you like you heard that and you went back for more, you know, it's like you're hardcore. Yeah. Yeah. Because, I mean, fish is is probably uh one of the the most hated records of of frank's you know uh but it's hilarious yeah there's crazy things i think most

people like in the broader sense they seem to go with apostrophe right yeah well i mean when i say you know if people say hey uh where should i start i always say you know apostrophe overnight sensations good place to start but then go back to freak out, and then, you know, the next couple, like, absolutely free, and we're only in it for the money. So you can see that in a 10-year period, he went from that to apostrophe, and you go, well, what, you know, how did that happen? Yeah, I listened to Zoodo Lords recently.

That's a good record. Yeah, for sure. Which one do you go back to the most? You know, I listen to a ton of stuff. I mean, growing up, watching him make records like Apostrophe and Overnight Sensation and all the stuff in the middle 70s into the early 80s, that's the stuff that is sort of the fabric of my youth. So I love all that stuff.

And we've played so much of it over the years. But one of my favorite records is the yellow shark which is a classical record of of frank's and uh the the pieces on there are incredible but not only is the music incredible but the way it's recorded yeah is is incredible it's it's different than standard um orchestral recording techniques right now so it just really check that out it's really really good now what about like um what was that tour you did with the on the hendrix bus uh that's a tour that's called the experience hendrix tour and it's run by the hendrix family um is that fun is that a money gig or you like doing it it's it's really fun it's sort of like guitar camp

because they have like somewhere between 15 and 20 guitar players that come up and do stuff. So, you know, Eric Johnson, Zach Wilde, Kenny Wayne Shepard. All the wizards. Yeah. So, you know, you get to sit backstage and be like, hey, show me that thing that you do with, you know. And you're just playing Hendrix music? Yeah.

What do you, which one do you like to play? Well, you know, I get assigned different songs. Oh, really? It is like guitar camp. Yeah, yeah. So I've typically played Freedom a lot, which I love that song. A lot of times I'll be playing with Eric Johnson.

The two of us will do. So we've done Love and Confusion. Is there singing or is it all instrumental? No, it's singing. Oh, yeah? Yeah. That's wild. And do you do that every year?

Every couple years it comes around. It's just fun because, you know, I mean, it's a different thing to focus on and I look at it the same way that I do with my dad's music in that if I'm learning to play something that Jimi Hendrix played, I want to learn as best as I can to play it exactly how he played it because to me, that's the ultimate tribute to it.

But the way that they do that tour is people you know people interpret uh the playing and make new arrangements and and and they do sort of uh have a different approach in terms of like yeah they will try to modernize this that or the other just because they allow for people to have that um their version yeah that freedom to do their version but for me i just uh personally i like the challenge of trying to do it exactly yeah you know because when i would learn a song as a kid if i didn't learn it exactly as i heard it on the record then i to me i didn't learn the song yeah well your dad did a couple of covers like i like what do you do whipping post he did whipping post he did you like that song or was he making fun of it well Well, it started because in Finland,

and there's a concert called the Helsinki Concert, there's a guy in the audience that yells up, Whipping Post! Whipping Post! And Frank says, oh, we don't know that one. Would you mind humming a few bars of that? And the guy starts humming something. He goes, yeah, that's what I thought.

So after that, Frank said, the next time somebody yells out Whipping Post, and would you mind humming a few bars of that? And the guy starts humming something. He goes, yeah, that's what I thought. But so after that, Frank said, the next time somebody yells out whip and post, we're going to play it. And so he made the band learn it. And so then they did play it, but he did like that song. He does a good version.

Yeah, it is really good. It's definitely a version. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's done some great covers of, like, I Am the Walrus. He did Stairway to Heaven. Oh, really? Yeah. Earnestly? Yeah.

What's cool is they orchestrated the guitar solo. It's all played with a big brass section, so it's all big band horns playing the guitar solo, and it sounds great. Oh, my God. Well, there's one story that you might appreciate i'll leave you with uh about about frank's one of my favorites uh you know one of the things uh that he was so amazing at is he he was the guy that could say exactly what you wished you would have said in the moment if you were given the opportunity you know so there's so many things

that happen in people's lives where you know they just don't react to given the opportunity you know so there's so many things that happen in people's lives where you know they just don't react to something or they you know and later they're like oh man i wish i would have done this or whatever but he just was you know he was always in the moment and he was always on yeah and so there was this one time where this this guy was a radio host, and it was in the middle 60s, and this guy didn't like people with long hair. You know, he's very conservative. Yeah. And apparently he had a war injury,

so he had some type of prosthetic leg or something like that. Anyway, so he starts in talking to Frank, and he says, So, Mr. Zappa, with your long hair, I guess that makes you a lady. And Frank, who's probably 26 or 27 at the time, immediately says to him, so, Mr. Pine, I guess with your wooden leg, that makes you a table. That's hilarious.

Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you. What is this? Because I poked around a little bit on to ask you what is this like because i poked around a little bit on the line what is this um this guitar player project oh what the hell was i thinking yeah that that is a record that i uh started making um sort of as a goof to begin with but then it turned into this other thing so more than 20 years ago i started this thing with the idea that i would uh make a piece of music that was the entire length of a CD, which is 73 minutes, basically. Well, I guess there's some, you know, that could possibly play 75, but it's in that range.

It's a continuous piece of music that morphs moment to moment. piece of music that uh morphs moment to moment and it's like uh it's basically an audio movie where in the background like if you were watching a film and everybody in the movie even the people in the background were all recognizable actors like you see sylvester salone and arnold schwarzenegger and all these people but they're they're just kind of there right and but some people come forward and whatever it's that's what this is musically there's a bunch of different guitar players that just sort of start coming out of the speakers occasionally you know yeah so the piece of music morphs from all these different styles but then it settles into a guitar solo from angus young or eric johnson or eddie van halen or steve

vi or engve malmsteen you know all these guys you know Brian Setzer I like that you put Angus in there I love Angus Angus is amazing he's one of my favorites great guitar player yeah you know the thing about his playing is like I like to study people's playing and try to play things you know and and sort of imbue it with the phrasing that I can interpret from them but his vibrato, he brings it right up to pitch and then just shakes it right there. It's like this really fast, frenetic thing where, but the physical nature of vibrato is to make it work,

you have to kind of move the string. Right. You know, but he's moving it in such a small increment to shake it right up at pitch that I can't do it. It's almost like to to me to to to try to do what he's doing i i have to like almost make the hand convulse right yeah yeah yeah and so i don't know how he does it so where's where's uh where's what the hell was i thinking at well you know the thing is it's actually um uh i'm i have it now it started on analog tape and then it moved to a digital format and then

recently i moved it all onto the computer yeah uh and so one of the things that i was doing at the time was i was actually putting in pieces of frank's music uh that would sort of be these segues you know i would learn how to play certain hard things on on the guitar and then i would put it in there but that stuff is all coming out because I've been doing Frank's music for 10 years now and I don't need to put that stuff in there so I have to write some new little parts. But yeah, I mean, there's still people

I'd love to get recorded on there, you know, like Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. That's a monster, man. I mean, his playing is like, you know, I can't listen to his music that much because it doesn't move me, but his guitar playing

is like out there, dude. Yeah. It's crazy. He's just one of those guys that has a sound and it comes just from his hands. It doesn't matter

what he's playing, you know, what gear or anything. Yeah, it's wild. All right, man. Well, this is, it's exciting and I'm happy for you. The record's great and you seem pretty good. Thanks, it's wild. All right, man. Well, this is, it's exciting and I'm happy for you.

The record's great and you seem pretty good. Thanks, man. Thanks. I thought that was a very great guitar conversation and I found it very touching. That stuff with his dad.

I mean, it's no easy thing to be the son of a wizard and then cut your own path and your own life. I like talking to Dweezil. Go to WTFpod.com for all your WTFpod needs.

Go watch my special more later on Hulu or on Amazon or in its original home on Epix. What else? Yeah, you know, you know the story. You know the story. I play a little guitar maybe. Thank you. Boomer lives! sectors each and every day. They embody Calgary's DNA. A city that's innovative, inclusive, and creative. And they're helping put Calgary and our innovation ecosystem on the map as a place where people come to solve some of the world's greatest challenges. Calgary's on the right path forward. Take a closer look out at calgaryeconomicdevelopment.com. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth

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